“Yes. The water tastes like crap.”
She smiled. “You shouldn’t sell this house. This is a great property. It’s a little too close to town for some people, but he’s set it up nicely to be self-sufficient.”
“I don’t want to live here.” He sounded like a whiner.
“Do you mind if we go inside?”
He pushed open the door between the house and garage as an answer. She walked past him and he got a whiff of fresh-baked lemon bars. Her shampoo? They silently walked the home. Truman had said everything he had to say the night before and didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with useless words. He caught her watching him a few times and wondered what she saw on his face.
Pain?
A desire for revenge?
She stopped in the long hallway and pointed at a framed collage of faded pictures. “What goes through your mind when you look at this?”
Truman stepped closer to look, even though he knew each picture by heart. They were candid shots of his uncle and his friends. Most of them were from the 1970s. Avoiding her eyes, he pressed his lips together as he considered her question. “I think of my uncle living here alone. I think how much we butted heads, but deep down I always knew he cared. I always wondered if he missed me when I went home for the school year.”
“Did you ever consider attending school here?”
“Hell no. This was a good place to blow off some steam during the summer, but I didn’t want to live here.”
“Did you know kids your own age when you lived here?”
Memories flooded his brain. Some good, some shitty. “Yes.”
“What was hanging here?” she outlined a faint rectangle on the wall.
“A mirror. It was in pieces when I got here that morning.”
Mercy stared at the white rectangle the old mirror had left by protecting the wall from dirt for decades.
She took a few steps and looked in the bathroom they’d studied last night, but she wasn’t looking at the floor this time.
“The gunshots broke the mirror in here, right?”
“Yes.” Truman didn’t like how her eyes had widened as she’d studied the wall. “Why?”
She turned and strode into his uncle’s bedroom, scanning every corner. “Were there any mirrors in here?”
Truman scowled. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Did you find any other broken mirror fragments in the house?” Her voice rose an octave.
He thought. “No. Why are you asking?”
She shook her head as she went back down the hall. She stopped where the broken mirror had hung. “It was knocked off the wall in the scuffle. It’s so close to the bathroom. Someone bumped it.”
“That’s what I assumed. What were you thinking?”
Her green gaze met his. “For a split second it reminded me of another scene.”
He didn’t know what crime she was talking about, but judging by the horror she was attempting to hide behind her gaze, he knew it’d been a bad one.
“I need to call Eddie.”
His antennae rose. “Why?”
“Maybe he noticed something I missed at Ned Fahey’s house.”
“Like what?”
“Like more broken mirrors.”
Mercy paced in the yard in front of Jefferson Biggs’s home, swearing at Eddie under her breath.
“Pick up, pick up. Dammit!” It went to voice mail. She left a message for him to call her right back and sent a text requesting the same.
Her heart hadn’t slowed since Truman had said a mirror had been broken.
Not the same. It’s not the same. That would be impossible.
Or could it be?
No. He’s gone.
Her phone rang in her hand and she nearly dropped it. “Eddie?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m at Enoch Finch’s home. Would you believe almost everything has been removed from the house? I guess the family thought they had free rein to come in and help themselves to whatever they wanted.” Disgust rang in his tone. “The sheriff told them he’d collected all the evidence and had turned it over to a cousin, but that was only three days ago! It looks like a mob of Christmas bargain hunters plowed through the place.”
“Did you notice if the mirror in the bathroom was broken?”
Eddie was silent for a long moment. “It is. Why do you ask? How’d you know that?”
Mercy’s knees threatened to give out on her.
“Mercy? Why did you ask that?”
“Maybe one of the family members did it,” she said. “It sounds like they weren’t very careful.”
“I can check the official report on the murder,” said Eddie. “Or it’d probably be quicker to ask one of the officers who was here. You’re not answering my question.”
“The bathroom mirror at Jefferson Biggs’s home was broken.”
“I remember. It was hit by a bullet or two.”
“There was another small mirror hanging in the hallway that’d been broken.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Eddie stated, losing his patience. “Mirrors break. Especially when people are shooting or fighting for their lives.”
“Did you look in the bathroom at Ned Fahey’s home?”
“I didn’t.”
“We need to find out if his mirrors are intact.”