The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [67]
“Sounds like Michelle wasn’t too thrilled with the deal.”
“She loved the house and she loved Archie. She told him what that man was up to, but I think Archie needed to think his father loved him, too. She said Archie lived one day at a time, and I guess if you do that, other people’s motives don’t matter as much.”
“Except that they did after Archie died,” Lester suggested.
He paused, thinking back over what he’d read about this case so far.
“Was that all it was?” he asked. “The house? I mean, was that the only reason Newell went after Michelle so hard once she was alone?”
Adele gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re wondering if he propositioned her.”
“Yes.”
She touched her chin, as if considering a single item from among many. “I’m not sure. It was the one thing I wondered about that she never told me.”
“You never asked?”
“No, no,” she said with some emphasis. “That’s not the way these talks went. You have to understand, it took a long time for us to get where we were.”
“A lot of history?”
She let out a short, humorless laugh. “A lot of bad history. Like I said, I was not a good mother. I did my best to be one.” She paused, as if eavesdropping on some inner piece of dialogue, before adding mournfully, “Too little, too late.”
Lester didn’t know enough to argue the point. There was, however, one last question that Joe had requested he ask.
“Mrs. Redding, this is going to sound a little weird maybe, but did your daughter have any trouble smelling things?”
Adele looked at him with her eyebrows raised, startled out of her melancholia. “Yes. She couldn’t smell much at all. She got really sick, years ago, landed in the hospital and everything. They said it was the flu, but I’m not sure they knew. Anyway, whatever it was ruined that part of her breathing system. I forget all the words now, but it was a known condition.”
She paused, thinking back, and then asked in turn, “Why?”
This time, Spinney lied, not wishing to drag her back once more to the source of her sorrow. He feigned taking a glance at the notepad he’d been consulting. “You know? They didn’t tell me. It was just a detail I was supposed to ask about.”
But it was more than that, and as he took his leave shortly thereafter to return home, it was the one piece of information that kept coming back around in his head.
Joe stood at the door of the converted schoolhouse once more, revisiting the scene that now seemed so familiar and yet ancient. No trace of the cat droppings remained, apart from a single faint floor stain. The plants were the worse for wear, ghosts of their former selves. And the air, because of the closed windows, was stale and vaguely musty. No one had been inside the place since the state police sealed it shut that first day.
With him this time, also reminiscent of ghosts, were white-clad crime scene technicians, outfitted from booties to hats, who methodically traveled through the building gathering whatever scraps they deemed relevant.
It was a formal requirement, given the case’s upgraded stature, but Gunther didn’t expect much to come from it. Any fingerprints would probably belong to people who had legitimate access. There’d been no gunfire, so no holes or errant bullets were there to discover. There was no reason to think any bloodstains would surface, and he and Doug Matthews had already gone through the papers.
DNA was always a possibility, however remote, but he remained doubtful of any context it might fit. Supposedly, Michelle had been living alone for half a year. Nevertheless, wearing a crime scene suit himself, he returned to the attached bedroom, where any such evidence was most likely to be found.
There, to his surprise, he discovered David Hawke standing on a stepladder, taking a bird’s-eye photograph of the oversize bed. The room had utterly lost its intimacy, not just with the absence of its occupant but with the addition of so many intruders.
Hawke was the forensic lab