“I don’t know. I just know—I know this, Caroline—it was Tank Sinclare that killed your mama and daddy.”
Beamer Beasley was right. Cheral’s theories sounded harebrained. They wouldn’t stand up in court for five minutes. Certainly not against a silver-haired, silver-tongued attorney such as the man she was accusing.
So why was I now sitting here, turning things over in my head, going back over every word I had exchanged over scrambled eggs and sriracha sauce with Ethan Sinclare?
? ? ?
“I’M NOT SURE how this changes anything,” said Beamer Beasley, when I tracked him down buying waffle fries at a Chick-fil-A on Howell Mill Road. “I mean, I know your mama’s ex-neighbor thinks Ethan Sinclare did it. She’s been yammering on about it for thirty-four years.”
“I really wish you had told me that,” I complained. “All you said was that Sadie Rawson might have had an affair. You never mentioned his name.”
“You never asked,” he barked down the phone line. “Last thing I want to do is drag a respectable man’s name through the mud, drag him into Ms. Rooney’s loony conspiracy theories. Ethan and Betsy Sinclare are well regarded here. He’s on the board of directors of the Alliance Theatre, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden. He organizes an annual golf tournament to benefit veterans, for God’s sake. He said he didn’t do it. He has an alibi. We checked it out. There is nothing to indicate he was at the Smiths’ house that day. End of story. Frankly, he was probably out of your mama’s league.”
I bridled at this last comment, but held my tongue. “Was he one of the suspects who had a gun?” I demanded instead.
“Was he what?”
“Last week, you told me that back in 1979 you questioned two suspects who owned guns. Was Ethan Sinclare one of the two?”
“Ms. Cashion.” Beasley sounded weary.
“Call me Caroline, for Pete’s sake.”
“With your permission, I’ll stick with Cashion. Police protocol. To do with respect and professional distance and all that. And to answer your question—”
“Doesn’t matter. I think I already know the answer. Do me a favor, though? Check where Sinclare was last Wednesday night. The night my house got broken into.”
Thirty-nine
* * *
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2013
My mother arrived before nine, bearing lasagna. Two deep pans of it, one sausage and one spinach. What I was in fact craving for breakfast was a croissant jambon fromage from Patisserie Poupon. If I’d known she was driving over, I would have asked her to pick one up on her way.
I wouldn’t have said no to a Vicodin, either. I now regretted having told Dr. Gellert not to bother refilling my painkiller prescription. Last night I had tossed and turned in bed, feeling as though a thousand tiny needles were stabbing my neck. I decided to view this not as a setback, but as a positive development: the numbness must be receding. My skin and nerves were knitting back together. Still. This morning I was tired and sore.
I was also worried. The photos of Ethan Sinclare were unsettling. During the night, as I’d writhed around on my mattress trying to escape the needle-knives, I had homed in on the weirdest part of my breakfast with him. He had denied knowing Sadie Rawson well. He had presented himself as a tennis buddy, closer to Boone. But Cheral Rooney had told me that Ethan and his wife socialized with my birth parents. Even if Cheral was flat wrong about there having been an affair, even if she was loony, as Beasley seemed to think, I’d seen the beach photo myself. Sadie Rawson resplendent in a bikini. There isn’t a beach within a hundred miles of Atlanta; at the very least they’d all taken a weekend trip to the coast together. Why had Sinclare lied?
With supreme effort I put a smile on my face. Mom was burrowed into my freezer, trying to clear space for one of her lasagnas.
“Your freezer’s packed to the gills,” she muttered. “What is all this stuff?”
“Here. Let me help.” I squeezed past her and started rearranging Tupperware tubs of chicken soup.
Mom stood watching. All of a sudden, she squealed. “You’re using your right hand!”
I looked down in surprise. It was true. I was throwing frozen soup blocks around as though it caused me no trouble at all. Tentatively, I stretched my right arm straight and rotated my wrist in a full circle clockwise. Then counterclockwise. I hadn’t been able to do that for more than a year.
Mom and I grinned at each other.
“I’m going to call your father,” she said. “He’ll be thrilled.”
I headed upstairs to change out of my pajamas. When I returned twenty minutes later, teeth brushed and hair twisted back in a bun, she was seated on my living-room sofa. Cheral’s photos were still spread across the coffee table. My mom had picked one up by the edges and was studying it intently, a strange look on her face.
I thought I understood. Had Mom ever seen a photograph of Sadie Rawson? She must be upset. The resemblance to me was staggering.
She waved the photo at me.
“Mom—”
“Darling,” she said. “I didn’t know you knew Ethan.”
Forty
* * *
My mouth hung open. I thought my legs might buckle. I steadied myself on the arm of the sofa. “What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t know you knew Ethan. Such a lovely man.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Of course. We’ve known Ethan and Betsy for years. We got to know each other at the ABA convention. Let’s see, the time it was in Dallas.” The ABA was the American Bar Association. “That must have been . . . goodness . . . sometime in the eighties. Twenty-five or thirty years ago. Ethan was seated next to me at the banquet. Which was a relief, I can tell you, because there are some exceptionally boring lawyers in this country, and I always seem to draw them as my dinner partner at these things.”