Page 55 of Death on Gallows Path

“Ruby said they were. No need to keep adding qualifiers for the purpose of this conversation.”

“That makes my question much simpler: Did Zoley leave clues for her husband that she was fooling around with Damon?”

We looked at each other for a beat.

“Oh, hell, yes,” I said for both of us. “And chances are good Zoley wasn’t discreet or careful enough for Pammy to miss those clues. Unless Pammy missed the signs on purpose, because she didn’t want to know.”

“But could she have ignored Zoley’s makeup? That has to be to cover a bruise, right? Could Pammy have thought Bryon hit Zoley?”

“He could have, too. Say, if he woke up to what was going on. Hits her then shoots Damon. Though how he got Damon out there—”

“Not Thursday for the bruising,” I interrupted. “I looked up how bruises age last night. It would likely take a day, two, for a bruise to be most visible. Then it would stay that way another day or two before it started fading.”

“That’s why you were looking at her face?”

“Uh-huh. Hope I wasn’t too obvious.”

“Not obvious at all,” she said loyally. “I noticed because I know you well. Seemed to me she had a lot less makeup on today.”

“Agreed. So, if she was hit — or otherwise acquired a bruise — say, Tuesday—”

“Or Monday night after training class,” Clara inserted.

“—the bruise could be most visible as early as Wednesday and stay that way through Friday before it began to fade. Making it reasonable to need less makeup today to cover it up.”

Clara looked at me. “Your words say it all makes sense about the bruises and the makeup, while your voice sounds like you don’t quite believe it.”

I didn’t dispute her assessment. “If Bryon hit Zoley because he realized Monday night what was going on between her and Damon, why wait until Thursday night to shoot Damon?”

“He got angrier after their conflict at training?”

“Tic-tac-toe as a motive for murder?” I asked.

“Displacement? Like in psychology. Acting out his anger over Zoley and Damon at dog training.”

“Would still have the issue of how he got Damon out to Gallows Path.”

“And how Bryon got Damon’s gun, as you pointed out before.” She turned into my driveway, adding with mock disapproval. “Anything else you want to poke holes in?”

“There is something else. We can’t be blinded by our biases from seeing them at training or we could suffer from elephant syndrome.”

“Elephant syndrome?”

Possibly not the formal name. I might have syndromes on the brain.

“Like blindfolded people staged around an elephant and experiencing only what’s in front of them,” I said. “The one by the trunk has a different experience from the one by the tail—”

“Totally different if the elephant decides to—”

“Yes, yes. The point is, we’re feeling the trunk, which doesn’t tell us the whole picture of what’s in front of us. We might be able to describe the trunk quite accurately, but we need to move around the elephant to avoid thinking it’s all trunk.”

“Okay, but what does it have to do with us looking into this?”

“We’re focused on Damon’s relationships with Pammy and Zoley and Bryon, because that’s what we observed at training. But there are other aspects to his life, things we don’t know about. His murder could stem from that.”

“Okay,” she said again, this time in acceptance. “For now, I’m going home to work. You go see Urban Parhem. See if he knows anything about Damon, his connections to other people. Pretty sure the Swindells have been here for generations.”

“But—”