Still Waters...

by Crysal V. Rhodes

  His eyes swept the rest of the article, and one sentence drew his attention: Mrs. Hiromoto, the housekeeper, reported that she had last seen Mr. Lake when she left work on Wednesday. How could the woman see someone in Hawaii who was in Carmel at the same time? Somebody had to be telling a lie. Was it Ingram, the housekeeper, or both? Logic told him that it was the latter. His pulse quickened. What in the world had he stumbled onto?

  Had Russell Ingram’s desire to head Stark Enterprises been so great that he might have wanted Lake dead? Mrs. Sharon and Mrs. Smith had no motives other than truth and they were positive that Lake had been on the Peninsula and not in Hawaii. Mrs. Smith had verified that Ingram had been with him the last time that Lake was seen alive. It was possible that Russell Ingram did have something to do with Moody Lake’s disappearance, and if so, it hadn’t happened in Hawaii. He wondered if Mitch knew about Ingram and that possibility. He had been an attorney for the company. Was he more than that? How close was Mitch to Ingram? Did Mitch know what was going on? Dana’s words to Ray flashed though his memory.

  “What I’ve found is very serious, and right now you’re the only one that I can turn to. The only one I can trust.”

  Maybe Dana hadn’t been up to one of her tricks when she called him. Maybe she had discovered something and it had something to do with Mitch’s death.

  Ray leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and concentrated on recalling every detail of his last conversation with Dana. He knew that she had to be home when she called him because that was where she had fallen down the stairs after tripping over—

  Mitch’s briefcase! That had been at the top of the stairs. Bev had tripped over it. At the time she had mentioned that the same thing might have happened to Dana, and Ray had the offending item at his house. Perhaps Dana had been bringing the briefcase with her when she was on her way to see him. Perhaps she had put it down, gone back to her room for something, then, forgetting that it was there, stumbled over it and taken a tumble. Did the briefcase contain something that she wanted him to see? He had gone over all of the papers in it and had found nothing out of the ordinary. There had been nothing to do with Stark Enterprises. How did Mitch fit into this whole picture?

  Ray sighed as he thought about Mitch and how little he really knew about him. He had been to his house in the Hollywood Hills numerous times, but it had always been for social occasions. He couldn’t remember being invited there for any other reason. He had gone on double dates with Mitch and Dana quite a bit over the past years. Laughs had been plenty, but conversations had never been deep. He and Mitch had known each other for years and they had called themselves friends. Yet he had known nothing about Mitch’s family, and Mitch had never asked him about his. They each knew where the other one had gone to law school, but they didn’t know each other’s middle names. They had friends in common—all associated in some way with the law. They played golf together and occasionally attended other sports events. If he really was honest with himself, he had to admit that he really didn’t know the real Mitch Clayton at all. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t questioned his suicide. He hadn’t known him well enough to doubt that he would take his own life.

  It came as a surprise to Ray that Mitch was suffering from cancer. Dana had informed him of that. Mitch had never said a word to him about it. Their relationship had been nothing like the one that Ray had with Thad. They knew everything about each other. They were confidantes. Ray didn’t know who Mitch’s confidante had been. Dana, perhaps? Maybe she had been right about Mitch having been murdered, except that she had been looking in the wrong direction.

  As Ray sat debating the possibility that there was some sort of rational explanation for all of this instead of something sinister, another ominous thought occurred to him. He typed the housekeeper’s name, Mrs. Irene Hiromoto, into Google to see if he would get any hits. He did—her obituary. It stated that her cause of death had been a heart attack. She had died a month after Lake’s disappearance. She had been forty-nine years old.

  Had it been a coincidence? Every instinct that Ray possessed screamed no.

  “Mr. Wilson?”

  Ray nearly jumped out of his chair at the disembodied voice coming from the front of the house. He chuckled at himself for having been spooked by the intrigue that he seemed to have uncovered. After alerting the contractor to his whereabouts, Ray went to inspect his work, paid the man, and saw him to the door. He called Thad to inform him that the repairs had been completed. Ray then prepared to head to Tiburon with a lot more on his mind than the short time that he would spend in his vacation home.

