“Mrs.Pembroke sends her regards,” I said.“She brought us a casserole for dinner, and she says her smoke alarm has been chirping.”
“I heard that part,” he said.“I’ll stop by on my way home and change the battery for her.”
“Protect and serve,” I said, smiling.
Who was this man?Someone who could sail like he was born on the water, had lived all over the country, had no family, and would make a house call to an old woman just to change a battery.I had more questions than I had answers, and the man of mystery was starting to wear on me, especially with Bea’s envelope of information sitting in my drawer.
I’d read a study once that a man could pretend he was someone else completely for up to two years before the façade started to crack and lies came to the surface.Maybe that’s why he rarely shared information with me.If you kept it to yourself, you couldn’t get caught in a lie later.
“You’re thinking heavy thoughts over there,” he said, and I realized I’d been staring into another of Henry Wainwright’s boxes without removing anything.
“Just thinking about the case,” I lied.
We kept working.A few boxes in I came across a card from James and Edie Everett tucked in a bundle of other correspondence with a rubber band around it.
Henry—
Come for supper Friday.We’re worried about you.
—James and Edie
The handwriting was easy and slanted to the left.I held it a minute and then set it on the personal pile.
“He came to the shop yesterday,” I said.
“Who?”he asked.
“Everett.Walt brought him by.He talked about Henry for an hour.They were close.As close as brothers, I’d say.”I tucked the card into the stack.“He’s not a fan of Milton.”
“I’ve met very few people who are.”
“But he was downright furious at the suggestion that Henry took his own life,” I said.“He said it never made sense, and he even asked Milton to see the body and told him Henry was left handed.He got shut down and Keats signed the death certificate.”
“Anger is good,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because if he’s still angry about it, he’s going to give us those records without dragging his feet.We need people who want this solved as much as Josephine does.”
“His grandson’s getting them down out of the attic for him and then he said we could have them.”
We kept sorting, and I sang “Black Coffee” since I wasn’t feeling nearly as enthusiastic as I had when we started out.
I opened the sixth box and looked inside, and then I immediately got to my feet and went into the dining room where I had Josephine’s portfolio and the police report.The photocopies of the scene weren’t clear enough for me to see details, so I opened my laptop and brought it back into the living room.
“What’d you find?”Dash asked.
“His desk contents,” I said, pulling up the scanned images he’d sent me of the scene.“I just wanted to make sure that was what I was looking at.I recognized the lamp from the pictures.”
“Good memory,” he said.
I set the laptop onto the coffee table so Dash could see the image, and then I started pulling things out of the box.
Pens.A stapler.A roll of stamps.A jar of little black licorice candies.A leather day planner.Patient charts, a prescription pad, and a Merck manual.A stethoscope.An ID badge for Medical University of South Carolina.And then a smattering of business cards that had fallen to the bottom.
“Anything interesting?”he asked, picking up the day planner.
“Maybe he’s got a name in there of the woman he was seeing,” I said.“There’s a Rolodex in here too.”
