Before She Knew Him(22)
Students had started to fill the hallway, and Matthew realized lunch was nearly over. He and Michelle ended their conversation, and as Matthew returned to his classroom with just enough time left to eat his egg salad sandwich, he congratulated himself for getting the information he’d wanted to get from Michelle. Columbus Day weekend. That afternoon he’d go online to find out where the C-Beams were playing.
Chapter 11
Hen had slept very little. She kept imagining what it was going to feel like when she checked the news the next morning to discover that a couple had been found murdered in their car in Middleham. Then she’d try to convince herself that that wasn’t the case, and if, God forbid, it was, then at least she would know who’d done it. At least Matthew Dolamore wouldn’t get away with it.
But the following morning there was nothing on any of the news sites she regularly checked. She did searches for “Middleham” and “murder” and nothing came up. She was relieved, of course, but told herself what she’d seen had been someone stalking someone else. Just because he hadn’t committed a crime last night didn’t mean he wasn’t going to.
After Lloyd left for work, Hen called the Cambridge Police Department from her landline and asked to speak to whoever was in charge of the Dustin Miller homicide.
“Detective Martinez isn’t in yet. Can I put you through to another detective?”
“I’d prefer to talk directly to him. Can I leave you my phone number?”
The detective called her back twenty minutes later. “Can I help you?” he asked, and Hen thought he was probably eating breakfast while he spoke.
“I have information that might pertain to the death of Dustin Miller.”
“Okay. Can I get your name?”
“It’s Henrietta Mazur, but I’d like to be anonymous. Not to you, but I’d rather my name not be made public in any way.”
“I will do my best, I promise you, Ms. Mazur.”
“You can call me Henrietta, or Hen.”
“What information do you have, Henrietta?”
She told him the story about going to dinner at her new neighbors’ and seeing a fencing trophy on view, and how that triggered a memory of having read about Dustin Miller’s unsolved murder. She told him she wouldn’t have thought too much about it except that Dustin had attended Sussex Hall and that was where her neighbor Matthew Dolamore was a teacher.
“What makes you think that the trophy you saw didn’t just belong to your neighbor?”
“Because I asked him if he fenced, and he said he didn’t, that he just liked the trophy. I think he said he bought it at a yard sale.”
“And you didn’t believe him?”
“There’s another thing. I went back to look at the trophy again, and it was gone.”
“When did you go back?”
“The dinner party was last Saturday night and I went back on Monday. Mira Dolamore, the wife, was there, and she gave me another tour of her house—”
“What did you tell her?”
“What did I tell her about why I was there?”
“Yes.”
“I told her I wanted another look at her house, at how she had decorated it. It wasn’t entirely untrue. We have the same house, the same design, I mean. But I really wanted to see the trophy again. There was writing on the base that I hadn’t been able to read the first time.”
“But you saw some writing.”
“I am almost positive that I saw the words ‘Junior Olympics.’”
“Not completely positive.”
“I’m positive. I saw them. I don’t know why I said ‘almost.’”
“That’s okay,” the detective said. “So you went back, both because you wanted to look at your neighbors’ house again and because you wanted a second look at the trophy. Did you see it again?”
“No, it was gone. It had been moved.”
“You’re sure?”
Hen was pacing. It was what she did when she talked on the phone. “I’m positive. It was there on Saturday and it was gone on Monday morning. He moved it or got rid of it, and I’m pretty sure it was because he’d seen the way I noticed it.”
“At the dinner party?”
“Yes. I guess I stared at it for a little bit and asked him about it, and he noticed. I could sense that he noticed.”
The detective coughed, then she could hear him sipping a drink, then he apologized. “Can I ask you why you noticed the fencing trophy in the first place? It’s not an incredibly uncommon object. Did you make the connection right away? How did you even know there was a fencing trophy taken from the scene of Dustin Miller’s homicide?”
“You reported it, didn’t you?”
“We did, yes, but that was a while ago. You just remembered reading about it?”
Hen told him how she used to live in Cambridge and that she’d been interested in the crime. She left out that she’d lived right down the street from Dustin—she could hear Lloyd’s voice saying that it would be a huge coincidence to live on the same street as a murder victim and then the same street as the murderer—and she left out her obsession with the crime, with Dustin, really.
“I think it was all in the back of my head,” she told the detective, now looking out the second-floor window in the upstairs guest room. “The fencing trophy. Sussex Hall. And then I put it all together.”