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“Well, you, me, and the sheriff. Don’t tell me you aren’t curious.”

“I am curious,” he admitted with a sigh, sitting down in his chair. “None of this makes a lot of sense.”

“So, let’s think of reasons she might be in the gazebo,” Alli replied. “Maybe she was meeting someone there. Maybe she thought she saw something and went to check it out. Maybe she was lured out there by the robber. There was a case I remember reporting on where the robber would pretend to need help, and then they’d smack the victim on the head and steal their stuff.”

“That’s plausible. Leigh would be the kind of person to want to help someone.”

“They might have hit her, or she could have fallen,” Alli suggested. “It sounds like there were benches and railings that she could have hit her head on.”

“The gazebo’s got a stone surround at the base, the bench is built in, and there are a few hard surfaces out there. It could have been a terrible accident.”

“In my experience, robbers and killers are two different people,” Alli said. “Murder is a whole other animal.”

“Do you have a lot of experience with murder?” he asked, clearly amused. “Are you one of those true crime junkies?”

“I know enough to do my job. Or my former job. Generally, we didn’t report on people having wonderful, happy days. There’s a saying, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, when it comes to local news. We were no different.”

“I guess not. If you were reporting this, what would you say?”

“That a woman who was well-liked in the community was killed under mysterious circumstances.”

“That sums it up. I will tell you that I’m not a big fan of the mysterious circumstances. I don’t like unanswered questions. I already have enough for a lifetime.”

Alli remembered her sister-in-law telling her that Sam’s mother had simply disappeared one day, never to be heard from again. Eventually, they had declared her dead, and the father had remarried to his late wife’s sister.

That was enough uncertainty for just about anyone.

Hopefully, the sheriff would get this case investigated and tied up in a neat bow quickly, leaving no unanswered questions.

This was the last thing her new boss needed in his life.

Chapter

Seven

“You need to tell us everything,” Tara said when Alli sat down to dinner with her brother and his wife. “We want every little detail. Don’t hold anything back.”

Alli had texted them that she’d been hired, and then had received a flurry of texts back about Leigh Gabler’s death. Mostly questions. She wasn’t sure that she had any answers.

“Start at the beginning,” Brian instructed. “How did you get hired on the same day someone was found dead?”

As simply and clearly as she could, she recounted the first part of her day. The ambulance lights, the body bag being loaded, the plaid-tie man beside her volunteering the grisly details.

Then Sam Winslow, appearing out of the chaos, asking for her resume, and then reading it under the low garage lights while police radios chirped and technicians shouted distances.

Brian leaned back in his chair and let out a low whistle.

“That’s... wow. And he found the body?”

“He did,” Alli confirmed. “I feel so bad for him. It was clear that he cared about Ms. Gabler a great deal.”

“She worked for the elder Winslow for about a hundred years,” Tara declared. “I’m guessing she was close to the family. So what happened after he hired you?”

“I went upstairs and started filling out paperwork. Then the sheriff came to talk to Sam about what happened. Apparently, she was killed in a gazebo outside the building, then moved to her car. They think it was a robbery.”

“A robbery at Winslow Financial,” Brian said. “Do they even keep money there?”

“They also found her purse, but her wallet and phone were missing. Sam ordered a security upgrade for the whole building. He told me the company’s paying for her funeral, no matter what it costs.”