“Yep.”

“How did she take it?”

He laughed. “You mean you didn’t see the skyrockets going off?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Oh, and she gave me this.”

He hooked a ring from his pocket, a lovely, old-fashioned square-cut diamond in an antique setting. A stray spot of sunlight through the thinning leaves caught the stone and it flashed blue fire. “She gave her own ring to Rob when he and Kate got engaged. This was her mother’s.”

He held it out to me, but I couldn’t take it. Agitated butterflies were tumbling around in my stomach so wildly that for an instant I thought I was either going to pass out or throw up.

“What’s wrong?” Dwight said as I took long deliberate breaths in and out to steady myself.

“You okay?” he asked, starting to look worried.

I nodded. “Stupid of me. Bad reaction. It’s just that telling your mother, my father, and now your grandmother’s ring—it’s really going to happen, isn’t it?”

He closed his hand around it. “Not if you hate the whole idea so much that you’re gonna keep turning green every time you think about it,” he said grimly.

“I don’t, I’m not,” I protested. I took his hand, uncurled his fist, and slipped the ring on my finger. It was a perfect fit.

“I can’t wait to start wearing it,” I lied, handing it back for safekeeping till he had told his son and I would have to put it on for all the world—and my family—to see. “When are you going up to tell Cal?”

“I would’ve already gone if Polly Viscardi hadn’t been killed last night.”

“It wasn’t suicide? She didn’t kill herself because she’d killed Braz?”

“Nope. It’s murder with a sloppy attempt to look like suicide.”

“You can tell that quick? Before the autopsy?”

“All Percy had to do was look at the rope with a magnifying glass,” said Dwight, speaking of Percy Denning, the deputy who’d had extra training as their crimescene specialist. “Whoever killed her used a rough jute rope. Looped it over the pipes that supported the canvas roof of the stand, then hoisted her up. Percy could tell by the direction the fibers had been rubbed that the line had been pulled across the pole and tied off while it supported her whole weight. If she’d tied it off first, then jumped off the edge of the platform like we were supposed to think, the fibers would have been rubbed in the opposite direction.”

“Then she wasn’t the one who stomped Braz?”

“Oh, we’ve still got her tagged for that.”

I looked at him questioningly.

“Her shoes. We’ve sent them to the SBI lab for confirmation. She’d cleaned them up pretty good, but Percy’s pretty sure from the heel print in the Dozer and the sample he scraped out of the crack between the heel and the shoe itself that she’s the one stomped Hartley to death. The blood type’s consistent with his.”

“Wait a minute! Does that mean her death was revenge for his?” I didn’t like this scenario one little bit. Not when the three people most likely to want Braz’s death avenged were Tally, Arnold, and Val.