I Love You More

by Jennifer Murphy

  “Like what?” Mack asked. Noting her questioning glance, he added, “I’d just like to get a better picture of who your husband was. It may help our investigation.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Well, both of our fathers died from a heart attack, and at the exact same age. Consequently, we both preferred to eat healthy. No meat or poultry other than free-range chicken, fresh-caught fish, organic fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, almond butter. And we’d just started hiking more regularly. We both loved the outdoors. Financially we were perfectly matched; Oliver was very frugal. And reading. Oliver enjoyed reading even more than I.”

  I wanted to say something sarcastic like What a great guy, but decided against it. “I understand you have a child, Ms. Miles?”

  “Yes. She’s eleven months old. Her name is Isabelle. She’s napping.”

  “Pretty name,” I said.

  “It was my grandmother’s. Do either of you have children?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  “One boy,” Mack said. “Evan. He just turned three.”

  “Oh, I can’t wait until three. Do you have a picture?”

  Mack dug into his pocket, flipped open his wallet.

  “He is so handsome. He looks like you.”

  “Do you think so?” Mack asked as he admired his son’s picture.

  There was something about Roberta Miles that made a man feel instantly comfortable, even special. She was warm, nurturing. She had a certain softness about her that made you want to bury your head in her lap, let her stroke your hair—tell me everything would be okay—

  “You said you had some questions about Oliver’s murder?” I was surprised how easily the word murder had rolled off her tongue.

  Mack replaced his son’s picture and adopted his questioning posture. Roberta Miles’s responses were slow, thoughtful. She’d been at a writers’ conference.

  “Wildacres Retreat? In the Blue Ridge Mountains?” She waited for us to indicate we knew the place. We didn’t. “Well, it lasts two weeks. The first week you just write, and the second you workshop some pieces. I only attended the last week, what with Isabelle and all.”

  “You took your daughter with you?” I asked.

  “No, my mother stayed with her. She was visiting from Baltimore. I must admit I was quite exhausted, Isabelle was rather colicky, and I think I may have had a bit of postpartum depression. My mother’s coming was Oliver’s idea. The retreat was a last-minute decision actually. Pure luck it fell while she was here.”

  “Did you go for your job?” I asked. “You manage a bookstore in Boone, right?”

  “Yes, Black Bear Books. But that isn’t why I went, Detective. I’m a closet poet.”

  “What time did the conference start?” Mack asked.

  “Check-in was between noon and three,” Roberta Miles said.

  “How’d you get there?” Mack asked.

  “I drove,” she said. “It’s only an hour and twenty minutes from here. It seems I left the very morning Oliver was murdered; only I didn’t know that then. Gave me the chills when I found out.”

  “What time did you leave?”

  “I’m not certain. Seven, perhaps? I wanted to leave before Isabelle rose. You know, so she wouldn’t cry when she saw me leaving.”

  “Why so early?” Mack asked. “Since check-in wasn’t officially until noon.”

  “Like I said, Detective: Isabelle. But I also wanted to stop off for breakfast at the Woodlands. Do you know it?”

  “Can’t say that I do,” Mack said.

  “Well, you are missing quite a treat. The Woodlands Barbecue is down in Blowing Rock, a little out of the way if you’re going to Wildacres, but it has some of the best barbecue in the state.”

  “Did you pay with a credit card?”

  “Oh my, no. I’m not a big fan of credit, especially when it comes to inconsequential purchases. I did pay the conference fee with a credit card.”

  “So there’s no way you can prove you were at the Woodlands.”

  “Well, not through an actual receipt, if that’s what you mean. But I think the waitress will remember me. I gave her a twenty-dollar bill and told her to keep the change. Can you imagine, my entire meal was under twelve dollars? And I got the chicken and pig platter.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but breakfast couldn’t have taken more than an hour, so what did you do with the rest of your time?”

