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I put that problem out of mind, not willing to deal with it unless I had to. On Wednesday morning I went in to classes and then came back home before my late afternoon shift at the Coffee Corner again. Surely by now Maria wouldn’t have any problems with me working. Besides, I needed that three hours pay, no matter how tiny the amount.

Getting ready to go into work later, it dawned on me that I needed to talk to Dot. Most times we’d been going to Christian Friends meetings at church together, but tonight I’d be going straight from the Coffee Corner to the Chapel. Once I had everything else together, I put my stuff in the car and walked around to the front door.

Once I’d knocked and set the inside dogs to barking, but before Dot shooed them away and answered, my cell phone starting ringing. I took it out of my pocket, determined to let it just ring unless it looked terribly important. It was Ben and I still needed to talk to him, so I ended up pantomiming to Dot and answering my phone at the same time.

“Mom? I think I’m in trouble,” Ben said, sounding like a worried kid.

Several things went through my mind at once. “Does this involve speeding tickets, tow trucks or your credit card?”

“Not this time. No blood, either, at least not mine,” he said, knowing what worried me the most. “But when I got back from class I had a call from Detective Fernandez.”

“That’s because neither of us have ever gotten over there to make a final formal statement and give them our fingerprints.”

“No, I think it’s more than that. He said that I had to be there before 5:00 p.m. today. That it was still voluntary, but if I had a family attorney I might want to think about calling him or her. That didn’t sound to me like he just wants fingerprints.”

My stomach suddenly felt like I’d been riding a really fast elevator rushing down. “Me, either. Don’t do anything, and I’ll be there to pick you up in half an hour, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Mom.” Ben hung up and I stood on Dot’s doorstep feeling mystified.

“I can’t believe the message that Fernandez left for Ben. He wants him down at the sheriff’s department this afternoon.”

Dot’s lower lip began to tremble. “I was afraid that this would happen, but I had to tell him the truth, Gracie.”

I walked into her cozy front room, and she didn’t stop me. “What do you mean, Dot? What were you afraid of, and why does it involve you or Ben for that matter?”

She sighed and absently stroked the head of Dixie, the dog nearest her, an affectionate lab mix who loved everybody. “We went down there yesterday and I told the detective everything I saw Monday morning. How Frank’s truck was in the driveway while we were getting ready to leave with the puppy.”

“Wow, he got here earlier than usual.”

“That’s what we thought, too. Buck even remarked on it. I thought it was odd he was here and it was just barely light. I also thought it was strange that he was talking to somebody on the driveway and they seemed to be having a bit of an argument.”

“Oh? What else did you tell the detective?” I felt a little light-headed and queasy, anticipating what I prayed Dot wasn’t going to say.

“I told him about the person that Frank was talking to. It was a man, definitely, but he had his back to us. I knew it wasn’t Darnell, because whoever it was talking to Frank, he was a head taller than Frank, and much thinner.”

Darnell might be fairly tall and weedy, but he was definitely not that much taller than his boss. “You couldn’t tell who it was, though?”

“Not really. But I had to tell the detective the truth—that the man I saw seemed young, and tall and was wearing shorts and a dark, hooded sweatshirt.”

“Just like Ben’s,” I said, thinking back to that same garment, the one I’d pulled off the living-room chair to put on and go outside and talk to the detective Monday. It had been tossed on the chair as if somebody had come into the house and flung it off the moment they got in the door.

“Just like Ben’s,” Dot echoed, her lower lip still trembling. “Gracie Lee, I really thought he’d gone back to school Sunday night when we had all gone to bed. If I had realized he was still home, I probably wouldn’t have told the detective what I saw.”

“No, you were right to tell the truth,” I told her. If anybody was wrong, it was Detective Fernandez for thinking that the person Dot saw could possibly be Ben. Now how was I going to convince
him
of that?

