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What happened next happened very, very fast.
Forty-Nine
Albert McBain was sitting in his small office at the Devon Savings and Loan on Broad Street where he was assistant manager, staring at some mortgage documents on his computer screen. He had two clients whose house deals were closing in the next couple of days, and if these docs weren’t pushed through, the deals could fall apart.
But this was his only reason for coming into the office, and he didn’t plan to be here for more than an hour. His boss and the branch manager, Ms. McGillivray, had told him to take the entire week off, considering that his mother, Elizabeth, had passed away the day before. And he fully intended to do that. There was much to be done, with help from his sister Isabel. A service to be planned, extended family to notify, an appointment with the estate lawyer, and then the unpleasant business of clearing out her apartment would have to be tackled.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Stamford Players’ latest production was due to open in a couple of weeks. The previous day’s rehearsal had been cut short when Albert got the call from the hospital that his mother was close to the end. Was it realistic for Albert to think that, with all that was going on, he could really pull the play together in time? Should the opening be delayed? But tickets had already been sold. Okay, not exactly thousands of them, but at least a hundred or so. Would people demand refunds, or would they be okay with hanging on to their tickets for a later date?
Whoever had said, “The show must go on!” surely hadn’t had to deal with the death of a parent two weeks before opening night.
The stress of it all had given him indigestion. He opened his desk drawer and found a half-empty container of Tums. He tapped three of them into his palm and started chewing.
His phone rang.
He was going to let it go to voice mail—he’d already changed his message to indicate he would be gone for the week due to a family emergency—but he could see from the flashing light that it was not a call from outside, but from reception.
Albert sighed and picked up. “Yes?”
A young woman said, “There’s a police detective here asking for you.”
“Um, oh,” he said. “Did you get a name?”
There was an exchange of words at the other end, and then the receptionist said, “Detective Hardy?”
“Send—send her back.”
He put the phone back on its cradle and thought, Oh no.
Albert really did not want to talk to Detective Marissa Hardy. Needless to say, he no longer needed to feign interest in some mysterious woman who’d shown up at Brie’s old address. Nor did he need the detective to track down who had waved to him and his sister and Norman from the hospital parking lot.
Not important.
He rose from behind his desk and greeted the detective as she reached his office door.
“Mr. McBain,” she said.
“Detective Hardy,” Albert said. “Please come in and take a seat.”
Hardy sat. “I’d like to offer my condolences. I didn’t know, until just now, that your mother had passed. Your receptionist said I was lucky to catch you, that you’d only come in to the bank for a short period to clear up a few things.”
“Yes,” Albert said solemnly. “We knew it was coming, of course, but it’s still kind of a shock. I mean, we were all talking to her on Saturday and she seemed, well, she didn’t seem like someone who was going to go in the next day. But things can turn on a dime, you know.”
Hardy nodded sympathetically. “Of course.”
“But if you only just learned about my mother, that can’t be why you’ve come in.”
“That’s correct,” she said.
“You still asking around about our strange sighting on Saturday?”
“In part,” Hardy said slowly.
“You know,” he said, “I think we might have overreacted, jumped to conclusions. And we were several floors up from the parking lot. I’m sorry if we got you involved in this for nothing.”
“Not at all,” Hardy said. “I always like to follow up on any lead.”
“Well, okay,” he said. “But honestly, I wouldn’t worry much more about it.”
