“I hope not,” Grace said.
“All I know is that Emily is determined to get married as soon as she can. She says she can’t wait to be Max’s wife.”
“Did you tell her that status was highly overrated?” Grace asked with that wicked little smile of hers.
“No, and you shouldn’t, either. It’s pretty clear that Max is a different person than the man I married.”
“And divorced,” she added.
“That’s true,” I said. I reached over and tapped the book. “You don’t know everything about that book yet. Look inside the flyleaf.”
Grace did as I asked, and I glanced over to see her eyebrows shoot up. “Lisa Grambling? Seriously?”
“Do you have a hard time believing that she and Jude might have been having an affair?” I asked.
“No, Lisa’s always been really flirty, but her husband, Frank, seems like the jealous type to me, and the man’s built like a tank. Was Jude really that crazy?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said as I stopped in front of Lisa Grambling’s house. “Let’s go ask her ourselves.”
“This is going to be fun,” Grace said happily.
“Take it easy. We’re investigating a murder, remember?”
“I know, but it’s exciting tracking down a killer, don’t you think?”
“Sometimes a little too much,” I said as I turned off the ignition and opened my car door. “Let’s go see what Lisa has to say about this,” I added as I took the book from Grace.
“Thanks, but I don’t want any of your donuts,” Lisa said after she opened the door. She was a curvy woman with lots of sex appeal, and she wasn’t afraid who knew it. “I’m on a diet.”
“I’m not out peddling donuts door to door,” I said with a smile. “I’d like to talk to you about Jude Williams.”
“What about him?” she said as she started to hint at a frown. “We’re just friends, no matter what anybody else says. He helped me clean out my attic last month, and we struck up a conversation. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
Grace stepped forward and asked, “Lisa, you haven’t heard about what happened to Jude yet, have you?”
“What are you talking about? The police chief didn’t arrest him for doing something silly, did he? Did it have something to do with me?” She started to go back inside. “I’ll straighten this all out. I’m sure that it’s just a harmless misunderstanding.”
“Lisa, Jude is dead,” I said softly.
“What! He can’t be dead!”.
“I’m afraid it’s true,” Grace added. “I’m sorry. We just assumed that you knew.”
“How did it happen?” she asked me.
“From what we’ve heard, he was hit in the back of the head with an iron bar last night.”
Lisa didn’t want to believe it; that much was clear. I thought it odd that she glanced back inside her house for a second before she spoke again. She was fighting back tears, but she still managed to keep most of her cool. “If you’re telling me the truth, then why are you here?”
“We found this in his room when we searched it a few minutes ago,” I said as I held the book up.
“Let me see that,” she snapped as she tried to grab it out of my hands.
I was ready for her, though, so I pulled it back just in time. “If you don’t mind, we’re going to hold onto that. What we want to know is what it was doing on Jude’s nightstand.”
“I loaned it to him,” she said uncertainly, as though she wasn’t sure that was the final story she was going to stick to. “I want it back now, though. It’s mine.”
“You’ll have to ask Chief Martin for it,” I said. “We were on our way to deliver it to him, but we thought we’d stop by here first and give you a chance to explain its presence yourself.”
“I already told you. Jude and I were friends. There was nothing more to it than that.”
“That doesn’t explain the picture on his cellphone we found,” Grace said. I turned to look at her in shock. Not only hadn’t I found any photos of Lisa or anyone else, I hadn’t even seen his phone.
I turned back to her to explain when I saw her brave face start to crumble. “He told me that he erased all of those,” she said, her voice ragged with tears.
I wanted to assure her that he might have, but Grace stepped forward again. “They were hard to find, so maybe nobody else will see them. How long had you two been having an affair?”
“Just a month, but I broke it off two days ago.”