Death in the Off-Season
Page 22
“But she didn’t know he was blackmailing me!”
“Are you sure?” Peter countered. “When I went to your house to tell you about Rusty, I walked in on Mayling reading a letter. She was so surprised she dropped the pages, and when I tried to help her gather them up, she lashed out at me pretty viciously.”
Merry shot a look at Peter. He hadn’t told her this.
“A letter?” Sky repeated. “But even if it were the letter, Rusty was already dead.”
“Maybe she was rereading it,” Merry said. “Before putting it back.”
“Reassuring herself that she’d done the right thing in running him over—is that what you’re saying?”
“People do strange things out of guilt.”
Sky gave a short bark of laughter, derisive and angry. “Listen, for the last time: I read Rusty’s letter the day after he died, and I’ll swear it had never been opened.”
“You’d say that in order to protect yourself—or Mayling,” Merry said. “Do you have any proof? The envelope with its postmark, for instance?”
Sky shook his head. “You’ll have to take my word. But that seems to be something no one does anymore.”
“As a police officer on a murder investigation, Mr. Tate-Jackson, I have to weigh abstractions like honor and trust—a man’s word—against the instinct to protect yourself or someone you love.” Or frame your girlfriend by borrowing her car and sweater to murder somebody, Merry added mentally. Everything Sky Tate-Jackson had told her could be a complete crock.
“How much of this will have to come out?” he asked. “About my—career, I mean?”
Merry shrugged. “Rusty’s dead. The sealed indictment is pointless, now. I’m guessing you’re safe from further prosecution and disbarment—unless, of course, you killed him to avoid just those things.”
“I didn’t.” Sky sighed. “I can face whatever I have to face. But I don’t want Mayling hurt.”
“Make sure she doesn’t skip town, okay?”
He hesitated, and Merry felt her hackles rise. She wished he was still on-island, under the casual surveillance of the extended Strangerfield clan.
“Okay,” he conceded. “I’ll call Mayling tonight and explain the situation. She wants to get back here to work, but I’m heading to Nantucket after Rusty’s funeral tomorrow, anyway.”
“Good.”
Some of the tension seemed to leave Sky’s body, as though they had reached an understanding. “What do you plan to do next?”
“Keep hunting. I should tell you we’re taking out a warrant to get access to Mayling’s car.”
“I suppose it was inevitable.” He was resigned but annoyed. “Don’t you think you’ve overlooked something, however?”
“What?” Merry held his gaze.
“The source. Whoever gave Rusty his information about Max’s merger. It seems to me the source had the most to lose.”
She glanced at Peter. “We’ve been thinking that, too. The source sold out Max, then sold out Rusty in turn. It must have cost him something.”
“Maybe everything.”
“The question is—would that still be a motive for murder ten years later?” Peter said.
“Depends who the source is,” Sky replied.
“He’s a needle in a haystack,” Merry objected. “Even Malcolm Scott couldn’t give us a name.” No need to tell a suspect like Sky that she thought Scott knew more than he’d shared.
“There’s one person who might help you.” Sky avoided Peter’s eyes, but Merry realized he was speaking to him. “Alison. She was living with Rusty at the time.”
“Keep her out of this,” Peter said softly.
“She should be told he’s dead, don’t you think?”
“She watches the news.”
“You’re afraid to see her, aren’t you, Peter?”
“Yes.”
“Then the detective needs to take the decision out of your hands.” Sky’s face was flushed and defiant. He was trading Alison for Mayling.
“I don’t even know where she is,” Peter attempted.
“The Princeton Alumni Office does,” Sky said harshly. “I’ve already contacted them.”
“You had no right.” Peter’s voice was almost inaudible.
“I had every right. What else could I do—wait for you and the police to see that my alibi is threadbare, my motives excellent, and my opportunity perfect? My job is damage control. If there’s a chance Alison can save me—or Mayling, for God’s sake—”
“You’re right,” Peter said with effort. “Send me Alison’s email address. I’ll start there.”
He rose from his chair and Merry followed. She held out her hand to Sky Tate-Jackson.
