R.J. and Joe exchanged looks. “She break your heart?” R.J. asked.
“Once. Long time ago.” He gestured to Joe for another beer. When Joe slid it to him, he guzzled it a little too fast. “Ain’t seen her in years.”
“Is she what brings you to Newpointe?”
The question didn’t amuse or surprise Barnett like R.J. might have expected. “I don’t mess with married women. I came for the huntin’.”
“She may not be married for long,” R.J. said. “Not if Stan dies. And if he wakes up, he’ll be smart to cut her loose.”
Barnett threw back the second bottle. “Where did you say she was livin’?”
“You gonna get in touch with her?”
“Maybe. Just check on her. Give her some moral support.”
“I wouldn’t eat anything she fed you, pal. You might wake up dead, too.”
The man’s face was tense, thoughtful, as if reeling from what he’d just heard. “You don’t have her phone number, do you?”
Again, Joe shot R.J. a look.
“Really, man. I need to get in touch with her. It’s important. We go way back.”
R.J. grinned and Barnett grinned back. Barnett had had enough to drink now that R.J. knew Barnett’s talk would come a little more freely.
“Almost married her,” Barnett confessed.
R.J.’s grin collapsed, and his eyes grew bigger. “You pullin’ my leg?”
“Nope. We were tight.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So why don’t you know her number?”
He chuckled and brought his third bottle to his lips. “Been a while, and I’m new in town.”
“So where you stayin’, bein’ so new to town?”
“Bonaparte Court apartments.”
“You work in town?”
“Not yet.”
“Then what brings you here?”
The man chuckled. “What are you? A cop?”
They all laughed raucously, and Barnett collapsed at his own humor. Man, he had trouble holding his liquor, R.J. thought. Three drinks and he was practically wasted.
As though the man realized it, he dug out another bill and paid Joe again, then slid off the stool. “It was nice chewing the fat with you two gentlemen,” he said, “but I have an appointment.”
“An appointment? It’s almost dark. What kinda work you do, anyway?”
“Consultin’,” he said.
“Consultin’ about what?”
“Computers,” Barnett said. “I’m a computer consultant. And I never let the clock dictate my hours.”
“You stayin’ in town for a while?” R.J. asked as he started back to the door.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He saluted them both, then hurried out the door.
R.J. set down his mug and looked at Joe. “I think maybe I need to get back over to the station and check out this fella.” He paid his tab and hurried out the door.
Chapter Seventeen
Since she had gotten only a couple hours of sleep the night before, Jill was running on empty by the time she got to Aunt Aggie’s house to talk to Celia. Doubts lurked like shadows in her heart, and questions shot through her mind with startling velocity. She sat in Aunt Aggie’s pristine parlor, decorated with hundred-year-old antiques, delicate urns and fresh-cut flowers, and hanging plants in front of the large picture window. Celia sat in a Louis XIV chair with her back to the window. She seemed like nothing more than a silhouette against the harsh daylight, and her face captured the contrasting darkness of the room, revealing little. David sat in a matching chair on the other side of a marble-topped table. A small Tiffany lamp provided warm relief from the shadows, lighting one side of each of their faces. Still, it wasn’t enough light to read Celia clearly.
“What is it, Jill?” Celia asked in a voice that revealed the fact that she’d spent much of the day crying. “You look almost mad at me. Are you turning on me, too?”
Jill shifted on the sofa and averted her eyes. “I have a few questions, Celia.” The words came in a flat, metallic voice, between tight lips.
“Okay,” Celia said. “Ask whatever you want. I have nothing to hide.”
Jill met her eyes. “Why did you tell me that you were acquitted in the first trial?”
Celia didn’t flinch. “I didn’t tell you that.”
Jill opened her mouth to speak, but an irritated, breathy sound escaped before the words did. “Celia, we all assumed it. Me, Sid…You didn’t correct us.”
