“I’m starving,” Lurleen said. “Investigations always make me hungry.”
“We could have coffee somewhere,” I said, “and I’ll pick up the kids from aftercare, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“That gives us several hours to do something,” Lurleen said. “I want to eat, but I also want to figure out how to have a private conversation with Nate. Any ideas?”
“That’s not a good idea, Lurleen,” I said. “I’ve thought about it and it could be dangerous.”
“Hmm,” Lurleen said. “I might call Stephanie and see if she’d like to go out for coffee or a drink. Then I might just run into him at her house.”
“Don’t do that, Lurleen.”
Lurleen ignored me. She called Stephanie and put her cell on speaker phone. “Could I take you out for coffee or a drink this afternoon?”
“Can’t today,” Stephanie said, “sorry, but I have way too much to do to get ready for Jonathan.”
“Can I help with that?” Lurleen asked.
“I have a list a mile long, so if you mean it, I could use your help.”
“I’ll be right over,” Lurleen said.
“Is Dr. Brown coming?”
“No, she’ll be tied up the rest of the day.”
“Good,” Stephanie said. “That came out wrong. I only meant I don’t know her well and I’d prefer it to be the two of us.”
“So would I,” Lurleen said. “I’ll be over in twenty minutes. Will that work?”
“Yes. Nate is taking the car to check in with Jonathan and pick up a few things, so if we can use your car, that would be great.”
“Absolument, chèrie , as long as it’s nothing too big.”
“I know. I’ve seen your car. It’s more personal things Jonathan might need.”
Lurleen hung up the phone and turned to me.
“Now we have a plan. I’ll be with Stephanie and you could accidentally run into Nate at the hospital. You could say you were just checking on how Jonathan was doing.”
I shook my head. “I’ll have to talk to Mason first, and you know neither he nor Kevin will go along with this plan.”
“Point taken,” Lurleen said. “Okay, I’ll spend time with Stephanie and maybe find a way to talk to Nate on my own.”
“No, Lurleen,” I said. “You can’t talk to Nate on your own. That isn’t safe.”
“Am I allowed to be a friend to Stephanie?”
“I guess they can’t stop you from being a friend,” I said.
“Maybe you can figure out what happened to Luke in the hospital,” Lurleen said. “Here’s the information I have.” She handed me a piece of paper on which she’d written the name of the hospital, the name of the surgeon and the dates Luke was there.
“I don’t know, Lurleen.”
“I’m not asking you to go to the hospital. Just see what you can find out online if anything.”
We split up at that point. I called Mason and told him what we were up to and what we hoped to find out.
“I can’t keep you from using the internet,” Mason said, “but don’t talk to anyone, especially this guy, Nate. He’s on Kevin’s short list of suspects.”
“Okay,” I said.
I went down one rabbit hole after another trying to get the information I wanted on the internet. The hospital had folded a few years after it opened, not long after Mr. Strout’s death. The surgeon was still in practice and I found no complaints against him filed with the Georgia Composite Medical Board.
I looked up Nicole Ash and drew a blank. When I tried Nicole Strout I was more successful. She was a registered nurse with no complaints that I could find. She and Donald Strout Junior divorced a year after Mr. Strout Senior died. That made the papers but with no details on why their split occurred.
Now what? The doorbell rang and Hermione’s loud barking interrupted my thoughts. I peered out a side window. It was Nate.
I shushed Hermione and opened the door but kept the screen door locked.
“He bite?” Nate asked.
“It’s a she and she only bites if she thinks someone is attacking me,” I said.
“That won’t be me. Can I come in?”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I need to talk to you because I want to get things straightened out.”
He was dressed in running shorts and a T-shirt. There was no room for any kind of weapon on his well-toned body.
Hermione stopped barking but she let out a low growl as Nate entered. She followed both of us into the living room.
I pointed to a chair a good distance away from me. “What is it you want to straighten out?” I asked.
