Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [38]
I felt someone’s eyes on me, and I turned my head to see that Chief Manning had taken the seat to my left and was watching me closely.
“Chief Manning—Lou, I mean,” I said. It was hard to imagine being on a first-name basis with this imposing man. “My family used to live here in town, and Ty mentioned you might have worked on a case that involved my mother.”
He didn’t say anything, but he gave a single nod of his head. I wasn’t sure if this was an acknowledgment that I was right, or encouragement to keep talking.
“My mother passed away,” I continued, nervous now, “when I was seven. Ty said you might have looked into the matter.”
“Leah Sutter.” He said this matter-of-factly, not as a question.
“Yes, that’s right. Do you remember this at all?”
Another nod.
“Dad, how about helping her out a little bit?” Ty said.
Lou glanced at his son, then back to me. “It was a long time ago, but I remember. What do you need to know?”
The kitchen went silent, and I had the sense that even Bert, standing over the lasagna at the stove, was waiting for my answer.
“It’s just that I was so little,” I said. I tried to make my words light and chatty, as if I had this conversation often. “And I don’t know much about how she died. I’m curious.”
“Well, let’s see.” Lou put his hand to the collar of his flannel shirt and slowly pulled at it. “Your mother died from blunt trauma to the head. She fell down the stairs, if I’m not mistaken.”
I felt a strange disappointment. “That’s it? She fell down the stairs?”
He nodded.
“Then why were you looking into the case?”
“Standard procedure.”
“But Dad,” Ty cut in. “I remember you saying that she’d been killed, and you were going to find out who did that to her. That sounds like you thought there was more going on.”
Chief Manning sent his son a look I couldn’t interpret. “Quite often, when family members say something like ‘She fell down the stairs,’ it means a possible abuse situation. So we have to look into it. We have to interview the family members, anyone else who was around, and we make a determination whether to pursue the case. When your mother died, we did consider whether she’d been physically abused. Maybe that’s when I made that comment to Ty.”
Bert made a tutting sound as she put the pan of lasagna in the center of the table and took her seat. “If I knew you were saying such things to the kids, I never would have let them come to the office.”
Chief Manning glanced at his wife and let a grin cross his mouth, then looked back at me. His gaze was disconcerting, his brown eyes unblinking, focused solely on my face. I had the brief thought that he should have been a lawyer instead of a policeman. I’d hate to go up against him in court.
It was hard to ask my next question, but I forced myself. “Who did you suspect of abusing her? I mean, when you had suspicions.”
There was another quiet moment, during which Ty began helping Bert dole pieces of lasagna onto the plates.
“We suspected your father,” Chief Manning said. “That’s standard, to look to the spouse first.”
“But they were separated. Doesn’t that remove the spouse from suspicion?”
“Actually, that usually makes us more suspicious. There’s often a lot of unresolved animosity in separations.”
That seemed obvious now that he’d said it, but I couldn’t imagine my father being abusive to my mom or anyone else for that matter. Yet what did I really know? “You ruled him out eventually?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Did you suspect anyone else?” I asked.
“You had an older brother, right?”
“That’s right,” I said. I cut my lasagna with my fork. “Dan.”
“Well, we thought about him, of course. He was old enough and big enough,