“There are papers to sign and checks to write.”
“But I’m sure they can wait till you’re stronger.” She crossed her arms and gave Art one of those assessing-looks as though she were his gym teacher.
“I’m not going to be stronger. Maybe in less pain, eventually, but not stronger.”
“That’s so bleak, Art, surely…” Taylor murmured.
“What is it they say you have?” Sissy quizzed him.
“ALS. Lou Gehrig’s. It’s coming on fast.”
Taylor clasped her hands in surprise. She’d seen someone pass from this before. One of her department heads at Joann’s. It had taken less than a year for the dreadful disease to end her old coworker's life, though the disease had variations. “Is this why you eloped the way you did?”
He nodded. “I didn’t want Reynette to have to be my caregiver, so it was hard to agree to marry her. But when she promised to hire nurses as soon as I needed them, I wanted to marry right away. To let her have some of my healthy life. To make sure she would inherit from me, so I could take care of her after I was gone.”
“She didn’t seem to need money,” Taylor said.
“No, she didn’t. But she was signing on for maybe a full year of unpaid labor as I die in front of her, whether we married or not. As my spouse she was entitled to half of everything we owned after my death. As my companion, or even fiancé, she would get nothing after suffering so much.”
Taylor opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t. The pieces seemed to fall into place. Art looking so much frailer than his age. The way he was keeping his distance from a daughter he wouldn’t see grow up. His ex-wife’s concern for him. Her concern that her daughter have a nice stepmom…
“Half of my estate would have been plenty for Jason. I’ve been giving him his mother’s money for the last ten years to protect it from any claims Gracie might make for Una.”
“Money,” Sissy grunted. “The root of all evil.”
“The love of money,” Art corrected. “Gracie loves it. Una does too. But she’s young and if I could have raised her myself, she might have grown out of it.”
“Even if she’s not your biological daughter?”
“I don’t think greed is a genetic trait,” he mused. “Though it could be. A case could be made.”
“Do Reynette’s kids know you’re sick?”
“No. Reynette was firm that we not tell them. She felt…” He sighed. “She didn’t have the highest regard for her daughter’s understanding and felt that Fawn would make a problem about our marriage if she knew.”
“Otherwise Fawn was happy with the relationship?”
“As happy as anyone ever is in these circumstances.” Art straightened the thick black velvet robe over his knees.
“What about Jason?”
Gilly entered the room with a mug of coffee for Art. It was a travel mug with a handle and a lid. She set it on the side table and then stood, arms crossed, watching him.
“What do you say, Gilly? Did Jason approve of Reynette?”
“No.” Her mouth was pinched and sour, but her gray eyes were sad.
“Did you?” Sissy’s demeanor was defensive, and Taylor understood. They were discussing the woman who was both family and best friend to Sissy.
“I was withholding judgement until I could know her better.” Her face was anything but sincere.
“Why didn’t Jason like her?” Taylor nudged her question in before Sissy could take another jab.
Gilly sat on the arm of Art’s chair. “Art, you and I go way back, correct?”
“Yes, Ma’am.” His face creased into a little smile.
“Jason and I met when we were in college. We were friends for many years.” Her serious face twitched as though she was trying to suppress a sense of humor. “Art is a lady’s man. That’s the only way to say this. After he lost his wife, Jason’s mother, he became the most eligible man on campus. Handsome, smart, wealthy. First, he worked his way through the adjunct faculty, then he started in on the students. When Gracie landed him, we were all shocked.”
Taylor was as well. Art didn’t have the kind of magnetic personality she thought a lady’s man needed.
“You exaggerate.” Art smiled.
“Gracie left him for a younger man, it’s true, but I contend she left him for a faithful man. What say you to those charges, sir?”
“Guilty. Gracie was a firefly, beautiful in the wild and exactly the thing someone wants to catch. But once you have a firefly in the hand, the charm is gone. They don’t do anything but shine.”
