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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Beverly Dorrio didn’t spell out her top suspects in the few moments before she indicated our visit was over by standing and gesturing toward the door. Or swatting a fly.

But when we pulled up in front of the house Jaylynn’s mother and sister shared, I had a feeling we’d arrived at the address of Beverly’s prime picks.

This time of year can be hard on the appearance of houses. Even cheery holiday decorations from early December can start to look listless.

Just guessing, but this house started every season looking listless.

Now it resembled New Year’s Eve partygoers straggling home at dawn.

A dingy plastic snowman listed toward a battered elf partially uninflated.

Light strings on the railing around a front deck drooped erratically.

The lawn’s last cut came a month too early, leaving longer blades to poke up through the snow, giving raggedy a bad name.

As we took the steps up to the deck, areas close to the house displayed rotten boards.

Both of us stopped.

We could see their state because an overhang kept them mostly snow free. What about the boards we couldn’t see?

I pointed to a trodden path.

The fact that previous walkers hadn’t fallen through the deck was no guarantee, but it was the best guide we had.

Clara nodded and went first. That also put her in position to take up the introduction duties when the weathered front door opened to her knock. That’s not weathered in a fashionable sense, but in a paint-peeling, wood-cracking, not-going-to-stand-up-much-longer sense.

“Hi, is this the Carnells’?”

A woman maybe a decade older than us blocked the opening. “Yeah.”

Past her, an older woman remained seated. She shot a glance at us, then away.

Neither was welcoming, but it didn’t dent Clara’s cheer or the flow of words similar to what she’d told the Dorrios, with tweaks for the expected point of view of Jaylynn’s family.

The older woman interrupted, calling from inside, “Why should we help you?”

“For Robbie, so he has answers—”

I cut across Clara’s words because I saw that appeal wouldn’t reach the door blocker. “To confirm, absolutely, that you’ve been right all along.”

She regarded me a moment from uninterested brown eyes. Finally, she swung the door halfway open and walked away from it.

With no indication she recognized the dismissiveness of the younger woman’s gesture, Clara followed her, saying, “You’re Payloma and Olive, right?”

The door opened directly into the living room.

Two identical worn upholstered chairs with devices in their arms that gave them away as recliners — not the kind advertised by celebrities — sat side by side in front of the television that was on the wall to our right and tuned to a celebrity update program.

The chairs gave an impression of solidarity that the humans didn’t.

Not bothering to confirm Clara’s guess of their identities, much less to welcome us, the younger woman — Payloma — said, “Like I said, why should we help you find out who killed Derrick? He murdered Jaylynn.”

She and the older woman shared similar facial structure, but the mother’s was softened and smoothed by excess weight, while her daughter’s appeared headed down the path toward the lines and drag of the senior Dorrios.

Olive Carnell said, “I don’t care how many times that Dova and those rich parents say their precious Derrick didn’t do it. He did.”

“That’s exactly it.” Clara’s warmth declared they were not only on the same wavelength, but completely simpatico. “That’s why finding out who killed him will erase any doubts raised by his murder about whether he killed Jaylynn.”

“Doubts?” Payloma went to her chair and sat with a flounce.

That finally allowed Clara and me to advance into the room and stand a normal distance apart instead of huddled at the doorway.

“Exactly,” Clara said. “Plus, if that’s not so — if he didn’t kill your sister — this is probably your only chance to find out who did. Because when he’s buried, the case will be, too.”

A flicker told me she recognized the fib in her words. The case wouldn’t be buried. She wouldn’t let it go. She wouldn’t let me let it go. Maybe I wouldn’t even let it go. And then there was the sheriff’s department and Teague not letting it go.

But Clara didn’t let the fib interrupt her flow.

“Either way, talking to us is your very best way to help assure justice for Jaylynn. Because, of course, that’s what you want more than anything else.”

Olive sobbed suddenly and sank deeper into the large chair, grasping a piece of paper towel from a roll on the narrow table between the chairs as she went.

“My girl, my girl,” she moaned. “She was an angel. Cruelly snatched away from me. Never to see her again. Not to have her comfort and love in my old age. Not to have that grandbaby in my life. Her baby. Her poor, sweet baby. That poor, poor baby.” Sobs took over from words.

“That kid’s done all right for himself.” Another grumble from Payloma.

“Oh, do you see your nephew, Robbie, regularly?”

“Hah. As if she’d let us get anywhere near him.” Clearly a reference to Dova by Payloma. “She’s as bad as those stuffed owls, the Dorrios. How they ever got naked long enough to have a kid is beyond me.”

The paper towel shifted, revealing her mother’s smirk, a moment of unity and approval Payloma didn’t seem to notice.

“Especially one who looked like Derrick did when Jaylynn snagged him. He was a hottie back in school — I was a year younger than them—”

“Ten months,” her mother said.

Payloma’s grumble lines deepened.

In high school, being a year younger would have been a drawback. Now she wanted to maximize the age difference. Even though Jaylynn stopped getting older years ago and Derrick never would again.

“—though he’d already cooled off considerably by the time Robbie was born.

Supposed to be the woman who falls apart, but he got pudgy and started losing his hair, while Jaylynn worked like crazy to get her figure back — mostly anyway.

