“I—I—I don’t know what you could possibly mean, Lila,” Barbara Hirshorn said. Her eyes darted around the room. “It was terrible, just terrible. The poor man was murdered.”
“She means that one of us might have done it, my dear,” Don Tracy said. Joe wondered if the man was capable of speaking without sounding as if he were delivering a speech on stage.
Barbara gasped, clapping both hands over her mouth.
The rest of them stared at each other, suddenly suspicious of people they’d known for years.
Then they stared as one at Gen—as if she had brought the real monster, because the real monster might be the truth—before turning to Joe again.
As they did so, he suddenly felt spotlighted, one degree removed from the people around him. It was almost like an out-of-body experience, as if this were just a scene in a film and he was watching it. A dead man had spoken to him, and then he himself had spoken to a girl claiming to be a psychic, and he had actually believed her. Which made all this totally unlike anything he had ever dealt with before.
Murder suddenly seemed so simple.
While death itself was not.
At last he stood. “You don’t need to look at each other as if you’ve all suddenly turned into the devil,” he said. “There are any number of other possibilities, and the police will be investigating all of them. Perhaps the murderer is counting on you all turning on each other. Perhaps he—or she—is hoping that the police will believe it’s a member of the society. Nothing has been ruled out as yet.”
“So why don’t we try to rule out a few things?” Barbara asked.
Everyone was silent.
“Seriously, who here would have anything to gain by Thorne’s death?” Larry demanded.
“No one,” Eileen said evenly, glancing at her daughter. “No one,” she repeated firmly. “I very much doubt any of us are in Thorne’s will.”
“But is murder always for personal gain?” Don Tracy demanded dramatically.
“Of course not. Think about Poe’s stories. Characters were killed simply because they made the narrator crazy,” Barbara Hirshorn said. “So…did Thorne drive any of us completely crazy?”
Lila let out a laugh that sounded like a bark. “Seriously?” she asked.
Barbara looked as if her feelings had been hurt, as if she thought that Lila was laughing at her.
But Lou Sayles set a hand on her arm. “Barbara, dear, I don’t believe Lila was laughing at you but simply because, well, which one of us didn’t he drive crazy?”
Nat Halloway cleared his throat. “He was a bit of a braggart,” he said.
“Oh, come on. Jared isn’t here to listen to what we’re saying, so we might as well be honest. Braggart? He was obnoxious,” Lila said.
“We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Barbara said.
“Death doesn’t change the truth,” Larry said.
Don pointed at Larry and said, “Face it, Larry. You’ve always talked about writing a book on Poe, but Thorne went ahead and did it. You can’t tell me you weren’t at least a little bit jealous.”
“I wouldn’t have killed him for that,” Larry protested indignantly.
“Really? So what would you have killed him for?” Lila demanded.
“I wouldn’t kill anyone!” Larry said, his face suffusing with color.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Eileen said.
“People, really, there’s no need to start accusing each other,” Joe told them.
“It’s impossible not to talk about it,” Lila said.
“I’m not suggesting that you stop talking about it,” Joe said. “I just think there are more constructive conversations to have. So…Thorne Bigelow was a man who aggravated his friends. And when was the last time you each saw him?”
“I hadn’t seen him since our last meeting, a month ago,” Barbara said, relief in her voice, as if she now considered herself free from suspicion. “But, we would all have seen him the night he died. We were slated to attend a dinner to benefit a literacy foundation.”
“So everyone would have been at that dinner?” Joe asked.
“Everyone,” Eileen said. “Even Gen was going to go. With me.”
Joe nodded. “Okay, he died a week ago. Barbara says she hadn’t seen him in ages. What about the rest of you?”
“I had a meeting with him on Friday to discuss his finances,” Nat Halloway admitted. “I left him alive and well.”
Larry waved a hand in the air. “He was at the Whiskey Bar on Thursday night. I saw him there.”
“I saw him at the Whiskey Bar, too,” Brook admitted.
“Last month,” Lila said. “I hadn’t seen him since the last meeting.”
“That’s a lie,” Brook said.
“What?” Lila demanded.
“You were at Dooley’s Pub the Tuesday night before he was killed. I saw you there, and I saw Thorne there, too,” Brook announced.