Leaving Time(86)

“You can do it here?” Virgil interrupts.

I crack open my left eye. “Isn’t that what you had in mind?”

His face reddens. “I guess I thought you’d need … I don’t know. A tent or something.”

“I can manage without my crystal ball and tea leaves, too,” I say drily.

I haven’t admitted to either Jenna or Virgil that I can no longer communicate with spirits. I’ve let them believe that the acts of stumbling over Alice’s wallet and necklace on the grounds of the old elephant sanctuary were not flukes but actual psychic moments.

I may have even convinced myself of that. So I close my eyes and think, Grace. Grace, come talk to me.

That’s how I used to do it.

But I’m getting nothing. It’s as empty and static as the time I tried to contact that North Carolina basketball coach who’d killed himself.

I glance at Virgil. “You get anything?” I ask. He’s typing away on his phone, searching for Gideon Cartwright in Tennessee.

“Nope,” he admits. “But if I were him I’d be using an alias.”

“Well, I’m not getting anything, either,” I tell Virgil, and this is, for once, the truth.

“Maybe you should do it … louder.”

I put my hand on my hip. “Do I tell you how to do your job?” I say. “It’s sometimes like this, for suicides.”

“Like what?”

“Like they’re embarrassed by what they’ve done.” Suicides, almost by definition, are all ghosts—stuck earthbound because they are desperate to apologize to their loved ones or because they are so ashamed of themselves.

It gets me thinking about Alice Metcalf again. Maybe the reason I haven’t been able to communicate with her is that, like Grace, she killed herself.

Immediately I push that thought away. I’ve let Virgil’s expectations go to my head; the reason I haven’t been able to contact Alice—or any other potential spirit, for that matter—has a hell of a lot more to do with me than it does with them.

“I’ll try again later,” I lie. “What is it you want from Grace, anyway?”

“I want to know what made her kill herself,” he says. “Why would a happily married woman with a steady job and a family, put stones in her pockets, and walk into a pond?”

“Because she wasn’t a happily married woman,” I reply.

“And we have a winner,” Virgil says. “You find out your husband is sleeping with someone else. What do you do?”

“Take a blessed moment and glory in the fact that at least I walked down the aisle at some point?”

Virgil sighs. “No. You confront him, or you run away.”

I unravel that thought. “What if Gideon wanted a divorce and Grace said no? What if he killed her and tried to make it look like a suicide?”

“The medical examiner would have figured out right away during the autopsy if it was a homicide rather than a suicide.”

“Really? Because I was under the impression that law enforcement doesn’t always make the most legitimate rulings when it comes to cause of death.”

Virgil ignores my jab. “What if Gideon was planning to run away with Alice and Thomas found out about it?”

“You had Thomas signed into the psychiatric ward before Alice disappeared from the hospital.”

“But he very well could have been fighting with her earlier that night, so that she ran into the enclosures. Maybe Nevvie Ruehl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She tried to stop Thomas, and instead, he stopped her. Meanwhile Alice ran, knocked her head into a branch, and passed out a mile away from them. Gideon met her at the hospital and they worked out a plan—one that took her far away from her angry husband. We know that Gideon accompanied the elephants to their new home. Maybe Alice slipped away and met him there.”

I fold my arms, impressed. “That’s brilliant.”

“Unless,” Virgil muses, “it went down another way. Say Gideon told Grace he wanted a divorce so he could run off with Alice. Grace, devastated, committed suicide. The guilt over Grace’s death made Alice rethink their plan—but Gideon wasn’t willing to let her desert him. Not alive, anyway.”

I think about that for a moment. Gideon could have come to the hospital and convinced Alice that her baby was in trouble—or told her any lie that would have made her leave abruptly with him. I’m not stupid—I watch Law & Order. So many murders happen because the victim trusts the guy who comes to the door, or asks for help, or offers a ride. “Then how did Nevvie die?”

“Gideon killed her, too.”

“Why would he kill his own mother-in-law?” I ask.

“You’re kidding, right?” Virgil says. “Isn’t that every guy’s fantasy? If Nevvie heard that Gideon and Alice were sleeping together, she probably was the one who started the fight.”

“Or maybe she never touched Gideon. Maybe she went after Alice in the enclosure. And Alice ran away to save herself, and passed out.” I glance at him. “Which is what Jenna has been saying all along.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Virgil says and scowls.

“You should call her. She might remember something about Gideon and her mother.”