He was too well-bred not to shake it.
Peter dropped her at LaGuardia in time for the last shuttle to Boston.
“I hope the funeral goes—well. Or well enough. You know what I mean.” She slid out of the rental car.
“Merry—”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for coming along. There’s no easy way to tell a friend he’s suspected of murder.”
“It’s even harder to tell your sister,” she said carefully, but he saw the steel in her green eyes. “You’ve got to confront her with that letter, Peter. And her husband. Sure you don’t want me around?”
Chapter 24
Will waded through water above his knees, the beater whirring merrily in front of him. He was completely happy. He had biked over to the farm after football practice, thrown on a pair of waterproof overalls, and plunged into the midst of the harvesting team Rafe had organized in Peter’s absence. The flooded fields, stripped of their bobbing red berries, glistened under the setting sun.
“Will!” Rafe shouted from the flatbed truck. “Wrap it up, okay? You can come back another day.”
Will waved in his direction and steered the beater toward the end of the row. Tomorrow was his first game, but he could probably come here early Sunday. A shadow passed over his mind as he remembered the last time he’d been to the farm in the early morning, but he shook it off. He was getting better at avoiding mental darkness. There had been a time when he could not fight it, and that had terrified him.
He cut the beater’s motor and hauled it up onto the dry bank behind him, then shook himself like a wet puppy and grinned as he caught Rafe in the shower of drops. He yanked off his overalls, which smelled not unpleasantly of dampness, earth, and mold, and looked around. “Where’s Ney?”
“Gone home,” Rafe said. He was paying out the hired harvesters’ wages in crisp bills, snapping each one to be certain they didn’t stick to each other, and his lips moved soundlessly as he counted. “Knows it’s suppertime, and Rebecca’s dropping food left and right. Dog’s as good as a vacuum cleaner.”
“She drops stuff on purpose.”
Rafe handed the last man his wad and clapped him on the back. “Probably right. School okay today? Got your homework?”
“I have two days to do it.”
“Don’t leave your backpack here.”
“It’s with my bike. Don’t worry. I’m not totally clueless,” Will said. He gathered up his gear and sauntered toward the house, pulling his beater in tow.
The foreman’s eyes followed him speculatively. Whether it was the prospect of two free days at home, or better yet, football, Will looked happier tonight than he had in months. Rafe felt a curious thankfulness, as though a burden had lifted from his shoulders.
He turned the truck’s ignition and drove off toward the barn.
Will’s backpack, heavy with books, pulled at his shoulders as he pedaled home. His young body shook off the strain of guiding the heavy beater through the bog more readily than those of the hired crew, worn out by years of hard labor, and he was still naive enough to find the ache of well-used muscles pleas
ant. He would sleep soundly tonight. He whistled slightly under his breath as the bike cut through the rough path that led across the moors to the Milestone Road; he was coming up on the radar tower and Altar Rock. Already in mid-September the days were shorter and the color faded early from the six-o’clock landscape; the twisting path was obscured by a gray light that turned the brilliance of the fall flowers to a mottled dimness. His eyes narrowed as he peered ahead.
He stood up on his pedals and leaned forward over the handlebars, hastening the bike toward town. His fall, when it came, was that much harder.
The bike shuddered violently as its throat met the taut wire stretched across the path, flipped over, and fired Will like a projectile fifteen feet through the air. The weight of the backpack pulled his upper body mercilessly to the ground as he fell. The back of his skull glanced off a rock, and he rolled over, his brain screaming in panic even as the darkness descended. He came to rest on his back.
A covey of bobwhite rose into the evening sky, leaving a listening stillness behind them. The front wheel of the bike spun merrily, uselessly, in the air.
Chapter 25
“It’s about time, Detective,” Rafe said, spitting the words through clenched teeth. He stood like a commando next to Will’s bike, legs spread and braced, arms folded over his powerful chest. The darkness was absolute out here on the moors at eleven o’clock at night, and a light rain was falling. Rafe was soaked. His dark hair was plastered to his scalp beneath his Red Sox cap.
