Murder by the Slice (27 page)

Sam said, “What about the other folks who work at the school? Anybody else like Gary Oakley crop up?”

“Convicted felons, you mean?” Mike shook his head. “One of the lunchroom ladies had a DUI conviction five years ago. That was the worst thing we found.” He smiled. “You schoolteachers are a pretty mild bunch.”

“We have our moments, dear,” Eve said. “We’re just discreet about them, that’s all.”

“I’ll take your word for that, Ms. Turner.” Mike looked at Phyllis and went on, “Did you think of anything else that might help, Mom?”

Phyllis shook her head. “Not yet.” She hated to stretch the truth, but she was still hesitant to drag Russ Tyler into this, considering how shaken Marie already was. And she still hadn’t been able to figure out what it was she had heard during the meeting at the school that had tickled at her brain for a moment.

Mike reached for his hat. “I guess I’d better get on home, then,” he said. He stood up and nodded politely as he put his hat on. “Ladies.” Then he added, “See you later, Mr. Fletcher,” as he went out.

Phyllis was distracted all through her preparations for supper and then during the meal itself. Sam offered to help her clean up afterward, and when they were alone in the kitchen, he said, “Something’s botherin’ you, isn’t it, Phyllis?”

“It’s this case,” she replied quietly. “When you look at it, it seems like there are plenty of motives and suspects, but those motives gradually get weakened or wiped out entirely, and then there are no suspects left.”

“There’s got to be one left, because somebody sure killed that poor woman. We just haven’t figured out the whole story yet.”

Phyllis nodded. “Yes, I have that feeling, too. There’s something we don’t know about, or something we’ve overlooked.”

“You realize,” Sam said, “that it’s not your job to figure it out. I know Mike sort of keeps you filled in and all—”

“You think he’s just trying to placate his nosey, meddling mother?”

“Now, I didn’t say that,” Sam replied. “I think he believes you’re a pretty smart woman—and he’s right about that, by the way—and he likes to run the facts by you because that helps him keep ‘em straight in his own mind. And there’s always the chance that you’ll notice something he doesn’t. But my point is, you can walk away from this whole thing any time you want to, and nobody’s gonna think any less of you for doing it.”

“I’m not trying to figure it all out because of what anybody will think of me if I don’t,” Phyllis said. “Despite her faults, Shannon didn’t deserve what she got. And if I can help Mike bring her killer to justice, I’m going to.”

Sam nodded, but she thought she saw a faint gleam of skepticism in his eyes. She wondered if he believed she got mixed up in murder investigations for the thrill of it. In truth, she had pondered that same question herself. She told herself that wasn’t the way it was, but at times, doubt nibbled at her mind. Maybe she liked playing detective a little too much… .

She put those thoughts out of her head and said, “Are you busy tomorrow?”

“What’d you have in mind?” Sam asked.

“I want to talk to Joel Dunston. I don’t know if he’ll see me or not, but I’m going to give it a try.”

“What do you think he knows that you don’t?”

“I’d like to find out just how much, if anything, he knew about what was going on between his wife and Russ Tyler.”

“Ex-wife,” Sam reminded her.

“Of course. I’m not sure he really thought of her that way, though. When he was looking for her during the carnival, he called her his wife. Maybe he thought they’d eventually get back together. Maybe he wouldn’t like it if he knew about Russ’s involvement with Shannon. After all, he considered Russ his friend.”

“In other words, you think
he
might be the killer.” Sam nodded. “You’re not goin’ to talk to him alone, that’s for sure. Just let me know when you’re ready to go, and I’ll go along with you.”

“Thank you, Sam.” Phyllis patted his arm. “I knew I could count on you.”

“You always can,” he said, and Phyllis found herself looking into his eyes for a few seconds longer than she’d intended to before she turned away and forced her mind back onto simpler things—like murder.

* * *

Early the next morning, Phyllis called Joel Dunston’s office to see if she could make an appointment to see him that day, claiming to suspect that she had a sinus infection. She hated to do anything under false pretenses, but it didn’t seem likely he would agree to see her if she admitted she wanted to question him about his ex-wife’s murder.

The receptionist at Joel’s office informed her that he wasn’t in the office that day and wouldn’t be for the rest of the week.

