“That’s not really my job,” he said. “That’s Michelle’s department.”
Elvis yawned and rolled partway onto his side.
“I know,” I said. “But you have to have an opinion. C’mon, Nick. I’m not going to tell anybody.”
He sighed. “At this point I don’t know.”
Neither one of us said anything for a moment. “Someone pushed her down those stairs,” I said after a moment of silence.
“You know I can’t tell you that,” Nick said.
“I didn’t ask you anything,” I said, sliding up into a halfway-sitting position. That was too much moving around for Elvis. He jumped down to the floor and stalked away, flicking his tail at me because he didn’t have fingers. “And I’m not going to repeat any conversation we have. I’m just saying, hypothetically”—I put extra emphasis on the last word—“someone must have pushed her.”
“Hypothetically, yes,” Nick said dryly.
I stretched out one leg and then the other. “But whoever it was didn’t just come up behind her and give her a shove. Hypothetically.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, and I could hear a note of caution in his voice.
“She was lying on her left side. If she’d been starting down the steps and someone had given her a push, she most likely would have landed on her right side.”
For a moment he didn’t say anything. When he did finally speak, it was just one word. “Because?”
I grabbed a pillow and stuffed it behind my back. “Lily went up and down those steps a dozen times a day. So she probably didn’t use the railing. I go up and down the stairs at the shop easily that many times in a day, and I know I don’t.”
“Okay,” he said.
“If someone had pushed Lily, her instinct would be to grab for the railing. It’s on the left side. If she couldn’t get her balance, she’d be leading with her right side as she fell and she’d land on that side. Which she didn’t.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Someone hit her,” I said slowly, the idea just occurring to me, making my heart sink. “She was at the top of the stairs. She was turning, and whoever killed her hit her on the back of the head. The momentum and the fact that she wasn’t turned completely around means that she would most likely have ended up landing on her left side.”
I waited for Nick to say no, to tell me I was wrong.
He didn’t.
“But how do you know she didn’t just hit her head on one of the steps?” I asked. I knew Nick was very good at his job, and if he said Lily’s death was murder, then it was. I just didn’t want it to be. I hated to think that the last moments of her life were filled with fear.
Nick let out another breath. Was he stretching his arms up over his head? I wondered. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s say someone did hit Lily over the head—and I’m not saying that’s what happened, just to be clear.”
“I know,” I said, nodding even though he couldn’t see me.
“The injury wouldn’t be up in the same place as it would be if she’d fallen, and it wouldn’t look the same.”
“What do you mean it wouldn’t be in the same place?” I asked.
“Did you take any anatomy classes?” Nick asked.
“In high school.”
“So you don’t know any of the bones in the skull.”
“Yes, I do,” I said a little indignantly.
My high school biology teacher had had a full-size skeleton in the lab that he’d named Clyde, which we’d all thought was made of some incredibly realistic plastic or resin. There was a bit of an uproar my senior year when it came out that Clyde had been a real person and an alumnus of the school—and really had been named Clyde.
I’d always liked Clyde. Once I’d even done the Macarena with him when the teacher was out of the room.
I pictured the skeleton’s bony head now. “The bone in the front where the forehead is, that’s the frontal bone,” I said. “The bottom part of the jaw is the mandible. The top of the head and the upper part of the back of the head are all parietal bone. And below that is the occipital bone.”
“Very good,” he said.
I couldn’t help smiling as though I’d just gotten a gold star from the teacher. “Thank you.”
“If Lily had slipped and hit her head, we’d expect to see an injury where the occipital bone and temporal bone meet or a bit above that, but not a lot above that area.” He didn’t even bother to say “hypothetically.”
“So if the injury was higher than that, it suggests someone hit her,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Okay, but you said the injury wouldn’t look the same,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Did you ever hit a piñata with a baseball bat?”
“Liam’s tenth birthday party. Samurai Pizza Cats.”
I heard something fall in the bedroom. I was guessing that Elvis had jumped up onto the small table I kept beside the bed and had nosed one of my books onto the floor. He’d done that before when he felt my attention was focused somewhere other than on him.
“Pizza what?” Nick asked.
“Samurai Pizza Cats. They were three cyborg cats—”
“Let me guess,” he interjected. “And they liked pizza.”
“Close,” I said. “They worked in a pizzeria.”
“Of course. How could I have missed that?” Nick laughed then. “I can’t wait until the next time I see Liam.” He cleared his throat. “When you swing, the end of the bat is moving faster than the part closer to your hands.”
“Right.” I heard what was probably another book hit the floor in the bedroom.
“So when it makes contact with the piñata, it does more damage than the shaft does farther down the length of the bat.”
“Because it has more momentum.”
“Exactly.”
I couldn’t say anything for a moment as I tried not to think about the fact that we were really talking about Lily and not a papier-mâché container shaped like a cat.
“You okay?” Nick asked.
“Uh-huh.” I swallowed down the lump that had suddenly tightened in my throat. “Help Michelle catch whoever did this, please?” I whispered.
“I will,” he promised.
I cleared my throat. “Nick, you know that Rose and your mother and—”
“I know.” I could hear a combination of frustration and resignation in his voice. “I’m beating my head against the wall, thinking I can find a way to convince them to stay out of this—aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. “You couldn’t hedge even a little bit? Throw me a bone?”
“Your mother, Rose, Liz—they’re all stubborn women. You know that. Put the three of them together and they become an immovable object.” I pulled my legs up and wrapped one arm around my knees. “You saw what happened when Arthur Fenety died and Maddie was a suspect. Nothing you or I said made any difference.”
I imagined him grimacing and raking a hand through his hair. “And after that little experience, you know what I found?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Gray hair. A little clump of gray hair, right in the front. You can’t see it, but it’s there. My mother is giving me gray hair.”
I smiled. “She says the same thing about you.”
He laughed.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” I said. “I promise.”
We said good night and I ended the call. I got up and went into the bedroom to check on Elvis. He was curled up on the lounge chair, head on his paws. Two paperbacks had mysteriously fallen onto the floor.
“I know you’re awake,” I said quietly. One ear twitched, and then he opened one eye, looked at me for a moment and closed it again. I bent down and picked up the books. One of them was a small cookbook Rose had given me full of simple recipes.
“They just use basic ingredients,” she’d said. “The kind of things you already have in your kitchen.” After she’d looked around my cupboards and refrigerator, she’d amended that to “things most people already have in their kitchens.”