  * * *

  Bev could barely contain the tears that threatened to flow as she read the latest entry in Dana’s journal. Her flight to San Francisco had been delayed, so she had opted for this as reading material rather than a magazine. She was glad that she had. Bev no longer harbored any guilt for having invaded her sister’s privacy. She had learned so much about Dana’s life from her journals. There had been revelations that she doubted that her sister would have ever shared. Her entries had confirmed what Bev had always suspected. Dana loved her family, but she felt that she had failed to live up to their legacy and had embarrassed her parents and sister with what she described as her “antics.” She felt that if she had been stronger, she would not have been an abused wife in her first marriage. Instead of embracing the strength that it took to leave that relationship, she berated herself for having chosen an abuser the first time and an adulterer the second time. She labeled her choices and her subsequent divorces as a disgrace to her branch of the family, and she seemed unable to forgive herself. Dana had been hell-bent on making her relationship with Mitch work, no matter what she had to do. She took her family’s rejection of him as a personal reprimand for having made yet another bad choice.

  In every journal, there had been page after page of self-deprecation. Bev wondered how her sister’s confidence had become so diminished. Their family worked hard on instilling pride and dignity in each of its members. Where had it gone wrong for Dana?

  Bev concentrated on the journal passage that she was now reading. It described what Dana believed that she had learned from being a part of the Stillwaters family:

  We are a family whose foundation is based on hate and revenge. My grandmother wanted revenge for the death of my grandfather. She blamed people outside of our race for his death. That’s why I don’t have a chance of getting my family to approve of Mitch. So, once again, I’m the pariah. With Mitch, I’m the first one to consider marrying outside of my race. I know that’s not going over well among the anointed ones, but never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that the hate that’s been passed down would turn into cold-blooded murder. It breaks my heart and angers me at the same time.

  Bev’s heart sank. Esther Stillwaters had tried so hard to teach every member in her family the principles of self love, self pride, and self determination. How in the world had Dana gotten a message of hate out of that? Were there others in the family who thought as Dana did?

  Closing the journal, Bev discreetly swiped at her tears as she looked out the window. Dana had been wrong about the family’s objection to Mitch. His race had never been the issue. It had been his character. If Dana weren’t so sick, or if it really mattered, Bev would tell her sister that the one and only time that she had met Mitch he had made a move on her, making suggestive remarks that were so graphic she was forced to give him a piece of her mind. The irony of the situation was that he had understood the dynamics between Dana and Bev perfectly. He had been smug when he informed Bev that Dana wouldn’t believe her if she was told that he had approached her older sister. He was as certain of Dana’s loyalty to him as he was of her jealousy and animosity toward her sister.

  “Anything that you say against me will only turn her against you,” he had told her.

  She had made the mistake of testing his challenge, certain that blood was thicker than water. She had avoided informing her sister about his outrageous behav
ior, but she had verbalized her objection to the man. Doing so had been a gamble, and it was one that she had lost.

  Over the loudspeaker the captain apologized to the passengers for the delay, and announced that they were cleared for takeoff. Bev relaxed in her seat. She wasn’t sure that she would read anymore of Dana’s journal entries. It was too difficult. Dana had emerged as a highly intelligent woman, but an extremely confused one. Her sister seemed to enjoy the role of victim. She liked being miserable. Bev felt sorry for her.

  That made the course that Bev had decided to take even more important to her. She was choosing happiness. Never before in her orderly life would she ever have considered getting on a plane and flying unannounced to a man’s home to surprise him. It just didn’t happen with Bev Cameron. She was used to controlling a situation. The results in this case were beyond her control, but she was going for it anyway.

