But Dora prevented a response by loudly quoting Scripture again. “Ephesians 5:18 . . . ‘Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit . . .’ ”

  “I’m sorry, Miz Deedah, my mother has intruded on our bridge lesson,” Sarah Ann said, tearing up.

  “This is Dora O’Rourke. She’s been asked to leave by both myself and Carlos,” Wendy added.

  Firmly but gently, Deedah said, “I’m sorry—Mrs. O’Rourke, is it?—but you are going to have to leave this club immediately with this kind of behavior. It’s simply unacceptable to us.”

  The anger in Dora’s voice was pronounced. “I am Sarah Ann’s mother. I know what’s best for her. I’m askin’ her to come home with me now instead of continuin’ to indulge in all this debauchery.”

  Sarah Ann held her head up and practically spat out the word, “No.”

  The hand that Dora had been pointing with so emphatically began to tremble. “We will discuss your punishment when you get home, then.”

  “I’m not coming home after this display. I’m tired of all this. I’m twenty-one years old. I will go to the Rosalie Women’s Shelter if I have to. I can’t keep living in the same house with you,” Sarah Ann said, finally breaking down into tears.

  Wendy moved to her side and patted her shoulder several times. “We’re here for you, Sarah Ann.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Rourke,” Deedah said, “but this is not the time and place for you to discuss family matters like this. Your daughter is here to learn the game of bridge, and that is all. We again have to ask you to leave so that we can continue our planned activities.”

  “I’d like to know when a country club became more important to a child than her mother.”

  “Mother, this isn’t a custody battle. It’s just a simple card game among friends,” Sarah Ann said.

  Dora glared at her daughter one last time, then turned on her heels, and marched resolutely to the front door without another word. It appeared that the Avenging Angel had been silenced for the time being.

  * * *

  Wendy and Sarah Ann were seated on Deedah’s office couch after the interrupted bridge lesson had been completed and all of the other newbies had left. Deedah, Hollis, and Carlos had also called it quits for the day, but Wendy had sensed that she needed to huddle with Sarah Ann after Dora O’Rourke’s overbearing display. The idea that some physical harm might come to the young woman at the hands of her obsessed mother did not seem altogether out of the realm of possibilities, and Deedah had given Wendy carte blanche to use her office and then lock up the RCC after that.

  “Do you really not want to go home?” Wendy was saying. “Won’t you need your computer and some other things for your schoolwork? Not to mention your clothes and shoes and all that.”

  Sarah Ann sniffled and managed a mock smile. “That’s the key to my getting away from Mother, you know. Graduating and then getting a job of any kind. I’m not sure I want to stay here in Rosalie, to be honest with you.”

  “No one says you have to. But I’m concerned about where you’re going to stay right now. I do have a suggestion. Why don’t you come home with me and spend the night in our guest room? Then Ross can accompany you back home tomorrow so you can pick up all your necessities. I’m sure your mother will want to cooperate with a police officer in the house. I’m not sure how long you can stay at the women’s shelter, but maybe they can work something out for you.”

  Sarah Ann’s smile went from mock to genuine. “That would be awesome if I could stay with you tonight and think about what I should do next. I don’t think I’d be able to thank you enough.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “In a way, I’m glad this happened today,” Sarah Ann continued. “You see what I’m up against at home now, don’t you? Mother’s gotten worse and worse the older I get. I think she resents my growing up because . . . well, I think I’ve figured it out. She knows that once I graduate, I’ll be on my own at last . . . and she’ll be alone. But I can’t help that. I have to live my own life.”

  Wendy managed a sigh. “The empty nest. You always hear it’s hard on a lot of parents.”

