the truth of his embezzlement. Maybe he didn’t want his sister to know out of shame or maybe it was out of self-preservation. Either way, it was clear he was dancing around the issue, looking for a way out.
“Emily!” The familiar young Latina nurse approached, holding a large, beige leather purse.
Sully’s hunched shoulders relaxed, as he had been given a temporary reprieve.
“We finally found Mrs. Wakefield’s purse,” the nurse said, “but she checked out this morning. We tried calling her, but the phone rings in her purse. So I wondered, since you’re a friend of hers, could you make sure she gets it?”
“A friend?” Emily mumbled to herself, a bit taken aback by being called the old woman’s friend. “Sure,” Emily agreed. She was happy to jump at the opportunity to go through that woman’s things and find out who she really was. “I’ll track her down and make sure she gets it.”
“A woman’s whole life really is in our handbags.” The nurse laughed as she handed it over. “That one feels like it has everything in it but the kitchen sink.”
Emily grabbed it by the handle and her wrist strained under the surprising weight.
“Thanks, Emily,” the nurse sang as she hurried back to her station.
Emily tried to control the smile that threatened to break across her lips as she anticipated the opportunity to dig through the woman’s private things. “I need to go,” she announced. “You want to stay here with Sully,” she asked Maggie, “or do you want me to drop you off at home?”
“Uh, I’m going to be here for quite a while sitting with Carolyn, so you probably want to go with Emily,” Sully quickly suggested.
Emily understood his desire to end the painful conversation with his sister. He was probably worn out, she assumed, from all the fancy footwork.
“I’ll go with Em,” Maggie said, stepping toward her brother, standing toe to toe, “but don’t think for one single minute this discussion about Lucas is over, mister.”
“No, I know you better than that.” Sully sighed and backed toward the door, rolling his eyes as he pushed it open with his back and disappeared into his wife’s room.
The girls strolled to the elevator and boarded, watching the doors glide shut.
“What does that woman have in this purse? My gosh, it must weigh fifty pounds,” Emily complained, unzipping the top of it as the elevator floated down.
“Emily, it’s not nice to be goin’ through her purse. Isn’t that against the law or somethin’?” Maggie frowned, watching Emily open it.
“I hate to tell you this, Maggs, because you think the best of everyone, but Gloria Wakefield isn’t who you think she is.”
“What are y’all talkin’ about?”
Emily did not reply, but a wide grin spread across her face as she pulled out a white handkerchief wrapped around a hard object. The cloth was stuck to the crystal with dried blood. She held the thing out in her palm and peeled back the corners of the hanky.
Maggie gasped.
Emily had found the bloody mountain-shaped paperweight. She had found the murder weapon.
“Oh, my. There’s a gun in here, too,” Emily exclaimed.
~*~
Emily and Maggie drove directly from the hospital to the police station, phoning Colin on the way.
“I knew you’d figure this case out, Emily,” he commended her. “I’ll call Ernie and let him know you’re on your way to see him. Do you have any idea where Gloria is?”
“Not yet, but I think I know a way to find her. Just be aware, though, she may not have been the one who put the paperweight in her purse.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The purse was out of her possession for days. Any one of our suspects could have taken the purse, tucked the paperweight inside, and hid it in an out-of-the-way place in the hospital.”
“You could be right. Ernie said Mrs. Wakefield was pretty out of it when the paramedics took her away.”
“And if the ER was busy that night, someone could have snatched the purse and not been noticed.”
“One of those people might have been Fiona,” he suggested.
“My thoughts exactly. I wondered why she was hanging around the hospital so much with a woman she barely knew. Maybe she hid the purse somewhere in the hospital and it got moved before she could retrieve it, so she had to stay at the hospital and search for it.”
“Besides, why would Gloria want to kill her own son?” Colin asked.