“That’s what Tayla said. Nobody is what they seem.”
“I can believe that,” Sara said. “Sweet-tempered Gil has turned into an angry bull.”
“Sylvia—who everyone adored—had a daughter who packs a weapon,” Kate said.
They looked at Jack. “Chet seems sane but with Tayla he was...”
“Feral,” Kate supplied. “Pushy, demanding, aggressive. I wanted to hug her. Well, I wanted to hug her even without his snapping, but that doesn’t matter.”
Sara was thoughtful. “Who else is not what he or she seems?”
“We wouldn’t know, would we?” Kate said. “Until someone lets us inside their minds, we can’t know. It’s like when you read that some man killed his wife and kids. You’re astonished. You just didn’t see it.”
“But it was all there,” Sara said. “When you know the answer, you can look back and see what the clues were. The question now is What have we seen that we paid no attention to?”
Th
ey had no answer for that.
“I think I’ll write all this down,” Sara said. “See if I can make sense of it.”
“And I need to go to work,” Kate said.
“Me too,” Jack added.
But they didn’t move. Someone they knew was in jail. She was freely admitting that she’d poisoned a woman—but they didn’t believe her.
“And you have to call the lawyer,” Jack said.
“Yes, of course,” Sara answered.
When they separated, they were silent. The feeling of “unfinished” hung heavily over them.
* * *
Kirkwood Realty was like a funeral parlor. Worse, everyone looked at Kate with accusing eyes. But no one said anything. Even Melissa was quiet—for about an hour.
“You found out who killed those Morris women, but Tayla doesn’t matter to you enough to take this case?” Her voice was pure venom. “I bet you want this place for your own. Is that what you’re hoping? To make it into Medlar Realty?”
Kate saw that the others in the office agreed with Melissa. She knew she should do the “strong woman act” and stand up for herself, but instead, she grabbed her handbag and left the office. She practically ran to her car. She wasn’t sure where she was going until she realized that she was about a mile from Jack’s job site.
As she pulled into the drive, her phone began ringing. She picked it up just as Jack opened the door and got into the passenger seat. “Gil is about to go after me with a sledgehammer. He—”
“It’s Everett.” Kate put the phone on speaker and leaned toward Jack. “Hello?”
Everett talked so fast they could hardly understand him. This time, he was in hysterics. Chet had been there. It looked like he’d lied to them about going to Atlanta. But then, they hadn’t exactly been honest with him either.
“It was like the Gestapo,” Everett was saying. “No. The Spanish Inquisition. I expected him to send me to the rack if I didn’t answer him.”
“What was he asking you?”
“Is that Jack? Do you two spend every second together?”
“Gage!” Jack snapped.
“He wanted me to tell him all about Tayla. Where, when, what. I told him what I remember, but he still went through my notes.”
“What did he find out?” Jack asked.