I was on my way to Victor Rooney’s place when Wanda Therrieult phoned.
“You saw what I saw,” she said.
“You tell me what you saw.”
“Well, I have to do a full autopsy, but I’d say this Thackeray student, this Lorraine Plummer, is the latest.”
“After Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“That was my thinking, too,” I said. “When will you get to the autopsy?”
“The body’s being taken to the morgue now, but honestly, Barry, I don’t know when I’ll get to her. All those other bodies, we may think we know what happened to them, that they were poisoned by the water, but I have to do the due diligence. Every one of them has to be autopsied.”
“You’re getting out-of-town help,” I said.
“Sure, but you’re going to have to wait. And if I don’t lie down soon, in a proper bed, I’m going to collapse wherever I’m standing.”
I knew how she was feeling. I’d been running on empty for several hours now. I wanted to go home, have something to eat—even a salad—then crawl into bed with Maureen and sleep till Christmas. Maybe, after I’d had a chance to talk to Rooney, I could do that. Even just a few hours of sleep would do me. I could be back at this by six in the morning, if not earlier.
“I hear ya, Wanda,” I said.
“Barry,” she said, “you know me.”
“I do.”
“I’m a woman of science. I believe in science. My life is all about science. It’s about facts and evidence and data. You know what I mean?”
“Yup.”
“There’s nothing mystical about it. But these last few days, I can’t help but wonder, are we being punished for something? Did we do something bad, and God’s taking it out on us?”
“Maybe not God,” I said. “But I get what you’re saying.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” she said.
I dropped the phone onto the seat next to me, and it hadn’t been out of my hand for ten seconds before it rang again. I glanced at the screen, saw the name Finley come up.
“Fuck off,” I said out loud.
It rang ten times before he gave up. But a few seconds later, it started ringing again.
Finley.
Was he going to keep doing this until I answered? I reached for the phone and put it to my ear.
“What is it, Randy?” I said.
His voice was more subdued than I expected it to be. Shaky, too. “Barry, can you come by my house?”
“What’s this about?”
“I think . . . I think there’s been a murder.”
“What? Randy, what’s going on? Who’s been murdered?”
“Jane,” he said. “Jane’s dead.”
“Randy, what happened to her?”
“She’s dead. Lindsay killed her.”
“Lindsay?”
“She works for us. Looks after Jane, takes care of the house. She did it. She killed Jane. She killed our dog, too. Bipsie. Bipsie’s dead. Lindsay killed both of them. I need you to come over. Barry, would you come over? Please, come over. She’s still here. Lindsay’s here. I told her she couldn’t go home yet.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
• • •
Finley was waiting for me out front. He walked up to my car, spoke to me through the open window before I even had my seat belt off.
“I want her charged,” he said. “You need to charge her with murder.”
“Okay, Randy,” I said, getting out. “Let me get up to speed.”
“I was handing out water. Lindsay called me to say that Bipsie was sick. She’d been drinking out of the toilet.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That’s the same water that comes out of the tap,” he pointed out to me.
“I know.”
“So the dog started throwing up and died. And she called to tell me. And I said, ‘How could you let the dog drink out of the toilet when the water’s poisoned?’ and she says, ‘What are you talking about?’ Can you believe that? She didn’t know? How could she not know?”
“Tell me about Jane,” I said as we walked to the house.
“Lindsay poisoned her,” Finley said. He was moving slowly, as though he were pulling a concrete block with each leg.
“How did she do that?”
“Lemonade. She gave her lemonade. There’re a hundred bottles of fresh springwater in the fridge, plus a watercooler. But that stupid bitch thought it was too much trouble to crack open a few bottles. I’ve told her a hundred times, use the bottled stuff for everything. Drinking, cooking. But she made the lemonade—”
“You talking about the frozen stuff? You add four cans of water?”
“That’s right. I always told her, use the bottles. Because my water is better. Even before what happened today, my water is cleaner and better. But she thought it was easier to make it with water from the tap.”
“She didn’t know,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Finley said. “It was murder.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the kitchen, crying her eyes out,” Finley said.
“I meant Jane.”
“Oh.” He swallowed hard. “She’s upstairs, in her room. Since she got sick—not today, but in the last year—I’ve been sleeping in the guest room so I wouldn’t disturb her with my snoring and turning over and all.”
“Sure,” I said. We were at the front door. “Why don’t you wait out here?”
“If Lindsay tries to leave, I’ll stop her.”
“Okay.”
I went into the house. The stairs to the second floor were right there in the foyer, but I went into the kitchen first. Just as Finley had said, Lindsay was sitting, and crying, at the kitchen table, a box of tissues in front of her, a mound of used tissues surrounding it. She looked at me when I came in, her eyes bloodshot.
“Lindsay?” I said. She nodded. I told her who I was and showed her my ID. “What’s your last name?”
“Brookins,” she said, dabbing her eyes.
“I’m going upstairs, and then I’m coming back, and we can talk.”
“I didn’t murder her,” she said. “What he says, that’s not true. I didn’t know.”
Something dark and furry in the corner of the room caught my eye.
“The dog,” I said.
