She wasn’t there, but we didn’t expect her to be. We parked our car around the corner to wait. Brooks parked his cruiser behind us.
“You don’t happen to have a gyro on you, do you?” I asked.
Daisy looked thoroughly confused. “Huh?”
“Never mind. Stakeout inside joke.” So inside, I was the only one who knew it.
“Let’s look around,” she said.
We got out of our car and I mimed to Brooks that we were going to scope out the house. He mimed back that he didn’t fully agree with that decision, but he also looked like he understood now that he couldn’t stop me. We canvased the Farleys’ yard, peeking into the few windows that didn’t have their shades pulled—with me taking the front and east side, and Daisy taking the garage and back. The house looked dusty and unused. Wilma Louise hadn’t been home much, apparently. Maybe she’d been living it up since Farley had been run down. Almost like someone who was celebrating.
I sat on the front porch and thought about how jealous it had made me to think about Trace with his bevy of better-than-Hollis women. And that was after we’d broken up. Would I have been driven to kill if we’d still been together and I’d found out he was seeing another woman?
I would like to think not.
But Wilma Louise Farley sure didn’t seem the type, either.
Maybe we had the wrong person again. It was possible. She could have been running from us because of all the press surrounding the coach’s death. It wouldn’t be the first time someone ran from a reporter just to get away from the sensationalism of a story.
Daisy joined me on the porch.
“Do you really think she did it?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Daisy said. “Without a doubt.”
“How can you know for sure? What if we’re just badgering this poor woman over a bunch of circumstantial evidence?”
Daisy started to open her mouth to answer me, but clapped it shut and pointed down the street instead. Farley’s enormo-truck was coming, slowly creeping, as if she was watching out for us. Daisy grabbed my arm and pulled me around the side of the house. I waved toward Brooks’s car to stay put. I doubted he would, but I wanted to feel for just a second like I had some sort of say.
“I left my notebook and pencil in the car,” I whispered.
“So?”
“So I can’t take notes.”
Daisy blinked at me. “I think you can trust your memory on this one. Come on.”
As soon as Wilma Louise opened the driver’s side door and toppled out of the truck—chatting on her cell phone once again—we stepped around the corner.
“We have some questions for you,” Daisy said in a very TV detective voice.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s getting better all the time.”
“Thanks,” Daisy said. “I’ve been practicing in the bathroom mirror—hey!”
Wilma Louise had taken one look at us, dropped her cell phone, purse, and a shopping bag on the ground and bolted through the yard, leaving the truck door wide open and the person she’d been talking to probably wondering where she’d gone.
“Stop!” I yelled, then ran after her. “We just want to interview you!” Not true, exactly. But close enough. I couldn’t arrest anyone—that was for Brooks to do. I just wanted to facilitate her capture so justice could be brought to the city of Parkwood. And to Coach Farley, because cheating is rotten thing to do, but not punishable by death. And to Evangeline, because maybe she loved him, even if loving him was wrong.
I heard soft thumps behind me and saw Brooks running toward us. He wasn’t just a good jogger—he was a great runner.
My lungs and legs were already burning. Why had I made so many excuses not to get to the gym? “Wilma…Louise…I just…I won’t…uh…” I was for sure slowing down.
But so was Wilma Louise. She’d kicked off her high heels and was trying to navigate her way across a neighbor’s gravel driveway barefoot.
“Oof! Ouch! Ow! Ow! Ow! Okay…” she said, gasping for air nearly as much as I was. “Okay…I’ll stop…”
Brooks, on the other hand, had not slowed at all. It wasn’t me she was stopping for; it was him. But the funny thing was, I was starting to see us as being on the same team.
“I’m innocent,” Wilma Louise said as Brooks reached her. “I’m a grieving widow.”
“Why’d you run, then?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want to be in the newspaper,” she said. “I just want my privacy. But I’ll talk to you…You’re relentless.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it.
We walked slowly back to her driveway, Wilma Louise and I still trying to catch our breath. I’d pulled out my phone to take notes, even though that was not my routine and I hate hate hated it. Wilma bent to pluck her phone out of the grass. That was when I saw a familiar notebook lying in the grass next to her spilled purse.
“Hey, that’s my notebook,” I said, picking it up. It was true what they said about criminals revisiting the scene of their crimes. Wilma Louise had visited and had taken a souvenir, apparently. “You took it? Why?”
“I wanted to see where you were with the case.”
“You could have just asked the police for that,” Brooks said.
She rolled her eyes and waved him off. “Pssh. Sure, I could have. But she wasn’t going to give up on this case. I also took the notebook to slow her down. If anyone was going to figure out who hit Gerald, it was going to be her. I was worried.”
I tried not to gloat. Don’t gloat, Hollis. Gloating is not attractive. Gloating makes you petty and small.
“Told you,” I muttered. Okay, maybe I would gloat a little.
“Why were you worried?” Daisy asked, taking my notebook and flipping through it. “If you aren’t guilty. Seriously, Hollis? There’s a new man in town, his name is Frank, and he’s delicious?”
I mean, it didn’t sound as bad when it was read aloud like that. “Can we focus, please?”
“Gerald was the love of my life,” Wilma said. “Soul mates, really. I wanted to know who killed him.” Her chin crumpled and her voice started to wobble. “We had plans, you know, to retire to Florida.”
Daisy, who had walked over to the truck, shook her head. “You may want to save—”
“We never had children. We didn’t need them. We were so happy, just the two of us.”
“You’re wasting your br—”
“We were going to go down and pick out a little house this summer.”
Daisy sighed, leaned into the truck, and pushed a button. The garage door groaned to life. Wilma Louise froze as the door lifted to slowly reveal a silver Jaguar with a mangled grill and a cracked headlight.
We all just sort of stood there and stared at it, until it dawned on me that Daisy knew the car was there this whole time and didn’t say anything.
“You saw it when you looked in the garage window,” I said.
She nodded, proud.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I started to, but we got interrupted.” She shrugged. “Besides, I like big endings.”
Brooks turned his back and mumbled into his radio. Soon, we heard a police siren fire up in the distance. He pulled out his handcuffs. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to put your hands behind your back.”
For the briefest second, Wilma Louise looked like she was going to run again. Her eyes went wild and her fists balled.
“He was a cheater!” she finally yelled. “He was a cheater and so was she. What do you care that he’s gone? Just let cheating dogs lie.” Brooks clicked the handcuffs into place and led her toward his car. “I did everyone a favor,” she ranted. “Nobody liked him!”
Which may have been the first true thing she’d said since we met.