CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Tampa, Florida

Sunday 7:00 a.m.

March 4, 2001

JUDGING FROM THE WAY I felt, Margaret must have been at least as tired, so I let her sleep. It was seven o’clock Sunday morning, but I called Hathaway at home anyway. The last thing I wanted was for him to go to Margaret’s to arrest her and find her gone. Then, I’d have hell to pay. It was going to be only slightly better when I told him myself that she wasn’t at her home before he got there.

I held the cordless phone to my ear as I walked around the kitchen collecting coffee-making materials. I heard the telephone ring several times and then Hathaway’s machine pick up. At least it was his home answering machine and not the office. Still, I was careful with my message.

“Ben, this is Willa Carson. Please call me first thing this morning. I have something important to tell you.” That was urgent enough, I hoped, to keep him from making a fool of himself at Margaret’s and then doing something equally stupid to save face.

After that, I argued with myself for a while over whether to call Larry Davis, going back and forth, with excellent arguments on both sides. A good lawyer can always argue both sides of any issue. Before I decided, George walked into the kitchen, gave me a hug and a morning-breath kiss. I held onto him much too long.

I was lucky to have him and feeling worse about Margaret’s situation by the minute. She’d lost not one husband she loved, but two. Not to mention her child. How far would Margaret go when pushed beyond what a woman should be forced to endure?

Was she capable of murder?

We forget, sometimes, how fragile humans are. Maybe Margaret snapped.

It’s happened before, under far less onerous circumstances.

“Hey,” George said, as he gently pushed me away so he could look into my face. “Let a guy get a cup of Joe before you go mauling him in the morning so he can at least be awake enough to enjoy it, hmm?”

He gave me a kiss on the top of my head and then turned to pour himself some liquid fortification.

“The coffee’s a good idea. I have a lot to tell you and not a lot of time to do it in.”

I poured a cup for me and placed the cordless phone back in its cradle. I moved both of us into the den where we could close the door and talk undisturbed. I told him about my evening’s adventure.

George is used to my nocturnal wanderings around the house and Plant Key, but he doesn’t like it when I leave our island in the wee hours. Before he could get his protective bluster up, I gave him the short version. George is a quick study. It didn’t take him long to grasp the implications of Margaret being in our guest room, both to Margaret and to me. But we’ve been married a long time. He knows better than to try to scold me into changing my mind. Especially over something I’ve already done.

“So, where are we?” he asked, when I’d finished.

“I’m not sure. Margaret said she didn’t kill Ron and I believe her. She said her first husband did it. I still don’t know why or how. I need to find that out.”

“Aren’t you a little confused here? Isn’t that Ben Hathaway’s job? Finding killers?”

When I started to say, “But, George,” he cut me off at the B.

“It’s one thing to rescue people you know and care about, Willa. I’ve accepted that I can’t keep you from doing that. But you don’t know anything about this character except that he’s a killer. You’ve helped Margaret. Hearing the piece of news that we know who killed Ron Wheaton will be enough to get Ben Hathaway not to arrest Margaret until he checks it out, at least. Why not stop while you’re ahead? Think about that while I refill my cup,” he said, as he patted my knee and walked out of the room.

Before George came back for my answer, the telephone rang.

Ben Hathaway returning my call. I could tell he was up and dressed and ready to get to work, even if it was Sunday. He was wary of my tale, but knew me well enough to trust my word. At a minimum, he knew I believed Margaret’s story. That was enough to make him want to investigate it.

Ben Hathaway has arrested the wrong person more than once when I told him not to. The State Attorney was getting a little sore about looking like a fool in public because Hathaway had done the wrong thing. Ben must have been “talked to,” as they say downtown. He was a little more cautious than he’s been in the past.

Ben agreed to meet here with Larry Davis, Margaret, George and me in three hours when I convinced him Margaret needed to sleep and I hadn’t called Larry yet. At least now I knew I was going to do so. That was progress, of a sort.

Larry was home and answered the phone on the first ring. If you despise telephone tag and answering machines, early Sunday morning is a good time to call people in Tampa. Larry wasn’t too keen on my interference with his client last night, but he agreed to come right over to Minaret and discuss it with me. “Then, I’ll decide whether and what we tell Ben Hathaway, Willa. It’s my job to represent Margaret. I’m not sure what it is you think you’re doing.”

A half hour later, I’d showered and changed into clean jeans and a long-sleeved tee-shirt. As an accommodation to the temperature, I’d put on socks with my Topsiders. I was forced to put some concealer on the dark circles under my eyes to keep from looking like a raccoon. Otherwise, I wore no makeup and no jewelry, the same as any other Sunday when I expected to stay home alone.

Larry Davis arrived on time. He and George and I repaired to the den and I told him everything I’d told George. Again, the short version, although he’d want more of the details later.

“So,” Larry summarized at the end of my narrative, “what we need to do is to get Margaret to identify her first husband, to tell us how she knows he killed Ron Wheaton, and to give that information to Hathaway in exchange for his agreement not to further harass Margaret. Do you think he’ll go for that?”

“I think he’ll investigate it. If he confirms Margaret’s story, no one need ever know that he was planning to arrest her today. Then the question is whether she can testify against the killer,” I said.

Both men looked surprised at that. “Why couldn’t she testify?” George was first to ask, which gave Larry a minute to think about it and reach his own conclusion.

