He walked around the corner to an office that had been decorated by the art class of Chepaquit High in honor of Chief Mellon's silver jubilee: in front of his desk on the gray-painted floorboards, the students had painted and then varnished a replica of the chief's badge, complete with his badge number.
The chief did not look pleased. "I wondered how the hell long it was gonna take you," he growled.
"How'd you find out?" Ken asked, dropping into the nearest of three chairs.
"Billy told Helen Jennings who told Agnes Ritter who told our very own Cindy. He's coming over in half an hour to make a statement."
"Then I'd better beat it," said Ken, rising.
The chief waved him back down. "He's down at the Laundromat, watching his clothes dry. One of the loads is a down blanket. You've got time."
Ken nodded. Everyone knew Billy did things according to a schedule. Try to rush or change it, and Billy would be too agitated to be even remotely helpful.
"You're lucky your daddy gave Beth and me a mortgage back when we had zip credit, or so help me, I'd have you up on charges," the chief added. "What the hell's the matter with you, not coming here directly? Are you so besotted by her?"
"Yes. Snack didn't do it, Andy."
"So she tells you. It was a long time ago. Kids do dumb things."
"Have you notified Sylvia's parents?" Ken asked, because he knew how much his own mother would want to know.
"We're trying to locate the next of kin right now—in northern Saskatchewan, no less. Her parents should still be alive."
"Obviously your people will try to get hold of her dental records?"
"Obviously."
If no employment records existed at Shore Gardens, as Laura had claimed, then they must have found something in the satchel—a wallet, an ID—that told them Sylvia had hailed from Saskatchewan.
The phone rang. The chief picked it up, listened, and then said, "Which brought it to? Wait, let me grab a pencil. Nine nine eight zero. Got it. Thanks."
He hung up and Ken began to ask him point-blank what exactly they'd found of Snack's, but the phone rang again.
This time the call was even briefer and the chief was not so calm after he hung up. "Son of a bitch, when it rains it pours," he growled. "Beezee just torched the refreshment stand on the beach, can you believe it? Damned juggling. He couldn't have waited until after the closing ceremonies?"
He grabbed a key ring from the top drawer and said, "We'll talk about this some more. I'm not done with you yet."
Out he went, leaving Ken a precious few seconds to poke through the crisp new folder that sat front and center on the desk. If he got caught—well, he didn't think about getting caught; he only thought about finding something he could use to get the Shores off the hook.
Right on top: the ME's report, a copy of which Laura was convinced he had in his glove compartment. Ken didn't much care how Sylvia Mendan had been murdered, and unless a bullet, a knife, or a blunt instrument had left a deep impression on the partly decomposed bones, the examiner wouldn't have been able to figure it out anyway.
He passed over the report and fastened his attention on the list of the finds from an examination of the crime site.
Bingo, he thought. An account of the buckle was there, exactly as the chief had described it ... and also one of a knife. A knife engraved with the initials O.T.S.
Shit! Father, or son?
He scanned the rest of the list quickly. Sneakers, some fabric, scraps of a bra. What might have been a lipstick case. Assuming that the chief would have the most pertinent stuff at the top, Ken resisted the urge to look further and closed the file, carefully returning it to its original position. He pivoted around and was standing on the chief's jubilee floor badge when Cindy appeared at the door.
"Something I can still do for you?" she asked him pointedly.
Ken himself had approved the loan for her mortgage, and he was hoping that he looked like someone severe enough to call it in if she pissed him off.
"Nope," he said. "Had to retie my shoes. New laces. See ya."
He made a hurried exit, and by the time he got home, he had managed to convince himself that losing a knife in a compost pile was practically inevitable if you worked in a nursery.
****
Laura wasn't all that anxious to have Miss Widdich open her door.
She was thrown back to that foggy, scary time when she had waited on the same porch to deliver a box of white, fragrant roses on the night of the summer solstice. This time the evening was golden, she had no roses, and it wasn't the solstice—but she felt as jumpy as she had been on that long-ago night when she was seventeen.