“There was a death in the family, you know,” the woman said. “Dr. Dunston is taking a little time off.”

“Well, that’s probably for the best,” Phyllis said.

“Would you like to make an appointment to see him when he’s back in the office?”

Phyllis continued the fiction she had started with, saying, “No, thanks. I’ll have to have this problem looked at before then.”

She hung up the phone and frowned as she tried to figure out what to do next. A couple of days earlier, Joel had been at the house he had once shared with Shannon, looking after his daughter. Becca might be back in school by now, but it was likely that Joel was still staying at the house. He might move back in permanently now that Shannon was gone.

She found Sam upstairs and said, “Joel Dunston isn’t in his office today, so we’re going to see him at his house.”

“You know for sure he’s there?”

Phyllis shook her head. “No, but I don’t know where else to look for him.”

“Let me get my jacket,” Sam said with a nod.

He shrugged into his denim jacket while Phyllis fetched her purse and a lightweight coat from her room. As they went downstairs together, Phyllis hoped they could avoid running into Eve, who would certainly want to know where they were going if she saw them leaving together. Phyllis was getting tired of fibbing to people, even for a good cause.

They were lucky and were able to get out of the house

without being noticed. Getting back in might be a different story.

“Let’s take my pickup this time,” Sam suggested. Phyllis was about to say that they could go in her car instead, but then she decided to go along with Sam’s suggestion. He was a man, after all, and she knew how men were about driving. Anyway, it didn’t really matter how they got there.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I can tell you how to find the place.”

As they headed out South Main Street toward the interstate, Sam said, “What are you plannin’ to say to the doc?”

“I thought I’d try to find out—subtly, of course—if he had any idea there was something going on between Shannon and Russ Tyler. I’m not sure how I’ll go about it.”

“Can’t just come right out and ask him, I reckon.”

“No, probably not.”

Sam looked over at her. “Mike could, though, if he knew about what was goin’ on.”

Phyllis frowned. “Sam, you’re not scolding me for keeping this to myself, are you?”

“Me, scold you? Nope. I figure you know what you’re doin’.”

“I don’t want to ruin Marie’s marriage if I can avoid it.”

She realized that she had made that statement several times over the past few days, and she wondered if that was really her motivation or if she just didn’t want to give up the one piece of evidence she had. She wanted to think that she was just trying to save the Tylers’ marriage, but she was coming to doubt that more and more.

The solution was to get to the bottom of this, to figure out exactly what it was she had heard or seen or both that would give her the answers she was looking for. As Sam drove, she cast her mind back to the day several weeks earlier, during the bake sale at Wal-Mart, when she had met Marie and first gotten involved with the PTO board from Loving Elementary. Phyllis tried to take it day by day, event by event, conversation by conversation… .

“Now where do I go?” Sam asked, breaking into her train of thought. Phyllis blinked, looked up, and realized that they had reached the interstate.

“Oh,” she said. “Turn left and get on the highway. You’ll get off again a couple of exits up.”

“Okeydoke.” Sam wheeled the pickup into the turn.

Phyllis knew that he hadn’t meant to intrude on her thoughts, but she was frustrated anyway. She had felt like she was closing in on something, but it was still incomplete, like a painting without all the details filled in. And there wasn’t time now to get back into that state of concentration. She had to pay attention to finding the Dunston house again and giving Sam directions for how to get there.

She realized that she would have to start from Marie’s house, because that was the way she had gone before. “Take the next exit and turn right,” she told Sam. “It shouldn’t be much farther.”

The twists and turns of the housing development south of the interstate were confusing, but they found Marie’s house without too much trouble. From there, Phyllis was confident she knew where they were going. She looked over at the Tyler house as they drove past it, but didn’t see Marie anywhere. That wasn’t surprising on a chilly day like this one. She was probably inside, and Russ was at work in Fort Worth.

Unless he was off meeting some other woman for lunch.

Phyllis told herself she had no reason to think that. With Shannon gone, maybe there wouldn’t be any more threats to the Tylers’ marriage. Although, as Sam had said, Russ didn’t seem to be the sort of man who was good at resisting temptation… .

“Take this left and then the next right.”

“Got it,” Sam said.