G
oing to see Fernandez with Ben was about the only thing that took precedence over work, so I called Maria. She sounded very understanding about the whole thing. In fact, by what she said I had to assume that she hadn’t expected me to come in at all today. I made the drive to school in record time and got to Ben’s dorm, where he was pacing around the bedroom in the suite that he shared with a young man named Ted from Minnesota, who I hadn’t seen much of in the semester they’d been roommates. Today was no different; Ben was there, Ted wasn’t. He either had an amazing amount of classes or quite a social life.

I hugged my son and discovered that he was shaking. “Hey, maybe the detective just wanted to scare you into coming in on his schedule,” I told him. I wasn’t so sure that was the case, especially after what Dot had told me, but Ben looked so nervous that I wanted to calm him down. Besides, I wanted what I said to be true.

“Come on, let’s get this over with,” I told him. I made sure he locked his dorm room behind him and we headed to the car.

“Did you call a lawyer?” he asked once we were on the way. “Is somebody meeting us there?”

“Not yet. I want to see what’s going on first. Is there anything else about that morning that you need to tell me before we get there?” I used the same line, as nonthreatening and unaccusing as possible, that I’d used all through his teenage years. I’d always found that it worked better than “Hey, what did you do?”

With that same line I’d gotten information about dings in a car, a crumpled package of cigarettes hidden way down in a trash can when he was fourteen—a one-time experience, I was told—and various other teen happenings both good and bad. This time there was a lot of silence.

“Not really, Mom. Honest. I don’t know anything about how the guy died. I didn’t see anything, didn’t do anything.”

“Is there any reason that Detective Fernandez might think otherwise?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking. We were close to the sheriff’s department station now and I was getting nervous.

There was another long pause, but that didn’t worry me too much. Ben was being thoughtful, which was okay in this situation. “Nothing I can think of. Definitely nothing that happened that day.” Now that remark made me a little confused, but I decided not to push it. We parked in the half-full lot at the sheriff’s department and made our way towards the glass-fronted cube that made up the front of the building.

Inside, all the sounds and smells of the place hit me and I remembered why I didn’t like being here. There was stale coffee, burnt popcorn or something else from the insides of a microwave and an overlay of old smoke vying for precedence with the strong smell of industrial cleaners. Phones rang, lots of people moved around the building and at least six conversations went on in various languages that I could hear just in the lobby.

“Come on, we need to go this way,” I told Ben, motioning towards the stairs to the lower level. We went down the broad staircase and I headed for the all-too-familiar detectives’ division. The door to their waiting room stood open, and Jeannie still sat behind the desk. At least some things hadn’t changed.

“Hi. I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” she said, looking up from her computer.

I told her who we were and that we were there to see Detective Fernandez. She got on the phone and he was there in a moment.

Just once I’d like to see the man when he truly looked happy to see me. Something other than happiness always came up instead, usually either anger or consternation. And it’s a shame because he’s got a nice face. He’s olive-skinned and lean and quite attractive, or he would be without that little vein in his temple that twitches when he looks like he’s coming down with a migraine.

“I was afraid of this,” he said by way of greeting. “See, this is why I told Ben on the phone that he needed to bring an attorney if he wanted company. He’s not a minor, so I can’t let you in with him if I’m asking him questions.”

“Hello, to you, too, Detective Fernandez. Here we are doing exactly what you asked and coming by the station to have our prints made and talk to you. Now why does that seem to upset you?”

He sighed. “Hello, Ms. Harris. Hello, Ben. Why don’t you go get your prints taken, and then come back here in a few minutes and let Jeannie know you’re finished? But I still can’t let you in a room where I’m questioning him.”

I decided to ignore that statement, and led Ben to the area, also way too familiar from things that had happened last winter, where fingerprints were rolled onto cards and processed. There wasn’t too much of a backup, and twenty minutes later we were back in the waiting room with Jeannie.

“I’ll be out here praying while you’re in there with the detective,” I told Ben. “Just tell him the truth and things should go fine.”

