He returned with a glass of red in one hand and a Jack Daniels in the other. He only drank Jack when he needed to unwind from something particularly difficult, so I knew which way the conversation was going to go.
He set the wine on the coffee table, threw some popcorn for the dog, and took a long haul from his glass before sitting down next to me.
“Laura was my fiancée,” he said.
I looked to the glass of wine but thought better of it.
He went on. “She died four years ago.”
“Paul, I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I should have told you. It’s hard for me to talk about.”
“I understand,” I said, taking his free hand. “We don’t have to do this.”
“No,” he said, “I want to.” He took another sip but remained silent.
“How did she die?” I asked, gently.
“She killed herself.” I went for the wine. “She’d tried to before. A couple of times. But someone always found her.”
“Paul, I …”
“She wasn’t a happy person. Laura. She was good at disguising it. Those who didn’t know her well thought she was happy enough, but.” he shook his head. “She’d been on medication her whole life. The first time she attempted suicide she was only twelve. Can you believe that?”
I remained silent, soaking it all in, waiting for him to continue. He didn’t.
“How long had you been together?” I asked.
“Seven years.” My heart fell into my stomach. “She’d only tried it once while we were dating. I found her in the bathtub with her wrists cut.”
“Paul, we really don’t need to talk about this if you—”
He grabbed my hand and held on tight.
“They never found her body,” he said. “She finally managed to do it without anyone finding her and stopping it.”
I flashed back to my conversation with Jeffers about the torso in the river and his words, “Happens more often than you’d think.”
“How do you know she—”
“There was a note.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “What that must have been like for you. What it must still be like.”
“What’s important is that she’s finally at peace. And so is her family.” He ran his hand through my hair and cradled my face. “And so am I.” He drained his glass and set it down on the table. “But poor Brimstone … I don’t think he’ll ever recover. Maine Coons are fiercely loyal to their humans and he was devoted to Laura. When she died, it’s like a switch was flipped. He turned from this lovable, playful, kittenlike cat to … well, the cat he is now. I think he feels like she abandoned him. And she did, I guess. She did all of us.”
“So you won’t abandon him.”
“Nope. Not for anything.”
***
I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of my phone vibrating. Paul’s arms were around me and his breath was warm on my neck. I untangled myself from his embrace as stealthily as possible, wrapped myself in a blanket, and took the phone into the hall.
“I think I may have something.” Jeffers said before I’d even had a chance to say “hello.”
“It better be life-threatening.”
“What? That’s not very nice.”
“It’s four in the morning!”
“Is it?”
I could hear the baby screaming in the background. The perfect child had finally discovered his lungs, it seemed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep and decided to get some work done. I had no idea how late it was. Or early, I guess. Anyway, now that I have you—”
“Can this really not wait?”
“No. And besides, you’re not going to be able to go back to sleep now. You’re going to be thinking about why I called. Forming all kinds of theories in your head. Driving yourself crazy with assumptions and wishing you had—”
“All right!” I said and stumbled downstairs to put the kettle on. “Is this about the staff? Did you look through your notes?”
“I did, but there’s nothing.”
“Hmmm.” I wasn’t entirely surprised, but I wasn’t ready to write it off yet. I said as much to Jeffers.
“Fine. But I’m not calling about that.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, so, Leduc and Macie were classmates at the University of Alberta. I managed to track down one of their teachers. Brian Dayleward. Still teaching if you can believe it! Seventy-five years old!”
“Go on,” I said through a yawn.
“Dayleward said the two of them were best friends until their final year. Then they barely spoke to one another. He couldn’t even get them to work together in class.”
“Does the teacher know what happened?”
“Thinks it had something to do with an accident that occurred during the summer. Leduc’s sister died. Said Vince was pretty despondent for much of the last year. Shut everyone out.”
“But Al in particular?”
“That’s what he said.”
The kettle started to whistle.
“How did she die?” I asked, setting my tea to steep.
“Drugs, evidently. I’ve got a call in to a buddy on the Edmonton force. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn a little bit more about the case. All I could find were a couple of old news reports that said very little. Just that a girl died at a house party of an apparent drug overdose.”
“Any suspicion of foul play or anything?”
“Nope. Just kids messing around and being stupid.”
