by K. J. Emrick
Now that Leighton had been recognized, especially by Cora and Evelyn, the rumor mill would know about it no time flat. Darcy hoped that didn’t send Leighton running all the way back to Arizona. Not before they had a chance to talk to him, and ask their questions… and get some answers.
It took nearly fifteen minutes after the casket was lowered into the ground for everyone to file past Linda and say their goodbyes. Jon and Darcy and Izzy stayed with her, for moral support as well as because they had given her a ride here. One by one, people came through and said a few words. When Sean Fitzwallis smiled and shook Linda’s hand, Darcy motioned for him to meet her over by Jon’s car. He nodded, and followed.
They were far enough away from the crowds over here that they could talk with no one hearing anything they said. “All right, Sean. Tell me what you know about Erika Becht.”
“And hello to you, too,” he smiled, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Sean was tall, and lanky to the point that his crisp white shirt hung loosely off his shoulders. He’d been in Misty Hollow for longer than anyone could remember. He was old, even if his face made it hard to tell his age. Thick gray hair stirred in the afternoon breeze. He hadn’t changed a bit in all the time that Darcy had known him.
She was pretty sure he never would.
Darcy wasn’t in the mood to be subtle with him. “Sean, I need your help. You know a little bit about everything that happens here in this town. You were here in 1977 when Linda’s mother died, I know you were. So tell me what you know, please. Linda is really concerned that her mother was killed. Is it true?”
“Darcy, Darcy.” He shook his head, and spread his hands wide. “There’s only one being in the universe who’s omnipotent. I’m not him. I know things, certainly. Sometimes I know more than I should, and other times I know less than I want to. A lot like you, I expect. In this case here, speaking of Erika Becht, I know just about nothing except that she died long before her time.”
“So you’re saying she was killed?”
Pursing his lips, Sean shook his head slowly. “I truly can’t say, Darcy. Lots of people die before their time. Some of them are murdered, sure. Some of them die in accidents that could’ve been avoided. There’s too many ways a person can die. Was Erika Becht murdered? Well, I think that might be for you to find out, Darcy Sweet.”
Then he turned and walked away. Darcy rolled her eyes. That was just about no help at all. “Thanks for your vote of confidence,” she called after him.
Still walking away, he lifted a hand in the air, and waved to her.
Darcy went back to join Jon and Izzy as they waited for Linda. The last of the people from town had said goodbye and were driving away. Pastor Phin was saying a last few words to Linda. Even Cora and Evelyn had left without trying to snag a few moments with Leighton to rekindle old times. After everyone else was gone, there was only one person left.
Leighton Reeves.
“Hello, Linda.” He stepped up and took Linda’s hands, holding them between his own. His voice was surprisingly strong for someone who was in his eighties. “I know you weren’t expecting to see me, but I couldn’t stay away.”
Linda yanked her hands back. “You couldn’t come back for my mother’s funeral, but you come back now? For Roland?”
Leighton tried for a smile that never quite materialized. “Roland and I were like brothers, once upon a time. We might have grown apart all these years later but I still felt like I had to be here. I heard about his passing, and I hopped the first flight out this morning. Drove straight here from the airport.”
“That still doesn’t tell me why you couldn’t be there for my mother.” Linda stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest. “You should have been there for her. You should have been there for me. You weren’t. Why not? Where were you?”
“Linda, please.” Leighton reached out for her, but she twisted out of his reach. “You need to understand. I was in Arizona. I didn’t hear that your mother had passed until days later and by then it was too late to come back. It was a different time back then in the seventies. There wasn’t the internet, there wasn’t text messaging… back then information took time to circulate.”
“You think that makes it all right?” Linda demanded, her voice rising.
Jon stepped up, putting himself in front of Linda, making himself a physical barrier between her and Leighton. “Hello, Mister Reeves. I’m Jon Tinker. We spoke on the phone.”
“And I said I didn’t want to talk to you,” Leighton said immediately. “I’m here to talk to Linda, Chief Tinker. Please go away.”
Old man or not, Darcy thought to herself, he had a commanding presence. A lesser man than Jon might just have stepped aside under that glare.
“I’m afraid I have to insist that you talk to me,” Jon said. “There’s a question that’s been raised about how Erika Becht died. You and she were close, weren’t you?”
“Yes, we were. Not that it’s any of your business, but at the time I was in love with her.”
A strangled gasp escaped from Linda’s lips at that and she tried to step around Jon again. He stepped in her way without making it obvious.
“Well,” he said, rubbing a hand over his chin, “then that raises the same question in my mind that Linda just asked. If you were in love with her, then why did you leave for Arizona and never move back?”
Leighton’s faded eyes met Jon’s piercing blue ones with a level gaze. “My life is not open to discussion, sir. Now please, let me talk with—”
Linda snapped out at Leighton, reaching past Jon with an accusing finger. “You killed her, didn’t you? Huh? Just admit it! You killed my mother!”
Darcy tried to stop her, tried to pull her back before she’d said too much, because she knew that if they confronted Leighton without enough proof that it would only make him dig in more and refuse to say another thing.
