To her mulish doubt, I said, “I think… No, I can’t even go that strong about whether or not the bad memories exchange was Josepha talking to Glenn in the hallway. But I am sure she thought he had a secret. We have to talk to him, Clara.”
Slowly, she shook her head.
“We do. And this time we have to press him. No more Ms. Nice Investigators. We have to get him to tell us why he came back, what he’s hiding. What else the sheriff’s department knows. All of it.”
“Okay. But I was shaking my head because Teague’s coming toward us and we have to stop talking about this.”
* * * *
“What have you two been doing today?” Teague asked with good-cop friendliness, which still vibrated with cop-ness.
“Clara’s been working for her clients. As for me—”
Clara talked over me. “The knife that stabbed Josepha came from the Haines Tavern. Can you believe it?”
“How did you hear that?”
“Oh, we’ve known—”
I returned the favor by talking over Clara. “A reliable source, but not, perhaps, as reliable a source as you have.”
“What do you mean, Sheila?”
That was Clara asking. Because Teague knew what I meant.
Watching him, I answered her. “He wasn’t surprised to hear Josepha was stabbed with a Haines Tavern steak knife because he already knew that. He was surprised that we knew. Which means he had the information from a law enforcement source. A source he’s quite sure would never share it with us. And that’s why he’s surprised we know. He’s also not happy we know, whether for himself or on behalf of his official source.”
Clara looked at him. “Is that true? That’s like … like you’re working against us, not with us. Well, not exactly with us, because you won’t. Which is another thing. But I’m not holding that against you. But—”
“Thank you. What we should be talking about is how you two know something law enforcement is holding back to further their investigation.”
That dry response lit tinder in Clara.
She propped her fists on her hips. “I’ve been sticking up for you. When Sheila said we should keep our distance—”
Teague shifted his gaze to me and hiked one eyebrow.
“—I said you were a nice man. I thought she was being paranoid, but now you act like this?”
I closed my eyes. Not long enough. When I opened them, his brow had rejoined the other at their normal height, but they rested above an assessing stare.
“Keep your distance? Paranoid?” he asked me.
“Clara’s point was that I wasn’t paranoid.” A glint in his eyes acknowledged I’d scored a point. “Despite that, I will tell you that our knowing about the knife is not through a law enforcement leak.”
“And you won’t tell anyone about it.”
Clara and I looked at each other. “We won’t tell anyone about it from now on.”
That covered her spilling the beans to Wesley. Of course, we couldn’t stop other people from telling us, as Rich had.
“How about going for some dinner to seal the deal — my treat. Want to go to The Tavern?” Teague asked.
“Sorry. We can’t. We have somewhere else to be.”
I held Clara’s gaze. She swallowed. “Uh-huh. Right now.”
We waited until Teague was out of sight after an easygoing acceptance of our decision before striking out across the town square in the direction of the Amber House B&B.
* * * *
“Glenn, you said you have nothing to hide.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t believe you. Everyone Josepha approached Saturday night had something to hide. And she approached you. What are you hiding?”
He said nothing.
“Okay, then I’ll hypothesize that it has to do with Heidi Holmes’ death and whether or not that was an accident.”
Kirstin gasped wordlessly. Clara protested with “Sheila.”
I didn’t pause. “But what I don’t get is why that’s worth hiding. You’d been gone — what? two, three months when she fell on that rainy night and died. You weren’t here. Were you?”
“No. God, no.”
“Then why come back? Why look up articles from the time? Why—?”
“Guilt,” Kirstin said. “Misplaced, unwarranted, unresolved guilt. You want to know why we came to this accursed reunion? Because all these years later, he was still caught by a dead girl. Because she was dead. He needed to be free of wondering. Tell them.”
He said nothing.
“Tell them, Glenn. Tell them how you broke it off with her, thinking she was seeing someone else, but blamed yourself that maybe that was an excuse you made up because you wanted to be free of her to go on to your new college life. Tell them how you’ve tortured yourself she might have committed suicide because you left her pregnant and deserted her. Tell them that I hounded you into coming to this reunion to finally — finally — have resolution over Heidi Holmes. You are not being disloyal to me. You are not—”
“Stop.”
No one moved as his sharp word echoed into silence.
Looking only at the table, he spoke slowly.
“When we broke up…” He rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. “When I broke it off, she’d been pushing for more. Getting engaged, married even. I said I was going to college. She said she’d move with me, we’d get an apartment, I could still go to school. I panicked. Felt like I’d be trapped. I broke it off right then. Wouldn’t answer her, none of the ways she tried reached out. Slipped out of classes early, took roundabout routes to avoid her. She stopped trying to contact me before the end of the school year and I was so relieved, I never wondered…”
He left a long enough pause that I said, “Not mature, but not unheard of for teenagers.”
“Yeah. But when you say not mature… It wasn’t until years after she died, in fact, after we’d married and Kirstin mentioned a friend who became pregnant by a long-time boyfriend who ghosted her after she told him, that it finally hit me that Heidi could have been… Could have been pregnant with my baby and didn’t know how to tell me, what to do.
