"Can't you just hop to the facts?" Dean said as he strained the spaghetti into a colander.
"Well, I figured the drowning of a child ought to make a big city paper and sure enough, after I checked a few of my sources and a couple of papers, I hit pay dirt!" He checked his notes, wetting his fingers as he turned each page.
"Pay dirt being...?" Dean prompted. Lord, he thought, listening to Fred was like watching a sloth race.
"Pay dirt being, that Whitehouse guy was right. The drowning happened right there in Pinkville, Virginia, not on some far off canoeing trip, like Edith said! It happened in a swimming pool, not some river. And Shipton was out of town. Both boys were swimming and Edith was watching them, or was supposed to be. The paper didn't give a whole lot of details but the boys got in trouble and Edith saved the youngest one, Donnie. There was no one else around. The paper says she was extremely distraught and sedated, and under a suicide watch."
"Interesting," Dean said as he drizzled the olive oil over the pasta and sprinkled it with pepper and Italian spices.
"Edith's version is as far-out fiction as some of Gladys Turnbull's stuff," Fred said like the learned professor.
Dean thought a moment. "So the whole business about Shipton lugging a dead body back to civilization was a total fabrication. The questions is, whose fabrication? Edith's or Ryland's? He's the one who told me-not Edith, even though he claims that was what she told him." Then he added, "Good job, detective O'Connor."
Fred nodded at the compliment. "That raises the question about Donnie not being able to talk. And why would he fear his stepfather."
"The drowning in a pool could have been just as traumatic as Edith's version, especially if Donnie felt some responsibility for his stepbrother's death. Maybe Jerome Shipton has never forgiven both of them or, at the very least, that's how Donnie reads it. I could see how Shipton might hate his wife. Maybe he blames her for both not watching the boys and then for saving her child and not his."
The pair was interrupted from further speculation by the sound of Martha's laughter and footsteps bounding down the stairs. The two children bounced into the room. Martha held a twenty-dollar bill.
"His ma wants to know if Donnie can eat with us." She held out the money. "She's just sitting in the room, in her white dress. She says she ain't hungry. But Donnie is. And she wants Donnie to sleep over with me and Janet for the night! She's paying Janet, too!"