“They were hardly kids. They must have been in their early twenties,” I said.
“Girl was eighteen.”
“Still old enough to know better.”
“Yep.”
“All right,” I said, taking my tea into the living room and curling up on the sofa, “so we know Vince’s sister died from an overdose at a party. We don’t know if Al Macie was at the party or was any way involved.”
“I think it’s safe to assume he was. On both counts. Otherwise, why would Leduc have ended the friendship?”
“Grief.”
“But if they were best friends, wouldn’t it make sense that he would turn to him for comfort?”
“There are no rules with grief, Jeffers. Everyone handles it in their own unique way,” I said, thinking of my own experience. Of Paul’s. Of Glynn Radley’s and Armin Penner’s. Grief comes in all shapes and sizes and doesn’t discriminate. Like a snowflake, it’s never the same.
“No. If Leduc has been obsessed with Macie all these years, it’s got to stem from whatever happened that night. Hopefully, I’ll hear from my buddy soon.”
“Wait a minute. Glynn said Al and Vince had never been friends. Remember?”
There was an audible exhale from Jeffers. “So you think Al deliberately kept the incident and the truth about his relationship with Vince a secret?”
“Maybe.”
“Why? It doesn’t make any sense. We need to talk to Glynn.”
“What about Vince?”
“Him too. He just got a whole lot more interesting.”
A crash jolted me awake. For the second time in only a few hours my sleep was disturbed and I cursed the day ahead as I knew it was going to be a tough one to get through. I’d fallen asleep on the couch. Paul appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Watch where you step.” Paul said. He was bent over, picking up pieces of broken glass from the kitchen floor. “I’m so sorry.” He held out the handle of what was once a juice pitcher. “It just slipped.”
“That’s okay. It was cheap. And I didn’t really like it.”
Orange juice pooled around his feet. Moustache had his nose pressed up against the window of the back door, looking in from outside and brimming with curiosity about what had fallen on the floor. And whether he could eat it.
“You all right to clean this up?” I asked. “I’ll run out and get us some more juice.”
Paul nodded, then called after me, “And something to put it in.”
While the Avondale boasted a one-stop shopping experience, its selection of pitchers was lacking. They were plastic, which in light of the current situation, seemed like a good thing. Of the two options I had, one was yellow with sunflowers and the other was green with frogs. As I played a mental game of eeny meeny miny moe, Leland Penner entered the store with a friend. I grabbed the jug closest to me, ducked my head, and moved quickly toward the cash.
“You’re that woman. From the school. You were talking to my sister,” he said, cutting me off at the pass.
“I’m sorry. I think you have me—”
“And you were at the house, too. With that detective.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but words failed me. I held on tightly to the frogs while my insides turned to jelly in the presence of this fifteen-year-old boy.
“You police?” he asked.
“I work with Detective Jeffers occasionally,” I stammered.
“You guys found who killed that teacher?”
“I’m afraid I can’t discuss—”
He snickered. Cockiness oozed out of every pore and made me wonder just what he thought he’d gotten away with.
“Got what he deserved, if you ask me,” he said, knocking my shoulder as he brushed by me. The frogs went tumbling to the floor.
“Why would you say that?” I asked.
He turned back to face me. “Karma’s a bitch. Isn’t that what they say?”
“I don’t see what karma has to do with anything in this case.”
“Don’t you? I bet my mother would beg to differ.”
“What does that mean?” Jeffers asked sleepily.
“I have no idea!”
“Well, when you figure it out, let me know. I’m going back to bed.”
“Oh, no you don’t! Not after last night. You’re going to talk to me whether you like it or not.”
I heard the rustling of blankets and the odd grunt before Jeffers’ begrudging, “Fine.”
“All this time, Jeffers, all this time we’ve been thinking Armin Penner killed Macie because of his involvement with Ellie—”
“Yes, and now we’re thinking Leduc killed Macie because he was somehow responsible for the death of his sister.”
“Let me finish,” I said, overlapping. “Wait a minute. What did you just say?”
“I said, the focus has shifted to Leduc because—”
“Oh my god!”
“What?”
“Do you still have Adele Penner’s hospital records?”
“Yeah.”
“I need to see them. I’m coming over. But first I have a stop to make.”