She was sitting in a booth at the far side of the
empty restaurant, near the bathrooms. It being January, they weren’t selling much ice cream. Hannah couldn’t go a day without ice cream, so she was just tucking into a giant banana split, and had purchased a hot fudge sundae for Scott.
“You and I
ate a gigantic meal not three hours ago,” he said. “I saw you eat two pieces of pie.”
Hannah shrugged, saying, “Great metabolism, I guess.”
“What’s all the secret squirrel business about?”
“I’m going to tell you why I was not surprised about Ava Fitzpatrick being in Theo’s will.”
“I know all about the photos of Ava on the wall in the secret room. Maggie told me today.”
“This is much older stuff,” Hannah said, “and it didn’t come from me.”
“If they turn the screws on me I’ll swear someone told me in an anonymous phone call,” Scott said, and crossed his heart with his finger for emphasis.
“Okay. You remember the summer Brad Eldridge died.”
“Yes.”
“Ava and Brian broke up for a couple weeks over Brian cheating with Phyllis Davis.”
“Go on.”
“So during that time, guess who is sniffing around Ava, trying to take Brian’s place?”
“Theo.”
“Yes indeedy. Then Ava and Brian get back together, suddenly there’s a bun in the oven, a wedding in the chapel, and old stink eye is left crying in the rain.”
“Ava was pregnant? You think the baby was Theo’s?”
“We’ll never know,” Hannah said. “Ava lost that baby soon after they
were married, so no one got to see if the kid had horns and cloven hooves, or red hair and freckles.”
“I didn’t know any of that. Maggie never talked about it.”
“Well, she wouldn’t, would she? It’s part of her family’s dirty laundry.”
“Does everyone else know?”
“It was juicy gossip back then, and you can bet it’s making the rounds again now he left her all that money. Theo was crazy about Ava, and the minute Brian went off with Phyllis he was there, giving her a shoulder to cry on. It was Theo who arranged for Ava to catch Brian and Phyllis in the act, parked out at the lake. After she dropped him to go back to Brian, Theo went nuts, got in lots of fights.”
“He broke my nose that summer,” Scott said, feeling the bump on the bridge.
“And Patrick beat the hell out of him for it.”
“That was also around the time Brad died.”
“Yep, and Theo left town right after the funeral.”
“So you think Theo left Ava the money because he was still in love with her?”
“Listen, I saw the wall of photos he had in that room and it didn’t look like love to me. It was something much worse than that.”
“Will you be talking to Ava anytime soon?”
“I could arrange to.”
“Tell her I have to talk to her but it’s only a formality, to dot my i’s and cross my t’s, so to speak, to keep Sarah off her back. If she wants to drop by my house to do it instead of the station, she can. But it has to be done, and soon.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thanks, Hannah.”
“For what? You never saw me and I was never here, and if you say I was I’ll deny it. That Scott, he’s delusional! I think he might hear voices.”
“Bye Hannah.”
“If you don’t want this sundae I’m going to eat it.”
“Be my guest.”
Later in the evening Scott sat at his kitchen table, trying to organize his thoughts with a series of lists on paper the way Ian had taught him. He had a timeline, a facts list, a questions list, a suspects list, and was working on some scenarios.
Hannah and Sam saw Theo and Willy around 12:30 a.m. Patrick saw Theo with Willy at midnight and then kicked Theo out of the bar at around 1:15. Tommy saw Theo fight with Phyllis and Billy between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m., but said Willy was not with Theo. Patrick walked Mandy home just after 2:00 a.m. Scott hauled Mitchell in just before 3:00 a.m. Ed found Theo’s body just after 4:00 a.m. Theo must have been killed between 1:30 and 4:00, and Willy disappeared after 1:00.
Where was Willy when Theo was killed and where was he now? Scott was convinced Willy had seen Theo’s attacker and had gone to ground somewhere. Who could have lured Theo to the vet’s office, or followed him there, and then killed him?
Phyllis, Billy, Patrick, Mandy, Maggie, and Mitchell were all out after the Rose and Thorn closed, between 1:30 and 4:00. He was hea
vily inebriated at the time, but maybe Mitchell saw something whilst serenading his ex-girlfriend, or on the way to her apartment building.
Even though Sarah had dropped Drew from the suspects list, Scott wasn’t ready to. Maybe Drew had still been in his office, unable to sleep and catching up on some paperwork. He could have caught Theo breaking in and killed him, thinking he was a burglar, or killed him simply because he’d fired him. He’d lied to them when questioned in the station afterwards; what else might he be hiding?
Scott reluctantly considered Patrick. Theo had repeatedly victimized the Fitzpatrick family. Bullying Sean, fighting with Patrick, burning Maggie’s house down, buying Brian’ disappearance (or maybe arranging it), and whatever the thing was he had with Ava; it was more than enough grounds for any one of the Fitzpatrick brothers to want the man dead. Brian was still missing and Sean’s alibi had checked out, so that left Patrick
Scott walked the streets of Rose Hill many nights on his rounds, and he often saw Patrick leaving Ava’s house via the back door after everyone else in town had long been in bed. If Theo threatened to reveal Patrick’s affair with Ava, would Patrick have killed him to keep it a secret? If Patrick found out about an affair between Ava and Theo, might he have killed Theo in a jealous rage?
He was certainly tall and strong enough. He was also one of the last people to see him alive, having kicked him out of the bar before Theo went to Phyllis’ trailer. According to Scott’s notes, Patrick got off work at 2:00 a.m., escorted Mandy to the trailer park, and then walked down Marigold Avenue, arriving home by 2:15. Did he overhear Theo making arrangements to meet someone at the vet’s later, someone like Willy Neff, and then showed up there after he dropped off Mandy?
