Code 61 - Donald Harstad [33]
As the hearse drove off and we turned back in toward the house, I felt this familiar urge. I really wanted a cigarette, and this was the stage in an investigation where I'd normally have one. I looked up toward the porch. The three looked pretty dejected.
Toby spoke up. I was beginning to think he was compelled. He was smoking again. “Why do you need an autopsy? Isn't it pretty obvious what killed her?”
Hester took that one, while I tried to smoke his cigarette vicariously. “There's a big difference between 'pretty obvious' and certain,” she said.
“Why are you coming back into the house? Aren't you done?” There was no malice in Toby or his questions. Just the same sort of question you always heard from the one kid in class who always had his hand in the air. Questions designed to focus attention on the asker, not the subject.
“Ask us again in five or ten hours,” I said. “In the meantime, we can't leave the scene unprotected, and the best way to protect it is to have one or more of us here.”
“Oh. But, why—”
Hester cut him off. “Done with your written statement yet?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then, would you be kind enough to show me just where everybody's bedroom is?”
Toby, being the compulsively cooperative sort, immediately launched into his task. “And the kitchen,” she continued, as they headed up the stairs.
In the meantime, I sat down with Melissa and Hanna to have what turned out to be an interesting but pretty fruitless chat about Edie that lasted nearly an hour. Regrettably, they both smoked, as well.
Melissa and Hanna seemed quite a bit more self-possessed than they had appeared even an hour before. A good sign, and I thought it was due to seeing Edie leave, and the relief that seems to come to the household when the body is finally removed from the premises.
We walked into the parlor. Hanna offered coffee, which I accepted. As I sat on the couch, I felt a jab in my hip. The copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch that I'd put in my back pocket. I pulled it out and laid it on the coffee table in front of me. Melissa reached out for it.
“Do you mind? Is it today's?”
“Yep, it is. Feel free.”
She sort of browsed through it as we sat and talked. Interesting.
Neither of them could offer much insight into Edie's character, at least not much that I didn't already know from Lamar. She did have a daughter, about three years old, who lived with Edie's mother. Edie didn't like her mother at all, and according to both Melissa and Hanna, with good reason.
Edie had lived, or had been living, at the Mansion longer than any of the rest of them, and she was the one that the owner would talk with if anything needed to be taken care of. According to Melissa, it wasn't anything particularly special, but Edie was a pretty reliable person, and could be counted on to attend to things.
Edie didn't appear to have been noticeably depressed the last few weeks, and hadn't shown any remarkable signs of mood changes. Both acknowledged they had no idea why Edie would take her own life, although they both thought she had plenty of reason to be depressed. Hanna shared the fact that she, herself, had attempted suicide once before, with what turned out to be something less than a fatal overdose of her sister's phenobarbital.
So, my questions about Edie's emotional state had elicited suicide-oriented thinking among others in the household, with the assumption I was on a suicide track. They seemed very sincere in their efforts to help, and almost apologetic that they hadn't observed any of what they termed “suicide triggers.” I did think it a little unusual that both of them were that familiar with the subject of suicide. I said as much.
“We've read about it,” said Melissa, “because some of our friends have been really depressed sometimes. We worry about them.”
“But Edie didn't fit in that category?” I asked.
“No. I mean, there's depressed, and then there's depressed,” said Melissa. “Things not going right, that can depress you, but it's something you get over. Lover leaving, grandparent dying, that sort of thing.