I’d known her. All this made me think that there were no nuptial festivities for Jack and Charlotte in the foreseeable future.
“I suppose that’s the cleanest I’m going to get it.” Charlotte had put the contract down and was working on her dress again. Now she turned away from the sink and gave me a forlorn look, as if the dog, and Jack’s unhelpfulness, had hurt her deeply, and I was supposed to do something about it.
But I didn’t know what to do. “So, Charlotte, what do you think of the figures?” I tried again.
“They’re fine.” But she’d spent only a moment looking at them. She pulled out her checkbook and wrote me a check. “Goldy?” she asked. “Can you be out at Gold Gulch Spa at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so we can do the walk-through, and you can figure out how to use their kitchen?”
“Sure,” I replied, although I didn’t feel too sure of it, frankly.
“Yes,” said Jack, “I’ll bring her.”
“That’s not necessary, Jack,” I said.
“Jack,” said Charlotte, attempting to be mollifying, “you don’t need to be there. I want to spend time with you, but not there, not tomorrow. If you need to grieve for your friend, then you should do that. Out at the spa, you’ll just get in the way, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart?
When nobody said anything, Charlotte said, “Will you call me tonight, Jack, if you need me?” He looked up at her hopefully and nodded. “Well then,” she went on, “I guess I need to go home and change before the fund- raiser.”
When the door had closed, I turned to my godfather. “Jack, you don’t have to take me out to Gold Gulch tomorrow. I can manage.”
Jack made his face blank, a practice I’d seen him do before. “No, but I want to go. To protect you from this Victor Lane character.”
“I don’t need protecting, thanks.”
“Uh-huh. Last time I looked, your first husband disproved that particular theorem.”
“Oh, Jack, don’t—”
“Now,” he interrupted, “tell me why Tom is investigating the death of my best friend.”
“I have no idea that that’s what he’s doing.”
“Bull. When I had too much to drink and hit a tree with the seventy-one Mercedes I had before I got the seventy-three, the whole thing was handled by state patrol. That’s how they do accidents in this state. I know, ’cuz I asked.”
“Jack, I don’t know—”
“Yeah, yeah, you said that already.” He stood up. “All right, I’m walking across the street to my own house.”
“Jack? You’re not angry, are you?” I asked anxiously as I walked him to the door. “I really don’t know what Tom is doing now. But I want to help with…with you feeling better about Doc Finn.”
“Uh-huh.” He heaved on his jacket and opened the front door. “Let me tell you something I learned in the years before I became a recovering lawyer.”
“Jack—,” I began, but he held up his hand.
“I always know when a witness is lying.”
DOGGONE IT, I thought, as I cleaned up Marla’s dishes. I wasn’t lying. Okay, I did suspect that Tom’s disappearance from the O’Neal wedding was related to the discovery of Doc Finn’s body. But I knew no more about the situation than Jack did.
When Tom finally came home, it was almost nine o’clock. I’d kept the ragout going on a low simmer, just in case.
“Miss G. You should have gone to bed. I’m sorry I’m so late.”
“Did you eat?”
“No. I’ll fix myself a plate.”
“Sit,” I commanded. Tom washed his hands and slumped at the table. He shut his eyes tight, either from exhaustion or to block out what he’d seen that evening. When I put a dish of cooked penne, steamed broccoli, and ragout in front of him, you’d have thought it was steak on the
“Oh my,” he said. “This looks wonderful.”
While he ate, I gave him an animated account of the rest of the day after he’d left, the reception, packing up with Julian, the visits from Marla, Jack, and Charlotte Attenborough. He shook his head and smiled briefly. But then the smile vanished.
“Can you tell me what kept you down at the department?” I asked.
“I can, but you can’t mention a word of it to anyone, especially that nosy lawyer godfather of yours.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Last night, a driver going west up the canyon spotted a reflection in the rain. Called in that she thought a vehicle might have gone off the road and landed down in that deep ravine where folks dump trash sometimes.”
“Yeah, I know the spot.” Despite the no dumping sign, people didn’t chuck their unwanted furniture and garbage down that hillside sometimes; they did it as a matter of routine.
“Last night, state patrol had their hands full with accidents in the rain, but they finally got around to checking that ravine. And there was Doc Finn’s Porsche Cayenne, on its side.”
“Did he slide off the road?”
“The mud has made it impossible to tell exactly what happened. But state patrol called us after they’d spent about an hour down in the ravine.”
The taste of acid filled my mouth.
“Somebody,” Tom continued as he pushed his plate away, “came down into the ravine and used a rock to break the driver’s-side window. It looks as if whoever the person was then used another rock, or something, to smash in Doc Finn’s skull.”
“The rocks couldn’t have come loose somehow, when the Porsche slid into the ravine?”
“No, Miss G. That’s why state patrol is good at what they do.” He shook his head. “Doc Finn was murdered.”
7
I slumped into the kitchen chair closest to Tom. My feet and hands were suddenly freezing. “So, what are they up to now, down at the department?”
“The ME’s been called. They’ll try to do the autopsy as soon as they can. And our department is analyzing the contents of Finn’s car, to see if that will give us any leads. There are only a couple of houses nearby, and our guys have canvassed the whole area. But nobody saw anything.”
“Do they have any idea where Doc Finn was going?”
“Yeah. He had his cell in the car. According to the Received Calls on there, he got a call from your godfather last night, but that went straight to voice mail. Before that, there was a longer call. It came around half past seven Wednesday night, from Southwest Hospital, from inside a patient’s room. He saw a neighbor as he was backing his car out of his driveway, and he said he was off to see an old patient. Only problem is, that room is on the maternity ward, and the patient in that room was out with her husband looking at their baby at the time. And she’s never been a patient of Doc Finn’s. She’s never even heard of him.”
“No security cameras recording the goings in and out of the patient’s room, I take it.”
“Nope. My gut tells me we’re talking about a clever killer here. Of course, during visiting hours there are all kinds of people in the hospital, so basically it could have been anyone.”
“Did Doc Finn even have any patients in Southwest Hospital at the time?”
“That’s something we’re checking on.”
I hugged my shoulders, but that couldn’t dispel the chill I was feeling. “You know Jack’s going to be devastated that his pal was murdered.”
Tom nodded. “I figured.”
“He really wanted to talk to you to night. He waited here a long time, wondering where you were, asking
