Page 108 of Death on Gallows Path

“Oh, my. Let me think. I’d been to the bank and the post office first and so that would have been . . . Yes, it was a week before Damon Swindell was murdered, because I remember Ira was reading a paper that had the weather forecast for that torrential rain we had the next day and that was the weekend before he was found out at Gallows Path. Because I remember thinking if it had been a week earlier, that whole crime scene would have been flooded. The rain’s why I did all those errands that day in the first place.”

She smiled, delighted she’d pinned that down.

“Do you remember what she was buying?”

Her smile dropped into a frown of concentration. “She had a basket with a number of items. I only took note of Vitamin C, because it reminded me to pick up some during their buy-one-get-one free sale. And I did, right after we separated.”

I couldn’t mask my disappointment.

But then Clara jolted upright. “Linda, where were you when you saw Pammy? What section?”

“Cosmetics. I’d stretched my mascara to being more a rumor than a color and needed a new one. When I turned around, there was Pammy, dropping an item in her basket.”

“Do you remember what item?”

The older woman’s brows popped up. “Why, yes, I do. Because I couldn’t imagine what she’d want with such garish colors — yellow and purple and green and . . . something else. I know women wear eyeshadows like that, but not Pammy Swindell.”

* * * *

“Not eye shadow,” Clara crowed after we’d ended the call. “I’ll bet you anything.”

“We can’t know for sure . . .”

“We will soon,” Clara said confidently.

She’d confirmed which drug store — the one closest to the center of town — and asked Linda to describe as precisely as she could where she’d been standing and where Pammy had been standing.

In ten minutes — five to get the dogs squared away inside and five to drive — we were in the cosmetic section in the front corner of the drug store. We located where Linda found her mascara quickly, because she’d pulled it out to show us during the video call.

We experimented with distances from there to Linda’s approximation of Pammy’s location.

“There it is.” Clara’s voice went low and excited. “Right there. It’s actually called the concealer color wheel.”

“Wait.”

Clara froze before her hand reached it. “You think there might be fingerprints?”

“No. Not after more than a week. But . . .” I’d pulled out my phone and took a few pictures of the makeup in the rack, then I went back to where we’d found the mascara and took a picture from there, showing Clara standing in front of the concealer, pointing to it, to show how readily Linda could have seen what Pammy had.

After that, we bought one of the kits and rushed out to the car for the privacy where we could express our sober and appropriate appreciation of tracking down this clue . . . Along with a few hoots and hollers.

* * * *

Clara brought down the mood as we sat at the tiny table in my kitchen, having finished our all-on-one-plate dinner of salad topped with slices of rotisserie chicken.

“I was thinking about the concealer wheel . . . What if Pammy bought it for herself because Damon hit her in the past? Or bought it for Zoley—”

“How could she have known Zoley would need it?”

“—because she’d been hit before. By Damon or Bryon.”

“All possible,” I acknowledged.

“So the concealer doesn’t get us anywhere?”

“It gets us one more piece of information.”

“You’re always so reasonable,” she groused.