A Dark and Twisting Path

by Julia Buckley

  I nodded my agreement. Cliff was a cop, but he was new to Blue Lake, and he didn’t understand the dynamic of this town, or the histories of the people within it.

  I had never been one to ostracize, but I felt it very strongly now as I accompanied Sam down the stairs: Cliff Blake was an outsider, and I didn’t trust him.

  * * *

  * * *

  AT SAM’S HOUSE, in his office lit by Tiffany lamps, we sat on chairs behind his desk to watch him pull up security footage.

  Doug pointed at the computer. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said, taking a sip of some coffee that Sam had provided. Sam nodded, but did nothing.

  “Sam?” I said.

  He turned to us with some reluctance. “Before we view this, I need to fill you in. There’s been an added complication.”

  “What?” Doug asked, leaning forward. He set his coffee down on the desk and put his hands on his knees.

  “I just checked my messages, which I admit I haven’t done for a day or so. Lena and I usually text, and she’s the only one I expected to hear from . . .”

  “What is it, Sam?” I said.

  With a sigh he reached out and pressed a button on his answering machine. We heard an unfamiliar voice say, “Sam West? My name is Eddie Stack.” I gasped, but Doug held up a silencing hand. “I live in Pine Haven, and I followed all the stuff about you in the news. There’s something you should know. Something about that little missing girl. And I’ll be happy to tell you, but I need money. Meet me at the park on Wentworth Street on Monday night, around eight o’clock. You can tell me how much it’s worth to get that guy once and for all.”

  That was the end. Doug whistled. Sam shook his head. “You can check the machine, or my message service, or whatever you check. I didn’t listen to this until about half an hour ago.”

  “How do we know it’s Eddie?” I said.

  “It’s Eddie. Or someone doing a really good impression,” Doug said. “He had a distinctive lisp.”

  “So he’s saying—what? He knew something about Athena?” I asked, shocked. “What can that mean? Could he have intercepted a letter, or . . . ?”

  Doug said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is valuable. He makes a direct reference to Nikon Lazos.”

  “He didn’t say the name,” Sam said. “He just said ‘that guy.’”

  “But it has to be Nikon. He mentioned the baby,” I said.

  Doug poked Sam’s blotter with a pencil. “Sam’s right. We can’t assume. But now the case is different. He knew something. He wanted money for that something. And now he’s dead; it could be that someone wanted to silence him.”

  We thought about that for a moment in the dark, quiet room. Then Doug stood up and looked into Sam’s forested backyard. He was in thinking mode. “No one can know about this. Lena? Don’t even tell Allison, or Camilla. Not anyone. This is privileged information.”

  “Okay,” I said, reluctant. How could I keep it from Camilla? “But then you don’t tell Cliff.” I said it without thinking, and both men turned sharply toward me.

  “What?” Doug said. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. He’s—new. An outsider.”

  “He’s a cop,” Doug said. “A good cop. And he’s helping with this investigation. You’re starting to get paranoid, Lena.”

  My eyes moved to Sam, who wore a quizzical expression. “Fine. I guess I am. Phone messages from dead men tend to freak me out.”

  Doug nodded. “Meanwhile, we need to watch the tapes.”

  Despite the fact that Doug vouched for Cliff, I was glad he had given him the evening off, so it was just the three of us who watched the fast-forwarded footage of Sam’s front stoop. It was not exciting viewing.

  “You were gone how long?” Doug asked before taking a sip of his coffee. I wondered if he needed it to stay awake. He’d been working a lot of hours, it seemed to me.

  “Eight days,” Sam said. “This is footage from the first day, which was April twenty-second.”

  “Looks like this one is a no-go,” Doug said. “And does that front porch light stay on all the time?”

  “It’s on a timer. It switches on at seven o’clock every night and goes off at six in the morning.”

  “Okay. So if someone shows up, we’ll see them.”

  We finished April 22nd and started on April 23rd.

