I can’t leave Dave right now,” Joe told Lindsay.
He was sitting in his car in the parking lot, watching a rabbit hop across the patio outside the Channing restaurant.
“Hang on a sec,” she said. “I’m parking the car.”
He heard her shut the door and set the car alarm. He wanted to be home with her, talk to her, hold Julie-Bug on his lap and rock her to sleep.
“He’s a mess, huh?” Lindsay asked.
Joe said, “Well, he thinks Ray’s doctor murdered him. I don’t know if he’s grief stricken or delusional or both. But I do know that he’s alone and in a bad place.”
Joe heard Mrs. Rose speak to Lindsay over the intercom. “Come on up, Lindsay dear.”
“Thanks. I’ll be right there.”
Lindsay said to Joe, “I never asked. Does Dave have a girlfriend?”
“He pays for the girlfriend experience.”
“Aw, jeez. Do whatever you need to do,” she said.
Lindsay told him that after she put Julie to bed, she’d ask Mrs. Rose to take over for another couple of hours so she could have dinner with the girls.
“I’ll bring her a case of Channing’s Private Reserve Cab,” Joe said.
“And one for us.”
“No problem.”
Joe said he’d be home tomorrow, and after exchanging good nights and phone kisses, he returned to Dave’s small, two-story stone house, which was identical to the house about twenty yards away—the house where his parents, Ray and Nancy, had lived. Dave had left the lights on, telling Joe, “If Ray’s restless spirit is still around, he’ll want to see the lights.”
Dave’s living room was sparsely furnished with two upholstered armchairs in front of the fireplace, a standing lamp, and a handmade end table made from what looked like antique wine crates. A collection of framed oil paintings, including one luminous view of the vineyard at sunup, hung over the fireplace. Joe had taken a close look. They were signed “Nancy Channing.”
An aged-plank dining table dominated the dining area. There were four straight-backed dining chairs, and Joe saw a short stack of folders in front of one of them.
Joe took a seat and opened the folder on top. It contained a thin sheaf of clippings from local papers, primarily obituaries. Dave brought Joe a cup of tea and said, “Read this one.”
“This one” was a glossy Napa Valley monthly publication called Great Grapes, which contained a lot of ads, a smattering of local news, and profiles of artists and business owners. Joe opened the magazine to where a slip of paper bookmarked an essay by a writer named Johann Archer.
Archer had written about the death of his thirty-eight-year-old fiancée, Tansy Mallory, a dance teacher and long-distance runner, who’d been taken to the hospital with heat exhaustion. He’d written that Tansy was in every other way healthy and recovering—when she died.
Archer had poignantly expressed his shock about the unexpected and still unbelievable loss of the woman he had dearly loved. The writer hadn’t mentioned the name of the hospital or the doctor, only that he disbelieved the hospital’s stated cause of death.
He closed the essay by writing, “Inexplicably, a sunny, generous, and optimistic woman is gone. Somehow my heart still beats and I continue to live. That’s inexplicable, too.”
Joe finished the article and looked up.
“Dave, you got the idea that your dad was murdered from this article?”
“Tansy Mallory’s obituary and two others, not counting Ray’s, are in that file. It’s more than smoke, Joe. I’m calling it a fact-based fire.”
Joe’s thoughts veered to his training in behavioral science with the FBI. He couldn’t read Dave. Of course he was depressed. But he was also edgy and maybe paranoid. That said, in times of tragedy it was common to strike out, blame someone. Dr. Perkins was a logical scapegoat for Ray’s death.
Joe asked, “Have you spoken with Archer or the families of these other people who died suspiciously?”
“No. I don’t know how to approach them, so I’m going by what I’ve read here. Two of the obits mention Dr. Perkins, which confirms my strong belief that that son of a bitch is on a roll. That he killed my dad.”