  She had already reserved a car that she would pick up at the airport, and then she would drive to Tiburon. She had even bought a new negligee that she hoped Ray would remove very slowly. That thought brought a salacious smile to her face. She was becoming so bad.

  By the time the airplane had cleared the runway and climbed high into the sky, Bev had replaced negative thoughts about Dana’s journal with positive thoughts of Ray. She wondered what he was thinking about now. She couldn’t wait to get to him.

  * * *

  “That’s right, Stark Enterprises,” Ray repeated into the speakerphone as he sat staring at the screen on his laptop. “I’ve read that Mitch did some legal work for them. The company’s headquarters is in New York, and it’s headed by a guy named Russell Ingram. Did you ever hear Mitch mention the company or its CEO before?”

  Ray’s fascination with what he had uncovered about Ingram had propelled him back onto the computer instead of on the road for Tiburon. Now he was talking to James Starr, a friend of his who had been a detective in New York City and presently owned a security consulting firm based there. He had met James through Mitch when the three of them played golf together. He and James had hit it off right away and still paired off on the golf course whenever they saw each other. His name had popped into Ray’s head as he was going over the information that he had gathered earlier. James had known Mitch much longer than he had and might possibly have answers to some of the questions that were haunting Ray. But instead of responding to Ray’s inquiry, there was a prolonged silence on the other end.

  “James?” Ray frowned. “What’s up?”

  There was another beat before he responded. “Why are you asking?”

  The tone in James’s voice was measured. Ray was on instant alert.

  “I was on the internet and ran across a picture of Mitch with the C.E.O. of Stark Enterprises, and the caption said that Mitch was an attorney for the company.”

  “And?” James stretched the word out making it clear that he wanted more detail in Ray’s explanation. “What has this got to do with entertainment law?” He sounded more defensive than curious. “Anyway, Mitch is dead. What difference does it make if he worked for the company or not?”

  There was a lot being left unsaid in this conversation. “What’s up, man? What aren’t you telling me?” Ray probed.

  Once again, Ray was met with a measured silence. He could hear James thinking. He had something to relay, but was weighing whether he should do so or not. Ray remained silent until James made up his mind.

  “Ray, all that I can say to you is that I have heard of Stark Enterprises, and if the caption that you read said that Mitch worked for the company, then he did.”

  That was it. No matter how much Ray tried, James would give him no further information. The two men disconnected, leaving Ray to speculate about what hadn’t been said.

  He knew from past conversations that James had worked as an undercover officer in the narcotics unit when he was with the police department. Could that mean that his reluctance to talk about Stark Enterprises indicated that the company was involved in the illegal drug trade? Ray came to only one conclusion about that, yes, and James’s reluctance to discuss Stark Enterprises more likely than not meant that the company was under investigation.

  Ray took a shaky breath. “Oh, boy.”

  What had started as mere curiosity on his part was developing into something he wasn’t sure that he wanted to pursue. James had been right. Who cared if Mitch worked for the company? He was dead. Yet an hour later Ray found himself still in Carmel on his laptop.

  He had settled in the kitchen this time, with a half-eaten sandwich sitting on the counter as he researched the name Charles “Moody” Lake. The latent detective in Ray identified him as being implicated in whatever had happened—or was happening—at Stark Enterprises. An extended search had yielded no more than Ray had discovered before about the man. Even his obituary was sparse. It listed his place of birth as upstate New York—but there was no city or town mentioned. It stated that he was in his fifties and mentioned his rise from messenger to the head of Stark Enterprises, his contributions to charity, and his demise in Hawaii.

  The mystery of Moody Lake’s life was as compelling as the mystery of his death. Ray stared at the picture of him on the computer screen. Who was this man? There seemed to be little information about him. Why had he been in Carmel under an assumed name? Had he been running from someone? Ingram, perhaps? If so, the younger man had found him.

  Was Stark Enterprises a legal front for illegal activities? Had Lake been into drugs? Most drug kingpins liked to remain discreet, and Lake fit that description.

