She shook her head. “That’s no way to live, denying yourself the pleasures of life.” She briefly froze, and then her chin began to quiver. “Oh my poor, poor boy.” Her body shook with one brief sob. “There are so many pleasures he’ll never know.”

Duckworth contemplated whether to get up and comfort her, but she saved him the trouble, suddenly standing up straight and saying, “We have to move forward. That’s all we can do.”

She brought a plate with half a dozen scones to the table. “Coffee?”

“Uh—”

“You have to have some coffee. You can’t have a scone without coffee. I already have some going here.” She put a hand to her mouth, as though she’d just realized she’d made a terrible mistake. “I suppose what really goes with scones is tea. Would you prefer tea?”

“Coffee’s perfect.”

“That’s good. I don’t know if I even have any tea. If there are any tea bags in the back of that cupboard, they’re probably ten years old. Does tea go bad?”

“I don’t know.” Duckworth cleared his throat, hoping to steer the conversation away from hot beverages. “How’s Mr. Pierce?” he asked, meaning her husband, not her son.

Her face fell. “Oh, I guess you didn’t hear.”

Duckworth felt the air going out of him. “What happened, Mrs. Pierce?”

“I think it all just became too much for him. First, those horrible accusations against Craig. Brendan found that terribly difficult to deal with. Well, so did I, but he took it badly. Then the outrage that followed when the charges were dropped.”

Duckworth was well aware.

It was alleged that Craig Pierce had sexually molested an eleven-year-old girl he’d encountered in a Promise Falls park. That would have been serious enough, but it was worse than that. The girl was mentally disabled, and her intellectual handicap made it easy for Craig’s defense lawyer to challenge her ability to accurately identify the man who had dragged her into the bushes. The prosecutors had no DNA sample to tie Craig to the assault, and ultimately had to dismiss the charges.

Some might actually have been inclined to give Pierce the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it had been someone else. Perhaps the girl’s confusion over identifying Pierce meant she had it wrong. But Pierce’s behavior after the incident suggested guilt. He’d had hair nearly down to his shoulders, but immediately after the incident had it all cut off. When the girl was asked to pick him out of a lineup, she was looking at someone with a buzz cut.

But the clincher was what Pierce was heard to have said after the charges had been dropped. With news cameras rolling nearby, he’d been caught whispering to a buddy, “Let this be a lesson. Always pick the dumb ones.”