We both knew what the other was thinking. Harold was prominent in both of our minds, turning our psyches upside down. No further words needed to be said about my husband. The sadness was apparent without being vocalized. Besides, there were only so many ways to express how much we missed him, and over the years, we’d said them all. As it was, Kaitlin got so choked up that she had to change the subject.
“We’re going to find out who did this,” Kaitlin replied.
With so many layers of bad news being stacked on top of each other in such a compressed amount of time, it would have been easy for me to topple like a house of cards in the wind. If I wasn’t careful, I could slip into despair, to give up on the day and retreat back to bed in hopes of having better luck tomorrow.
If it wasn’t for the anger swelling in my veins, I might have done just that. My outrage soon became too much to ignore, and too strong to subdue. As devastated as I was, my sorrow was usurped by a rage that could only be quelled one way. I needed to know who was behind this. What kind of soulless person would do something so heinous?
“I know you’re going to catch the guilty party. I’m just having trouble reconciling who could be so morally bankrupt.”
“Actually, that’s what I came here to ask you.”
I was unable to follow my daughter’s logic on that one. Hopefully, she could clear up my confusion. “What do you mean?
“You were his secretary for decades and his friend for just as long. Other than dad, no one knew him better than you, especially when it came to his old cases. That knowledge is invaluable now.”
I wanted to believe my daughter had dropped all the bombshells she had to share with me. After all, my heart could only take so much. Unfortunately, my heart and my instincts were in disagreement. My gut was telling me there was still something my daughter still wasn’t telling me about this situation.
I understood why she was taking her time parceling out each detail. She’d come here with an overwhelming amount of information and didn’t want to drop it all on me at once for fear of leaving me deluged. Consequently, there was only so much I could do while I remained partially in the dark. This whole predicament was a giant ten-thousand-piece puzzle, and I was still missing a crucial piece.
I hypothesized aloud. “Why am I so invaluable? Do you think someone from one of Sid’s old cases might have done this?”
Kaitlin’s eyes widened. She was clearly impressed by my intuition. I had to admit, it was good to know that after all these years I still had some surprises up my sleeve.
“I have reason to believe just that,” she said.
“Why?”
“My forensics team found a piece of an old, worn file folder label on the carpet beside Sid’s filing cabinet at home.”
“What did it say on the label?”
I had a creeping suspicion what file she might have been referring to, but didn’t dare to say it aloud. If I had even a single shred of luck to my name, I wanted to call on it right then and there. This had trouble written all over it. I just hoped it wasn’t written in permanent marker.
If I was worrying you, there was good reason for that. Some things were better left to history. Unfortunately, the very moments we wanted to bury in the past ended up being the ones that so often kept finding their way back into our lives. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get them to go away. It was these times that wouldn’t stay buried and that threatened to bury me if I wasn’t careful. When I thought of Sid’s investigative career, one case stood out more than any other.
Right then, I secretly hoped that my gut was wrong and that I was just letting my fears get the better of me. Because if I was right, this would get messier than a pie-eating contest at the county fair.
As my daughter pulled an evidence bag out of her purse, my nerves were nearly frayed. I saw that inside the bag was the label. Despite my attempts to look away, the urge to know if I’d been right proved too impossible to resist. As I peered at the label, my suspicions were confirmed. It read: Widmark.
A shiver went down my spine. I was shaken and nearly trembling. This was the worst-case scenario I’d been worrying about. In an instant, things had gotten personal. Kaitlin didn’t just have a murder investigation on her hands, she had a blood feud that had been simmering for years.
“What can you tell me about the Widmark case?” Kaitlin asked.
I could tell her everything. All the dirty, twisted details. Once I caught my breath, that was. Private eyes were no strangers to making enemies. It just came with the territory. Some would call it an occupational hazard. The Widmark case was the most hazardous of all.
I knew it from the moment Olivia Widmark walked into Sid’s office. I’d begged Sid to turn this case down, but he didn’t listen to me. He told me I was just overreacting, that I was worrying over nothing. He wasn’t fooling anyone. I knew he didn’t even believe that himself. Even after all these years, I still remember the anxious look in his eyes.
So why did he ultimately take the case if even he was skittish? It could be summed up easily like this--when you weren’t in a position to say no, you’d find yourself saying yes to the most dangerous of things. Like so many regrettable decisions in life, the pursuit of money played a major factor. Sid had many skills, but money management wasn’t one of them. He was the kind of guy who thought betting on the ponies at the racetrack constituted building a diverse investment portfolio.
I told him not to be so reckless with his money, but he always believed that one day those horses would make him rich. Instead, they led him right to the front door of the poorhouse.
When the Widmark case fell on his desk, he’d taken some serious losses at the track and was completely strapped for cash. Not surprisingly, he jumped at the first paying job that came his way. To him, the money outweighed the pitfalls.
This wasn’t the first time Sid was wrong, but the other times didn’t come with deadly consequences. I knew it did me no good to linger on a faulty decision Sid had made almost decades ago, but I couldn’t help it. Ultimately, I couldn’t change it now. What was done was done. All I could do was help bring his killer to justice. What a terrible thing to be right about, as it looked like this case had come back to haunt him in the most deadly way possible.