  “Shakespeare’s birthday,” I said with a smile.

  Both men looked at me as though I had sprouted antlers. I pointed at the date. “The twenty-third. It was the day he was born and also the day he died.”

  “Fascinating,” Doug said, although his face said otherwise.

  The 23rd had nothing to offer except a wayward raccoon who tried to open Sam’s mailbox and a deer who briefly wandered past the camera.

  Sam clicked on the file for the 24th, and Doug started telling us a story about a deer who made it into the lobby of the police station.

  “What the hell?” Sam interrupted. He paused the image and leaned forward. “Do you see that?”

  At first I saw nothing but Sam’s front stoop. The time stamp was two a.m. Then, at the edge of the screen, I saw a figure in black. “Oh my God,” I said.

  Doug leaned in, his eyes bright with cop excitement. “Can you slow it down?”

  “I think so. Hang on.” Sam fiddled with some things on his keyboard and then we watched the video in slow motion as a figure in black—complete with a hood that was weirdly sinister despite the fact that it was connected to a coat—stood in front of his door. For a moment the person—man? woman? it was hard to tell, except that they seemed fit—blocked the view of the door, and in the next moment the door swung open and the person went inside.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Sam.

  “This is unbelievable.” Doug was staring hard at the screen, but the door closed. “Do you have other angles? Other rooms?”

  “I do. I’m guessing we should check this room, right? That’s where the knife was.”

  “Set it up.” Doug put his coffee cup on the desk, then leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “What is happening in this town?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to be lighten the mood. “Before Sam came here, all you had to worry about was that deer in the lobby.”

  Neither man bothered to laugh at this. They were both tense, alert, waiting to see what Sam’s computer would reveal. Finally Sam said, “Okay. Here’s the twenty-fourth, and this is the office camera. I’ll forward to two o’clock.”

  On the tape the room was dark, but there was a security light outside the window that illuminated just enough for us to see movement. Thirty seconds in we saw a door open and a figure move into the room. He or she held a small flashlight, which they used to study the room in a disturbingly methodical way. They looked at the desk last.

  “Can you make out a face?” Doug asked.

  “No. I can barely see the figure. Maybe your guys can have a go at this footage? Enlarge it or something?”

  “I’ll see what we can do.”

  “They’re at the desk now, can you see?”

  “I can.” Doug’s mouth was a thin line. He took exception to crime, but he especially took exception to a frame-up, and Sam had been the victim of more than one.

  The figure was opening drawers in the desk. They seemed to take something out of one of them; a flash of white paper in the darkness. “That’s weird,” Sam said. “I don’t know what—there! He’s touching the holder where I kept the knife. Do you see it? It’s like he’s contemplating whether or not to take it—and he just did! Did you see that little flash of metal?”

  “Yes! I saw it!” I yelled. “Doug, look!”

  “I see it. Sam, I’m sorry. You know I didn’t suspect you, but it probably looked as though I did.”

  Sam froze the image on the screen and made a
note about its location for Doug’s tech people. “I get it,” Sam said. “Whoever’s doing this is trying to make it inevitable that you would suspect me. It’s not your fault.”

  “This is a puzzle,” Doug said, tilting back his chair. “This is not Eddie Stack in the picture. The person isn’t the right height. Stack was quite tall, and this visitor is only medium height.”

  “Could it be Nikon?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Lazos is tall, too. So far we’ve got nothing linking this to Nikon. Even the message is vague.”

  “Except for the mention of the child. He used her name, didn’t he?”

  Sam shook his head. “He said ‘that little missing girl.’ There are plenty of missing girls in the world.”

  Doug nodded. “It’s almost like he was purposely unclear—as though he feared someone was listening. We’ve got to take some steps before we work on that message. We have to find out who our little ninja visitor is, for starters. I can try to fingerprint the doorknobs, but your hand has been on all of them . . .”

  “No.” Sam pointed at the screen with a pencil. “He’s wearing gloves,” he said. “See? Look where he’s clutching the knife.”

