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fall back in place before turning to face him again.
    Clearly, she was anxious for him to go, but he hadn’t finished his business here. His gaze met hers. “I hate to put you through anything else, but there’s something I need to ask.”
    Just as Mrs. O’Neal had done, he lifted the cup to his lips and belted the whiskey. It singed his throat on the way down. “The note. If you could just tell me what was in Megan’s suicide note, it would help me put the past behind me once and for all.”
    Her hands covered her eyes. Her shoulders vibrated, and then she stumbled across the room and crumpled into a sloppy heap on the couch. “I guess you got the right to ask. There weren’t no note, Drex. That’s one reason I went to Deputy Hawkins and asked him what made him so sure my baby did that to herself. How did he know Megan weren’t murdered?”
    “There was no note?” In all this time, he’d never considered that possibility.
    “I thought that was suspicious, but Deputy Hawkins took me by the hand and explained right nicely that most people who kill themselves don’t leave notes. Megan weren’t murdered. So the fact there weren’t no note didn’t mean nothing.”
    His headed pounded from the smoke and the whiskey. He picked up the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. No note did mean something. It meant he’d never know for sure if Megan killed herself because he broke it off with her, or if she’d had some other reason.
    Maureen continued to talk, as though the memories had come flooding back, and she couldn’t dam them up any longer. “Anyway, I came home and I Googled up suicide and I found out what Hawkins told me was true. There’s usually no note. But I found out something else while I was about it, and I went back to the deputy and told him I didn’t think my baby shot herself in the head. Most girls use more ladylike methods, like pills and whatnot.”
    “That always bothered me too,” he said, between swigs. But there had been no evidence of a robbery, and Megan had been in a terrible state of mind.
    “Anyway, Hawkins got his back up. I didn’t get the hand-holding treatment that time around so much as the brush-off. He said all the evidence pointed to suicide. There weren’t no robbery. She had no known enemies. Megan’s prints were the only ones on the gun. There was gunshot residue on Megan’s hands.”
    She took a long draw off her cigarette, followed by another. “Then I called him a rotten liar.”
    “Why would you do that?”
    Her fingers passed over her lips. “Because the night Megan died, Hawkins came here all keyed up, told me there weren’t no gunpowder on Megan’s hands. He asked me did I know someone who wanted to hurt her. And then just two days later he looks me square in the eyes and says he made a mistake, his test was wrong and the crime lab’s test was right. He’s sorry, he says, but there was gunpowder on Megan’s hand after all. There had to be, he says, because electric microscopes don’t lie.”
    Charlie didn’t know much about forensics, but he was on a first-name basis with microscopes courtesy of his premed studies. “Did Hawkins maybe say electron microscopes don’t lie?”
    “That’s it exactly. Electric microscopes don’t lie . He told me to chin up to the stone cold truth. My girl was heartbroke, and she shot herself and I had to accept it.”
    Hawkins was right—at least about electron microscopes—those findings would be dead accurate, more so than any rapid test for gunshot residue the deputy might have done at the scene. Charlie needed to sit down.
    Maureen began to slur her words. “I went home like he told me, but I couldn’t sleep that night. So the next day, I went back to Hawkins, and I asked if anyone checked Simone Kincaid’s hands for gunshot residue. That was before Simone was a Carlisle, you know.”
    He slumped down next to Mrs. O’Neal on the couch, her words drilling into him. She thought Simone