  “I went into Little Switzerland and did a bit of shopping. It’s a lovely and quaint little village just up the Blue Ridge Parkway from Wildacres.”

  “Did you buy anything?”

  “I’m not much of a spender, Detective Jones. I just wanted to browse. I did have a cup of tea at the inn, but unfortunately I didn’t pay for that with a credit card either.”

  “What time did you arrive at … uh”—Mack looked down at his notes—“Wildacres?”

  “A little before noon, actually, but the director let me check in early. Would you like me to give you her contact information? So you can verify what time I arrived? I’ll give you my mother’s information as well.” Before either of us could answer, she’d opened a drawer in the nearby end table, retrieved a notepad and pen, and started writing. “Here’s my mother’s phone number, and here is the website and e-mail address for Wildacres. I’m afraid I don’t know the telephone number off the top of my head, but I’m sure it’s listed on the website. Is there anything else you need? The address for the Woodlands?”

  “I can look it up,” Mack said. “Though there is one thing I’m wondering about.”

  “What’s that, Detective?”

  Mack leaned forward, rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “Seems odd you didn’t touch base with your husband while you were gone. Wherever we are, the wife and I check in every day.”

  “That does seem a bit peculiar, doesn’t it?” Roberta Miles said, and smiled. “Well, you see, detectives, there isn’t any cell-phone service at Wildacres. With the exception of the retreat center itself, it’s pretty undeveloped up there, mostly forest, dirt roads, even bears. It’s barely accessible in the winter months. Oliver travels—I mean, traveled—a lot. It wasn’t unusual for him not to contact me for a few days. When we were first married, I must admit I wondered about that, but then, well, I just got used to it.”

  “Makes more sense now, I should think,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, since now you know about his other lives.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “When exactly did you contact the local PD?” Mack asked.

  “You mean the police? The Wednesday after I got back.”

  “You arrived home on Saturday, right? So four days later?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why four days? Why not, say, two, three, or even five?”

  “It wasn’t about the number of days. Oliver didn’t come home. He always arrived home by dinnertime on Tuesday and left on Thursday afternoon. That’s how his travel schedule worked. So when he wasn’t home by Wednesday morning I knew something was wrong.”

  “And you never connected your missing husband with the dead man on Cooper’s Island?” Mack asked. “His picture was all over the news.”

  “I don’t own a TV,” Roberta Miles said. “Nor do I subscribe to the local paper. I prefer not to surround myself with negative energy.”

  I could almost feel Mack trying not to roll his eyes. Mack is your regular, everyday guy. We’d actually had more than one conversation about his dislike of those artsy-fartsy granola types. “You were married to Oliver Lane for what, well over a year, and you didn’t have any idea he had two other wives?” Mack asked. “You never once wondered where he was when he wasn’t home with you and your daughter?”

  She straightened. “You all might find this naïve, detectives, because your line of work breeds suspicion, but I am proud that I’ve always seen the good in everyone and anything. Why would I suspect my husband of something so distasteful as polyg
amy? Oliver was a good man, good husband, good father. Would you suspect your wife of such a thing, Detective Jones? Does it ever cross your mind that she’s with another man while you’re at work?” She paused. “I thought not.”

  Mack was staring at Roberta Miles with his mouth open, face flushed.

  I jumped in. “You’re right about our line of work, ma’am. It does, as you say, breed suspicion, but unfortunately somebody has to fight the bad guys so honest, trusting people like yourself can go on being that way.”

  “I appreciate your diligence, detectives.” A hint of sarcasm?

  “We should be on our way,” I said, and rose. Mack followed suit. “Thanks for your time and frankness, and for so graciously inviting us into your home unannounced.”

  I gave her my card, told her again how sorry we were, asked her not to hesitate to call if she needed anything. She walked us to the front door, urged us to drive safely, watched us get into the car, drive away.

  “Geez, do you believe that guy?” Mack said, when we were safely buckled in. “I mean she knows the guy had two other wives and yet she was still painting him as perfect. Sounds like he was some player.”

