Free Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace by Sarah Graves Page B

shouldn’ttake anything at face value, she pulled the Artful Dodger’s front door open, gestured for him to go in ahead of her.
    “Meanwhile, let’s just see what Roger Dodd has to say about all of this, shall we?” she told Chip. “You never know, he might remember something important.”
    Inside, the air smelled of stale beer and dish detergent. Roger was behind the bar washing glasses and placing them on the rinse rack in assembly-line fashion.
    Freshly shaven and dressed as usual in a polo shirt and jeans, he turned the sprayer off and listened while Jake explained who they were looking for and why. After that, she let Chip describe Carolyn and ask about the fellow at the bar, the one with the limp.
    Roger’s face changed at that part of the conversation, but she wasn’t expecting anything to come of it.
    So she was amazed when, after giving them the old I-don’t-know-anything-about-it routine for a few more minutes, Roger Dodd suddenly broke down.
    “ I DIDN’T KNOW. WHEN HE WALKED IN LAST NIGHT AFTER two years of me thinking he’d been drowned, I just about fainted,” Roger babbled as they went out. He closed the bar’s front door and locked it. “Anne said she knew Randy wasn’t dead, that if he was, there would have been a body. But I told her no, she was crazy to think that after so long.” He sucked in a hitching breath. “My God, it was like seeing a ghost… . I knew he was dead. He had to be. Anne and I, we even fought about it. We fought about it on the day she—”
    “Shut up, Roger,” Jake told him in disgust. Beside her on the sidewalk, Chip waited silently. He seemed to know he was out of his depth here.
    Me too
, Jake thought. “Let’s go talk to Bob Arnold,” she toldRoger, and he came along obediently enough, still justifying and explaining.
    “I didn’t know,” he insisted again as he got into the car. “I loved Anne. I’d never have let anything happen to her.”
    “Oh?” she retorted. “So that’s why when your supposedly dead brother showed up here last night, you didn’t tell anyone?”
    She pulled out of the parking spot. “Or even before then? That he was still alive, that he’d killed her sister, Cordelia—his own wife—and that he intended to kill Anne, too?”
    She felt like punching him, but of course she couldn’t. “You kept your mouth shut on account of how you loved her so much?”
    Because that, impossible as it seemed, was the gist of what Roger had admitted: that Chip’s crazy theory was right and Randy Dodd was alive—though Roger insisted he hadn’t known it until his supposedly deceased sibling appeared hale and hearty in the Artful Dodger the night before. But now Roger was convinced—
    “I was about to go see Bob Arnold myself when you two walked in,” he declared defensively.
    —and Jake was, too: Randy Dodd was indeed alive, and as recently as twelve hours ago he’d been right here in Eastport.
    And that meant anything could have happened. She gunned the engine, causing a couple of blithely jaywalking teenagers to jump back up onto the curb. She didn’t quite give them the old middle-finger salute as they glared at her.
    But it was close. In the back seat, Roger went on whining. “Cordelia could’ve been an accident,” he insisted. “How was I to know that Randy had—”
    “Yeah, sure,” she cut him off sarcastically. “Her falling down those cellar stairs was just one of those things, huh?”
    Sure it was. At the time, everyone had thought so. But now … She met his eyes in the rearview mirror.
    “But Anne dying, and the way that she died—come on, Roger, don’t tell me you didn’t know then that something was up.”
    Stabbed to death in her own kitchen
. Imagining it, Jake just barely managed to restrain herself from stomping the gas pedal again.
    “But why am I even asking? You knew it all from the start. You had to. Because here’s the thing, Roger.”
    What the brothers had done was falling together in her head