I pulled my head out of the clouds and turned my attention back to my daughter, who was waiting impatiently for an answer to her question.
“I can tell you everything there is to know about the Widmark case,” I said.
“Good. Do you know of anyone mentioned in that file who would want Sid dead?”
If it hadn’t led to such a tragedy, I almost would have laughed at the outrageousness of that statement. She didn’t know the half of it. Unfortunately, it was on me to clue her in on all the dirty details.
“Kaitlin, now you’re the one who is going to want to sit down.”
She scrunched her nose, confused. “Why?”
“Because everyone mentioned in that file had a reason to want Sid dead.”
Chapter Five
I made us both a cup of coffee as I ran through the details with Kaitlin. They weren’t pretty. It was a tangled web of romantic betrayal that had torn two families apart. Something this messy couldn’t just be swept under the rug. The ripple effects were so long lasting that they still reverberated to this day.
If ever there was a time for a generous dose of caffeine, it was then. Not just for myself, but my daughter as well. With all that had been going on, I hadn’t noticed until now, but Kaitlin had some serious bags under eyes. They were so pronounced that she looked like she hadn’t slept in days. While I knew that couldn’t be true, it probably wasn’t that far off. She had a tendency to overexert herself, to stretch herself so thin that a full night’s sleep became a casualty, drowning in the wake of her work.
It would be easy to blame a bloated work schedule, but that wasn’t the case. She worked the same hours as every other detective on the force did, at least on the clock. It was her lack of downtime off
the clock that did her in. When someone brought their work home with them like she did, it was no surprise that relaxation was a foreign concept to her.
When all this was through, I had to remind her to take better care of herself. Caffeine was never more than a stopgap, a temporary fix to a persistent problem. The only true solution was to catch up on her sleep. I knew she cared dearly about her job, but if she wanted to do both herself and the badge a favor, she’d learn to never skimp on her shut-eye. Sleepless nights only led to lethargic mornings.
I could feel a mom lecture coming on, creeping up to the tip of my tongue, but I held it back and shelved it for later. Kaitlin had enough on her plate. If I weighed her down any more, she might topple over.
Instead, I went over the Widmark case with her in excruciating detail. My daughter scribbled down a furious set of notes, filling up page after page on her pocket-sized writing pad. When I finally finished, she sat back in her chair with her eyes as wide as saucers, trying to absorb it all. She looked like she’d just finished a plate of spicy food and was in need of an antacid. I wished that were the case. That was a much easier problem to solve than what she was faced with.
As the gravity of the situation sunk in, my daughter became uncomfortably quiet. A red flag immediately went up in my mind. I couldn’t remember the last challenge she’d backed down from. Long odds weren’t known to scare her. She’d always tackle the gravest of situations with a confidence and tenacity that I really admired.
I didn’t see any of that now as I stared into her eyes. Reticence was taking center stage. For a woman who was never shy about her feelings, it was a concerning sight. So when she took her time to reply, I decided to speak up.
“Are you ok?”
She let out a big sigh. “Yeah. Those are just a lot of details to keep track of.”
She wasn’t kidding. Suddenly, her uncharacteristically reserved reaction made perfect sense. She’d obviously come here expecting a case that was a little more open and shut in nature, when I dropped a string of bad news on her.
“I’ll say there are a lot of details. I’m actually surprised that I remember them all. You can see now why I wanted Sid to steer clear of this case.”
Kaitlin was still playing catch-up. “So, let me make sure I got this straight. Peter Widmark was cheating on his wife, Olivia, with her best friend, Hannah Gable.”
“Yes.”
“When Olivia found out about the affair, hell broke loose, and she divorced Peter, leaving their daughter, Jenna, with a broken home. Meanwhile, when news of the affair got out, there was equally bad news for Peter’s mistress too.”
“You’re right so far.”
Kaitlin kept reading from her pad. “Hannah Gable’s husband, Brad, divorced his wife, then in disgrace, Hannah left town.”
I nodded. “That’s every awful detail.”
“So, just from this case file alone, the possible suspects in Sid Harper’s murder include Peter Widmark, Olivia Widmark, Jenna Widmark, Hannah Gable, and Brad Gable.”
“Except, Brad Gable died of a heart attack a few years back.”
Kaitlin’s eyes opened wide. “Wow.”
I lowered my head. “Yeah.” It would be easy to linger on that point, but with everything else that needed to get sorted out, there wasn’t time to get caught up much longer. “Anyway, you have the rest of the suspects right.”
Kaitlin groaned. “What a mess.”
“I’m sorry you’re the one who has to clean it up.”
She stared out into the distance. “It could be worse. Then again, it could be a lot better too.”
My daughter got a faraway look in her eyes that drew her head into the clouds. I didn’t know the specifics of where her thoughts were taking her, but I was certain they weren’t good. I also knew becoming fixated on anything but the case wouldn’t get her any closer to finding Sid’s killer.
