I pondered the statement I had written the day after my conversation with my sister. Clipped to the paper was Peg’s blurry picture of the door and the poker, not legal evidence, but conclusive as far as I was concerned.
I have concluded my ill-advised and faithless investigation of the deaths of Clarice and James Clancy. The county coroner’s verdict was correct in both cases—accidental death and murder by person or persons unknown.
If my sister had not been present to intervene the day Mrs. Clancy fell down the steps, the woman would have killed Rosemarie—second-degree murder or perhaps voluntary manslaughter.
Peg saved Rosemarie’s life and arguably mine too.
For what would I have been without my Rosemarie?
Did Jim Clancy know the truth about what happened? I doubt it, or he would have tailored his story to fit the actual facts. In his bitter, hate-filled, love-starved mind he may actually have believed his version of the events.
I stand guilty as charged: guilty of not trusting my wife; guilty, Othello-like, of permitting a tiny doubt to become a deadly cancer of suspicion; guilty of seeing murder in eyes where there was only raw terror. I thought I saw the expression of a black widow. But it was only the face, in Peg’s excellent metaphor, of a lamb going to the slaughter.
I write this concluding note and will maintain the file to remind myself of the folly of which I am capable, even about someone I always loved. More than life itself.
The only worry that remains, just as it did when I found the papers in the safe at Lake Geneva, is the chocolate ice-cream-bar factor. I still worry about Jim Clancy’s last trick. Maybe it’s not out there, a trap waiting to be sprung. But deep down I think it is. I haven’t won the game yet.