Gilly rolled her eyes. “He took up with older, smarter women while married to her and stuck with them after. With that in mind, I can assume Reynette was a smart woman.”
His face brightened, then drooped again. “She was brilliant. A diamond in the rough.”
Sissy snarled.
Taylor cringed. Though Reynette was around the same age as Art and clearly not a bright young thing, he still wanted her as something he could form or shape or mold. Men like Art grossed her out. “And that was why Jason didn’t like her? Because she was brilliant?”
“He disagrees that she was brilliant.” Gilly stopped to consider the red, seething face of Sissy Dorney. “No offense. He’s highly prejudiced in favor of formal education. He didn’t think she was brilliant and saw no reason for his father to marry someone he assumed was just the next woman of many.”
“Did he not know you were sick?” It dawned on Taylor that Art was the most honest person in the room, despite his unfaithfulness. When he said he had married Reynette as a means of paying her for taking care of him as he died, he meant it. He likely loved her no more nor less than any of the women in his long string of ladies, but at the end of their time together he would owe her more.
“Jason is aware of the diagnosis. But many men, for example Steven Hawking, live very long and even productive lives with the disease. It depends entirely on the type. Jason still hopes mine is actually the slow progressing type, despite what doctors have said.”
“It’s hard losing a parent.” Taylor looked away to the wall of delicate, brightly colored shapes of glass.
“But you did love her.” Sissy’s statement was firm, like a demand or a decree.
“She delighted me utterly,” Art said. “She had wisdom and talent and comfort and her face, that smile and those dimples and the way her eyes lit up when she was pleased or excited or happy. That face was what I wanted to look at every night over dinner. I loved her very much.”
Sissy relaxed, just a bit.
Gilly patted his shoulder. “Art doesn’t go in for conquests,” she said. “He falls in love entirely. Very romantic.”
“Until he falls out again,” Sissy said.
“She was my last. My final love. The last woman I would ever be with. She was worth the long wait to find her.” His eyes were soft and moony.
“And yet,” Taylor said, “your health is currently strong. You might meet someone else.”
Gilly nodded with a bit of a smirk. “You see the situation clearly, I think.”
Sissy inhaled sharply, and loudly. “So, Jason didn’t want you to marry my aunt. Did he not want it badly enough to see her die first?”
“Jason is an intellectual,” Gilly said.
“Jason is a cold fish. Tell them how long you had to wait for him to fall for you,” Art said.
“I didn’t wait. I had a nice life with my first husband.”
“Widowed?” Sissy asked
“Divorced. It was nice until it wasn’t. And then Jason and I, old friends, fell in love.”
“She fell in love. Jason can’t drum up enough passion to love or hate. Murder, especially premeditated, would have taken him considering someone else and how their lives intersected with his. He wouldn’t have bothered.” Art spoke like Jason was a character in a novel, rather than his own flesh and blood. Art might be able to drum up passion for women, but he seemed as clinical as he claimed Jason was otherwise.
>
“Art isn’t wrong. Jason is wonderful at what he is wonderful at. Passion is not one of those things. But, as a second act in my life, he is just right.” Gilly patted Art’s shoulder and stood again. She walked first to the shelf of sculptures, then turned again to face Taylor and Sissy. It felt like a show, like she was performing for a class of art students.
“You found blending your family with his was worth the effort though?” Taylor asked.
Gilly considered for a moment. “I have a daughter. She’s in college herself now. She likes Jason, but at the same time, I don’t live here. We’re not blended so much as running in parallel.”
Taylor pictured two quilts carefully folded, set next to each other on a shelf, rather than a front and a back, bound together, or new cloth added to an old blanket to restore what time and life had tried to destroy. It was a cold picture, but she suspected Gilly would agree it was accurate.
“Gilly is a good girl,” Art said. “And Jason is okay too. They are happy the way things are, and so am I.”
“Who is going to care for you now that Reynette is gone?” Taylor asked.