  “My bet is he’d been at it for a while. Hey, I’m hungry. You?”

  Downtown Boone was as quaint and rustic as I thought it would be. The two-story brick buildings housed an array of mountaintype stores specializing in ski, bicycle, and hiking gear, along with specialty clothing and gift shops, an art supplies store, a gallery, Mast General Store, which looked like it carried the kitchen sink, and a number of restaurants. We found a place called Heavenly Diner. The neon sign and striped awnings were right out of Mayberry. My mother was a huge Andy Griffith fan. I smelled grease as soon as I walked in the door; I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. A counter that backed up to the kitchen ran the length of the narrow restaurant. Several booths with red vinyl seats, Formica tabletops, and miniature jukeboxes lined the windowed wall. All, save one, were occupied.

  The waitress, who may have been attractive had it not been for the cropped purple hair, nose ring, black lipstick, and green fingernails, wore a crisp white uniform and pink apron.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Belinda. Can I take your order?”

  I’d expected her name to be something like Roxy or Gigi. “How’re your burgers?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t eat meat, but customers seem to like them.”

  “I’ll have a burger and fries.”

  “Cheese?” Belinda asked.

  “Sure. And what about your malts?”

  “What about them?”

  “They any good? Oh, that’s right, you probably wouldn’t know since milk comes from a cow.”

  “Funny,” she said. “They’re called Heavenly Malts, aren’t they?”

  “Then I’ll have a vanilla malt too.”

  “Same for me,” Mack said.

  “Just the malt?” Belinda asked.

  “No, the burger too, but no cheese.”

  Belinda yelled our order to the cook, and then went back behind the counter where she seemed to be in deep discussion with a young man on one of the barstools. He sported a similar hairdo and nose ring, and very tight black jeans.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Mack.

  “Those nose rings look like they’d hurt,” he said.

  “I mean about the case,” I said.

  “Well, for one thing, unless we can verify that Roberta Miles was at the Woodlands, her alibi is weak. Wildacres Retreat is roughly the same distance from Cooper’s as Boone is.”

  “You’re saying she could’ve shot Lane and made it to the writers’ retreat by noon?”

  “Easy,” Mack said. “If she didn’t stop for breakfast and tea.”

  “But Lane got shot at seven fifteen. She would’ve had to leave a lot earlier than seven.”

  “Maybe she lied; I’ll check with the mother. And I don’t buy what she said about not knowing her husband was missing. I mean, who doesn’t know their spouse, shit even their roommate, is missing when they don’t see or hear from him in nearly two weeks? I don’t care how diligent she is about avoiding negative energy, she can’t avoid life. What? Does she live in a gopher hole?”

  “It’s a little like that up here,” I said.

  “You mean you believe her?”

  “I didn’t say that. What about the other two wives?”

  “Julie Lane’s alibi checks out. She was representing her architectural firm at some meeting in Philadelphia. Called a ‘design charrette.’ Apparently everyone working on the project, including the local community, draws the building together. Can you imagine? Getting paid to sit around some table drawing pictures? Sounds like a junket to me. And, if we believe the kid’s version of what happened the day of the murder, it lets Diana Lane off the hook.”

  “It’s not like the two of them had time to get their stories straight,” I said. “Not to mention her lab work came back negative for blood and gunshot residue.”

  “Funny, though, that she didn’t call 911.”

  Belinda delivered our burgers and malts. She looked as if she wanted to ask us what we’d been talking about. She probably didn’t encounter a couple of suits driving an unmarked black Buick every day.

  “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “Nope, looks good,” I said.

  She hovered for a moment, but then went off to take another order.

  We devoured our burgers without speaking. After I sucked up the remaining drops of my malt, which had definitely lived up to its name, I asked Mack where we’d left off.

  “Diana Lane not calling 911.”