Celia dropped her feet to the floor and sat up straighter. As she leaned forward, her face came out of the shadows, and the colors of the Tiffany lamp gave it warm definition. “Did you use the word acquittal?” Celia asked. “I don’t think you did. You didn’t say anything at all untrue.”
“Celia, you knew what I thought.”
“Why does it matter?”
“It matters because if you were acquitted of a crime, then any evidence used in that trial is irrelevant in a subsequent trial. If you were charged with Stan’s poisoning, the jury has no right to even know that you’d been charged with that before. But when the trial didn’t come to a natural conclusion…”
“Then I must be guilty? Is that it?”
“There’s a difference between acquittal, Celia, and being let off on a technicality. The judge could allow that evidence.”
Celia breathed a disbelieving laugh and got up. David braced his elbows on his knees and stared down at the floor between his feet. Jill watched Celia walk across the room, her arms crossed. It was a gesture that Jill was accustomed to—a defensive gesture that her clients often used. Especially the guilty ones.
“So what are you saying, Jill? That you don’t believe me now that you found out I wasn’t acquitted? You think I killed Nathan?”
She took a moment to consider that, then realized that she didn’t—couldn’t—think that. She just couldn’t help being miffed that Celia hadn’t been honest with her, and she needed to know the reason she had for hiding details about the case. “No, Celia. That’s not it. I believe you’re innocent. But you need to understand that you may be arrested for this, and if you are, your life is very much in my hands. I want to do everything in my power to help you. But that means that you have to help. You can’t leave things to my assumptions. You can’t let me think things and not correct them.”
“All right. I messed up! I wasn’t thinking.”
“You have to think, Celia. Your life, and maybe Stan’s life, depend on it.”
“Leave her alone,” David said. “Can’t you see she’s upset? She’s only had a couple of hours’ sleep in two days, she’s been throwing up, her husband’s dying in the hospital—”
“Dying?” Jill asked on a whisper. “Has he taken a turn for the worse?”
“No!” Celia cried, shooting David a venomous look. “David, don’t say that. He can’t die.”
He looked at her helplessly. “I’m just saying…you have enough on you without her badgering you like some half-baked criminal.”
“She’s not badgering me,” Celia said, wearily walking back to her chair and sinking into it. “She’s doing her job. It’s a tough one. I’m sorry, Jill. I’ll try to be more honest with you from now on. Please don’t give up on me just because I didn’t tell you everything.”
“It’s not me you have to worry about, Celia. Sid thinks he was duped, too. He thinks you were covering up.”
“Why would I do that? I knew you’d get the trial transcript! I’m not stupid. I just had Stan on my mind, and I was so afraid of going through it all again…” She stopped and looked vacantly at the wall behind Jill. In her eyes, Jill saw the emotions struggling and the self-recriminations winning out. “All right, I guess I did know that you thought I was acquitted,” she admitted finally, as the light from the lamp caught a tear in her eye. “But as far as I was concerned, I was. The judge dismissed the charges with prejudice. That means they can’t try it again. I was off. I wasn’t found guilty.”
>
Jill reached into her briefcase and pulled out the transcript, set it in her own lap, and looked down at it. Her head was beginning to throb, and she rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “There’s another thing.”
“What?”
“Sheree Donolly.” Jill looked up at her, gauging her reaction.
Celia gave David an “I should have known” look, and he plopped back in his chair. “What about her?” David asked.
Jill kept her eyes on Celia. “Why didn’t you tell me that she was having an affair with Nathan, and that the prosecution thought that was your motive for killing him?”
Jill wasn’t sure if the red color on Celia’s face came from the lamp or from the alarm at hearing that name again.
“Because…” The word came out just above a whisper. “I don’t think it’s true.”
“What? That they were having an affair? There were witnesses who said you knew about it.”
“My husband loved me!” Celia’s lips trembled, and she pushed her hair back from her face. “I didn’t know about any affair until after he’d died. I still can’t believe it, and I don’t trust anything she said in that trial. Nathan and I, we had so many plans…He wouldn’t have done that, Jill. It was just a lie they used.”
