Aspen Allegations - A Sutton Massachusetts Mystery

by Kasi Blake

  Chapter 23

  My tree pose was wobbly. I focused on the burly oak at the far end of the yard, the one with the neatly carved hole which occasionally housed the family of squirrels. I thought of its two up-stretched limbs as my own reaching toward the sky. And yet my center was gone. I swayed, as capricious as a willow in a springtime gust, and finally I had to put my left foot down.

  Jason sat at the table, sipping his tea, his eyes on the feeder out the side window and the titmouse who sat there. The soft grey tuft on the bird’s head made him seem a wild-eyed teenager, eager to shock his parents. The titmouse snatched at a sunflower seed, settled it in his beak, and then swooped off to an aspen to diligently peck into it.

  Jason’s voice was soft and reassuring. “Anyone would be shaken up by last night,” he murmured.

  I stretched my right leg back, angling that foot perpendicular to the mat. My left foot went point-forward in parallel. I stretched out my two arms, one back, one forward, becoming a human starfish. But unlike that noble beast, if one of my limbs had been cut off, it would not regenerate. It would be gone forever, an eternal reminder of how close I had come to that final crossover.

  I reined in my mind. Pose: Warrior II.

  I looked forward, settling my left knee down, stretching my arms out fore and aft as if I was surfing on my yoga mat. I strived for that balance – half the weight on my front foot, half on back. Balance on my back foot’s right edge, the furthest point there. Press my forward, left foot firmly into the mat.

  Breathe.

  My thoughts were floating, drifting clouds. Yes, certainly, they were sometimes storm-clouds, sizzling with an energy that I could feel through every atom of my body. And yet they were simply thoughts. Simply bursts of electrical energy that, if I released them of attention, would eventually drift away. The more I practiced, the more I could disengage from being controlled by them. Surely I would never be perfect – but that was not the point. Even the most adept monks were still troubled by circling thoughts. The aim was solely to become slightly better at separating oneself from the control of those thoughts. To have the ability to stand apart, to watch them, and to view them objectively.

  A smile came to my lips. And when I did that, was it simply another corner of my mind which watched that first set of operations? And if I drew back again, was it a third corner of my mind watching the first two? Just how many vantage points did my mind hold? At what point could I look down at all of the lightning-storm operations of my brain, the reptilian core, the esoteric beauty center, and believe I beheld it all?

  I moved through the various stages of my routine, the rolling cat, the bridge pose, the bliss of savasana where I lay flat on my back and simply breathed in the luxury of being alive, of having a roof over my head and food in my pantry. So many on Earth dreamt of such luxuries. I would not take them for granted.

  At last I sat cross-legged, looking through the slider at the back yard. A downy woodpecker hung on the suet feeder, nibbling contentedly at his morning meal, and I pressed my hands together at my chest.

  “Namaste,” I offered him and the world.

  “Namaste,” echoed Jason, smiling down at me.

  I stood, and he went to the fridge, filling a glass with ice and adding in my protein shake. He brought it to me as I sat with him at the table.

  His eyes held mine as I began drinking my breakfast. “The police seem to be taking our theories more seriously now,” he commented.

  “Well, we were nearly run off the road, and someone did break into Matthew’s house,” I agreed. “Whoever it is seems willing to take some drastic action to keep his secret safe.”

  “I checked in this morning. Neither Sam nor Richard has a good alibi for last night.”

  I looked down into my shake. “I suppose that doesn’t mean much,” I murmured. “Until recently, if someone had asked me what I’d done on a given night, I would have said I was home alone. There would have been no one to vouch for where I was or what I was doing.”

  His hand came over mine. “And now there is,” he murmured.

  A smile came to my lips and I looked up, nodding. “And now there is.”

  After a moment I took another sip. “I wish they had been able to trace that email message Jeff got down to something more specific, though.”

  Jason’s eyes twinkled. “Our modern technology may be good, but it’s not that good,” he pointed out. “They know it came from somewhere in Sutton. Did you want a street address?”

  “That would be nice,” I agreed, a grin growing despite my discouraged mood. “And then we could look it up in Google Maps, and there’d be a big arrow pointing at someone’s house. With a note on the side saying solution right here.”

  His smile widened. “I suppose you were looking forward to a Hercule Poirot style gathering, then.”

  I laughed out loud at that. “Oh, could you imagine?” I asked. “Me, the shy one, gathering every single suspect into one room? Questioning and grilling and challenging them, and then spinning to stare the guilty man straight in the eye?”

  “But we don’t have a butler,” pointed out Jason with a chuckle. “Isn’t it always the butler?”

  “It always seems to be the person least suspected,” I countered. “Maybe that means that somehow Charles is the guilty guy. Maybe all of his doddering and avoidance is some sort of an elaborate act that he’s kept up for decades.”

  Jason shook his head, doubt creasing his brow. “I always preferred the tenets of Occam’s razor,” he countered. “Those convoluted, twisted plots that movies adore rarely make sense in the real world. In that 1935 Singletary Lake drowning it was straightforward. Man has wife. Man falls for seventeen-year-old girl. Man decides he’d rather have the fun than the duties of a wife-plus-two-kids, so man drowns wife. Man is shocked when his brilliant plan doesn’t work.”

  I took another sip of my shake, looking out at the feeder. A pair of chickadees attempted to land on the same perch simultaneously then erupted in a flurry of feathers and squawks. As they flew off, a dove whirred in and complacently took the spot.

  “OK, then, what is the simplest solution here?”

