Page 28 of No Quarter

She handed Valerie a cup of coffee. The cup itself felt like a porcelain antique.

“Thank you,” Valerie said.

The old lady, her hair tied back in a gray bun, sat down in her armchair, and then pulled a brown cardigan over her legs to keep her warm.

“It’s all so unfair,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Who would murder my beautiful Agatha?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out, Margaret,” Valerie said. “I really am sorry for your loss.”

“I don’t know if I can stand it,” the old lady said with a vacant expression. “You get old, and you lose so many, eventually you have had enough of life. I should go first. Not my granddaughter.”

Valerie reached out and squeezed her hand.

“I’ll catch the monster who did this,” she said.

Margaret tried to smile, but the effort was devoid of joy. Her eyes were empty of life, as though the grief for her granddaughter had used up the last of any remaining spark.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course not,” Margaret said, forlornly. “I want to help. I don’t understand what happened, I just want to help if I can.”

“Is there anyone that you think may have resented Agatha?”

“It’s hard to say,” Margaret said. “She was a beautiful girl. A bit of a lost soul, though. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, and she wandered around town doing odd jobs.”

Valerie wrote down everything in her notebook.

“Would you say she was carefree?”

“Sometimes,” Margaret said. “But only when she wasn’t depressed.”

“She spent time at Elmwood Psychiatric Retreat for a while, didn’t she?” Valerie didn’t want to mention that there had been another murder. Not yet. If she upset Margaret, she might clam up.

“Yes,” Margaret answered, taking a sip of her coffee. “She got a good bit better after that.”

“Did she ever talk about her time there?” Valerie inquired, jotting down a few more thoughts in her notebook as she did.

“A little,” the old lady explained. “I think it was mostly a good experience.”

“You say ‘mostly,’ Margaret. Is there a reason for that? Did Agatha have any bad experiences there?”

“Well,” she said with a sigh. “Now, I don’t like to gossip, but she did say there was a security guard there. Oh, what was his name? P ... P ...”

“Paul? Peter? Patrick?”

“Yes,” Margaret replied with recognition. “Patrick.”

“What did she say about him?”

“That he was rude and nasty to her,” Margaret said.

“Did she tell you anything about him? What he looked like, anything?”

“She said he was a big fellow with a big bushy beard. He had brown hair.”

Valerie jotted down a few more notes.

“Did you ever meet this security guard?”

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