The Bad Break

by Jill Orr

  “I’m okay!” I called out as brightly as I could manage. I was wearing a yellow sundress, now covered in brown splatters, that I hoped provided ample coverage as I crawled around on hands and knees trying and mostly failing to pick up the ice cubes and put them back into my cup.

  “I’ll get that,” a man wearing dark blue coveralls said as he walked up with a mop and one of those rolling buckets. “That was quite a fall. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “Just my pride,” I said, standing up and smiling weakly. “Sorry about the mess.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” the man said. “I’m sorry about having that cord there. I was just fixing to start working on the floor.”

  “Nope, it was my fault. I was rushing.”

  The man looked at me intently for a moment. I was starting to get uncomfortable when he said, “Are you by any chance that reporter from the Times? The one who busted Sheriff Tackett?”

  This had happened a few times over the past month. Ours was a small town, and my picture had been in the paper after Holman and I had helped send the sheriff and county prosecutor to prison.

  “That’s me.” I stuck my hand out to shake his. “Riley Ellison.”

  “Jack. Nice to meet you.” He shook my hand. “If you’re in a hurry, you can go on ahead. I’ll get this taken care of.”

  I hated to leave him with the mess I’d made, but I didn’t want to miss my opportunity to meet with David. “Thank you so much, Jack. I really appreciate your coming to my rescue!”

  I made my way to the hospital caffeteria and scanned the room for a slightly younger version of Thad, which was what I expected David Davenport to look like. I was wrong.

  “Riley?” A ridiculously handsome guy stood up from one of the small tables by the windows. He gave me a wide smile as he reached to shake my hand. “David Davenport. Sorry to make you come all the way down here, but this is my second home these days.”

  I could already tell this guy had more charisma in his right dimple than his brother had in his whole body. His eyes flicked down to the mocha-colored Rorschach on the front of my otherwise sunny dress.

  “I, um, had a little spill,” I said, feeling the heat creeping into my cheeks. And then I quickly changed the subject. “I’m so sorry about your father.”

  David ran a hand through his thick, dark hair as he sighed and looked to the left. The gesture was pure Thad, and it struck me that although the two didn’t look alike at all, they definitely had similar mannerisms.

  “Thanks. I’m still trying to make sense of what happened.” He sat down across from me at the faux-wood table and dropped his hands into his lap. He looked young, incredibly attractive, and very tired. We got some of the fundamental questions out of the way, like where and when he was born, the basics of the family tree, and a general skeleton of his father’s life before he married Thad and David’s mother. I knew a lot of this already from the file, but it never hurt to get information firsthand. After we covered those topics, I wanted to get some deeper information about the relationship between father and son.

  “Did your father’s profession influence your decision to go into medicine?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said quickly. “I grew up going to work with him, listening to him talk with his patients on the phone late at night. I was with him when people would stop us in the grocery store to thank him for taking care of someone they loved. I saw how what he did made a difference in people’s lives. I knew I wanted to do something just as meaningful with my life.”

  It wasn’t every day that you saw unabashed hero-worship from a twenty-seven-year-old guy about his dad. “Will you go in to cardiology as well?”

  “Not sure. I’m finishing up my first year of my internal medicine residency, and I have two more before I have to decide. I’m leaning toward it, but I just got off a Peds rotation and really liked that too. So I don’t know, maybe pediatric cardiology?”

  “Cool,” I said and made like I was jotting something down. But really I was trying to think of another question. I wasn’t expecting David Davenport to be so interesting given what I knew of his brother. Thad had always been nice to me when he came by the library to visit Tabitha, but he was chronically vanilla. Literally and figuratively. He had skin the color of a button mushroom, with ample dark hair covering his arms and occasionally sprouting out of the top of his collar. He wasn’t necessarily unattractive, but I’d always assumed Tabitha’s interest in him had as much to do with his family money as anything else. His brother on the other hand was dynamic and energetic and refreshingly un-hairy.

  “Um, okay, so can you tell me about the kind of father Arthur was to you?”

  He picked up his phone, which had been sitting face-down on the table, and checked the time.

  “Oh, I’m sorry—do you have to go?” I asked.

  “Nah, I have another few minutes. Do you mind if I grab a shake or something while we talk? Not sure when I’ll get another break.”

  “Of course.” I followed him over to the cafeteria line.

  “You’re from Tuttle, right?” he asked as we stood in line behind a man holding a large refillable coffee mug. “What year were you in school?”

  “I graduated a year behind Tabitha.”

  “I was a few years ahead of you then.”

  “You didn’t go to Tuttle, though.” This wasn’t a question. With a graduating class of eighty-seven people, I would have known anyone—or at least been able to recognize anyone—who was within a few years of my class.

  David ordered a Green Monster shake from the woman working behind the counter. She blushed and he pretended not to notice, but something told me he knew exactly the effect he had on the opposite sex. “I went to Woodberry, over in Charlottesville.”

  That made sense. Woodberry was a fancy prep school about an hour from Tuttle Corner. It was known for strong academics, but an even stronger sports program. David, while clearly bright, was athletically built, with the thick neck of a football or rugby player. “Did Thad go there too?”

