By the time Gertie got back from getting Nolan settled, Ida Belle and I were serving the lasagna, meat sauce, and French bread Gertie had heated up. It smelled incredible and I could hardly wait to dig in. Italian food wasn’t standard fare for Sinful, so I was determined not to get my hopes up. Lasagna was one of the few things I missed about DC.
“This looks great,” I said as I sat down with a piled-high plate of pasta.
“It is great,” Gertie said. “The woman who made that is an Italian from New York. She’s been here forty years or better so no one considers her a Yankee anymore, but her mother doesn’t speak a lick of English, only Italian.”
Ida Belle nodded and cut off a bite of the lasagna. “Best Italian food you’ll find in the South, that’s for sure.”
Feeling hopeful, I took a bite and sighed. They were right. It was just as good as anything I’d ever eaten up north and better than most. I followed it up with a bite of crunchy garlic bread and almost felt guilty for enjoying it so much, given the circumstances by which I’d come by the meal.
“She should charge for this,” I said. “I’d pay.”
“A lot of people would,” Gertie said, “and I’ve pointed that out to her, but she has no desire to be a cottage industry. Said she spent enough time at the stove when her kids were little, and now she only does it when the mood strikes her.”
“She has seven kids,” Ida Belle explained.
“Jeez,” I said. “Between cooking, cleaning, and the laundry, she must have never gotten a break unless she was sleeping.”
Gertie nodded. “And probably did very little of that.”
I looked over at Ida Belle and she asked Gertie, “Is Nolan asleep?”
“He was starting to doze off when I left. The television is on, so as long as we keep our voices low, he won’t be able to hear us. Fortune can keep an eye down the hallway and let us know if she sees him coming this way.”
“Good,” Ida Belle said and filled Gertie in on our thoughts from earlier. I could tell Gertie hadn’t had time to process the information like we had, but the gravity of the situation hit her before Ida Belle finished with our conclusion.
“The whole thing is so troubling,” Gertie said. “I mean, I always have a problem with truly horrific crimes, but this entire thing has a feeling of…malevolence to it that I haven’t felt before. At least not in Sinful.”
Ida Belle nodded. “I’m not often prone to fanciful thoughts, but I have to agree with you. My mind is usually very logical and structured but now, I have this feeling like a dark cloud is hanging over us. I don’t like it. We’ve seen some pretty bad things recently. For this to bother us this way means something is so very wrong.”
Although I didn’t feel as strongly about the situation as Ida Belle and Gertie, I had to admit that this crime left me feeling more uneasy than I had before. Maybe it was because I’d met Gail and liked her, or because I felt sorry for Nolan, but I didn’t think that was it. Not entirely. It was something else, something elusive and dark.
“So we’re back to figuring out who the catfish was,” Gertie said. “Assuming we think it’s the same man.”
“I think it would be a huge coincidence if it wasn’t,” Ida Belle said.
“But where do we start?” I asked. “And before you answer, consider that this man has already killed once to protect his identity. I don’t think he’d hesitate to kill again.”
“And he’s made a good job of it,” Ida Belle said. “According to Myrtle, no one heard a thing.”
I nodded. “I find that interesting as well. I know Peaches says she sleeps like the dead, but a pistol shot coming from the house directly behind her should have jogged her out of sleep. And Myrtle overheard Carter saying Nolan heard a pop, which doesn’t jibe either.”
“You’re thinking suppressor?” Ida Belle asked.
“Has to be. All those people in all those surrounding houses and no one heard anything? It’s not possible.”
“I agree,” Ida Belle said. “So we have a killer who’s well equipped and prepared. Where do we go from there?”
We all sat in silence for a while, then Gertie perked up. “What about the photos? It may not be anything but it’s something to check.”
“It’s worth a look,” Ida Belle said, “especially after you crippled yourself to get them.”
“And made Peaches mop her bathroom,” I reminded her.
“It was for a good cause,” Gertie said. “Let me go get the camera.”
“No,” I said and jumped up from the table. “You stay put. You’ll be lucky if you’re walking on that ankle at all tomorrow.”
I grabbed Gertie’s purse from the back doorknob where it was hanging and pulled out the camera. I sat down and started scrolling through the photos. The first couple contained only a partial view of the backyard and not even a sliver of the trellis. The next set was taken from the balcony railing and I was relieved to find several well-focused shots of the trellis, in varying degrees of distance.