“The Silver Sleuths,” I said.“Would you like to come in?I’ve got fresh biscuits and a kettle on.”
Something in her expression shifted.Not a smile, but a softening around the eyes that suggested she hadn’t expected kindness and was recalibrating.“Thank you.I would.”
I led her to the kitchen because the kitchen was where I did my best thinking and my best listening, and because the living room felt too formal for a woman who was carrying something heavy in that leather folder and heavier still in the set of her jaw.
I directed her to the table I’d set for Dash, and then poured hot water into the china teapot and brought it to the table along with two matching cups and saucers.I set creamer and sugar in front of her, and then I put out a small plate of biscuits to finish the presentation.Because in the South, presentation is everything.
Josephine Wainwright Hale sat at my kitchen table with the rigid composure of someone who had rehearsed what she was about to say and would not be derailed by hospitality.
Chowder investigated her shoes, deemed them acceptable, and settled at her feet.A good sign.His instincts about people had proven reliable enough that I’d started treating them as a screening tool.
“What can I do for you, Mrs.Hale?”
“Josephine, please.”She set the portfolio on the table but didn’t open it.Her hands rested on top of it, fingers laced, knuckles white.“I have a brother.Had a brother.He died twenty-five years ago, and I’ve spent every one of those years trying to get someone to believe me when I tell them he was murdered.”
The shift in tense, from have to had, cost her something.I heard it in the breath she took after.
I’d put orange pekoe in the teapot and I poured out before I sat down across the table from her.She took her time putting cream and sugar in her cup.I didn’t rush her.Twenty-five years of trying to be heard couldn’t have been easy.
“His name was Henry Wainwright,” she said.“Dr.Henry Wainwright.He ran a medical practice on the island for more than twenty-five years.”
The name rang a distant bell.I’d heard it mentioned over the years, one of those names that floated through island conversation the way old stories do, attached to a face I’d never seen and a life that ended before I’d paid much attention to Grimm Island’s history.
“As I said, he was murdered twenty-five years ago,” Josephine continued, and her voice had the practiced steadiness of someone who had told this story many times to many people who hadn’t listened.“In his study, at his desk.They found him with a gunshot wound to the head and Sheriff Milton ruled it a suicide before the sun went down.He took one look at Henry and decided it was an open-and-shut case.Milton declared that he just never recovered from Charlotte’s death a couple of years before.”
“Who’s Charlotte?”I asked.
“Henry’s wife.She died of ovarian cancer much too young.”She took a delicate sip from her cup.“There was no autopsy.No investigation.Case closed.”
I raised my brows at that information.Even I knew that suicides were automatically treated as a homicide until the medical examiner signed off on the death certificate.
“I’m not dismissing you,” I said gently.“But the question has to be asked.Is there a possibility that Henry could have taken his own life?”
Something flashed in her eyes that was hotter than grief and older than anger.
“My brother was not suicidal, Mrs.McCoy.He was fifty-five years old and he loved his work.He loved his patients.He had friends, hobbies, a full life.Did he miss his wife?Of course he did.You don’t lose the love of your life and whistle your way through the rest of it.But Henry was a man who kept going.He always kept going.And he’d found love again there at the end.A nice woman from Charleston.”
She leaned forward, and the morning light caught the lines around her mouth that twenty-five years of this fight had carved there.
“Mrs.Hale,” I said, wondering how in the world a case like this could possibly be solved after so much time.Or if it was really a case at all.People never wanted to think their loved ones could end things so tragically.But it happened every day.
“You haven’t heard the most important part yet,” she interrupted, before I could tell her I wasn’t sure I was the right person to help her.“Henry was left-handed.Always had been.But the gunshot wound was to his right temple.”
The kitchen went very quiet.Even the air-conditioning seemed to hold its breath.
“Milton never acknowledged it, and I told him he was wrong,” she said.“Evil, horrible man.All he cared about was money and power.I even told him I’d contribute to his campaign fund if he’d reopen the case and look at things a little closer.But he wasn’t interested.And not one of Milton’s deputies asked why a left-handed man shot himself with his right.”
I set my teacup down because my hands were not entirely steady.
“I wish I could say hearing this about Milton surprised me,” I said.“But it doesn’t.”
“He released Henry’s body to the funeral home in under twelve hours.”Her voice was ice over bedrock.“Henry kept a pistol in the top drawer of his desk.Everyone in his circle knew about it.He’d mentioned it at a party once, said he had plenty of protection after some unhappy patient had made threats.Milton decided Henry must have gotten drunk and used his own gun on himself.There was about two fingers of bourbon sitting in a glass on the desk.Henry always had a nightcap before bed.”
I wrapped my hands around my teacup and let the warmth of it anchor me.Outside the kitchen window, a mockingbird was running through its repertoire in the magnolia, cycling through stolen songs like the morning was anyone else’s business.It wasn’t.
“Was there anyone you can think of who wanted to hurt Henry?Or threatened him?”
Josephine’s composure held, but I could see what it cost her.The tendons in her neck tightened.Her fingers pressed harder against the leather.She opened her mouth to answer.
