‘According to your wife it would have worked if your neighbour hadn’t stumbled into the middle of things.’
‘When Buddy went out to take care of Wade, I had a chance to convince Roger he was the patsy unless he was man enough to make the first move.’
‘You must have talked fast.’
‘Have you tested the gun Denise used on Roger and me?’
Dalton nodded. ‘It’s the same gun that killed Johnna Masterson.’
‘You know that night, I couldn’t understand why Buddy took the gun with birdshot and let Roger grab the twelve-gauge. I figured he overlooked the difference in the guns, but I should have been known better. Buddy hadn’t overlooked anything from the start. That was no different. The weapon he intended to use on Roger was the handgun they had used to kill Johnna. Once he eliminated Roger with it he could turn the birdshot on Molly and me, and no problem at all if he had to shoot us a few times before it took. The sloppier the work the more convincing the scene. The point was to make it look like we had a gun battle using our guns, as if Roger showed up to talk, and things got out of hand.
‘That. 38 is yours?’
I shook my head. ‘Buddy told me one time it’s cold.
I expect it is, but once you matched it to the Masterson homicide and found my prints on it, you would have believed it was mine.’
‘Closing out our investigation of that case as well,’
Dalton muttered.
‘At that point Buddy’s only problem would have been controlling Denise Conway, who suddenly had five million all to herself, but somehow I don’t think that would have been a problem.’
‘I started doing some background on Mr Elder after you passed that polygraph, Professor. On paper he looked just fine, but when I called down to Louisiana I found out Denise Conway was his half-sister. They had the same mother, grew up together in the same house.
‘According to the mother Denise got married about three years ago. Husband had some money. Eight months later, poor soul killed himself.’
‘Police reopening that case?’
‘I recommended they take another look at it. I’ll tell you something else,’ Dalton added with a sly grin.
‘Your friend Mr Elder was plenty smart. He went to college just like his transcripts say, but their mother tells me Denise was the one in the family who tested off the charts. According to her, that girl was a genuine prodigy.’
‘Denise was behind the whole thing?’
‘Appears to be the case.’
Gail Etheridge dropped by one morning before I could get around much. She wanted to know if I intended to bring suit against the Beery estate. She wasn’t drumming up business, just curious, I expect, but I suggested she find our neighbour before some shark got hold of him and have a little talk with him.
If anyone deserved the mother lode, I said, it was Billy Wade. Gail said she would look in on him after she left me. ‘Be sure you do,’ I said, handing her a twenty,
‘and give him this for me if you will.’
Gail waved the bill at me. ‘What’s this for?’
‘He’ll know.’
Pocketing the twenty she told me, ‘I wanted to come by and apologize for not believing you, David.’
‘I didn’t have much of a track record,’ I said. ‘From your perspective it must have looked like pure self-destruction.’
‘Well, you can be an unbelievably stubborn man sometimes.’
‘No hard feelings, Gail.’
‘How are things going at school?’
‘They offered me three years’ salary if I’d just go away.’ Gail nodded at this with a vague look of satisfaction. She had probably calculated something like this and knew, too, as I did, that if I pushed I could get a lot more out of them and even keep my job. ‘I told them to go to hell. I said I’d go away for nothing.’
Gail’s satisfied smile curdled. ‘I take it you’re representing yourself?’
I laughed. ‘What gave me away?’
She appeared to want to give me some advice, but as I wasn’t paying for it she restrained herself admirably and changed the subject. ‘Molly’s going through with the divorce, I understand?’
My laughter caught in my throat. ‘Looks that way.’
‘I thought you two had worked things out.’
‘I was in trouble, Gail. Molly wouldn’t leave me until she got me out of it. That’s just the way she is.’
‘You’re a fool to let a woman like that get away.’
‘Molly’s not the most forgiving woman in the world.’
‘I guess I’m missing something.’
I didn’t answer her. Gail could think what she wanted.
I spent a week in Florida once I was up and moving around a little. Molly and Doc were already doing business together. She had a broken down house, a genuine catastrophe, she was living in and a second under contract that she intended to patch up for the snowbirds. She seemed happy to be starting over, a bit uncomfortable with me around but too polite to say so.
Lucy was doing well in school, working three nights a week giving private lessons on Ahab to rich kids and training a couple of wild-ass quarter horses fresh off the racetrack for the owner of the stable. We had a talk one evening on a horseback ride about the lie Lucy had told me, the affair that never was. Her idea, she confessed.
It might well have been Lucy’s creation, or Lucy might have imagined it was, but we both knew her mother, if not in fact instigating it, had gone along with it. I didn’t care to point this out because Molly wasn’t really the one to blame. It was my fault.
‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, ‘what your mother went through those first couple of years after you were born, Lucy?’
Jezebel skittered because she felt Lucy’s body stiffen.
We were walking suddenly on forbidden ground.
‘I can imagine,’ she said carefully.
‘You’re way ahead of me then.’
‘She never told you?’
‘She never told me, and I never asked.’
Lucy considered this for a long time without offering a comment.
‘I don’t know who was more afraid of the truth, Lucy, your mother or me. I guess I was always afraid if I heard about how she got through it, I wouldn’t be able to love her in quite the same way. I think she understood that or started believing it herself. We walked around your mother’s finest moment, the choice to give you life, and ended up turning it into something she thought she should be ashamed of.’
Lucy blinked.
‘What your mother did, coming off the streets and making a life for the two of you, not one girl in a thousand could have accomplished, and I made her think she had to keep it to herself.’
‘I don’t understand why she wants a divorce!’
‘You remember when I told you that silence is the biggest lie of all?’ Lucy nodded. ‘Well, our lies caught up with us, kid.’
I met Robert The Realtor, who wasn’t an entirely offensive character. He and Molly were intimate. I could tell by the way he shook hands with me.
I had imagined something else for Molly and me when I got down to see her, but it wasn’t going to happen. A week into it and I knew the only thing Molly wanted was for me to take off. There were no words to erase our history together, and for a time it seemed there weren’t even words to talk about it. The night before I left we had dinner together in Naples.
Afterwards we walked along the beach. I think in the dark with the wind around us to carry our words off to sea we could finally speak about things that mattered.
She said she was sorry she had put Lucy into the middle of things. She should never have done that. She was the one who had left the farm for a drive with Buddy the night Johnna Masterson disappeared.
‘It was my fault,’ I answered. ‘I should have said something. Instead, I just pretended to believe you both.’
‘When did you know?’
I laughed and looked out at the dark mass of ocean.
‘I knew from the start, Molly. I knew it from the moment Lucy told me she met Buddy at a frat party.
The kid is a terrible liar. It’s one of the things I love about her.’