She wore a pair of long cutoffs and a pink T-shirt. She was smoking a cigarette. When she heard me approaching, she turned and looked at me without reacting. It was almost as if she expected me.
Turning back to look out at the bay, she said, “I don’t smoke. It just seemed the right thing to do after being accused of murder.” She tossed the cigarette into the messy garden.
“I have a couple of questions,” I said.
“Of course, you do. Opal tells us you’re the one who figured out Chris didn’t order the pizza himself. That he was probably already dead.”
I nodded my head. “You ordered the pizza from the pay phone at Main Street Café, didn’t you?”
“On the advice of my attorney, I’m not going to answer that.”
“That makes it sound like you did fake your alibi. And if you faked the alibi, for you and Carl, it makes it seem like one of you killed your husband.”
“Yes, I understand that.” She kept staring out at the bay. It was calm. Calmer than she was. “I wish my lawyer had let me say that yesterday. I wanted to. He doesn’t think I’ll be believed. Or maybe he doesn’t believe me. Or maybe he’s just trying to run up his bill.”
She stopped and seemed to think about what she wanted to say. “Chris and I had been fighting. I’d found out what he was up to. And apparently, you have too.”
I nodded.
“That night, I went over to the church. I’d finally worked up enough nerve to catch him in the act. He was there. Dead. I thought— I assumed Carl had done it. That he’d found out what was happening. I had to protect him. He was already at Opal’s house. I hurried over to Main Street Café, said hello to a few people then I used the pay phone and Chris’s credit card number to order a pizza.”
“Dinah was sure it was a man.”
“I lowered my voice and spoke through my sleeve. And I pretended to have a cold.”
Something about what she was saying made me ask, “You thought Carl killed your husband, but you don’t think that anymore?”
“No. I actually got an attorney before we were arrested. I brought Carl with me. He was shocked that I thought he’d killed Chris. He admitted he knew about Chris and Denny, but he said he wouldn’t have done it, couldn’t do it. I could see he was telling the truth. I should have just called the police when I found the body. Now it looks very much like one of us killed him.”
“When you found the body, did you see anything that could have been used to kill him?”
“No. I looked. But I didn’t find anything.”
“How exactly did you find out Reverend Hessel had a problem with drugs?”
“A few weeks before he died, a man approached me at Main Street Café. He said he was an old friend of my husband’s. That he’d grown up in Fife Lake, but met Chris while they were both in prison at Stateville over in Illinois. He told me they’d shared a cell. And he told me why. The drugs and everything.”
That made sense. Reverend Hessel had said he had family in the area. But he didn’t. He’d come because of his prison buddy. He probably had a place to stay in Fife Lake for a short while. Before he began his long con.
Ivy had paused to think about what she was saying and what she’d say next. “I think I’ve been very naïve. As soon as Chris became our pastor, he began telling me he was seeing constituents in the evening. He’d come home excited by the work, energized, unable to sleep. Of course, he wasn’t seeing anyone. I mean, not anyone who went to our church, at least. He was seeing young men he found on the Internet.”
She took a deep cleansing breath.
“When I found out what was really happening, I confronted him. He promised to stop, said he wouldn’t do it anymore. Still, I cut off his allowance.”
“You gave him money?” I asked, even though I kind of already knew the answer.
“The church doesn’t pay much. I thought he might stop if he didn’t have money. I hoped he would. But he didn’t. He’d say he had to meet someone in the evening. He’d come home excited. Except now I knew. He wasn’t excited, he was high.”
“Why did you think Carl had killed his stepfather?”
“One time, when Chris said he was seeing someone, I waited about a half an hour then I drove past the church. I recognized Denny’s red Thunderbird. I should have confronted him then, but I didn’t—”
“You knew how Carl felt about Denny?”
“Yes, of course. He’s my son. I knew it was only a matter of time until he found out.”
“After you cut him off, how do you think Reverend Hessel was paying for his drugs?”
