by Jessica Beck
“Let’s drive over there and find out,” Momma said.
“I have a better idea. Let’s walk. If they don’t know we’re coming, they won’t realize that we’re there before it is too late to hide their current transgressions.”
“My, don’t you have a devious mind,” Momma said with a smile.
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, you know,” I answered with a grin of my own.
“I certainly hope not,” she said.
We passed the teenager, who was still oblivious to our presence, though I was close enough to reach out and knock the phone right out of her hand if I had a mind to. I would never do it, but it did strike me that a young woman probably not more than fifteen or sixteen and alone in the park was so completely enamored with her electronic world that she wasn’t aware of anything going on in the real world around her. I wanted to warn her that she should be more vigilant, that the world could be a cruel and dangerous place, but I knew that most likely all I would get in return was an eye roll at best, and the possibility of much worse. I still considered saying something to her when I noticed a child’s plastic jack o’lantern pumpkin in the bushes just behind her.
“Excuse me, is that yours?” I asked her, standing in a way that my shadow blocked the sun from her.
“What’s that?” she asked, refusing even to look up and make eye contact.
“Is that your plastic pumpkin over there?” I asked again.
She didn’t even glance at it, or us, for that matter. “No. It’s all yours.”
As she said it, Momma smiled, but there wasn’t a great deal of warmth in it. “You are Lucy Danvers, aren’t you?”
That caught her off guard, and she finally looked up from her cell phone. She had short brown hair, clear blue eyes, and shiny braces on her teeth. “How do you know my name?”
“I’m great friends with your grandmother,” Momma said softly. “How is she doing, dear?”
“Better,” Lucy said as a whisper of a forlorn smile slowly crept onto her face. “The chemo’s working. At least that’s what they say, because she still looks rough to me. If she’s getting better, why are they putting her back into the hospital? I keep checking my phone waiting for news about her, but so far, I haven’t heard a thing.”
So that explained her obsession with her cell phone. I suddenly felt bad about judging her so harshly earlier.
Momma reached out and patted the girl’s shoulder, and I thought for an instant that it was a dangerous move, but the girl’s smile suddenly looked as though it were about to break into a thousand tears. “There, there, my dear. Your grandmother is a tough old bird. Don’t count her out just yet.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said as she stood, and to my shock and surprise, the teenager hugged my mother fiercely. “I needed to hear that. I’ve been sitting here for what feels like hours lost in my own nightmares. I keep expecting to get a call that she’s gone. That’s why I keep staring at my phone. Sorry if I was rude before.”
“You owe us no apologies. Shouldn’t you be with your father, though?” Momma asked her. “We’d be glad to drive you to the hospital.”
Lucy shook her head. “Thanks, but Dad is putting on a brave face, and I just can’t take it anymore. I had to get out of there before I snapped.”
Momma took the girl’s free hand in hers. “He needs you, my dear. I know it’s not fair, but you must be strong for him and your grandmother, Lucy. Can you do that?”
The teenager pondered the question for a moment before nodding. “I can do it if I have to.”
Momma pulled out a business card from her purse. “Here is my number. If you need someone to talk to, day or night, call me.”
“I will. Thanks.” A few tears trickled down her cheeks, but she didn’t even seem to notice them. “You’re right. I’d better go.”
“Be strong, Lucy.”
“Thanks. I’ll try.”
“I’m sure you’ll do marvelously.”
After the teenaged girl was gone, I turned to my mother in amazement. “How did you do that?”
“Do what, Suzanne?”
“When we saw her sitting there engrossed in her phone, I assumed she was just another sullen teenager, but you not only looked hard enough to really see her, but you did your best to help her in a tough time.”
“It was nothing. Anyone else would have done the same,” Momma said, clearly a little embarrassed by my overt admiration.
“I wish that were true with all my heart, but you don’t know how wrong you are,” I said.
“What did you ask her about when you first approached her?” Momma asked me, clearly trying to change the subject. “I missed it.”
“I was talking about this,” I said as I pushed aside some leaves and retrieved a plastic pumpkin with black eyes, a nose, and a set of crooked teeth.
“It’s clearly someone’s discard from the festival,” Momma said. “Throw it away, Suzanne. It’s just trash.”
The funny thing was that it didn’t feel like trash to me, and it certainly wasn’t empty. A man’s light jacket was folded up inside, and as I pulled it out, a wallet fell out onto the ground.
“That’s odd,” Momma said.
“I’m going to open it to see who it belongs to,” I said as I leaned down and picked it up.
“Shouldn’t you just turn it in to the police, Suzanne?”
“That’s probably exactly what I should do,” I said with a smile, “but I’m going to have a peek myself first.”
Before she could stop me, I flipped the wallet open.
That was when I found the moon-faced man staring back at me from his driver’s license photo.
CHAPTER 8
“Suzanne, you shouldn’t touch anything in that,” Momma said as I took the edge of my T-shirt and pulled out the driver’s license so I could get a better look.
