It was an unexpected answer in both speed and wit, and it made me laugh.
He smiled. “It’s funny, but I’m serious.”
“No—I mean, I get it. . .” I said. I knew I needed to follow up on that, but I couldn’t think of quite what to ask. What was it about this guy that made me feel so flustered? I again pretended to make notes in order to buy time to think.
“Riley?” He interrupted my thought.
“Yes?”
“Don’t you want to ask me if I think my brother killed my father?”
That got my attention. “Do you?”
“Not a chance in hell. And you can quote me on that.” There was no smile on his face when he spoke this time, no playful twinkle in his eye. He was dead serious and he wanted me to know it.
“What about the night of the murder,” I said, my pen poised over my notebook. “Thad says he came to your house around nine.”
“I wasn’t home, but Thad has his own key. If he says he was there, he was there. It’s just that I didn’t see him.”
His phone vibrated and he turned it over; his brow wrinkled at whatever was on the display. “Shoot—I have to run, I’m sorry.” He looked up. “But maybe we could continue this conversation another time?”
“Sure. My deadline for the obit is Saturday.”
“Oh,” he said, “well, I’m going to be here until”—he turned over his wrist, which didn’t have a watch on it—“forever.” He smiled. “But maybe I could call you sometime?”
“Of course,” I said. “You have my number. I’ll be working on this right up until deadline if you think of anything else.”
“Okay,” he said. I was about to stick out my hand to shake his when he smiled and looked down at the ground. “What if I think of something else, like, totally unrelated?”
“Um, well, sure. You never know when one can include the odd tidbit in a piece . . .”
A pinkish hue appeared just under his high cheekbones. “Uh, I guess I’m really bad at this,” he said and cleared his throat. “What I am trying to say—very awkwardly, obviously—is could I call you sometime? You know, not necessarily about this . . .”
My stomach flipped over. He was asking me out? I’d had no idea. I wasn’t used to cute doctors asking me out. Or cute anybodies for that matter. Jay had asked me out online through Click.com, and the only other guy I’d dated before him was Ryan, who asked me out by passing me a note in tenth-grade Geometry. “Oh,” I said, trying to play it off casually. “Oh . . . well, uh . . .” Casual wasn’t really my thing.
“I’ll take that as a no?”
“Gosh, David, that’s so nice,” I said quickly, not wanting to stretch out this hideous moment. “But I’m actually seeing someone.”
“Aw, man.” He smiled. “All the good ones are taken. Ah, well, it was worth a shot.”
It was me who was fully blushing by this point. “Um, thanks,” I said, tucking an errant hair behind my ear because I needed something to do other than stand there and look like an idiot.
We walked out of the cafeteria together without a word. I had parked out front, and there was one main corridor that led to the entrance. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me,” I said, which seemed somehow oddly formal. “Again, I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks.” He flashed me his wide, confident smile, and I knew he’d be just fine after my rejection.
We said our goodbyes and he went up the elevators back into the bowels of the hospital. I headed out to the parking lot. But as I got into my car, I wasn’t thinking about what he said about his father or his brother, or how I would incorporate his quotes into the obit. All I could think about was how odd it was for a good-looking, single doctor to hit on the woman writing his father’s obituary while she was writing it. And, much to my own dismay, how flattered I was that I could turn the head of someone like David Davenport.
CHAPTER 10
Arthur Davenport’s office was in a building adjacent to the hospital, so I figured as long as I was right there I’d pop over to see if his office manager could spare me a few minutes. Tabitha had told me that Arthur and Donna had worked together for years and that she knew more about his life than he did.
Donna was red-eyed and blotchy-cheeked when she came to the door. The office was closed for the day, but she and another woman were inside making phone calls and rescheduling patients with other physicians. She invited me right in when I told her I’d be writing Dr. Davenport’s obituary for the Times.
“It’s such a shock,” she said as she let me inside. “Arthur. . . murdered? I still can’t believe it . . .”
It was hard to see someone in this kind of pain, and it wasn’t lost on me that this woman, who was not a blood relative, was clearly the most distraught of all the people I’d talked to thus far. She took me back to her office and sat me down in an old chair with peeling faux-leather on the armrest. We talked for almost twenty minutes and from what Donna had to say about him, you’d have thought Arthur Davenport hung the moon. She told me about how patients would travel for miles just to see him and how he was the hardest-working man she knew. I took copious notes and got more than a few quotes I could use for the obit. So I decided to veer off the obituary course for just a moment.
“Were there any patients who didn’t
