“Do you have any idea who did it?” I asked. “I’m still stunned.”

“Me, too,” he said. “As for who did it? Nope, not a clue. I can tell you it wasn’t me. My grandfather and my father didn’t get along, but Pop isn’t capable of murdering anybody. I’m sure of that.”

I brought up the obvious omission. “What about Alex?”

He blew out a breath. “Alex. Jeez, I don’t know. She’s hot tempered and fickle, and you’d have to be living in a cave not to know she and I don’t get along. We only talk on an as-needed basis.”

Apparently Prescott’s murder didn’t qualify as an as-needed basis for a conversation. Plus he hadn’t answered my question nor said he didn’t think his sister was a murderer.

“That’s got to be tough, working together every day,” I said.

“It wasn’t my idea.” His voice hardened. “I didn’t get a say in that decision. Grandpop figured it would be easier to keep her in line if she was back here rather than up in New York. After her third marriage fell apart, she decided to start shopping around a tell-all memoir. She said she nearly had an agent lined up, plus she was sweet-talking some publisher.” He shook his head in disgust. “With Alex that’s code for she’s sleeping with him.”

“I heard about the memoir,” I said.

“Are you kidding me? Everybody heard about it. And I’m not just talking about the Romeos and their morning kaffeeklatsch at the General Store. There was a piece about her in the goddamn Post. Of course they were only too happy to run a story about a scandal involving the Averys. You probably saw the piece. After Alex finished dragging her husbands through the mud, she was going to start on our family and all of our supposed hidden secrets about how we acquired our money and the newspapers.”

I had read the gossipy story in the Post, but Scotty wasn’t finished venting his anger. “She made us sound like a bunch of thugs. Mafiosi. It sent Grandpop into orbit. Hence the order to come home. He said there was nothing dishonest about the way the Averys had earned their money and there was no story to tell.”

He stopped talking and shook his head as if he was remembering an ugly family scene.

“I’m sorry.”

His laughter held no mirth. “You and me both. You know what’s ironic? No one—none of us, Pop, Alex, my kids—is an Avery by blood. Grandpop adopted my father after Grandma Rose married him and Pop changed his last name to Avery,” he said. “So this whole thing is just insane.”

“Was Alex angry with your grandfather because he made her come back to Virginia?”