Кэти Дэйли - The Magic Of Halloween Night

Cass flipped the yearbook to the page with individual photos of the juniors. “Evie was a junior when we were. Robert was a senior that year. If Robert did something to Evie that she still resented all these years later, then I might suspect that she was the one who shot Robert.” He paused. “That’s if she was back in town last Thursday. We know she was in town when Bill died.”

“Bill did have black paint on his hands, and Evie had been using black paint for the tombstones,” I pointed out. “I suppose it’s possible that Bill visited Evie the night he died, presumably to apologize for whatever he and Robert had supposedly done to her in high school. If whatever had been done to her was really bad, I suppose bringing it up might have opened old wounds, so she might have followed Bill when he left and ran him off the road.”

“If Bill and Evie talked in the barn where she’d been working on the epitaphs, it would have been nearly impossible for Evie to go into the house, grab her keys, get into her car, follow Bill, and run him off the road before he got home,” Cass pointed out.

“Yeah,” I had to agree. “I guess that is a farfetched scenario.” I paused. “But I suppose she could have killed Robert if she was back in town on the night he died.”

Cass looked at his watch. “It’s early yet if you want to take a drive out to her place. If she’s home, maybe we can talk to her. Make sense of what’s really going on.”

“Okay,” I said, getting up. “I’ll just let Aunt Gracie know what we’re doing.”

Evie lived in the same general area as both the location of Bill’s accident and the site where Robert had been shot, only she lived on the north rather than the south side of the road. When Robert’s body had been found, Cass had focused on the houses on the south side of the road since their proximity to the location of Robert’s death was more likely than homes that were quite a bit further away. In terms of Bill’s accident, I supposed farms on either side of the old highway were equally likely.

When we arrived at Evie’s home, I noticed that her car was in her gravel drive, and the lights were on inside her home. After Cass parked and I stepped out onto the drive, I noticed that the gravel was comprised of crushed stone that included both red and green pebbles. It really did appear as if Bill had been at Evie’s farm on the night of his accident.

Cass knocked on the door, and Evie answered, looking more than a little surprised to see us. “Cass. Callie. Come in.” She stepped aside. “Don’t trip on that luggage. I just this minute got home from Cincinnati and haven’t had a chance to lug the suitcases upstairs yet.”

I realized that if Evie had just gotten home, she couldn’t have killed Robert, although she had been home on the night of Bill’s accident.

“How can I help you?” she asked, after showing us into the living room and offering us a seat on the sofa.

“We’re in the area asking folks about a couple events that occurred in the past two weeks,” Cass said.

“Events?”

“Bill Fuller’s auto accident eleven days ago and Harrison Roberts’ murder four days ago.”

She paled. “Bill was in an accident?”

Cass nodded. “His vehicle left the road, flipped, and hit a tree.”

“When?” she asked.

“It was the night before the decorating party at the barn,” I said.

She put a hand to her mouth and sat down. “Oh, my. I hadn’t heard.” She looked at me. “As you know, my grandmother has been ill, and I left to go out of town later in the day after we talked that Friday. I just this minute returned. Is he…”

I knew she was asking if Bill was dead, so I jumped in and answered that he was.

A single tear slid down her cheek. “I just can’t believe this. How did I not hear before I left?”

“The car was hidden in the trees, and wasn’t discovered until later in the day on Friday,” Cass said.

“I didn’t hear about the accident until Friday evening,” I said. “You would have left for the airport in Denver by then.”

“We suspect that Bill was visiting someone in this general area on the night of the accident,” Cass continued.

“Me,” she said. “It was me.” She swallowed hard. “Bill works at the paint store, and I’d called earlier to see if someone could deliver more black paint to me. I spoke to Bill, who informed me that he had a dinner date, but would be happy to bring it out after if I didn’t mind a late delivery. I knew I’d be up for most of the night getting the tombstones ready anyway, so I told him that was fine. I guess he showed up around ten-fifteen or ten-thirty. He didn’t stay long. I guess he left by eleven. Maybe eleven-fifteen.”

“The accident must have occurred shortly after he left here,” I said.

“Poor Bill,” Evie said. “I feel just awful that his death was the direct result of him doing me a favor.”

“It’s not your fault,” Cass said. “These things happen.”

“Do you know what happened?” she asked.

Cass admitted that he didn’t. Of course, if Bill had been visiting Evie and had flipped his car and hit a tree shortly after leaving her place, it seemed like we were back to driver error as the cause of the accident. There were a lot of deer in the area. It seemed likely that one could have run in front of Bill, who swerved and ended up in the ditch on the side of the road, which caused him to roll and then hit a tree.

Evie looked at me. “You said that Robert is dead too and that he was murdered.”

“Shot in the back this past Thursday,” Cass confirmed. “His body was found in the woods not far from where Bill’s car ended up. We’ve considered the possibility that the two deaths were linked, but if Bill had been here visiting you before the accident, it seems unlikely that’s the case.”

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to shoot Robert in the back?” I asked.

Evie laughed, although it came out as more of a snort. “Do you have a while? The guy was a real tool when we were all in high school.”

I frowned. “I don’t remember him being so bad. Of course, we weren’t really friends, so to be honest, I barely remember him.”

“Trust me, you were lucky that you hadn’t struck up a friendship with the guy. He was really nothing more than an insecure little twit who seemed to get a kick out of making the people around him look bad. I didn’t shoot the guy, and, in fact, wasn’t even in town when he was shot, which, by the way, I can prove, but I seriously have no sympathy for the low life, and I’m glad he got what was coming to him.”

I narrowed my gaze as I tried to work everything out in my mind. When I’d spoken to Jeri, she’d mentioned that she’d overheard a conversation Harrison had with someone on the phone where he mentioned Bill’s name on several occasions. Jeri had said she’d heard him mention something about him opening up old wounds after all this time. It sounded as if Evie wasn’t the only person he’d hurt in high school. I had to wonder who else he might have hurt who would still be so angry as to kill him all these years later.

“While I have no doubt that Robert might have deserved being shot in the back, it’s still my job to figure out who might have done it,” Cass said. “We’re looking at those residents who live on farms and ranches on the south side of the old highway. Does anyone come to mind who seems to you to be more likely to have pulled the trigger than anyone else?”

Her lips tightened. I could see by the look on her face that she knew who would have wanted to shoot Robert, but instead of filling us in, she simply shook her head and then promised to think about it. Cass asked a few more questions and then asked her to call him if she thought of anything. Once we were in his truck and headed back to town, I asked him what he thought about things given the new information we’d just received.