A minute later, after Sam had made the turns, Phyllis

said, “That’s the house on the left. You can pull up at the curb.”

There were no vehicles parked in the driveway. Both doors of the two-car garage were down, and Phyllis couldn’t tell if there were any cars inside or not. They would find out soon. She had decided that if Joel was here, she would ask him about the casserole dish she had left a couple of days earlier. She’d told him then there was no hurry about getting it back, but she could tell him that something had come up and she needed it. Yes, a casserole emergency. Happened all the time, didn’t it? Actually, it didn’t, but Joel probably wouldn’t know that.

Sam eased the pickup to a stop at the curb. They got out, Phyllis opening her own door rather than waiting for Sam to come around and open it for her. When they reached the front door, Sam stood back and let Phyllis take the lead. She pressed the doorbell and heard it chiming somewhere in the house.

A moment later the door swung open. Becca Dunston stood there in jeans and a sweatshirt. Her brown hair was in braids that hung over the front of her shoulders. She looked surprised and worried as she said, “Oh, hi. I thought you were somebody else. That’s why I opened the door.”

To make sure the little girl didn’t close the door in their faces, Phyllis said quickly, “You remember me, don’t you, Becca? I was working at the carnival the other day, in the cafeteria.”

“Oh, yeah, you were the lady with the cakes and the snacks and that stuff.” Becca seemed to relax a little. “My dad doesn’t like for me to open the door when he’s not here, but I saw that pickup through the picture window and thought it was Lane’s.”

Phyllis thought back to her visit to the Dunston house a couple of days earlier, recalling the name of the young man she had seen there with Kirk. “Lane Erskine, you mean?”

“Yeah, Kirk told me he was coming by to pick up some

stuff from the shed in the backyard. I thought maybe he’d bring Nicole with him.”

“Who’s Nicole?” Phyllis asked. Becca hadn’t asked them in yet, so she wanted to keep the girl talking. From what Becca had said, Joel wasn’t here right now. Phyllis wasn’t sure how much information she could get out of Becca, but the possibility seemed worth a try. She was a little troubled, though, by the thought that she was trying to question an innocent child who had just lost her mother.

“She’s Lane’s little girl. We play together sometimes. She’s so cute and adorable.” The superiority of being three or four years older was plain to hear in Becca’s voice. “She goes everywhere with him when he’s got her.” Becca adopted a confidential tone. “Lane doesn’t live with Nicole’s mother, you know. But he has her on weekends, and other times, too. Her mother’s not a good person.”

Phyllis wouldn’t know about that, but it didn’t surprise her. So many people had children these days who really shouldn’t.

“But of course Nicole’s in school today,” Becca went on. “She’s in kindergarten. I didn’t think about it being a school day because I’m still home, since …”

Her voice trailed off as sorrow appeared in her eyes. Phyllis knew she was remembering
why
she was home from school. To distract her from that, Phyllis asked, “What was your brother’s friend supposed to pick up?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just some stuff. Kirk keeps it covered up with a tarp. He won’t let me look at it. Daddy doesn’t know it’s out there in the shed.”

“We came to talk to your daddy. Did you say he’s not here?”

“He’s gone to the store. He asked me to come, too, but I didn’t feel like it. I had a stomachache earlier.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you think he’d mind if we came in and waited for him?”

“I dunno… .” Becca looked rather suspiciously at Sam.

“Oh, this is my friend, Mr. Fletcher,” Phyllis said. “He used to be a teacher, too.”

“And I coached basketball,” Sam put in. “You ever shoot hoops, Becca?”

“Sometimes.” She started to step back. “I guess it would be okay—”

At that moment, a car pulled into the driveway from the street and one of the garage doors started to rise, its opening mechanism no doubt triggered by a remote control in the car. The driver stopped before pulling into the garage, though, and quickly got out of the vehicle. Phyllis heard anger in Joel Dunston’s voice as he demanded, “What’s going on here?”

Chapter 26

Joel came around the front of the car toward them. His movements were stiff and his eyes were intense behind his glasses. But after a couple of steps he slowed and the frown on his face went away. “Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Newsom,” he said. “I didn’t notice you at first. I just saw this fellow standing there, and I’ve told Becca not to answer the door when I’m not around, or talk to strangers—”