Jack looked at her.
“Oh. Preggers.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean to be nosy but why didn’t Cal and Sara marry?”
“No one knows, and Sara won’t tell. If you ask her, she turns into a statue. Immobile and soundless. She just plain freezes. Sometimes I wonder how different everything would have been if Sara had married him. For one thing, she would have been my grandmother.”
“Too bad she isn’t,” Lea said. “If she were a blood relative, she might have helped you in your business, educated you, and encouraged you in your pursuit of a woman like Kate. It is certainly bad that she’s not yourrealgrandmother.”
Jack laughed, then leaned over and kissed Lea’s cheek. “Thanks.” He paused, then said, “Would you like to see the inside of Granddad’s house?”
“I think you and I should talk about why we came here.”
“I told you about Randal.”
She gave him a look that said he knew what she was talking about. “I didn’t kill my husband and I don’t know who did. None of you have even hinted athowhe was killed, but we don’t think it was a firearm. Someone would have heard it. As for opportunity, all of us were all over the house. We would have seen a stranger, so it had to be one of us.”
“No guesses?”
“That’s hard to say. Everyone disliked him so very much. He was rude, sarcastic, and loved to put people down.”
“Yet you married him.”
“I can assure you that before the wedding, he was the kindest, most thoughtful person in the world. But I do understand why he was murdered.”
“It’s a matter of who.”
“What if you never found out? What if you just left it alone?”
“As Sara has said, ‘No matter how vile a person is, you can’t kill them.’” He looked at her. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”
She didn’t speak for a moment as she seemed to be pondering something. Leaning back, she dug into her trouser pocket, withdrew a ring, and handed it to him.
It was obviously old, with an intricate yellow gold band and three reddish-brown stones.
“I found it. It’s not really valuable, and I never saw Mrs. Meyers wear it. Maybe it was sentimental.”
“Are you saying that this had something to do with the murder?”
“I have no idea,” Lea said. “As you know, Randal and I had to sneak around to see each other, so one night I was hiding in a doorway. It was a full moon and quite bright. I saw Rachel running across the lawn. She had a paper bag in her hand and she dropped it. The lawn had been watered and I guess the paper broke. She went to her knees and I could hear her cursing as she searched for whatever had been in the bag. It took her what seemed like an eternity to find all the items.”
“And you were in a hurry to get to Randal.”
“Yes. I was afraid he’d leave. He does love punctuality. Anyway, Rachel gathered whatever she’d found in the grass and rolled it into her top. I still don’t know how she did that because that girl wore practically nothing. Barbara used to make jokes about her shaving. Oh! Sorry. Just girl talk.”
“And this ring was left behind?”
“Yes. The next morning I thought about what I’d seen. It was just barely daylight and I heard Derek in his room. As always, I wanted to avoid seeing him, so I went outside. I looked in the grass about where Rachel had been and I saw the ring.”
He waited for her to say more but she was silent. “You didn’t give it to Mrs. Meyers?”
“It was a dilemma. Should I give it to her or to Rachel—who I was pretty sure had stolen it? But I’d seen that she had a whole bag of things. If I gave the ring to Mrs. Meyers, she might check what else was missing. Then I’d get Rachel in trouble. And if I gave it to Rachel, she’d know I knew her secret, and I’d make an enemy. And trust me on this, you donotwant Rachel for an enemy! In the end, I did nothing. It was cowardly of me, but at the time, I had other things on my mind.”
Jack was looking at the ring. “When Rachel dropped all the stuff, you didn’t see anything green, did you?”
Lea’s eyes widened. “Like that big emerald ring Mrs. Meyers owned? I only saw it once at dinner. It’s so big that it has a name and a history. She told us. It belonged to some Indian prince hundreds of years ago. She said her husband gave it to her on their twentieth anniversary. We were all quiet because she looked like she was going to cry. She held her hand to her heart and whispered, ‘I will miss it.’” Lea looked at Jack. “Was Derek going to take it from her?”