“We’ll make sure he’s cared for.” Gilly’s voice was warm, almost sad. Maybe she had more heart than Taylor was giving her credit for. “He doesn’t need to find himself a wife to make sure he’s not alone.”
He sighed, dreamily. “I will miss Reynette every day for the rest of my life.”
He meant it, too, as he had the days of his life numbered.
* * *
“It’s easy to say a man doesn’t have the energy to murder.” Sissy drove them in her minivan, hitting the corners like she was a race car driver. “But there are a lot of cold-hearted psychos out there. Jason had every reason to want to see Reynette dead.”
“Even so, would he have had the access he needed to poison her slowly?” Taylor watched the little ranch houses speed by as they drove toward the center of Comfort.
“Why wouldn’t he have? He’s in town and that’s his father’s house.”
“Can we go there today?”
Sissy pulled the wheel and they took a sharp left. “Sure.”
“If Fawn is there, let’s talk to her about how much time Jason spent with his dad at the house. If she’s not, let’s look through everything that could have been poisoned. We’ve been focused on motive, but maybe we need to spend more time on the means.”
They were at the house in seconds. “If we knew why, then we’d know who.” Sissy yanked the e-brake though they were parked on flat road. “But we can’t figure that out, so you’re right. It’s time to think about how.”
The historic home was set back from the road but had no driveway. Instead there was an alley between the house and an old barn. Fawn’s car wasn’t in the alley or parked at the curb. “They sure have a lot to maintain here. You say they were just staying six months?”
“They had it on a six-month lease, but Reynette said she was hoping they could talk the owner into selling it. If they did a good job getting it into shape—nothing major, just cleaned up and maintained, then the owner might consider it.”
“Who owns the place?”
“Reynette dealt with a property management company. I don’t know who inherited it after old Harrison passed.” Sissy let them in with a key. The back door opened to a screened porch that acted as a mud room. They went through it into the kitchen.
The kitchen felt like something Joanna Gaines could only dream of. White cupboards original to the 1930 addition flanked two walls of the huge square room and a large butcher block topped old farm table stood in the center as a sort of kitchen island. The appliances were nothing to write home about, but half the counters were marble—old marble that had lost its polish over time—and the other half were stainless steel. A large window over the sink flanked by soft bleached cheese cloth curtains allowed the weak winter sun to peak in.
Sissy went straight to the farthest cupboard and flung open the door.
Taylor started in on the carton next to the counter. It was full of spices. She opened one and sniffed. Mild American paprika. “Not the cartons.” Taylor spoke to herself mostly. “This is the food they hadn’t been eating. Hey Sissy, how long had they been living in this house?”
“Two weeks.”
“And this is the most they’d unpacked?”
“Honeymooners.” Sissy slammed a door shut and opened the next. “They ate all of their dinners out, often at Berry Noir. Reynette wasn’t much on lunch but liked a nice breakfast.”
Taylor tugged open the old fridge door. It had been more than a week since Reynette’s death—almost two. She didn’t want to smell the milk in the paper carton. “Eggs. Milk. Bacon. Cheese.” She slid open the vegetable crisper. The veggies weren’t so crisp anymore. “Of all of this food, I guess someone could have poisoned the milk.” Taylor squared her shoulders, opened it, and smelled. It was sour, but not poisonously so.
“Aspirin doesn’t smell.” Sissy slammed another door shut.
“Then how do we check….?” Again, the question was for herself. Taylor longed for a fancy little wand she could dip in the milk to test it, like a sort of pregnancy test but for aspirin.
She moved an orange juice container. It was empty. “The OJ is gone. I wonder. If she really liked that.”
“She hated orange juice. That had to be Art’s.”
“Oh.” Behind the orange juice was a lidded glass jar full of what looked like fuzzy iced tea, but Taylor had her doubts. She took it out, unscrewed the lid and took a sniff. It had a musky, beer like sent. “Kombucha.”
“Yes, she brewed her own.”
“That would be easy to poison…” Taylor put the lid back on and set it on the counter.
