by Jill Orr
“And when Sheriff Haight heard Dr. Davenport had toxic levels of the drug in his system, and then found those same drugs on Thad, he arrested him.” I finished Tabitha’s thought for her.
“Exactly.”
“But wait,” I said. “I’m confused, did Arthur die from digitalis poisoning or from being stabbed?”
“The medical examiner hasn’t determined the official cause of death yet. But Carl—in his infinite stupidity—decided to arrest Thad anyway.”
Tabitha was so distressed I felt sorry for her. She seemed genuinely concerned for Thad. I could imagine that spending any time at all in jail would be pretty hard on a guy who had grown up on the Davenport estate, and it was touching how scared she was for him.
“I’m sorry, Tab,” I said. “This must be so hard on you.”
“Yeah. His final tuxedo fitting is in three days! Can you imagine if I have to ask the tailor to come to the jail to do it?”
Just then the door to the sheriff’s office opened. Butter leaned halfway out and looked at Tabitha. “You can see him now if you want.”
Tabitha said nothing but gave Butter the evil eye before twitching past him into the station.
“I was there when that girl was born, did you know that?” Butter said, shaking his head. “Marge was the on-call nurse at Tuttle General the night Patricia’s water broke. I was up there bringing Marge some dinner. Anyway, little Tabby was born just after 8 p.m., I remember, because there was a Nationals game on and Dr. Benton was itching to get home to watch it. She came out all pink and wrinkly, like we all do I expect, but I remember she had a set of lungs on her like I’d never heard. Marge and the other nurses joked she was gonna be an opera singer.” He laughed at the memory. “I guess she found another use for those lungs of hers.”
I smiled. Tabitha was well known around town for her robust rants. “Hey, how’s Carl holding up?” I asked him before he turned to go back inside.
“He’s doing all right, trying to conduct the investigation to the absolute letter of the law—with so many eyes watching and all. And the mayor’s had that little minion of hers calling over here every hour to get an update.”
“Uch, Toby.”
Mayor Shaylene Lancett’s nephew, the only son of her only brother, was her unofficial second-in-command. Even though Toby Lancett held no official post within our government, he was continually dispatched by the mayor for anything she couldn’t, or didn’t, want to do herself. This gave Toby, an otherwise excellent candidate for Most Likely to Be Shot by His Own Troops, an inflated sense of power.
“I can see why the mayor’s upset though. Two murders in about as many months does not exactly reflect well upon Tuttle Corner now does it?”
“No, it does not. Carl would sure like to solve this one quickly and move on.”
“How about Lindsey Davis? Has she been by yet?” Lindsey Davis was the new prosecuting attorney in Tuttle County.
He nodded. “She was here about a half an hour ago—” Butter stopped midsentence. He’d said too much and he knew it. “Nuh-uh.” He wagged a finger at me. “No comment. That’s what I’m supposed to say to all-y’all right now. Carl’ll make a statement soon. Until then”—he mimed locking his lips with an invisible key and then, in true Butter form, he ate it.
I hung around the sheriff’s office a while longer trying to get anyone to talk to me, but they were all on message with “No comment.” Once I’d hit a dead end I decided to go by the office quickly to log the story. It was a short piece, reporting only the news that there’d been an arrest in the case. I had just uploaded the article and was getting ready to head home when I got a text. I assumed it was from Jay checking on me, but I was wrong. It was from Tabitha:
I NEED TO TALK TO YOU ASAP. MEET ME AT LIBRARY NOW. COME ALONE. PLEASE.
CHAPTER 6
Tabitha, red-eyed and blotchy-cheeked, sat across from me in the children’s section of the library. Even though it was way past closing time, we both had keys and knew the code to the alarm system. Plus, we knew Dr. H wouldn’t mind us meeting here. And back in the children’s section, we could sit with the lights on and no one would be able to see from the outside. Tabitha said we needed absolute privacy for this conversation. And after hearing the story she just told me, I understood why.
