Well, I used to think it was only improbable to impossible, so yes, I am actually moving to that conclusion. Yes, until a better suspect comes along, and Emma’s been careful to work on ruling those…I think you should take it seriously, too.”
My heart soared. Brian was talking about Tony.
“Yes, I know she’s not the authorities, but it’s only recently that we’ve had something more concrete. Yes. Yes, I will. Good night.”
Brian hung up.
“Well?” I asked.
“He’s pissed you didn’t go straight to him, but we have to live with that. I’m going to give him the report—mine and Roddy’s—the plate, all the names of the people who handled it. It seems that he thinks you’ve got a fan in Stuart Feldman, and he might be able to do something about getting a friend of his to look at the rest of the food—the sample.”
“Okay. Well, thanks for sticking up for me.” I felt myself choking up. “Thanks for bringing the stuff to the lab.”
“Hey, what else am I here for?” He held me tight. “And it was fun.” Brian pulled back, looking sick, though. I felt none too good myself.
“I’m going to call Dave Stannard, up in Maine,” he said. “And then I’m going to be out on the porch for a while.”
I thought briefly about protesting, but Brian was right. Everyone had to know.
I nodded. “I’ll be right there.”
“Don’t be too long, Em, okay?”
I nodded again. I needed to think. I couldn’t tell Meg, I couldn’t ruin her wedding memories, especially since no one got hurt. I would tell her, though, to be even more careful than usual. Quasimodo the cat yowled at the door. I let him in, and watched him mow down some food while I got the bourbon out. Quasi finished in a hurry, and ran back over to the door, looking at me hopefully.
“No way, cat. You stay in whenever I catch you; there’s coyotes out at night. Consider yourself caught.”
Quasi growled; I poured my drink. Eventually he slunk off, sulking as obviously as any human. I went upstairs.
Tony knows everything about me, I thought. He knows I abhor bullies, and so that’s why he went for Chuck. And Dora, I thought suddenly; for all her forceful personality, she has a lot to protect, and he found that out. He knows the painting meant something to me, and that was taken, possibly destroyed. He knows how I feel about the site, about my crews, about the artifacts. It wouldn’t be hard for him to find out about Dora’s parents—he might have been one of the few people to know, having been here as long as she—or Marty and Sophia or my parents. And Meg, there’s all of that…And don’t forget Michael—
I put the bottle down suddenly. How did he know about Michael Glasscock?
Michael had been to the house exactly once. Michael and I knew each other from a brief month of research at the Shrewsbury Library. While anyone could have read about the murders that left us alone in the house together—suspecting each other—there was nothing that would indicate that we’d kept in touch since. I couldn’t even describe our relationship: Michael was dismissive and rude about my style of research, clinging as he claimed, to antiquated notions of material evidence. At the same time, he occasionally sent me references that were spot on for my work, and got me thinking down avenues I would never consider, but it always made my research better and more interesting. For my part, I asked him questions about the history of philosophy for the periods I studied, and maybe my “almost Neanderthal obsession with the mundane, the quotidian, and the material” inspired him in the same way. Not that he would have admitted it.
Brian was vaguely jealous of Michael. Despite the fact that I found him attractive, it had never been anything more than an amusing sort of crush, mostly based on how his brain appealed to me. Brian had said that was worse than mere physical attraction and teased me mercilessly about it. And Michael was notoriously attracted to anything with a double-X chromosome. Whoever sent that image knew that there had been a frisson between us.
But we never even spoke on the phone, aside from that call last week, and he never even sent me anything in the mail, so it couldn’t be by rifling my college mailbox—
But my home mail was another story. That had been violated.
Michael never sent me anything there.
It has to be