Aspen Allegations - A Sutton Massachusetts Mystery

by Kasi Blake

  Chapter 18

  I gazed at the sky as Jason and I drove north on 495, heading for Haverhill. It was the day of my monthly writing group meeting, and Jason had chivalrously offered to drive me the hour each way so we could spend some time together. He had a park he wanted to visit in the area, so it was a good excuse for him to get out of his typical neck of the woods.

  “Look at those blues,” I stated, my eyes tracing the various shades. “What would you call that?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched in a smile. “Sky blue,” he grinned.

  I gave him a swat. “You can’t describe a sky as being sky blue, that’s cheating,” I teased him. “How about robin’s egg blue?”

  He gave it thought. “I think robin’s egg blue is creamier, perhaps warmer,” he stated. “That is decidedly a cool, pale blue.”

  I looked to the right. “And then, over there, we have a darker, richer blue. I’ve given up on knowing what to call that. Kathy, my poet friend, calls that Maxfield Parrish blue. But even that seems like a cheat, to simply reference an artist who tends to use the color a lot. Surely, though, the color has a real name. Something in nature should be that color other than the sky of course.”

  He nudged his head at another portion of the sky. “That over there might seem like a Caribbean Sea blue.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I agreed. “So now we’re calling sky the color of water. What’s next, calling a light-colored water sky blue?”

  He chuckled. “Being a writer is complicated stuff; my life is much easier. I head out into the woods and look for deer tracks. You see the tracks, you know they were made by a deer, and that’s that.”

  I grinned. “I think you’re simplifying things a bit,” I teased. “You’re able to tell which are turkey tail mushrooms, you know which tracks go with which animals, and if we ever got lost, I know you’d be able to find us a way out.”

  His eyes came to meet mine for a moment. “I’m honored you have so much faith in me.”

  “I do,” I agreed, and meant it with all my heart.

  Minutes eased by in a comfortable silence as the sky drifted from sky blue to ice blue to Caribbean Sea blue in a veil of light grey clouds. Soon we were pulling off the River Street exit, and he was dropping me off at the entrance to the 99 Restaurant.

  He gave me a nod. “I’ll be back at six, then?”

  “That sounds great.” I gave him a wave. “Just call my cell if you end up running into traffic or something. I’ve got books to read, so I’ll be fine.”

  “Have fun,” he called, and then I was heading inside.

  I shook my head as I moved through their lobby area. Now they’d installed a TV even in this small waiting area. It seemed as if bars and restaurants were installing TVs in every corner of their building, as if patrons couldn’t possibly survive without a television signal for more than five seconds. Whatever happened to allowing imagination a fertile place to grow, or, God forbid, an actual conversation?

  The next door opened into the restaurant proper, and I glanced to the left. Our habitual booth was already opened up into a double-wide layout, and Anne sat at the table, munching on a bowl of popcorn. I smiled and headed down to sit down across from her.

  “Good day,” I greeted, laying down a copy of my literary magazine. “Here’s the latest issue for you to look through, if you’d like.”

  She picked it up eagerly, and paged through the poems, photos, and stories. I gave the popcorn a gentle push so it was a bit further from me. It was bad enough that I ate it sometimes, but it wasn’t even that good. It was fairly stale with a hint of chemical sharpness.

  The waitress swung by, a middle-aged woman with bobbed blonde hair. “Merlot for you, dear?”

  “A cabernet today, thanks,” I responded.

  She nodded and was off. I leant back, relaxing after the long drive. The booths were comfortable enough, with ridged wooden backs. The music was set on “popular” today, and I smiled as Carley’s “Call Me Maybe” came on. The wealth of parodies on YouTube were staggering, with my favorite being the Cookie Monster singing “Cookie Maybe.” I found myself tempted to find it on my cell’s YouTube to show to Anne, but I resisted.

  In a moment the waitress had returned with my wine. Right behind her came Simone. Simone plunked into the booth beside me, smiling her welcome. “You would not believe the week I had,” she greeted. “My whole family has suffered through the flu for the past month; I’ve had no energy. Today is the first day I was able to get in motion.”

  The waitress came by again, and we put in our orders. Our salads with ranch dressing showed up almost immediately, and Simone smiled in amusement as I pushed the croutons off to the side.

  I shrugged. “I’m not that hungry right now, so I might as well eat the parts I really enjoy,” I pointed out, taking a bite of the lettuce. I turned to Anne, who had put the magazine aside. “How are your students treating you?”

  She shook her head, running a hand through her grey hair. “When I retired from teaching college in person, I thought the online courses would be a fun way to keep my fingers in the process,” she sighed. “But the kids online are just as bad as the in-person students. In the spring there was that girl who was grumpy with my quizzes, so she took to the forums to openly discuss cheating on the tests. She tried to incite all of the other students to join in. I thought that was outrageous, but now I have a student who is even worse.”

  “Oh?” I asked, taking a sip of my wine. “What is this one doing?”

  “She’s an older woman, and she’s having trouble understanding the material. I’ve been teaching this course for over ten years, and people have never had problems with the areas she’s stuck on. I think she’s just not carefully reading the chapter. She’s gone to the dean twice now, both wanting him to force me to give her an A and also to get a full refund at the same time.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t you drop her from the class?”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. “No, I’m not allowed to drop someone simply for being obnoxious. I’m stuck with her. I fully expect, when the course finishes up in mid-December, that she will come back and agitate to get a better grade than whatever she earns.”

  “Maybe this will be a learning experience for her, that she can’t bully her way through every course,” I pointed out.

  Anne sighed dejectedly. “She told the dean I was the meanest teacher she’s ever had.”

