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Julia looked around the empty waiting room of the vet clinic as if the walls might have ears before she dropped her bombshell. “It was Crystal.”
“Crystal?” I asked.
“Dr. Vance’s old rodeo friend.”
It took me a few seconds to recall that Crystal was also now married to Blake Vance, Reba’s ex-husband.
“Blake’s wife?” I asked just to be certain.
“Yes.”
“Did Crystal confess or something?”
“Didn’t have to,” said Julia. “She left her purse behind. It had her ID in it and everything.”
I pictured the purse and the strewn contents scattered next to the prostrate Reba as she’d lain bleeding on the floor of the exam room. I’d naturally assumed that the purse and the lipstick used to scrawl the vile message on the linoleum had belonged to the victim. It seemed I had been rash in making such an assumption.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would Crystal do such a thing?”
Julia pressed her lips together and inclined her head towards Maxwell, who was soaking up every word. Apparently, the answer to why Crystal would attack Reba was too scandalous to be spoken aloud in the presence of a child.
I was just formulating a follow-up question when Dr. Bagley came into reception and said, “Emma, I was hoping to have a word with you.”
I left Maxwell and the animals under the watchful eye of Julia in the waiting room and followed Dr. Bagley into her tiny office next to the recently ransacked storage room.
“I wanted to ask you something, Emma,” were Dr. Bagley’s first words. So, it wasn’t about Earp or his condition. “I was wondering what exactly you saw yesterday when you discovered Reba,” she continued.
I told Dr. Bagley what I’d witnessed in the exam room, the bloody tracks visible in the parking lot and the ransacked storeroom.
“Hmm,” was all she had to say at the conclusion of my tale.
“Why do you ask?” I said.
“The whole thing isn’t sitting right with me.”
“Dr. Vance getting hit in the back of the head? I didn’t imagine that it would.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Dr. Bagley told me. “Of course, I’m upset that Reba was attacked. It’s just that I can’t help feeling that they’ve arrested the wrong person.”
“You mean Crystal?”
“You knew?”
“Julia told me.”
Dr. Bagley firmed her lips together and nodded as if she didn’t think much of Julia.
“You don’t suspect Julia, do you?” I asked quietly so as not to be overheard by anyone passing by—or possibly putting their ear to—the office door.
“Of attacking Reba? No, I don’t.”
That implied that Dr. Bagley had some sort of bone to pick with her receptionist, but clearly, Julia wasn’t Roberta Bagley’s prime suspect for who’d been knocking Dr. Vance in the back of the noggin with a trophy.
“You don’t think she’s the one who’s—” I never got the rest of my question out, which was meant to be an inquiry into Julia’s possible guilt in connection with the thefts from the clinic’s drug stash.
Dr. Bagley’s phone dinged, and it was as if she temporarily forgot I was even in the room. When she finally transferred her attention from her phone back to me, she said, “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to go make a house call to deal with a horse.”
I was curious what Dr. Bagley thought of Julia, but I was even more interested in why she thought Crystal had been arrested in error.
“What makes you think it wasn’t Crystal?” I asked as Dr. Bagley placed her hand on the doorknob to leave the room.
“It’s way too obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “Why would anyone do something like that and leave their purse complete with ID behind to incriminate themselves.”
Roberta had a point, but I decided she might be overestimating the intelligence of the average violent offender. Stranger things had happened. Perhaps, shortly after scrawling “Die Reba Die” on the linoleum, Crystal had been disturbed by the arrival of another person—that person might even have been me—and she’d panicked, forgetting that by neglecting to gather up her scattered belongings, she was leaving incontrovertible evidence of her guilt behind.
That was a plausible scenario, but, as Dr. Bagley had pointed out, it was also a possibility that someone had stolen Crystal’s purse prior to bludgeoning Reba with the aim of planting it at the scene.
“I really do have to go,” Dr. Bagley said. “Maybe we can discuss this more later. Ask Julia for my cell number.”
“Call me anytime,” I said.
Crystal might be safely behind bars as we spoke, but Dr. Bagley was right: it was too soon to feel confident that whoever had it out for Reba Vance was definitely out of circulation.
“Thank you.”
“There was one more thing I forgot to tell you,” I said to Dr. Bagley’s back.
“What?”
“Someone called 911 before I did.”
Dr. Bagley took this big. She turned all the way around and stared at me.
“What makes you think that?”
“When I called, dispatch told me I should expect to wait twenty to thirty minutes, but both the police and the ambulance arrived in less than fifteen.”
“Maybe they just happened to both be close by.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “One of the responding officers told me they’d come all the way from down by Cedar Grove and that she’d been dispatched before I’d even called it in.”
Dr. Bagley looked far more troubled than I’d have expected by this revelation.
“Do you suppose whoever was ransacking the storage room—” I asked.
Dr. Bagley put her finger to her lips and inclined her head toward the open door as if to tell me untrustworthy ears might be listening.
“I’ll call you later,” I said and let her go.
I went back out to reception and collected Earp’s ointment. Maxwell was reading aloud from an outdated copy of Show Cats. I supposed this was for the benefit of Earp and Hercules, who were sprawled in apparent slumber on the floor at his feet. Or perhaps, Maxwell was attempting to entertain Julia, who sat behind the reception desk with a bemused smile on her face.
According to Show Cats, at the time of printing Teacup Persians and a breed unfortunately christened as the Peterbald were all the rage. Maxwell held up the page he was reading so I could see what a Peterbald looked like. Fortunately for the Peterbald, the cat looked better than it sounded.
“Time to go,” I told Maxwell.
“But I haven’t read the article about ten ways to solve territorial aggression in Abyssinians,” said Maxwell.
Maxwell takes after Georgia in many ways, but perhaps in no way more than a voracious thirst for acquiring knowledge wholly inapplicable to daily life.
“Do you know any Abyssinians exhibiting territorial aggression?” I asked.
Maxwell grudgingly admitted that he did not.
“Well, let’s go then, so Julia can disinfect the waiting room for mites before Earp infects the entire canine population of Amatista.”
“I thought you said that mange isn’t contagious,” Maxwell said, rising reluctantly to his feet and tugging at the leashes of first Earp and then Hercules in an effort to rouse them from their slumber.
“It’s not contagious to humans,” I said. “Not very, anyway.”
“Alright,” said Maxwell. “Nice to see you, Miss Throckmorton. Be sure and read the article about the Abyssinians, just in case. It starts on the page with the corner folded over.”
When we got back to Little Tombstone, I sent Maxwell to range around the trailer court with the animals while I popped into the kitchen of the Bird Cage Café to have a word with Juanita.
The lunch rush was over, and I found Juanita sitting on a high stool at the stainless steel island that served as space for food prep and, at the moment, paperwork.
I waited until Juanita had ceased tapping away at her calculator and recorded the result until I spoke.
“Hello, Emma,” she said. “Did you eat?”
I had eaten if one counted a tuna sandwich and the non-rotten half of a half-rotten apple as a proper meal. Juanita would not, but I lied and said I’d had lunch.
“I hear you went on a date last night,” said Juanita. “Good for you.”
She, unlike Georgia, did not press for details.
“I was wondering something,” I said.