Russ picked up his empty plate and dropped it in the sink with a clank. “Okay.” Then, as if he were worried I might continue the conversation by asking him about his own feelings, he sat back at the table with me and grabbed the pill bottle I’d set there. “Now what is this you needed my help with?”
“I needed a way—a safe way,” I added quickly, “to tell whether the pills in this bottle are what the bottle says they are. Since you take the same thing, all I need to do is compare them with yours.”
“You can look at any of my medicines you want if it keeps you from talking to people you shouldn’t be.”
Russ went to the cupboard over his sink and brought down a green plastic pill bottle. He popped the top and shook four of them out onto the table. The pills were white and oval shaped.
I gently opened Clement’s pill bottle. With how clumsy I was, I had images of me removing the top too forcefully, sending the pill shooting across the room, and losing it down the drain in Russ’ sink.
I tapped the bottle until one of the two pills slid out into the lid.
It was a yellowish-orange shade and round.
No one could confuse the two pills. I had one more thing I needed to check—the information on the two bottles. It had to match. Otherwise, the difference in color could be a dosage indicator. That wouldn’t explain the difference in shape, though. Brand might, if one of them took the name brand and one took a generic brand. Russ took generic medications to save money.
I held out my hand, and Russ passed me his bottle. I laid them side by side on the table.
The dosage and brand name were exact.
Someone had swapped out Clement’s pills.
21
I took Velma and Toby home the long way through the woods. My mind worked the case, and if I’d gone directly home, I would have ended up pacing the house.
Darlene wanting to kill Clement made no sense. Clement adored Darlene. He’d taken care of her. What could have possibly motivated her to want to kill a man who, by all evidence, was good and kind and loved her?
If I had any hope of having Clement’s charge reduced or dropped, I needed a strong argument and a lot of proof that his suddenly cured medical condition had been real and had been inflicted by someone else. Without a clear motive, that’d be difficult.
I walked until my nose turned so cold that it hurt. I must have kept us out longer than I thought, because when we got home, both dogs dropped immediately to their beds for a nap.
With them quiet, I pulled out all the material I’d collected. Most of it related to Gordon and wasn’t applicable anymore. As much as I hated to admit it, Clement must have been the one to kill Gordon.
I set aside everything that applied to Gordon. All that was left was the background checks that Hal, the private investigator who regularly worked for Anderson’s firm, ran for me on Clement and Darlene when he got back from his vacation, the newspaper article about the opening of the museum that I’d printed off, and what Clement told me about their life.
Both background checks were unexceptional. No extra money spent. No outstanding debts. The Dodds were average, responsible people. They’d saved for their retirement, and all their current income came from Clement’s early retirement pension from teaching and the museum. They’d inherited their home and the museum from Clement’s dad, so they didn’t even have a mortgage.
I wasn’t going to get anywhere staring at the same material I’d read multiple times. My brain had already fallen into repeating patterns. My dad always warned new hires about it. You only got one chance to see material fresh, he said.
I’d been blinded by what we thought happened. We thought this was either a horrible accident brought on by a naturally occurring medical condition or that someone had targeted Gordon. That someone had targeted Clement instead hadn’t even entered my mind.
I wasn’t going to be able to see the material fresh again, so the best alternative was to instead find fresh material.
I called Hal and asked him to put a tail on Darlene for a week. It might end up being a waste of resources, but I didn’t know where else to start. I also started work on a subpoena for Darlene’s cell phone records.
A knock sounded at my door. Hopefully it wasn’t Russ ready to back out of the grief support group meeting already. If he did, I was out of ideas for how to help him.
Stacey stood outside my door instead, a bundled-up stroller behind her on the ground. Since she said Noah was sleeping, we carried the stroller up together, took the blanket off, and left him the way he was even though what I really wanted to do was take him out and snuggle him.
But Stacey was twisting a strand of her hair around her finger before we had the door closed and Noah settled. With Stacey, that was never a good sign.
Russ wouldn’t have called her as soon as I left to talk to her about how much she needed a grief group, would he? If that was it, I’d better jump in and tell her what I’d done before she started the conversation. Otherwise, she could feel like I’d betrayed her somehow and was talking about her behind her back.
“I had an idea about Russ,” I blurted out.
I forced my words to slow down so I didn’t sound so guilt-ridden and filled her in as I made us both a cup of chamomile tea. I would have rather had coffee, but Stacey was off coffee because of Noah, and it seemed callous to drink it in front of her.
Stacey gave a doesn’t-matter shrug. “Those are usually free, so it’s probably a good place for me to start, too.”
Her nonchalant attitude made it seem like she hadn’t known and that wasn’t why she came. Yet she kept shifting position in her seat. It made her look a bit like she really needed to use the restroom.
She finally stilled on her seat. “Have you decided whether you’re going back to being a lawyer?”
Technically, I’d never stopped, but I knew what she meant. She wanted to know what I’d decided about joining Anderson’s practice. That shouldn’t have made her nervous, but it seemed like it did. “I’m waiting to make my decision until I’ve had to argue the current case in court.”
If I couldn’t manage a case on my own, it wasn’t right of me to take on clients at all. I’d willingly help Anderson as a consultant whenever he had an innocent client, but I couldn’t sign clients if I couldn’t see their case through to the end. It wasn’t fair to them to pass them off when they were at their most vulnerable.
Besides, despite what Saul said, it wasn’t enough to love a career. You also needed to be good at it. If I couldn’t competently do all aspects of my job, I needed to move on to a new one. That’s what responsible grown-ups did, like it or not.
Stacey had a ring of hair around her finger, and she held it up by her cheek like she wished she could chew on it. With anyone else, I would have simply asked what was going on. With Stacey, I had to approach it a bit more tactfully.
“Are you planning something that we might need to do around here before more of my time would be taken up by the practice?”
Even though Stacey wasn’t supposed to be working during her maternity leave, we hadn’t been able to keep her from unofficially continuing to involve herself in almost everything that came up. She and Nancy had designed the whole new product line for the website and for sale in the Short Stack, our pancake house. Nancy would handle all the baking, but Stacey was the organizational genius.
Stacey shook her head. “It’s just that…” She brushed her hair against her lips, seemed to notice what she was doing, and dropped the lock. “I need to make a decision about where I’m going to work once my mat leave is over.”
The chair suddenly felt wobbly underneath me. I wanted to beg Stacey to stay at Sugarwood—literally get down on my knees and offer her whatever it took. All the paperwork and inventory maintenance that Stacey loved required twice the day’s normal allotment of caffeine and more candy than I should eat over the course of two weeks for me to face.