  I looked over to Simone. “This sounds like a winning formula for her,” I teased. “Each new teacher she runs into can be the new meanest teacher and she can always make that complaint. If teachers cave into her, not wanting to deal with the grief, she gets a string of As and maybe even some free classes as well.”

  Anne took another handful of popcorn. “Well, I don’t care,” she stated firmly. “This will be my last class, and then I won’t have to deal with it any more. I can focus on my painting and my poetry.”

  We finished our salads, and the waitress brought over our main dishes. I had the salmon with asparagus, the same thing I’d gotten every month for the last two years of meetings. It was, as usual, fairly tasty.

  Anne looked over at me. “So how are things going with your investigations? What was his name again?”

  “John Dixon,” I replied. “I’m still not sure about the drowning of his friend Eileen, back in 1968. Sometimes it seems as if it was suspicious. But then at other times it seems simply like a tragic accident, one that ripped apart a group of four close friends. Who knows, though. Maybe they would have separated as they left high school anyway and gone off on their own paths.”

  Anne cocked her head to one side. “John Dixon? And Eileen drowned at the end of high school?”

  Curiosity perked within me. “Do you know of them?”

  “Wait, let me see if I can find it,” she murmured, digging through the bag at her side and pulling out an iPad. “I think my publisher was talking with me about that book recently to get some feedback on a cov
er concept.”

  I sat back in surprise. “I had no idea John had gone that far in his project. I thought he was barely getting started.”

  Anne was focused on her tablet. “It was all hush hush,” she murmured. “They were friends from way back, I think Vietnam. When John mentioned his project, my publisher leapt in with ideas.”

  She slid a few screens and then stopped, nodding in acceptance. “Ah, here it is.” She passed the tablet across the grey table toward me.

  I looked at the image in interest. If I’d given thought to what the cover might be like, I’d have imagined a canoe sitting alone in the middle of a lake, or maybe smooth ripples. But the book was taking a different tack entirely.

  It was an image of John and Eileen when they were both around sixteen. They were standing in a garden lush with orange day lilies and bright crimson peonies. John was tall, dressed in a sapphire linen shirt, his dark hair shining in the golden summer sun. He had his arm wrapped possessively around Eileen’s waist. She was laughing out loud, leaning into him, wearing a white peasant blouse and a long, olive-green skirt. Her hip-length blonde hair was caught by the wind, blowing like a curling banner.

  The title on the page was “Sixty-Eight Love Affair.”

  “Wow,” I said, gazing over the image. “This isn’t quite how I imagined his work. I thought he was writing about the tragedy.”

  “That is what my publisher initially thought too,” agreed Anne. “Apparently John was pushing hard to focus on the romance, about how he and Eileen were soul-mates. He wanted to lay out how they were partners since they were quite young and how he was her one true love. She and he would have settled down in a house on the lake, raised kids, and lived the perfect American Dream. Then tragedy struck and he lost it all.”

  I pursed my lips together. “Did anybody else know about this angle?”

  “I don’t think so,” she stated. “He was sharing the intro excerpts of his book with many people, to get feedback on his writing style, but he wanted to keep the main storyline, cover, and title a secret. He said that way it would make the largest splash when it was finally released.” Her eyes dropped to the tablet for a moment, to the image of the laughing couple. “I got the sense that he thought the other men would be jealous of him and he was looking forward to that.”

  “I agree they probably would have been a bit put out by this take on their childhood,” I pondered. “Each of them seemed to think that she was fond of them and had a special connection with only them. For John to claim her as his one and only might not have sat very well.”

  I took another sip of my wine. “I wonder, too, how Jeff would have felt. He probably wanted to think that it was his mother John loved. The idea that John spent his entire life pining after a dead woman probably wouldn’t be settling.”

  Anne took back her tablet, tucking it into her bag. “John also kept saying that he had a secret to reveal in the story, one which would be shocking to all of his friends.” Her mouth tweaked into a wry smile. “I guess we won’t know what that was now,” she murmured. “He didn’t leave behind any notes?”

  I shook my head. “Just the story he had finished up until now, which cut off several years before the tragedy,” I agreed. “There was nothing in there that was surprising at all. So his secret must have been planned for a subsequent chapter.”

  Simone looked between us. “You mean he had no notes at all?” she asked. “When I write stories, I always have reams of notes to work with. I keep a list of important dates, descriptions of locations, and that sort of thing. That way I can glance at it and know my writing is consistent. Sure, he was writing about a history that he lived, but even so I can’t imagine he had memorized every date or every name. You’re saying he had no notes at all while he worked on this? Just one Word document that he filled out page by page, like a modern day Kerouac?”

  Her words made me pause, and I sat back for a moment. “Well, there didn’t seem to be anything on the hard drive,” I pointed out. “Just the one file containing his story.”

  Simone pursed her lips. “He was sharing that story with people, right? As he wrote it?”

  I nodded. “Yes, he was doing that quite enthusiastically. Whenever people came over to visit he would read his latest chapter to them to get their feedback.”

  “All right, then, he probably wouldn’t have made much of an effort to hide that file, then,” she noted. “There weren’t any secrets or surprises in that file. But his notes file, the one that held his upcoming revelation, he probably kept hidden somewhere. That way, if someone used his computer for something, to check Facebook or send off an email message, they wouldn’t accidentally come across it. I bet he tucked it in an odd corner, with a name that wouldn’t be recognized.”

  “You might be right,” I agreed. “I’ll have to check with Matthew and see if he’s already reformatted the hard drive. This is certainly worth looking into, at least.”

  The waitress came over. “Any desserts tonight?”

  Anne looked at me and smiled. “I will if you will,” she offered.

  “All right,” I conceded with a smile. “Two hot fudge sundaes, please.”

  The waitress chuckled. “Coming right up, girlies.”