The Inn at Holiday Bay: Letters in the Library

by Kathi Daley

  As I read and reread the file, I began to get a feel for the overall situation. Isaac Dumbarton was a local farmer who married Trish Newman, a graphic designer from Chicago. She was passing through town when her car broke down, Isaac helped her, and seven months later they married. Trish moved to Indiana and sixteen months after they wed, the couple welcomed a daughter into the world. When Isabella was five, Trish decided that farm life was not for her. She divorced Isaac and took Isabella to Chicago, where she resumed her career. Trish tried to win full physical custody of Isabella, but the judge awarded the parents joint custody, with court-ordered visitation for Isaac. According to witness statements, the relationship between Isabella’s parents continued to deteriorate. When Isaac was shot and killed, there were a lot of folks who assumed that Trish was responsible because she just happened to be in town visiting friends at the time.

  While there was a lot of information in the file, I didn’t see any mentions of anything happening on July 18. Maybe the date meant something to Ben. Maybe when he reviewed the file he was reminded of something. Or maybe…

  I grabbed the organizer and turned to July 18 of the year that Ben died. In the notes section of that page, there was a single word scribbled in Ben’s familiar scrawl. Denton. In my mind, Denton must be a name. I tried to remember if that name had come up anywhere in the file I had just gone through several times, but I didn’t think so. Still, it felt important. I realized it was just as likely that Denton was someone he was to meet on a case he’d been working on that July and had nothing to do with the murder all those years earlier. I wondered how I could find out.

  I picked up my phone and called Colt. “I might have found something that may be related to whatever could have been going on with Mark’s and Karen’s deaths.”

  “Sounds promising. What is it?” Colt asked.

  “It’s sort of complicated. Would it be okay if I came to your office?”

  “I am on my way out for an interview. I can stop by your place when I am done. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  “An hour would be fine.” I paused. “Does the name Denton mean anything to you?”

  “I’ve been doing some digging and I’m pretty sure that someone named Theo Denton is responsible for both Mark and Karen’s deaths.”

  Chapter 17

  The hour that I had to wait felt like a lifetime after Colt dropped that piece of news and then rang off. I was pretty sure I was going to strangle him when he finally showed up. To pass the time, I went over to the house to check in with Lonnie rather than wearing a hole in the flooring with my pacing.

  “The place looks great,” I said as I stepped into the mostly complete first floor.

  “I think it is coming together just right. I spoke to Bobby this morning and he confirmed that he will be here to start taking care of the mantel in the living room and the crown molding in the dining area a week from today.”

  “That’s great. I can’t wait to see how it all comes out. I have to say this project has been messier and noisier than I ever imagined, but it’s also a lot of fun. I feel like the house has a new look every time I wander over.”

  “At this point there is something new to explore every few days. Georgia told me that you solved the mystery of the letters in the library.”

  “We did. And I suppose it turned out to have a happy ending. It is sad that both Victor and Ursula died so young, but their daughter lived on and had a happy life.”

  “I guess that’s something. The flooring for the second story is going to be delivered tomorrow. We aren’t quite ready for it, so I am going to have them stack it in the living room. I wanted to warn you in case you came over and wondered about it.”

  “Thanks for the warning. Did the guy with the cabinets get back to you?”

  Lonnie nodded. “They should be in by the middle of next week. Things are really humming along. I hate to jinx it, but right now we are actually ahead of schedule.”

  “That’s great. I don’t want to jinx it either, so I will forgo the high five.” I paused at the sound of a car in the drive. “That must be Colt. I’ll check back in with you before the weekend.”

  “We’ll be taking off at noon on Friday, but I’ll make sure we chat before I go. Lacy has been talking about organizing a dinner party for Sunday, so I’m sure you’ll hear from her later today. She is going to make some of her famous ribs, so if you are free it will be worth your while to come over.”

  “Dinner sounds fun, and I love ribs. If I don’t hear from her, I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  I waved to Lonnie and headed out the back door, which led out to the drive. “Okay, what is this about a man named Theo Denton killing Mark and Karen?” I asked before Colt had even managed to make it all the way out of his car.

  “Isaac Dumbarton had a son from a high school fling with the prom queen, Sandra Denton. While Sandra and Isaac never got married and Sandra retained full legal and physical custody of Theo, Sandra continued to live in town, and Theo and Isaac were tight. By the time Isaac was killed, Theo was seventeen.” Colt pulled something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. It was a photo of a tall, thin, blond man. “This is Theo Denton. Do you think we could continue this conversation inside?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry. I just got so impatient waiting for you.” I started walking toward the front door of the cottage. “This guy fits the description of the man who pushed Mark.”

  Colt stomped the snow off his feet, then took a step into the entry. “He does and there is more.” Colt took off his jacket and hung it on the rack. I hung my jacket up beside it. “Can I possibly get a cup of coffee?”

  “Oh sure,” I answered, heading to the kitchen. “So about Theo… Are you sure he killed Mark and Karen?”

