Tears slid down her cheeks. “You need to go.”
“Okay,” I said, “I will, but I’m worried about you. I can help you if you need it.”
Her back stiffened, and she swiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I’m fine. Maybe we can talk about it next week when things die down.”
“It can’t wait until next week,” I said. “I can walk with you while you shop, and we can talk in code if you like. So we don’t scare your son.”
The look on her face suggested she was about to shoot me down, but to my surprise, she nodded. “Okay.”
She started down the aisle, and I said, “I’m going to just leave my cart here and walk with you.”
“Okay.”
“Were you and her close before she left?” I asked.
Her mouth twisted wistfully. “I thought so, but lookin’ back, I don’t know that she could be friends with people. Paul says she was a user, and even though he’s guilty of a lot of things, he knows how to read people.”
“Did Paul know her?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I didn’t know him through our friends.”
“But you knew him back then.”
Her cheeks pinkened. “Not before she left, but we met soon afterward.”
“How did you meet?”
She grimaced and leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Paul pulled me over for speedin’, even though I wasn’t, and made me get out of the car. He said he was goin’ to let me off with a warnin’, but only if I gave him my phone number.”
I gasped. “Are you kiddin’ me?”
A smile lifted the corner of her lips. “He told me that he’d seen me around town before and didn’t know how else to approach me.”
“And you said this was after Heather left?”
“About six months after.” She leaned in further, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “He was married, but I didn’t know it at the time.”
“Did he take you to the Mountain View Lodge?” I asked.
She looked taken aback by my question, so I was surprised when she said, “No. He’d always come to my house. I always thought it was strange that we didn’t go to his place, but he always had an excuse. Then the one time we went there, his wife found us.” She sniffed. “Lookin’ back, I think he planned it that way.”
What a first-class asshole. But she clearly wasn’t ready to talk about that yet, at least not to me, so I veered back to the subject at hand.
“Was Heather upset when Wyatt didn’t propose at Christmas?”
She rolled her eyes. “Boy, was she. She’d been countin’ on it. She’d already asked me and Abby to be her maids of honor.”
“Really?” I said. “I didn’t think she and Abby were close at that point.”
“That’s the sad thing. They weren’t. But Abby came home over her Christmas break, and Heather asked us both then. When she told us that Wyatt hadn’t proposed like she’d planned, I told her not to worry. He’d come around. And then he did, only Bart wouldn’t give Wyatt the tavern or any piece of his inheritance, and Heather was fit to be tied. I tried to tell her that any woman in town would kill to have Wyatt Drummond for a husband, with or without the money, but she said she wanted more.”
“So she set him up to get arrested?”
Guilt filled her eyes. “I don’t know for sure, but I’ve suspected.”
“Do you know if Heather had another boyfriend after the arrest?”
“She met someone at the salon. She was always pretty vague about him. One night she got super drunk and admitted he was married. But it fizzled out, because the next thing I knew, she was askin’ me to arrange a going-away party for her. She seemed excited about her plan to leave, even if she kept it close to her chest. I have to confess that part of me was happy she was goin’.”
“But you threw her a going-away party anyway?”
“Yeah,” she said with a sniff. “I’d just lost my job at the Mountain View Lodge after snatchin’ a key and lettin’ Heather use a room to meet her guy from the salon. They’d taken to meeting there, I guess, but she was running short on money and she seemed desperate when she asked me for a room that night.”
What if she wasn’t meeting the salon guy? What if she’d been meeting Paul? Or what if they were one and the same? It would fit with the timeline Tammy had given us. Although Tammy hadn’t recognized the picture of Heather, she’d likely seen her in the dark. For all I knew, she’d been wearing a hat or her hair had been up. “And you have no idea who he was?”
“No. I tried to pry it out of her, and she would only tell me that he was a forty-three-year-old banker having a midlife crisis. She’d hoped he’d be her next ticket to livin’ high on the hog.”
Had Heather told her the truth? If so, that would definitely strike Paul out as her boyfriend. I’d guess him to be in his late thirties, early forties now.
“Do you know if she left Wyatt a note saying she was pregnant the day of her going-away party?”
“Yeah,” she said with a frown. “Said she did it as a joke—one last way to get Wyatt. But I didn’t know about it until after he left the party. I’d overheard them arguing in the room.”
“Did you think she was really leaving town?” I asked.
“She acted so excited about it, but it was hard to imagine she’d just go. I knew five thousand was much less than she’d hoped for. I figured she still had something going. A plan to get more money. She admitted as much to me before the party. Said she might not have to leave after all if it worked out.” She sighed. “But something changed. After the party, she collapsed on the sofa and
