Shades of Twilight Page 28

usual," she said dully.

"I never meant to cause him any trouble."

"Why not wait until morning?"

"Because I wanted to fix it before then."

"Then why didn't you talk to her before you went to bed?"

"I was a coward." She gave him an ashamed took.

"You don't know how nasty Jessie could be."

"I don't think you're a coward at all, honey. It takes guts to say something's your fault. A lot of grown-ups never do learn how to do it."

She began rocking again, and the haunted look came back.

"I didn't want anything bad to happen to Jessie, not bad like that. I'd have laughed if her hair fell out or something. But when I saw her head ... and the blood ... I didn't even recognize her at first. She was always so beautiful."

Her voice trailed off, and Booley sat in silence beside her, thinking hard. Roanna said she'd turned on the light. All doorknobs and light switches had already been dusted for fingerprints, so it should be her print on that particular switch, something easy enough to check. If the light had been on when she'd gone to her room, and off when she went to talk to Jessie, then that meant either Jessie had turned off the light herself after Webb had gone, or someone else had. Either way, Jessie had been alive when Webb had left the house.

That didn't mean he couldn't have returned later and gone up the outside stairs. If his alibi at the Waffle Hut checked out, though, that meant they likely didn't have enough circumstantial evidence to charge him. Hell, there was no motive anyway. He wasn't having an affair with Roanna, not that Booley had pinned much credence to that theory to begin with. It had been a shot in the dark, nothing more. The hard facts were, Webb and Jessie had argued over something Roanna said was her fault while totally absolving Webb. Jessie had threatened him with the loss of Davencourt, but no one had believed her, so that didn't count. In a temper, Webb had yelled at her to go ahead and get a divorce, and slammed out of the house. Jessie had been alive then, according to both Roanna's testimony and the coroner's estimate of time of death, based on the degree of rigor mortis and the temperature of Jessie's body. No one had seen or heard anything. Webb had been at the Waffle Hut close to the time of Jessie's death. Now, they weren't talking about any great distance here, nothing that couldn't be driven in about fifteen or twenty minutes, so it was still within the realm of possibility that he could have returned, bashed her in the head, and then calmly driven to the Waffle Hut to establish his alibi, but the odds of convincing any jury of that were pretty slim. Hell, the odds of convincing the county prosecutor to press charges on that basis were even slimmer.

Someone had killed Jessie Tallant. Not Roanna. The girl was so painfully open and vulnerable, he doubted she knew how to lie. Besides, he'd have bet money she didn't have the strength to pick up that andiron, which was one of the heaviest he'd ever seen, specially made for the oversize fireplaces here in Davencourt. Someone strong had killed Jessie, pointing to a man. The two other men at Davencourt, Harlan Ames and the stableman, Loyal Wise, had no motive.

So, the killer was either Webb-and unless Webb confessed, Booley knew there was no way of proving it-or a stranger. There was no sign of forced entry, but to his amazement he'd discovered that none of the people here locked their balcony doors, so force wouldn't have been necessary. Nor was there anything stolen, which would have given them robbery as a motive. The plain fact was, Jessie was dead for no good reason that he could tell, and it was damn hard to make a murder charge stick without giving a jury a motive it could believe.

This was one murder that wasn't going to be solved. He could feel it in his bones, and it made him sick. He didn't like for law-breaking slime to get away with so much as stealing a pack of chewing gum, much less murder. It didn't

make any difference that Jessie had evidently been a bitch of the first water; she still hadn't deserved to have her head bashed in.

Well, he'd try. He'd check out all the angles, verify Webb's alibi, and present what he had to Simmons, but he knew the prosecutor was going to say they didn't have a case.

He sighed, got to his feet, and looked down at the forlorn little figure still on the sofa, and he was moved to offer her some comfort.

"I don't think you give yourself enough credit, honey. You aren't stupid, and you aren't a coward. You're a sweet, smart girl, and I like you fine." She didn't reply, and he wondered if she'd even heard him. She'd been through so much in the last twelve hours, it was a wonder she hadn't cracked under the strain. He patted her on the shoulder and quietly left the room, leaving her alone with her regrets, and her nightmare images.

The next few days were hell.

The entire Shoals area, which consisted of Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Florence, the four towns that butted together where Colbert and Lauderdale Counties met at the Tennessee River, were riveted by the spectacle of the bloody murder of a member of Colbert County's premier family and the ensuing investigation of her husband as the killer. Webb was as well known, if not quite as respected yet, as Marshall Davenport had been, and of course everyone who was anyone had known Jessie, the star of the local top society. Gossip ran rampant. Webb hadn't been arrested, and Sheriff Watts would say only that he had been questioned and released, but as far as everyone was concerned that was as good as saying he'd done it.

Why, look at how his only family treated him, the whispers ran. Lucinda cried every time she saw him, and she couldn't bring herself to talk to him yet. Gloria and Harlan Ames were convinced Webb had killed Jessie, and though publicly they didn't say anything, they had made a few comments to their closest friends, the "just between you and me" kind. The more moral souls were disapproving