Which is exactly what happened.
“I knew coming back was a mistake,” he growled under his breath. “I came here to pay my respects to Roland.”
“It’s hard for us to picture that,” Jon told him, trying to get the conversation back on track. “Roland was almost universally disliked, and I’m saying that standing this close to the man’s grave. You wouldn’t even talk to me over the phone about your past here in Misty Hollow. Now we’re supposed to believe you were close enough to Roland Baskin to drop everything and come attend his funeral?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Chief. It’s the truth.”
“Are you sure there isn’t another reason you came back? Like maybe for Roland’s money? Or to ease your guilt over something that happened all those years ago?”
With his face growing ruddier by degrees as blood rose in his cheeks, Leighton blustered, “I don’t have to answer anything—”
Linda cut him off. “If you came to see if you were in his will then you wasted a trip!” She threw off Darcy’s warning hand, unable to stop herself. “You aren’t! He didn’t care about you, Leighton, any more than anyone cared about him! He probably thought you killed his sister just like I do!”
Leighton was already turning away to leave. Linda’s words hung between them, there among the graves, like ghosts drifting in the air.
Jon tried one more time. “Mister Reeves, if you didn’t have anything to do with Erika Becht’s death, then why don’t you come down to the station with us? I’ll give you as long as you need to explain your side of the story.”
There was no answer. Leighton kept walking away.
“Jon,” Darcy almost pleaded. “There has to be something we can do to keep him here.”
“Like what?” he asked. “I don’t have a thing to hold him on. Other than our stunning wit and our assumptions, that is, neither of which are going to make an arrest warrant appear out of thin air.”
Darcy racked her brain. They had to keep him from leaving town again.
Then she had an idea.
“We have your letters,” she called after him.
“The ones you sent to my mother,” Linda answered. “Those letters. Do you even remember what you put in them?”
He drew his leg out of the car. He slammed the door shut, and walked back over to them. “I know what I put into every single letter I ever sent your mother, Linda. Love. My love for her. Isn’t that enough?”
“If it was enough,” Darcy said, “then why would you have to add an additional message in invisible ink?”
His eyes got just a little bit wider. “You found that too, did you? I can’t believe you…” He shook his head. “I suppose, Chief, that I might have something to talk about with you after all.”
“Exactly what I was thinking, Mister Reeves.” Jon hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Let’s all head back into town. I think this conversation will go a lot more smoothly if we’re not standing in a graveyard, don’t you?”
Leighton sighed deeply. “Do you want me to ride with you?”
“No need,” Jon told him. “Just follow along. There’s no reason to think you won’t stay with us, right?”
Leighton sighed heavily. “I wouldn’t dream of disappointing you, Chief. You lead the way. I’ll follow.”
As they walked back to the car, Linda found Darcy’s hand and squeezed it with hers.
“We got him,” she said, her voice trembling. “Darcy, we really got him.”
Darcy watched as Leighton Reeves got into his car, frowning at himself. The man was obviously upset about something.
She gave Linda’s hand a squeeze in turn. A murderer in Misty Hollow. There was nothing new in that, now was there?
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see what he has to say for himself.”
The interview room at the police department was a bare space with a single table placed crosswise in the middle, with a chair on each side. The wall beside the door had been fitted with a one-way mirror, allowing Darcy, Linda, and Izzy to watch from the hallway as Jon spoke with the elderly Leighton Reeves.
“Why won’t he just confess to it already?” Linda asked, not for the first time.
Darcy put her arm around her friend’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Linda. Jon is the best at what he does. If there’s anyone who can trap him in his own lies, it’s Jon.”
Through the speakers, they heard Leighton repeat the same answer that he’d given to most of Jon’s questions. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, Chief Tinker. You can say a lot about me, and the way I’ve lived my life, but you can not change the fact that I loved Erika Becht.”
“Well,” Jon said, reaching into his suitcoat to take out his cellphone, “love comes in many different forms. For instance. Some people compose love sonnets. Some people just whisper those three little words to their partner in the middle of the night. Others go and buy a Hallmark card because they can’t figure out how to say it themselves. Then, there’s guys like yourself, Leighton.”
He flipped through the screens on his phone and then turned it around to show him. “You write love letters, with secret messages.”
Darcy couldn’t quite see the screen from where she was standing but she knew that Jon had taken pics of the three letters on his cellphone after she’d found the messages in their invisible ink. For the second time this week, Darcy considered getting a phone for herself. One without a service plan. She could have taken the pictures herself that way.
Maybe a lavender case, she thought to herself, suppressing a smile at her running joke. Jon would love to see her have a phone the color of lavender lipstick.
In the interview room, Leighton looked at the photo on Jon’s phone as he used his fingers to zoom in on the image.
A smile slowly spread over his weathered face.
“I remember that,” he said, reaching across the table to touch the image on the phone. Jon took it away first. “I wrote that to her. I wanted her to know…”
Then he looked up at Jon, and a wall came down behind his eyes, blocking his emotions. “I see the letter got to Erika. Did you… do you know if she read it?”
