Page 24 of A Talent for Murder

“Yours and Josie’s?”

“Yes.” Even though he’d lost weight, apparently, he hadn’t gotten new clothes, and his T-shirt, with an image of a crow under the words say nevermore, swam on him.

“First off,” I said, “I’m really sorry for your loss.” He nodded at me. “And I also want to come clean. I’m primarily a fiction writer, poetry mostly, but I went to school at Shepaug University, and when I heard about Josie... I don’t know, I just kept thinking about her. So the thing is, I asked around a little, just people I used to know from there, and I started to think that maybe it wasn’t what it seemed. I mean, that it was more likely a murder than a suicide, and that meant that someone had got away with it. Then I looked you up, and it’s clear that you feel the same way.”

“I do,” he said. A waitress was hovering near us, but she must have seen the intense look on Travis’s face and she backed away.

“I didn’t know Josie, and I don’t know you, but I thought that maybe I could write a piece about what happened, and try to get it published. And that way I could help you out a little.”

“That would be great,” he said, leaning across the table between us. “It’s actually good that you don’t know us, that you didn’t know Josie. I keep telling the world that she was killed, but I’m biased because I was her husband. No one believes me. But if you said something...”

“I agree,” I said.

The waitress finally approached, and I quickly looked at the menu, ordering some kind of mocktail that was made from a blackberry shrub, and the chickpea burger. Travis ordered a dark ale and the soup of the day. While we were ordering I started to feel a little guilty about lying to this man, but I also told myself that I was trying to find Josie’s killer and if I managed to do that, it would be worth a whole lot more to him than an article.

“So why don’t you believe Josie kill herself?” I said after the waitress left with our order.

I expected him to talk about how much she loved life, or how she wasn’t the type, but the first thing he said was, “She was scared of heights. Deathly scared. There’s just no way in hell she would have gone out on a balcony, let alone jumped from it. I mean, that was the first thing I thought when I heard what had happened. Also, if she had been so unhappy that she wanted to kill herself, then I would have known about it. I know you won’t believe that, no one does, but she would have told me. I know it.

“We even talked about suicide once. She said she used to think about it all the time back in high school. She said that if she ever did it, it would be with drugs, something that would put her to sleep. There’s just no way she would jump from a balcony.”

“What would you have thought, then, if she went to this teachers’ conference and took an overdose and died there?”

He pursed his lips so hard that his upper lip pressed up under his nose. “That’s a good question that no one has asked me. And I’ll say this: I still think that she wouldn’t have done it. Our lives were good, and she was really excited about that trip.”

Our drinks arrived, and after tasting the blackberry mocktail I was a little regretful I wasn’t drinking a beer. Travis’s had come in a glass shaped like a shoe. “Cool, huh?” he said, catching me looking at it. “This place is so awesome. Josie didn’t like beer, but she ordered it here because of these glasses.”

“Why was she excited about the trip?”

“Can I ask you something? You said you talked with some people at Shepaug. What did you hear? What’s the gossip from there? Was it just that she was some freaky goth girl who jumped from her dorm?”

I had been expecting Travis to ask me this question, but I hadn’t decided yet what to tell him. But knowing him for five minutes I thought that he could handle what Libby Frost had told me. “What I heard,” I said, “was that maybe Josie had hooked up with someone at the conference, or that she was looking to hook up with someone at the conference. And if that was the case, then I think people feel like maybe she was consumed with guilt and jumped, or maybe someone pushed her. Had you heard this before?”

I asked because he was nodding solemnly while I spoke.

“Yes. And those rumors are correct. Not that she would have felt guilty, but that she was probably looking for someone to have sex with.”

“You knew about that?”

“You’ve heard of polyamory?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I don’t know that we were calling our marriage polyamorous, exactly, at least not yet, but we had started to experiment with being with other people. I went to a comic convention in Las Vegas and hooked up with someone and told Josie about it and it made her really excited. I’m sure you’re judging us—”

“I’m not judging you. I promise. My parents were polyamorous long before there was a word for it, but for them a lot of it was about hurting the other person. Revenge. One-upping one another. This new version seems preferable.”

“Josie and I just knew that we were going to spend our whole lives together no matter what, and that we were going to share everything with each other, so why not openly expand our sex lives? It seemed a natural thing to do.”

“Josie was interested in finding someone during the conference at Shepaug?”

“Yeah, she was psyched about it. I was, too.”

Travis was halfway through his beer but hadn’t touched his soup. He seemed grateful to be talking about Josie, but his eyes, with deep shadows around them, were frightened and sad. I thought of my father’s eyes that morning.

“Did you tell the police this?”

“Of course I did. And the way they looked at me, I knew what they were all thinking. That I changed my mind about the whole thing and drove down to Shepaug and killed her myself.”

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