Merry had a headache. She’d missed most of her meals between planes and rental cars. The pit in her stomach deepened when Howie Seitz met her at the airport with the news of Will’s accident. His second bit of information—that Clarence’s divers had found a rented Jeep at the bottom of Gibbs Pond—buoyed her momentarily. The implications ran through her head all the way out to Mason Farms.
Gibbs Pond sat between Peter Mason’s cranberry bog and the cooperative on Nantucket Conservation Foundation land; it was the main source of water for both. Whoever had knocked Rusty over with the Jeep had simply disposed of it in the most likely spot. But why, an insistent interior voice asked her, hadn’t the murderer left Rusty’s body inside the Jeep when it went into the pond? Why leave the body at the scene of the crime?
Because he wanted Rusty to be found, Merry thought.
She forced herself to consider the worst. Whoever had thought of the pond knew the island and the immediate neighborhood well. Peter Mason was obvious, but as nobody had known Rusty was on-island, he would probably have left his brother’s body in the car when he sank it. But perhaps he’d had doubts. Rusty had rented the Jeep from an airport kiosk, after all. He’d been seen. Peter might have panicked, disposed of the murder weapon, and left his brother to lie like a vagrant in the bog.
Her headache had begun at that moment.
Now she slammed the Explorer’s door and looked at Rafe. Merry knew this mood. He was furious and hurt. He’d failed to protect Tess’s son, a boy he’d begun to think of as his own. “I’m sorry, Rafe,” she said. “Will didn’t deserve this.”
“Folks never get what they deserve, Merr. Good or bad.”
She still wore her dress under the slicker she always kept in the car. She walked over to the bike, stumbling as her thin heels sank into the wet sand, and bent down to beam her flashlight on the throat of the handlebars. A faint mark of bruised paint, nothing more, and some lingering patches of torn grass from the impact with the heath. The rain on her head was chill. She thrust her hair behind her ears, pulled up the hood of her slicker, and played the beam around the trampled bit of earth.
The rain hadn’t helped. The once-dusty path through the moors was a morass of wet sand and mud. Will had been taken away by the rescue squad; tire tracks and the movements of men lifting his body had obscured any other tracks that might have remained. She closed her eyes for an instant, willing the pounding in her temples to stop.
“I wish I’d gotten here earlier,” she said.
“Nate Coffin answered the call. He got somebody from your crime scene division, and they worked over the whole place pretty good.”
“Peter is in Greenwich if you want to reach him. The funeral’s tomorrow.”
“I know Pete’s schedule better’n my own,” Rafe said. “I’ll call him as soon as you’re done with this. Did you find anything in New York?” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.
“Meaning, if I’d been around today, Will might not be in Cottage Hospital?”
“I just wonder if you know what you’re doing, Merry. I’m starting to think I’ll be the next one on a stretcher, and I don’t like that one bit.”
She turned the flashlight beam on his face. “Stop it, Rafe. I couldn’t have saved Will. Neither could you. So quit blaming yourself and blaming me.”
She shifted the beam to the ground, searching for the stakes Clarence had told her were there. The first one sprang up suddenly, like a hidden watcher, in the darkness at the side of the trail. She walked over to it and crouched as low as her narrow skirt would permit, shining the light on its base. The weathered wood suggested the stake had stood in the field for some time, but the earth around it was only recently disturbed. A smart move on the killer’s part—a new stake might have caught too many eyes. The force of the bike’s impact against the wire had thrust the stake forward, but it had held. She searched for its mate on the opposite side of the trail and inspected it. Then the line, taut and gleaming and deadly in the flashlight’s beam. Ordinary, lead-colored wire, strong yet light, available in any hardware store.
She stood up and snapped off the light. “So much for that,” she said. “Guess I’ve got to face Tess now.”
“I think you should leave Tess for tonight,” Rafe said, walking toward Merry. “She can’t tell you anything about this business, and all she’ll want is to be alone with Will.”
