Davenport calls the B&B at 3 PM on Monday afternoon, and the tone of her voice tells me everything before she says a word.
“I need to see you and Mrs. Hawthorn. Now. At the house.”
She arrives twenty minutes later. She’s alone — no Harding, no evidence bags. She carries a notebook in one hand and asks whether we have twenty minutes.
We sit in the kitchen. Agnes makes tea. I slice a lemon cake I baked this morning — lemon zest and poppy seed, the kind of cake that fills a room with brightness even when the news is dark. Davenport accepts a slice without comment.
“I interviewed Mr. Musgrove this afternoon,” she says. “At his office. His attorney, Philip Redmond, was present.”
“How did it go?” I ask.
“Mr. Musgrove was cooperative. Polite. He answered every question. He answered through counsel when he wanted to.” Davenport takes a bite of cake. She chews. She swallows. “His accounts conflict.”
Clover opens one eye, then settles again. None of us moves.
“He says he drove straight home and remained there until the call to Melissa. You say he told you he stayed in his car near the B&B.”
“He did.”
“Write down exactly what he said. Include your questions. I need to know which details you supplied first.”
I look at Agnes. She looks back without rescuing me.
“I told him Eugene saw the car.”
“I know. Eugene told Harding about it this morning. Now Dale knows what the witness remembers before we can finish checking his account.”
“I thought he might explain.”
“Instead he had an opportunity to change his explanation. Don’t do it again.”
I take the notebook from the drawer. My face burns as I write down the question about the driveway and the answer about moving the car. Davenport waits until I finish before asking about the threat.
I give her the exact words. She has my message from this morning; she asks what happened immediately before and after them. Then she takes the pages, reads them, and returns to the phone record.
“Mr. Musgrove also said he didn’t check his phone. He says he doesn’t recall Victor’s call.”
“He didn’t mention receiving a call.”
“He did not. When I asked him about it, he said — and I’m quoting — ‘I don’t recall receiving a call from Mr. Crane. I may have missed it. I wasn’t checking my phone.’”
“Eleven seconds,” Agnes says. “Long enough to hear a message. Or a threat.”
“The carrier entry alone doesn’t establish what was said,” Davenport says. “We’re comparing it with the handset data. There is also a message from the same minute. I’ll ask you about it when I can do so without feeding you an interpretation.”
She sets her fork down. The cake is half-eaten. The kitchen smells like lemon and butter and the particular tension that comes from a room full of people who know something terrible and are waiting to see how terrible it gets.
“His location remains uncorroborated,” Davenport says. “The car sighting conflicts with his account, and your conversation supplies another version. We will put those differences to him.”
I want her to say we have him. Instead she takes another bite of cake and waits for the question she knows is coming.
“But?”
“Circumstantial evidence can prove a case. The problem is that these circumstances still support more than one explanation. I’m checking those explanations before asking anyone to rely on them.”
“What about the gardening gloves?” I say. “The ones in the conservatory greenhouse. Dale said they were his — he mentioned it last week. If he handled the contaminated biscuit while wearing those gloves…”
Davenport taps her pen against the closed notebook. “A glove is not a fingerprint. Half the people in this town garden. And you told me Lily crossed the kitchen before dinner. You told me Agnes arranged the tea service. You also told me the pantry blocked your view at eight-fifty-five. Every one of those facts has to be considered, even the ones you dislike.”
“You think Lily did it?”
“I think your friendship with Lily does not constitute an alibi. I also think grief makes people certain they remember things they only inferred. That is why I ask for records, not theories.”
It stings because she is right. At the gallery, Lily had defended Victor with the intensity of someone who wanted me to stop asking questions. Hank had a delivery receipt, but five minutes existed between that signature and the kitchen door. Agnes had keys to every room. And I had baked the biscuits. Suspicion is easier than proof; it can spread to everybody at once.
“The gloves did not test positive for walnut. That doesn’t tell us who wore them on Thursday, or even whether gloves were involved.”
“The walnuts he brought to the B&B. The bag of black walnuts.”
“We have them. But owning walnuts doesn’t connect someone to the bitten biscuit.”
Davenport picks up her blazer from the back of the chair. She puts it on. She buttons it with the precise, deliberate movements of a woman who has been doing this long enough to know that the worst part of a murder investigation isn’t finding the truth — it’s proving it.
“We’re seeking the records we need and developing grounds for any further searches. I can’t discuss the details.”
“And if you don’t find anything?”
“Then we keep testing the other explanations. We don’t choose a person because we’ve run out of patience.” She looks at Agnes. “Please don’t put yourselves in danger trying to finish this for us.”