The door opened a crack. Laura was surprised to see that a chain had been engaged on the other side of it. The room beyond was dark; clearly the blinds were all closed. Miss Widdich's hawkish nose and penetrating eyes filled the gap, and her hair seemed to glow whiter than ever. All that was missing was the flash of lightning and the crackle of thunder.
"Miss Widdich ... please," Laura begged softly. "Can I come in for just a few minutes? I desperately need to talk to you."
"About what?" she asked, narrowing the gap another inch.
"About Sylvia. You know I'm here about Sylvia."
"I don't know anything—least of all, why you're harassing me."
"But I'm not! I'm just trying to do the right thing for my brother. He's going to be blamed for this, you know he will. You heard Billy."
"How can your brother be blamed? They don't even know who it is," she said, easing the door closed millimeter by millimeter.
"They do know. It's been confirmed. Well, not through DNA yet, obviously. But all signs point to the bones being Sylvia's. There's really not much doubt," Laura added, trying to prod a reaction, any reaction, out of the older woman. Horror, fear, disbelief, she didn't care.
Instead, what she got for her effort was a hissed, "Why don't you just go back to Portland, you evil child!"
And a door shut firmly in her face.
Well, this is rich, she thought, blinking at the gargoyle doorstop. Ordered out of town by the resident witch.
She lifted the ring in the gargoyle's nose and rapped sharply. No answer. "Fine!" she said loudly. "If my brother gets tried for this, it'll be on your conscience. Think you can live with that?"
No answer. "You're the one who's evil," Laura muttered. She turned and stamped down the stairs, determined to return by stealth the next time. With any luck, she'd surprise Miss Widdich in her garden. Even the evil had weak spots.
She got in the pickup and backed out angrily, sending stones kicking into the azalea hedge. What on earth did Corinne see in the woman, anyway? All Laura saw was a selfish, secretive, demanding old maid. And worse.
She arrived home to find her sister ironing a pair of valences for the two kitchen windows. Perky and cheerful, the damned curtains seemed too optimistic by half. And so did Corinne.
"Where did you get lost? I thought you were just going out for bread," Corinne said, smoothing the fabric with long, easy strokes. Clearly, ironing was therapy for her.
"I detoured to Miss Widdich's."
Corinne looked up. "Why?"
"Too many things about her don't add up, and I wanted to shake her ... her ... arrogance, damn it. Where does she get off?"
"Oh, not the Sylvia cultivars again," Corinne groaned.
"Not only that. One minute the woman's too crippled to walk without a cane, and the next, she's digging holes like a convict in a chain gang. That limping-along-with-a-cane thing is all an act, you know."
Corinne was more amused than surprised. "Don't be silly," she said. "She finally broke down and got a cortisone shot, that's all, and it's worked wonders for her knee. That's why she's been able to dig again."
"Then why did she fake needing a cane after I saw her digging? I caught her doing it twice. What was the point?"
"I imagine that she was just too embarrassed to admit that she felt better, that's all," Corinne said, la
ying the crisp, smooth valence over the back of a chair to dry. "Her herbal remedies turned out not to be as good as modern science."
She tore open the cellophane wrapper of her second valence and shook it out. Holding the length of it against herself, she said, "Wouldn't this make a beautiful dress?"
"If you don't mind looking like a bowl of fruit," Laura groused. Truly, her mood was vile. "Corinne, how can you be so serene? Don't you see where this investigation is going? They're going to accuse Snack of murdering Sylvia!"
"No they're not. Snack is innocent, so we have nothing to worry about." She shook out the valence and laid it on the ironing board, then pumped spray starch onto the first section. The iron let out a satisfying hiss as she slid it over the dampened cloth. "You know how I know that?" she added.
Laura simply shook her head, unnerved by her sister's serenity.
"Reverend Knowles dropped by while you were gone. I've missed services two weeks in a row now, and he wondered why. Wasn't that nice of him? He didn't have to do that. I told him how afraid we all were, and he said, 'If Snack didn't do it, you have nothing to fear.' Snack didn't, so I don't."