After scanning it and then taking a photo of it with my cell phone, I put it back where I’d found it, and as I took more pictures, I said, “I’m not messing up any fingerprints, and we have a right to take a few photos before we call the police chief.”
The wallet was nearly empty of any other identifying items or marks, and there was just nine dollars clearly visible inside, along with a folded twenty tucked behind the “secret” section that everyone knew about. I took photos of the cash as well, and then I studied the driver’s license again. “His name was Carson Winfield,” I said as I read it off. “It says here that he’s from Montana. What in the world was he doing in North Carolina?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Momma said as she looked furtively around. “Suzanne, will you please call the police now?”
“Okay, I’ll call them,” I said as I tucked the wallet back into the jacket and then returned it to the plastic pumpkin. I’d already touched a few of the items before I’d realized their significance, but I knew that the police had my fingerprints on file. It was perfectly natural to assume that I’d check a lost wallet to see who it belonged to. At least that was what I was going to try to sell to the police chief.
“Chief, it’s Suzanne Hart.”
“Suzanne, I still don’t have a cause of death for the man you found this morning. Shoot, I don’t even have an ID on him yet.”
“His name was Carson Winfield, and he was last known to be living in Montana,” I said.
There was a moment’s pause before the chief responded. “And how exactly do you know that?”
“Momma and I were walking through the park to surprise Jake and Phillip at the cottage. We spotted a plastic Halloween jack o’lantern in the bushes on the way there. I thought it might be trash, but when I picked it up, I saw that there was a man’s jacket inside. When I tried to pull it out to see who it belonged to, a wallet fell on the ground, so naturally I wanted to see who it belonged to so I could return it to them.”
“Naturally,” Chief Grant said. “I’m guessing that’s your way of telling me that your fingerprints are all over it.”
“How el
se could I see who the owner was?” I asked. I saw that Momma was looking at me with a slight hint of disapproval, but I hadn’t lied at any point in my conversation to the police chief, at least not so far. Sure, I may have left a few things out, and the things I had told him may have been skewed in my favor, but I hadn’t lied.
“Fine,” he said with a grumble, accepting my story, at least for the moment. “Don’t touch anything else, okay?”
“We’ll be here waiting for you. You can’t miss us.”
He didn’t even dignify that with a response, since the park was so small that the moment he entered it, he’d clearly see us.
After I hung up, I said, “No worries, Momma. He’s on his way.”
“You weren’t exactly forthright with him just now, were you?” my mother asked me sternly.
“How do you mean? Everything I told him was the truth.”
“Perhaps, but you neglected to mention that we were actively searching for a clue as to the man’s identity when we found the jack o’lantern.”
“Does it really matter what our motivation was?” I asked her. “We found a lost or discarded wallet in the park, and we called the police. It’s exactly what any good citizen would do under the same circumstances.”
“Are you telling me that they’d take those photographs as well? Suzanne, are you honestly trying to convince me of that, or yourself?”
“Momma, we have one foot in a bucket every time we try to investigate something. If there’s a chance we can learn something and we let it pass us by, who are we helping? Besides, who gets hurt by what we did? The police will have every bit of evidence we found. We’re not withholding anything.” I’d made it a point to continually use “we” instead of “I.” I wanted Momma to realize that we were a team in this investigation, and she was just as much a part of it as I was.
“I can see your point when you put it that way,” Momma said reluctantly as Chief Grant spotted us and walked over to join us. If Momma’s husband had been investigating the case when he was chief, he would have probably come ripping up Springs Avenue in his squad car, his siren screaming and his lights flashing. Chief Grant favored a more low-key approach, something I was most grateful for.
I noticed that the chief was already wearing latex gloves. As he reached for the jack o’lantern, he said, “Hello, ladies. Thanks for calling me. Where exactly did you find this?”
“It was over there under those bushes, and some leaves had been kicked up around it to try to hide it,” I explained.
“And you just happened to spot it on your walk home?” he asked skeptically.
“It may have been partially hidden by debris, but it is bright orange, after all,” I said. I didn’t see any reason to bring Lucy into it, and I was glad that Momma didn’t volunteer the young teen’s name, either. She had enough on her plate at the moment without being questioned by the police. Besides, she hadn’t seen us when we’d been standing right in front of her, so I doubted that she’d be able to help the investigation at all.
The chief took the jacket out carefully, found the wallet immediately, but instead of opening it, he set it aside. Only after he’d done a thorough examination of all of the pockets of the jacket did he fold it back up and replace it where it had been. Then and only then did he take out the wallet and study it. After searching the contents thoroughly, he looked at me again. “Tell me again. This is exactly the way you found it, right?”
“Right,” I said. I knew what he was so delicately asking me. The question was fair enough, so I had no problem answering truthfully. If he asked me if I’d taken any photos of what we’d found, I wasn’t sure I would have been quite so forthright with the truth.
