It had to be You

Jim were rewarded with double portions of lunch and a nice cash tip, with Miss Twibell’s most gracious thanks.
    At that, there was a general exhalation of the held breaths that had prevailed among the staff all morning.
    But as soon as the young men had finished their lunch, burped contentedly, and taken away their tools, Miss Twibell went into high gear again, to everyone’s sorrow.
    “Betty, Mr. and Miss Brewster, I’ll need your help now. We’ll start with things that go in the storeroom. You can bring in the large things first. And while you’re putting them away, I’ll go through the smaller items that go in the outside cabinets. It’s time to purge some things that are past their prime and replace them. I’ll make a list as I go.”

    Chief Howard Walker, on the other hand, completely wasted what he’d hoped would be a productive Sunday afternoon that he’d hoped to use clearing up his office and filing masses of piled-up paperwork.
    Instead, he interviewed most of the women on Miss Smith’s list of addresses for the knitting circle. He managed to interrupt several Sunday after-church dinners, chatting with housewives who came to the door in their special Sunday aprons. Most of them showed alarm when he showed up. Some also showed impatience at the interruption when they realized he hadn’t shown up for any important reason, such as complaints against their children for missing school or breaking someone’s window.
    None of them had anything of consequence to say about Mr. Connor, alive or dead, except the few that complained that early on, when he still had his strength, he’d been rude when they met in the living room at the nursing home—making loud, nasty remarks about the noise of cackling hens with nothing worthwhile to do except gossip and laugh.
    Howard went back to his office in the boardinghouse, which reeked of cabbage even more than it normally did, and furiously filed paperwork, throwing a good quarter of it out as useless to keep any longer.
    Then he went over all the notes he’d made on the death of Sean Connor. He often found that taking copious notes was helpful. Most often, if he took down enough details, some of the items would fall together and mean more than he originally thought they did. No luck today, though. He, like everyone else, couldn’t come up with a viable theory as to why anyone would have a motive to kill someone who was about to die within a matter of hours anyway.
    He kept coming back to his notes about Mark Farleigh though. He didn’t really know anything about this man except what Miss Twibell had told him. He had no reason to think she’d lie about him. But maybe her own perception of Farleigh wasn’t true. How could he possibly question a man who would only speak to one person, and then merely with a word or two of acknowledgment?
    It was clear that Farleigh was a deeply disturbed individual. So were many of the men who had served in the Great War. The only ones who seemed to be able to put it out of their minds were the most stupid and insensitive of them. Simply thinking about what they’d had to endure filled him with horror. More than one soldier, just in Voorburg alone, had committed suicide because they couldn’t get their minds off the constant fear, the smell of the mustard gas, the mutilations they’d suffered, or those they themselves had inflicted on strangers.
    Howard found himself wondering if Sean Connor had been a soldier in that war as well. Could there be some obscure motive there? Could Farleigh have met him on a battlefield? He made a note to find out whether Connor had enlisted.
    Then he turned his thoughts to the nursing assistant, Betty. She had borne the brunt of Sean Connor’s bone-deep nastiness. Having to clean and dress his knee regularly must have put a strain on both him and her. Connor undoubtedly would have been rude to her. Perhaps even violent. Maybe she had simply reached a breaking point and could no longer stand to be anywhere near him.
    On the other hand, she did admit, even though she needn’t have, that the last time she checked on him, she merely looked in the door instead of checking his breathing or blood pressure or temperature. That bit of honesty about a failure to do her job thoroughly was in her favor.
    What did he know of the Connor family, in fact? He’d heard Miss Smith’s version of how Sean Connor had alienated his only son. Chief Ed Simpson had verified it. But what about the rest of his