“You should have told me, Celia. Lie or not, I needed to know about it.”
“Why? All you need is the truth, Jill. I didn’t do it.”
Jill watched as Celia collapsed in tears, and David reached across the table and took her hand.
“Sheree and Nathan had a thing before he married Celia,” David said. “Some people said it never really ended. That he only married Celia for her money.”
Celia’s face twisted more, and she turned to David, shaking her head. “It wasn’t true, David. He loved me. We were happy.”
“I know, Sis,” he whispered. “They were,” he went on, looking back at Jill. “At first, I kind of thought the rumors might be true, but he changed my mind. He was good to her. Our parents were crazy about him.”
Jill didn’t like those rumors. “What did you think, David, when you heard those things in the trial? Celia was biased, didn’t want to believe them. But what about you?”
He let go of Celia’s hand and looked down at his feet again, struggling with his answer.
“I need the truth, David. I know you want to spare Celia’s feelings, but we need to cut to the heart of this.”
David looked up at her. “I thought it was true. I had even seen him with Sheree a couple of times at the office.”
“The office? You worked together?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “When he married Celia, my dad gave him a position in our company. He was executive vice president of marketing. Couple of times, I stuck my head in his office to tell him something, and Sheree was there. Once I saw him in the car with her in the parking garage, coming back from somewhere.”
Celia had heard this before, probably during the trial, so she didn’t seem surprised. But she shook her head, denying it all.
“Did he offer any explanations?” Jill asked.
“Oh, yeah. Said she was trying to borrow money from him. He acted like she was bugging him to death, and he couldn’t get rid of her. I bought it, at the time. But then, after all the testimony in the trial, I had to wonder.”
“They were lies,” Celia insisted again. “Why would those things be true, when they lied about my knowing? They said he’d asked me for a divorce just before the murder. That he’d told me about Sheree. That wasn’t true. The night before he was murdered, we’d had a romantic dinner in Natchez, and we’d planned a trip to New England when the leaves changed. There wasn’t any talk of divorce or another woman. They were all lies, and I won’t believe them, when I already know how many other lies were set up in that whole case. Somebody out there wanted them to believe the lies, and they worked very hard to make them all sound believable.”
Jill saw from the way Celia dropped her face into her hands and began sobbing that this was even more painful to her client than Jill had thought. She leaned back in her chair, too exhausted to comfort Celia. David sat there awkwardly, as if he wanted to comfort her but didn’t know how. Jill wondered how she would feel if she found her husband dead, then was accused of murdering him, then learned that he’d been cheating on her? How would she feel if she’d had to spend months in jail, unable to get her own questions answered, unable to find the person who’d really done it?
Wearily, she got up and put her arms around the woman who was her friend, and remembered why she’d wanted to represent her in the first place. It was simple. She knew Celia was innocent.
Stooping in front of her, Jill made Celia look at her. “Celia, you have to tell me everything. But I know you didn’t keep these things from me deliberately. The problem is that I’m afraid the police are going to grab this with both hands when they read the transcript. I tried to head it off by giving it to them myself, hoping they’d see that we weren’t trying to hide anything. But when Sid gets finished, he’s going to come to all the wrong conclusions.”
Celia hiccuped a sob. “Oh, if only Stan would wake up. He would tell them. He knows I wouldn’t do that. He may even know who did…where he ate…who he saw…maybe something tasted funny…” Her voice trailed off, and she covered her face again and shook her head hard. “But he may not even wake up.” She rubbed her face and looked up, then touched her stomach and got to her feet. “Oh, no. I’m gonna be sick again.”
She ran out to the bathroom, and Jill followed her tentatively. She stood at the bathroom door as Celia threw up. “Are you okay?” she asked after she had finished and was leaning against the wall.
“I guess.”
“I think you should see a doctor, Celia. Arsenic or not, something isn’t right.”
Celia just kept leaning against the wall, but she didn’t say anything.