“Bipsie,” she said. “I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.”
I nodded. “I’ll be back.”
I went up the stairs and found Jane’s room without help. All I had to do was follow my nose. The woman was sprawled diagonally across the bed, facedown, her legs up by the pillow. The bedspread was awash in vomit. It looked as though maybe she’d been in the process of trying to crawl out of the bed before she succumbed.
On the bedside table, a tall, narrow glass with half an inch of pink lemonade in the bottom.
I made my way back down to the kitchen. Lindsay’s version of events was not much different from Randy’s.
She had taken Mrs. Finley her lemonade around ten in the morning. Jane had said she was tired and probably going to go back to sleep. Lindsay returned to the kitchen to tidy up and start lunch preparations, then went to the basement to do laundry. It must have been around then, she said, when the fire trucks with their loudspeakers went through the neighborhood. She had heard some indistinct noises outside, but didn’t pay any attention to them.
It wasn’t her habit to listen to the radio or turn on the TV through the day. During her downtime, she read. She showed me a dog-eared, used copy of a John Grisham novel. I looked inside the front cover, where it had been stamped “Naman’s Used Books.”
“I was about to go upstairs and check on Mrs. Finley,” she said, “when Bipsie started to act weird.”
The dog was throwing up. She cleaned up after her once; then the dog was sick again. As Lindsay was wiping up after her a second time, the dog keeled over.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I called Mr. Finley to tell him. He said the water was poisoned. And then I thought, oh no.”
I nodded understandingly. “Okay,” I said.
“He says I murdered her. I didn’t murder her. It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. It’s just, he is always telling me to use his water, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, because one time, his water had some brown flecks or something in it. A bad batch, he said. But ever since then, I don’t use it all the time. When I make Mrs. Finley lemonade, I just use the tap, but I didn’t tell Mr. Finley. If he knew the water was poisoned, he should have told me before he went out.”
It wasn’t in my nature to come to Randy’s defense, but I said, “He probably didn’t know then. And once he did, he probably didn’t think he needed to call home. Because of what he was always telling you.”
She had both hands up to her mouth. “Oh God, I did kill her. I did. But I didn’t mean it.”
I went back outside, found Randy standing under a tree.
Weeping.
I came up on him from behind and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Randy.”
He had one hand on the tree trunk, supporting himself. He struggled to regain his composure, then said, “You saw her?”
“Jane? Yes.”
“She looks so . . . she’d be so humiliated.”
“She’ll be taken care of.”
“You talked to Lindsay?”
“I did.”
“What did she tell you?”
“It’s an accident, Randy. She didn’t know. It’s not murder.”
Finley turned, put his forearm on the tree, and rested his head on it. “I know.” He started twice to say something, then stopped. The third time, he managed. “It’s my fault. Soon as I knew what was happening, I should have called. I just thought—no, I just didn’t think. I was so consumed with . . . with taking full advantage of what was going on. That was all I could see.”
I said nothing.
“It was a tragedy, I knew that. It’s not like I didn’t care. I did care. But I saw an opportunity, and I took it.” He turned his face around enough to see me. “That’s what I do.”
“I know. It’s in your DNA.”
“I got so focused on that, I never thought about . . . and the thing is, she’s the whole reason I’ve been doing it.”
I took a step toward him. “What do you mean?”
A self-effacing smile came over his face. “You know what an asshole I am, right, Barry?”
Who was it who said “never bullshit a bullshitter”?
“Sure.”
“I was trying to show I wasn’t. Maybe not to you. I could never convince you. But after all the dumbass things I’ve done over the years, especially that stuff with the hooker a few years ago, I wanted to prove to Jane there was more to me than that. I was going to be mayor again, I told her. I was going to do some good. Some real good. I even had an idea to get some jobs here. I was working a deal with Frank Mancini. You know Frank?”
“I’m aware of him.”
“I mean, yeah, there was something in it for me, too, but he’s going to build this plant on the site of the drive-in. Jobs. Maybe not as many as that private jail that was going to move in here at one point, but some. I wanted to get this town back on its feet. I wanted to show Jane. I wanted her to be proud of me again. I wanted to pay her back for all the shame I brought down on her.”
I nodded.
“You believe any of this?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe.”
He stopped using the tree to support himself and looked me in the eye. “You think I did it. That I somehow did this thing to the water, so I could rush in and be the white knight.”
“Maybe,” I said again.
“If I was going to kill hundreds of people to save my political career, you don’t think I would have made sure my wife wasn’t one of the casualties?”
I searched those eyes. I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was possible he was telling me the truth.
It was also possible Jane was already deathly ill, her days numbered, and in Finley’s mind, letting her go a little early was justifiable to advance his political objectives.
But for the love of God, he was only running for mayor of Promise Falls. This wasn’t the goddamn presidency. How could someone want something that insignificant that badly?
On top of that, Jane’s death really did come down to Lindsay going against her employer’s wishes, and not being aware of what was happening in the town.
No, Randall Finley did not intend for his wife to die.
I held out a hand. He looked down at it, puzzled, then slowly took it in his and gripped it.
“I believe you,” I said.