  “Sure, no. But mostly certain.” Colt sat down on the sofa. I handed him his coffee, he took a sip, then set the mug on the coffee table in front of him. He pulled another photo out of his pocket before he spoke again. “I called everyone I had spoken to who had seen Karen on the trail the day she died. One of the witnesses had taken a bunch of photos, and I asked to see them. This was one of them.”

  The photo was of three people, two men and a woman. Walking behind them at the exact moment the photo was snapped was a man who looked an awful lot like Theo Denton. “Wow. That does look like him. If we can prove that this is Theo, I guess that would demonstrate that he was in the same woods as Karen on the day she fell to her death.”

  “I agree. Which is why I called a buddy of mine who works for the DA in Philadelphia and asked him if he could arrange to show Theo’s photo to the witness who claimed to have seen a tall, thin man with blond hair push Mark in front of the bus. He was willing, and the witness told my buddy that there was an eighty percent chance that the man he saw push Mark was the same man. Unfortunately, the man who pushed Mark was wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, so a hundred percent identity verification is probably not in the cards, even if we can find another witness.”

  I sat on the edge of the chair across from Colt. “Okay, say Theo killed Mark and Karen. Why?”

  “That I don’t know. I do, however, intend to keep digging until I find out.”

  “Do we know where he is now?”

  “His last known address was in Philadelphia. He no longer lives there, but he did when Ben and Mark visited and when Mark died.”

  “So Ben and Mark must have gone to Philadelphia to talk to him, or to confront him. Maybe Ben found out that he had something to do with his father’s death.”

  “Maybe. All we can do is speculate now, but we’ll figure it out.”

  “If Theo did kill Mark and Karen, and he was living in Philadelphia when Ben saw Mark in Philadelphia, it tracks that Ben was aware of whatever was going on between Theo and the Stinsons. I still feel like there might be clues in his notes and possessions. I’ll keep looking. I know it looks like Ben’s accident had nothing to do with this, but it still feels like he was somehow involved in it.”

&nb
sp; Colt nodded. “If nothing else, he knew something.”

  “What about the boxes that Karen’s cousin left with Lily? Did you find anything that might lead to a clue as to what was going on in Karen’s life at the time of her death?”

  Colt blew out a breath. “I opened the boxes and took a quick peek, but I haven’t had time to look at every photo or read every letter. I suppose there could be a clue to be found.”

  “Are the boxes at your house or your office?”

  “My home.”

  I stood up. “Okay. Let’s head over there now and look. I’ll help you, which will make the search go twice as fast.”

  Colt hesitated.

  “You do want to figure this out, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “So let’s figure it out. You know you can trust me not to blab any secrets I may come across while looking through Karen’s mementos. Did she have a journal of some sort? A lot of people keep them.”

  “Not that I saw, but like I said, I’ve been busy and haven’t taken the time to really sort through the stuff. You are correct, though; it is time to button up this case.” Colt stood up. “Let’s go. If we both work on it, we should be able to look at everything I have in a few hours.”

  ******

  Colt lived in an apartment in a small complex. It was barren and drab and not at all the sort of place where I would want to spend much time. Colt was single and he had a demanding job, so he most likely spent very little time in the cramped space. I could definitely see why he didn’t think it was an adequate place to have his niece and nephew come for a visit. His idea to buy a home with a yard seemed like an even better one now that I had gotten a look at his current residence.

  “Let’s each take a box and go through it,” Colt suggested. “There are eight in all.”

  I picked up a box, took off the lid, and began sorting through photos. Most of them looked as if they were of Karen in recent years and I doubted they’d hold a clue to her relationship with Theo Denton, but I didn’t want to miss anything, so I took the time to look at each one and to see if there was any writing on the back. The box Colt selected for himself had yearbooks and scrapbooks. He appeared to be taking the same care as I as he went through each item one at a time.

  “A lot of these photos are of scenery,” I said. “There are a few with people in them, but most are of animals and landscapes.”

  “Karen liked to hike and ski. She spent her free time in nature and tended to do a lot of it alone.” Colt held up a yearbook. “According to her high school yearbook, she was popular. I found photos that show that she was not only a member of the student council but was on both the track team and the girls’ basketball team, and she was a member of the yearbook committee and a photographer for the school paper.”

  “I suppose that her desire to spend time in solitude could have developed after high school.” I set the box I had been looking through aside and started on the next one. “If there is anything important to find in these boxes, it seems like it would be from her childhood. Something from her time in Indiana, because her link to Theo Denton is from Indiana.”

  “Unless she stayed in touch with someone even after she moved,” Colt pointed out. “There could be a letter that might provide a clue.”

  I picked up a stack of letters between Karen and a man named Ron. They weren’t all that old, so they probably didn’t have anything to do with Theo or her and Mark’s deaths, but I decided to take a peek anyway. I felt a bit like a voyeur. “Do you think that whatever Ben found during his investigation led to Mark and Karen’s deaths?” I asked after determining that Ron was a past lover and setting the letters aside.

  “It does look as if that might be the case, but until we find actual facts, I think we need to keep an open mind.”

  I picked up a diary, opened the cover, and began to read, but it appeared to be from her high school years, so I set that aside too. I suspected that if there was a clue to be found, it would be from a diary or journal during the last year of her life or her childhood before she moved to Holiday Bay. I picked up a newer-looking journal and began to read. My breath caught in my throat when I realized the last entry was written on the day that Karen died. “I think I have something.”

