Page 53

His face didn’t exactly fall, but I could see a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. “Oh, right. I forgot that you’re there on Saturday nights.”

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I can see if Alix wants to pick up those hours. Let me give her a quick text.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I replied, and got my phone out of my purse so I could send her a message. I’d already put everyone’s information in my contacts list, since you never knew when you might need to call someone in for backup.

Alix, want to take my shift from six until closing tomorrow?

The answer came back so fast, you would have thought she was camped on her phone, just waiting to see if she’d get called in to work.

Sure. Be there @ 6.

And that was that.

“Done,” I told Jude. “Let me give you my number so you can send me your address.”

Probably the most casual way I’d ever given a guy my digits. Celeste would have been proud.

Jude retrieved his phone from the breast pocket of his jacket, and we exchanged information. Then I got up from my seat.

“Well, duty calls,” I said. “But I’ll see you tomorrow at six.”

“Looking forward to it.”

And, judging by the light in those amazing hazel eyes, he actually was.

Apparently, the good people of Prescott had decided that Francis Brennan’s murder was old news, because the bar was busier that Friday afternoon than it had been since the fateful Thursday when he’d been killed. Roz and Marco and I were on our feet pretty much the whole time, bringing people drinks and charcuterie boards, explaining our list to tourists who didn’t know much about the local wineries and meaderies and breweries. I didn’t mind, though, because the increased traffic told me that my fears of the bar going belly-up because a terrible crime had been committed on the premises were all for nothing.

A little after four, just as the Happy Hour rush was really starting to ramp up, Bob Anselmo walked in.

No sign of his wife, and he still looked just as terrible as he had at Father Frank’s funeral, with dark bags under his eyes and a grayish tinge to his skin. He sat at the end of the bar and ordered a glass of Tannat from DA Ranch, one of our heaviest wines, although he didn’t seem too inclined to touch it.

Marco and Roz were both busy with patrons in the main section of the room, leaving me to handle the patrons sitting at the bar. I figured I probably wouldn’t get a better opening than this.

So I paused in front of Bob and said in an undertone, “Dr. Anselmo, can I ask you something?”

He looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, as though he hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in days or maybe even weeks.

“What?”

You can do this, Lorelei.

“Were you and Father Frank at odds when he died?”

Bob just stared at me with those red eyes. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Because I’ve heard from several people that something was really weighing on him those last few weeks,” I replied, which was only the truth. “And you’ve been acting preoccupied, too. A man died in my bar, Bob. I’m just trying to figure out what really happened.”

He gazed down into his glass of Tannat. The wine was dark red, almost inky in the room’s subdued lighting.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said.

For some reason, I hadn’t been expecting such a flat denial. Rather than reply, though, I just stood there, waiting. With some people, you had to coax words out of them. In Bob’s case, I got the feeling that he — just like Nell — had been holding something inside that he desperately needed to get off his chest.

And even though a bar wasn’t a confessional in a church, it was still a place where a lot of people found it easier to unburden themselves.

Without directly looking at me, Bob said, “Father Frank found out that I’d been having an affair. He’d been pressuring me for weeks to end it and tell Joanne. In fact, we had an argument about it in the church parking lot.” He stopped there, lifted his stemless glass, and swirled the wine inside a couple of times. But he still didn’t drink any of it. “So yeah, we argued. I wanted him to leave it alone. But I didn’t kill him.”