She still had that roll around the middle that comes along with a kid.

Not that getting rid of it would have made a difference in keeping him, even if he hadn’t killed her, because he was already starting to slide back to being like Mother and Father Dorrio .

” Was that supposed to be a snooty, upper-class British accent?

“And now Robbie’s just like him, thanks to the great Dova Dorrio and her saying to him all the time you and me, Robbie, you and me .

Closes out his real mother’s family, that’s for sure. ”

“You don’t see him?”

“Not if he sees us coming first,” she said with dark would-be humor. “Walked right away from me when I said hello at the gas station a while back.”

“That’s awful, turning your back on family,” Olive mumbled. “He didn’t get that from our side.”

“Such a shame to lose touch like that.” Clara’s patented soothing had an almost immediate effect on the mother. “Especially when I understand you all were close when he was a baby, living nearby and everything.”

“We were,” Olive said with a sigh. “We were so close. Taking care of Robbie so, so often for Jaylynn.”

“Free babysitting,” Payloma muttered under her breath.

Would be interesting to know if she realized I could hear her. I guessed Clara heard, too, from a slight twitch of her shoulder, as if an insect landed on it.

At first, I thought Olive hadn’t heard her, but then she said, “You always were jealous of Jaylynn. Ever since you came along.” She turned to us. “I found her leaning over the crib, hitting her sister with a plastic cup.”

“I was the younger one and she was in my bed after kicking me out — actually kicking me. You saw the bruises.” This sounded like something that had been repeated ad infinitum in family squabbles.

Clara tugged them back on track with, “So you frequently took care of Robbie, but that night...?”

“Jaylynn was back to teaching and it so happened that Payloma and I were both working late shifts at the hospital, so we were here to look after Robbie for her while she was at the school.” Olive sniffled again into the lump of paper towel.

“That night we were both working. Me in the all-night café — it’s not glamorous, but that hospital couldn’t run without it.

If the workers and visitors had to count on the machines for coffee and tea or a snack to tide them over, there’d be a lot more deaths every night, I’ll tell you that.

We not only have good coffee, but salads and sandwiches that won’t destroy your gut.

That’s why I’ve gained this weight, you know. All odd hours messed up my gut.”

Clara said, “Your customers must be so grateful for you providing good food at their most difficult time. Even if they don’t always show it, because it’s such a difficult time for them—”

“ Never show it. Not families and not most of the staff. There are a few who are pleasant,” she qualified carefully.

Payloma snorted. “Then you get better than I do. I’m an admitting clerk, caught between the administrators who lay down the law but aren’t ever on the front lines, the medical people who think they’re God, and the patients, who think I’m trying to steal their identity.

Back then, I was just starting out. If I’d been smart, I’d’ve quit, benefits be damned. ”

“Payloma,” her mother remonstrated.

Payloma rolled her eyes. “At least I’m day shift now. We both are. Seniority still goes for something. Not much. Especially since we have to be there at six in the morning, not nine like normal people. And no more pay or respect or—”

Clara smoothly diverted that flow. “But back then — that particular night — neither of you was available to care for Robbie?” Without waiting for confirmation, she added, “Did Jaylynn call you?”

“No. If only she had,” Olive said with another sniffle, but not one big enough to require more paper towel.

“She knew our schedule,” Payloma said. “No reason to call when she knew we weren’t home. We didn’t know anything about what happened. Not until the next morning when the cops showed up.”

Lines around her mouth and eyes tightened, strengthening the resemblance to her mother. Also showing what I interpreted as genuine sorrow.

But that faded under a more martial light as she added, “Not a word to us otherwise. Didn’t expect the Dorrios to consider us, but Dova could’ve at least let us know that she had Robbie while the deputies questioned Derrick.

We were frantic looking for him. She knew we would be.

She knew how often we cared for Robbie. She’d been here often enough when we had him. ”

Clara voiced my reaction, too, when she asked, “You knew Dova? Both of you? Before... everything happened?”

Olive snorted. “I knew the Diva — that’s what we call her, because of her name.

” In case we didn’t get the Diva-Dova connection.

“But only from her hanging around here. That was when we were caring for Robbie. Well before that, she and Payloma were fast friends. For a while, anyway.” Her voice dropped on the last words, coating them with dark significance.

Payloma grimaced. “Yeah. Right, Mom. We all know she used me. Okay? After you’ve said it ten million times it kinda loses its impact, so you might as well stop talking about it.”

But then she turned to Clara and talked about it herself.

“She was new in town, working in records, wanted to meet people. We started talking at the cafeteria one day. We were about the same age, liked the same things. Her mother was that woman who was in Congress who everybody hated because she was so nasty to people.”

I remembered Kit talking about the woman. She’d adopted several children, possibly as political scenery. Mommy Dearest of D.C. they called her.

Plenty of women served in Congress and raised good kids — at least as many as men did.

But this woman had far deeper issues than a demanding job and a career that can foster a reality disconnect.

During a full-blown incident , she was removed from a committee room — the sight of plenty of political tantrums — and taken straight to St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in D.C. She never left.

If my memory had the timeline roughly right, Dova would have been old enough by then to be on her own. But what preceded it couldn’t have been fun.

Another reason for her to be protective of Robbie.