She puffed out her cheeks. “The applications from seniors and such are here, so are the volunteers’ records. We match people. Why?”
“Laura Patchett filled out an application.”
“Does this have to do with her murder?”
“I think so.”
“Hang on.” Joan rose and walked to her sole colleague’s desk. She talked, she waited a beat, and the other woman nodded.
Bingo.
The woman followed Joan back to where I was sitting. “I must have been out on a break, but Cheryl was here,” she said, retaking her seat.
Cheryl, younger than Joan by a decade and likely her junior in status, was eager to please. “Joan had told me to watch out for Charlotte, so I sneaked up on her and found her in the program’s applications.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, like ten days ago? Now, I don’t know if she located Laura’s application in particular, but she was rifling through them. If that’s what she was looking for, she found it. The program doesn’t have more than sixty applications for assistance and they’re in alphabetical order.”
Charlotte Wynn, what have you done? Without a doubt someone who suspected Laura was losing her eyesight had asked Charlotte to search the program’s records for proof. Or maybe Charlotte had acted all on her own. And then what? Had she taken that proof to Brodie? Or directly to Dalton?
“Did you tell Laura that Charlotte might have been looking for the application?” I asked.
“No, but I wish I had,” Cheryl replied. “Does that help?”
“It does.”
“I’m glad. I liked Laura.”
“Did anyone else ask to see the program’s records?”
“I never saw anyone.” Cheryl looked to Joan.
“Not anyone who didn’t have business looking at them,” Joan said. “From now on I’m banning Charlotte Wynn from searching the Records Section on her own. No more privileges. If Roche and White need a record, I’ll get it. Charlotte can take a seat by the door.”
I thanked them, exited Town Hall, and strode west for the offices of the Juniper Grove Post to talk to Mary. Whatever she was holding back, she was going to spit out.
Just inside the Post building was a long and narrow room where reporters and various underlings worked. Head high, eyes front, I walked past their cubicles as though I belonged there and marched toward a set of glass-enclosed offices at the back. I’d never been to Mary’s office, but I doubted the woman who headed circulation and advertising did her job from a cubicle no larger than a queen-sized bed.
I saw her two seconds before she saw me, and when she caught the expression on my face, she knew I knew she’d been holding back. She gave me the same look Joan had—a blend of belligerence and remorse. I know you’re angry, but I can explain.
Until that moment I hadn’t been totally convinced that Mary had withheld important facts, but on seeing her face, seeing her shoulders sag and her chin drop, I was.
She motioned me inside her office door—as though I needed her invitation to enter—and asked me to sit. She remained standing and so did I.
“Rachel, I haven’t been completely honest with you,” she began.
No kidding. “Stop right there, Mary. I haven’t got time for excuses. You asked me to help you, and I’ve been trying to do that. Two people are dead.”
She acted as though I’d slapped her. “I don’t think . . . this was personal, I couldn’t—and you wouldn’t either. No mother would—not that any of this was his fault.”
“Parker.”
She sank into her chair. “It started with Parker. Started.”
I sat too, waiting for her to elaborate.
“Parker told me about Connor Morse’s arrest record. He said a student at JG thought drugs were in Morse’s past. So near the end of his senior year, Parker attended the Youth Law Enforcement Academy in Denver, and he found someone who could hack the online database. Morse had been arrested in Denver and charged as an adult, so his record was in the database. Parker got a printout.”
I wanted to scream. “When we talked at Wyatt’s, you pretended not to know any of this. When I asked you who you thought gave you Morse’s arrest record, you said, ‘I don’t have a clue.’ Your exact words. It wasn’t some anonymous person who put it in your mailbox, it was your son. He handed it to you.”
“He wanted to show me . . . I don’t know. That he knew important people.”
“Seriously?”
“I know it sounds—”
“Ludicrous. It sounds ludicrous. So there were no threats, no demands for you to give Morse’s record to the Post.”
“No.”
“Well, good grief, why did you do it?”
Mary shot me a sharp look. “To save my job. Brodie wants to scale it down or eliminate it. Him and his ‘online presence.’ What do they need a hard-copy subscription head for? Our subscription growth is online, and people just sign up when they sign up. They don’t need me. Marketing is all I know, and I do less and less of that. It’s easier to get advertisers for the online edition. It’s not like the old days.”
“Morse lost his job.”
Mary looked away, out toward Cubicle Land. “Clay mortgaged our house without my knowledge. If I lose my job or they make me part time, we lose our home. I had to make myself valuable to someone who has the owner’s ear, and I chose Brodie.”