“Tab,” I said after she’d finished unburdening herself. “I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a priest. I work for the newspaper, you know.”
She shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m planning to tell Carl all of this tomorrow anyway, but I wanted you to know what really happened because once I tell Carl what I did—” She broke off for a moment. “—I’ll probably be in jail right beside Thad.”
I nodded. I wasn’t certain about the particulars of the law, but I knew enough to know that what Tabitha had done almost certainly fell outside the bounds of legality.
Turns out part of what I already knew was true; it just wasn’t the whole story. Tabitha had gone over to Thad’s house and found Dr. Davenport dead in his office. As she walked around the body she saw the handle of a small folding hunting knife sticking out of his chest. Thad’s knife. It had been a gift from Arthur to Thad when Thad graduated from Duke, the blade engraved with the words, Be the man I know you can be.
“I know it was stupid, but I just panicked. Before I really thought about what I was doing, I grabbed the knife from his chest, wiped it clean, and threw it into an urn in the hallway.”
Thad had not been at a meeting in Richmond, as she had told me earlier. The truth was that she hadn’t seen him since the night before. He’d come over to her place Sunday night and they’d fought.
“Arthur could be hard on his boys.” Tabitha’s hand shook as she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye; the massive diamond on her left ring finger caught the light as she moved. “He loved them, but often held them to an impossible standard, particularly Thad, being the firstborn and all.”
Tabitha said the two had gotten into it yet again about Thad’s being in pharmaceutical sales. Dr. Davenport felt like Thad had chosen the path of least resistance instead of rising to his potential and going to medical school like his brother.
Thad told Tabitha that Arthur was halfway into a bottle of Macallan when Thad got home Sunday night. “He started in about how it was so embarrassing when Thad walked in ‘hawking his crap’ in front of his colleagues. He said how much smarter and more motivated David is, and why can’t he be more like him . . . he just went on and on.
“Thad has the patience of a saint. Obviously.” She threw me a guilty look from under her lashes. “So he was pretty good about letting that kind of stuff roll off, but I guess it got to him that night because he started yelling back. Thad said it got bad—years of resentment started coming out, both of them yelling and screaming at each other.
“He came to my place around 7:45 as upset as I’ve ever seen him. He said he was going to show his father that he couldn’t control him. He said he was going to tell his father that he didn’t need him or his money anymore.” Tabitha’s face twisted in anguish. “I know it was wrong of me—and selfish—but all I could think about was the wedding and where we would get married. I mean, we have less than two weeks to go and the invitations have already gone out and—” Fresh tears sprang to her eyes and she wiped them away quickly. “Anyway. Then we fought. It was awful, we almost never fight. Thad got so angry, he left my place at just after nine and said he was going to stay with his brother.”
I was rapt listening to this story and wondered how much of it Carl Haight knew. This certainly did not look good for Thad.
“So why did you go over to the house the next day?”
She took a deep breath. “Arthur and I had always gotten along really well, and I just thought if I could talk to him and get him to calm down, maybe he’d apologize to Thad and we could go on like none of it ever happened. But then I saw him lying there . . . with Thad’s knife . . . I mean, of course I knew Thad would never—could never—but I just reacted out of p
rotective instinct and now . . .” This was the most genuine emotion I’d ever seen from Tabitha in all the years I’d known her.
“I called you for help, but by the time you got there I was so freaked out by what I’d done, I couldn’t even admit it to you, so I made up that stuff about the obituary.”
“I had a feeling there was more to the story than just you wanting me to write the obit,” I said.
She nodded. “I called you because you were able to get to the truth of what happened to Jordan, even after the sheriff closed the case. I need you to do the same thing here, Riley. You’re not one of those people who just accepts things at face value.” She said this like it was both a compliment and an insult. “And despite the face value here, there is no way Thad killed his father. He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body. You have to help us!”
