Aside from the old man gasping for breath, the railcar had gone deathly silent. The other principals quickly got up from their booth. Jones threw some bills on the table. “See you next month,” he said hastily before making his dash for the door. The others were hot on his heels. Fitz followed after them.
Tennyson watched the men depart. “I imagine there was plenty of torment to go around. After all, your lover was dead.”
“Lover? How dare you!” Whittaker thundered. “It’s bad enough youboyscome here to talk about Marie, but to then accuse me of sleeping with her? Preposterous! I don’t have to sit here and listen to this bullshit!” He made to get up, but a quick shake of Ronan’s head kept Preston in his seat, thereby trapping Whittaker, unless he decided to shimmy to the floor and get out that way.
Calmly, Ronan pulled his phone out of his back pocket and flipped to the picture of the love letter and its envelope. “There are a few things we’ve neglected to tell you about why we’re here.”
Whittaker’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“My husband and daughter are psychic,” Ronan began.
Whittaker made a rude noise as he turned to Tennyson. His lips curled into a snarl. “Charlatans, the lot of you.”
Tennyson sighed. Ronan knew his husband wasn’t relishing what was about to happen. “Your father was a violent, jealous man. When he lost his temper, which was often, he’d beat you in front of your mother. Then, when she wouldn’t confess to his imagined misdeeds, he’d beat her too. When it was your turn to get married, you broke the circle of violence, but jealousy raged in you the way it had in your father.”
Whittaker sat stone-still. It didn’t look like the man was even breathing.
“During the concert, my six-year-old daughter encountered the spirits of the three dead kids. They don’t think Miss Fairbanks was the one to poison them.”
“Marie wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Whittaker mumbled, his earlier rage gone.
“Both my daughter and husband reached out to Marie, but neither could reach her spirit,” Ronan said. “Max was kind enough to give us access to her old classroom, and that’s where we found this.” Ronan pushed the phone across the table. “You sent that note to Marie.”
Whittaker’s shoulders drooped lower. “Marie was the love of my life. I interviewed her for the kindergarten position one year after I married Sheila. She’d said she was pregnant. I believed her. There was never a baby.”
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you,” Ronan said, meaning every word.
“Since my marriage had been conceived on a lie, I did everything in my power to make Sheila as miserable as I was. I screwed every willing woman I could get my hands on. Flirted openly with other women in front of my wife. I practically ruined my reputation at work coming on to the female teachers. Each day was a new and fresh hell until I met Marie.”
“Why didn’t you just file for divorce?” Jude asked. “Wouldn’t that have been simpler?”
“I asked for a divorce, even had the papers drawn up, but she refused to sign them. In the meantime, I fell more in love with Marie every day. I wrote her love letters, poems. Left flowers on her desk, along with her favorite chocolates. I was head over heels in love.” Whittaker shook his head.
Ronan could feel the sadness and desperation radiating from the old man. “Did Marie feel the same way about you?”
Whittaker nodded. “Her husband was a good man, but she didn’t have that same spark with him that she had with me. She was going to divorce him, and I had spoken to my lawyer about going forward with a contested divorce. Sheila was served with papers the day before Marie’s murder.”
“That’s what you meant in the note when you wrote you’d done as Marie asked?” Ronan tapped the phone, enlarging that line of text.
“Yes. Marie wasn’t going to ask her husband for a divorce until Sheila was served. She didn’t want to hurt Greg, but she wasn’t in love with him either. The plan was to get our divorces finalized and then move out west. Santa Fe or Tucson, resume our careers, raise our child together.”
“Child?” Ronan asked, feeling shocked to his core. “We read the autopsy report, and there was no mention of Marie having been pregnant when she died.”
“This entire town thought Marie murdered three precious children. Everyone, with the exception of me, turned against her. I knew she wasn’t the one who poisoned those kids. Everything to do with her death was slipshod. The police assumed one of the kids’ parents killed her and left it at that. There was no evidence collected. The autopsy was cursory at best. It was obvious she’d bled to death as a result of the stab wounds. According to everyone, she’d killed the kids, and it didn’t matter who killed her. Justice had been served. An eye for an eye and all that Old Testament bullshit. I’d heard the cops spoke briefly with the parents of the dead kids, but none of them were interrogated or arrested. Case closed. Until today, apparently.”
“We don’t have the jurisdiction to reopen Marie’s case,” Ronan said.
“Marie hasn’t moved on. Neither have the kids. All we want to do here is give these spirits the ability to cross over and rest in peace.” Ten’s voice was soft. “I’m so sorry you lost her, Mr. Whittaker. I’m even more sorry to ask if you killed her.”
Whittaker buried his head in his hands and began to sob. Preston wore a stunned look but patted the old man on the back.
Ronan turned to Tennyson with one question on his mind. Did Joseph Whittaker kill Marie Fairbanks? Ten shrugged as if to say he didn’t know. Why was it that Ten could recite the horrors of Whittaker’s childhood but not see if the man was a cold-blooded killer?
“I killed Marie,” Whittaker said. His gaze rested on Max’s abandoned coffee cup. His back hunched even more.
“Why?” Ronan asked, feeling no satisfaction from the old man’s confession.
“I didn’t kill her with my two hands but with my love.” With a shaking hand, Whittaker reached for a napkin. He wiped his eyes and sat up a bit straighter. “You were right about my father, Mr. Grimm,” he said, focusing on Tennyson. “He was a jealous and violent man. I had a little bit of that jealousy in me too, but not like Sheila. She knew I never loved her and only agreed to get married because she was expecting. When I asked for a divorce, I told her I was in love with someone else and was done living the charade our marriage had been from day one. I don’t know how, but Sheila found out Marie was pregnant with my child. I always suspected Greg Fairbanks had been in touch with her about the affair.”