“You sound as if you don’t trust me. I sensed that when you stopped by this morning. I want to get on the right side of things, and you might be my ticket for getting there. That cop, Delaney, seems to think I’m a suspect in Nicole Ash’s death. Believe me, I barely knew the girl. What I did know was enough to keep me far away from her.”
“It didn’t look that way at the book club,” I said. “You two looked close.”
“I was acting as her bodyguard,” Nate said. “She was afraid someone might be out to harm her. She wouldn’t tell me who it was, but she offered to pay me well to protect her, so I took the job.”
“Did she tell you what nearly frightened her to death?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t tell me that, claimed she didn’t know, and believe me I tried to get it out of her.
“You were hired to protect her and then she was murdered that same night.”
“Don’t lay that one on me. Nicole suddenly thought I might be the bad guy based on that tarot card reading she had.”
“Did you hear what Crystal said?”
“Yes. She said the cards meant that the men around her might wish to hurt her, and Nicole believed it. She kicked me out. Crystal said she’d stay with her, so I stayed outside the house all night.”
“You stayed outside and saw nothing?” I asked.
“I saw no one suspicious if that’s what you mean, like her ex-husband. He’s the one I worried about.”
“Did anyone else visit her?”
Nate hesitated. “Sure, some people were concerned after what happened at the book club and stopped by.”
“Like who?” I asked.
“Like Josephine and then Stephanie.”
“Stephanie said she only talked to Nicole on the phone,” I said.
“So she lied a little. Josephine came by first and stayed ten minutes. Stephanie arrived a little later. Neither one of them showed up around the time Nicole was murdered.”
“You told the police about those visits?” I asked.
“No, neither visit was relevant.”
“You need to tell the police anyway, or I will,” I said.
“Please don’t do that.”
It sounded more like a demand than a request.
I changed the subject. “There must be other entrances to the house around the side, the back,” I said. “How could you monitor all of those?”
Nate shrugged. “I got out of my car, stretched my legs from time to time, but there’s only one main road leading to and from the house.”
“And what if someone parked a distance away, walked to the back of the house?”
He shrugged again. “Maybe they could have done that, but the back gate stays locked. And I’m a good bodyguard. People don’t get hurt on my watch.”
“Nicole got killed on your watch!”
“Yeah, but Crystal was inside, so she’s the one you should be talking to. She’s the one who really hated Nicole. You know Nicole made a play for her husband, broke up their marriage.”
“I heard that,” I said, “so why in the world would she stay with Nicole and why would Nicole allow her to do that?”
“Beats me,” Nate said.
“You saw her leave and come back to find Nicole’s body?” I asked.
“I know that’s what she claims, but I never saw her leave—the garage is at the back of the house.”
“Wait a minute. You didn’t see or hear her car leave around midnight?”
“Maybe I did fall asleep for a little bit,” Nate said, “or maybe she didn’t actually go anywhere. Look, I came here to ask you to get the cops off my back. That’s all. I didn’t kill Nicole.”
“So why do the police think you might be involved?”
“Well, maybe Nicole and I did have one small fling before I learned better, a fling that didn’t end so well.”
“Really?” I said. “When did you have your fling with Nicole?”
“Right after Luke died,” Nate said. “Everyone was cut up about it, acting crazy. It was a lot to handle.”
“Nicole was cut up?”
“She told me she was, but I don’t know for sure. She said she needed some comfort and her husband couldn’t provide it. She said he was too upset. It seemed harmless. It was never meant to be anything, but Don Junior found out. I nearly lost my job. If it hadn’t been for the rest of the family I would have. Mr. Strout Senior and Josephine never liked Nicole. They convinced Don Junior that it was all her fault, like I was a helpless lamb led astray.” He laughed at that. “I wasn’t a helpless lamb but Nicole could be pretty persuasive when she put her mind to it. Our fling was basically a one-night stand and I stayed clear of her after that. Her future husband came on the scene around that time and that was the end of her marriage.”
“You’re talking about Ben Ash,” I said.
“Yeah, I am. He got hired as a gardener, and that meant it wasn’t difficult for the two of them to get together.”
