"Not if I want to drive today." Pamela promised to send me a list of tasks to do as soon as she had figured it all out.
I took her back to Jake's and gave her a quick hug. “I'll see you soon," I said. "And you make sure you get that promotion."
"I will."
Deep in thought, I drove home.
I climbed up to my living room.
Cosmo glared at me. "That took you long enough."
"I can't always take you with me. It looks weird," I said. "Unless you've got an invisibility spell."
"Very amusing."
His voice softened to a sound that was almost a purr. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine a handsome, suave tenor standing in my room. Maybe that was another one of his superpowers.
"Going by your glum look, Pamela is off the hook?" he asked.
"One hundred percent," I said. "Which means we've got to take a much, much closer look at everyone else. If only we could leave Aunt Violet’s murder out of the equation. Jake had more than enough people who wanted to see him gone."
Chapter thirty
Ireached for a piece of paper. "First, we have Hank, the landscape guy. We haven't taken a close look at him yet because, honestly, I don't see how he would have been able to get close enough to my aunt, unless he used her garden to poke around? Then there's Kyle. With Pamela out of the picture, he's the one who has the most to lose. Him or his doting parents or his granddad. Doc Hanson would have been ideally placed to poison his patients because he knew their medication and schedule."
I thought a little harder. "Then there is Jimmy, who is the least likely to have been a suspect." I said this reluctantly. Jimmy had been as good as family when I was growing up. To consider him hurting my aunt was a huge stretch, yet I couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility that he was somehow involved.
"He's in his eighties," Cosmo said.
"Yeah, but what about his son? He's been trying to get his offspring into this house a couple of times now."
"Except what would he gain?"
"I don't know. That's the problem. We don't know the motive." I wrote down Jimmy and his son. "Then there is the girlfriend," I said.
Cosmo sat upright. "What girlfriend?"
"There was a small perfume bottle in Jake's house. He kept it in a special box, so I assume it meantsomething to him."
"It could have been old."
"No," I thought back. "It still had some scent clinging to it. Can't have been more than, I don't know, a week or two."
"Did you recognize the scent?"
"It seemed vaguely familiar," I said.
"Maybe one of your aunt's?"
I stared at him. "Why would he keep an empty perfume bottle of hers?"
"Because he liked her."
"I don't think so. Not the liking part, the perfume. I'm sure I've smelled it recently, but it was a bit too intense for my aunt. And Jake could have had another girlfriend."
"I would know. I swear to you, unless he made very sure not to have her around while Violet and I were awake, there was no other woman in his life."
"But it must mean something. There was also a military medal."
