He followed my eyes. “I just need a quick statement. For the paperwork.”
I pointed vaguely. “You can ask Jemma. She came in right after… right after Mr. Finch’s body… fell.”
The sheriff scribbled down the information and then touched my shoulder lightly as he looked to Summer. “Can you stay with her?”
“Sure.”
I sat on my hands to stop the shaking and watched the crowd part around the sheriff. I knew next to nothing about dead bodies, but Mr. Finch couldn’t have been gone long. From what I knew about animals—at thirteen years old, I’d had a brief stint of thinking I wanted to be a taxidermist—I was pretty confident that rigor mortis was all but gone after twelve hours. His arms hadn’t budged even as he’d inelegantly plopped onto the ground, which meant that a very-alive Mr. Finch had been somewhere, most likely nearby, since he’d gone missing nineteen or so hours earlier.
The sheriff peeled away while Summer escorted me to my guest cottage. I was in such a daze that I had no idea how much time had passed when Lacy arrived with lunch.
The two women conversed in whispers for a few minutes before Summer gave me a hug and a brief goodbye, and Lacy remained with me in the cottage, urging me to eat something. I picked up and put down a sandwich, nibbling at the edges to satisfy her. In between tiny bites, I detailed the evidence—the Polaroids, the honey, the ledger—watching her expressions shift as she listened to my conundrum.
“I think Mr. Finch died less than twelve hours ago, sometime after two a.m.”
“Which is good, right?” Lacy asked.
“It means that Aunt DeeDee was led away in handcuffs before he died, so she can’t be guilty of killing him. I just need the autopsy to confirm the time of death.” I took a sip of water. “But the other things—Miss 2001’s crown in her room and the fact that the original winner, Cathy Peabody, disappeared while Aunt DeeDee was in charge of the pageant… I don’t even know where to start with that.”
“It was so long ago,” Lacy said, taking another bite of her sandwich.
“Do you remember hearing about the original Finch house? Out on the back side of the property?” I vaguely recalled Mr. Finch mentioning the old estate, saying they were considering converting it into a pageant museum.
Lacy took a sip of Diet Coke. “I’ve never been out there, but sure. I’ve heard of it. Your aunt said it can’t be torn down because it’s historical.”
“I wonder if any of the archives would be out there, especially if the Finches are planning to convert it into a place for tourists to visit.”
“Maybe,” Lacy said, turning toward the window. “But I have a million things to do today, and you don’t seem in any state to… to search the woods.”
She was right. I was mentally and physically exhausted and probably still in shock at seeing Mr. Finch’s corpse. I also had no desire to possibly put my own life in danger by wandering around the unused and untrimmed outskirts of the property alone. I could almost hear Aunt DeeDee and Momma agreeing in their admonishments:You better stay put, young lady, until you see the sunrise.This time I was more than happy to comply.
“Let’s do this: I have to go check on a couple more tent issues,” Lacy said. “Promise you won’t go anywhere without me.”
“I won’t, but…” I knew Lacy, being fiercely independent, might balk at what I was about to ask. “Are you sure it’s safe?”
“I’m sure.” To my surprise, Lacy just gave me a soft smile. “I have pepper spray, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
I didn’t like the idea of her out there alone—or of me inside alone. “But can you come back here to spend the night when you’re finished? I want to head to the back side of the property.”
I didn’t mention that I was also afraid to be on my own, but she seemed to sense as much. Lacy hugged me one last time before she locked me inside with no other company than my churning thoughts.
I closed my eyes to try to clear my mind, but one memory in particular kept rising to the surface. Six weeks after Momma died, on a Saturday evening in early September, I emerged from my fog long enough to have an actual conversation with Aunt DeeDee.
“I’ve already started sorting through your mother’s belongings,” she said to me from the door of my childhood bedroom. She’d tried to pry me out of bed for dinner but had eventually given up and started rummaging through mymother’s things. “Feel free to take anything you want with you when you leave.”
When you leave…Those last three words made me shoot up in bed. “Where do you think I’m going?”
Aunt DeeDee pursed her lips, confused by my question. “Back to school. You have a year left of your program, so I thought…”
I forced back the tears threatening to escape. My aunt—the very woman who had just lost her sister—was expecting me to re-enlist in the real world, to head back to school as if I hadn’t spent the last year as a caregiver, to restart my life as if my mother hadn’t died. I remembered hearing once that people grieve differently, but it had only been a few weeks. How could this be the conversation my aunt was already having with me?
I didn’t want to cry in front of her when she was bustling around the house, sorting through Momma’s belongings like they were part and parcel for Goodwill, but holding back my tears contorted my features into a kind of frozen spasm.
To her credit, as soon as she saw my bereft confusion, Aunt DeeDee hurried into my room, dropping my mother’s favorite purple scarf in the doorway. She threw hers arm around me and pulled me into her breast, swaying back and forth as she must’ve done when I was a baby. After that day, Aunt DeeDee and I performed our individual dances with grief, and I began to realize that our approaches to loss are worlds apart. Aunt DeeDee gets in there, gets her hands dirty, gets down to brass tacks. I tend to sink into the sadness, to wallow for as long as possible.
Take Mr. Finch’s death as a micro-example of our natural reactions. When I saw his body on the ground at my feet, my instinct was to run to my cottage, to crawl beneath the comforter, to hibernate until spring. On the other side of town, even in her dire situation, Aunt DeeDee would be pacing the cell,thinking about all the steps she would take to find out who’d done such a thing. All the while, we both knew she was relying on me to work with the sheriff to find the truth.
But maybe knowing how she would react helped push me forward. I had to process the facts. First, my aunt was in jail for theft, and second, someone had accused her of killing two people: Mr. Finch, whose body now lay in some sort of repose and Miss 2001, aka Cathy Peabody.
