We agreed to make no final decision about an interview with Jonathan until Saturday night or Sunday morning. In the meantime we would try to turn our attention to other things. Halloween was coming up fast. We could spend the first half of the weekend getting ready for that.
We let the kids sleep in Saturday morning and we did the same. Then we hit the road. Lurleen and Danny had other plans, so once more it was the four of us. We had breakfast at the Silver Skillet, something I never had time for during the week. I enjoyed every bite of my scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, cheese grits and biscuits. There is no Southern breakfast that can compare with what they deliver at the Silver Skillet. Mason and the kids seemed to feel the same way. We barely spoke until we’d polished off the last biscuit.
“Now what?” Jason asked.
“Now we take a drive,” Mason said, “out to the countryside. We buy some pumpkins and whatever else we see that we want for Halloween.”
“Can Hannah come?” Lucie asked.
Mason looked at me and I nodded.
Lucie was on her cell immediately.
“If Lucie gets to call Hannah, can I invite Noah?” Jason asked.
“Sure,” I said. I called Melissa, Noah’s mother, and she said he was free. Workouts for his traveling soccer team didn’t start until the next week.
“Great,” Mason said. “We’ll swing by and pick up both the kids.”
It was a good thing Mason had insisted on buying an SUV a few weeks after we married. “We only have two kids, but they have friends, so we’re going to need this,” he said.
I wasn’t a super fan of SUVs, but Mason was right. We’d be carting kids one place or another, and I wanted to be able to do that.
We picked up Hannah first. She lived in Buckhead, north of the Silver Skillet.
“Thank you,” she said as she climbed in our car. “This weekend was going to be totally bunk.”
“Bunk?” I asked.
“Boring,” Lucie said. The two girls began a conversation about plans for Halloween and about what had been going on since they last saw each other. I understood around half of what they said, but it didn’t really matter. We drove across town to Decatur where Noah was waiting for us outside his house. Melissa stood beside him and followed him to our car. “He’s so excited he wouldn’t wait inside,” she said. “He somehow thought you might drive off without him.”
I laughed. “Hop in, Noah—we’d never leave you behind.”
We set off, first for a drive into north Georgia in search of a pumpkin farm and a hayride. Mason took us directly to a perfect spot. I looked at him, eyebrows raised. “How’d you find this?”
“Googled it of course while you were finishing up that last biscuit. I want to be seen as a super dad, you know that.”
“You are a super dad,” I said. “You don’t have to strain yourself by being perfect.”
At the farm, we settled into the back of a truck full of hay along with half a dozen other people. The weather was clear and we spent twenty minutes being jostled from side to side as we road through pumpkin patches and small forests of Georgia pine. Then it was time for pumpkin picking followed by lunch from a hotdog stand with cider doughnuts for dessert.
We left the farm around two.
“More,” I asked the kids, “or do you want to go home?”
“More, please,” Hannah said. “If we’re going to be handing out candy this year, we need to be dressed right. Could we go to a costume store? There’s a big one near my house and my granddad gave me money for a costume.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “You boys all set with what you’re going to wear?”
Jason and Noah smiled.
“They’ve been set for a month now,” Mason said, “but they don’t want me to tell you or anyone else what their costumes are.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can wait a few days to find out.”
We drove to the Halloween store near Hannah’s house. It was full of all kinds of Halloween paraphernalia, not just costumes.
What was most amazing was a mask-making section in the store. “You bring us a headshot and we’ll make a mask from it,” a sign read. That caught my attention. The examples were breathtaking. A picture sat on a counter and beside it was a mask that looked identical to the photo. These could be scary or funny I thought.
Then I had another thought.
What if someone had had a mask made of a real live person—or maybe a dead one—and that was what frightened Nicole so much. I pulled Mason aside and told him what I was thinking. He nodded.
I heard him talking to the man behind the counter. “You sell a lot of these masks?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe our business this year. We’re the only shop in town that does this. We have a turnaround time of 24 hours, so we can still make you one before Halloween.”
“Thanks,” Mason said, “You keep a record of who buys these masks?”
The man gave him a funny look. “No, but we do keep a record of all our sales in the store. You with the police or something?”
“As a matter of fact I am,” Mason said. He showed him his badge.
“You think one of our masks was used in a holdup? I better let you talk to my manager.”
The kids were off in another part of the store. “Why don’t you keep the kids occupied while I check this out a little more,” Mason said to me.
“Will do.” I wandered away and made sure the kids stayed busy in another part of the store. I told Jason and Noah they could buy some decorations for the house. Lucie and Hannah were busy trying on costumes.
Mason waved me over ten minutes later. We didn’t speak other than to purchase what the kids had found. Then we drove home listening to their chatter. Once we arrived, Noah and Jason stayed outside to play with Hermione. Hannah and Lucie disappeared into Lucie’s room, packages in hand.
“We probably have about ten minutes of privacy,” I said. “What did you find out?”
“The manager wouldn’t give me any names of people who purchased masks. I’d need a warrant for that, but he did tell me about one strange picture someone brought in. It was a photo of an old guy with a really scary smile on his face that made him look as if he were dead or some kind of monster.”
“That could be the rictus smile Nicole talked about,” I said.
“I had the same thought,” Mason said.
“You’re thinking it could be a mask of Mr. Strout?” I asked.
“I am. I’ll talk to Kevin and see if he can get a warrant to find out who purchased that mask.”
“So, if that’s what Nicole saw in the window,” I said, “and that’s what frightened her so badly, then maybe she did have something to do with Mr. Strout’s death.”
“Exactly,” Mason said.
“Now, all we have to do is figure out why Nicole might have wanted to kill Mr. Strout.”
