On the first Sunday Prescott was in town, he went to the Methodist church where Robert Cushner’s funeral had been held, but Wendy Cushner was not there. He went again the next Sunday, and saw her father-in-law, the man who had hired him. Prescott had sat in the back where Cushner would not see him, then made sure that as soon as Dr. Stevenson, the minister, had pronounced the benediction, he was on his way out the door.
Prescott kept up his observation and widened his research for three more days. Then one day he waited until midmorning, when the older child was in nursery school and the younger was in the back bedroom for a nap. He walked around the block to the front of her house, and knocked on her door.
She opened it only a few inches, with a bit of the trepidation that a woman alone often displayed when a strange man came to the door. “Hi, can I help you?”
“I’m Roy Prescott,” he said. “I’m the man your father-in-law hired to find the killer.”
She looked at him with a mixture of alarm and exasperation, but she let him in. Wendy Cushner was not an especially neat housekeeper, and she was not apologetic about it. The living room had a few of the kids’ toys in unlikely places. She simply picked up a doll from the couch, told him to sit where it had been, set it on the coffee table, and sat down across from him. Close up, she looked tired and sad and worn.
He patiently lulled her by asking the questions he knew that she would have already been asked. They were about the enemies her husband might have had, the strangers she might have noticed near the house in the days before the crime, the worries her husband might have mentioned to her. She answered that nothing had come to her attention. He asked about the possibility that a business competitor might have ordered her husband’s death. She answered the question truthfully: she didn’t believe that could have happened. He had already sold his business before he was killed.
Prescott took that in and kept asking other questions, always sympathetically. After a time he left. The next day, he came again, and asked more questions. He came several times, always speaking gently and patiently, always careful to tell her things that he knew, so she would come to feel that they were sharing information. On the first day, he’d told her what the local police had told Millikan, and what Millikan had seen in the restaurant. On another day, he’d told her about his conversations with the killer, and what they had made him believe about the man. After a few days, he was sure he had convinced her he liked her and felt sorry for her. He left her alone for a couple of days, and kept her under even closer surveillance. Then he was ready for his final visit.
He waited until they were settled in the living room, then said, “I’m afraid that this time I’ve got a hard question. The police will eventually get to it, so we might as well do it now. It’s about Donna Halsey.”
He paused, and watched her face grow still and rigid, then begin to waver and get a rubbery look around the mouth. Her eyes were wet, not weeping, but watering as though she had been hit in the face. She said, “You know about Donna Halsey?”
He said, “I figured it out a couple of weeks ago. How long have you known?”
“I never did know. I thought . . . I didn’t think he would do that.”
Prescott said, “You mean you found out after he was dead?”
She nodded. “He said he was working that night. It was something about trying to get the bugs out of a program to get it ready for production so he could introduce it in some computer show. The show was going to be in—like—January. He lied. He knew that by January the company would already have belonged to somebody else for months. He already hadn’t owned it for a week.”
“You didn’t know he’d sold the company,” Prescott said.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t think I was even listening to what he said about staying late that night. It was just a bunch of words, plausible because they were words he had used a lot. But it’s amazing, isn’t it? I remembered exactly what he said.”
“Did you know the marriage was in trouble?”
“No.” Then she shivered, as though she were shaking off something that had clung to her, like dirt. “That’s not true. We argued a lot . . . not always out loud. He wasn’t happy with the way things were.”
Prescott was silent, not even pretending to understand. He just waited, and she spoke again.
“I didn’t get it,” she said. “I mean, I understood the words he was saying, but I didn’t understand that he meant them, exactly as he said them. I thought he was just complaining, whining for attention, like the kids do. What he was doing was something more. Sometimes I think it was his fault for letting it go, saying something and then not saying anything again for a month or two, so that I didn’t take it seriously enough. Sometimes I think if he hadn’t mentioned anything—just kept his mouth shut—then in time everything would have been okay by itself. I was busy from dawn to dusk with the kids, and cooking and shopping and the stuff that you have to do just to be a family. I was tired, and half the time I was frantic.”
She stopped and looked at Prescott with the purest expression of sadness and regret he had seen in years. “He didn’t threaten me, or say, ‘If you don’t start paying attention to me, I’ll find somebody who will, beginning next Thursday.’ See, in life it would be a lot better if there were big signs that popped up at important times and said, ‘Hey! Drop everything and handle this. You’re fighting for your life now!’ There isn’t anything like that. Everything comes at you at once, and you do your best, and then you find out you picked the wrong thing.” She was crying now. “I did that. I kept this house as neat as a pin. I took wonderful care of the children. I did everything, volunteered for everything at the school, the church, helped friends and relatives. I cooked nice meals, I . . .” She seemed to hear her own voice and not want to go on.
Prescott prompted her. “Did you ever meet Donna Halsey?”
“I knew Donna Halsey as well as he did. As soon as I learned she was one of the ones who got killed, I said, ‘Who was she with?’ She would never, in a million years, have gone into that restaurant by herself. The police were positive she was with that man Gary Finch, but I didn’t believe it. There was only one person there that she could have been with.” She sobbed. “Even my mother knew it.”
“Your mother?”
“She had warned me, at least two years ago. She got the feeling one day that things weren’t quite the same between me and Bobby. It was something she saw in his face one night when he was talking to me. She sat me down the next day and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but is everything okay?’ I told her she was right: it was none of her business. But she wouldn’t give up. She was sitting right where you are. She looked around, not in my eyes, and said, ‘You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a better mother than I was. You’re a terrific cook. But I’m going to say one thing because you’re also the best daughter in the world and I love you. In the history of the world, no man ever left his wife because some other woman was a better cook, or was more eager about setting the food on the table, or arranging it more attractively on the plate. The way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach, it’s a bit south of there.’ Then she stood up and left. You have to know my mother. She’d never said anything like that in her life. I saw her blush in church one time when the minister read some passage about somebody’s loins. But as soon as Bobby was dead, and the paper printed the names of the other people who had been in the restaurant, she knew. She has never said anything about warning me, just come and tried to help me and be sympathetic. But what she said will always be there between us, just lying there. She was right, and I didn’t take it to heart.”
“I’m sorry you ever had to find out,” said Prescott. “It serves no purpose. But I’ve got to say that you’re being too hard on yourself. You have nothing to blame yourself for. You weren’t the one who did this. He was.”
She sighed, then sobbed a little, so her breath came out shivery and choked. She said, “He paid for being tempted. I’m paying for being stupid.” She squinted. “He wasn’t bad. Nobody but me can really know that. He loved us. He would have stayed faithful—had been faithful for twelve years, before this. I told myself after it happened what a bastard he was, what a pig, what a rat. The truth is, he wasn’t.”
Prescott said, “I believe you. People make mistakes, and usually they get the chance to make up for them. If he had been given the chance, I’m sure he would have gotten over Donna Halsey pretty quickly, and your marriage would have been fine.”
As he spoke, she began to shake her head irritably. “I’ll show you something.” She got up and went to a kitchen drawer, and pulled out a piece of paper. She came back and handed it to him.
Prescott took it into his hand, and he could feel that the stiffness was already going out of the paper because she had held it in her hand so many times, folded and unfolded it. The letter was a memorandum of agreement between Vitaltrex Corporation and her husband to transfer his company for $20 million in cash and $14 million in