The chief looked at my mother for confirmation, and after she nodded in agreement, he sighed a little. “Okay. I’ll take it from here. Thanks for calling.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Will you do me one favor?” I asked as Momma and I started to walk toward the cottage.
“I will if I can,” the chief said.
“When you find out the cause of death, would you call me and let me know?” I asked.
“Is that what this is about? Are you two digging into this after all? Ladies, we don’t even know if foul play was involved yet.”
“Not officially, but what’s your gut telling you?” I asked him.
“My gut doesn’t play any role in this,” he answered curtly.
“We both know better than that, Chief,” I said. “If Carson Winfield’s death turns out to be natural causes, which I sincerely doubt, then why did he hide his wallet and his jacket all the way over here? My guess is that he was meeting someone, and he was being careful about it.”
“Any idea who that might have been?” he asked me.
Momma looked as though she wanted to say something, but I beat her to it. “Like you always tell me, it’s too early in the investigation to have many answers yet. We’re still trying to figure out what the right questions are we should be asking and who we should be talking to.”
“Join the club,” he said as another officer arrived, this one carrying video and still-picture equipment.
“You’ll call me with news?” I asked him again.
“When I find anything out, and when and if I get the time. That’s the best you’re going to get out of me. Have a good evening, ladies.”
“You, too,” I said.
The police chief paused for a moment and sighed before he spoke. “Grace is out of town, but it’s probably just as well, since I’m not going to have any free time for her anyway. The truth is that I’ll most likely be in my office half the night, and it’s already been a long day.”
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Chief Grant said, and then he promptly dismissed us and started instructing his underling on exactly what he wanted.
As we walked to the cottage, Momma asked, “We’re really no closer to uncovering the truth than we were before we found that pumpkin, are we?”
“I don’t know if I’d say that.”
“I will concede the fact that we have the man’s name and his tenuous financial status if his wallet is any indication, but we still don’t know why he was here in the first place.”
“I’m willing to bet that it wasn’t to play tourist,” I said. “The fact that he hid his wallet before he met someone tells us volumes. He anticipated that there might be trouble, and he took precautions. That tells us a great deal. The more we learn, the more I’m willing to bet that he was murdered, and I’m not waiting on the coroner to confirm it.”
“What should we do, then?” Momma asked.
“At the moment? I don’t have a clue. We need to find Gabby, and we need more information in general. Unfortunately, after we do an Internet search on the man’s name, there won’t be much we can do.” I pulled out my phone and did a quick check on Carson Winfield from Montana. There were no results. It didn’t surprise me all that much. A great many folks seem to leave little or no electronic footprints in the web. To dig deeper would take more resources than we had at our disposal. As I put my phone away, I said, “No luck there. Come on, let’s go see what the men have been up to.”
“How can you just drop it like that?” Momma asked as we walked the final few steps to the cottage.
“What choice do we have? Don’t worry. We’re not giving up, we’re just taking a little break in the action.”
“Very well,” Momma said as we both spied a pile of pipes and wiring on the grass in front of the cottage.
“Brace yourself,” I told my mother, trying to steel myself at the same time. “This could get ugly.”
“The truth is that it’s not as bad as I imagined it was going to be,” I admitted. The men had pulled out much of the outdated plumbing from the wall, and a good bit of the wiring as well. There was still more to do in the realm of demolition, so at least they were taking their time.
“Thanks, I think,” Jake said as he surveyed the mess. “I�
�m worried about the kitchen, Suzanne. Look at this.” He held up a piece of what appeared to be galvanized pipe.
“What exactly am I looking at?” I asked him.
“Here’s what it should look like,” Phillip said as he held up a shiny new section of pipe.
“Did this come out of the wall, too?”
“No, we bought it at the hardware store for illustration purposes,” Jake answered. The new tube’s walls were thin and expansive, whereas the old one had barely more than a pencil’s diameter inside. “That’s why our showers here are so weak,” he said.
“What is that?” I asked as I studied the gunk lining the inside of the pipe section.
“Rust, mineral deposits, all kinds of things,” Jake explained.
“Somebody’s been on the Internet,” I said with a grin.
“Hey, there’s no shame in looking for more information when you know that you need it,” he said a little too defensively.
“I wasn’t criticizing, I was complimenting you,” I quickly amended. “Do you think the kitchen pipes are like this, too?”
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” Jake said, and then he looked at my mother. “We need your permission to go a little further in our demolition, Dot. The water and the electric are already turned off. What could it hurt to see how bad the kitchen pipes really are?”
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Momma said after a few moments. “Let’s be clear, though. You can remove plaster and sections of old plumbing and wiring, but you are not to touch anything structural.”
“Do we at least get an extension on our deadline?” Phillip asked her.
She smiled sweetly as she said, “You do not.”
Instead of being upset, her husband just laughed and looked at Jake. “Told you.”
My husband shrugged. “That just means that we’re in for a long night. Are you up for it, Phillip?”