“I wish it weren’t my job to show up at hospitals and accident scenes. I’m always the last person anyone wants to see. That’s why I have to be paid to do this.”
“I know you don’t do it for the money, Merr,” Rafe said awkwardly. “And I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick.” He pulled her toward him in a rough embrace.
She had to shut her eyes against the shock of it, thrilling through her body. His strength, the way his arms seemed to fit around her, the good smells of rain-wet skin and flannel shirt.
“You love him very much, don’t you?” she whispered.
“I love ’em both. It’s killing me to see Tess like this, and not be able to help. She’s everything to me, Merry.”
“I know,” she said. And heard a door close somewhere in her mind.
George’s arm tightened around Peter’s waist as the Seventh Wave motored toward the channel beyond the Indian Harbor Yacht Club. Behind them, the club’s officers stood at attention on the dock in their dress uniforms. Rusty Mason, an acknowledged master of wind and water, had embarked on his final voyage. Indian Harbor was speeding him to his rest. As the Mason boat slid past the vessels of friends and former crew members, their flags dipped to half-mast in silent farewell. At the channel buoy, the deep boom of the first cannon fired from the shore reverberated across the water.
Long Island Sound was a flat, oily gray this Saturday afternoon; it fit the mood of the Masons and Whitneys scattered around the deck. Hale was at the wheel, his eyes on the darkening horizon, his eldest son, Maxie, at his elbow. Little Casey, almost consumed by the bulk of her life preserver, sat primly swinging her legs in the cockpit. Near her stood Sky Tate-Jackson and Dr. Pritchett, the yacht club chaplain, who had agreed to officiate over the burial—more as a favor to George and the Whitneys than from any remembered love for Rusty. He was an avid sailor himself and had lost some hotly contested races to Rusty’s skill; had Rusty been less obviously exultant in his victory, Dr. Pritchett might have viewed him more kindly.
Julia
Mason was below deck. Peter imagined her sitting there, ramrod-straight and icy in her composure, a deep furrow of displeasure etched into her brow. That line of unhappiness had probably greeted him at his birth, he thought; it had accompanied his mother through life, that much was certain, growing deeper with age, regardless of whether she witnessed her daughter’s marriage or her husband’s death. Josh and Abi Whitney, George’s twins, sat opposite their grandmother, waiting for her to notice them. Presently they would grow bored with her stubborn disregard and come up on deck.
The boat lurched as it hit the wake from a cigarette boat, and Peter braced himself with his good arm to ride out the swinging passage through crest and trough. They were motoring across the sound to Oyster Bay, Rusty’s boyhood haunt. There was no wind to fill the furled sails, nor had there been for the past week. A muggy, humid stillness had come down over the New York suburbs like wet wool, trapping the smog from the city and turning the sound the color of olive oil. The odor that rose from the waves was of heat and fatigue that came straight from the streets of Manhattan.
The metal box holding Rusty’s ashes sat below on the galley table, one reason for Julia’s steadfast vigil in the cabin. She had not spoken to Peter since his arrival at the Round Hill house late the previous evening. It was clear she held him responsible for his brother’s death.
He had driven straight from LaGuardia in the desperate tug-and-hurl that was Friday night commuter traffic, clinging to the wheel with his one good arm to steady it over the potholes that riddled I-95, and sighing with relief when the Arch Street exit came into view. If he could fly directly to George’s door, he’d visit more often, he thought. Gone were the days—his late teens and early twenties—when he’d exulted in speed, driven like a demon, and scorned all cars with automatic transmission. A decade on the island had eroded his tolerance for blaring horns, shaking fists, vicious cuts and weaves among the lesser cars that chose a tortoise pace. The realization disconcerted him even as he recognized its sense. He might be growing wiser, but he was certainly growing older. Perhaps with time he’d become even more eccentric, the sort of uncle the Whitney children would speak of with affectionate understanding—unmarried, childless, cultivating his cranberries and his sheep during the day and reliving Napoleon’s battles by night. They would visit him during the summer holidays as they would a quaint reconstruction of a vanished settlement, for its historic value.