Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

I always wondered if that replaced what she was missing from her seemingly perfect marriage.”
    I had replaced what was missing from my seemingly perfect marriage with doughnuts. Volunteer activities? That was a route I had never considered. “Did you like Carter?”
    “Hardly ever saw him,” she said. “But we did socialize a few times and he was just a very negative person with a lot of opinions. He spent a lot of time on that blog and his boat and didn’t do much else. That’s what leads me to believe that things weren’t perfect between the two of them.”
    “Are they ever?” I asked. “Perfect?”
    “Of course not. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think Lydia was completely happy. That’s all I’ll say.”
    Made sense if you subscribed to the “methinks you doth protest too much” school of reasoning. If I thought about her blog postings, it made sense. Lydia was a woman trying to convince herself that everything was okay in Wilmottville when in fact she had a distant and removed husband who thought about nothing but his incendiary blog and his boat.
    “He’s being buried tomorrow,” she added. “There’s a memorial service at the Unitarian church.”
    I thought about that. I wondered if I could go and not feel like a rubbernecker.
    Or if taking a sick day this early in the semester, before it had even started really, would give me a figurative black eye with administration.
    It didn’t matter. I was going.

Fifteen
     
    I had to break my “no lying” rule and call in sick to school, even though I was as healthy as a horse with just a little nagging nausea. A petite horse. I laid it on thick with Sister Mary’s assistant, Jolene, and brought it home with a gagging noise that made her hang up quickly after promising to tell Mary that I was under the weather.
    Being as I hadn’t attended too many celebrity funerals, and Carter Wilmott was a bit of a celebrity around these parts, I never took into account the fact that every major local news outlet would also be in attendance. As I strode up to the church, feeling fine in my sleeveless black shift and high-heeled pumps, I got a knot in my stomach, knowing that pictures of this event would be splashed across every Westchester paper, not to mention a few New York City papers, whose reporters often wrote about the goings-on in sleepy towns in the area, especially if such goings-on were as sordid and juicy as the Carter Wilmott death/murder.
    I got inside without being photographed, or so I thought, and slid into a back pew, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, black wide-rimmed sunglasses covering my black eye and, hopefully, my identity. I didn’t look out of place among the many well-heeled mourners who were all in chic black clothing and dark sunglasses. This is a village that really dresses for its funerals. I wondered how many of them were wearing girdle-topped panty hose like I was and in danger of losing consciousness from having their diaphragms cut in half. Lydia strolled in through a side door wearing her usual uniform of crisp white shirt, big, chunky, expensive-looking necklace, and dark sunglasses. The only thing different about her outfit was that instead of her usual size-two designer jeans, she wore a beautifully cut black pencil skirt that showed off her amazing figure and long legs. If her late husband was distracted and distant from that, he had been a complete idiot in life. She sat in the front pew with several other family members, her two young-adult children, and her frumpy and rather odd sister, Elaine, who thankfully had shed her sweatpants for the day and wore a black sack dress.
    I was raised in a devout Catholic household so a Unitarian service, to me, was pretty simple and scaled back in its pomp and circumstance. A few Cat Stevens songs, followed by some generic prayers and a couple of speeches that made Carter sound like a cross between Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. I also noticed that there were hardly any tears shed; must have been some kind of lapsed-Protestant way of dealing with things. Even we Catholics were allowed to cry a little bit if the spirit moved us. But during this service, there was complete silence, nary a sniffle, and no evidence of moist eyes or cheeks.
    After forty-five minutes or so, just long enough for me to determine that, yes, I would have to cut myself out of my girdle-topped panty hose, the ceremony abruptly ended, with Lydia standing in her pew and receiving