“Not we, Ditie, Kevin Delaney needs to figure that out.”
I nodded. “You know I’ll have to let Lurleen know about this. She’ll get it out of me one way or another.”
“Yes, unfortunately, I do know that,” Mason said.
I told the kids I needed to run an errand and left the house to find Lurleen. She and Danny were at an estate sale in midtown, but she assured me she was about done. Danny was apparently more than done. I could hear him in the background saying all the good stuff had already been sold.
I agreed to meet them at their house. They beat me there and Lurleen was sitting in her office with her computer turned on. Danny was standing behind her.
“Now, what is it you’ve found?” she asked. “I’m keeping notes.”
I explained about the mask.
Within minutes, Lurleen showed me a picture of Mr. Strout on the internet. It was an article about his business ventures and his philanthropy. “This picture was taken maybe twenty years ago, so he doesn’t look all that old,” she said. “Wait, let me find his obituary—here it is.”
Danny and I scrunched over Lurleen’s laptop, studied the photo and read the obituary from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
“The AJC, or whoever wrote this,” Lurleen said, “makes him sound like a do-gooder, helping the community and supporting small businesses. It’s a long write-up.”
“It is,” I said. “It says that Josephine Strout will take over the business.”
“Let’s see if there are more stories about the man,” Lurleen said, “but first let me print out the obituary so you can read it more carefully while I search.”
Danny and I each took a printed copy and sat in the breakfast nook in Lurleen’s kitchen. Danny insisted on making coffee.
“We need to be sharp,” he said, “so we don’t miss anything.”
Lurleen joined us five minutes later with a number of photographs she’d printed. She spread them across the breakfast table.
For the next ten minutes we were quiet. We read, peered at photographs, examined them closely, read some more.
“What’s your take away?” I finally asked the two of them.
“What’s yours?” Lurleen asked.
“First off,” I said, “this obituary makes Donald Strout Senior sound like a saint, but then that’s what most obituaries do. It seems he was heavily involved in several businesses in town, including some residences for the elderly.”
“Apparently, he had innovative ideas about that,” Lurleen said. “He seemed to be advocating for the smaller home versions of housing for the elderly. That isn’t what his sister wanted. She had her own business at the time and was heavily invested in the grand-scale assisted living places and nursing homes. I wonder if they had a falling out about that.”
I shrugged. “You saw the list of surviving relatives?” I asked.
Lurleen grabbed my copy of the obituary and rattled them off. “A surviving daughter, Stephanie, a son, Don Junior, each with a spouse—Jonathan and Nicole—and a sister, Josephine.The article notes that a third child, Luke, predeceased Donald Senior as did his wife, Judith Strout. All of this jives with what we’ve been told.”
Lurleen rearranged the photographs from oldest to most recent.
We studied three photos that were taken within a year of Luke’s death. The first was at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of some sprawling building. Lurleen checked the date and the story.
“This was six months before Luke died,” she said, “and the building was an assisted-living facility described as the most-up-to date community-oriented facility in Buckhead.”
Buckhead means it was probably for the wealthy,” I said. “That’s the right area for those with money, obviously. Does the article say more about what made this facility special?”
“A little,” Lurleen said. “It’s mostly a long blurb under the photo. It says it was a large venture designed by Josephine Strout and that the facility included easy access to stores, medical services, restaurants, all on the grounds of the facility.” Lurleen was quiet for a moment. “Here’s an address.” She rattled it off.
“I know that facility,” I said. “It was shut down due to COVID, but I don’t know any of the details.’
“I do,” Danny said. “That particular facility wouldn’t comply with the CDC regulations and rather than be investigated, it closed its doors.”
“How do you know that, Danny?” I asked.
“Friends in public health,” Danny said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know the details, Ditie.”
“We had our own battles to fight,” I said. “We had to do what we could to keep serving the refugee population, and it wasn’t easy.”
“I remember how you struggled,” Lurleen said. “You and Vic and the rest of the staff had your hands full trying to stay open and protect your patients.”
“Is there anything more we can tell from the photo?” I asked. “There must be a dozen people in the picture.” I handed the picture around. It was a grainy newspaper photo.
Lurleen was the one who spotted her. “Look,” she said. “Does that remind you of anyone?”
A well-dressed woman was holding the hand of a young boy and stood beside a slightly older man. She looked young, mid twenties, and she also looked distinctly like Nicole.
“You think it’s her?” I asked.
“I do, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Anyone else we should recognize? Isn’t that Josephine Strout standing next to her brother, and . . . wait a minute . . . that’s Stephanie beside Josephine.”
Lurleen took back the photo. “Looks like it, and beside her is Jonathan.”
We studied the photo and those people standing beside Donald Strout to his left. A man, a woman, and directly beside them the person we’d identified as Nicole holding the hand of a young boy. The young boy was undoubtedly Luke. He had the same fair hair as Nicole.
“Could Nicole have been Luke’s mother?” Lurleen asked.
“She would have been young,” I said, “but it’s possible. If she were Luke’s mother, why would she hide the fact?”
“Maybe Don Junior wasn’t the father,” Lurleen said.
“Can you find a photo of Nicole a few months before Luke was born?” I asked.
Lurleen searched through the photos on the table. Here’s one, six months before Luke was born, a family photograph.”
It looked as if it was taken at some social event.
“It’s the Swan Ball, one of the biggest social events of the season,” Lurleen said.
We saw Nicole standing beside Don Junior, elegantly dressed. Stephanie stood next to Jonathan. Mr. Strout stood beside Mrs. Strout, who was seated in what looked like a wheelchair.
“No one looks pregnant,” I said, “but it might be that no one was showing yet.”