Ray must have been pushing seventy years old, but in his elegant suits, he still cut a fine figure. With his silver hair and upright posture, he looked like the sort of model you see on vitamins for older people that promise youthful vitality no matter one’s age.
He gestured to the crime scene tape. “What happened? Was there an accident? Is everyone all right?”
“Sort of.” I gave him a brief rundown of the previous day’s events. “But it looks as though the shed is actually on the neighboring property, not Monty’s, so it shouldn’t be a problem in terms of the project, long-term.”
“The woman was found in a shed? That’s terrible. Who was it?”
“I have no idea. The police think it might have been someone looking for shelter—and there may have been drugs involved.”
His eyes fixed on me.
“Did you see her?”
“Yes, I was there when they found the body. She was in her forties, maybe? Light brown, curly hair. She had a tattoo of a hand on her neck. . . .”
As I said it, I realized what the tattoo reminded me of: that knocker on the blue door of the haunted house, the hand holding a ball.
Ray turned white as a sheet. “Not . . . Linda?”
“Linda?”
“Linda Lawrence? The . . . the girl who escaped the Murder House?”
• • •
When a person goes into shock, there’s nothing quite like fruit juice to set them aright. Or at least that’s what my father always said, and he’d dealt with more shock than I had over the years. So Ray and I sat in the shade, and I urged him to down some Jamba Juice while we waited for Inspector Crawford. Dog, who I had let out of the car, was doing a much more effective job of comforting Ray than I was. Ray kept up a steady rhythm of petting Dog’s silky brown coat while sipping his smoothie.
For my part, I had served myself yet another cup of Blue Bottle coffee, because that morning’s earlier jolt of caffeine simply wasn’t cutting it anymore.
“You told me you were familiar with this neighborhood, but I didn’t realize you knew the Lawrence family,” I said quietly.
“I did know them. Quite well.”
I nodded, remaining silent while I tried to formulate my next question: Did you know of the massacre? Could you tell me about it? No matter how I phrased the query in my mind, it seemed rude, even ghoulish.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I’m going to assume from your silence that you’ve heard something about what . . . happened?”
“I heard a man killed his family.”
“You heard right.” He blew out a long breath. “That man was my best friend.”
I looked over at him, shocked.
“I know what you’re thinking. Sidney Lawrence must have been a madman, right? And how could a madman have friends?” He shook his head and ran a hand through thick salt-and-pepper hair. “I don’t know what to say, except that what Sidney did that night . . . that wasn’t Sidney.”
“Then who was it?”
There was a long silence, and he took another swig of juice. The scent of the smoothie’s strawberries and bananas wafted toward me, melding with the aromas of tilled earth and sawdust. Pleasant smells, comforting smells.
“Do you believe in demons, Mel?”
“I . . . uh . . .” I stammered. A year ago I wouldn’t have admitted to believing in ghosts, but now I understood that our human energy lingered on long after the physical deaths of our bodies. But demons were a whole different ballgame. I didn’t know much, and I didn’t want to know more. Quite frankly, I didn’t even want to consider the possibility that they might really exist. “I don’t . . .”
“I know, I know. . . . It sounds crazy. I don’t know that I believe it myself, except that it’s the only thing that could explain what happened that night. Some sort of demon possession. But maybe that’s my Catholic upbringing talking. I guess in the modern world, we would refer to it as a psychotic break. Some kind of mental problem, where he snapped, became someone other than himself.”
“Were there any signs? Odd behavior leading up to that night?”
He shrugged. “I guess . . . I mean, we were both under enormous stress. We worked together and the business was facing a number of challenges—we were undercapitalized, and we had both sunk everything we had into it. I was okay; I had some other resources. But Sidney had a wife and three children to provide for. He was . . . at his wit’s end, I guess.”
“Was he acting strangely at work?”
“There were allegations . . . some unexplained financial activity, though I could never believe it of him. Even after . . . It’s funny—in a way, the idea that Sidney snapped and struck out in violence would be easier for me to believe than his cooking the books. He just wasn’t that kind of guy. We were . . . He was my best friend.”