“If she was and with the way I cut her off, then left, could she have been so desperate a few months later that she’d committed suicide?”
“But she didn’t kill herself, Glenn,” Clara protested. “The official reports—”
“They’ve been known to get things wrong.”
I added, “There also wasn’t anything about her being pregnant.”
“No, no there wasn’t.”
“That’s not enough for you?” Clara asked.
He rubbed his neck again. “I don’t know. I read those articles. Everything you said was right there in black and white. But … I don’t know.”
I jerked my head side to side. “No. That isn’t what Josepha needled you about. It doesn’t fit. There’s something else. That might be why you came, that might be what matters to you and to Kirstin, but it’s not what Josepha was after you about.”
He shrugged.
The gesture lit my fuse.
“We are trying to figure out this murder. If you really didn’t commit it, you are hindering our finding out who did by keeping secrets. And not telling us makes it more believable that it was something worth killing Josepha over.”
“It isn’t.”
We all waited. We all watched him.
He shot a look at Kirstin. She looked back at him steadily.
“Fine. Here’s the deep, dark secret Josepha thought she had on me. I didn’t graduate from high school,” he said.
“Of course, you did,” Clara said. “You were valedictorian.”
“Yes. But I didn’t graduate.”
“I saw you walk across the stage and get your diploma.”
“Yes, that, too. Though what you saw me receive from Principal Ingram was a diploma placeholder. Officially, I did not complete the state requirements to graduate.”
“How is that possible?”
“I took a few college courses my junior and senior years. I filled in high school classes where I could. By the end of senior year, I’d missed one requirement. I was going to make it up over the summer, but then my family moved.”
“What did you miss?”
“Half a credit of PE.”
“Gym? You didn’t graduate over a gym class?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“But then how did you get into college?”
“I’d been accepted early. Based on my academics, not PE,” he added dryly. “Apparently they never went back and checked my transcript. My parents were so terrified I’d lose my scholarship they made me swear not to tell anyone. It’s still a taboo subject in the family. Though I did tell my PhD advisor. She said she didn’t care that I hadn’t sweated enough in high school, she’d make me sweat plenty. And she did.”
He took Kirstin’s hand.
“As it turns out, I came to appreciate fitness and health when we met, then married, and started having kids. It became vital to me to extend my time on earth with all of them as much as I can.”
I saw Clara melting at the sentiment.
I stuck with practicalities. “You mentioned your transcript. Does it show you didn’t graduate?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never checked.”
“Would this affect your other degrees? Could they take them away?”
“I doubt it. I know of students who started community college without a diploma or a GED and went on to a bachelor’s degree or more. Nobody raised a stink about that. But try to convince my parents of that. They still live in dread it will come out.”
So much so that they barely mentioned him in their updates — to people here in North Bend County. Doing everything they could to keep a spotlight off him that might reveal this.
Kirstin said, “The only instances I’ve ever heard of a diploma being revoked involved cheating, plagiarism, or something else that tarnished the integrity of the school. Glenn has only reflected well on his alma maters, including North Bend County High School.”
He tightened his hold on her hand and she squeezed back.
“You knew all along?” I asked her.
“From our third date.”
“Some pickup line, huh?” He almost grinned. It faded quickly.
“Kirstin, your family, your advisor, who else knows?”
He shook his head. “I honestly rarely think about it. If I did, especially to the extent of being paranoid about it, would I have risked coming to the reunion?”
“Possibly not.” I didn’t want him to dismiss this. “But Josepha found out and that points to someone else here knowing.”
Would it be a motive? Not the way he told it now — but how accurate was that — and what about to spare his parents the realization of their twenty-year nightmare?
“She didn’t say she knew,” he objected.
“She wouldn’t have. Not overtly. That wasn’t how she operated. But the comments she made to you… She knew. Still, it comes back to how she found out.”
“School records?” Kirstin asked. “Would she have had access to those?”
“Not that we know of. And I’d think she’d have to know about it first to go searching. Scrolling through decades and decades of school records on the off chance of finding something like that? I don’t think so.”
“Mr. Ingram knew,” Glenn said.
“The principal,” Clara filled in for me. “But he moved to Florida right after he retired and he died at least five years ago. If Josepha found out from him — not that I could see him sharing something like that—”
Glenn’s head shake confirmed her opinion.
“—she would have had to hold onto it on the chance Glenn came back someday and she’d have the opportunity to use it against him.”
That fit my take on Josepha Viedux, but I’d save that observation for when Clara and I were alone.
“If she thought I’d crumple at the knees, she’d’ve been disappointed,” he said with satisfaction.
“That might have made her more dangerous,” I said. “But we still have the question of how she could have found out.”
Clara jerked upright. “Mr. Ingram’s widow lives here. After he died, she moved back to be near their children. Maybe Josepha knew her.”
“Or cleaned for her?” I asked.
She pointed at me. “Or cleaned for her. Exactly. Although that’s if Mr. Ingram had papers that included Glenn missing half a credit in PE, moved those papers to Florida, his widow kept his papers, and moved them back up here…”
“Not likely,” Glenn said.
“All we can do is ask, starting with if Josepha’s company cleans for her,” I said.