“Well, what difference does … How would Peggy have access?”
Doreen explained, “First, she works in the kitchen at Rosemoor, but here’s the other thing. When I got home, I quickly looked up her name and address, where she lives.” She brought it up on her nearby laptop, clicked on the satellite view, and then stated, “This is her house.”
He leaned forward, stared at, and said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”
She looked back at him. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes. Then I wondered if Peggy had a son living with her. If so …”
Mack sat back, looked at her, opened the pizza box, picked up the biggest piece, and shoved a huge bite into his mouth, chomping furiously, as he stared at the satellite image of Sarsons Beach and the house right next door to the old man who’d had the old box of rat poison stolen from his garage.
Twice.
Chapter 18
Later that evening, after Mack had gone, Doreen was wide awake in bed, thinking about everything and how sad it was if she were right. There wasn’t any way to know for sure, but, in her gut, she knew it. She didn’t quite know how it related to the young man, Alan, who’d been poisoned at the grocery store, but the fact that Alan had been to Peggy’s house to visit with her son, Alan’s coworker, was suspicious. As was the fact that Peggy’s house was next to the old man’s house. And Peggy’s son could have been the one the old man saw getting into his garage.
Well, all that was just too coincidental, until they sorted out exactly what had gone on. But this was just way too much connection between Alan and Peggy and Chrissy. Even Mack had been quite perturbed by the whole thing. He kept swearing during dinner.
And finally he said, “You know that I was hoping to have an evening off.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I was too.”
He nodded. “And, from that tone of voice, I can hear how sad you are.”
“Chrissy didn’t need to die. She could have had a nice ending to her life, spending it with Xavier,” she explained. “There was absolutely no need for somebody to do something like that to her.” She looked over at him, as he got up.
“I have to leave,” he stated quietly. “I’ll check in with you, as soon as I run some of this down.” He picked up the bagged sugar bowl.
Doreen nodded. “Yeah, you do that.”
He stopped as he went to walk out the front door and then turned around, headed back, pulled her onto her feet, and wrapped her in a hug. “You have to consider these things, if you want to keep doing this,” he noted. “For every time somebody commits murder, there’s always a story. There’s always a loss. There’s always greed, envy, hate, or some other stupid excuse for taking a life. Always something shows up in these murders that will turn you inside out and upside down. It’s the cost that you pay for looking into this stuff,” he murmured.
His chin rested on top of her head, and she nodded slightly. “I know,” she acknowledged, “but I still feel like I need to do it.”
“I was afraid you would say that,” he noted. “And I do understand. That’s why I’m in law enforcement.”
She tilted her head back, looked up at him, and said, “And you do such a fine job.”
He rolled his eyes. “You make me feel like a fool constantly.”
“No, not true,” she argued, “but I have more time to do this, to focus wholly on one case at a time. I have some connections to do this, and I have some things that I can do to make your job easier.”
“You think this makes my job easier?” he asked in astonishment.
“To help you make your job easier.” She stepped back and added, “Go do what you have to do.”
He looked at her and asked, “You’ll be okay?”
“I am, until I’m not.”
He winced at that. “I’ll call you just before.”
She nodded. “Before what? Before you leave?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll make sure you’re all right.”
“You probably should,” she replied in an odd tone.
At that, he stopped and stared at her.
She shrugged and said, “Don’t mind me.”
“I do mind you,” he stated, “and I want to keep you alive and safe and well.”
“Good.” She crossed her arms over her chest and waited till he left. And then she took a cup of herb tea and went down to the river’s edge. She didn’t want to talk to people, didn’t want anything to do with anything, just to admire Mother Nature and share a little bit of peace and quiet. Mother Nature could be quite a capital B apparently, considering she put humans on this planet, and all they ended up doing was hurting each other. Or God maybe did that? She didn’t have any proof either way, and so everything just seemed like conjecture at this point.
But, in her heart, she knew she was right about Peggy. Maybe that was just the voice of experience over the last few months of dealing with cold cases, as everything slowly pulled together in her world. And, at the same time, it had been, … it had been tough. She’d done a lot, maybe too much in some ways. By the time she wandered back to her house and went upstairs, had a hot shower, then curled up in bed, she still hadn’t heard from Mack.
She wondered whether he was leaving yet or if he was still at work. She texted him, to see if he was still at work. He sent a curt Yes right back. She realized that he was still fussing with whatever it was he was fussing with. And that was a good thing.
She drifted off to sleep, her heart sad and feeling an overwhelming grief for Chrissy, an older woman who had just wanted to be loved at the end of her life. Something everybody wanted, no matter how old they were. Something everybody had a right to expect and to enjoy, particularly when they already had somebody special in their life. To think that whoever had transferred all that gossip to the person in Chrissy’s life—Xavier, who was supposed to trust Chrissy unquestioningly—had been one thing, but to think that whoever, possibly even the same people, had worked to kill Chrissy, to make her pay for being the one chosen by Xavier, that was something else entirely. And it just made Doreen sad.
Finally, with a lot of effort, she fell asleep.
Chapter 19
Doreen woke to something wrong. Mugs growled right beside her, his head coming up off the blankets. Thaddeus slept soundly on the roost, and Goliath was stretched out, his face tucked into his paws. But Mugs? Mugs was not sleeping.
She raised her head from the pillow, looked at him bleary-eyed, and whispered, “What’s the matter, buddy?”
He just growled again and then again, this time hopping off the bed and racing over to her bedroom doorway. He stopped at the closed door and looked at her, whining. She got up, grabbed her housecoat, and pulled it on her shoulders, noting it was only 11:00 p.m.
There was no sign of Mack yet, although she really didn’t expect him to come over this late at night, not with him having such a long day at work. But she did expect a text. As she checked her phone, she found no further texts, and he hadn’t tried to call either.