“Thank you.” Faith had never been easy with gratitude, but her words were more heartfelt than anything Will had ever heard come from her mouth.
Will asked Sara, “Are you going to do a tox screen for Geary?”
She directed her words to Amanda. “Faith works for you, not APD. They need a warrant to draw her blood and I’m guessing you don’t want to go to the trouble.”
Amanda asked, “Hypothetically, what would a tox screen find?”
“That she wasn’t intoxicated or impaired by any of the substances they test for. Do you want me to do a blood draw?”
“No, Dr. Linton. But I appreciate your help.”
She left without another word, or even a glance Will’s way.
Amanda suggested, “Why don’t you go check on the merry widow?”
Will thought she meant Sara, then logic intervened. He walked to the back of the house to find Mrs. Levy, but not before seeing Amanda pull Faith into a tight hug. The gesture was shocking coming from a woman whose maternal instincts were more closely related to those of a dingo.
Will knew that Faith and Amanda shared a past that neither woman ever talked about or even acknowledged. While Evelyn Mitchell was blazing a trail for women in the Atlanta Police Department, Amanda Wagner was doing the same in the GBI. They were contemporaries, about the same age, with the same ball-breaking attitudes. They had also been lifelong friends—Amanda had even dated Evelyn’s brother-in-law, Faith’s uncle—a detail Amanda had failed to mention to Will when she assigned him to investigate the narcotics squad that was headed by her old friend.
He found Mrs. Levy in the back bedroom, which seemed to have been turned into a catchall for whatever struck the old woman’s fancy. There was a scrapbooking station, something Will only recognized because he had worked a shooting in the suburbs where a young mother had been murdered while she was pasting crinkle-cut photographs of a beach vacation onto colored construction paper. There was a pair of roller skates with four wheels. A tennis racket leaned against the corner. Various types of cameras were laid out on the daybed. Some were digital, but most were the old-fashioned kind that used film. He guessed from the red light over the closet door that she developed her own photographs.
Mrs. Levy was sitting in a wooden rocking chair by the window. She had Emma in her lap. Her apron was wrapped around the baby like a blanket. The little geese were reversed across the hem. Emma’s eyes were closed as she sucked fiercely on the bottle in her mouth. The noise reminded Will of the baby in The Simpsons.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” the old woman offered. “Emma seems to be perking up just fine.”
Will sat on the bed, careful not to jostle the cameras. “It’s a good thing that you just happened to have a bottle for her.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She smiled down at the baby. “Poor lamb missed her nap with all this excitement.”
“Do you have a crib for her, too?”
She gave a raspy chuckle. “I assume you’ve already looked in my bedroom.”
He hadn’t been that bold, but Will took this as an opening. “How often do you watch her?”
“Usually just a few times a week.”
“But lately?”
She winked at him. “You’re a smart one.”
He was more lucky than smart. It had struck him as odd that Mrs. Levy just happened to have a baby bottle lying around when Emma needed it. He asked, “What’s Evelyn been up to?”
“Do I look rude enough to pry into someone’s business?”
“How can I answer that without insulting you?”
She laughed, but relented easily enough. “Evelyn never said, but I’m assuming she had a gentleman friend.”
“For how long?”
“Three or four months?” She seemed to be asking herself a question. She nodded her answer. “It was just after Emma was born. They started out slowly, maybe once a week or every two, but I’d say in the last ten days it’s been more frequent. I stopped keeping a calendar when I retired, but Ev asked me to watch Emma three mornings in a row last week.”
“It was always in the morning?”
“Usually from around eleven to about two in the afternoon.”
Three hours seemed like a long enough time for an assignation. “Did Faith know about him?”
Mrs. Levy shook her head. “I’m certain Ev didn’t want the kids to find out. They loved their father so much. As did she, mind you, but it’s been ten years, at least. That’s a long time to go without companionship.”
Will guessed she was speaking from experience. “You said your husband’s been dead for twenty years.”
“Yes, but I didn’t like Mr. Levy very much and he didn’t care for me at all.” She used her thumb to stroke Emma’s cheek. “Evelyn loved Bill. They had some bumps along the way, but it’s different when you love them. They’re gone and your life splinters in two. It takes an awful long time to put it back together.”
Will let himself think about Sara for just a second. The truth was that he never stopped thinking about her. She was like the news crawl that ran at the bottom of the television while his life, the main story, played on the screen. “Do you know the gentleman’s name?”
“Oh, no, dear. I never asked. But he drove a very nice Cadillac CTS-V. That’s the sedan, not the coupe. Black on black and the stainless steel grill on the front. A very throaty V8. You could hear it blocks away.”
Will was momentarily too surprised to respond. “Are you a car person?”
“Oh, not at all, but I looked it up on the Internet because I wanted to know how much he paid for it.”
Will waited her out.
“I’m guessing around seventy-five thousand dollars,” the old woman confided. “Mr. Levy and I bought this house for less than half that.”
“Did Evelyn ever tell you his name?”
“She never acknowledged it. Despite what you men want to think, we ladies don’t sit around talking about y’all all the time.”
Will allowed a smile. “What did he look like?”
“Well, bald,” she said, as if this was to be expected. “A bit paunchy around the middle. He wore jeans most of the time. His shirts were often wrinkled and he kept the sleeves rolled up, which I found rather perplexing because Evelyn always liked a sharply dressed man.”
“What age do you think he is?”
“Without the hair, it’s hard to tell. I’d put him around Evelyn’s age.”
“Early sixties.”
“Oh.” She seemed surprised. “I thought Evelyn was in her forties, but I suppose that doesn’t make sense with Faith being in her thirties. And the baby’s not a baby anymore, is he?” She lowered her voice as if she was afraid someone would hear. “I guess it’s coming up on twenty years now, but that’s not the kind of pregnancy you forget. There was that bit of a scandal when she started to show. Such a pity how folks behaved. We’ve all had our bit of fun now and then, but as I told Evelyn at the time, a woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down.”
Will hadn’t considered Faith’s teenage predicament beyond thinking it unusual she had kept the child, but it had probably rocked the neighborhood to have a pregnant fourteen-year-old in their refined midst. It was almost commonplace now, but back then, a girl in Faith’s predicament was generally suddenly called away to tend a never-before-mentioned frail aunt or given what was euphemistically called an appendectomy. A handful of less fortunate ones ended up in the children’s home with kids like Will.