Pushing those thoughts aside for now, I tried to lure my mind back to the steady, soothing rhythm of my swim. Between climbing a tree this afternoon and traipsing around in the dark in a wet towel tonight, I realized that this hadn’t been one of my finer days. It’ll serve me right, I thought as I finally drifted off to sleep, if all I get from this is a terrible head cold.

Fourteen

I awoke to the sound of ringing. I reached for an alarm clock, only to realize it was my cell phone, chiming from inside my briefcase. By the time I got the case open and the phone out, I was awake enough to sound relatively coherent.

“Callie!” I heard Tom say. “I was just about to hang up.”

“Sorry about that,” I replied, sitting up on the bed and stretching my legs out in front of me. They were a little sore from my swim the night before, but not too bad.

“Just wanted to see if you were able to make any headway in your investigation yet. I know it’s only been a day, but I’m anxious to hear.”

I hesitated, thinking of what I knew thus far, the impressions I’d had of the people I’d met, the odd goings-on around the house.

My short list of suspects, at this point, extended to those people who regularly gave Wendell his shots. That meant four family members, two staff members, and two employees. Eight people in total, half of whom Tom would immediately rule out simply because they were members of his dear friend’s loving family. Despite the things I had thus far seen and heard, I didn’t think Tom would appreciate the direction my investigation had already taken.

“I’m narrowing things down,” I replied evasively. “But at this point, it’s more a matter of watching, listening, and, above all, not jumping to conclusions.”

“Of course.”

I wondered how I could pump him for information about the different members of the Smythe family. Though I didn’t want him to know that I was including family members on my list of suspects, I also needed to find out what his impressions were of Marion, Judith, Derek, and Sidra.

“The Smythes’ home is so lovely,” I said finally. “Do you get to come here often yourself?”

“From time to time,” he said. “Now that Wendell’s dead, I realize it wasn’t nearly often enough.”

Without much prodding, Tom began to reminisce a bit, telling me that he had first met Wendell and Marion when he was 18 and a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. He described his first lonely week at college in Philadelphia, hundreds of miles from friends and family. One Sunday he and some fellow students went to a large church near the campus.

“They had a wonderful program there,” he said, “where church members would ‘adopt’ new students for a semester—taking them out for Sunday dinner, showing them around the city, sometimes inviting them over for a home-cooked meal. The Smythes adopted me. We hit it off so well that we made it a permanent arrangement. We’ve been friends ever since.”