  He thought about that for a while, sipping his tea. The circular clock gently ticked away the seconds, its face offering an herbal marker at each hour. I thought, as each tick sounded, how that was one less moment of my life. Each breath was gone forever into the past, never to be retrieved. That was my life passing and I needed to be attentive to each precious drop.

  “I think John’s death might have been an accident,” he said at last. “I cannot think of anyone we’ve met who would slay another person either for the joy of it or as a deliberate desire to end their life.”

  I ran a hand through my hair, drawing out the pony-tail holder I’d worn during my yoga session. “So why would the assailant have had a gun?”

  “Maybe to scare him into complying with something? There had to be a conflict of some sort.”

  “The book,” I posited. “Whatever was going to come up in the book?”

  “That sounds reasonable,” he agreed. “So this book was being worked on. Something was going to be made public that the assailant didn’t want to be known. It was a fairly serious topic for him.”

  “Something that he felt would destroy his life.”

  Jason nodded. “So he wanted the book to stop. That’s all. He didn’t want to hurt anybody or do anything rash. He simply wanted this book, which after all didn’t even exist yet, to go away. If the book went away then everything would stay the way it was. They wanted to keep the status quo.”

  I leant forward. “So this person, nervous about the potential book’s contents, went to talk with the author.”

  Jason held my gaze. “Just to talk. But maybe he worried that John would be too wrapped up in his author’s pride to listen clearly. Perhaps he was concerned that John had already been talking up the book to his friends and wouldn’t want to just put aside such an attention-gathering project.”
r />   “Right,” I agreed. “So the person brought along a bit of insurance. Something to help guarantee that John took this request as seriously as it warranted.”

  “John could be too focused at times after all. He might not see how critically important this was to the other party. He might need a bit of jarring to understand another’s viewpoint on the issue.”

  It was starting to seem plausible. “During their talk, John scoffs. He says that he already has loyal fans encouraging him. He has a publisher friend designing covers. How could he let them down? How could he explain just abandoning his project?”

  “And then the assailant brings out his gun to make his point. But maybe he doesn’t quite know how to hold it properly.”

  “Maybe John gets panicked and lunges for it to knock it away. Or maybe John becomes furious and dives to grab it himself.”

  “Heck, maybe the guy with the gun trips over something.”

  I nodded. “Then there is John lying on the ground, a bullet hole blasted through his chest, and there’s no turning back now. There’s only the specter of years of legal battle ahead. So he runs.”

  Jason sat forward. “Once the lies begin, it’s that much harder to turn around and tell the truth. It’s so much easier to just keep marching forward and hope it all dies away after a time.”

  I took a sip of my shake. “Just like Eileen’s death.” I nodded. “It was a flurry of excitement for a while. Then they ruled it an accident and it faded into the background. Life went on.”

  I looked at Jason. “So who is it then?”

  He thought for a long moment, then shook his head. “It could be any of them,” he sighed. “Once that hard drive vanished we lost our ability to trace it from that end. Whoever hacked into your account, to know when we found the password, simply used it to lure Matthew and Jeff away from the vicinity. Really, the only dangerous part of it all was side-swiping us. But all we saw was a dark SUV. There are probably thousands of those in this vicinity.”

  “All three of them have access to one, apparently,” I sighed morosely.

  “As does half of the town,” he pointed out. “It seems to be the vehicle of choice in these parts.”

  “You remember that snowstorm of 2011? We had snow piles literally taller than cars! I’m thankful I sold that Mustang of mine years ago. It was little more than a sled when the white stuff came down.”

  He chuckled. “I’m sure it was fun in the summertime, though.”

  I grinned at the memories. “Yes, it was.”

  I tilted up my glass, finishing off my shake. “Well, where does that leave us?”

  “We know the hard drive had something meaningful on it. So it does seem related to John’s story he was writing. I think we can safely say Jeff isn’t involved.”

  “Unless he hired someone,” I commented morosely. “It could still be pretty much anybody.”

  “I think I’m leaning toward his innocence,” he stated. “Occam again. The idea of him overseeing a complex conspiracy just doesn’t make much sense. If he wanted to stop his father, he could just have sabotaged his father’s computer. He was the one who gave his father the system in the first place. A few computer issues, a few other distractions, and he could have dragged the process out until his father finally succumbed to his illnesses.” He shook his head. “No, I get the sense that Jeff honestly was trying to help his father finish those memoirs as best he could. He knew it might bring up childhood dreams and loves, and Jeff seemed all right with that.”

  I smiled. “I am glad to hear that you feel that way too,” I commented. “I like Jeff. He seems a good soul.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So what do we do, then? Gather up the three boys down at Lake Singletary, put them into canoes, and see who flinches first? In traditional Agatha Christie fashion?”

  Mirth bubbled up in me at that scenario but I shook my head. “We had enough trouble wrangling interviews with them separately,” I pointed out. “The chance of getting all three of them to agree to meet us, and then to head out onto the frigid surface of Lake Singletary when the air temperature is barely over freezing, is slim to none. No, we have to think of something else.”

  “And what might that be?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure.” I brightened in a smile. “But I do have a stack of three Midsomers Murders DVDs waiting in the living room. We could have a marathon and see if inspiration hits us.”

  He made a sweeping motion with his arm. “A perfect way to spend a wintry Sunday afternoon,” he agreed. “Settle yourself in and I’ll make the popcorn.”

  “A perfect gentleman,” I sighed, and he drew me in against him, his warmth enveloping me.