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Except possibly the hypothetical other woman, who might or might not exist.
I also couldn’t help noticing how Sara hadn’t tried to protest that Jeffrey would never stoop to anything as low as blackmail. She might have had her doubts about why he would have targeted Archie and Victoria, but she clearly believed he was capable of doing such a thing, especially when you considered how dire his financial straits had been.
Which I supposed was interesting from a moral standpoint, but it didn’t help me get any closer to finding out who had known about Jeffrey’s meeting with Victoria and had taken steps to poison that carton of creamer in her fridge with atropine, thus ensuring he’d never meet with anyone else after that fateful morning.
“Well, someone knew,” I said, my tone as tired as I currently felt. Maybe it would be much worse when I was eight or nine months pregnant, but even now I could tell I wasn’t nearly as physically ready for this kind of running around as I’d been back before I was carrying another human being inside me. Part of that tiredness was probably just sheer frustration at not being able to get any kind of handle on who had been responsible for Jeffrey Sellers’ death, but still.
“I suppose so,” Sara responded, sounding nearly as weary as I did. This probably wasn’t the sort of thing she’d wanted to wrestle with after working a full day at the medical center. She shifted where she sat, adding, “Was there anything else? I’ve told you everything I know.”
Which wasn’t as much as I’d hoped. But even though Sara technically had access to atropine at her work, and even though most people would probably have agreed she had a motive to poison Jeffrey by way of her suspicions about there being another woman involved somehow, I still didn’t think she was our murderer.
I couldn’t be sure, though. Not without being able to see her aura…not when I was second-guessing myself pretty much every step of the way. She would definitely have to stay in the “maybe” column for now.
“No, there’s nothing else,” I told her, hoping she couldn’t hear the disappointment and worry in my voice, and stood. “Thanks for talking with me again.”
A shrug. I noticed how she didn’t say it was no problem, probably because it kind of was.
I didn’t comment, of course. No, I just headed to the front door and let myself out, gladder than ever that at least I’d have some jambalaya to fortify me before Calvin and I headed home.
Maybe Sara was our murderer and maybe she wasn’t, but I knew I’d need a lot more evidence to convince me one way or another than what I currently had in hand.
13
Your Cheating Heart
Calvin wasn’t quite as dejected as I was, but even he seemed a little subdued during dinner. “Something will come to you,” he told me as he handed over a basket of sourdough rolls.
“It hasn’t so far,” I returned, then selected a roll and put the basket back down on the table.
But sourdough rolls had their way of cheering me up — oh, those luscious carbs — and a few bites made me feel a little better about the world, my mind already working at the problem and trying to see if there was some other way we could approach this.
“If Jeffrey really was seeing someone on the side,” I said after swallowing a bite of roll, “would there maybe be credit card transactions or something to show he’d taken her out to dinner or whatever?”
Calvin had just scooped himself a bite of jambalaya, so he had to wait until he was done chewing before he could reply. “It’s possible, although he seemed like the kind of person who would have done everything on a cash basis so there wasn’t a paper trail.”
“Still,” I said, and paused. I supposed this kind of digging around wasn’t much different from what Ben Ironhorse had done to locate NancyAnne Nielsen’s itinerary and let us know she was here in Arizona, but for some reason, it felt much more personal. “Could your deputy take a poke around in Jeffrey Sellers’ bank statements to see if he can find anything that looked unusual?”
That request got me the slightest narrowing of my husband’s dark eyes. Being Calvin, though, he considered my question carefully before he offered a reply.
“He might,” he allowed. “But I’m still not sure if we’re going to find anything of interest.”
“If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.”
My husband’s head tilted, as if he was turning over various possibilities in his mind before discarding them one by one. “We could try interviewing some of his neighbors to see if any of them saw any women coming and going from Jeffrey’s apartment. Because we already know what Sara Tilden looks like, if they report having seen someone who doesn’t match her description, then the mystery woman might be the person he was seeing on the side.”
I supposed that was possible. On the other hand….
“Do you really think he would have brought someone like that to his apartment?” I asked next. “You’d think he’d want to go to her place so there wouldn’t be any chance of his neighbors noticing anything out of the ordinary.”
If they were even that observant at all. When I had visited the place, it seemed like the kind of apartment complex where people worked long hours and didn’t have much time left over for spying on their neighbors. At least, I hadn’t seen a single occupant while we were there. True, it had been in the middle of the day, but in general, you’d usually glimpse at least one person coming and going after taking a late lunch or whatever.
“Well, are you going to do the legwork?” I asked. “I put Melanie off today with a story about getting some tests done in Phoenix, but sooner or later, she’s going to wonder why I keep taking off in the middle of the day.”
And yes, she probably knew about my amateur sleuthing if she’d talked to anyone in Globe at all, but I still didn’t feel like going into a lot of explanations.
“I can do it,” Calvin said easily. “Or at least, I’ll try. If Hector Salazar’s cows decide to start marauding again, I might not have a chance to get away.”
I made a face at him, and he grinned, telling me it had mostly been a joke…mostly. The cows could probably wait, but if a genuine emergency came up, Calvin’s fact-finding mission at Jeffrey Sellers’ apartment complex would have to be put aside until later.
