Let it Sew (20 page)

Chapter 29

Tori let herself into the library through the back door, Charlotte’s high school yearbook
tucked under her arm and more than a few questions pecking at her brain. All night
long, she’d found herself replaying snippets of conversations from the past few weeks
that had seemed so innocent when first uttered, yet now, when seen in a different
light, were anything but.

But as she’d learned many times in her quest to track down Parker Devereaux’s killer
thus far, the ground tended to shift beneath her feet when she least expected it,
proving her wrong again and again.

It had been hard summoning her best poker face when she walked out of the chief’s
office with nary a word about her latest head-spinning suspicion. And it had been
hard convincing Ethan she needed to see his mother’s yearbook, only to send him back
inside for the one that matched the earlier year noted in his mother’s final sketch
without giving him any reasons as to why.

By the same token, though, if her latest hunch proved true, she might be able to have
her first full night’s sleep since finding Parker’s body.

“Dixie?” she called. “Are you here?”

The stocky woman she’d come to count on in more ways than one peeked her head down
the hallway and waved. “I’m here, but I’m busy with those two boys from the high school
who were interested in the Vietnam era.”

She knew she should be happy for Dixie, happy for the smile the boys’ continued interest
instilled on her friend’s face. But it was hard.
She
needed Dixie, needed her knowledge of a different time and place that couldn’t be
researched in a book.

Or could it?

Glancing down at the book tucked under her arm, she willed her voice to sound as natural
as possible. “Okay. But will you come to my office when you’re free, please? I have
something I need to ask you.”

At Dixie’s nod, Tori flicked on the light in her office and carried Charlotte’s eleventh-grade
yearbook over to her desk and sank into her chair. A call to Frieda had confirmed
what Charlotte’s final sketch had revealed at the police station. Sadie Sweeney had
stopped by for a visit that last night, her presence enabling Frieda to sign off for
the night far earlier than normal. But even with that, Frieda had made sure, before
leaving, that the women were all set for their long-overdue visit—Sadie with her wine
and memories, and Charlotte with a fresh sketching pencil.

It was a visit that, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t have even raised Tori’s
eyebrows—as it apparently hadn’t for Frieda, either. But considering the woman’s marital
relationship with Tori’s chief suspect
and
the unsettling fact that Charlotte had died later that same night and, well, her
eyebrows were raised. Big time.

Opening the book, Tori flipped straight to the junior class, slowly searching page
after page for a Charlotte. Sure enough, roughly forty students in, she came to a
slightly younger face than the one she’d seen in the wedding photo buried alongside
the woman’s husband.

The senior class followed, but Tori passed those pages by, skipping ahead to the open
pages in the back designed specifically for signatures and notes from classmates.
A note near the bottom of the second such page caught her eye, the masculine writing
marred by a reddish-colored stain.

Intrigued, she held the book to her nose and inhaled, a faint, yet still present smell
catching her by surprise.

“Wine?” she whispered.

Her gaze traveled back down to the stain and the writing still visible beneath its
mark.

Charlotte,

Before I met you, I thought my path was clear and my destiny set. That may still be
true, but now, rather than look ahead on that path, I will forever be glancing back
over my shoulder . . . wondering and imagining what might have been if only I’d seen
you first.

Stunned by your presence,

Jerry Lee

“Jerry Lee?” she read aloud with a voice that was as stunned as it was quiet. “Jerry
Lee Sweeney?”

“And aside from an underclassman who caught his eye midway through their senior year
and periodically throughout the next year or so, Jerry Lee was pretty smitten with
Sadie.”

Dixie’s words from weeks earlier filtered through her thoughts as if the woman were
in the room with her at that moment, single-handedly tying the seemingly odd strings
in her hands into something resembling a bow.

Flipping backward, Tori stopped on the page devoted to members of the high school’s
senior class whose name began with the letter “s.” And, sure enough, there was Parker
Devereaux’s best friend and longtime business partner, Jerry Lee Sweeney. The next
page revealed a student listed as Sadie Underwood . . .

Sadie.

