Page 25 of A Talent for Murder

“You think that’s what they were thinking?”

“Sure. But they checked my alibi and I was here in Woodstock, at a friend’s game night. Lots of witnesses.”

“It didn’t bother you thinking about what Josie might be doing at her conference?”

He shook his head. “It didn’t.”

“But there’s still a possibility, right, that Josie was excited about having a sexual adventure, and then after she did, it made her feel terrible? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened.”

“I think it’s much more likely that she picked the wrong guy, or maybe even the wrong girl. And then something went wrong. But I know in my heart that it wasn’t something that went wrong with her, it was with the other person.”

I was nodding, and he continued, “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I pushed her into this thing and it freaked her out. It’s not like I haven’t had a few sleepless nights wondering about that. But let’s say she did meet someone and something got triggered inside of her, something so terrible that she decided to take her own life. She was never going to go over a balcony.”

I believed him, maybe not that he knew everything about his wife, but that he knew that she wouldn’t jump from a building.

“Let me ask you,” he said, “what do you think happened?”

I finished chewing a bite of my chickpea burger and said, “She met the wrong person. And now that I’m talking to you, I feel like I know more about this person.”

“Like what?” Travis said.

“Well, I know that whatever happened to her wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive thing. It wasn’t some guy who suddenly went into a rage. Because if that had been the case, then there would have been a fight, and there would have been evidence of that fight. No, I think that whoever killed her was someone very smooth who knew what they were doing. Maybe they lured her out on the balcony, said that the railing was really high and she’d be fine, and it was a beautiful night. Something like that. She was unaware of what was about to happen. She was taken by surprise.”

I was worried that I’d said too much, but Travis was rapt, nodding his head. “That’s what I think. Someone clever killed her. And he got away with it.”

“You said earlier that she might have hooked up with either a boy or a girl...”

“I just said that because it’s a possibility. Josie pretended she liked girls, just to be open to them, but I don’t think she really did.”

“It was a guy, then,” I said. “Statistically, that makes the most sense.”

“I’d agree with that,” he said.

“Travis, did you have much contact with her while she was on this trip?”

“Yes and no. The first day, yes. We texted back and forth some. She sent me pictures of the campus, stuff like that. But the day it happened there wasn’t much contact at all. I thought she’d probably met someone, and I didn’t want to bother her.” Travis cupped his mouth and nose with one of his tattooed hands, and squeezed his eyes shut. I thought he was about to cry, but then he took his hand down and said, “It’s actually good talking to you about this. I know that my friends want me to move on, but I can’t.”

“It’s hard to move on when there are unanswered questions.”

“It is.”

“If I find any answers, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Okay,” he said. I ate some more of my burger and he moved his spoon around his soup bowl. “You’d have liked her if you met her,” he said. “You’d have liked Josie. She was fire.”

Chapter12

After sending the text to Lily and before hearing back from her, Martha, suddenly physically exhausted, went to the living room sofa and lay down. Until she had seen that photograph of the Jane Austen brooch, a part of her believed that she’d concocted the whole thing out of her overactive imagination, that her husband was exactly who he seemed to be, and that the crimes (the murders) that had taken place in cities where he’d traveled only represented an odd coincidence. But now she lay on the couch, her mind both numb and somehow spinning, and looked up at her ceiling with its tiny cracks and realized that her world had altered forever.

Gilbert jumped onto the couch by her feet, startling her. He gave her a cursory glance, then folded his paws under his chest and settled into a meat loaf position on the very edge of the sofa cushion. Martha concentrated on her breathing, telling herself to not overreact until she spoke with Lily. Maybe she wouldn’t be as convinced by the significance of the brooch as Martha was currently feeling.

After lying on the couch long enough that Gilbert had fallen asleep, curling onto his side to catch the sliver of sunlight that was coming in through the south-facing window above the alcove, Martha forced herself to stand up. She went into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator even though she wasn’t hungry. Then she wandered the house, half in a daze, mostly berating herself for having the audacity to actually get married. She’d long known that her life was meant to be lived alone. Did she think that particular curse had a time limit on it? But then she told herself that maybe things really did happen for a reason, the type of thing her religious sister was always saying. Maybe the reason for her marriage to Alan Peralta was so that she could be the one to stop him from continuing to kill women. From now on, that was what Martha decided to tell herself.

When her phone finally rang, she was back in the living room, on the computer, looking for anything she might have missed in the articles that had been written about the drowning death of Mikaela Sager.

“What did you find?” Lily said.

“I found out a lot,” Martha said, annoyed to hear that her voice was shaky, “but the reason I sent you that text was because of something I found out about Mikaela Sager, the massage therapist.”

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