To Sketch a Thief by Sharon Pape

be.
    “Fair to everyone,” she said, although with less conviction.
    Zeke shook his head. “Okay, let’s not talk about what’s fair, let’s talk about the truth. The truth is that you’ve been trying to decide if you want to keep the dog, not what’s best for him or me. You probably don’t even realize it. Hell, I suspect you’ve even got yourself bamboozled into believing that you’re bein’ evenhanded.”
    “Oh, right, and you’re the very model of being honest with yourself,” Rory said tightly. “After more than a hundred years, you still haven’t made peace with yourself so that you can move on.” Even as she said the words she realized she’d crossed some invisible line, but she couldn’t bring herself to apologize or back down. When she was being pushed into a corner, she couldn’t help but push back harder.
    Zeke’s jaw clenched, causing the bones and veins of his face to stand out. His eyes narrowed like a sniper homing in on a target. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he shot back at her. “And you’re a fool if you think you know me.”
    “Know you? How can I know you, if you refuse to tell me anything?” Frustrated, Rory almost threw her coffee mug at him, but she stopped herself in time. He wouldn’t have felt it anyway and she would have been stuck cleaning up the mess. Instead she thumped it down sharply in the sink.
    “You want to know something about me?” Zeke snapped. “Then start by keepin’ your word and figure out who killed me!”
    “I’ve tried and you know it.” She’d found articles about his death in the archives of the local newspapers, but they’d provided little useful information and led to more questions than answers, none of which Zeke had been willing to discuss with her.
    “You found out I was shot to death in this house. Why, thank you kindly, ma’am, but I was already in possession of that information.”
    “Who was John Corbin?” Rory demanded, locking eyes with him to make it clear she had no intention of backing down. If she was going to have an angry ghost on her hands, she might as well try to harvest some information from the ordeal. “Was John Trask using the alias John Corbin when he was on Long Island?”
    “How are you gonna hone those detecting skills of yours if I just provide you with all the answers?” he asked wryly, some of the venom gone from his tone.
    Rory kept her guard up. She’d never known him to capitulate so easily. “If you actually had all the answers, you wouldn’t need me to figure out who shot you,” she pointed out. “And I seriously doubt I’m going to have many cases in which everyone involved is dead and gone, along with their entire generation.”
    “I daresay you never expected to have this case either and yet here you are.”
    She took a deep breath and gave herself a time-out for a silent count of ten. “If you really want me to make any progress,” she went on evenly, “you’re going to have to give me something more to go on.”
    “Corbin was Trask,” Zeke said, his tone heavy with exasperation. “Does that suit you?”
    Rory ignored the question since it was only meant to goad her. “Then it seems pretty cut-and-dried. Trask knew you were after him, so he killed you before you had the chance to arrest him.”
    “There you go jumpin’ to the wrong conclusion.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meanin’ I know for a fact that he didn’t do it.”
    “Really? And how can you be so sure of that?”
    “I had him square in my gun sights—right there in front of me—when I was shot in the back.”
    “I see,” Rory murmured, trying to wedge this new piece into the puzzle. Someone else had been in the room that day. She couldn’t see any reason for Zeke to have been hoarding this information, except as a means of controlling her and what she ultimately discovered about his death. And that made no sense, unless there was a part of him that wasn’t all that keen to learn the truth after