  “Shoot,” Doug said. “I might need to share this info with our FBI friends.”

  “Oh yeah, because they’ve been really helpful in the past,” I said with some bitterness.

  Sam smiled at me. He was always surprised by my loyalty; I wondered why.

  “The timing of this is strange,” Doug said, not registering my response. He pointed a finger at Sam. “This break-in happened more than a week ago. But Stack was only killed this morning. And the only reason he didn’t meet with you was apparently that you didn’t get his message.” He paused, thinking.

  Sam took up the idea. “So this break-in was about something else. Right? And they took some souvenirs, but maybe didn’t know they’d use them on Stack. The break-in and the murder have to be related because we have that letter opener linking them. But what if the letter opener was just an afterthought?”

  I raised my hand. “If Eddie Stack knew something, and they knew he knew, they would have killed him last week. They couldn’t have known that he called you, or they would have killed him to prevent your meeting, right? So he must have given himself away somehow. He must have done something to draw their attention. And maybe that’s when they decided to use their surveillance of Sam to their advantage.”

  “But why the surveillance?” Sam asked, still mystified.

  “Camilla had it pegged. Only Nikon is this weird,” I told him.

  Doug sighed. “Nikon? I’m going to need some more coffee. I have a whole bunch of questions for you, Sam.”

  I suddenly felt exhausted. “You won’t need me for those, right? Sam, I think I’m going to head back to Camilla’s.”

  Doug stood up, looking weary. “Not alone, you’re not. Sam, if you’ll make another pot of coffee, I’ll walk Lena home.”

  “Deal. But I get to walk her to the door,” Sam said, which meant he wanted to kiss me. Doug inclined his head and bent over the computer, typing some notes into his phone.

  Sam followed me to the front entrance. “Sorry about all this. I was hoping to snuggle up with you tonight.”

  “First we’ll focus on catching your mortal enemy. But yes, snuggling sounds good.” I put my arms around his neck and kissed his warm mouth. “It’s hard to believe you were once notorious,” I said softly.

  “Don’t kid yourself. I’m still notorious to a whole lot of people. I am living proof that you don’t need any evidence to decide you hate a person.”

  “Shush. You have to think positively. Look at all the friends you have and how determined we are to help you.”

  “You’re right.” He smoothed my hair off my forehead.

  “Hey. What did Victoria want?”

  He sighed. “You guessed, huh? I didn’t want to tell you because I thought you’d be upset.”

  “I was, sort of. But I get why she wants to talk to you.”

  “She wants consolation. Not just about poor little Athena, but about me. She wants to know there are no hard feelings. That I believe her when she says she knew nothing about Nikon’s attempts to frame me.”

  “And do you?”

  “Yes. He seems just crazy enough to have done it all on his own.”

  “So could this—ninja visitor have anything to do with Athena?”

  He shook his head. “I just can’t imagine how. Or why. But the reality is that Eddie Stack is dead. A man I never met, but who connected himself to me. None of it makes sense.”

  “It will. Doug likes puzzles. He’ll sort this out.”

  “Or maybe you and Camilla will. My mystery-solving friends.”

  Doug came around the corner, zipping up his jacket. “Finish making out and then let’s go, Lena.”

  I grinned and gave Sam one last kiss, which was meant to be quick, but Sam’s mouth lingered on mine, longingly.

  Doug opened the door with an impatient sound, Sam let me go, and I went out into the chilly evening with Doug Heller, fearful that a hooded figure in black might be standing in the trees, watching our departure.

  5

  As they hiked the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus, they encountered a young woman from the hostel who introduced herself as Ariadne, and for the rest of the day she dogged their steps, determined to become one of their party. Delia couldn’t help but feel suspicious of her enthusiasm—what would make her want to spend time with strangers?

