talk, the more they try to convince me, and pretty soon they forget that every word they utter can someday come back as nails in their coffins. “Do you remember anything else?” I asked.
“Well, not much,” he said. “But I remember that vision of Carl standing over me with the knife and the blood dripping down.”
Done saying his piece, he appeared unconcerned, I assumed convinced that he’d swayed me.
“It’s odd,” I said, purposely keeping my expression blank.
Jacob gave me a half-shrug and asked, “What is?”
“When someone is standing like that, blood falls off the knife straight down in round drops, splats on the floor.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So what?”
“There weren’t any round drops anywhere near your body,” I said. “Actually, not on the entire kitchen floor.”
Jacob squirmed ever so slightly in the chair. “Maybe they got smudged when I fell on them.”
“Well, it’s all pretty strange,” I said, keeping my voice even, as matter-of-fact as I could manage. “I noticed it at the time, but it didn’t strike me as important until now, but there were no blood drops from anyone holding the knife high, like an assailant would have done if he stood over you. How do you explain that?”
A slight flush crawled out of Jacob’s shirt collar, white to go with his dark gray suit. He had on a blue tie for the wedding.
“I don’t know anything about things like that,” he said.
“I don’t think you planned very well,” I said. “Despite that, it was rather convincing for a while.”
Jacob scooted back just a bit in his chair, put some space between us. It didn’t worry me. The video camera covered the entire area.
“The blood evidence actually suggests something else.” I waited for him to ask what, but his lips were tight, his jaw clenched. “There were smears on the floor, blood that rubbed off the knife’s handle and blade, between your body and where we found the knife, under the kitchen table.”
This time he spit out the words. “So what?”
“So, whoever threw the knife was low, close to the floor. I thought at the time that the killer was kneeling over you. But now I’m thinking that he was lying down.” I placed my arm across the rickety table between us. “It’s like my arm is your body, and the knife was flung out across the floor. Jacob, when I think about it, it’s like you threw it there while you lay bleeding.”
“Why would I do that?” he asked, for the first time his brow lowering as if growing angry.
“To get the knife away from you after you cut your own throat,” I said.
At that, Jacob curled back his lips, revealing a slice of teeth, and released a short burst of laughter, as if I’d just told the most amusing joke. When he did, he flinched again. His voice growing increasingly rough, he asked, “You think I cut my own throat?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “And I didn’t know this until today, but the doctor at the hospital thought you did, too. He hadn’t mentioned it to me because he assumed it was preposterous. But I contacted him on my way to your wedding. The doctor said that from the angle of the cut, that it curved up just a little, the entire time you were in the ICU, he wondered off and on if you’d done it to yourself.”
“Oh, come on,” Jacob scoffed. “Why the hell? I almost died.”
“At the house, the EMT told me that you were lucky,” I said. “But it was really that you were smart. You knew you could cut your windpipe and survive, as long as you didn’t sever any arteries.”
“That’s crazy,” Jacob snickered. “How can you say that? I almost bled to death. Didn’t the doctor tell you that?”
“Well, everything didn’t go as you planned it, did it?” I said. “Naomi promised you and Laurel at Sunday services that she’d come over first thing Monday morning, seven thirty at the latest. What you couldn’t know was that she’d be late. That was why you almost bled to death.”
“Carl—”
“Killed Myles for you, didn’t he?” I asked. “Then, when he realized it was all unraveling, that we’d figured out that Myles wasn’t the killer, he panicked and hung himself.”
Jacob sucked in a deep breath, I supposed trying to calm the pounding in his chest.
“I’m figuring that this whole thing started on Sunday when Carl told you about Laurel and Myles, that he saw them together on Saturday afternoon,” I said. “You were mad,