  Sarah Ann’s smile disappeared and her voice quavered. “All of that may be true, and if that’s all there was to it, I’d feel a little bit better about . . . well, what happened to Aurelia.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I can’t prove it, but I have a very bad feeling about Mother and what may have happened between her and Aurelia when she visited Overview. You see how she gets. She finds passages and throws them at people and expects them to fall in line without questioning anything. She hates questions. She believes in absolutes. And lately, she’s starting referring to herself as the Avenging Angel. You heard her today.” Sarah Ann shivered for a few seconds. “It makes me wonder what type of avenging she may already have done.”

  “You know that my husband has already interrogated your mother down at headquarters, don’t you?”

  Sarah Ann said nothing, but nodded.

  “He doesn’t seem to feel that your mother is capable of murder, and he wonders where someone like herself would have the wherewithal to get her hands on cocaine and force someone like Aurelia to overdose on it. I also highly doubt your mother is the type to know her way around the streets. Does your mother own a gun?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then how did she pull all of that off, if she actually did it? I’m wondering if she could have had help, which is a totally different issue.”

  Sarah Ann took a deep breath and exhaled all in one smooth motion. “I don’t know about all that. I’m just telling you what I suspect, and your husband and the rest of the police department can take it from there. I just consider that I’m only doing my civic duty.”

  “I promise you that I’ll be discussing everything that happened here today with Ross when I get home. Including what you’ve told me. Or you can tell him yourself. It may be helpful since it appears the case is going nowhere fast. Officially, Aurelia’s death is still considered a suicide.”

  The two rose from the couch together and hugged for a good ten seconds. Then Sarah Ann pulled back slightly and said, “Thanks for caring about me, Wendy. You’re practically a saint. Of course, I know you’re not old enough to be my mother, but I wish you were.”

  Wendy found herself blushing. The words gave her the sort of warm feeling that she frequently got from being around Ross. “I’m not sure I’m quite ready for motherhood yet, much less sainthood, but I tell you what. You follow me in your car, and we’ll stop by the drugstore and get you a few things like a toothbrush on the way to my house. I think I have a pair of pajamas for tonight that’ll fit you, too.”

  “Oh,” Sarah Ann said, bringing her hands together prayerfully. “Would you mind if I run to the ladies’ room real quick before we leave? With all the crying I’ve done, I must look like a raccoon with my mascara running and all. Do you mind if I fix my face up a little?”

  Wendy chuckled softly and waved the tips of her fingers. “Run quick, like a little bunny rabbit.”

  “Will do.”

  As Wendy watched Sarah Ann leaving the room, she found herself tossing around the word that had been brought up in such a complimentary fashion just a few minutes earlier—mother. She had told Sarah Ann that she thought she wasn’t ready to become one yet, but Bax had not so subtly dropped a few hints here and there about becoming a grandparent. Namely, when was it going to happen? He let it be known that he was leaning toward the sooner rather than the later option.

  She and Ross had discussed it more than once, to be sure. They both wanted children eventually, and as had been the case with Ross on the issue of getting married in the first place, he had gotten there first. She had told her father not to be impatient and that it would come in time.

  “But I don’t wanna be so old that I can’t hold your babies,” he had told her with a gleam in his eye. “I wanna do things with ’em.”

  She had smiled back at him and said, “You’re young yet, Daddy. And so am I. I’ll know when the time is right.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The next morning, Ross had just finished bringing Bax up to date on his chaperoning duties for Sarah Ann O’Rourke, as the two of them were seated across from each other in Bax’s office.

  “I’ve never felt such tension in a house before,” he concluded. He made fists of his hands and brought his knuckles together like opponents in a prize fight.

  “Mother and daughter at war with each other,” Bax said, shaking his head. “A sad story. Things were so different between Wendy and her mother every precious day that Valerie was with us. That’s the way it should be for everybody in every family.”

  “I think Dora O’Rourke was in shock as we left with the last few things, though,” Ross continued. “You could see in her face that she couldn’t believe what was happening. Maybe this will be a wake-up call for her. Her daughter wasn’t bluffing. But that’s too bad because from what I’ve observed and what Wendy’s told me, Dora was the one who caused all the trouble in the first place. Anyway, Sarah Ann is settled in at the women’s shelter for a while. Wendy’s gonna look in on her later and see what can be done after that.”

