CHAPTER 13

“I can’t believe it,” Julia said. “Not in my wildest dreams did I think Anika would cheat on her husband. She and Charlie seem so happy together.”

“She can’t be the only faithful one out of the two couples,” I said, shaking my head. “She knew Wayne was cheating on Brigit, and she had to have known that Charlie was cheating on her. After all, if Cassie knew, then Anika knew. She lived with him.”

“So Anika cheated on Charlie to get back at him for having an affair with Brigit?”

“Or the other way around. It could be that she cheated first and Charlie had an affair to get back at her.”

Julia gave me her sour-lemon expression. “But with Wayne Gundersen?”

“In matters of revenge, any fool will do.”

“You don’t have proof.”

“No, but I hope to get it. And if I’m right, Wayne isn’t the only suspect in Brigit’s murder. Anika had a motive to kill her.”

Julia began to clear our cups from the table, and I slipped back into my coat. I had an early dinner date with Gilroy and didn’t want to be late.

“The last time I saw Charlie and Anika together,” she said, “they looked so in love. Like they were starting fresh.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” And so can hotel reservations, I thought. “Julia, remember Wayne supposedly planned to take Brigit away for a long Valentine’s weekend in Colorado Springs? That was all smoke and mirrors. He was really planning to take Anika—and Charlie knew it.”

“He’d willingly let her go?”

“If that meant he could spend the weekend with Brigit, why not? Though why he’d give Charlie the name of his and Anika’s getaway hotel is beyond me. Unless he thought it was funny in a sick kind of way. He knew he’d be with Brigit while Wayne was with his wife at their special hotel.”

“All this cheating! It’s too much.”

“It’s a spider’s web, Julia.” With a jolt, it occurred to me that I’d overlooked a glaring complication. How, if Anika was Wayne’s lover, was she planning to go to the Springs with him? She and Charlie were going to the dance together, weren’t they? Anika couldn’t be in two places at once.

“Well, have a lovely dinner with the chief,” Julia said, heading into her living room. “How long has it been since you two had a quiet dinner in a restaurant?”

“A few weeks.”

“Oh, dear. The life of a policeman.”

I paused at her front door. “Do you know if Anika planned to be at the Valentine’s Day dance? I’m talking about before Brigit died.”

“She didn’t say, but I would think so. She knew Charlie was putting in a lot of work making the decorations. I assumed they were going together.”

“Then how could she have traveled with Wayne to the Springs?”

Julia threw back her head. “Of course! She couldn’t go with Wayne and Charlie.”

I was tempted to bang my head on Julia’s door out of sheer frustration. Trying to solve this case was like trying to find my way out of a hedge maze. I would optimistically turn a corner only to run straight into another part of the hedge. “Every time I think I’ve figured something out, I hit an obvious obstacle. Something I should have seen a long time ago. Unless Charlie and Wayne are into wife swapping, Anika was going to the dance with Charlie and Brigit was going to the Springs with Wayne this Friday. And if they were into wife swapping”—I flung my hands in the air—“why would either of them murder Brigit?”

“Could there be another murderer? One we haven’t considered?”

“No,” I said with unjustified conviction. “It’s one of the three.”

“So you’ve let Royce off the hook.”

“Don’t gloat, Julia, it’s not becoming.”

She hurried me out her door and onto her porch. “Go. You’ll be late and have to wait another month to have dinner with Chief Gilroy.”

I trotted down her steps and up my own, gave myself the once-over in the mirror, and headed out my back door to the garage. My jeans and sweater would do just fine. Like every other restaurant in town, Wyatt’s was a casual place, and neither Gilroy nor I were into dressing up.

Driving down Finch Hill Road, I encountered another obstacle in my search to find Brigit’s murderer. If the cheating between the two couples was consensual, a disgusting wife-swapping affair, why did Brigit plaster Main Street with flyers? Wasn’t that breaking the rules? If people found out about the couples’ affairs, Wayne’s real estate business would take a dive.

Charlie’s line of work insulated him from public opinion. The lawn-care company he owned didn’t bear his name, and I couldn’t imagine the Board of Trustees severing business ties with him. Juniper Lawn Care had probably signed a years-long contract with the town. Besides, Charlie didn’t service properties himself, he sent others to do the work.

I pulled into a parking space across the street from Wyatt’s, checked my watch, and headed across the street, my thoughts still tumbling like rocks rolling this way and that down a hill. What if wife swapping wasn’t part of the deal? What if Wayne didn’t know about Brigit and Charlie? And what if Charlie had wanted to break off his affair with Brigit? And Brigit, ever dramatic, ever vengeful, had threatened to tell Wayne about the affair?

Worse, what if Brigit had threatened to tell Anika? I’d been a fool not to consider it.

