He paused and offered up a smile.
I recognized the smile. He’d found a fatal flaw in my reasoning. He usually did.
“Nice and tidy thinking,” I ventured, but it was tentative.
His eyes glistened; his smile widened. “I’ll even accept that it was a sixty-year-old woman you were wrestling with, on that dirt farm.”
“We weren’t wrestling. She’d shot me. Once I was down, she mostly kicked.” I arched my own eyebrows, desperate for a retort. “Surely you know older ladies who can kick?”
“Alas, yes,” he said, unfazed, “but that is irrelevant to the major flaws in your reasoning.” His straw slurped at the bottom of his cup. “Most likely, Sweetie Fairbairn is simply running from her own crimes. She could have killed Andrew Fill for stealing money from her. She could have killed the clown, to act out her own long-festering fantasies. She could have killed her guard because he’d heard something about her misdeeds. She could have killed George Koros because he got wise to what she’d done. As for her giving away all that money, on her way out the door, remember that no one yet knows how much money she had in the first place. For all the money she gave away, she might have taken plenty more with her, to use to stay invisible for the rest of her life.”
He leaned across the table as much as his height would allow. “That said, do you know what really knocks the hell out of your theories?”
I knew what he was going to say. I had considered it as I lay in the hospital.
I spoke fast, to beat him to it. “Koros and Darlene didn’t have to kill all those people to get at Sweetie’s money. They only had to kill one person: Sweetie Fairbairn herself. Darlene was Sweetie’s closest surviving relative. Even with a will cutting her out, she could make claim against at least some of those millions.”
He smiled and stood up, happy that I’d seen his logic, and helped me to my feet. We started toward the rental van.
I looked past him, at the high school kids circling each other at the front of the Would You? Boys, shaggy and scruffy, too cool to comb; girls, studiedly casual, too eager to not be eager. All of them were full of themselves, full to bursting, full of the night. It seemed like a thousand years since I’d felt a summer’s evening that way-the heat, the musk, that special young lust for almost everything.
Then I saw the sheriff’s cruiser, parked a bit too far down the block.
“We’ll start for Chicago first thing in the morning?” Leo asked, still strutting brain-wise, as we got in the van.
I didn’t answer. He drove us away in silence, enjoying his crafty refutation of my theories about Sweetie Fairbairn. I watched the outside mirror. After a mile I was sure.
“Sweetie Fairbairn was a philanthropist,” I said. “She’d have had an ironclad will, leaving money only to those charities she believed in, not to some sister she hadn’t had contact with in forty years.”
He groaned.
“We’re of interest here,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Those headlamps following us.”
He checked the rearview.
“They belong to the sheriff’s car that was parked down the street from the Would You? Ellie Ball wants to know what we’re up to.”
“Which means?”
“Tomorrow, we ask her why.”
CHAPTER 48.
The next morning, a sheriff’s car was parked right in front of my door when I stepped out with thin, room-brewed coffee to smell the day.
“Mr. Elstrom?” the deputy asked, getting out. “The sheriff would like you to come to her office.”
“Come, or be brought?”
He shrugged.
I said we’d be there in an hour, and went to knock on Leo’s door.
“Been out to the Taylor place recently?” Sheriff Ball asked as Leo and I sat down.
Her office had a glass-topped table, four chairs, and a window that looked out over a small parking lot. She’d decorated her walls with photos of uniformed officers. Some of the photos were old, yellowed with age.
“Yesterday evening,” I said.
“Both of you?”
“Just me.”
“In spite of just being shot, you felt well enough to drive?”
“Piece of cake.”
“What were you doing out there?”
“Wondering, like you, if Darlene was around, and whether there was anything out there that might incriminate her in her sister’s disappearance.”
“And in your shooting?”
“That’s of some interest, yes.”
“You smashed your way in?” She turned to look at the purple iridescence, spotted here and there with shell shapes of orange and light blue that, today, was Leo.
Leo smiled.
“Nah,” I said. “I just pushed some cardboard back from an unlocked window.”
“You then crawled through, twisting your wounded side?” Ellie Ball asked.
“I’m agile, even in pain.”
She let the lie go. “What did you find?”
“Gossip magazines and adult clothes-and kid clothes, for someone twelve, fourteen years old.”
“Alta’s clothes,” she said.
“After all this time?”
“I’ve heard Darlene never got over her sister’s death,” she said.
“The mother died earlier that year?”
“January or February. Though she was only a senior in high school, Darlene was quite fierce about keeping the family together. She and Rosemary, a junior at the time, alternated days, so one would always be home with Alta.”
“What was wrong with Alta, that she needed constant care?”
“She was a high-tempered girl, small physically, but very intelligent. Did well in the primary grades. Then, around junior high, she contracted a virus that apparently caused some damage. They pulled her out of school, and that was the last folks saw of Alta Taylor.”
“After high school, Darlene worked janitorial at night?”
“Also so she could be home days, to take care of Alta.”
“What did the mother die of?”
“Fell and hit her head. Where’s this going, Mr. Elstom?”
“Why did you pull us in here?”
“I’m always interested in trespassers.”
“There was an autopsy for the mother?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Isn’t an autopsy expected, in cases of questionable death?”
“Nothing about it was questionable. Darlene saw her mother fall. Besides, we were poor rural, then as now. No money laying around for an unnecessary autopsy.”
“No autopsy for Alta, either?”
“No mystery there, either.”
“What did she die of?”
“Sickness of some sort.”
“A lot happened to the Taylor family that year,” I said. “The mother dies early, in January or February. In April, a gas station attendant gets killed-”
Sheriff Ellie Ball’s eyes flashed. “Wait just a damned minute. How does that fit in?”
“Both Darlene and Rosemary were seen near the gas station that day.”
“With Georgie Korozakis, riding around in his convertible. They were kids, out joyriding. Nothing more.”
I went on. “Then Rosemary Taylor takes off, in June. Alta dies three months later. Tell me, Sheriff, have things happened that fast to other families in Hadlow?”
Ellie Ball glared at me, said nothing.
“What did Alta Taylor die of, exactly?”
“You’re asking whether Darlene murdered Alta?” Her words came out exaggeratedly slow, weighted with fury.
“Whether Darlene murdered the mother, as well.” I tried to smile sweetly.
She stared at me for a long moment. Then she reached for her phone and tapped three digits.
“This is Ellie. Could you look up Alta Taylor’s cause of death?” We waited in silence for longer than we should have until, finally, the sheriff nodded and hung up. “Alta Taylor died September third.”