E Is for Evidence

stirred restlessly. "I have things to do. Why don't you tell me what you want."
    "Well, let's see. Just in rambling around town, it occurred to me that it might help to find out who inherits Olive's stock."
    "Stock?"
    "Her ten voting shares. Surely, those wouldn't be left to someone outside the family. So who'd she leave 'em to?"
    For the first time she was genuinely flustered and the color in her cheeks seemed real. "What difference does it make? The bomb was meant for Terry. Olive died by mis-take, didn't she?"
    "I don't know. Did she?" I snapped back. "Who stands to benefit? You? Lance?"
    "Ash," came the voice. "Olive left all her stock to her sister Ashley." Mrs. Wood had appeared in the upstairs hall. I looked up to see her clinging to the rail, the walker close by, her whole body trembling with exertion.
    "Mother, you don't have to concern yourself with this."
    "I think I do. Come to my room, Kinsey." Mrs. Wood disappeared.
    I glanced at Ebony and then pushed past her and went up the stairs.

24
    We sat in her room near French doors that opened onto a balcony facing the sea. Sheer curtains were pulled across the doorway, billowing lazily in a wind that smelled of salt. The bedroom suite was dark and old, a clumsy assortment of pieces she and Woody must have salvaged from their early married years: a dresser with chipped veneer, matching misshapen lamps with dark-red silk shades. I was reminded of thrift-store windows filled with other people's junk. Nothing in the room would qualify as "collectible," much less antique.
    She sat in a rocker upholstered in horsehair, frayed and shiny, picking at the fabric on the arms of the chair. She looked awful. The skin on her face had been blanched by Olive's death and her cheeks were mottled with liver spots and threaded with visible capillaries. She looked as though she'd lost weight in the last few days, the flesh hanging in pleats along her upper arms, her bones rising to the surface like a living lesson in anatomy. Even her gums had shrunk away from her teeth, the aging process sud-denly as visible as in time-lapse photography. She seemed weighed down with some as yet unidentified emotion that left her eyes red-rimmed and lusterless. I didn't think she'd survive it, whatever it was.
    She had clumped her way back to her room with the aid of her walker, which she kept close to her, holding on to it with one trembling hand.
    I sat in a hard-backed chair near hers, my voice low. "You know what's going on, don't you?" I said.
    "I think so. I should have spoken up sooner, but I so hoped my suspicions were groundless. I thought we'd bur-ied the past. I thought we'd moved on, but we haven't. There's so much shame in the world as it is. Why add to it?" Her voice quavered and her lips trembled as she spoke. She paused, struggling with some inner admonition. "I promised Woody I wouldn't speak of it again."
    "You have to, Helen. People are dying."
    For a moment, her dark eyes sparked to life. "I know that," she snapped. The energy was short-lived, a match flaring out. "You do the best you can," she went on. "You try to do what's right. Things happen and you salvage what's left."
    "Nobody's blaming you."
    "I blame myself. It's my fault. I should have said some-thing the minute things began to go wrong. I knew the connection, but I didn't want to believe it, fool that I am."
    "Is this related to Woody?"
    She shook her head.
    "Who then?"
    "Lance," she whispered. "It started with him."
    "Lance?" I said, disconcerted. It was the last name I expected to hear.
    "You'd think the past could be diffused… that it wouldn't have the power to affect us so long after the fact."
    "How far back does this go?"
    "Seventeen years, almost to the day." She clamped her mouth shut, then shook her head again. "Lance was a hellion in his teens, rebellious and secretive. He and Woody clashed incessantly, but boys do that. Lance was at an age when of course he had to assert himself."
    "Ash says he had a couple of scrapes with the law back then."
    She stirred impatiently. "He was constantly in trouble. 'Acting out' they call it now, but I didn't think he was a bad boy. I still don't. He had a troubled adolescence…"She broke off, taking a deep breath. "I don't mean to belabor the point. What's done is done. Woody finally sent him off to military school, and after that he went into the army. We hardly saw him until he came home that Christmas on leave. He seemed fine by then. Grown up. Mature. Calm and