Sissy slammed another door and held out a jar of jelly. “So, would this. Homemade. Gooseberry. I bet she had it on her toast. Mostly gone.”
“Do you think we can convince the police to test these?”
“Can’t hurt to try.” Sissy opened another door just to slam it.
“I’ll go up to the bathroom and look in there,” Taylor offered.
“I’ll call the cops.”
Taylor took the steps two at a time. Surely because of the attack on Art, the cops would be willing to check this out.
They looked through everything in the house at least twice more and left messages with the sheriff’s office. While the person who took Sissy’s message was polite, she made no promises. Sissy stormed around the house as rain poured outside.
“All we can do is wait.” Taylor sat on a Rubbermade bin by the front door.
“We can take the evidence with us.” Sissy strutted into the kitchen.
Taylor tipped off the box with care. She was tired, worn out from a long day of getting nowhere fast. “You can’t take any of that.” She put a restraining hand on Sissy’s shoulder. “Not if it’s murder evidence. We have to leave it here for the police.”
Sissy let out a string of invective that made Taylor blush.
“We need to get out of here. Let me take you out for a drink.”
Sissy leaned on the counter, her eye on the fridge. “Whoever did this to Reynette is going to get away with it.”
“No. No way. We’ll never let them.” Taylor found it easy to lie when the lie might be comforting, but Sissy saw through her.
She glared at Taylor. “I think you tried harder for your mom.”
Taylor bit her lip to keep herself from repeating some of the things Sissy had just said. Then she squared her shoulders and left. Rain or no rain, she needed to get as far away from Sissy as she could.
Chapter Twenty
Taylor buried herself in work the next day, first hitting McMinnville to restock her office supplies. There was a sale, so she loaded the family Audi with at least a year’s worth of printer paper. And folders and sticky notes and boxes of pencils left over from back to school. So many pencils. Maybe she could get the store name printed on them. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. As she slid the company ca
rd into the card reader a weight lifted from her shoulders. She was prepared now for any pencil situation that could arise at her shop. Ever.
She had deliberately ignored all of the links Grandma Quinny had sent her over Facebook that had to do with counseling or grief after she clicked one that suggested over-shopping was an unhealthy way of numbing yourself to your feelings. Sometimes numb felt amazing.
It had been another dark and dreary end of November day, with few shoppers. As closing time approached, storm clouds rolled in that were darker, wetter, colder.
Taylor was just wishing she could shut the shop for the night when a rain-soaked child slunk in. The happy ring of the bells was at odds with her bedraggled appearance.
She was long and thin, taller than she looked old, with stooped, rounded shoulders. Her head was covered with the hood of a wet sweatshirt, but Taylor caught a glimpse of profile—broad cheekbones and an upturned nose.
“Good evening,” Taylor called to her from her perch at the register.
The girl looked up, startled.
Taylor had never seen the girl before in her life, but there was no mistaking that face. Una Woods was the spitting image of her mother and, if her tall, slender build and stooped shoulders told her anything, it was that Art was truly her dad.
Taylor could see what they meant when they said she also looked like Guy, but Guy and Gracie were almost brother and sister in their looks, as married couples sometimes were. But neither of them were built on that long lean scale Una was.
“Can I help you find something?” Taylor asked, hoping she was hiding her excitement. She assumed a lot, in naming this girl Una, but she would have bet money it was her.
“Is Hannah Warner here?” Una’s wide eyes and youthful face spoke of fear.
Taylor wanted to grab a blanket off the wall and wrap her in it and tell her everything was going to be okay. “She’s not, I’m sorry. Is there something I can do for you?”
The girl chewed on her bottom lip. “I was um, I was wanting to talk to Hannah.”
“Do you need her number?” Fingers crossed that was an okay thing to do. Taylor remembered the moment that had cost her closeness with her childhood bestie Maddie last year. How making assumptions on what was safe behavior with kids had caused problems between Maddie, Taylor, and even Hudson.
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