“Does Thad know what you did?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t have time to tell him. I hoped to tell him on the drive over to the station, but they separated us.” She dropped her face into her hands and took another deep, steadying breath. With her eyes still focused on the carpet below, she said, “I know I have to tell Carl, but once I do he probably won’t even look for other suspects. He’ll focus all his energy on Thad—and me.”
She had a point there. Dr. Davenport was a wealthy man and Thad (and by extension, Tabitha) stood to inherit a lot of money after his death. When you added in the rocky personal relationship, the murder weapon or weapons being in Thad’s possession, and the argument the night before he died, it didn’t take much to see Thad and Tabitha as lead suspects.
Tabitha stared at me and I could feel the weight of her desperation. It was painful. Whatever the truth was, Tabitha believed to her core that her fiancé was innocent.
“I need your help, Riley.”
“I’m not sure what I can do . . .”
“You’re smart. You’ll figure it out. You knew there was something off with Jordan’s death and you were right. You have to know there’s something off here, too. You’re already writing the obituary, right?”
I nodded.
“So just use those interviews to look into who could have wanted Arthur dead. Did he have any enemies? Any bad business dealings? Anyone else who would profit from his being out of the way? Or maybe it was one of his girlfriends—he always had plenty of those . . .”
“Listen,” I said, thinking about the mounting evidence against Thad. “My job as a reporter is to uncover the truth. Are you prepared for the possibility that you might not like what I find out?”
“We have nothing to hide,” she said firmly. “Just find out what really happened. Because whatever it was, I can promise you it had nothing to do with me or Thad.”
Despite Thad’s means, motive, and opportunity, I wasn’t convinced that he had killed his father—at least there was enough doubt there for me to want to know more. And I’ll admit there was a small part of me that was excited by the possibility of uncovering new information or a hidden suspect on this case. That would show everyone at the Times that I wasn’t just a one-hit wonder, wouldn’t it?
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look into it. But I’m not doing this for you or Thad. I’m looking for the truth—whatever that might be. You know that, right?”
“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!” Tabitha cried as she pulled me into an aggressive embrace that suggested she did not understand any such thing.
When I got home, Jay was asleep on my couch with a very comfortable Coltrane curled up at his feet. I texted him before I met Tabitha to let him know I’d be a while. He wrote back saying simply: I’ll wait.
I walked in quietly and set my purse and keys down on the sofa table and allowed myself a moment to indulge in the sight. Jay was what women of an older generation would call “a real catch.” He was smart, successful, kind, funny—not to mention easy on the eyes. I tiptoed over to the couch where he lay sleeping and leaned over to kiss his perfect mocha-skinned forehead. His lashes fluttered open like Snow White.
“Hey.”
“Hi,” I said, and dipped my head again to kiss him. “Thanks for taking care of Coltrane.”
“Aw, he took care of me—that dog has the soul of a philosopher.” He smiled and propped himself up on his elbow. “How’d it go? Everything okay?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, unsure of how much I could ethically tell him. I didn’t want to lie to him, but since Tabitha had made me promise to keep what she told me off the record until she talked to Carl, I couldn’t tell him about the conversation either. Plus, there was a tiny part of me that worried about what Jay would think if he knew I’d agreed to look into who else might have a reason to want Arthur Davenport dead. He’d seen a lot of bad guys in his time with the DEA, and because of that he tended to worry about safety more than someone else might. The last thing I wanted was for him to worry. So I did what any woman would do who wanted to avoid answering a question posed by a gorgeous man who just happened to be lying on her couch: I distracted him.
Hey Riley,
My name is Jenna B and I am going to be ur Personal Success Concierge™ over the next month and hopefully a lot longer than that—haha lol!
I am so excited to meet u! When I read ur profile I was like, “OMG. This girl and I could be frickin’ twins!” It’s like we’ve lived doubles lives—seriously. U grew up in a small town; I grew up in a small suburb. U were an English major in college; I am thinking about majoring in English if I decide to go back to school—plus, I read Pride and Prejudice at least once a year. How frickin’ weird is that?
