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The next morning, I ate my jam and toast with one hand while I made a list of people to interview with the other. By the time I was done scribbling, there were six names on the back of the envelope which held the unpaid electric bill for Little Tombstone:
Reba Vance
Crystal Vance
Blake Vance?
Jimmy Throckmorton?
Dr. Bagley (again, but only about Jimmy)
The real Rex Popov (find him first)
It was a long list, and I felt exhausted just looking at it. I stared at the list for a minute while I finished chewing my last bite of toast and jam, then added one more item to the list: pay the electric bill.
Duke Dundee ending up dead down a mine shaft had me jittery. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that either Blake or Jimmy had been the reason Duke was no longer with us, but I couldn’t help wondering. Hopefully, I could find out everything I needed to know without confronting either of the men in the flesh.
I decided to start where I should have started in the first place: a face-to-face interview with the initial victim.
I leashed up Earp, wrestled Hercules into her harness, and headed out on foot in the direction of the old Catholic chapel on the edge of town.
If Katie-the-mail-carrier’s intel was accurate—which it always had been up until this point—the little adobe house next to the even tinier house where Father Orejo had set up housekeeping early that spring was where I’d find Reba.
It was one of those mid-summer days where it starts getting hot long before you expect it to, and even though it was barely past nine, I was sweaty by the time I was standing in front of the gap where the gate in the fallen-down weathered picket fence that surrounded Reba’s house doubtless used to be before Janey ran it over.
I was in the act of coaxing Hercules—who takes sudden and irrational aversions to things at random—through the nonexistent gate when the front door opened, and Reba came out.
“We thought we’d come by and see how you were doing,” I said as I gestured at the animals.
“I was just going out for a little walk to build up my strength,” said Reba, “but that can wait. Won’t you come in?”
“Earp’s been treated for several days now,” I said. “Does that mean he’s no longer contagious?”
Reba reassured me that the animals were welcome within, and I herded them inside.
“How are you feeling?” I asked when I’d seated myself on Reba’s couch, Earp had found a spot under the coffee table, and Hercules was rooting around the base of a tower of cardboard boxes stacked near the front door. What I could see of the place was sparsely furnished, and most of Reba’s belongings still seemed to be in boxes.
“I’m feeling pretty good, considering,” said Reba as she reached under the coffee table to pat Earp’s head, then walked over to the preoccupied piglet and scratched between Hercules’ shoulder blades. Clearly, Reba had chosen the correct calling.
“Have you gone back to work yet?” I asked.
“Tomorrow,” said Reba. “I’ll just be doing half days for a while. I’m still getting headaches from time to time, but the doctor says there’s probably no permanent damage.”
She made no mention of Duke or going in to cover for the grieving Dr. Bagley. Had Julia not called her as promised? Was Reba unaware that Dr. Bagley’s son was dead? I decided to let that matter rest until I’d found out what else I wanted to know.
There was no graceful way to ask what I wanted most to know, so I didn’t try. “You really have no idea who attacked you?” I asked.
“Not a clue,” said Reba. “I know everyone is convinced it was Crystal, but I don’t see how that can be true.”
“What makes you so sure?” I asked.
“It just can’t be. Crystal and I have been best friends since high school. She’s the last person who’d ever hurt me.”
Reba might be convinced by her years of friendship, but there was another more concrete reason I doubted Crystal’s guilt. There had been something bothering me ever since the day of the attack when I’d reached up and tried to take down one of the remaining trophies that lined the cabinet top while I waited for the ambulance to arrive.
“How tall is Crystal?” I asked.
“About your height,” said Reba.
“To the best of your knowledge, was the trophy used to hit you in the back of the head with the rest of the trophies displayed on the top of the cabinet in the exam room?”
“Yes.”
“Crystal is too short to have gotten one of those trophies down,” I said, “unless she climbed up on the counter to do it or dragged in something to stand on ahead of time. I tried myself, and I couldn’t reach them.”
The purse and its scattered contents left behind hardly suggested the malice aforethought involved in having to steal the trophy beforehand, then lie in wait with it.
“That hadn’t occurred to me,” said Reba, “but now that you mention it, it’s true. I put those trophies up there myself, but I’m much taller than Crystal.”
“You’re sure that Crystal didn’t have anything against you?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I know people wonder about her marrying my ex-husband, but there’s nothing to that. Blake and I broke up amicably, and it was years after when Blake and Crystal got together. In fact, Crystal asked for my blessing before she made a move on Blake.”
“She made a move?”
“Yes.”
“And you and Blake are still friends?”
“Yes.”
“If it wasn’t Crystal, then, who had it in for you?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Reba. “Whoever it is, though, must hate us both.”
That seemed a logical conclusion to reach. Whoever had hit Reba on the back of the head had likely hoped to kill her and frame Crystal for the murder.
“Are you sure there isn’t someone who holds a grudge against both you and Crystal?” I asked.
“I can’t think of anyone.”
“What about Blake? Who might have a grudge against him?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be an effective way to get back at someone: to take the two most important women in his life away from him?”
Something I couldn’t identify flitted across Reba’s face as if there was something she wasn’t telling me, but she soon replaced that expression with a smile.
“I can’t think of anyone,” she said.
“I hate to ask this question, but someone suggested that you’d been seeing a man who has a criminal record. Were you?”
“Jimmy?” Reba said. “Jimmy Throckmorton and I sort of ran in the same circles for years, but we’d drifted apart. We only went out a couple of times since I’ve been back.”
“Why did Jimmy go to prison?”
“He has a few problems,” said Reba, “but he’s never gotten in trouble with the law for anything of a violent nature.”
“What do you mean by problems?” I asked. Reba shrugged. She clearly didn’t want to elaborate, so I continued, “You and Jimmy went out a couple of times?”
“We did,” said Reba, “but we decided not to see each other anymore.”
“It was a mutual decision?”
There was a long pause before Reba said yes, and when she did, I didn’t really believe her.
“Are you sure that Jimmy wasn’t still interested?” I asked. “How did he react to being turned down?”
“I didn’t actually turn him down,” said Reba. “I just texted him and told him I needed some time to get my head together. I know he’s supposed to be a catch. His radio show is super popular, even if he—”
“Even if he what?”
“He’s very good-looking,” Reba said, which didn’t seem to be a completion of her previous sentence at all.
“How did Jimmy react to you turning him down?”
“He wanted to see me.”
“And?”
“I said no.”
“Did he take no for an answer?”
“I’m not sure,” said Reba. “I blocked his number.”
“Why did you feel the need to do that?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like you believed Jimmy would take no for an answer.”
“I didn’t really give him a chance to keep pestering me,” said Reba.
She hadn’t, but something about Jimmy must have tipped Reba off that he wasn’t likely to stop calling once Reba had asked for space. It was also highly probable that Jimmy hadn’t taken Reba's rejection well, although it was an enormous leap to imagine that Jimmy had been so angry about being turned down that he’d attacked Reba at her workplace and framed Crystal for it.
I decided to let the Jimmy line of questioning go.