“I’m not waiting for the house to be sold,” she said without his having to ask. “It can sit on the market empty. Let them stage it if they have to.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Texas,” she said. “Outside Houston. I have family there. I’m putting all this on a truck, sending it that way, putting it into storage until I find a place to live. I can’t get out of this goddamn town fast enough.”
Duckworth said nothing.
“They’ve crucified him,” Tanya Sturgess said. “They’ve fucking crucified him. Accused my husband of monstrous things when he’s not here to defend himself. Agnes Pickens was the one behind it all. Why else would she throw herself off the falls? The woman was consumed with guilt.”
Duckworth listened.
“You know what happened last Thursday? Believe me, if I didn’t ever have to leave this house, I wouldn’t, but I had to go to the store the other day. I’m going up and down the aisle and a woman sees me — I don’t even know who she was — and she looks me right in the eye and she says, ‘What was it like to be married to a man who steals a baby?’ What gives her the right to speak to me that way? What gives her the right?”
“People judge,” Duckworth said.
“Don’t they, though?”
He followed the woman into a ground-floor study, where she’d evidently been packing books. She took a handful off the shelf and dropped them into a box.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To destroy whatever small shred of reputation Jack might have left?”
“I’m here following up on one thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s from three years ago.”
“Three years?”
“Three years ago, this month. The third anniversary is actually later this month. I wondered if your husband kept his old appointment books. Something that would tell me what he was doing at that time. That day, if possible.”
“Why on earth would you need to know that?”
“It’s part of the overall investigation,” he said.
She dropped some more books into the box. “Well, you’re two days too late.”
“What do you mean?”
She opened her arms wide to indicate the scope of the task before her. “I’m going through all this stuff and I’m not taking it all with me. I’m pitching as I pack. I didn’t see any reason to keep Jack’s old appointment books. They went out with the trash.”
Even if the doctor’s own calendar was gone, the hospital might have what he was looking for, Duckworth thought. If Sturgess had been the ER doctor on call, for example, on the night Olivia Fisher was murdered, it would have been hard for him to slip out to the park to kill someone.
“The only one who keeps stuff like that is me,” Tanya Sturgess said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I keep my own old date books.”
Duckworth nodded slowly. “Would you have one from three years ago?”
She studied him. “Why should I look? Why should I bother? Why should I help you?”
Duckworth could think of several reasons why helping him was in his interest, but not one that was in hers.
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. If I were you, I wouldn’t help me at all. But it could be important.”
Tanya Sturgess dumped some books on a desk and said, “Follow me.”
She went to a drawer in the kitchen, pulled out several old date books with wire spines. “Three years ago?”
Duckworth nodded.
She found the right one, opened it, fanned the pages until she got to May. “Here we go,” she said, and handed the book to him.
It wasn’t like he was looking for a notation for the day Olivia Fisher died with a note that read: “Jack kills girl, home late for dinner.” But knowing what the doctor was up to that week might help.
He scanned the week’s entries. On Tuesday evening, she’d written down “dinner Mannings.” Friday at eleven, “mani-pedi.” Wednesday: “Dry cleaning.”
He saw an entry for Monday at ten thirty a.m. that caught his eye. “What’s this, Dr. Gleber?”
“Dentist,” she said. “That would have been my semiannual cleaning.”
“Okay.”
“Really, what’s this about?” she asked.
He ignored the question and continued to study the days leading up to the day Olivia had been murdered: May 25. Duckworth noticed an appointment for the twenty-second that appeared to be something medicaclass="underline" “1 p.m. Seward clinic.”
Duckworth showed it to Jack Sturgess’s wife. “What would this be? Is Dr. Seward your doctor?”
“Seward’s not a doctor. He’s a physiotherapist.”
“You were seeing a physio?”
“Let me see that,” she said, taking back the book. She went back a couple of weeks. “I remember this.”
“What?”
“This was when Jack got hurt.”
“Hurt?”
“Two weeks before. Yes, here it is. We went to see friends in Maine, and Jack was hiking in the woods and twisted his ankle. His right ankle. Hurt so much he couldn’t drive home. Had to use a cane for a few weeks, and went to the Seward clinic for physio. It was a couple of months before he could walk normally again.”
“So all through this period, this week here,” Duckworth said, taking the book back and pointing to the two pages, “your husband was basically disabled? He had trouble getting around?”
The dead doctor’s wife nodded.
Did a guy with a bum ankle attack a woman in a park? And run away after he’d killed her?
“Thank you,” Duckworth said, and handed the book back to Tanya Sturgess.
He’d want to confirm the doctor’s injury with the Seward clinic, but he felt, with some confidence, that he could rule out Jack Sturgess in the murder of Olivia Fisher, and because the modus operandi was identical, the death of Rosemary Gaynor, too.
“Tell me about the Gaynors,” Duckworth said.
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“What am I trying to do, Mrs. Sturgess?”
“You’re trying to find a way to blame Jack for that, too. For what happened to her. That’d really help you out, wouldn’t it? Find a way to prove Jack killed Rosemary. Well, he didn’t do that, and I won’t help you frame him for it. You want to pin everything you can on him. He’s not here to defend himself. Have you found a way to connect him to the Lindbergh kidnapping? The Kennedy assassination?”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Duckworth said. “I don’t think he killed Rosemary Gaynor any more than you do. But I want to find out who did.”
She eyed him dubiously. “You’re trying to trick me.”
Duckworth shook his head. “No. Let me ask you again about the Gaynors. How well did you know them?”
“Bill and Jack were friends. I didn’t really know Rosemary. We went out for dinner once or twice a year.”
“Did Bill and Rosemary get along?”
“I suppose. They did when we were all together. The four of us never socialized after the baby came, or even in the months before that. When Bill and Rosemary were in Boston.”
“But you saw Bill occasionally in the period before his wife died?”
“I did. The odd time.”
“What was he like?”
“I guess, looking back, I’d say he was on edge.” Bitterly, she said, “I didn’t like him then and I hate him even more now. He’s as much to blame as Agnes Pickens. He was a horrible person, dragging Jack into a scheme to get that baby for him and his wife. Jack devoted his life to helping others and look what he got for it.”
That didn’t quite line up with the facts as Duckworth knew them. Jack Sturgess needed money to pay off gambling debts. He saw Bill and Rosemary’s quest for a child as an opportunity to get it. And as far as Duckworth could tell, no one had forced Sturgess to murder Marshall Kemper or Doris Stemple. Or threaten to plunge a syringe into the neck of David Harwood’s father.