“We have,” Dash said. “Your wife confirmed you were home. But wives have been known to lie for their husbands.”
“Martha would never—” He stopped himself, jaw working. “My wife was a godly woman. She wouldn’t have lied, not even for me.”
“What about Stephanie? Would she have lied for you?”
“Stephanie married my son two years after the murders,” Crenshaw said, each word measured and deliberate. “So, no. She wouldn’t have. The marriage didn’t last, I’m afraid. Stephanie had…ambitions that didn’t align with island life. She wanted more than my son could provide.” There was bitterness in his voice now, the kind that comes from watching a family alliance crumble. “Why are you asking about her?”
“A witness saw a blond woman in a nurse’s uniform at Turtle Point the night of the murders,” Dash said, leaning forward slightly. “Saw her with Reverend Pickering around nine o’clock.”
The color drained from Crenshaw’s face, then flooded back twice as red. His hands gripped the arms of his chair until the leather creaked under the pressure. “That’s impossible. Stephanie was at work that night. She worked the evening shift at the hospital. She couldn’t possibly have been at Turtle Point.”
“You’re very certain of her whereabouts,” I said, watching his face carefully. “For something that happened so long ago.”
Crenshaw’s face had gone from red to purple. “This interview is over. I’ve answered your questions, told you everything I know, which is nothing. I was home with my wife the night of the murders. Stephanie was at work. Neither of us had anything to do with what happened to Ruby Bailey and George Pickering. If you want to harass me further, you can speak to my attorney.”
He reached for his walker with shaking hands, pulling himself to standing with visible effort. For a moment, I saw him as he must have been forty years ago—tall, commanding, the kind of man who was used to being obeyed. The kind of man who would have viewed Ruby Bailey’s defiance as intolerable.
“One more question,” I said as he prepared to leave. “Did George Pickering keep a journal? Personal records beyond the church ledgers?”
Crenshaw’s walker scraped against the floor as he froze mid-step. “A journal?”
“We have it,” Dash said quietly. “Every confession he heard, every secret people told him, every piece of information he collected. All written down in his own hand.”
The silence that followed was profound. Crenshaw’s knuckles went white against the walker’s handles.
“That’s—” He swallowed hard. “George wouldn’t have done that. It would have violated every tenet of pastoral confidentiality.”
“And yet he did,” I said. “Pages and pages of other people’s secrets. Financial improprieties. Affairs. Things people thought they’d confessed in confidence.”
“Where did you get this journal?” His voice had gone thin, reedy.
“Does it matter?” Dash asked. “The question is whether your name appears in it, Mr. Crenshaw. Whether George documented your conversations about the church finances. Whether he wrote down what really happened to that two hundred thousand dollars.”
Crenshaw’s face had gone gray. He shuffled toward the elevator without another word, his walker clicking against the tile with the rhythm of a clock counting down.
“He’s lying,” I said.
“About which part?”
“All of it. Some of it. Enough of it.” I gathered my things, suddenly desperate to be out of this place with its false cheerfulness and underlying despair. “He was afraid of what Ruby knew. The money disappeared from the church building fund and never got properly accounted for. His son’s girlfriend was a blond nurse who later became his daughter-in-law—very convenient timing for a marriage that cemented her loyalty to the family.”
“But we can’t prove any of it,” Dash said as we walked back to the elevator. “His wife alibied him. The church board approved all the financial decisions. Everything’s clean on paper.
“Or she’s lying to protect him,” he added. “Though verifying hospital records from 1985 is going to be nearly impossible. Most places didn’t keep paper records that long, and nothing was digitized back then.”
“So we take Crenshaw’s word for it, or we don’t,” I said. “And given everything else he’s lied about or conveniently forgotten, I’m not inclined to believe him.”
“Neither am I,” Dash said. “Which means Stephanie Chester stays on our list until we can prove otherwise.”
The elevator doors opened with a soft chime, and we stepped inside.
“Magnolia Gardens is twenty minutes from here,” Dash said, checking his watch. “Elsie Crawford. Let’s pray she’s having a lucid day, and see if she can give us something more solid than Crenshaw’s carefully rehearsed denials.”
The drive to Magnolia Gardens took us deeper into the low country, past plantation houses and marshland, through the landscape that had witnessed centuries of secrets. I sang quietly, not quite realizing I was doing it until Dash glanced over with that slight smile.
“In my sweet little Alice blue gown, when I first wandered down into town…”
“That’s an old one,” he observed.