  “My daughter, the investigative reporter, the amateur sleuth, and now the social worker. I’ve known for quite some time she’s a multitasker.”

  Ross smirked. “That about covers it.”

  Then Bax handed his son-in-law a sheet of paper. “This is the timeline I’ve worked out for all the visitors Aurelia Spangler had at Overview the day she died, based on what they all told us. Obviously, any of them could be lying. The one thing that’s fixed is Aurelia’s TOD, according to the coroner. According to the housekeeper, Lula West, she had the day off. We’ve checked, and her alibi holds up there. So the deal appears to be that if all of them were telling the truth, then Vance Quimby was the last person to see his sister alive. But note the huge gap between the alleged times of all the visits and the TOD.”

  Ross began scanning the neatly typed document with great interest:

  2:30—Charlotte Ruth visits (says took 20 minutes)

  4:00—Dora O’Rourke visits (says took 15 minutes)

  5:30—Vance Quimby visits (says took an hour)

  8:00 to 9:00—Aurelia’s approximate TOD

  “I see what you mean,” Ross said, finally looking up from the page. “According to this, if Charlotte and Dora are telling the truth, they inadvertently confirm that Miz Aurelia was definitely alive when they both left her. Which brings us back again to Vance Quimby. His sister would have been alive when he left her, according to the TOD.”

  Bax leaned over his desk and took the sheet back, then made a disdainful face. “Here’s the thing that gums up the whole works, though. There’s a huge gap between the time Vance said he visited and the time his sister died according to the coroner. There was plenty of time for any of the others, including himself or someone we don’t yet know about, to return or show up for the first time to take care of some nasty, unfinished business. That’s the x-plus factor here, and it seems to be doing its best to elude us completely.”

  “And there’s still that one last possibility, unfortunately,” Ross added. “That Aurelia Spangler really did commit suicide for the reasons she described in that note she left on the table, despite what her brother told us about her mood in general. I’ve read that some suicides aren’t planned all that far in advance. They just happen like spontaneous combustion.”

  “We’re not making much progress, are we, son?”

  Ross stuck out his chin and winced at the same time. He hated when cases reached a standstill like this, and it happened all too frequently. So frequently that a healthy percentage of them went cold.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” he said. “We have everyone’s DNA, but that doesn’t help us much because we already know they were all there at one time or another. And if there was somebody else we don’t know about yet, then they were damned careful not to leave a trace of themselves behind.”

  Bax exhaled. “You know how intent my daughter is on proving the suicide diagnosis wrong, of course.”

  “Does the sun come up every morning?” Ross paused briefly. “Nothing more from Doxey?”

  “I was gonna tell you,” Bax began. “He called me this morning just after I’d first come in and said there might be a glimmer on the horizon. I’m hoping something will come of it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, he said that one of his homeboys believes there is a new player out there, but that they might as well be invisible. He says whoever it is hasn’t been dealing on the streets as usual. No one’s spotted anything, anywhere. But someone’s siphoning off business. Someone’s moved in on the sly, and under those circumstances, Doxey and his homeboy wonder how long it’ll be before someone pays the price for that. Now, that could get really ugly.”

  “Well, there’d be an upside. It would likely bring whoever it is out in the open,” Ross said, sounding a bit more optimistic.

  Then he seemed lost in thought for a while. When he finally came up for air, he began telling Bax what Wendy had shared with him last night about Milton’s latest telegram delivery to Professor Isaacson.

  “Milton was certain that the letter opener and the rag dolls were the essence of Aurelia’s scary vision. But what if that was a gross misinterpretation? What if instead, Aurelia was seeing a representation of violence brought about by this street business being siphoned off? What if the real meaning of that vision hasn’t occurred yet? Should we be so willing to dismiss that as a possibility?”

