“Milo has no reason to dig in the woods, Vi,” Dad said.
“How do you know? He’s probably looking for the body of his ex-girlfriend.” She began furiously knitting again. “He needs to find it and move it before all the digging starts for the construction.”
A hush fell over the table as we considered this possibility. Even though most of it was based on cat reports and hearsay, it was a possibility.
“So you’re saying Milo’s an idiot?” Seth asked.
Diana snorted, and Dad chuckled.
Vi’s face turned a dangerous red. “Do you have a better idea, Mr. Smarty-pants?”
“It just seems to me that if I had buried a body out in the woods I would have a general idea of where it would be.” Seth didn’t look up from his iPod as his thumbs waged war on zombies or aliens on the tiny screen. “Plus, I wouldn’t return to town with a building project guaranteed to dig up that body.”
Seth had scored a point but at great cost; he would have realized this if he had looked at Vi while he was talking. Vi didn’t like to have her theories squelched. Part of my brain considered her idea; Milo had something going on besides the strip mall project.
“Tom, what can you tell us?” I hoped he would have something good to divert Vi’s attention.
He’d been watching my mother’s cards as if she were performing magic tricks. “Things are not very good at the station,” Tom said. “We don’t have much to go on, and Mac is getting irritated.”
“I’m sure we didn’t help much yesterday,” I said.
“He hasn’t mentioned it again, actually. I thought he’d bring it up every chance he got, but he’s been all business. Everyone’s checking and double-checking the evidence. Mac spent some time in the archives, but I don’t know what he was looking for. He sent us back out to canvas the neighborhoods for witnesses. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now.”
“Well, you have two witnesses right here, so technically you are doing your job,” Vi said, and gestured to the dogs. “Too bad they’re both sticking to the same bacon story. And none of you seem interested that Milo was buying bacon.” She narrowed her eyes at the dogs and rested her chin on her hand, which dragged her mouth into more of a frown than usual. Her knitting had tangled, and she let it slip to the floor.
Seth reached over and patted Baxter’s head; he shot Vi a look and held Tuffy tighter.
“All we have right now is that both Sara and Tish were shot with a small-caliber revolver,” Tom said. He consulted his ever-present notebook. “The ballistics test says it’s the same gun, so whoever shot Sara didn’t think he needed to get rid of it.”
“That’s interesting,” said Diana. “It takes a certain amount of arrogance to kill someone and then assume you’re never going to be a suspect.”
“There was no sign of a break-in at either address. We’re assuming the killer knew both victims,” Tom read from his notes. “The only other thing we’re looking into is the threats that were coming through Sara’s website.”
“What threats? She never told me about any threats,” Mom said. She looked around the table to see if she was the only one in the dark.
“Gary told us about it. Apparently, in the past month or so she’d been getting threatening comments on the blog at her website,” Tom said.
“What kind of comments?” Mom said.
“Mostly it had to do with her work as a psychic. Gary said she thought it was another psychic in town trying to scare her off,” Tom said.
“Alison mentioned it the other day,” I said. “It started with comments about her being a fraud and needing lots of ‘theater’ at her séances. Then the tone became more threatening. They said that if she kept doing her séances she would regret it.”
“According to Gary, Sara thought it was Tish.” Tom flipped through his notes again. “Tish said she didn’t know anything about it. She never went to Sara’s site, according to her computer-search history.”
“You know you can delete browsing history,” Seth said. His voice indicated he didn’t think Tom could even turn on a computer.
“I know.” Tom glowered at Seth. “We have a computer guy in Grand Rapids looking at both machines for us. So far, there’s no link.”
“I heard there was some issue with Gary and Sara over this land deal,” Diana said.
“Yeah, he came clean on that one.” Tom nodded.
He explained Sara and Gary’s fight over the land and their divorce settlement.