Evie cast Gabriel a wicked look, and he grinned his reply. Linda was cutting a path for her toward the kitchen. This was going to be an interesting evening, even if it didn’t turn productive.
“Learn anything useful?”
Evie glanced up at Gabriel on the step above her. She was sitting on the stairway they had climbed two-plus hours earlier, edged over to the side so people still leaving could get around her. She sniffed the drink Gabriel put into her hand before tasting it. “I’ve got a headache again.”
“It’s the music. Most of their friends must have hearing aids they can turn off,” he quipped as he sat down beside her.
“I learned that the Florists’ relatives know more about me than anyone other than my mother.” She took another sip of the punch.
“The small-town rumor mill can be very efficient when stirred up by something this dramatic,” Gabriel said.
“I’m guessing the banker in the family ran a credit check, probably even looked at my recently canceled checks, since I keep an account with the same state bank.”
“Want me to go slap him on the wrist?”
She considered it briefly, then shook her head. “No. If I get in a bind and need to know details about someone, he now owes me a favor.”
Gabriel’s shoulder pressed against hers as another person passed. “They mean no real harm. They’re just protective.”
“Don’t they understand I’m trying to find their missing family members?”
“You’re State Police, a not-so-favorite badge around these parts.”
Evie thought she could understand that. She went back to his original question. “I think they were in marriage counseling over in Decatur-Scott and Susan Florist. It wasn’t all a happy family, going back about two years before they disappeared. The aunt kind of confirmed it for me. And money is missing out of their family assets. Mr. Florist-family-banker didn’t realize what he confirmed as he complained about the problems of maintaining, then settling an estate when the State Police won’t rule it a homicide and the courts won’t issue death certificates for seven years. If you ask the right question and sound like you know more than you actually do, that guy can talk himself into some useful tangents.”
Gabriel took the drink out of her hand. “Trust you to have made that kind of progress. Okay, this isn’t the place for this kind of conversation.” He pulled her to her feet, steadied her so she wouldn’t fall, led her down the stairs and out the door.
“You seem bothered I’ve gotten answers from the Florist family.”
He shook his head, kept her hand in his, and moved briskly down the sidewalk. “Lower your voice, please. Take a look around.”
Groups of friends were saying lingering goodbyes around a few cars on the street. She shut up. Gabriel strolled along, gave her hand a friendly swing as he said, “Pretend you’re having fun.”
Evie caught a few smiles directed their way, indicating they thought it nice the sheriff had a date, and found it interesting she didn’t mind the assumption. “I am having fun.”
Gabriel finally slowed. “Okay. You can safely say whatever you would like now.”
“Give me back the drink. This version is the best so far.”
He handed her the glass. She sipped at it and nodded. Her throat was dry from having talked quite a lot. “I want the recipe for this, if you can pry it out of the blender guy. Anyway, it was easier to talk about the case than duck questions about being your date. And most everyone I met brought up the subject of the Florist family. So I went with it.”
“Which is why I pulled you over to the party-well, one reason.” He unlocked the post office, guided her inside. “You’ve got some thoughts running around your head.”
She was grateful to step into the heated building after her brave words earlier about nixing the car. “They were in marriage counseling, probably over in Decatur, and there’s between forty and eighty thousand dollars missing from what their banker relative expected to find in the estate.” She walked over and set her drink on the table, pulled her phone out to check for messages. “I’m not sure where they were siphoning away cash that smoothly from their accounts. I maybe had a whiff of something being off in their finances before you pulled me away to the party, but I haven’t pinpointed it. I need to get my head back into those numbers.”
She started to move toward the open files, and he reached over to put a finger lightly under her chin. “Not tonight,” he said firmly, turning her to face him. “That’s a task for tomorrow. You’re sure on the marriage counseling?”
“Sort of. Sure of the location-Decatur-and that it was a standing Wednesday evening appointment for both of them. Pretty sure it started about two years before they disappeared.”
“Why didn’t we have this?” He looked puzzled and extremely frustrated, a combination that was rather appealing. She had known she would get his attention with this idea, so she hadn’t mentioned it until she was reasonably confident.
She patted his arm in sympathy. “Because it’s not really there, Gabriel. Not in their schedule books, not in what they told their family and friends, not in their finances-no checks have a memo line saying ‘marriage counseling.’ It wasn’t only Susan keeping something covert, or just Scott-it was both of them. They worked together to keep it under wraps.”
She studied the crime wall and the month-at-a-glance calendar pages. She’d found something new, and she wasn’t above admitting to herself it felt really good. “The aunt knew something. I think they were using her to cover up what they were really doing. A friend says, ‘I called you Wednesday evening, but didn’t get an answer.’ And they would say, ‘Sorry about that, we were over at my aunt’s, and cell reception isn’t good at her place.’ Like that. They’d stop by the woman’s place for ten minutes, use the stop to cover a three-hour gap in their evening.”
Gabriel pulled out a chair, draped his arms across the back of another one. “Tell me what you’re seeing to get to that conclusion.”
Evie thought about where to begin, decided to simply walk him through it. She made herself comfortable in her chair and propped her feet on the next one over. “I’ve been looking for motive to harm the family, digging for something that would be a trigger, trying to track their movements, what happened in their lives. I’ve been looking at any schedule or calendar I can find, anything with dates on it. You’ve collected a lot of paper on this family, Gabriel. Name the subject, and an officer put together a file on it. That’s proved very helpful when I have a feeling something is there but hiding beneath the surface. I’ve been into the guts of those boxes today.” She looked around at the stacks.
“I found that Susan suddenly developed an interest in speaking Spanish. That’s what I first noticed. She audited classes over in Decatur at the junior college. Spanish I, then Spanish II, Advanced Spanish-two years’ worth of Spanish classes. Always on a Wednesday night. No grades, no exams, but merely auditing the courses. She started about three weeks into the semester, so it wasn’t something she planned and began at the term’s start-she just abruptly joined that first class. I figured they were planning a vacation to Mexico when I first noticed it, but that much Spanish over that length of time didn’t make sense. And I checked-she had four years of Spanish in high school and another year in college. She could have skipped all the classwork and simply bought a refresher set of audios to brush up.
“I figured maybe there was an affair on the side, with a standing appointment on Wednesday evenings when she knows her husband is at work. If she gets asked about the Spanish classes, she can rattle off a sentence and say how fun it is.
“I looked up Scott’s schedule to confirm he was regularly working Wednesday nights. What I found was the opposite. Scott never drew a paycheck for work on a Wednesday night. If he was scheduled to work that night, he’d arrange to swap with someone. Or he would work a double the day before and flex the time off the rotation. In the two years before they disappeared, Scott was never paid for work done on a Wednesday night. That’s just weird, isn’t it?” She paused and looked at Gabriel, and he nodded his agreement.