  He paid for the shake, took his change, smiled at the pretty checkout girl again, and we walked back to the table. “No, he went through Tuttle schools. I don’t think Wood-berry was even on my parents’ radar when Thad went through school.” David’s face changed at the mention of his older brother, who now stood accused of their father’s murder. “You know, I just realized something,” he said, a wistful look on his face.

  “What?”

  “I guess I’m an orphan now.”

  Technically that was true. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said nothing for a few moments, allowing David the space to sit with his realization. “Um, how long has your mom been gone?”

  “She died when I was sixteen. Cancer,” he said in the matter-of-fact way physicians have of talking about illness and death.

  “Your father never remarried?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Got close a time or two but I don’t think he was really interested in starting over after Mom passed. He used to joke, ‘Marriage is a lot of work, and I already have a full-time job.’” David laughed. “But really, I think Dad was just a bit of a player, you know?”

  The word player was not often applied to a sixty-year-old man and it struck me as odd. “Was he seeing anyone—I mean, just before he died?” I wasn’t sure if I was asking as a part of my role as obituarist or crime reporter, or if it even mattered. Either way, David didn’t look offended.

  “Dad always had something going on,” he said. “But he didn’t usually talk to me too much about it, thank goodness.” He smiled and gave me a wink.

  With about five minutes left before he had to go back to work, I asked the one question that all good obit writers are supposed to try to get an answer to. “So, if you had to say, what was the one thing you learned from your father’s life?”

  David leaned forward, elbows resting on the table, his slate-blue eyes looking directly into mine, while he thought about how to answer this rather philosophical,
cosmic question. Most people have to think about this one for a while. But David Davenport was not most people, and within a few seconds he said, “Life is short. Don’t be an asshole.”

  It was an unexpected answer in both speed and wit, and it made me laugh.

  He smiled. “It’s funny, but I’m serious.”

  “No—I mean, I get it. . .” I said. I knew I needed to follow up on that, but I couldn’t think of quite what to ask. What was it about this guy that made me feel so flustered? I again pretended to make notes in order to buy time to think.

  “Riley?” He interrupted my thought.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you want to ask me if I think my brother killed my father?”

  That got my attention. “Do you?”

  “Not a chance in hell. And you can quote me on that.” There was no smile on his face when he spoke this time, no playful twinkle in his eye. He was dead serious and he wanted me to know it.

  “What about the night of the murder,” I said, my pen poised over my notebook. “Thad says he came to your house around nine.”

  “I wasn’t home, but Thad has his own key. If he says he was there, he was there. It’s just that I didn’t see him.”

  His phone vibrated and he turned it over; his brow wrinkled at whatever was on the display. “Shoot—I have to run, I’m sorry.” He looked up. “But maybe we could continue this conversation another time?”

  “Sure. My deadline for the obit is Saturday.”

  “Oh,” he said, “well, I’m going to be here until”—he turned over his wrist, which didn’t have a watch on it—“forever.” He smiled. “But maybe I could call you sometime?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You have my number. I’ll be working on this right up until deadline if you think of anything else.”

  “Okay,” he said. I was about to stick out my hand to shake his when he smiled and looked down at the ground. “What if I think of something else, like, totally unrelated?”

  “Um, well, sure. You never know when one can include the odd tidbit in a piece . . .”

  A pinkish hue appeared just under his high cheekbones. “Uh, I guess I’m really bad at this,” he said and cleared his throat. “What I am trying to say—very awkwardly, obviously—is could I call you sometime? You know, not necessarily about this . . .”

  My stomach flipped over. He was asking me out? I’d had no idea. I wasn’t used to cute doctors asking me out. Or cute anybodies for that matter. Jay had asked me out online through Click.com, and the only other guy I’d dated before him was Ryan, who asked me out by passing me a note in tenth-grade Geometry. “Oh,” I said, trying to play it off casually. “Oh . . . well, uh . . .” Casual wasn’t really my thing.

  “I’ll take that as a no?”

  “Gosh, David, that’s so nice,” I said quickly, not wanting to stretch out this hideous moment. “But I’m actually seeing someone.”

  “Aw, man.” He smiled. “All the good ones are taken. Ah, well, it was worth a shot.”

  It was me who was fully blushing by this point. “Um, thanks,” I said, tucking an errant hair behind my ear because I needed something to do other than stand there and look like an idiot.

  We walked out of the cafeteria together without a word. I had parked out front, and there was one main corridor that led to the entrance. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me,” I said, which seemed somehow oddly formal. “Again, I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “Thanks.” He flashed me his wide, confident smile, and I knew he’d be just fine after my rejection.

  We said our goodbyes and he went up the elevators back into the bowels of the hospital. I headed out to the parking lot. But as I got into my car, I wasn’t thinking about what he said about his father or his brother, or how I would incorporate his quotes into the obit. All I could think about was how odd it was for a good-looking, single doctor to hit on the woman writing his father’s obituary while she was writing it. And, much to my own dismay, how flattered I was that I could turn the head of someone like David Davenport.