Suddenly, the bow that was taking shape in her head got a good, tight pull from yet
another inscription—this one written by
Charlotte
inside a very different book.

My dearest Brian,

I love the you that you are—the you that you are because of a father’s love.

Forever and Always.

Love,

Mommy

Charlotte hadn’t written “your father’s love.” She’d written “a father’s love” . . .

“Sorry about that, Victoria. But I just had the most fun with those two young men.
Their paper is done, yet they came in to ask me more questions, if you can believe
it. Said they wanted to know more about that time in our history.”

“How did Charlotte and Parker meet?”

Dixie stopped midway across the office. “Charlotte and Parker? They met about the
time Charlotte was graduating from high school. Apparently, Jerry Lee had a party
and invited Parker—someone he’d been friends with throughout his childhood. Charlotte
was there, too, and she said it was love at first sight. Must’ve been because they
married less than three months later.”

Tori forced herself to look up from the yearbook picture of Jerry Lee, as a question
she hadn’t even been aware she was contemplating found its way out from between her
lips. “Parker Devereaux wasn’t Brian’s father, was he?”

Dixie stopped mid-step, her face draining of all color. “Why do you ask?”

“I just need to know.”

For a moment, she thought Dixie was going to turn on her heel and head back into the
library, Tori’s question unanswered. But finally, the woman spoke, her voice hesitant.
“No. He wasn’t. But he knew Charlotte was pregnant when they married and he agreed
to raise the child as his own, giving him his name on the birth certificate despite
the obvious issues that presented themselves at Brian’s birth.”

“Who was the father?”

A second, longer pause was soon followed by an answer Tori didn’t expect. “I don’t
know. Charlotte never said and I never asked. In fact, other than telling me that
Parker wasn’t the father and that only she, Parker, and the biological father knew
the truth, she never spoke of it again.”

Mustering up every ounce of courage she could via a deep breath, Tori shared her suspicions
aloud. “I think it was Jerry Lee Sweeney.”

Dixie gasped. “Jerry Lee? No. Where on earth did you come up with that?”

She spun the yearbook around so Dixie could see, flipping ahead to Charlotte’s junior
class picture and then back to the senior class pages depicting Parker, Jerry Lee,
and Sadie. “Didn’t you say that Jerry Lee and Sadie were high school sweethearts?
That aside from an underclassman who caught Jerry Lee’s eye midway through his senior
year, he was pretty smitten with Sadie?”

“I did. But from what I gather, he kept that girl’s identity a secret from everyone,
including Sadie. So I don’t see how you can take a few pictures and make the leap
you’re making.”

Without saying a word, she flipped to the back of Charlotte’s book and the wine-stained
inscription from Jerry Lee to Charlotte.

Wine-stained . . .

She matched Dixie’s gasp as the items Charlotte had depicted in her last drawing flashed
before her eyes.

The yearbook Dixie was reading now . . .

A lone pearl clip-on earring . . .

A full glass of wine . . .

“I had no idea—”

She waved off her friend’s rant with one of her own. “Dixie! That’s it! Sadie must
have put two and two together that night while looking through Charlotte’s yearbook.
She must have been so stunned she spilled her wine on the page. She did it! She killed
Parker.”

Dixie began shaking her head before Tori was even finished. “If she
just
found out Charlotte had been the underclassman her husband had been mooning after
all those years ago, what reason would she have had to kill Parker five years ago?
And why
Parker
? What did
he
do to Sadie?”

She felt the air whoosh from her lungs as she realized Dixie was right. Maybe Sadie
being in Charlotte’s house that last night was nothing more than a coincidence.

A wine-stained coincidence.

No. There had to be a connection. Somehow, someway.

“If Sadie killed anyone after reading what Jerry Lee wrote, my money would be on Charlotte.”

Her head snapped up. “Charlotte?” But even as the question hovered in the air between
them, she knew.

Charlotte hadn’t died earlier than Frieda expected.

She’d been
murdered
.

By Sadie Sweeney.

The same Sadie Sweeney who touted herself and her life as picture-perfect.

