“How come?” he asked, looking at her warily.
“It’s bad news about Donna. I’m sorry to tell you that she’s been found murdered.”
Will sank slowly down onto the loveseat. “Oh no, this can’t be.. . It can’t.”
“Here, drink this,” she said, holding the coffee out to him.
He didn’t reach for it. Just sat there, dazed.
“Will?…”
Again, he didn’t respond. Just sat there goggle-eyed, his breathing quick and shallow. He was a big strapping guy but size meant nothing when it came to shock. At West Point, Des had seen rock-hard specimens of fearless fighting manhood faint dead away over a flu shot.
She darted into the kitchen and rummaged under the sink for some ammonia. Came back, uncapped it and waved it under his nose.
Will barely reacted to the first two whiffs. After the third whiff he recoiled from her, his eyes starting to clear. Then the recognitionof the news set back in. “Oh, God,” he gulped. “She was my soul mate, my everything. What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to drink your coffee, and we’re going to talk. Come on, take this. The caffeine will help.”
Obediently, he reached for it and took a sip, his chest rising and falling. “How did it happen?”
She sat in the armchair facing him and crossed her long legs. “The details aren’t pretty.”
“I don’t care,” he said, his eyes searching her face. “Tell me everything. I need to know.”
“She was found at the Yankee Doodle.”
Will’s eyes widened in surprise. “The motel?”
“She checked in there last night at about ten o’clock. She was meeting somebody, Will. Whoever he was, he knocked her unconscious and he…”
“And he what?” Will demanded.
“Drowned her in the bathtub.”
“No, this can’t be,” Will groaned, rocking back and forth on the sofa. “You’ve made a mistake. Take another look. It’s got to be somebody else, not Donna.”
“It’s Donna. I saw her with my own two eyes.”
He drank some more coffee, clutching the mug tightly in both hands. “Will they have to cut her open? Please tell me they’re not going to do that.”
“I don’t believe that’s called for,” Des replied. “Have you got someone who can stay with you, Will? You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”
“I have no one,” he replied woodenly. “Just Donna-and now she’s gone.”
“May I use your phone?”
He didn’t respond. Barely seemed to hear her.
Des went in the kitchen and called Mitch, who promised he’d be right over. Then she returned to Will and sat back down. “Mitch is going to hang out here for a little while, okay?”
“Who did this to her, Des?” Will demanded suddenly. His shockhad given way to raw anger. It often happened this way. “Who murdered my Donna?”
“We don’t know yet. You can help us out. If you’re up to it, I mean.”
“Of course, but how?”
“By answering some questions. I have to warn you, this might be rough.”
“You can ask me anything. I don’t give a damn. I’ve spent the whole night going crazy. She didn’t come home. She never, ever did that before.”
Des took out her notepad and pen. “Do you have any idea where else she was last night?”
“She had her meeting of the Dorset Merchants Association. They get together for dinner twice a month.”
Will’s mention of the Merchants Association set off a faint flicker of recognition in the back of Des’s mind. “Where do they usually meet?”
“At the Clam House. There’s a back room for club meetings.” The Clam House was a seafood restaurant adjacent to the Dorset Marina, popular with boaters and tourists. “It usually runs from seven until about nine.”
“Did she typically go without you?”
“Yeah, the association was her deal. We’ve always divided up the workload according to our strengths. Donna was good at working the room. She liked it, even. Me, I’m a cooker. I belong in the kitchen with my pots and pans.”
“Were you expecting her home after that?”
“Not directly, no. She had to meet somebody about a catering gig on her way back.”
“Any idea who that was?”
Will furrowed his brow in thought. “She may have told me their name, but I’m drawing a total blank. Things are always just so hectic. It was a cocktail party. A bon voyage thing. That’s all I remember.”
“Where did she keep track of her appointments? Could she have input it somewhere?”
Will smiled very faintly. “No, no, she hates… she hated computers. But it ought to be written down in her date book. It’s black leather.”
“This would be in her shoulder bag?”
Will nodded his head, swallowing.
“Okay, good,” Des said, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be written down. That there was no catering gig. It was simply the little white lie she’d told Will to buy herself enough time to stop off and screw her boyfriend. “What time did you get home last night, Will?”
“I rolled in about nine-thirty. I was expecting her by ten, ten-thirty. We always stayed in touch by cell phone. If she knew she was going to be later than that she would have called. I tried calling her about eleven. When she didn’t answer I started to worry. I phoned our late man, Rich Graybill, to see if she’d stopped by The Works. Rich is usually there until about midnight, cleaning up and getting things set up for the morning. But he said he hadn’t seen her.”
“Tell me more about him. What’s his story?”
“Who, Rich? He’s a young guy, good guy. Lives with his girlfriend, Kimberly. She’s one of our pastry chefs.”
“Her last name?”
“Fiore.”
“What did you do after that, Will?”
“Paced around a whole lot,” he confessed. “Kept calling her cell phone. Kept getting more and more worried. Like I said, I called the state police to see if there had been any accidents. I can’t even remember what time I did that…”
“Not important.” And even if it were they would have logged his call.
“At one point I actually decided to go look for her at The Works. I thought maybe she’d decided to get an early start on tomorrow’s baking. Which makes no sense, because if that’s where she was she would have called me. But I was just so desperate. I couldn’t just sit here, you know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I left her a note on the kitchen counter in case she got home whileI was out.” He loped into the kitchen and returned with it, gazing down at it as if it were the last piece of concrete evidence that Donna and their marriage and their life had ever existed. Gently, he placed it on the coffee table for Des to see. He’d scrawled it in pencil on a piece of lined yellow paper: “Don-Don-I’m out looking for you. Where are you? Be home soon. Love, Willie Boy”
“When I got back here, she still wasn’t home,” he added quietly. “And I’ve been sitting up ever since.”
“Will, there are some things I need to ask that might seem pretty cold and hurtful. But I need to ask them, and you need to answer them. If you can, that is.”
“I understand.” He sighed, flopping back down on the loveseat. “Fire away.”
“Was Donna involved with someone else?”
Will glared at her, his jaw clenching. For a second, he looked like a vengeful Viking warrior. Then he relaxed, his gaze dropping to the worn rag rug at Des’s feet. “We had our troubles,” he admitted. “All couples do. Especially when they’re together twenty-four hours a day. But I swear to you, I wasn’t sneaking around on Donna with another woman. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
