Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best ereader for academics .txt) 📕

began to visit him there, at home—would that it had been in the bars! May God forgive me for saying so!”

He fell silent, looking at the trees and up at that perfect blue sky. Eventually he gave his head a small shake. “Marion didn’t drink. They were both teetotal, she and Peter. But on that fateful afternoon, this man had encouraged Marion to have a drink, and she had yielded. One drink led, as it so often does, to another, and she had become drunk. She lost track of time and the time to return home and collect the children from school had come and gone. Thank the Lord Mary was of an age to have her own key. She was a sensible, responsible girl, she collected her brother and saw him safely to the house.

“At five thirty, Peter returned home and found that his wife was not there. These were the days before everybody had a cell phone. He came to the church, assuming she was here, but nobody here had seen her, and so he went to his neighbors next door. There, his long time friend told him bluntly that his wife was having an affair and she was at that very moment no doubt at this man’s apartment. I don’t know if what his friend did was right or not, but we had all suffered too long in silence watching him being cuckolded.

“Peter went insane. Why he put young Cyril in the car, we shall never know. Perhaps he thought he should not leave the children alone. Mary stayed with the neighbors. Why not Cyril? Perhaps he had it in his mind to hold up to her the full extent of her treachery, to shame her,  to ‘guilt trip’ her, in the modern usage. Whatever the case, he took Cyril and went to this man’s apartment.

“There, on the sidewalk, in full view of everybody, he screamed at his wife, called her a… Called her names I shall not repeat, but which you can imagine. Then he physically manhandled her into the car. She, for her part, was screaming at him that he wasn’t a man, that he was a sissy, that she was sick of him, all manner of horrible things. Then they took off at high speed, went across an intersection without stopping at the lights and were rammed from the side by a truck. They were both killed instantly and the boy witnessed the whole thing from the back seat.”

We sat for a moment without speaking. There was quiet, sporadic birdsong in the trees above my head.

“You tell it as though you witnessed it.”

“There were a handful of us who followed him. We were afraid of what he might do, that he might do something he would later regret…”

“You were here in Elk Grove? That’s quite a coincidence.”

“Oh no, not at all.” He smiled. “We have a long tradition in my family of spending Halloween together. It’s quite a thing around here. I omitted to mention, it was Halloween. That’s why he initially came to the church. He thought she might be helping out…”

I sat staring at the grass between my feet. Dehan stood and walked away with her hands in her pockets. Father Cohen frowned at her and then at me. “Is that significant?”

I smiled. “It might be.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Dehan had started walking in a wide circle, staring down at her boots. On a sudden impulse, I said, “His mother, Marion, she didn’t quite fit in. She wasn’t from the neighborhood, was she?”

“Oh, no. No, she wasn’t.”

Dehan had stopped and was watching me with narrowed eyes. I sighed. Father Cohen was frowning at me. I said, “She was a New Yorker, wasn’t she?”

“Well, in a sense, yes. Her family hailed from the Bronx. But they had moved west when she was young. I forget where they went to. It wasn’t far from here. Oh, yes!” He snapped his fingers. “Reno. She spent most of her childhood in Reno, then they moved to Sacramento and finally Elk Grove. Apparently the crime rate in Reno was quite high, and they were looking for a better environment for their daughter. Tragic how it played out in the end. Tragic, and not a little ironic.”

I thought for a moment, sucking my teeth. “What paper was it that this guy worked on?”

“The Elk Grove Herald. They ran the full story, which must have been very distressing for Mary. The journalist was fired and left town, I believe. I can’t imagine that any of this is very helpful to you, Detective.”

Dehan was still staring at me. I said, “More than you can imagine, Father. You have actually been extremely helpful.”

We left him finishing his morning constitutional and crossed the common back toward Mary’s house. The birds were still chattering, but seemed too lazy to get a real conversation going. As we approached the car, Dehan stopped in her tracks and spread her hands. “Halloween? Seriously? He sees his parents killed on Halloween? What are the odds, Stone? There is no way that is a coincidence.”

I pressed the button on the key fob and the car bleeped. “So if it isn’t a coincidence, how do you explain it?”

“I can’t. It can’t be done.” She approached the car and got in, slamming the door. “This case is full of meaningless coincidences. Coincidences that don’t mean anything.”

I laughed. “That would be a meaningless coincidence.”

“And you want to tell me how you knew that his mother was from New York?”

“I could smell another meaningless coincidence.”

I pressed the ignition and pulled away, turned left onto Foulks Ranch Drive and then left again onto Elk Grove Boulevard. Dehan scowled.

“Where are we going?”

“As soon as you find it on your phone, the public library.”

She did a lot of swiping and typing