They followed the same procedure as before. Away Cecilia and Essie Mae went to the mountains of North Carolina, and six months later came home with another baby, again a daughter, this time named Richelle after her father. I knew that at some point Richelle became Dickce, a nickname formed from the names of her legal parents, Dick and Cecilia (often called Kitce by Dick, I discovered, Kit for Katherine and Ce for Cecilia).

I had a slight headache now from reading the cramped handwriting, and I set the book aside even though there were more pages left to read. I wanted to consider the implications of the true relationship between Vera Cassity and the Ducote sisters.

Being a distant cousin was one thing. Being a full sister or a half sister—especially if Vera had been able to prove the relationship—was quite another.

If she were their full sister, Vera might have some claim to her father’s estate—worth millions, if rumors about the Ducote fortune were accurate.

That was not a crazy motive for murder.

TWENTY-NINE

Slow down, Charlie, I told myself. Vera was the half sister of An’gel and Dickce, but only half, and it was because they shared the same mother. As far as I knew, Vera’s father was Jedediah Hobson, not Richard Ducote, and I couldn’t see Richard Ducote allowing a child of his to be passed off as the child of another man.

There was a simple way to settle this. I knew Richard Ducote died in an accident while Miss An’gel and Miss Dicke were very young. If his death occurred long enough before Vera was born, that would settle the issue. All I had to do was find out the exact dates of Richard Ducote’s death and Vera Hobson’s birth.

The former was simple enough. The archives kept a file of information about notable citizens of Athena, and the Ducote family figured prominently in it. Digitized a couple of years ago, it was accessible via computer.

In less than five minutes I had the information I needed. Richard Ducote died in a hunting accident seventy-five years ago, when Miss An’gel would have been about nine and Miss Dickce seven. I also checked Cecilia’s death date. She outlived Richard by nearly forty years. I recalled someone telling me that Vera’s mother died when Vera was about thirty, and that meant that Cecilia had outlived Essie Mae, more than likely.

Now to find out exactly when Vera was born. I checked an online genealogical database but that yielded no results.

That meant I would have to go to the courthouse and check the public records. As long as I was going to do that, I reckoned I might as well look up Richard Ducote’s will. It would be interesting to see whether there was any provision for Essie Mae. Come to think of it, I should also check for wills for Cecilia and Essie Mae. I remembered that Vera had inherited money from her mother, money that Essie Mae in her turn had allegedly inherited from a relative. Could the money have come from the Ducote estate?