  Colt looked at me. “What is it?”

  “Karen’s journal. She wrote something in it the day she died.”

  Colt held out a hand. I passed it to him.

  Colt began to read out loud. “ʻSome secrets are meant to be shared, while others are best taken to the grave. I have a secret that at one time I felt justified in keeping, but after finding out what actually happened to Mark, I am no longer certain that the pact Isabella and I made is one I should continue to maintain. I need time to think. Time alone to think over everything. I need time to work up the courage I know I will need to do what I know needs to be done.’”

  Colt stopped reading.

  “Is that it?”

  He nodded.

  “We need to work our way back. Maybe at some point she reveals what the secret that she feels burdened by is.”

  “Perhaps,” Colt said. “But if the secret is one that is so heavy as to cause her this amount of angst, I’m not sure she would reveal it, even in a diary.”

  “She hints that what happened to Mark is in some way related to the secret,” I said. “Lily said Karen mentioned to her that she was upset because of the death of a loved one and talked about a trickle-down effect. Karen seemed to be getting over the death until a couple of weeks before her own death. Perhaps when Mark died, she wasn’t aware that it was connected to her secret. Maybe she had mourned the loss of her half brother but had begun to move on, but then she was made aware of that connection. Maybe she even felt a certain amount of responsibility for his death.”

  Colt leaned forward on his elbows. “Karen had a secret that in some way must have been related to Theo Denton. She’d kept it for all these years, but then Mark was pushed in front of a bus and Karen realized that it was Theo who pushed him, and he did it because of the secret she’d kept.”

  I nodded.

  “So what was the secret?”

  I paused to think about things a bit. “We know that Theo was Isaac’s illegitimate son from a high school fling. They were close, despite the fact that Isaac never married Theo’s mother. We know that Isaac was shot to death and that Isabella’s mother was a suspect but was never charged. It appears that the murder occurred during the summer when my husband was in Indiana, visiting Mark. According to the case file, the Dumbartons were the Stinsons’ neighbors, and Karen mentions Isabella in her journal entry, so the two of them must have known each other, maybe even were friends.”

  “So far I am with you.”

  “Years after Isaac’s death, Ben goes to Philadelphia to see Mark there, even though he lives in Baltimore. It appears as if Theo lived in Philadelphia at that time, so I am going to assume that he was the reason for the visit there. We don’t know what occurred in Philadelphia, but Ben died three months later in what appears to be an unrelated accident. Mark was pushed in front of a bus seven months after the visit by a man who fits Theo’s description. Four months after Mark’s death, Karen died in a fall, and it appears that it may have been Theo who caused the fall as well.” I looked Colt in the eye. “Whatever happened, it must have had something to do with Isaac Dumbarton’s murder all those years ago.”

  Colt got up, crossed the room to the kitchen, took out a bag of coffee, and began to fill the coffeemaker. “What if Theo was the one who killed his father? What if somehow Mark and Karen knew it? Maybe Ben knew as well. Maybe they promised never to tell, but Mark changed his mind for some reason and Theo had to eliminate him.”

  I picked up a pen and began to click it open and closed. “Okay, say that is true. Why would they keep Theo’s secret all that time? And if they did for some reason vow to keep his secret, why would he kill them more than a decade later? We can speculate that Mark changed his mind and was going to te
ll, but why would he?”

  Colt poured two cups of coffee and set them on the table. “Yeah, that theory feels pretty weak. Still, I do feel like the murder is related, given the fact that it appears that Theo killed both Mark and Karen.”

  I bit my lower lip. “It just doesn’t make sense that Mark and Karen would have been protecting Theo all this time. Maybe Karen wasn’t protecting Theo. Maybe she was protecting someone else.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s look around some more. Read more of the diary. Maybe Karen spells it all out somewhere else.”

  Colt picked up the diary he’d been looking at and I continued to search in the box. I really hoped Karen had written down her secret, but after hours of looking, the only conclusion I could come to was that she hadn’t.

  Chapter 18

  It wasn’t until the following day, when I was looking through Ben’s things, that I finally figured out what must have happened. Or at least that was what I suspected. I called Colt and asked him to come over.

  “I know what happened. At least I think I do,” I said.

  Colt sat down. “I’m listening.”

  “I found an interview Ben did a few months before he died. It was a human-interest piece that resulted from a case he had worked on in which a woman killed her abusive husband by poisoning him over time. The reporter asked Ben if he considered turning his back and letting the women walk because her reason for killing him was that he had practically broken every bone in her body, and Ben replied that while he felt compassion for her and what she’d been through, the murder clearly was premeditated, rather than an act of self-defense, and he felt she could have and should have found another way to deal with him. The reporter then asked Ben if he had ever been faced with a situation in which he was forced to choose between his responsibility to his job and his responsibility to humanity, and he said that he had not had to struggle between his legal obligations and his personal feelings since he had been a cop, but that he had been forced to make a similar choice in the past and, in the long run, it hadn’t worked out for him.”