Mortal Fall by Christine Carbo Page B

entire time we ate I kept telling myself I was not going to let her stay the night.
    “Are you eating well?”
    I shrugged. “Yeah, good enough.”
    “You sure? Looks like you’ve dropped a few.”
    I shrugged. “Not sure.”
    “Well, I need to fatten you up a bit before—”
    “Before the reunion.” I shook my head in disappointment.
    “No, well yes, that’s what I was going to say, but I didn’t mean it that way.”
    I put my fork down, pushed my chair back, and walked to the fridge.
    “Monty,” she pleaded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
    “What way did you mean it?”
    “Just that, that . . .”
    “Um hmm.” I nodded. “That’s what I thought. You’re, you’re just too much,” I said softly.
    “Please, just sit down.” She held her hand up. “I won’t mention it again, I promise.”
    My cell phone rang as she finished her sentence. She dropped her hand back to the table. I looked at the ID and didn’t recognize the number. “Go ahead and answer it,” she said.
    “Monty, this is Ward. Sam Ward.”
    “Sam,” I said, moving to a kitchen cabinet and resting against it, eager to hear why Wolfie’s wolverine-study partner was calling. “What’s up?”
    “First, Pritchard mentioned to you about those sabotaged traps in the South Fork, right?”
    “Yeah, he did. You know something more about that?”
    “No, nothing more. It’s something else, probably nothing, but I just was over visiting Cathy and the kids, and Cathy said something that made me think I should share it with you.”
    “What’s that?” It flashed across my mind that Sam was a close enough friend to be a comfort to Cathy. Against my intuition, I briefly considered whether there was something more between them. I knew how the quest for truth could be a demanding mistress. If Wolfie was that obsessed with his research, it was certainly possible that his wife might confide a little too much in the family friend. I looked at Lara sitting at the table. Her body rounded forward and slumped in sadness. She pushed her food around her plate with agitation, and in that instance, in the collapse of her frame, I knew that I was way off about Cathy Sedgewick. I was just jealous. Cathy’s love for Wolfie was palpable and real, and just because Lara and I had ripped a hole in our marriage and let our stability leak away didn’t mean I had the right to make ridiculous assumptions.
    “Well, it hadn’t occurred to me before but Cathy was saying how Wolfie would never commit suicide, not like that kid last summer.”
    “Kid last summer?”
    “Yeah, I don’t know if you ever heard about it, but we had hired a guy to help us out with setting some traps out the spring before and when we started running low on our budget the following fall, we had to let him go. Sweet guy. Kind of quiet, but a hiking machine. He’d go anywhere we asked through all kinds of weather. Anyway, after we let him go, he was found about two months later, before Christmas, in his apartment. He had OD’d.”
    “I remember reading that in the paper, but I had no idea you guys had hired him.”
    “After it happened, we all felt really bad and Wolfie especially felt awful. He wondered if our letting him go and not having a job had anything to do with his depression.”
    “His name?”
    “Brad. Brad DeMarcus. He was actually the brother of Will, who’s the bartender at the Snow Ghost Bar and Grill in Whitefish.”
    “Oh really?” I thought of the bartender’s joking about the silly drink and the Wild West.
    “Yeah. Anyway, not sure it means anything at all, but thought I should mention it.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “Every piece of information helps. I’ll look into it.”
    Lara was looking at me with wide eyes, her head resting on her hand. She had quit fiddling with her food and she didn’t look particularly irritated anymore, so I’m not sure why I felt my anger prickle. “You have to go?” she asked.
    I stared back for a