  Ray continued to stare at the man’s picture. The more he looked at him the more he got the feeling that there was something familiar about him, especially around the eyes. It was the eyebrows and the ears, too. The slope of his eyebrows reminded him of someone. Who? He leaned closer to the screen to examine the picture. He traced the eyebrows with his index finger. Where had he seen that slope before? It was very pronounced, and those ears—he traced the ears.

  Licking his lips, Ray slowly leaned back in his chair as the answer dawned on him. His goddaughter Nia had those eyebrows, and she had inherited them from her mother.

  As a matter of fact, her beautiful little face looked as though it had been genetically split in half. From the bridge of her nose to her chin, she looked exactly like her father, having inherited his nose, his perfectly centered dimples, his mouth, and his chin. From the bridge up she looked just like her mother. She had inherited her great-grandmother’s eye color, but Nia’s eyes were large and expressive like Darnell’s and they were framed by the same thick, luscious eyelashes and sloped eyebrows. She even had her mother’s ears.

  Ray closed his eyes and visualized the face of his best friend’s wife and child. He opened his eyes and looked at Moody Lake’s picture again. What was that man doing in Carmel using a different name? Why didn’t he want anyone to know who he was? Yes, Stark Enterprises was an international company, but its CEO didn’t have worldwide recognition. The paparazzi hadn’t been camped on his doorstep. Why the secrecy? Was there more to his presence on the Peninsula than a simple vacation? Was he protecting someone? Having a rendezvous with someone?

  “I remember that he came over to introduce himself to me once and wanted to meet Darnell…”

  Mrs. Sharon’s words echoed in Ray’s head. He studied Moody’s picture again.

  Had the man been a stalker? Had he planned on harming Darnell? He enlarged the photo. The slope of the brow, the shape of the ears kept leaping into the forefront. What crept into Ray’s consciousness caused his head to pound. What he was thinking was impossible. Quickly, he turned off his computer, disconnecting himself from the source as if it were complicit in the formation of his illicit thoughts.

  Ray backed away from the counter on shaky limbs. No more Stark Enterprises, no more Russell Ingram, no more Moody Lake. He had to get back to the realm of sanity, because what flashed across his mind had been insane, and he refused to go there.

  CHAPTER 19

/>   “Hi, baby.” Bev was nearly breathless with excitement as she strolled through the San Francisco airport with her overnight bag slung across her shoulder.

  She was headed for the car rental agency. Darnell had called just as Bev disembarked from the plane. Her daughter was unaware of her mother’s plan to surprise Ray, and she planned on keeping it that way. As a matter of fact, Darnell wasn’t aware of the change in the relationship between her mother and Ray. Bev knew that Ginny had noticed how the vibes between Ray and her had shifted and she assumed that her mother would have said something to Darnell, but it was becoming apparent that she hadn’t. That made Bev wonder why. No matter, she felt too good to care.

  As far as Bev was concerned, if she had wings she would fly. Never would she have thought that in this stage of her life that she would feel this happy about a man. She wanted to share her joy with someone, but when Darnell said—

  “My, don’t you sound happy today. What’s up?”

  Bev answered, “Oh, I’m just enjoying life.”

  “That’s good. When are you flying back to California?”

  It was clear that she thought that Bev was still in Chicago, and Bev didn’t correct her assumption.

  “I plan on being back in L.A. on Monday.” Bev quickly changed the subject. “How are my grandbaby and son-in-law doing, and how is the production going?”

  Those were safe subjects and Darnell took the bait, telling her about her family and the progress of the new film. She was chattering happily until a voice over the airport loudspeaker caught her attention.

  “Who’s that? Where are you?”

  “I’m out and about doing my thing.” Bev was deliberately evasive. “I’ve got to go now. Kiss my grandbaby for me.” She disconnected before further questions could be asked. Sometimes it was best not to let your children know all of your business, especially your grown children. It made life less complicated. This was especially true when it came to her daughter, who was always getting to the bottom of things.