As I pulled open Wyatt’s front door, Charlie leapt to the top of my suspect list.

Gilroy was waiting for me just inside the door. We spotted a small corner table in the already-busy restaurant and decided to snag it before anyone else could. “From now on, early dinner means before five,” I said, following him as he weaved his way around the tables.

Wyatt’s wasn’t the sort of place where you made fashionably late dinner reservations. It was almost unthinkable to order a meal after six or six thirty, and I liked it like that. As Gilroy held my chair for me, my mind traveled back to an eight o’clock working dinner date in Boston my last year there. The managing editor had asked several senior editors to join him at Constantino’s, a trendy Italian restaurant, to discuss the upcoming book calendar. Madness, I thought. Stuffing yourself until nine o’clock at night. I wasn’t even sure I’d eat a cream puff that late.

Gilroy seemed in a talkative mood, so after we ordered, I asked him how his chat with Anika had gone. He turned the question back on me.

“She says she went to your house yesterday to tell you that Brigit was afraid of Wayne.”

“I’m glad she mentioned that. I forgot to tell you. It’s weird she’d show up on my doorstep, and after I’d just talked to her at Town Hall.”

“What was your impression of her?”

Lowering my voice, I said, “I think more than anything, she was covering for herself, though I’m not sure why. Two days before the murder, Brigit tells Anika that Wayne is becoming violent, and Anika brushes it off? Not likely.”

“A funny thing to do with a friend.”

“James, I’m not sure Brigit had any friends. She and Wayne ate dinner several times a month with Charlie and Anika, and as intimate as that sounds, I think their dates were nothing more than habit. Maybe the Gundersens liked eating out but couldn’t stand to be alone with each other. I’ve seen no evidence of genuine warmth between the two couples, present or past. Charlie and Anika were unmoved by Brigit’s death. Downright cold. I talked to Charlie soon after he found out about it, and the biggest reaction I got from him is when I told him that Julia and I had just talked to Anika in her office. That got a rise out of him. Brigit’s murder didn’t.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“He was worried about what she’d told me. They’re both lying. The question is, are they lying about cheating or about murder?” I quickly filled him in on my latest suspicions, unfettered by hard facts though they were, regarding Charlie, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere.

Seeing the waiter approach with our food—steak and potatoes au gratin for Gilroy, Wyatt’s amazing chicken scallopini and broccoli spears for me—we sat in silence until he left, promising to return with our missing bread rolls. Gilroy and I made our cursory comments about how good it all looked, and as I dug into my chicken, I realized that he had two cases on his mind, one involving murder and the other involving criminal bookkeeping at Town Hall. “Did you talk to Anika about the Town Hall books?”

He grimaced. “I asked her about the unusual charges on the books, starting with the plumbing charge Mrs. Gundersen brought to my attention.”

“How did she react? Did you make her sweat the sweat of the guilty?”

“I made her laugh.”

My fork froze midway to my mouth.

“She explained the charge, Rachel. I won’t go into the details, but there was nothing wrong with it. She called in one of the trustees to corroborate her explanation and said she’d have the mayor contact me to confirm.”

“But Brigit—”

“And there was nothing wrong with any other charge I could see. Mrs. Mays showed me the books and told me they were open at any time if I wanted to check. I don’t know what game Mrs. Gundersen was playing, but it was a game, and she had me fooled. If I had to guess, she was trying to cause trouble for Mrs. Mays. Without me saying a word, she guessed it was Mrs. Gundersen who told me there was trouble with the bookkeeping.”

I laid down my fork. “Wayne might have told her that Brigit made the accusation.”

“Making his temper tantrum at the station yesterday even more of a sham. Eat your chicken. I have to leave soon.”

“You see what I mean? None of them are friends. Not even Charlie and Brigit. You’d think the man would have a speck of affection for the woman he was having an affair with, but no.”

“Rachel, you don’t know what Mr. Mays really felt. He didn’t do anything to hurt her, right? He didn’t set her up like she did Mrs. Mays with this bookkeeping thing. In Fort Collins I had to tell a man his wife was killed in a boating accident on Horsetooth Reservoir, and when I did, he acted as if I’d told him she’d be late for lunch. If I hadn’t known better, I would have called him cold.”

If I hadn’t known better. I nodded. Of course he knew better. Gilroy’s own wife had been murdered during a carjacking in Denver, before he had moved to Fort Collins and become a police officer. Knowing him as I did now, I was sure he’d taken news of her death stoically, even calmly. And the officer who informed him of the tragedy would have thought him cold—when he was anything but.

“I sense disagreement,” Gilroy said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “Tell me why you think they dislike one another. I want to hear your thoughts.”

“In a nutshell? I wonder why Charlie and Anika are doing everything they can to make it look like Wayne killed Brigit.”