Keeping the Stillman spigot flowing and cashing in on a million-dollar life insurance policy looks like a motive to me. Who needs Jake around when Brian could use the hungry Vo-Tech kids to work on the Mustangs and get that million dollars?
The cold rain soaks me to the bone as I arrive home. At the school, the kids will be settling down for nap time about now. Instead of being there, I’m having visions of autopsy photos, lab results, angry police officers, and gunshot wounds.
I squish into my house and hear hammering upstairs. Ken must be home. The steady downpour probably shortened his workday. I drip water to the laundry room, where I strip off my soaking wet clothes. I scamper to the bathroom and suds up with a warm shower.
We are going to visit my father and stepmother tonight at the retirement village for dinner. It is a standing invitation for all-you-can-eat chicken wings. On the first Wednesday of the month, the village opens its doors to outsiders, with proceeds going to their capital campaign to build a new wing (hence the name of the monthly dinner, “Wings For The Wing”). Many retirement communities have seen a need to offer a special wing for their memory-impaired residents.
After blow-drying my hair, my short Afro returns. I no longer look or feel like a drowned rat. A nice floral dress, sensible flats, and Ken’s favorite necklace complete the makeover.
I peek at the faded black-and-white photo kept hidden in my jewelry box. In the photo, I am sitting between my father and my biological mother. I am in my Sunday best, wearing a white dress and matching shoes. My smile is genuine and reminds me I have smiled all my life. People guess me to be ten or fifteen years younger than my fifty-seven. No worry wrinkles stare back at me from the mirror.
In the photo, my father, Stan Wallin, is wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and skinny back tie. I can’t decide what his expression is. Being military at the time, you might say he has a military bearing. The photo was taken in England in 1969, when I was almost five, and you might say he borrowed some of the Brit’s ‘keep calm and carry on’ facial expressions for the picture.
Eleanor (it’s been nearly a half-century since I called her mom or mother) clutches her purse on her lap. A Jamaican studying nursing in London on a scholarship, she met my father in the infirmary on a Royal Air Force base where he was stationed as she was finishing up her credits. In the photo, she wears a church hat and a dark dress that reminds me of where I get my curves. I do the math and figure I am over thirty years older than she was at the time the picture was taken. Her dark skin is flawless in this shot, but her hands give away her stress. Her expression is one of profound sadness. I don’t recall her ever smiling. There may be photos of her in my dad’s footlocker where she appears happy, but I don’t remember seeing any. Someday, we may have that conversation about what made her perpetually sad. It would be the first since she walked out of our lives the day before I turned six years old. How does a child that young make sense of the yelling, the tears, the hugs, and the ensuing abandonment? Someday, I might get that answer, but today I tuck the photo away with those feelings and remind myself to be grateful for all that I have. I’ll have dinner tonight with the parents who loved and raised me, then Sunday dinner with my kids and grandchildren.
I bring my notebook down the hall into my makeshift office. I research the words I didn’t understand from both the autopsy and toxicology reports. I add notes to my timeline and stretch red strings on the board between Jake, Brian, and the Stillman twins.
I call Erin a few minutes after four. She allows my adorable grandchildren, Caleb, Jesse, and April, screen time from then until ten minutes before she plates dinner. I fill her in while she readies dinner in the kitchen.
“Mom, Brian told Sharon that Jake died at midnight. Candace tells you he’s in cahoots with a couple of lowlifes laundering money and that he stands to collect a million dollars on a life insurance policy he took out on his business partner. Am I missing anything here?”
“Then why would Brian wait until the night before Jake was to marry Sharon to kill him?” I ask her.
“That part stumps me too, she answers. She then shouts away from the phone. “April, put down Chuckles, please. The cat doesn’t want to play teatime with you.”
Chuckles is a white long-hair rescue kitty they picked up from the pound a few years ago. The cat and April are inseparable, except for times like this.
“I’ll have to talk to the other groomsmen, Jake’s brothers, about what happened at the cabin before they went home that night,” I tell her.
“Anything at the rehearsal dinner of note?” she asks.
“Mabel and Candace said that everybody seemed to have a good time. Both agreed that Becky Steele had a couple too many drinks.”
“Do I know her?”
“She was in the same kindergarten class as Sharon and Jake. She was Sharon’s maid of honor.”
“Can’t place her,” Erin says.
“She’s Reverend Steele’s daughter.”
“Oh, that’s where I know her from. I went to that church a few times for weddings and such.”
“That brings up a question I have for you, honey.”
“What’s that?”
“What was it like for Wes and you going to the school where I was a schoolteacher?”
“I liked it,” she says. “We got to see each other every day at school. I enjoyed helping you out on special school projects. If I wasn’t feeling well, the nurse would let me go to your classroom to rest.”
“Do you think that may have been a factor in you deciding to homeschool Caleb and Jesse?”
“Without a doubt,” she says immediately. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. When they get to middle school, they will all be in advanced classes, and I get to watch them grow up.”
“Did you feel you were swimming in a fishbowl with everybody looking at you because I was a schoolteacher in town?”
She starts laughing. “What?” I ask.
“I’m gonna get all Zen on you, mom. Does the fish know it’s in a fishbowl or is that just what normal feels like?”
“So you’re saying you didn’t know any different. What about Wes?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Dad said the same thing. He thinks that Wes going through school behind the force of nature known as Erin Strong was intimidating.”
“Force of nature? Did he say that?”
“Those were my words, not his.”
“Like I said, you’ll have to ask him,” she says.
“There was a point to me asking you that, because both Mabel and Candace pointed out that the reverend’s daughter had too much to drink at the rehearsal dinner. You knew her not from school but from the church. Yvette Strohmeyer, who was also in the same grade, said that Becky grew up in a fishbowl because her dad was a preacher. Her behavior was always being watched and judged.”
“Other than Becky Steele having too much to drink, anything about how Jake and his best man were getting along?”
“I may have to go back to Mabel, but Candace didn’t get the sense that Brian was going to kill Jake in a couple hours, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Is it safe to say that maybe what was said or done at the cabin caused Jake’s death?” Erin opines.
“So, the gunshot residue on Jake’s hand and stippling surrounding the entry wound doesn’t make you think it was a death by suicide?”
“It was his non-dominant hand, Mom. Absent a motive, no, I still don’t think he shot himself,” she says.
“The cops don’t know about any motives, and the detective who won’t let us look at the file or 911 calls was being cutesy with me about there being no note.”
“How so?”
I go back to my notebook and read to her, “Let’s agree there is no note.”
“Why couldn’t he just say there was no note?” she asks.
“Could it be something to do with the Stillman twins?” I ask.
“How did you make that jump, Mom?”
“Brian’s helping the twins wash their money. Jake knows or figures out where the cash is coming from. Jake wants nothing to do with them anymore. He is getting married the next day and doesn’t want his wife to have a husband with a bad reputation for doing shady deals.”
“The cops know something about the Stillman twins’ illegal activities. Maybe Jake became a weak link and needed to be eliminated. The cops are happy to keep calling this a death by suicide so as not to alert anybody about their investigation into the Stillman brothers,” I tell her.
“Until Gwen Strong and her daughter poke around, and they have to pretend to open the case to keep us from getting more information that points towards the guys with a motive to kill Jake,” she says.