“I’m more interested in why you sent it,” Jon told him.
Darcy knew that Erika had never read the letter. Leighton must have known that, too. Was he really trying to stick to his alibi story even now?
Linda thumped her hand against the frame of the one-way mirror they were watching through. Leighton turned to face them, and even though Darcy knew he couldn’t see through from his side, it was like he was staring right at Linda.
“Just confess,” she growled at him, her voice pitched so low that Darcy could barely hear it. “Just tell us what happened.”
That was all Linda really wanted. She just wanted some closure to put this behind her. Darcy wished the same thing for her.
Jon snapped his fingers in the air, pulling Leighton’s gaze back to him. “Now tell me something. How could a man like yourself, who had his pick of any girl in town, fall in love with just one woman?”
“Because,” Leighton sighed, “Erika Becht was special. She and I were made for each other. I loved her. I adored her daughter. Once I had myself established in Arizona I was going to send for them to come join me so I could marry her. We were going to be a family.”
He sighed again, and gestured helplessly to the letter on Jon’s phone. “That’s what that letter was supposed to tell her.”
Darcy remembered the words of that third, final letter. All of this talk about leaving town together. You know why I can’t. You know what we would both be giving up if we tried that… Is there any way I could convince you to wait for me?
Now, in light of what Leighton was saying, those words took on a slightly different meaning in Darcy’s mind. Could it be that instead of telling her goodbye, Leighton was just explaining why they had to wait?
Darcy’s mind built a scenario… Erika asks Leighton to take her away, Leighton says no they have to wait, and then they argue. Erika runs away, crying…
And someone kills her.
Or…
They argue, and Leighton kills her.
All this time Darcy had been working under the theory that Leighton was definitely the killer. Everything she knew had pointed to that. Now she had two possible scenarios.
Which one was the truth?
She leaned forward, with Izzy and Linda, to hear what happened next.
“Okay, then what about this?” His fingers slid the image around until it was centered on some of the browned, invisible ink writing. “You slipped a secret message into this one. Now, I’m not sure if it was meant for Erika to see, or maybe someone else, but why don’t we talk about that for a minute. Maybe that will help us figure out the rest of it.”
Leighton chuckled, and some of the tension eased from his face. “It’s childish, I know, but this was our special way of talking to each other. We gave each other messages that no one else would ever see. We could tell each other our deepest feelings, or dreams… everything. I have never been so deeply in love with a woman. Not before, and not since.”
He was blinking, and Darcy was surprised to see he was holding back tears. His love for Erika had been that deep. As the moment stretched, she looked over at Jon through the window. She understood that kind of love. It made you do crazy, silly things like write secret messages back and forth or make jokes about girls from the past who wore lavender lipstick. Goofy things. Romantic things.
It did not make you kill. That wasn’t love.
She looked at Leighton again, and wondered if maybe they had been looking at this all wrong…
Beside her, Linda gasped, and blinked back tears of her own. “My mom loved him, too,” she whispered.
In the interview room, Leighton stared hard at Jon and sat up straighter. “Wait a minute. Just, wait now. You said… you want to know if I left this message for Erika or fo
r someone else? Of course it was for Erika. Who else would it be for?”
Jon took his phone back and slipped it into his pocket. The show and tell part of his interview was over. “According to our sources, you were quite the lady’s man when you were younger. In fact, we believe the argument you mention in your letter happened because Erika found out you were dating other women.”
“That’s a lie!” Leighton insisted, slapping his palm down on the table for emphasis. “That is a bald-faced and baseless lie!”
Jon simply waited for him to be done. Then he spread his hands and went on like nothing had even happened. “Even the secret message you left in the letter points to there being other women. ‘Don’t believe her,’ is what you said. You already admitted it was you that wrote that. So who were you talking about? Which one of your lovers did you and Erika argue over?”
“That doesn’t… you can’t—” He stuttered, and then swallowed and started over. “Listen to me, Chief. Yes, Erika and I had an argument. I admitted that in my letter. I was going to Arizona. I had to set up our life before I could bring her out with me. She didn’t want me to go, certainly, but we had that all worked out. As soon as I had secured a job and bought a house, we would have been together. But then…”
Seconds ticked by.
“Then, what?” Jon asked.
Leighton slumped in his chair. It was like he was being crushed under the weight of years. “Then someone began spreading rumors about me. That’s what happened. Saying I was with other women. One, in particular, I mean. So yes Chief, we argued. We had the worst argument we’d ever had, and she cried, and I’ll be honest with you I cried a little too, and then we both went our separate ways. I went off to Arizona. Erika…” He had to clear his throat before he could say the words. “Erika died.”
Linda slapped the edge of the window again. Leighton jumped in his seat.
Jon gave the one-way mirror a sharp glance as if to tell Linda to stop it. “Well,” he said to Leighton, “that’s the story up to a point, isn’t it? The problem we have, Leighton, is that there’s a question about when Erika died. A question about how she died. Your letter says you were with Erika for lunch.”
