A Flicker of Doubt - Tim Myers [5]
“She shouldn’t be,” I said, “And neither should you. Go,” I insisted.
“Harrison, I’m already here. What sense does it make for me to leave and just have to come back in three hours.”
I shrugged. “Go shopping, go back to bed, I don’t care. Eve, thanks for coming in, but I’m going to be okay.”
She took it better than I had any right to expect. As she started putting her coat back on, she said, “You’re sure about this?”
“Absolutely. Don’t worry, I’ll tell Millie that you tried.”
She was shaking her head as she left, but I was glad she hadn’t put up a fight Eve still knew more about candle- making than I did, but I was starting to catch up, and after all, it was my name on the mortgage now, and she knew it
I was waiting on my second customer of the day when the telephone rang.
It was Morton, and he had news for me about what had ended Becka Lane’s life.
Chapter 2
“Well, she didn’t drown,” the sheriff said. ‘To be honest with you, I think it kind of surprised the coroner, finding her in the water like that.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“It was sleeping pills,” he said gravely. “She must have taken a ton of them. I’m sorry, Harrison, but it looks like she killed herself.”
“What? That can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Morton said, “Harrison, I just talked to the man myself. He put a rush on the job. I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it”
“But she hated taking any kind of pill at all. I refuse to believe Becka would do anything like that. I’m not saying she would never try to kill herself, but there’s no way on earth I could ever believe she’d do it with pills.”
He paused, then said, “Harrison, it’s been a while since the two of you went out. People change, you know?”
“Not like that, they don’t,” I said fiercely. “I remember when she broke her arm six months ago. She wouldn’t even take a whole pill to help her sleep, and she was in some serious pain.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “People change. She must have had some problems you didn’t know about.” His voice softened as he added, “More folks end their own lives than anybody could imagine. Not every car accident is an accident, if you know what I mean. I’ve seen more than one crime scene on the road that didn’t leave skid marks from braking.”
“So you’re not going to pursue this?”
He snorted. “What is there to pursue? F6r whatever reason, Becka Lane decided she couldn’t take it anymore, and so she decided to check out”
“And she just happened to fall into the river after overdosing, is that what you’re saying?”
Morton said, “I admit that’s odd, but the woman wasn’t in her right mind. What are you expecting, rational behavior from someone who’d probably already decided to kill herself? She could have gone to the overlook to do it A lot of folks go there. Who knows what she was thinking in her last few hours?”
“I don’t believe it,” I said flatly.
“Harrison Black, don’t go stirring up trouble where there isn’t any, do you understand me? I know you’re upset, and I can imagine it’s hard to believe that somebody you once cared about would kill herself, but you’ve got to accept the fact that it’s over and there’s nothing you can do about it now.”
I hung up without even bothering to say good-bye. There was no way Becka would loll herself. She thought too highly of her divine right to exist. And even if she did want to end it all, there’s no way she’d ever do it with pills. But it was clear that the sheriff was going to blindly accept the premise that she’d overdosed intentionally and killed herself. That didn’t mean I had to, though.
I owed it to Becka to find out what had really happened.
I was still I trying to figure out my next step when Greg Runion—Micah Ridge’s gung ho land developer— walked into the candleshop.
“Harrison, I need to talk to you.”
“This isn’t a great time.” Runion and I had crossed paths before, and I’d felt an immediate dislike for the man from the first time we’d met that had only grown stronger with time. I didn’t have a problem with most real estate developers. After all, somebody had to build the places