Free Pumpkin Roll by Josi S. Kilpack Page B

Pete reconvened at command central—i.e., the kitchen table—fifty minutes later. There wasn’t a more dignified snack food available so she’d had to make do with dry cereal. She needed fuel of some kind to keep her brain working; the pancakes were beginning to wear off. She settled in on her side of the table with her laptop open in front of her. Pete sat opposite her and had filled up two pages of the notebook, which had her worried. It wasn’t a competition, but she really wanted to win. “What have you got?” she asked, officially beginning the meeting of minds.
     
    “Well,” Pete said, turning back to his first page. “I’m still waiting for one more call to come back verifying a few details, but she doesn’t have a criminal record.”
     
    “That’s good news,” Sadie said, relieved. She hadn’t bothered looking for criminal information since she figured Pete had that market cornered.
     
    “Yeah,” Pete said. “But she had her driver’s license—Vermont issued—revoked back in ’97. Her doctor said the medication she was taking impaired her ability to operate a car.”
     
    “Which means at some point she was able to have a driver’s license, and she had residency in Vermont,” Sadie said.
     
    Pete nodded and wrote something in the margin. “I couldn’t find details about her medication, but I found reference to some hospital stays. One in ’96, one in ’98, and another one in ’01. They were all three to five days long—I’m guessing it was a psych ward.” He grabbed a handful of Froot Loops and put them all in his mouth.
     
    “I found the ’96 and ’01 stay, but not the ’98,” Sadie said, adding “1998” next to item four on her list of twelve details she’d put at the top of her list for organizational purposes. “The first stay was in Vermont, right?”
     
    “Right,” Pete said. “It looks like she lived there for about five years before that. The next two stays were here in Massachusetts.”
     
    “The last stay was in Belmont. Where was the other one?”
     
    “Not sure.”
     
    “Family members,” Sadie said, moving on to the next topic.
     
    “Mother died in the early nineties in a car accident. Other than that, there’s her father and a younger sister.”
     
    “The sister’s name is Gabrielle,” Sadie said, nodding. That was item eight on her list, and an important discovery. “I think she lives here in Boston. I wonder if she’s the person I talked to yesterday. Maybe she pretended to be Delores, though I don’t know why she would.”
     
    Pete nodded. “I figured that must have been her, too.”
     
    “Her dad’s dead,” Sadie said—item six.
     
    “He is?” Pete asked, reading through his notes.
     
    “Yep, four months ago.”
     
    “How do you know that? I didn’t find it.”
     
    “Okay, I admit it—I asked Shawn for help. He discovered in one of our other cases last month that while it sometimes takes time for official records to be updated, the obituaries are immediate. Anyway, he found the dad’s obituary—it was run in Lowell, north of here. It requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to Eastridge Hospice in thanks for the care he’d received, so that means he knew he was dying. There was only a graveside service, but Delores and Gabrielle were mentioned by name in his obituary—Delores first, which would make her the oldest. Delores’s mother’s obituary stated that she and Timothy Wapple had divorced but remained friends, and there was no mention of any other marriage. I’d guess Dad didn’t remarry either, since no other wife was listed in his obit. He gave generously to the Veterans of Foreign Wars—that wasn’t in the obituary, though, I found that by happenstance when his name came up in an old record of donors for an event back in the early nineties.”
     
    Pete stared at her. “You found all that in less than an hour?”
     
    Sadie shrugged. “Like I said, I had help.”
     
    Pete tapped his