Larry said, “Because Margaret was married. She never divorced him. We don’t know whether he was ever declared legally dead. If he wasn’t, the spousal privilege could keep her from testifying against him. On the other hand, she’ll have to disclose whatever Ron Wheaton told her about wanting to die, because he wasn’t really her husband.”

I finished up, “And two marriages may also make Margaret a polygamist, technically. She could be prosecuted for that, although I doubt anyone would press charges, especially since she didn’t intend to marry twice. But if she’s not technically his wife, it may mean that Margaret won’t collect Ron’s life insurance or the rest of his estate. If anyone protests her claim to be Ron’s sole beneficiary, it would be one unholy mess, that’s for sure.”

Larry said, “Trusts and estates are something I know about. It’s highly unlikely that Margaret’s first husband wasn’t declared dead. Given that she believed he had died, surely there was a body, a death certificate and a funeral.”

George seemed perplexed by all of this. “But, if he wasn’t really dead, isn’t all of that null and void?”

“Actually, no,” Larry explained. “Once you’ve been declared dead, in the eyes of the law, you’re dead. To change that, there’s yet another legal procedure to go through.”

“That figures,” George said, with a wry smile. “You can’t even be alive in this country without government intervention.”

Larry laughed. “At least, not if you’ve been dead, first.”

“Just one more thing I need to bring up,” I said, finally deciding that now, if ever, was the time. They looked at me expectantly. “I have a piece of physical evidence to give Hathaway. I think it will help Margaret, but I’m not sure.”

Larry was the first to jump in, “What kind of physical evidence?”

“I found a syringe in the bushes outside the veranda where Ron died. I suspect the syringe is the murder weapon. And that it’ll have the killer’s fingerprints on it. I want to give it to Hathaway.”

As I thought, this piece of news didn’t make George or Larry very happy. Before they had time to jump all over my frame about it, though, Dad showed Ben Hathaway into the room, saying, “I found this guy ringing the doorbell downstairs when I returned from my run. He says you’re expecting him.”

Another hour later, Larry and I had filled Ben in and secured his promise to investigate Margaret’s claims that her first husband had killed Ron Wheaton. But to do that, he needed more information.

By now, it was going on eleven o’clock, so I thought I could awaken Margaret and have her come in to help us with this piece of the puzzle. I went down the hall to the guest room to find her while the others drank even more coffee.

I knocked on the guest room door, calling Margaret’s name several times. When she didn’t answer, I pushed the door open and looked into the room.

Margaret’s bed was empty. The door to the bathroom was closed, so I went over and knocked there several times. Again, no response.

When I opened the bathroom door, it was empty, too.

Margaret had left sometime this morning, but when? Where did she go? And how did she get there?

The four of us discussed what to do about finding Margaret and investigating her claims about the mysterious husband, divided up the job and went our separate ways. Larry fought with me over who got to go to Margaret’s house, but in the end, agreed it was a job I could do best while he went to his office and began preparing to defend Margaret’s arrest, if it came to that.

I gave Hathaway the syringe I’d been keeping in Greta’s glove box. After sputtering at me about chain of custody and obstruction of justice for a relatively short time, he went off to investigate Margaret’s claims. He had some ideas as to where he could look, and access to law enforcement files, he said. George, who was feeling a little left out, although he tried to describe it differently, came with me.

George drove us over to Margaret’s house, which looked empty from the outside. I had him pull up in the driveway and we went to the back door, which had been unlocked the last two times I’d come here. It was unlocked again. George protested at just walking in without ringing the bell, but I was fairly sure Margaret wouldn’t be here anyway, so I wasn’t worried about catching her in flagrante dilecto or anything.

George walked into the house calling Margaret’s name. After we’d made a thorough check of all five small rooms, even he was convinced that Margaret wasn’t here. I’d expected as much.

The reason I arm-wrestled Larry Davis for the right to come here was so that I could look around for evidence about the mysterious first husband, not because I really thought Margaret had gotten up this morning and taken a cab back home.

By now, I knew her agenda was something more complicated than that. There was more to Margaret Wheaton than I had initially suspected.

Hathaway was checking with the cab companies to see who picked Margaret up at Minaret this morning and where they took her. He had the manpower for that. I needed to investigate more cleverly.

After facing down George’s protests, I began a systematic search of the places in Margaret’s house where I thought she might have hidden something related to an earlier marriage and birth of a child that she’d wanted to keep from her husband for thirty years. It was pure assumption on my part that Ron Wheaton hadn’t known about Margaret’s first marriage, but it was based on knowing Ron as I had.

I believed that when they couldn’t have children of their own, Ron would have suggested that they find and attempt to reclaim Margaret’s first child, if he’d known about the child. Ron loved children and it had been a source of great sorrow to him that he and Margaret had never had any. They’d tried to adopt, I think, years ago.

Ron would definitely have taken Margaret’s child, if not when he first met her, certainly in later years. I felt sure of it.

“I don’t know, Willa. It’s not right to snoop through Margaret’s things. And, I have no idea what Ron would have done.” George was getting in his usual mode of trying to do the “right thing,” which I didn’t have a lot of time for.

I let him keep talking, but I continued to search.

I tried under the bed, behind all the pictures, in her lingerie drawer.

What I was looking for would have been overlooked by Hathaway and his men when they searched because they weren’t looking for old documents and pictures.

George kept up a steady stream of objections until I finally turned to him and said, “Just look in plain sight, then. Don’t touch anything. Or wait out in the car. I’m going to finish here, one way or the other.”