  “Maybe she just didn’t think to,” I said. “She was obviously in shock.”

  “Or maybe she was buying time,” Mack said.

  “For what?”

  “For her accomplices to get away.”

  “Accomplices?”

  “The other wives.”

  “You think they did it together? That’s a leap.”

  “I’m just throwing the idea out there. The blond-hair thing is pretty weird. I mean the exact same color, style, and length? What’s up with that? And what about their answers? That whole ‘don’t call me ma’am’ thing for instance. Julie Lane said something very similar when I talked to her. How about the other Mrs. Lane?”

  “Which other Mrs. Lane?”

  “The first one. Diana. Geez, this is confusing.”

  “What about her?”

  “Did she say anything about not calling her ma’am?”

  “Not that I remember. But even if she had, lots of women don’t like to be called ma’am. It’s some sort of feminist thing. I admit the hair stuff is strange. Maybe our vic asked them to wear their hair that way, and besides, if they were trying to elude us, wouldn’t they have made an effort to look as different as possible?”

  “Don’t you find it odd that Diana Lane knew exactly how long her swim took? Or that she just happened to return to the beach house fifteen minutes after the murder. There was no gun; we tore that place apart. So obviously whoever pulled the trigger took it with her.”

  “Or him,” I said.

  “So you’re still saying burglary?”

  “I’m saying that things aren’t always as they appear.”

  “How so?” Mack asked.

  “Agatha Christie. Murder on the Orient Express.”

  “Let me guess,” Mack said. “Another movie analogy.”

  “Hear me out,” I said. “A murder takes place on a train. The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot investigates and finds that the dead passenger, Ratchett, is really a notorious criminal named Cassetti, who kidnapped and killed the three-year-old heiress Daisy Armstrong. Turns out each of the twelve passengers had a connection with the kid, and one by one stabbed Cassetti in his sleep, but in the end, Poirot pins the murder on an unknown assailant who secretly boarded the train during the night.”

  “Wow,” Mack said. “He let them get away with it?”

  “He though
t the guy deserved it,” I said. “But that isn’t the point.”

  “What is?”

  “We knew the passengers had murdered Cassetti. We watched it. But if we hadn’t, if the scene of the actual murder had been cut, we might have bought Poirot’s theory about a thief boarding the train in the night. It was plausible.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mack said. “You yourself said it was the passengers, that Poirot made the thief thing up.”

  “The point is, you and me, we’re each playing a different movie in our minds where this case is concerned. What we need to do is get rid of any of the scenes we’ve imagined but can’t substantiate. I was thinking about what Diana Lane said about her husband always having cash on him when they traveled. Since we didn’t find any at the scene, I decided to check that out. Turns out our vic paid for everything with cash. I’m betting the wives aren’t the only ones who knew that.”

  “Who doesn’t use credit cards?” Mack asked.

  “Somebody who doesn’t want a paper trail,” I said. “And you don’t think that’s sketchy? There may be more to Oliver Lane than polygamy.”

  “I don’t know,” Mack said. “A robbery angle seems like a stretch.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “So what now?”

  “We do our job. We check into Roberta Miles’s alibi. Recheck the other wives’. We find out if anyone saw a suspicious car either on the ferry or the island, or a woman matching either Julie Lane’s or Roberta Miles’s description near the beach house the morning of the murder. We keep looking for that gun. We do a deeper investigation into Oliver Lane’s background. Talk to his therapist, or whatever doctor prescribed those pills I found at the scene. Check in with his work colleagues again; make sure we didn’t miss anyone. See if any of his clients had it in for him. Seems he represented some mean dudes, Mafia types, wealthy bankers, shady politicians. And we don’t make any judgments until we’ve got something concrete. At this point, all that other stuff—the timing of the murder, the wives’ answers, Diana Lane’s arrival at the scene—could just be coincidences.”

  “Since when do you believe in coincidences?” Mack asked.