Scott knew he was going to have to follow up with Patrick, and he dreaded Maggie finding out. He also needed to talk to Tommy, and see if he had anything more to say. Maybe the reason Tommy was so scared to talk was because it was Patrick he saw following Theo. Tommy and his mother were adopted members of the Fitzpatrick family, and they wrote his mother’s paychecks.
If Brian was still alive, and somehow knew about the bequest to Ava, would he come back and kill Theo, hoping to cash in? That was a stretch, Scott knew.
Who else hated Theo enough to kill him?
Knox certainly had both the height and strength, but also had a US Senator giving him an alibi. If Theo was sleeping with his wife, supplying her with drugs in return for items stolen from Knox’s collections, the fear of scandal might have been motive enough. Those photos of Ann Marie would be explosive blackmail ammunition. Maybe Knox wanted to remove both liabilities in order to protect his political aspirations. Theo also had some information which might embarrass Knox, as evidenced in the file Maggie had taken from the safe; something that happened when he was in college. If Knox hired the killer, he didn’t have to be in town when the crime took place, just as he was out of town when Anne Marie had her accident.
Knox’s brother Trick may have killed Theo for cheating him out of his commission on the sale of the glass factory. Trick’s wife Sandy would probably give him an alibi, even though he cheated on her repeatedly, and she suspected his brother of attempted murder.
There was always the anonymous “disgruntled business associate” theory, which Sarah preferred, or one of a hundred other people Theo had blackmailed, cheated, or screwed (literally or figuratively) over the years.
Caroline and Gwyneth stood to gain the most wealth from Theo’s death. Scott’s gut didn’t react to the idea, but it was practical police work to find out if either woman was having financial difficulties. He couldn’t imagine Caroline doing anything that might detonate such a karmic time bomb, and Gwyneth didn’t seem like she had the constitution for such a cold-blooded act.
Immersed in his notes and working on several plausible scenarios, it surprised him to hear a knock at his back door and find Ava on his back porch. She was dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, and was hugging herself in the cold. Scott let her in and put more coffee on.
“They think I’ve gone to bed, so I can’t stay long,” she said as she sat down.
Ava Fitzpatrick was the only daughter of parents who were already past middle age when they adopted her, and they had both passed away before their granddaughter Charlotte was born. An astonishing beauty in high school, Ava was still a stunning woman in her mid-thirties, the kind of woman who made many a man’s heart beat faster when she was near.
Scott was no exception. He wondered how a man could ever tire of looking at her. She had one of those luminous complexions
which required no makeup, sensual lips which were not too full but perfectly shaped, a bright smile, dark eyes with thick, long lashes, and shining dark hair which fell over her shoulders. She was always voted Miss Everything in high school, but amazingly never seemed pretentious or stuck on herself. She was a nice, friendly woman, a good mother, a gracious innkeeper, and Scott couldn’t understand how Brian could have abandoned her and the children.
Scott hurriedly gathered up his notes and slid them in a drawer while Ava pretended not to notice.
“I was as surprised as anyone when I found out Theo left me money,” she said moments later, holding a mug of coffee with both hands to warm them. “We dated briefly the summer after Brian and I broke up, but it was only a few dates and never anything serious.”
“It may have seemed more serious to Theo.”
“He was hurt when I broke it off, but there was never anyone but Brian for me. Everyone knew that.”
“And after?”
“Brad died, and Theo went back to England. I guess it was ten or twelve years later, when his father died, that he moved back. He would say hello to me in passing, but we never had a real conversation. I honestly don’t know why he left me so much money.”
“After Brian left, did Theo come to see you?”
“Well, now that you mention it, he did.”
“Go on.”
“You know at first we thought Brian must have been in an accident or something, and then a few weeks passed and all the money in our bank account disappeared.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it wasn’t much, but it was all the savings we had–a few thousand. He cashed a check in a Miami bank and cleaned us out. I saw the cancelled check; it was his handwriting, his signature. We knew then he meant to leave, and that was the last sign we had of him.”
“I guess I was out of the loop back then. I didn’t know.”
“That’s one of the things I like most about you, Scott; you don’t gossip and you don’t listen to gossip. Everyone in this town must know about that check but you.”
Scott thought about what Sarah continually said about listening to gossip being part of his job, and hated to think she might be right.
“And Theo came to see you?”
“Yes, he came to the house one night, very late, when I was alone with the kids put to bed. He said he’d heard about the account being cleaned out, and wanted to know if I needed money.”
“And you said?”
“Well, I thanked him, but told him the Fitzpatricks were taking good care of me, and I was going to get a job. This was before I decided to start the bed and breakfast. He said the offer was open ended. Then he left.”
“Anything else?”
“I was surprised to see him, and I thought later, you know, he might have been hitting on me, but I was such a mess at the time, I didn’t know if I was coming or going. I wouldn’t have recognized a pass if he’d been naked with a rose in his teeth.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing.”
“No anonymous letters, no cash mysteriously showing up when you needed it?”
“The church and the Fitzpatricks always made sure we had everything we needed. It’s still tight sometimes, but the bed and breakfast supports us.”
“If you remember anything else, will you let me know?”
“Absolutely. Oh Scott, what people must be thinking. You know how people are in this town.”
“Don’t worry about it. The people who know and care for you won’t doubt you.”
“Oh please. They’ll stand by me, and defend me to the death, but don’t think they aren’t all wondering the same thing everyone else is.”
“I hope that’s not true,” Scott said.
“That’s only
human nature, and I can’t control that,” she said, with a delicate sigh and a look that made Scott want to slay dragons on her behalf.
“Try not to worry about it,” Scott said. “If you need someone to talk to, I’m always here.”
“Thanks, Scott, you’re a doll.”