It all fit. Perfectly.

The only question that still remained was whether Charlotte had been murdered in a
fit of jealousy or as a way to keep her quiet.

“My bet’s on jealousy,” she whispered.

*   *   *

Tori made her final lap around the outside of the library before heading back toward
the stone steps that called to her in much the same way a lighthouse called a ship
home. She’d been walking for nearly an hour, her thoughts a jumbled mess despite the
list of questions she’d jotted down in her notebook with Dixie’s help.

Question by question, the answer had come up the same.

Jerry Lee.

Jerry Lee.

Jerry Lee.

Slowly, she climbed the stairs, the absence of cars in the lot and the lack of pedestrians
going in and out of the front door letting her know she’d walked right through closing.
When she reached the front door, she pulled, the give of the door quelling any fear
Dixie might have locked her out in the woman’s haste to get home.

“Dixie, I’m back,” she called as she turned and locked the door in her wake. “I’m
sorry I walked so long. I guess I just lost track of time.”

She turned to find the library’s main room empty and several stacks of books lined
up around the information desk.

Hmmm. That’s very un-Dixie-like . . .

After a quick peek down several aisles, Tori headed down the hallway toward her office,
her thoughts jumping to the various motives she and Dixie had schemed where Jerry
Lee was concerned.

He was angry at Parker for raising his son?

He was bilking thousands upon thousands of dollars from Parker’s company?

They were possibilities, she supposed, but they didn’t sit right. Not completely anyway.
There was something missing; she was sure of it.

She rounded the corner into her office and froze. There, standing behind Tori’s desk
with eyes open wide in terror, was Dixie . . . with Jerry Lee Sweeney’s arm around
her neck. Gasping, Tori spun around and ran into the hall, only to be stopped by Jerry
Lee’s halting words.

“You walk out of here to call the cops, Miss Sinclair, and I swear I’ll snap her neck.”

She looked from Jerry Lee’s angry face to Dixie’s terrified one, her gut telling her
to get the man talking.

“Why did you k-kill them?” she stammered.

“
Them?
I didn’t kill
them
.”

“Sadie killed Charlotte, didn’t she?” It was a risky question to ask, but it was all
she could think of to buy herself time and a moment to think.

A flash of pain crossed Jerry Lee’s face, only to disappear as quickly as it had come.
“I suppose the notion of me fathering another woman’s son—and a mentally challenged
one at that—was more than she could take. It doesn’t really mesh with her image.”

Tori took a slight step to her right and then followed it up with a second and third,
finally leaning her body against the doorjamb as her focus alternated between Jerry
Lee, Dixie, and the cell phone she was all too aware of in the back pocket of her
jeans.

Jutting her chin toward the yearbook on her desk, she hoped the momentary visual distraction
would afford her the second or two necessary to slip her hand behind her back and
pull out her phone. “I saw what you wrote to Charlotte when you were kids.”

Bingo.

Jerry Lee looked down at the still-open yearbook, the now wine-stained inscription
claiming his attention just long enough for her to do as she’d hoped. Flipping the
phone open against her pant leg, she slid her fingers across the keypad until she
reached the speed dial number assigned to Milo and then hoped and prayed he would
be able to make out the confession she was determined to get, as well as their location.

“I know you were putting your volunteers on paper as paid employees at the center
so you could pocket the money for yourself. But I also know you didn’t start that
until
after
Parker was dead. Was that the plan all along? Is that why you killed him and tried
to pin it on Ethan? So you could set your plan in motion?”

Jerry Lee looked up from the yearbook with a snarl. “I trusted Parker to raise my
son as his own while I held up my end of the bargain and never told a single solitary
soul—including my wife—that I was Brian’s biological father. I knew Charlotte loved
Parker and that she’d always resent me if I kept her from him. So I signed over my
parental rights prior to his birth with the understanding that he’d be given the same
life and privilege as any future children they might go on to have. When Brian was
born the way he was, I guess I gave up on some of that, thinking, like everyone else,
that there wasn’t much life to be had by someone like that.