And honestly, isn’t it impolite of people to notice when you’re telling a tiny fib?
“If you need help, Henry, I can help you get it.”
Okay, that was just gross.
I said, “You know, I’m not sure this is working out.”
Unfortunately, he agreed with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Two days later, I had the flu. Stuffed up nose, chills, body aches, fatigue. You know the drill. I told my grandmother I wasn’t feeling well, went back upstairs, and took an Oxy. Okay, two. I mean, I hadn’t had one fordays. Edward treating me like I was a raging addict took the fun out of things. But now that I was sick, it made no sense to abstain since I knew I could just sleep my symptoms away.
Anyway, that’s why it took me three days to set up a visit with Ivy Greene behind bars. That, and the fact that the Wyandot County Jail had this weird, unnavigable phone system that I tried to use to schedule a half-hour visit. It took two hours to get an appointment for that Thursday at eleven in the morning.
I told my grandmother I was going to Meijer over in Traverse but drove to the Wyandot Municipal Center instead. I wasn’t entirely sure where the jail was exactly, but I believed it was attached to the sheriff’s office in some way.
It made sense to stop off and see Detective Lehmann for a minute. He could direct me to the jail afterward. I wasn’t especially surprised when he looked up from his desk, and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I scheduled an appointment with Ivy Greene in about fifteen minutes.”
“Well, that’s interesting. We let her out this morning.”
“You what?”
“We can only hold someone for seventy-two hours. The prosecutor declined to charge her.”
“But she didn’t have an alibi. And she has a motive. What about Carl?”
“We let him go, too.”
“How could you do that?”
“They lied about their whereabouts and they have motives, but that’s all we have. We don’t have a murder weapon. We can’t place them at the scene. I brought them in to see if either of them would talk, but they had a lawyer here within the hour. Neither of them said a word.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“I can’t charge them with silence. Not to mention, I really don’t know what to charge them with. Maybe Carl killed his stepfather and his mother is helping him cover it up. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe they planned it together. So murder, aiding and abetting, conspiracy to murder those are all possible. But I don’t know which goes where.”
“How are you going to figure it out?”
“Without one of them turning on the other, I don’t know. I need witnesses; people they might have confided in, or better yet, the murder weapon.”
I wondered for a moment why he was being so forthcoming to me. He usually wasn’t. Then he asked, “You’re friendly with that Opal girl…”
“I’m not sure friendly is the right word.”
“Has she said anything about Carl’s relationship with his stepfather?”
“Only that she’s convinced he’s not the murderer.”
“If she says anything, let me know.”
“Sure,” I said, though honestly I wasn’t sure she’d want to talk to me ever again. And even if she did, I doubted she’d talk to me about Carl.
I walked out of the Municipal Center feeling kind of bummed. I had questions I wanted to ask Ivy. Now I wouldn’t be able to ask them. Actually, that wasn’t true. I knew where she lived. I could just drive to her house. She was just as likely to answer my questions there as she would have been to answer them in jail.
Fifteen minutes later, I was pulling into Ivy’s driveway. I walked down the boardwalk to the fake chalet and knocked a couple of times on the awkward basement door but got no answer. I started back to the driveway but noticed Ivy down by the water. Following a nearly invisible path, I made my way down the sloping lawn.
