Donna looked stricken. “Of course not! He was helping them all—in many cases, he had saved their lives! No, everyone loved him. I mean, on occasion, I suppose there was the odd . . .” she stopped herself.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “No—there wasn’t anyone who would want to hurt Dr. Davenport.” You could tell Donna would protect Arthur Davenport’s reputation with her life, but I needed her to open up.
“The sheriff is going to be looking into all of this, you know.”
She twisted the wedding ring on her left hand. “Arthur could be, um, well, it’s just that for a very smart man sometimes he didn’t always make the smartest choices.”
I poised my pen over my notebook. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes darted toward the front of the office and she lowered her voice to a whisper, “Arthur liked the ladies.”
This was the second time inside of an hour that I heard Arthur Davenport was a ladies’ man. Love gone wrong is perhaps the oldest motive for murder in the book. I tried asking her the same question I’d asked David. “Was he seeing anyone before he died?”
She let out a snort. “Someone? Probably more like a few someones . . .”
“Can you give me any names?”
She shook her head, her face coloring. “No, no, I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sure it has no relation to . . . well, you know . . .” Her eyes grew misty again, and she dabbed at the corner of one with a crumpled tissue.
“Donna,” I said, “the best thing you can do for Arthur now is to help us find out who did this to him. If you know something, you should speak up.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She looked terribly uncomfortable, and the Southern girl inside me desperately wanted to rescue her from the situation, but my inner-reporter muzzled her and I waited in silence for Donna to continue. “You might want to, um, ask around about Arthur’s past love life. There’s a certain someone in town who was carrying a pretty heavy torch for him.” She widened her eyes. “She thought they were destined to walk down the aisle, but I don’t think he shared those same thoughts.”
“Who?” I asked.
“That’s all I’m going to say about that,” she said and pursed her lips together.
I left it—for the moment—making a mental note to find out who this “certain someone” was at a later date. And then I switched gears. “I had a nice chat with David this morning.”
“Oh, that David,” she said with affection. “He’s an ornery one.”
Ornery wasn’t exactly the word I would have chosen to describe him. I might have gone with handsome, articulate, chiseled . . .
“He was a little devil as a child—always getting into everything, real physical, like he never quite knew how to control himself. Gave his father fits as a little one,” she said with a laugh. “But he always got away with it because he had that charm, you know? That scampy look in his eyes. No one could resist David when he looked at you with those eyes, least of all Arthur.”
“And what about Thad?”
At the mention of Thad’s name, she grew somber. “Thad was a different kind of boy,” she explained. “He was much more serious. Always did the right thing, said the right thing—as opposed to David, who was a wild child. Thad wasn’t like that. He was always polite, always well mannered. Much more serious, you know. More like his mother, I suppose.”
“Do you think he could have done this to his father?”
Donna’s eyes flashed. “Of course not!” It was an automatic response. “Thad would never hurt his father. He worshipped him—both the boys did.”
That was the second person that morning to tell me there was no way Thad killed his father. Third, if you counted Tabitha. Strange that the evidence painted such a different picture.
“Artie—Arthur,” she corrected herself, “was a big personality. He wasn’t a saint, he was a man just like any other, but he was an excellent doctor and a caring father to those boys. I don’t know who would could have . . . have . . .” This brought on a fresh wave of tears.
Poor Donna had had enough for one day. “Thank you for talking with me. You’ve been so helpful.”
She stood and took my hand. “Thank you, dear,” she said warmly. “I’ll look forward to reading the obituary on Sunday. It’ll be such a comfort to us all.”
CHAPTER 11
When I got back to the Times office I was not-so-secretly proud that I’d been able to get two key interviews done in the short amount of time since I’d been given the assignment. Even Flick would have to acknowledge my competency on this one. So after setting my stuff down in my cubicle, I went to see him to receive my praise.
“How come you did the interviews without talking to me first?” Flick apparently did not find my research praiseworthy. “You heard Jackson. I am supposed to be giving you the benefit of my experience on this.”
I hadn’t expected him to throw me a parade, but I hadn’t expected him to be angry with me either. “Yeah but c’mon, Flick. David? And his office manager? Obviously those two were going to included on the list.”
“‘Yeah-but’ nothing—”
“I just thought that—”
“I know what you ‘just thought,’ Riley,” Flick said. “You just think you know it all and that you don’t need any help from anybody, but I’m here to tell you, kid, that isn’t the case.”
The familiar brew of humiliation and anger swirled inside my gut. I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down before speaking. “Flick,” I said using my most controlled voice, “I think if you look at my notes, you’ll see that I did a pretty good job with the questions.”
“Did you ask David if his father ever talked about moving away from Tuttle Corner? Or