As simple as that. Laura smiled wanly. Was Corinne in total denial?
She was about to suggest it when she heard a truck with a noisy muffler pull up. She ran to a window to see who it was. If it were anyone who had anything to do with the investigation, Laura had every intention of running him off with the family shotgun. She was so very sick of them all.
The lettering on the side of the van read: MISTER FIXER, APPLIANCE REPAIR. Suspicious that someone would be gung ho enough to show up on a Sunday, she went back to her sister and said, "Were you expecting someone to come look at the dryer?"
"That must be George. He said he'd try to stop in and get a number for the broken belt, if that's what it is. I hope Snack's right, because it wouldn't be an expensive repair, George said."
"I'm getting paranoid," Laura muttered, and she went back to let him in.
George carried a tool bag with him and was as polite to Laura as a country doctor. If the man thought there was a murderer in the house, he certainly wasn't letting on.
Corinne gave him a warm smile and put aside her iron.
"Thanks for stopping by, George. The dryer's in the basement; I'll show you where. I hope you can save it. It really is an old one; we've had it since I was a child, and even then, we bought it used."
"With a dryer, there's not much that can go wrong," George said reassuringly as he followed her downstairs to view the patient. "We'll get it working again, don't you worry."
The phone rang and Laura, alone in the kitchen, answered it.
"Why is it that you never answer your cell?" Ken asked without a hello. "I keep leaving voice mail for you."
He sounded newly tense. She wondered if they were just taking turns being strung out, or if they wore off on one another that way.
"I dropped the phone in the koi pond a few days ago," she said coolly. "It hasn't worked since."
"I need to see you. Where can we meet?"
"Here?" she asked instantly, responding to the urgency in his voice.
"I'd rather not. How about here?"
It crossed her mind to say, "If this is a trick to get me into bed, the mood is definitely all wrong."
"How about O'Doule's?" she countered.
"Fine. Five minutes."
Five minutes later, she was sitting at one of the bistro tables that were crammed into the popular hangout. The noise level was deafening: on Sunday evening, the bar featured live music.
"But I didn't realize that," she shouted in apology across the table.
Ken moved his chair so that it was touching hers. He leaned closer to her, his shoulder brushing hers, and spoke loudly into her ear. His message was as electrifying as any whispered words of desire could have been.
He said, "I think I found something today that links Sylvia to Miss Widdich."
Laura started so violently that she whacked her drink, spilling a small puddle. She blotted the rum mix with both their napkins and simply nodded. Tell me more, more.
Ken leaned his forearm on the table and swung his other arm around the back of Laura's chair. Anyone looking at them would have seen, at best, a couple on a hot date and at worst, a guy seriously and even obnoxiously on the make. They would not have seen two people desperately trying to move suspicion away from a man they believed was innocent.
Over the sexy, pulsing sound of a reggae tune, Ken said in her ear, "When I was in Chief Mellon's office today, he took a phone call. A number got mentioned. I'm a banker; I can smell when a number is an amount and when it isn't. I decided he was alluding to the amount of money they found in that satchel they found in the toolshed: nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty dollars."
Laura nodded, as fiercely attentive as if he were giving her driving directions to heaven.
"On a hunch," Ken continued, "I got to thinking: assuming that the satchel was Sylvia's, where would someone like her get her hands on ten thousand dollars? She could have robbed a bank, but I am the bank. She could have robbed a shop in Chatham, but very few shops around here have that kind of cash—then or now. Again, as a money man, I think I might have remembered a robbery. We're not exactly a high-crime district at this end of the Cape.
"I wasn't happy about having this thought—but I wondered whether Sylvia might have been blackmailing someone she'd had a quick fling with: the mayor, the police chief. The aging president of the local bank," he added wryly. "She was young, beautiful, and presumably out for something, or she wouldn't have been in a backwater burg like ours. With all due respect, the wages you paid her wouldn't have been an irresistible incentive to stay. Nor could they have added up to ten grand."
