“Thanks so much for waiting,” Phoebe told him. The front of the large room, she saw, had been set up as a store, with shelves of feed and supplies. It opened at the back onto an area with industrial-looking equipment and huge container bags. That was clearly where the feed was ground and bagged.
“Not a problem,” Wesley said. “What’d you do to your arm?”
“Broke my elbow—but just a minor fracture.”
He smoothed an eyebrow with his hand, a gesture she interpreted as impatience. He was being polite, but he was clearly eager to leave.
“This should only take a second,” Phoebe said. “What’s that smell, by the way?”
“Oh, that’s probably the molasses you’re smelling. We sweeten the animal feed with it. We have vats of it in the basement, and it’s piped up to the back room.”
As she drew a notebook from her purse, the store phone rang.
“Lemme just grab this, okay?” he said. “It’s a guy calling back about a lawn issue.”
Wesley answered, “Springville Feed Company,” and ended up in a conversation about crabgrass. As he talked, Phoebe’s eyes wandered over the space. In the middle of the first floor was an open area protected by a waist-high wooden fence; beyond it was the top of a large, weathered paddle wheel, at least twelve feet in diameter. She moved closer and stared down into a pit large enough to hold the wheel and several wooden gears. At one point the stream had run through there, she realized, making the wheel turn, but now it was totally dry.
Across the room she heard Wesley say good-bye, and she returned to where she’d been standing.
“Pretty interesting, isn’t it?” he said, coming from behind the counter. “The water churned the paddle wheel around, and that moved the gears that in turn activated the grist stones.” He pointed to an area to her left, and she swiveled her head in that direction. There was a large circular stone resting on the floor.
“Yes, fascinating,” she said, though she hadn’t a lick of interest at the moment. “Anyway, as I said on the phone, I’d love a better description of the man at the jukebox. You said he was in his late thirties, perhaps early forties, not dressed as a townie. Anything else you recall?”
Wesley slowly shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “I mean, he seemed sure of himself, confident. That much I remember.”
Phoebe pulled the photo of Stockton out of her purse. It was a long shot, but it was all she had.
“This wasn’t the guy by any chance, was it?”
“He looks vaguely familiar, but no,” Wesley said. “The guy I talked to was darker. Dark hair, dark eyes.”
Phoebe stuffed the photo back in her purse and, after hesitating for a second, pulled out her phone. I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought.
“What about him?” she asked. She opened up the photo she had taken of Duncan in his kitchen last Friday.
“Oh, wow,” Wesley said after a couple of seconds.
Phoebe caught her breath. “What?” she asked. It came out as barely a whisper.
“This is a professor from Lyle. I’ve seen him.”
“What do you mean? He’s the man you saw that night?”
“No, no, definitely not,” Wesley said. He narrowed his gray eyes. “I just recognized him from school.”
Thank God for small favors, Phoebe thought.
“So now you’re thinking a guy did it, huh?” Wesley said as Phoebe dropped the phone back in her purse.
“Yes. Someone familiar with the area who knew about the Sixes and figured it would be easy to frame them. And very possibly someone connected to Lyle College. It might be the man you talked to that night, but maybe not. Can I ask you one more favor?”
“Is it going to take long?” Wesley asked. He sounded a little testy, as if he were starting to run out of patience.
“No, just a few minutes, I swear.” She reached into her purse again and pulled out a copy of Hutch’s notes.
“These are the notes Ed Hutchinson took after talking to you last fall. He told me that when he’d reread them, he’d found something significant in them, but he never had a chance to tell me what it was. Can you look and see if anything jumps out for you?”
Wesley shrugged his shoulders before he’d even looked but then glanced down and moved his eyes along the page.
“Sorry, nope,” he said after not more than a cursory glance. “I mean, it’s all just the stuff I told him.”
“There must be something significant in the underlined parts,” Phoebe said. “Mr. Hutchinson looked over a set of notes I took after my first meeting with you, and he highlighted the exact same things. It’s uncanny, but the two sets of notes are almost identical. All the details are the same—nearly word for word. It’s, well—”
And then, as she said the words, the truth seemed to charge into her brain, like someone flinging open a door and bursting into a room. The same. The two sets of notes were exactly the same. Every single detail given to Hutch had been repeated to her—an entire year later. Glenda’s words from the other day echoed in her head: “A liar’s story is often just a little too pat.”
Phoebe now knew what Hutch had discovered through the notes. Wesley had made up the story. Because, she thought, without understanding the reason, Wesley was the killer.
She forced a smile, but she could feel how lopsided it was on her face. Can he tell? she wondered as terror mounted inside her. Can he tell I just figured it out?
“Well,” she said feebly, “if nothing occurs to you, I’d better scoot and let you close up.” She looked down, hoping he couldn’t see her fear, and tucked the notes back into her purse. She saw that her fingers were trembling.
“Where’re you headed?” he asked. When she forced herself to look back up at him, she saw that he’d slapped a smile on his own face, but it was ugly and mean.
“I thought I’d just stay in with a book tonight,” she said. Fear had turned her voice into only a whisper. “Well, good night.”
“You really think I’m going to let you leave now?”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“You know why I’m saying that, right?” he said. “I just saw you figure it out in your head. Or kind of, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
She started to turn around and aimed for the door, but he took a giant step with her and blocked her way.
“Don’t make me fly into a rage, okay?” he said. His voice was different now, surly and low. “That’s what Gramps did.”
“I won’t make you mad,” she whispered. “I promise.”
“That Gramps,” he said, shaking his head back and forth as if someone had turned up the speed on him. “He thought he was so damn smart. Didn’t that irritate the hell out of you?”
Humor him, she told herself. Until you can figure out what to do. “Did—did Hutch call you about the notes?”
“Well, I told you he called me—so I could make it seem like I’d shared the stuff about Blair. But he’s too much of a busybody to just call.” Wesley snickered. “He dropped by here last Saturday afternoon. I was outside the lawn care barn, and he pulled up in his truck. Took me a second to recognize him. Said he was sorry about not taking my case seriously before, and he was finally trying to follow up with me. He showed me the notes he’d taken, and then he whips out the notes from you. And all of a sudden he starts to go all Lenny Briscoe on me. He asks in this mocking way if I don’t find it funny that every detail is the same. And then he says that when someone’s telling the truth, they tend to forget certain details or recall them a bit differently. But liars often repeat it word for word because they’ve rehearsed it. The whole time he’s not accusing me, just insinuating in this sly way, like he’s the hotshot cop and I’m just some idiot.