Page 24 of Wrong Door

“Would it be okay if we spoke to a few more employees?” Miles asked.

“Of course. Anything you need, it’s yours.”

“Could you show us where to start?”

She nodded, got to her feet, and said, “This way.”

Hartman walked them back to the main hall and pointed them toward a side door that opened onto the grounds, and they took it. “Anyone who worked closely with Patrice would be on the grounds today. And please…just remember we all just found out and some are quite sad about her passing.”

“Of course,” Vic said. “Thank you.”

Outside, the estate opened up around them. An antiquated walkway ran along the left side. It was bordered by trees and flowerbeds. Beyond this, the gravel path curved around the rear of the house toward the informal garden, which was visible from where they stood as a deeper, lusher space. The kitchen garden sat behind a low wall to the right, its beds practical and dense, staked tomatoes and herb rows and what looked like a cutting garden at the far end.

A man was working in the side yard between the kitchen garden wall and the path, crouched over a bed of low plantings with a hand tool. He was in his thirties, and he looked up when he heard them on the gravel and stayed crouched for a moment, assessing, before he straightened and pulled off one glove.

Miles showed his badge. "Special Agent Sterling, FBI. This is Agent Stone. Do you have a moment to talk?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He eyed them both again and asked, “Is this about Patrice?”

“It is,” Miles said. “can I get your name?

"Darius," he said.

“And did you work with Ms. Odom?”

"Yeah. Four years." He said it in the flattened way of someone who had already heard the news and was still in the early stage of carrying it. "What do you need to know?"

They asked the same questions they’d asked Hartman, focusing in on the chance that Patrice Odom may have had enemies here at the estate. Darius found that laughable and shared his time with Patrice with them. He described her as kind, hilarious, and a walking encyclopedia of all things related to flowers and other plants.

They thanked Darius for his time and found a second groundskeeper within just thirty seconds. This one had been visibly crying. A quick round of introductions revealed that his name was Vernon; he had been at Whitmore for seven years. He had indeed worked closely with Patrice off and on. He was quiet for a moment after Miles finished asking about unfamiliar visitors or anything out of the ordinary in the past several weeks.

His eyes went wide for a second and then he began to nod. “Yeah, actually. I’d say maybe two weeks ago, give or take a day.” He was looking at the middle distance, toward the gravel path that ran along the side of the house toward the rear garden.

“And what did you see?” Miles asked.

"I was working the front parterre, and I noticed a man at the garden gate. The one on the south side, the wrought iron gate off the side path. It's not a public entrance, but people stop there sometimes to look in. Tour visitors, mostly."

"What did you notice about him?" Miles asked. “What made him stand out?”

"He was sketching. He had a notebook, the kind with a hard cover. He was standing at the gate drawing, like very into it. I watched him for a couple of minutes from across the parterre." Vernon's expression was neutral, reconstructing rather than editorializing. "We get architecture students all the time. SCAD students, students from other programs. They come to sketch the historic buildings and the formal gardens. It's common enough that I didn't think anything of it, but this was an older guy. Just had a weird vibe, you know?"

"Can you describe him?" Vic asked.

"He was a white guy in his forties, on the thin side. He was wearing a canvas hat with a wide brim, pulled down. Maybe one reason he stood out was because he was wearing a dark jacket, even though it was warm. He was there for maybe twenty minutes and then he walked back toward the street."

“Did he have any interactions with Ms. Odom?” Vic asked.

“If he did, I didn’t see it.”

Miles had brought to mind the description from Margot Finney at the bookstore on Broughton Street—the man she had seen arguing with Desmond Hale two weeks ago. The description was pretty much the same, right down to the canvas hat.

Vernon looked at the path toward the south gate. "I did see Patrice walk past that side of the garden at one point while he was there.”

“Was the man watching her?”

“I don’t know for sure. I mean…he could have been. Like I said, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it because it didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time.”

“Do you remember where Ms. Odom went during this time?”