Anyway. I want to just lay out for u how this whole thing is going to work. Ur free trial comes with an unlimited number of emails over the next 30 days. (After that we can figure it out. There are plans.) But basically I’m here for u whatever u need. U can ask me questions and I’ll try to provide guidance and give u my perspective and—[TRIGGER WARNING]—sometimes even challenge ur truths. Challenging truth is an important aspect of being a Personal Success Concierge™. More on that ltr.
Anyway. Just a little bit about me: I am a gifted encourager and I have had an overdeveloped sense of intuition from a very young age, according to my mom. I love to workout, meditate, eat clean (except when it comes to Cinnabon, u feel me?), practice yoga, and journal when I have the time. My secret dream is to star in a movie opposite Eddie Redmayne. I also hope to own a tiny house someday.
Would love to know more about what makes u u and what u hope to accomplish over the next 30. Write back when u can. Can’t wait to dive in!
xx,
Jenna B
Personal Success Concierge™
Bestmillenniallife.com
Dear Jenna B,
Thank you for the nice letter. I thought I marked the box next to “Thanks but no thanks” on the initial form. Maybe there was some mistake? In any case, I am not in need of a Personal Success Concierge.
Best of luck getting that tiny house someday!
Riley Ellison
Hey Riley,
A lot of people r intimidated by the process at first, but no worries I got u, haha lol! Plus, did you not get the memo that it is FREE, as in 100% gratis??? That’s like a huge savings. U’d b silly not to take advantage of it. In the wise words of Nike, “Just do it.”
Anyway. I’ll make it easy for u: Fill in the blank of this sentence: The thing I am most afraid of in the world is: ____
xx,
Jenna B
Personal Success Concierge™
Bestmillenniallife.com
Getting roped into situations against my will.
All best,
Riley
CHAPTER 7
Jay left the next morning before the sun came up. He said he wanted to go home and catch a shower before heading up to the DC office, where he’d been spending a lot of time lately. I got up, made coffee, and sat down to my laptop as I did every morning to read the obituaries. I looked through the obituary sections from eight newspapers habitually. It
had become a way to center myself, a ritual like drinking coffee or going for a run. Maybe it was the perspective obituaries offered. Maybe it was the reminder that we are all just bouncing around on this planet for a short time. Or maybe it was just that I loved learning about people’s stories. Reading about a life well lived filled me with a certain sense of peace and hopefulness, and was as good a way to start my day as anything else I’d found.
That day’s selections included a taxi driver from Connecticut whose hobby was growing large vegetables; a grandmother from Denver who had never cut her hair, not once in her whole life, and it was down to her calves when she died at age eighty-seven; and a once-famous violinist who lived in a small village in the English countryside who died after a long battle with Parkinson’s. After the disease robbed him of his ability to play, he offered free lessons to any child in his village who expressed a desire to learn. And I read about a woman from a small town in Oregon who once a month on Thursdays for over twenty-three years made homemade lasagna, garlic bread, and a green salad, and dropped it off at the local fire station. When she passed, more than forty firefighters, past and present, attended her funeral. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I like to think Mrs. Edith Westerson was looking down that day and saw how many lives she touched with her simple kindness.
Full up on perspective for the day, I walked into the office at just after 8 a.m. Gerlach Spencer and Bruce Henderson actually stood up and applauded as I walked in.
“The intern’s got skills,” Henderson said, as I set my things down at my desk. “That was quite a scoop you got last night.”
After I talked with Tabitha, I had logged an update to the story I’d written earlier, to reflect what Tabitha told me about the events leading up the Arthur Davenport’s death. I had to attribute the information to an “anonymous source close to the family,” but it was still a strong piece containing new information about a hot case. I’ll admit I felt proud of it, even if the story had just landed in my lap.