Suddenly, Jill felt bone tired. Too tired to go on with this. Too tired to interpret her own instincts appropriately. “Celia, maybe I’ll go by the hospital and check on Stan. But first, is there anything else I need to know? Anything at all?”
“No, Jill. Nothing.”
“No more surprises?”
“Of course not.” Celia led her out of the bathroom and back into the parlor. David was standing now, staring out the window, and Aunt Aggie had come in from the backyard and was waiting to see if Celia was all right.
Jill went back to the sofa, slid the transcript back into her briefcase, and snapped it shut. “Look, we’ll start over in the morning, and maybe we can make some sense of all this. I really could use some sleep.”
“Me, too,” Celia said.
“Aunt Aggie, make her call the doctor. Something’s wrong with her.”
“First thing in the mornin’,” Aunt Aggie said.
“I’m just gonna go on home after the hospital, okay?” Jill said, finally. “And I’ll be here bright and early tomorrow.” She looked at David. “Are you staying with them tonight?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because I feel better with a man in the house. We don’t know who’s out there, or what they want.” As she said that, it occurred to her that David, with his slight build, might not be much of a deterrent. Still, his presence gave her some peace of mind.
As she stepped out into the humid night air, she took in a deep breath and wondered how this was going to end up. She hoped Celia didn’t get a conviction this time. But Jill just wasn’t sure that she was equipped to defend someone against murder.
Chapter Eighteen
The Wednesday night prayer meeting at Calvary Bible Church, which usually consisted only of its core group of active members, was unusually packed tonight. Allie and Mark Branning paused at the door of the fellowship hall, where supper cooked by some of the deacons’ wives was being served. Every table was filled to capacity, and some of the teenaged boys were carrying folding chairs in for those in the overflow.
“Good grief.” Mark stopped just inside the doorway, scann
ing the crowd. “I haven’t seen some of these people since Easter. Are the children singing tonight?”
Though the children’s musicals were always a big crowd sweller, what with all those proud parents and grandparents with their camcorders and cameras, Allie felt sure that wasn’t the draw tonight. When there was drama in town, people came to church. It was the central clearinghouse for all of the gossip that had filtered its way from telephone line to telephone line.
Allie saw Dan Nichols sitting at the end of one of the tables with two seats vacant, and when he waved for them to take them, they headed toward him.
“I saved you a couple of seats if you want them,” Dan said, running his fingers through his thinning hair. “The crowd really threw a wrench into supper, and the ladies are running around like chickens with their heads cut off back there trying to accommodate everybody. I already ate with Jill.”
“We’ll just get something later,” Allie said, taking her seat next to Dan. “I’m not that hungry, anyway.”
“Any word about Stan?”
Mark and Allie shot each other dismal looks before Mark spoke up. “We just came from the hospital. He’s still not awake. It worries me. It worries me a lot.”
“His parents are exhausted,” Allie added. “I don’t know how they’ll get through this.”
“Well, maybe tonight’s prayer meeting will help them,” Dan said.
“Maybe.” She met Mark’s eyes, but thankfully, he didn’t take the opportunity to shoot Dan’s hope down.
The piano on the stage at the far end of the room began to play, and Allie looked up to see Sue Ellen Hanover—the postal clerk—pounding the keys. Nick Foster got up and began leading those who had finished eating in a round of praise choruses. Since he liked to keep prayer meeting comfortable and relaxed, he held that service in the fellowship hall, where people could eat and fellowship among friends before they got down to business.
When they had finished singing the praise choruses, Nick took the microphone and began to read out the names of those who were sick, in the hospital, had special prayer requests, or had asked for intercession for friends or relatives. He seemed to fly through the names, as though he knew that the room hadn’t been packed tonight for the usual fare. The fact that there were needy people out there who had requested earnest prayers, only to have them practically glossed over, bothered Allie. Nick had no business catering to the roomful of undevoted people salivating for a morsel of news.
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