  CHAPTER 10

  Arthur Davenport’s office was in a building adjacent to the hospital, so I figured as long as I was right there I’d pop over to see if his office manager could spare me a few minutes. Tabitha had told me that Arthur and Donna had worked together for years and that she knew more about his life than he did.

  Donna was red-eyed and blotchy-cheeked when she came to the door. The office was closed for the day, but she and another woman were inside making phone calls and rescheduling patients with other physicians. She invited me right in when I told her I’d be writing Dr. Davenport’s obituary for the Times.

  “It’s such a shock,” she said as she let me inside. “Arthur. . . murdered? I still can’t believe it . . .”

  It was hard to see someone in this kind of pain, and it wasn’t lost on me that this woman, who was not a blood relative, was clearly the most distraught of all the people I’d talked to thus far. She took me back to her office and sat me down in an old chair with peeling faux-leather on the armrest. We talked for almost twenty minutes and from what Donna had to say about him, you’d have thought Arthur Davenport hung the moon. She told me about how patients would travel for miles just to see him and how he was the hardest-working man she knew. I took copious notes and got more than a few quotes I could use for the obit. So I decided to veer off the obituary course for just a moment.

  “Were there any patients who didn’t like him? Anyone who might have wanted to harm him?”

  Donna looked stricken. “Of course not! He was helping them all—in many cases, he had saved their lives! No, everyone loved him. I mean, on occasion, I suppose there was the odd . . .” she stopped herself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “No—there wasn’t anyone who would want to hurt Dr. Davenport.” You could tell Donna would protect Arthur Davenport’s reputation with her life, but I needed her to open up.

  “The sheriff is going to be looking into all of this, you know.”

  She twisted the wedding ring on her left hand. “Arthur could be, um, well, it’s just that for a very smart man sometimes he didn’t always make the smartest choices.”

  I poised my pen over my notebook. “What do you mean?”

  Her eyes darted toward the front of the office and she lowered her voice to a whisper, “Arthur liked the ladies.”

  This was the second time inside of an hour that I heard Arthur Davenport was a ladies’ man. Love gone wrong is perhaps the oldest motive for murder in the book. I tried asking her the same question I’d asked David. “Was he seeing anyone before he died?”

  She let out a snort. “Someone? Probably more like a few someones . . .”

  “Can you give me any names?”

  She shook her head, her face coloring. “No, no, I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sure it has no relation to . . . well, you know . . .” Her eyes grew misty again, and she dabbed at the corner of one with a crumpled tissue.

  “Donna,” I said, “the best thing you can do for Arthur now is to help us find out who did this to him. If you know something, you should speak up.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She looked terribly uncomfortable, and the Southern girl inside me desperately wanted to rescue her from the situation, but my inner-reporter muzzled her and I waited in silence for Donna to continue. “You might want to, um, ask around about Arthur’s past love life. There’s a certain someone in town who was carrying a pretty heavy torch for him.” She widened her eyes. “She thought they were destined to walk down the aisle, but I don’t think he shared those same thoughts.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “That’s all I’m going to say about that,” she said and pursed her lips together.

  I left it—for the moment—making a mental note to find out who this “certain someone” was at a later date. And then I switched gears. “I had a nice chat with David this morning.”

  “Oh, that David,” she s
aid with affection. “He’s an ornery one.”

  Ornery wasn’t exactly the word I would have chosen to describe him. I might have gone with handsome, articulate, chiseled . . .

  “He was a little devil as a child—always getting into everything, real physical, like he never quite knew how to control himself. Gave his father fits as a little one,” she said with a laugh. “But he always got away with it because he had that charm, you know? That scampy look in his eyes. No one could resist David when he looked at you with those eyes, least of all Arthur.”

  “And what about Thad?”

  At the mention of Thad’s name, she grew somber. “Thad was a different kind of boy,” she explained. “He was much more serious. Always did the right thing, said the right thing—as opposed to David, who was a wild child. Thad wasn’t like that. He was always polite, always well mannered. Much more serious, you know. More like his mother, I suppose.”

  “Do you think he could have done this to his father?”

  Donna’s eyes flashed. “Of course not!” It was an automatic response. “Thad would never hurt his father. He worshipped him—both the boys did.”

  That was the second person that morning to tell me there was no way Thad killed his father. Third, if you counted Tabitha. Strange that the evidence painted such a different picture.

  “Artie—Arthur,” she corrected herself, “was a big personality. He wasn’t a saint, he was a man just like any other, but he was an excellent doctor and a caring father to those boys. I don’t know who would could have . . . have . . .” This brought on a fresh wave of tears.

  Poor Donna had had enough for one day. “Thank you for talking with me. You’ve been so helpful.”

  She stood and took my hand. “Thank you, dear,” she said warmly. “I’ll look forward to reading the obituary on Sunday. It’ll be such a comfort to us all.”

  CHAPTER 11

  When I got back to the Times office I was not-so-secretly proud that I’d been able to get two key interviews done in the short amount of time since I’d been given the assignment. Even Flick would have to acknowledge my competency on this one. So after setting my stuff down in my cubicle, I went to see him to receive my praise.