Sorrow was a dangerous companion that tagged along uninvited and cropped up at the most inopportune of times. I had a feeling it was pulling her into a nasty patch of emotional quicksand that I needed to stop her from sinking in. The case was starting to get me riled as well, digging up awful thoughts that put me in perilous danger of lapsing into a fog of despair of my own.
I tried to pull us both back from the brink.
“I have to admit, I’m a little confused,” I said.
Kaitlin replied with a decidedly discouraged tone in her voice. “Only a little?”
“I’m serious here. The Widmark case is twenty years old. Why would this happen now?”
That wasn’t the kind of question I thought could be answered in a split second, but she jumped right in to prove me wrong.
“I can help you with that,” Kaitlin said.
I was all ears. “How so?”
“The class of 1986 celebrated their thirtieth reunion last night. More importantly for this case, it represented the first time in two decades that all four of the names listed in the Widmark file were in the same place at once.”
The fog lifted in my mind, giving way to crystal clarity. A school reunion was fertile ground for bad blood to boil, old grudges to be revisited, and for the past to derail the future.
“Let me guess. Some old rivalries were dug up?” I said.
Kaitlin nodded. “With a new face thrown into the mix as well.”
“Who?”
“Sabrina Gable.”
“Gable? Sabrina?”
The last name Gable rang plenty of bells in my mind. However, that first name was not at all familiar to me.
Kaitlin cleared up the confusion in my mind. “Sabrina Gable, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Hannah Gable.”
Math was never my strong suit, but in this case, it didn’t need to be. With Sabrina being nineteen-years-old, it meant there were only two men who could be her father—Brad Gable or Peter Widmark. I knew who my bet was on.
After hearing the latest news, I was so shocked that I nearly dropped my coffee cup. After managing to barely keep myself together, I replied, “So this Sabrina girl, am I to assume she’s Peter’s illegitimate daughter?”
“You don’t have to assume it. When she showed up at the reunion last night, she came right out with it.”
“Wait a minute. She went to the reunion?”
Kaitlin nodded. “She did much more than that. From what I hear, Sabrina came on like an earthquake and rattled the Widmarks and Gables right down to their cores.”
“That muddies the water somewhat.” My eyes were as wide as saucers. “Talk about a serious pickle.”
“It’s more like a tsunami. Sabrina went up to Peter Widmark looking for money, and when he turned her away, she gave him the business.”
“I’ll bet.”
“She chewed him out for not supporting her mother or being there for her during her during her childhood. When the rest of the Gables and Widmarks got wind of who Sabrina was, the rest of the evening devolved into a series of heated shouting matches.”
I followed my daughter’s line of logic to its deadly conclusion.
“And, with old grudges dug up, Sid took the brunt of the killer’s misplaced anger for uncovering the evidence of infidelity that tore these people’s lives apart all those years ago,” I said.
Kaitlin nodded again. “That’s what it looks like.”
I sighed. “What a mess.”
“That’s where you come in.”
If I didn’t have enough layers of confusion to work through already, my daughter decided to throw another one my way.
I had no idea what she was referring to, nor was I sure that I wanted to know. Ultimately, I asked her what was going on. “What do you mean?”
With all the surprises that had come my way that morning, I should have been prepared for anything. That was far from the case, as she blindsided me with her next statement.
“So, what do you say, will you help me out with this case?” Kaitlin asked.
At first, I didn’t know what to say. I was too confused to
even put together two words. Hadn’t I just helped her out? What more could I do?
Then, it dawned on me. The look in her eyes gave the answer away. She wanted more than just a rundown of the case file. What she was proposing was a partnership that was as intriguing as it was unconventional. At least, that was what I thought she meant. There was only one way to know for sure, although I could barely bring myself to say the words aloud, for fear of embarrassment if I had interpreted the situation incorrectly.
“You don’t mean in the field, do you?” I asked.
It turned out I was spot on.
“Actually, that’s exactly what I meant.”
I had to sit down again before I got knocked right off of my feet. What she was talking about, deputizing me so we could team up and solve this case together, was the kind of thing that I would have jumped at without a second thought during my youthful secretary days of yore. Over the years I’d done similar things for Sid, rummaging around for leads on a number of his marquee cases.
Those days were firmly in the past. Not to mention, a lot had changed since then. To start, there was substantially more tread on my tires. On the other hand, my insatiable curiosity and yen for puzzle solving were burning as hot as ever, like an eternal flame that could never be extinguished. It was with those mixed feelings that I approached this unique situation.
Surprisingly, my heart, body, and mind were quite willing and eager to give this a try. The only things holding me back were concerns about my judgment. With the previous cases I’d worked on with Sid in years past, I never had a personal stake in them. I could objectively go about completing the job to the best of my ability without distraction.
This was uncharted territory. It was the most highly subjective subject matter of all. I’d be lying to myself if I pretended I could cast my personal feelings to the side. Unfortunately, that was what the best casework demanded. Objectivity was always the most effective tool to uncover the truth, not trying to carry out a personal vendetta.
Meredith Potts Fourteen Book Cozy Mystery Set Page 77