  Ross had never seen his father-in-law looking quite so skeptical, and he knew something on the order of a lecture was on the way. “I have to tell you, son, I’m a little uncomfortable factoring these so-called psychic visions into the equation. We already know from Vance Quimby that he and his sister were essentially an upscale carnival act ready to rake it in out at Overview. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know for a fact that genuine psychics have been very helpful to law enforcement from time to time—I don’t deny that—but do we really wanna spend a lot of time on what Aurelia Spangler had to offer, one way or the other? Don’t we have to fall back on more conventional things like the actual evidence? That’s our training, and it should be guiding us, of course.”

  “When you put it that way, I guess not.”

  But Ross had to admit to himself that living with his Wendy had definitely had an influence on him, and he was not quite ready to dismiss her instincts. They had solved crimes for her before, and he considered himself fortunate to be married to someone with such out-of-left-field talents.

  * * *

  The distinguished Dr. Gordon Henshaw had been more than happy to clear some time for Charlotte Ruth on Wendy’s behalf, particularly since he found the story of Aurelia Spangler’s suicide more than intriguing. Now graying at the temples, pushing sixty, and a practitioner of his craft for nearly thirty years in Rosalie, he had struck a gold mine in the historic, quirky river port. To his way of thinking, it was simply a fact of life in the Deep South—the older the city, the more people worshiped at the shrine of genealogy, and the more people needed to have their heads examined because of the fallout. The reasons for that were epic and innumerable, if not always logical; but they were all nothing short of lucrative for him.

  To add to that, the still-trim Dr. Henshaw had a bedside manner that was soothing and melodious. His soft, smoky voice put his patients—particularly the females—in mind of the celebrated Nat King Cole, even though the doctor never sang romantic ballads to them. Without putting them to sleep, he was somehow able to nearly hypnotize them with his reassuring tone, and that no doubt had everything to do with the fact that practically all of his patients raved about him. In cyberspace, he was always getting those five-star reviews that every professional wants to receive and then publicizes extensively on websites.

  Wendy had told him that Charlotte Ruth was a newcomer to Rosalie, however, and he wondered quite frankly if the problems she had brought with her from somewhere outside would yield quite so easily to his particular gifts. He kept his ego in check enough to know that he was not the perfect fit for everyone, however.

  “Continue with what you were saying about you and your new friends learning bridge,” he was saying to Charlotte a few minutes into their first session, facing her in his comfortable leather armchair.

  Charlotte sank back a little deeper into the big green pillows behind her on Dr. Henshaw’s couch. On either end of it sat two enormous ficus plants that nearly touched the ceiling, and there were several ferns and potted palms throughout the office to complement the doctor’s green wallpaper.

  “I just wasn’t prepared for the trauma of it all. Here I thought I would just be learning a game for pleasant social reasons, and I ended up deeply involved in this horrible murder.”

  “But Wendy told me the case is currently considered a suicide, and you said the same thing to me.”

  “Well, maybe I should clear that up a bit. I went to Wendy and implied that I had caused Aurelia Spangler’s suicide. I have to admit I was a mess on that particular occasion.”

  Dr. Henshaw made a few quick notes and said, “So, you did not cause her suicide, then?”

  “No, I lied. It was much worse than that. I actually murdered Aurelia Spangler. I’m the one the police are looking for.”

  Dr. Henshaw straightened up a bit more in his chair and cleared his throat. He was accustomed to hearing everything conceivable from his patients and was not fazed in the least by Charlotte’s remark.

  “You murdered her? That’s very interesting. Would you mind telling me how you did it?”

  “With cocaine, of course. She died of an overdose of cocaine. It was truly quite horrendous for me to observe. It was like she was disappearing before my very eyes the more she snorted it.”

  Dr. Henshaw did not blink and continued in his trademark beguiling tone. “Was it her cocaine?”