"She's divorced," Patrick Thorne said. "The husband's not in the village. It's just her and her daughter."
Ellie Ashton's interest was piqued. "Was there a third party involved? Who's the other man?"
"You can rule out a crime of passion. The so-called 'other man' is so sick he can barely get up—it's Clayton Xavier's father, and he can't even get out of bed." Patrick Thorne saw right through Ellie Ashton's line of thought and thought she had a wild imagination.
Storm Xavier and Vernon Spann are both wimps who wouldn't even kill a chicken. How could they possibly kill a person?
Besides, Vernon Spann isn't in the village, and Storm Xavier is practically on his deathbed. It's absolutely impossible. Then there's that damn fatso from the town's school district. He was fired, and I heard his family moved back to their ancestral home to farm. They're a long way from Millstone Peak, so there's no way he'd come all this way to hurt someone.
