I nodded. I put a pin in this whole Thad’s-not-really-a-doctor thing and made a mental note to come back to it later.
“Okay. So since one of the drugs Thad reps is Digoxigon, which, like I said, is a form of digitalis. Naturally, he carries samples of it in his car and stores samples at home . . .”
“And when Sheriff Haight heard Dr. Davenport had toxic levels of the drug in his system, and then found those same drugs on Thad, he arrested him.” I finished Tabitha’s thought for her.
“Exactly.”
“But wait,” I said. “I’m confused, did Arthur die from digitalis poisoning or from being stabbed?”
“The medical examiner hasn’t determined the official cause of death yet. But Carl—in his infinite stupidity—decided to arrest Thad anyway.”
Tabitha was so distressed I felt sorry for her. She seemed genuinely concerned for Thad. I could imagine that spending any time at all in jail would be pretty hard on a guy who had grown up on the Davenport estate, and it was touching how scared she was for him.
“I’m sorry, Tab,” I said. “This must be so hard on you.”
“Yeah. His final tuxedo fitting is in three days! Can you imagine if I have to ask the tailor to come to the jail to do it?”
Just then the door to the sheriff’s office opened. Butter leaned halfway out and looked at Tabitha. “You can see him now if you want.”
Tabitha said nothing but gave Butter the evil eye before twitching past him into the station.
“I was there when that girl was born, did you know that?” Butter said, shaking his head. “Marge was the on-call nurse at Tuttle General the night Patricia’s water broke. I was up there bringing Marge some dinner. Anyway, little Tabby was born just after 8 p.m., I remember, because there was a Nationals game on and Dr. Benton was itching to get home to watch it. She came out all pink and wrinkly, like we all do I expect, but I remember she had a set of lungs on her like I’d never heard. Marge and the other nurses joked she was gonna be an opera singer.” He laughed at the memory. “I guess she found another use for those lungs of hers.”
I smiled. Tabitha was well known around town for her robust rants. “Hey, how’s Carl holding up?” I asked him before he turned to go back inside.
“He’s doing all right, trying to conduct the investigation to the absolute letter of the law—with so many eyes watching and all. And the mayor’s had that little minion of hers calling over here every hour to get an update.”
“Uch, Toby.”
Mayor Shaylene Lancett’s nephew, the only son of her only brother, was her unofficial second-in-command. Even though Toby Lancett held no official post within our government, he was continually dispatched by the mayor for anything she couldn’t, or didn’t, want to do herself. This gave Toby, an otherwise excellent candidate for Most Likely to Be Shot by His Own Troops, an inflated sense of power.
“I can see why the mayor’s upset though. Two murders in about as many months does not exactly reflect well upon Tuttle Corner now does it?”
“No, it does not. Carl would sure like to solve this one quickly and move on.”
“How about Lindsey Davis? Has she been by yet?” Lindsey Davis was the new prosecuting attorney in Tuttle County.
He nodded. “She was here about a half an hour ago—” Butter stopped midsentence. He’d said too much and he knew it. “Nuh-uh.” He wagged a finger at me. “No comment. That’s what I’m supposed to say to all-y’all right now. Carl’ll make a statement soon. Until then”—he mimed locking his lips with an invisible key and then, in true Butter form, he ate it.
I hung around the sheriff’s office a while longer trying to get anyone to talk to me, but they were all on message with “No comment.” Once I’d hit a dead end I decided to go by the office quickly to log the story. It was a short piece, reporting only the news that there’d been an arrest in the case. I had just uploaded the article and was getting ready to head home when I got a text. I assumed it was from Jay checking on me, but I was wrong. It was from Tabitha:
I NEED TO TALK TO YOU ASAP. MEET ME AT LIBRARY NOW. COME ALONE. PLEASE.
CHAPTER 6
Tabitha, red-eyed and blotchy-cheeked, sat across from me in the children’s section of the library. Even though it was way past closing time, we both had keys and knew the code to the alarm system. Plus, we knew Dr. H wouldn’t mind us meeting here. And back in the children’s section, we could sit with the lights on and no one would be able to see from the outside. Tabitha said we needed absolute privacy for this conversation. And after hearing the story she just told me, I understood why.
“Tab,” I said after she’d finished unburdening herself. “I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a priest. I work for the newspaper, you know.”
She shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m planning to tell Carl all of this tomorrow anyway, but I wanted you to know what really happened because once I tell Carl what I did—” She broke off for a moment. “—I’ll probably be in jail right beside Thad.”
I nodded. I wasn’t certain about the particulars of the law, but I knew enough to know that what Tabitha had done almost certainly fell outside the bounds of legality.
Turns out part of what I already knew was true; it just wasn’t the whole story. Tabitha had gone over to Thad’s house and found Dr. Davenport dead in his office. As she walked around the body she saw the handle of a small folding hunting knife sticking out of his chest. Thad’s knife. It had been a gift from Arthur to Thad