“He came on board before Mr. Strout Senior died?” I asked.
“Yeah, he did. I remember he was at the funeral for Mr. Strout and the family was furious about it. They asked me to tell him to leave.”
“Did you do that?”
“I tried to and I got a black eye for my effort. Then they wouldn’t let me call the police. They said they didn’t want another scandal. Nicole and Don Junior were already in the middle of an ugly divorce.”
“Do you have any reason to think Mr. Strout Senior was murdered?”
Nate looked shocked and shook his head. “They said he died of natural causes, a massive MI,” Nate said. “He was in the hospital four or five days. It seemed he was getting better and then he died.”
“Why did the family refuse an autopsy?” I asked.
“No one in the family wanted that and the doc said he’d had a second coronary, simple as that.”
“A second coronary, you mean another heart attack,” I said.
“Yes. He had a second myocardial infarction. Why do you keep asking about that?”
“Because most people who aren’t in the field of medicine would have said he had a second heart attack, not a coronary or an MI. Why do you use terms like that?”
“I trained as an EMT, and it made me very useful to have around in an emergency,” Nate said.
“Were you by any chance the person who found Mr. Strout Senior after his first heart attack?”
“I see where you’re going with this, and I don’t like it, Dr. Brown. I was the person who found him, and I did CPR until the medics got there. You can check that out. I was the one who kept him alive—I wasn’t the one who killed him.”
“Okay,” I said. “Did you know Mr. Strout died exactly one year to the day after Luke died?”
“What?” Nate sounded genuinely surprised. “That’s crazy.”
“It may be significant,” I said. “Where did you find him after his first MI? Was anyone else around?”
“I found him in his greenhouse. Mr. Strout loved exotic plants and I found him lying on the floor. I didn’t see anyone around, but Mr. Strout kept pointing toward the door of the greenhouse before he lost consciousness. I yelled for help and called 911. People came running, but by that point I was doing CPR.”
“Who came running?” I asked.
“Ben, then Nicole and Josephine—those three I think.”
I sat back in my chair. “Thanks, Nate. I’m going to pass all this information along to Kevin Delaney. He might know about it, but if he doesn’t, it could take the pressure off you a bit. By your account, you tried to save Mr. Strout.”
“I did.”
Nate stood. “People told me you would be a good person to talk to in order to get things straight, and you have been.”
“What people?”
“Stephanie for one.”
“You two are very good friends it seems,” I said, “and maybe something more than friends.”
“Look, I’m not a perfect guy. I have my needs and Stephanie has hers. She loves her husband, but he spends all his time working and she gets lonely.”
I nodded. He made for the door and Hermione followed close behind, not growling or showing her teeth but definitely not wagging her tail. Someone to be wary of she seemed to be saying.
Nate left without another word and I called Mason. He listened to what I had to say without a comment until I was done.
“Why did you let him in the house, Ditie?”
“He was in running clothes. I could see he didn’t have a weapon, and I needed to hear what he had to say. Besides Hermione was with me.”
I could imagine Mason shaking his head. “I’ll pass all this on to Kevin, but don’t call anyone to check on his story.”
He ended the call before I could respond. I wondered if he suddenly felt he had more rights about controlling my life now that we were married, but I wasn’t being fair to him. Mason wanted to keep me safe, and he’d wanted to do that from the first time we met.
I headed to my computer in search of details about the death of Mr. Strout Senior. I couldn’t find the details I wanted like a way to check out what Nate had told me. I could find the date of his death, which was October 26, so that was a match. But if he had been murdered, how did someone make sure he died on that particular day? Couldn’t he have died earlier from his first coronary as Nate described it? Maybe the initial heart attack happened on its own and someone saw it was an opportunity to finish him off. Someone with medical training, like Nicole or Nate? Would Josephine have known how to do something to cause his death? Would Jonathan? It all seemed to hinge around revenge over the death of Luke. Someone thought Mr. Strout Senior was responsible for Luke’s death, and later perhaps that person decided Jonathan was responsible.