What bothered Dean most was his misread of Edith Shipton. If he'd thought for a minute she was suicidal, he'd have taken some steps to protect her from herself.
"I was a cop for a lot of years. I should be able to react professionally to something like that. I was trained to defuse desperate situations, not sit around and be blind to their development."
Gladys shrugged. "It was all his fault. He drove her to it. He was a terrible man. I'm glad he's gone from here. If she'd killed him, I'd be glad of that too." She brushed away a tear, leaving a streak of smeared rouge and mascara. "He was nasty to everyone. Even Miss Quincy."
"You heard him arguing with Claire Quincy?" Fred asked.
"No, no. Not Claire-her sister Effie." She leaned forward. "I heard them talking at night." The large woman had Dean's attention. "She whispered something to him and he just laughed in her face and said, 'Try and stop me'. He was that way with everyone he encountered, brutish. He was a cruel and nasty man."
Dean turned to Weller. "So tell me how Edith Shipton tried to kill her husband," he asked. "And why."
Weller looked as if the answer should have been obvious. "She cut his rope, figuring on hooking back up with that Ryland fellow but then his girlfriend showed up and in no uncertain terms pointed out why that was a dead end. First, she gets brooding about it, knows she's pregnant, knows Shipton is still alive and won't let her go. And now he'll be all the more pissed off at her, seeing as he knows she tried to kill him. Donnie's father cares for his son. He's someone who will take care of the boy, maybe better than she can. So she-"
Gladys read from her notes, "...stepped up on the velvet chair, tightens the silken cord about her neck, and closed her eyes...."
Dean rose and began to leave the room, disgusted that Gladys Turnbull would trivialize Edith Shipton's death in fiction, even before the shattered woman was cold in the ground. "That was a human being they hauled out of here, Gladys. You might not have liked Edith Shipton, but her death is still a tragedy." He immediately felt bad for snapping at the woman who in some ways didn't demonstrate the good sense to blow on hot soup.
"What's a matter?" Weller asked, changing the subject. "Isn't that the way you read it?"
Dean stopped. "I'm not sure I'm reading it at all. A woman killed herself in my inn. If I was a bit more sensitive, I might have stopped her." The others looked at him, surprised at the depth of his reaction. He continued, "She came down to my room last night."