Page 39 of Dead to Rites

Another gorgeous fall day. Now it was only a week until Halloween, and jack-o-lanterns had started appearing on front porches. I made a mental note to go to the store and get some and carve a few of my own the next day, since I didn’t want anyone to accuse me of not being in the spirit of the season, not when it had always been my favorite holiday.

Also, Halloween last year had been a blur of grief and not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do with myself, and I wanted to make sure this year was as different as possible.

Even if I was investigating a murder.

The front door at Copper State Cellars was locked, as I’d expected it to be. The bar wouldn’t open for another hour and a half, and Marco wouldn’t be in until closer to noon.

I let myself in and made sure the lock engaged behind me. No sign of Roz, and I guessed she was probably in the office. The paperwork involved in running the business was a lot more extensive than I’d thought it would be, and she always seemed buried in it when she wasn’t interacting with customers.

Just as I’d thought, she was sitting at the desk, staring at a spreadsheet on the big iMac in front of her. She looked away from the screen, expression slightly startled, when she saw me in the doorway.

“It’s your day off,” she pointed out, and I nodded.

“I know,” I said. “But I was hoping you could give me some information.”

She gazed at me for a moment, then closed the spreadsheet she’d been working on. “About what?”

On the walk over here, I’d decided to be open about my plan to solve Father Frank’s murder. There was every chance in the world that Roz would only smile at my attempts to play Nancy Drew, but in the end, figuring out who’d killed him would help her just as much as it would help me. We’d been busy on Saturday as everyone came by to pay their respects, true, and yet I’d noticed foot traffic had been a little lighter than usual on both Sunday and Monday. That could have just been the time of year and nothing else, but I couldn’t help thinking that some tourists must have heard about what had happened here and were steering clear in case the killer wanted to bludgeon someone else to death in the Copper State Cellars men’s restroom.

“About the people I met at Father Frank’s reception Sunday night,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out if any of them would have a motive for killing him.”

Her eyebrows rose slightly, but she only said, “I’ll do my best. Take a seat.”

I sat down in the office chair that faced the desk. “Nell Whitaker?”

Another tilt of Roz’s eyebrows. It seemed clear enough to me that she couldn’t believe meek, thin Nell was capable of cold-blooded murder.

However, she replied easily enough. “Nell’s worked at Sacred Heart for almost twenty years. Everyone knows her and respects her.”

“So there isn’t anything iffy about her?”

Roz considered my question for a moment. “Well, I’ve heard on the grapevine that she’s been acting anxious lately, but most people just assume she’s dealing with some kind of health issue she doesn’t want to talk about.”

That explanation for her behavior seemed plausible enough. But the parish secretary could have also been on edge because she’d confessed some horrible secret to Father Frank, maybe infidelity or something even worse, then had second thoughts and decided to get rid of him before he could reveal her transgressions to anyone else.

“Is she married?”

“No,” Roz said, shooting down my infidelity theory. “Her husband passed a few years ago. She doesn’t have any other family in Prescott, just a sister in Buckeye.”

It sure felt as if I should scratch Nell Whitaker off my list of suspects, or at least move her to the bottom. “What about Bob Anselmo?”

Now Roz smiled. “Oh, he’s a piece of work, all right. I’ve always thought he was a little too slick for his own good, although I hear his podiatry practice is very successful. He likes to act like he’s a big deal — drives a BMW, had a custom home built out near Watson Lake.” Her voice lowered, even though we were the only two people in the office, and Marco wasn’t due to show up for another hour or so. “I’ve heard he spends a lot of time in the Village of Oak Creek in Sedona, supposedly playing golf, even though we have several perfectly good courses here in Prescott.”

“He’s having an affair?” I asked, and Roz shrugged.

“That seems to be the rumor, but no one has any concrete evidence. Still, I wouldn’t put it past him.”

I recalled the closed-off expression Bob’s wife Joanne had worn at the reception, the way she hadn’t said a single word. Did she know about her husband’s philandering? Did she care?

Hard to say. There had been people in my parents’ circle who had “arrangements” like that, where the wife stayed silent because she didn’t want to give up the big house and the nice car and the biannual visits to the aesthetician for Botox or fillers or whatever treatments she was using to convince herself that her husband wasn’t sleeping with someone twenty years her junior.

Maybe Joanne did know about her husband’s infidelity. Maybe she’d guessed that he’d confessed it to Father Frank and had murdered him out of rage that he’d kept a secret like that from her, even though, as a member of the parish, she had to have known that a priest couldn’t exactly go around blabbing what people had told him in the confessional.

Still, I thought I’d better leave her in the “maybe” group for now.

“And Hal Pruitt?” I asked next. He was certainly odd and bad-tempered enough that I could imagine him committing murder.

“Oh, he’s an old crank,” Roz replied. “He’s got a temper, but I’ve never heard that he was violent in any way. He lost his wife about ten years ago and has gone to Mass almost daily ever since.” She paused there, thinking for a moment, and then added, “He was very close to Meg Lindley’s late husband — they used to go fishing together almost every weekend. But I don’t think that has much to do with Father Frank’s murder.”