She’d seen a weird pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer.
“Maybe she had something like that at work.”
“I can’t think why. I don’t see what . . .” He trailed off as Louise took his hand. Eve saw when realization hit him. “Is that . . . That’s what killed Marcus.”
“Would he have had a pair?”
“For what?” Color flooded back into his face—anger now. Denial was over. “He didn’t sew. He didn’t make things. For Christ’s sake, I bought him a set of screwdrivers as a joke, because as smart as he was, he could barely change a lightbulb. They weren’t handy people, Dallas. They were good people. Generous people. Loving. If you’d spend five minutes listening to me, you’d know she didn’t do these things. Why aren’t you—”
“Henry.” Louise said it softly, drawing their joined hands up to her cheek. And he deflated.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know you have to ask questions. I just . . . I smelled her hair. Now I can’t.”
Charles brought in a tray with a tall white pot and five oversized white mugs. He set it down on the table, sat on the arm of Henry’s chair while Louise poured the coffee.
“I didn’t get into this last night,” Charles said. “So I’m going to say this to you now, Henry. I’ve known these two women for a while now. If anything happened to Louise, I’d want these two women looking after her. I’d want them looking for the answers. Because I know they’d find them. Answers won’t bring Darlene and Marcus back, but having the answers will matter to you.”
Nodding, Henry took a mug from Louise and, as he had the night before, cupped it in both hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Eve told him. “I went through Darlene’s things. I found these hidden in a drawer in the closet.”
Eve opened the file bag, took out the evidence bag, showed the cards and pamphlets.
“I don’t understand. Hidden?” He took the bag, read through the plastic. “She had all these? Psychics, tarot readers? What would . . . Mediums.” He closed his eyes. “She hid them from me. She couldn’t talk to me about it, so she hid them from me.”
“She never mentioned her interest in this area?”
“God. About a month after her parents died—she and Marcus were in grief counseling, but she stopped going. I asked her why she’d stopped, and she told me she wanted to explore another avenue. She hadn’t been able to say good-bye, had questions she needed to ask them, so she’d gone to a sensitive. A friend of a friend had a friend, that sort of thing. I was . . . tolerant. I probably showed how fucking tolerant. The sensitive she went to didn’t have the capabilities to communicate with the dead.”
He waved his hand by his ear as he used the phrase. “But she had some recommendations. I said something like I thought grief counseling would be more beneficial than tossing time and money at some gypsy with a crystal ball.
“I don’t believe in that sort of thing, so I dismissed it all. I—I dismissed her. So she hid all this from me because she felt I wouldn’t understand or approve.”
“Was she going to someone?” Louise asked.
“We’re looking into that, but we do know she withdrew cash weekly from a new private account she set up a few months ago.”
“A new account?”
“A new account in a different bank. Every week she withdrew nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”
“Ten thousand a week?” The stricken guilt on Henry’s face shifted to puzzlement. “For how long?”
“Including the withdrawal she made yesterday morning, eighteen weeks. Do you know of any reason she’d want or need that much cash?”
“No. Just no. She’d have some cash, sure, but Darlene preferred using plastic. She’d have a clear record monthly that way. She was generous, and she didn’t deny herself either, but she was raised to know where her money went.”
He pointed to the evidence bag. “One of them. One of them was scamming her. Scamming her.” He shoved forward in his seat. “Marcus must have found out and threatened to go to the police. That could be why he wanted to hold the intervention, Louise. Because he found out some fake medium was scamming Darlene.”
“Henry, he would’ve told me,” Louise said.
“But it makes sense,” Henry insisted. “It finally makes sense. This medium got into Marcus’s apartment somehow, and killed Marcus. When Darlene got there, he forced her onto the terrace, pushed her over. You have to find him,” he said to Eve. “You have to find whoever she was paying. That’s who killed her, killed Marcus. You have to find them.”
“I intend to. Do you know if she took any trips, did any traveling in these last eighteen weeks?”
“I know she didn’t. She was supposed to go to East Washington last month and to London, ah, about six, eight weeks ago—both trips she sent her assistant in her place, and handled her part via ’link conference. She said she didn’t want to leave home. Just couldn’t leave home.”
“One more thing. You’ve all said she didn’t use—and that’s bearing out—but did you notice any changes in her behavior, any signs she seemed impaired over the last weeks?”
“She started sleepwalking.”
“Henry, you never told me.”
He shook his head at Louise. “She asked me not to say anything. The first time—maybe three months ago—I found her downstairs, in the kitchen, middle of the night. She was making these pouring motions. I asked her what she was doing, and she looked at me. Through me, I guess, and said she had to pour the tea for the tea party. It was kind of funny, really, and she woke up as soon as I touched her. She didn’t remember getting up.”
He set his untouched coffee down. “A few weeks later, I woke up, heard her talking. She was crawling under the bed, calling out to someone to come back. I thought she meant her parents—that she was having a stress dream about them. I tried to coax her out at first, and she laughed. She laughed, and said she wanted to go down the rabbit hole. She wanted to see where he’d gone. She woke up again when I took her hand.”
“And didn’t remember?” Eve prompted.
“No. She was baffled, and a little embarrassed. It happened one more time about two weeks ago. I woke up, and she was sitting on the side of the bed staring at me. I asked her what was wrong. She said—it was like a riddle. Ah, she said: Why is a crow like a desk? I think.”
“A raven?” Louise asked. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
“Yeah, that’s it. A raven.”
“It’s from Alice in Wonderland, the book. And the riddle has no answer. The rabbit hole, that’s an Alice reference, too. And the tea party could be the Mad Hatter’s tea party.”
“Was she a big fan of that story?” Eve wondered.
“I don’t know,” Henry told her. “Not that I know of, especially. Maybe it’s something she read as a kid, or her parents read to her. So it reminded her of when they were alive, when everyone was safe? I don’t know.”
“All right.” A question for Mira, Eve supposed, the department’s head shrink. “We’ll get back to you,” she said as she rose.
“Isn’t there something I can do?”
“We’ll go be with the family,” Louise told Henry. “In a little while we’ll go be with the family. I’ll walk you out,” she said to Eve and Peabody.