His eyes were bigger than they’d been when he broke a neighbor’s window playing ball at thirteen. “If you say so. I appreciate the prayer part, Mom.” Ray Fernandez came out of his office then and motioned Ben in. My son got up, squared his narrow shoulders and followed the detective.

I had to take it as a good sign that Fernandez was talking to Ben in his office. If he had a truly serious reason to suspect Ben of a crime, they wouldn’t be in the office right now, but in one of those awful little rooms they used for questioning. They were even grimmer than the ones you saw on television. For now I had to hope that things would be smoothed out quickly. And once they were, I planned to light into a certain detective for worrying me and scaring my son.

After about twenty minutes of waiting in that outer room I felt pretty jumpy. It seemed like forever before Fernandez came back out and motioned for me to come in with him. Ben stood behind him, looking pale and a bit shaken. I wanted to ask him so many questions, but knew that if I ventured any of them now it would make the detective mad. Having dealt with him before, I pretty much knew the rules the man wanted a police investigation to go by. They didn’t include witnesses or suspects comparing notes on the way in and out of his office.

I gave Ben a good long look and as much of a smile as I could muster. His in return was pretty weak. Jeannie must have sensed Ben’s discomfort, because she was up from her desk, already showing him where to sit to wait for me, and offering to get him a soda from the machine nearby. While following Ray into his office, I could hear Ben agreeing to a cold drink.

I struggled to just sit myself down in the uncomfortable chair facing Ray Fernandez’s desk and be quiet, but for Ben’s sake that’s what I did. At this point I didn’t want to do anything that would cause problems for either of us. I knew that my son had no part in anything having to do with Frank’s death, but I had absolutely no proof. And I knew from past experience just how little credit Fernandez would give to mother’s intuition.

The silence stretched on while Fernandez took a sip of his coffee, looked down at his notebook and then up at me. Those golden brown eyes made me want to squirm about the same way my tenth-grade English teacher did. She always suspected I was up to no good but could never prove it. In reality, the worst thing I ever did in her class was sneak a novel behind the book we were supposed to be reading.

“Okay, so what’s up? I expected you to be on my case the moment you got in here.” Fernandez had one slim dark eyebrow arched in question, making him look sinister.

“I’d like to,” I admitted. “But it would only upset you, and I have no proof that you’d accept that would show you that Ben had nothing to do with any of this.”

His eyebrow quirked a little bit higher. “Does this mean you have some kind of proof that I
wouldn’t
accept?”

“Not exactly. I can tell you that I’m pretty sure Ben didn’t leave the apartment that morning until he heard me screaming in the driveway. But I can’t prove it, because I only heard him through doors before that moment in the morning, I didn’t see him.”

“Okay. Then let’s walk through everything that you did see and hear that morning, just to verify the statement you gave me that day.” Fernandez was being much calmer than I expected. That probably should have calmed me down, but it didn’t. Nothing would calm me down much until he looked me straight in the eye and told me that Ben was no longer a suspect in Frank’s murder.

I went through the events of Monday morning as clearly as I could remember them. “So you were in the bathroom and Ben knocked on the door from his side, telling you he needed to shower.”

I nodded. “And after that he spent at least forty-five minutes in there, but I didn’t see him go in because I closed my door as I left. So I can’t prove in any way that he got straight out of bed, looked at the clock and went directly in to take his shower.”

“But it’s what you would have expected him to do?”

“It is. Ben’s not prone to wandering around outside, especially not early in the morning. He’s pretty good about telling me where he is, or if he’s going out when we’re actually under the same roof. I don’t always know everything when he’s at school.”

“And if he’s like most eighteen-year-old males, that’s probably a good thing,” Fernandez said with a hint of a grin. “I’d worry more if he actually told you everything that went on when he wasn’t at home.”

He looked down at his notes again. “When I talked to you the first time Monday morning, you went back into the apartment to put on a jacket.”

“At your urging, I would add.” I tried not to snap.

“True. You came out in a dark hooded sweatshirt. Was it yours?”

