“I’m driving, so it’s not ideal. It’ll be better if I come by—though I can’t make it there for an hour.”
He doesn’t seem thrilled at the prospect of showing up here—I’m sure he’s even more uncomfortable being around me now that I’ve bared my soul to him—but at least he’s coming.
“Okay, see you then.”
I force myself to focus on work for a while, making another stabat the article I’ve got due. I also agree to an emergency Zoom session late this afternoon with a client named Michelle, whose boss arranged a surprise meeting with her at eight thirty tomorrow morning, giving no reason why. She’s terrified she’s about to be fired.
Forty-five minutes later, I open the storage closet off the kitchen and drag out two of the folding aluminum chairs that Clarissa pointed out to me on the tour, and lug them to the backyard, along with a small folding table. There’s a flat, grassy area under the big maple tree, and I set everything up there. I return for my laptop and then text Sam to tell him to come around to the back, thinking that maybe he’ll feel less awkward if he doesn’t have to be in the house alone with me.
It isn’t long before I hear a car pull up behind mine in the driveway, and moments later Sam rounds the corner of the house. I hate how much my stomach churns at the sight of him.
“Hey,” he says, offering a faint smile as I rise from my chair. Though it’s nothing to write home about, it’s the first smile he’s given me since I ended things with Jamie.
“Hi. Is this okay—I mean sitting out here?”
“Yeah, fine.” He drops into the empty chair across from me, with its slightly tattered green and white plastic strips, and stretches his long legs out in front of him on the grass. He looks a little less unkempt today, dressed in khaki shorts and an unwrinkled heather-blue T-shirt.
“So, what’s going on?” he says, not wasting any time.
I start by coming clean, confessing that I had snuck into Jamie’s apartment last week, hoping to learn what had been troubling him this summer, and found the list. Sam lifts an eyebrow as I’m speaking but doesn’t comment. Then I grab my laptop, click the pages I’ve saved, and show him one by one, demonstrating that the properties all belong to Liam.
“It just doesn’t smell right to me,” I say.
“Huh,” he says, his brow furrowed. “I’ve never thought of Liam as someone with a lot of dough to splash around. Could he have inherited money?”
I shake my head. “His father was a veterinarian in the area, and though I believe they had a comfortable life, they weren’t wealthy. And from what I heard, Tori grew up modestly.”
“So then where’d he get the money?”
I nod. “Exactly. What I’ve been wondering over the last hour is whether he got it from his grandmother—without anyone being the wiser.”
“Liz?You think he took advantage of her cognitive decline to talk her out of money?”
I let out a long sigh. “The truth is, he wouldn’t have had to do any talking. Jamie told me once that Liam is the one who handles their grandmother’s finances, which means he keeps an eye on her accounts and pays her expenses at the assisted-living facility. She apparently has a pretty nice nest egg.”
“How did Liam end up with that responsibility?” Sam asks.
I stretch my own legs out across the grass. As tense as I am, it’s calming to be sitting in the backyard after so many hours cooped up inside the house.
“From what I know, Drew asked him to take over the task because Liam lives around here, and so it seemed to make more sense for him to be in charge instead of Jamie. And for what it’s worth, Drew lets Liam draw a monthly fee for his efforts.”
“Was there any oversight of the arrangement?”
“Well, not by Jamie, or he would have mentioned it when he was telling me all this.”
“It makes sense that Drew would farm out the job—I’ve heard him say more than once that he doesn’t have a head for numbers—butthere should have been oversight. Regardless, this list suggests that Jamie stumbled on something that made him suspicious of Liam.”
“Right. And don’t you think this could be what was troubling him so much the weeks before he died, that he suspected his cousin was defrauding his grandmother and wasn’t sure how to handle it without causing a massive rift in his family?”
Sam scrunches his mouth to one side. “Maybe. And here’s something else. Remember how I said that the first time I noticed Jamie seemed troubled was during lunch at the club, and that he’d just come from seeing Liz?”
Something clicks into place for me. “Apparently, she still has lucid moments, so what if she said something that tipped Jamie off?” I sigh. “God, is it really possible Liam stole from her, and Jamie found out?”
“There could be a perfectly legit explanation for Liam owning the properties,” he says. “But let’s say there isn’t. Would your next thought be that Liam murdered Jamie to prevent him from exposing what he learned?”
“Yes, I guess it would be,” I say, though the idea nearly leaves me breathless. “And he left the party early, which means he had opportunity.”
“This is pretty fucking awful—that Jamie might have been shot by his own cousin. And what are we supposed to do about it?”