She leaves. The front door closes. The kitchen settles into the kind of silence that only happens when the people in the room have heard something they expected and still aren’t prepared for.
Agnes picks up Davenport’s plate. She washes it at the sink. She dries it with the blue towel and puts it away in the cupboard with the careful, deliberate movements of a woman who is holding herself together by focusing on the small things.
“His own account doesn’t hold,” she says to the window.
“Yes.”
“And Eugene saw his car.”
“Yes.”
“And Victor called him.”
“Yes.”
Agnes turns from the sink. Her eyes are dry and sharp and fierce.
“Then we find the evidence,” she says. “If the police can’t prove it, we prove it. We find the walnut grinder. We find the gloves. We find whatever Dale used to kill Victor, and we bring it to Davenport, and we end this.”
“Agnes, Davenport told us to stay away from Dale.”
“Davenport is a good detective. But she doesn’t live in this house. She doesn’t know what it feels like to sit at a table with a man for twenty-one years and then learn that he helped your husband bury a body in the woods.” Agnes’s voice is steel. “I’m not staying away from anything. Not anymore.”
She picks up the teapot and pours two cups. She hands me one. We sit at the farmhouse table with our tea and our lemon cake and our shared, fierce, unbreakable resolve, and outside the window the garden is golden in the late afternoon light and the conservatory is quiet and empty and holding too many memories.
“We start with Dale’s house,” Agnes says. “He has a workshop in his garage. George used to joke that Dale’s garage was better equipped than the B&B’s kitchen.”
A workshop. A garage. Another place where the things people shared might have ended up. I think of the recipe photograph and wish the biscuit came with the name of its maker.
“Davenport said she’s going to search his property.”
“She has her work to do. I have something to ask him that no warrant can answer.”
“Agnes, we can’t break into his house.”
“I’m not suggesting we break in.” Agnes’s eyes glitter. “I’m suggesting we go to dinner.”
“Dinner.”
“Dale invited me to dinner on Wednesday. He called this morning, before his interview with Davenport. He said — and I quote — ‘I think we should talk, Agnes. Woman to man. Neighbor to neighbor. Let’s put this behind us.’”
“He invited you to dinner.”
“To his house. Wednesday at seven. He’s cooking.” Agnes takes a sip of tea. “And I’m going to accept.”
Clover yawns from her chair, thoroughly unimpressed by our crisis.
“Agnes, that’s insane.”
“It’s strategic. If Dale is cooking dinner, he’ll be in the kitchen. The garage is attached to the kitchen. I’ll have access.”
“Access to what?”
“I want him to tell me what happened to Thomas while looking at me. If the workshop door is open, I will look. I won’t pretend I’m above it. But I am not going there only to hunt through his rubbish.”
I stare at her. Agnes Hawthorn — seventy years old, sharp-tongued, straight-backed, and apparently willing to walk into the house of a man she believes is a murderer in order to search his garage for walnut dust.
“I’m coming with you,” I say.
“Absolutely not.”
“Agnes—”
“If Dale sees both of us snooping, he’ll know. One old woman accepting a dinner invitation is normal. Two women poking around his garage is suspicious.”
“Then I’ll wait outside. In the car. If anything goes wrong—”
“Nothing will go wrong. I’ve been managing difficult men since before you were born.” Agnes finishes her tea. She stands. She straightens her apron. She becomes, again, the woman who runs a bed-and-breakfast and wins pie contests and has never, in seventy years of life, backed down from anything.
“Wednesday,” she says. “Seven o’clock. You’ll drop me off and wait on the street. I’ll tell my attorney where I’m going. And I will be out by eight-thirty.”
“And if Dale tries something before ninety minutes?”
Agnes reaches into the pocket of her apron and pulls out her phone. She holds it up.
“I’ll text you every fifteen minutes,” she says. “And if I stop texting, you call the police and you don’t come inside. Is that understood?”
“Agnes—”
“Is that understood?”
I look at her — this woman who has given me a home and a job and a purpose and a reason to believe that belonging is possible, even for someone like me. This woman who lost her certainty about her husband and her peace of mind to George’s letter and her trust in the closest thing she has to a son. This woman who is seventy years old and five-foot-four and built like a ship in a bottle — small, contained, and absolutely unbreakable.
“Understood,” I say.
Agnes nods. She picks up the teapot and carries it to the sink. She washes it. She dries it. She puts it away.
Then she turns to me with an expression that’s half steel and half something softer — an affection she no longer quite conceals.
“Wednesday,” she says. “Wear something that doesn’t look like you’re casing a house.”