She and Leila had worked pretty hard on the pumpkin display. It looked so great that they even put an ad online that people could come have a fall photo taken for ten bucks.
We’d had a few takers. It was mostly young couples, and inevitably one of them would have a DUI or some other rowdy nonsense they wanted free legal advice about.
It was still locked up when we arrived, and I thought that was odd. AJ was usually here before us.
“AJ’s taking a personal day,” Vicki reminded me as I unlocked the door.
“That’s right,” I remembered. “What’s she doing?”
“She didn’t say,” she shrugged.
“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s odd. She’s been taking a lot off time this past week.”
“Whatever,” she said. “We jumped up and took a month off to go to Tahiti. It’s not like we have much room to talk.”
I cocked my head in agreement. Still, it wasn’t like AJ to take so many days off. What was going on with her?
We flipped on the lights and got ready for the day. No sooner had I sat down at my desk, when Kelsi came in. She looked better, although I could see she had been crying. She wore a red cotton sundress and strappy sandals.
“Kelsi,” I said. “Come in, have a seat. How’s it going?”
“Hi,” she said as she sat down in front of my desk.
“Can I get you some water or coffee?” Vicki asked.
“Water would be great,” she said.
Vicki fished a mini water bottle out of the fridge, and handed it to Kelsi and sat down next to her.
“What’s going on?” Vicki asked her.
Kelsi sighed and she opened the water.
“Well,” she dropped an envelope on my desk. “I thought I’d come pay my bill in person and tell you that you were right.”
“Right?” I replied as I opened the envelope and glanced at the amount. It was right. I handed it to Vicki who slipped off to her desk to close out the invoice.
“About what?” I asked Kelsi
Kelsi swigged the bottle and her dark blue eyes were actually very pretty.
“About James,” she said, “and how he died.”
I leaned back in my chair and Vicki and I both listened, while Vicki tapped away on her computer.
“I know James’ death wasn’t what you were working on,” she said. “But I know that you had a lot to do with finding the truth.”
“What was the truth?” I asked.
“I’ve been at the police station all morning,” she said. “They have Gary Zimmerman in custody.”
I raised an eyebrow. “They think it was Gary?”
“He confessed,” she said flatly. “I would have never have thought to have been so betrayed.”
My immediate thought was that he would need a lawyer. Vicki caught my eye, and her expression said she was thinking the same thing. We both snickered and shook our heads at each other. Hell, no.
“Gary and I go way back,” she said. “His family lived next to mine, and we grew up in the same homeschool co-op for a while. No one liked the Zimmermans. People picked on them, and called them weird, and I just thought they were mean. So, I somewhat befriended Gary. That is, I was kind to him. And, you know, we were kids, we didn’t know we were doing, and yada, yada, we might have shared a few kisses behind the barn.”
She sighed and shook her head. My only thought was that this woman seemed to get around in this band.
“But,” she said. “It didn’t mean anything, and we were just dumb kids, playing around with things we had no business playing around with. We got older, and grew apart. I went to public school, he stayed in the co-op and graduated from there. My life changed. I started a band. I met Roy. I got pregnant. Roy left. I met James. I got married. I had a baby. Yada, yada. All that time, Gary would keep up with me, and I was always kind to him.”
She swigged the water and was silent for a few moments before she continued.
“Then,” her voice continued with a resigned steadiness. “Things started to get rocky with James. He knew Elias wasn’t his, but he didn’t know whose it was. He found it that Roy was Elias’ dad, and he started to change. He toured more. He avoided us.”
She rubbed her face and stood, and paced the small room as she talked.
“Then,” her voice warbled, “right before Africa, James told me he wanted a divorce. I was devastated, and I begged him to say. In the end, we decided we were going to go to counseling and try to work it out. That’s why I went to Africa with the band. For us, that tour was a vacation to save our marriage.”
She stared out the window for a few minutes. A city decorating crew wrapped orange and black tinsel around a light post in front of the office, and another worker rose in a crane to add a banner at the top.
“But things in Africa weren’t going so well,” she said. “It just got worse. We were fighting worse than ever, and the band was all around, taking sides. Mostly his. That’s why I ended up that night in the pool with Roy. It was a bad choice, I know. But James had said things that…”
Her voice trailed off and tears welled up in her eyes.
“James had said things,” she continued in a whisper, “the kind of things that you can’t take back.”
She composed herself and came back to sit in front of my desk. I leaned back and crossed my legs and rubbed my chin as I listened thoughtfully.
“So,”