“No. It’s Ben’s. He’d left it in the living room and it was the first thing I thought to grab. My lightweight jacket was in the bedroom, and the sweatshirt was handy.” I had resolved that I would tell the truth with Fernandez, even if it didn’t make me, or Ben, look all that good. I had never found a problem yet that lying helped. Besides, as my grandmother used to say, if you always told the truth, you never had to worry about keeping your story straight.

Fernandez seemed continually surprised by my answers. He must have expected me to defend Ben, and I had every intention of doing that when I could do so
and
tell the truth. “Before Monday, had you ever seen your son and Frank Collins together?”

“Only when they were both in the apartment over the summer when Frank was working on the remodeling job. And that wasn’t very often.”

“You’d never heard Ben have any arguments with Mr. Collins about anything?”

“I never saw Ben talk to Frank Collins in much of any fashion, argumentative or otherwise. And I can’t imagine what they might argue about.”

That finally got Fernandez writing in his notebook again, making me wonder what was behind that question. What had Ben told him that would be a surprise to me? I was going to have to have a chat with my son after this.

“Ben seems like a fairly easygoing guy. And you said Monday that you don’t own a gun, correct?” Did Fernandez think he was going to sneak something by me?

“That’s correct, Detective. I do not now, nor have I ever, owned any kind of gun besides a water pistol that Ben might have had at one time or another. I don’t believe in keeping guns in the house.”

“Fair enough.” He wrote some more in his notebook while I sat trying not to fidget.

“I take it that Frank was shot, as it looked like Monday, and you’re trying to figure out who owns the gun that did it.”

“Now you know I can’t tell you anything of that sort,” Fernandez said, grumbling. That vein in his temple had begun to work overtime.

“Hey, you’re asking me questions about my son and I’m telling you the truth. I figured I could at least chance that you’d do the same if I asked you a question.” It wasn’t likely that I’d get an answer, but I could at least try.

Fernandez gave me a long, thoughtful look. My heart did little flip-flops in reaction. “Circumstantially there are things that could look like Ben had something to do with all this.”

“Like Dot seeing somebody in a dark hooded sweatshirt talking to Frank that morning,” I said. “And the fact that I can’t prove that Ben wasn’t outside before I saw him.”

Fernandez sighed. “Exactly. I hoped that Mrs. Morgan wouldn’t say something to you, but apparently that was too much to hope for.”

“She only told me the truth. And I still don’t think the person she saw was Ben. He told me he hadn’t had any contact with Frank that morning, and I believe him. We may not have the best mother-son relationship in the world, but he normally doesn’t lie to me about anything.”

“Even when it would cause him trouble?”

I nodded. “Even then. He even told me when he drove Dennis’s new car without permission when he only had his permit in Missouri and Dennis was sure somebody on a parking lot made that horrible scratch in the finish. He spent most of the summer mowing lawns to pay for the bodywork, too.”

“I can see why you have faith in him then,” Fernandez said. He didn’t appear to be teasing me, either.

“Good. So are we free to go?”

“For now. I can’t promise that I won’t be calling either of you back in. There’s still a lot of lab work to be done, and several more people I haven’t talked to yet that could clear some things up for me.”

“Is Ben still a suspect?”

Fernandez sighed again. “Ms. Harris, I can’t rule anybody out at this point, especially not anybody who’s young and male. You’ve apparently told me the truth so far and it would be a disservice to you if I didn’t do the same. But he’s no more or less a suspect than about half a dozen other young men.”

He looked down at his notebook. “You don’t happen to have a list of the subcontractors on the job, do you?”

“Not a formal one. I could piece one together, but I’d expect that Frank himself would have kept the actual list, and that Dot Morgan would have a copy as well. But I have to tell you that Frank wasn’t nearly as good with paperwork as she wanted him to be.”

“I haven’t talked to half the people that I need to yet, and that’s becoming a familiar refrain. It would appear that Mr. Collins wasn’t as great as he could have been about a lot of things.” He looked at me sharply. “Not that you should be repeating that.”