Laura closed her mind to the music and the raucous conversations all around them, memorizing every word of what Ken was saying. He was building a case, and it wasn't against Snack.
"Armed with that idea," Ken said, "I spent today going through the deposit and withdrawal records at Chepaquit Savings—not so easy, since, in my infinite wisdom, I moved the bank over to a new database system recently. And guess who took out precisely ten thousand dollars on June twentieth of 1987?"
"She didn't!"
"Oh, she did. As for the twenty bucks that were short—maybe Sylvia dipped into the satchel for cigarette money afterward; maybe someone just miscounted. But both totals are close enough to be related. The amount, the timing—"
"The reason? What was the reason?" Laura said, bumping his ear in her desire for him to give her the answer to that too.
"That," he said, tucking away the lock of her hair that was tickling his cheek, "is what we're going to find out."
He paid for their drinks and they left in his car, leaving her pickup in O'Doule's lot. Like everything else in Chepaquit, the ride to Miss Widdich's was mere minutes away. It was nearly dark. The secluded driveway to her house left Laura prickly all over with apprehension; she was grateful that this time, she was with Ken.
He parked back a few yards from the front of the porch. "You'd better wait in the car," he suggested. "If we both confront her, she may spook."
"She is the spook," Laura quipped, but it felt wrong to sound like a smartass just then. "Okay," she said more humbly. "I'll sit tight."
She watched as Ken got out and went up to the gargoyle. He lifted its heavy ring and dropped it down three separate times, hard, each time setting her knees twitching. Laura was just able to make out the door opening a crack; again she saw no light issuing from the room behind. Slowly sliding lower in her seat, she strained without success to hear what they were saying through her rolled-down window. Was Miss Widdich aware that Laura was in the car? She couldn't say.
Suddenly, amazingly, the door opened wide and Ken was admitted inside. A light went on after the door was nearly shut behind them. Laura was wild with curiosity, but she made herself stay in the car. Ken had already managed to get a heck of a lot farther than she had, and she didn
't dare blow it; the stakes were simply too high.
So she sat where she was, and she tried to spin different scenarios in which someone like Miss Widdich would give someone like Sylvia ten thousand dollars, and how that could result in Sylvia's death.
Chapter 27
Ken was looking at a woman who had been crying. Her eyes were puffy and red, and her white hair had broken free in places from the bun that usually held it together on the back of her head. The tears had obviously gone on for a while: a mound of crumpled wet tissues covered most of the square oak table next to the sofa, and the Kleenex box was on the floor, empty. On a low wooden table in front of the sofa, a plate held the remains of curled orange peels, a half-full glass of milk, another plate with some saltine crackers on it, and a bottle of gin without a glass to pour it into.
Miss Widdich had clearly been having a very bad day.
She seated herself on the moss-colored sofa and then commanded Ken to sit down. Her voice was thick, maybe with drink, probably with emotion.
Ken chose a straight-backed wooden chair, the least comfortable one in the near-dark room; he did not want to get overly cozy with the woman. Nonetheless, she looked so ill-used that it was easy for him to sound sympathetic. In a way, he was.
After he explained his discovery, with a creative embellishment about currency serial numbers, he added softly, "They'll be able to put two and two together pretty quickly, Miss Widdich. It's just a matter of time until they figure out the connection between you and Sylvia. I've only been following the money trail. I don't know what else the authorities have discovered, but you can bet that if they have your money, they have a lot else besides."
He felt safe in adding, "Sylvia was Canadian; they know that much. And more."
Maya Widdich's face looked as thoroughly crumpled as one of her used-up tissues. From grief or from fear? Ken couldn't tell. She was simply too inscrutable for that.
"Sylvia didn't have a gun sticking in your back when you withdrew the money on June twentieth, 1987, or the bank would have had a record of it on camera," he said in a wry tone. "Clearly you were not robbed by her."
A Month at the Shore Page 25
