I smirked. “Uh-huh. Hard to believe when you’re lip-locked with her daughter’s husband.”
Luis shot Traylor a sympathetic look. At the same time I did a quiet victory dance inside. I knew that Luis had been gay. My gaydar never proved me wrong.
“We did not mean for this to happen,” Luis explained. “When I first came to live with Zelda, yes, I had loved men before, but when she took me into her bed, I also loved her.”
“But you kept seeing men on the side?” I asked.
His face flushed with guilt. “Yes, I did. I could not help my own nature.”
“And I didn’t know mine,” Traylor said. “I come from a long line of lawyers, politicians. We’re supposed to be perfect and get married, have children, be in public office.”
“So you couldn’t be your true self,” I filled in.
He nodded. It was a story I’d heard many times over. Men and women both forced into societal roles that they didn’t feel in their hearts. But they performed their duties anyway, usually living secret lives for many years until they finally came to terms with who they were and divorced their significant others, who didn’t turn out to be very significant after all.
It hurt my heart that people lived such lies, and that they also dragged others into their lies, shattering many lives in the process.
Traylor spoke. “It wasn’t until I met Luis that I understood who I really was.” He sighed and crossed back over to the man and took his hand. “I promised him that after Christmas I would tell Lemon the truth. My plan is to leave her, but not until after the holidays.”
How kind of him, I thought sarcastically. “So she doesn’t know.”
Both men shook their heads. “We’ve kept it a secret for years,” Traylor said.
“Even Zelda never guessed,” Luis said sadly. “I always put her first, in everything.”
I studied the guilt on their faces, the unease in their bodies—stiff shoulders, clenched jaws—and I wondered something.
“So,” I said, pacing the room, “you want me to believe that the two of you had a secret affair for years and no one knew—not even Zelda. If she had discovered it, what would have happened to your inheritance in the will, Luis?”
He swallowed hard. “She would have kicked me out of the house and removed my name from the papers,” he admitted quietly.
“Yes, she would have. But what if”—and now I was feeling very Sherlock Holmes-ish—“she did discover it? What if Zelda had, just tonight, realized that the two of y’all were secret lovers? What if she told you that not only would she take you out of the will, but she would also tell Lemon? What if that made one or both of you so angry that you decided to kill her? Or, maybe you hadn’t even meant to kill her. Perhaps she told you, Luis, that you would be erased from the will, and blinded by anger, you grabbed the first thing you could find—a knife—and you plunged it into her heart? After all, Zelda left me alone in this very room. She could have gone anywhere—the kitchen, maybe, and it could have been there that she walked in on the two of you doing exactly what I just caught you doing. Maybe you killed her together. Maybe, just maybe, Traylor handed you the knife, Luis. But you were the one who plunged it into her heart.”
Literally, the spirits of police detectives of Christmas past had taken hold and were speaking through me. I barely even knew what I was saying. I was simply a conduit for the words as they spewed from my mouth.
Luis, whose face was red, but not from embarrassment anymore, rose angrily. “How dare you suggest that I would have done such a horrible thing. I know how guilty we look—because we are guilty. But I, for one, would never have hurt Zelda. Yes, we were going to come out, and then I would have hurt her, betrayed her even,” he murmured. “But we would have been honest. We would have finally confessed to her and Lemon the truth. I didn’t care about the wealth. I can always make money, and I have a little saved. Lemon will tell you differently, of course. The money or the house never mattered to me.”
“But now you have the house. Something Lemon did not expect.”
“I knew about it,” Traylor interjected. “Zelda told me of her wishes, to change the will.”
“Ah,” I said in realization. “That’s right. You were her lawyer. So you knew of the change, that Lemon was only getting the money.”
He scoffed. “What little of it there is.”
My ears pricked up at that. “What do you mean?”
Traylor gestured around the room. “The house is where all of Zelda’s equity has gone. She was a lavish spender and had more debts than she did money coming in.”
She had, after all, told me that her business had been drying up. It would make sense that there were debts. “Does Lemon know about the debts?”
Traylor shook his head. “All Lemon knew was that the house was worth more than the money she had on hand. Zelda didn’t want anyone to know about what she owed to her lenders. She was extremely private about that sort of thing.”
“Why did she change the will?” I asked Traylor. That was the sticking point, wasn’t it? “It seems to me that she must’ve had a very good reason for changing things around.”
Luis and Traylor exchanged a look. Luis finally answered. “Zelda knew that Lemon would sell the house, and she didn’t want that. Lemon has made it abundantly clear that she never cared to keep the home or anything in it.”
“Not even the elves?” I joked.