  —From Death at Delphi

  ON MAY 2ND I awoke to sunbeams that illuminated my room and warmed the fur of the cat who slept beside me. Something buzzed on my bedside table; I checked my phone and found I had two texts: one from Sam West (Good morning. I love you), and one from Doug Heller (Looking into our ninja visitor. Don’t forget Belinda).

  I sighed and stretched, then texted back to Sam (I love you, too. Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out) and Doug (I’m making arrangements now) and then Belinda: Can we meet sometime today? Maybe during your lunch hour?

  I set the phone aside and slid out of bed. Even the carpet was warm, and it gave me a good feeling. I showered and dressed in record time so that I could be at breakfast with Camilla, who was an early riser. As I descended the creaking stairs, clad in blue jean shorts and a Blue Lake sweatshirt, I pondered the latest act of malice against Sam West. Why wouldn’t the world just leave him alone? What had he ever done to anyone? Why had Eddie Stack selected Sam, even if he had information about the missing Athena? Why didn’t he just call the police?

  But I knew the answer to that question. He had wanted money, and Sam was wealthy. Had Eddie’s greed cost him his life?

  Camilla sat at her dining room table, drinking coffee and crunching cinnamon toast. She greeted me warmly, although she seemed distracted. I had told her the night before what we had found on Sam’s recording, but not about Eddie Stack’s call. I felt traitorous not sharing that information with her, but Doug had insisted.

  “Lena,” she said, pouring coffee for me. “I’m thinking about Sam’s night visitor.” I nodded and took a piece of cinnamon toast from the tray in the middle of the table.

  “Yes. It’s hard to think of anything else.”

  “Doesn’t this merely confirm my idea that somehow Nikon Lazos is behind this?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Doug doesn’t want to rule anything out. We did mention Nikon to him last night. Unfortunately, Sam is such a public figure that any number of people could have formed grudges.”

  “Yes, grudges. But who is so vengeful that they would steal a knife from Sam’s house in order to plunge it into the chest of another man? How is anyone that angry?” Her face was distressed.

  “It’s terrible to contemplate. I’ve been refusing to do it.”

  She sighed. “I won’t make you thin
k about the crime, then. But we do need to think about the perpetrator.”

  “But I can’t imagine how Nikon could blame anything on Sam. Nikon is the one who ran off with Sam’s wife, not vice versa. Nikon is the one who essentially held her prisoner. And Nikon is the one who stole a baby. How is any of this Sam’s fault? I can’t imagine that Nikon is involved, and yet there is the reality of—”

  Her expression was quizzical. “Yes?”

  I studied her noble face. “This is ridiculous. I’m not doing it.”

  “What are you talking about, Lena?”

  “Doug told me to keep something to myself. To not tell anyone, even you. As if you would somehow blab it around town! You have to know, because you and I work things out together.”

  “You’re telling me there’s more? Beyond the night visitor?”

  I sighed. “Sam had a message on his phone from Eddie Stack.”

  For the first time since I’d known her, Camilla Graham looked truly surprised—almost dumbfounded. “From the dead mailman?”

  “Yes.” I told her about the call, relaying it to the best of my memory.

  “Oh my,” she said. There was a gleam in her eye, despite her generally solemn demeanor, that suggested a part of her was enjoying this information. Camilla was, at heart, a solver of mysteries.

  Now she looked thoughtful. “But he didn’t mention Nikon by name? Or the child? So Doug doesn’t want us jumping to conclusions. All right. Who else would be a likely candidate for framing Sam? Possibility one is that some random person built up anger against Sam after reading about him in the paper for a year. When Sam was exonerated, that person needed for him to be guilty, so he created another crime.”

  I nodded slowly, not convinced. “Sounds strange, but real life is stranger than fiction. What’s another option?”

  She tapped her fingers on the tablecloth, brows furrowed. “Just a couple of months ago Doug caught another murderer in this town. Perhaps someone is angry about that. And linked as that story was to Sam West, this person who is angry about the arrest—a family member, perhaps?—might have somehow conflated that with Sam.”