Noreen’s lip again trembled. “He said he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Taking in her friend’s anguished gaze, Kathy felt an overwhelming sense of compassion.
“I promise you, Kath, I trusted that man. He was our customer for years. He lied to me. He misrepresented those people he recommended and now that could destroy our friendship.”
Kathy shook her head and stepped forward to grab Noreen in a hug. “No. You were acting in good faith. You wanted to do well by your customer. It isn’t your fault.”
“Maybe not,” Noreen said, almost a sob, “but you’ve had to suffer a financial loss because of it.”
That was true, and Kathy would never again accept a referral from Noreen—but she also knew that the Darcy’s would never again ask her to take their guest overflow.
“Our friendship is worth more to me than anything that happened last weekend,” Kathy said.
Noreen pulled back, her expression the epitome of anguish. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am—”
“You have and as far as I’m concerned we never have to discuss this again.”
“You’re way too kind,” Noreen said.
“No, you’ve been kind to me. When I got the house, you took days away from your own business to help me clean out the rubbish that was here. You fed me, Tori, and Anissa burgers, bought us drinks, and you’ve been a true friend. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
Noreen wiped at the tears leaking from her eyes. “Liar.”
Kathy smiled. “Not at all.”
“Hello!” came a voice from downstairs: Tori.
“Coming,” Kathy called. “Holy cow, I had better check my rolls in the oven and hope they aren’t burnt. Come on. I’ve planned a lovely lunch. Let’s go downstairs and enjoy it.”
Noreen smiled. “I’d love to.”
21
Tori’s gaze traveled around Swans Nest’s dining room. Kathy had outdone herself when serving her first meal in the completed dining room, even if it was a simple one. Everything looked so darn pretty. She set down her fork and reached for another one of those light-as-a-feather rolls. “These are too good, Kath.”
Kathy laughed. “Then be grateful they didn’t burn. Another minute in that oven and they would have.”
The conversation had been pretty innocuous, with no mention of Charlie Marks/Mark Charles. Tori hadn’t brought up her run-in with Shepherd and Amber, saving that bit of news for later when she and Kathy were alone. When she’d helped Kathy in the kitchen, she’d been told that Kathy hadn’t had time to broach the subject with Noreen before Tori’s arrival. And yet, tension still seemed to fill the dining room.
It was Noreen who finally approached the subject. “I need to apologize—”
“We’ve already discussed that,” Kathy began.
“Let me finish,” Noreen insisted and drank the last of her second mimosa. “The other night when you guys and Anissa came to the bar, I acted rather coldly toward you because … because I was afraid you were going to bring up the subject of Charlie Marks.”
Tori and Kathy exchanged looks, but said nothing.
“I mean,” she started again. “You did find his body on your property, and that was just a little too close for comfort for Paul and me.” She seemed to think about it. “Mostly Paul. You see, he and Charlie Marks had been friends. But that changed just before Charlie disappeared for the first time.”
Nothing we didn’t already know, Tori thought and reached for the teapot, pouring herself another cup. She was about to pour one for Noreen, who shook her head. Kathy did likewise.
“There was a fight at a bar up at Lotus Point and … Charlie ended up going to the hospital.”
“Yeah, we kind of heard about that,” Kathy admitted.
Noreen managed a weak laugh. “I’m not surprised. Memories around here are long. Of course, all this happened long before I even knew Paul. I’m not proud of him for fighting—God knows the last thing we ever want in our bar is a fight—and it’s come close to that a few times, but Paul’s become a pretty good bouncer. To stay in business—he had to.”
And, Tori had to stop herself from urging.
“If you heard about that, you probably heard what they were fighting about.”
“Yeah,” Tori said.
“For a while, the deputies thought that Paul and Ronnie might have killed Charlie. They were arrested after the fight, but there was no real evidence of them ever being in the Marks’s house—even if Charlie’s room was made to look that way.”
“We heard there was no fingerprint or other evidence to implicate them,” Tori said.
“That’s right—and of course, Paul and Ronnie were sweating bullets for a while there, but they always did figure that Charlie just up and left before something worse happened. I mean, you don’t rape Horace Bloomfield’s daughter without ramifications.”
“Had Charlie been threatened by old man Bloomfield?” Tori asked.
“The old man wanted to kill him—and a lot of people around here thought he did just that.”
“Kill Charlie himself?” Kathy asked aghast.
“Or had him killed,” Noreen said.
“But how come nobody mentions that part of the story?” Kathy wondered aloud.
“Because money talks. He didn’t want the whole county to know what had happened to Lucinda. But, of course, plenty of people did know.”
Like Irene Timmons, who had been only too happy to report the story decades later.
“Mr. Bloomfield invited Paul and Ronnie up to the house after Charlie’s disappearance.”
Tori’s eyes widened. This was a new dimension to the story.
“And?” Kathy urged.
“And he thanked them for beating the crap out of Charlie and told them they’d have jobs for life.”
“And that’s how Ronnie got to be a butler?”
Noreen shook her head. “Not exactly. They both went back to their jobs at the canning factory, and when it was sold a few years later—the new company fired everybody and closed down the plant.”
“But I thought it was still running,” Tori said.
“It was bought by a conglomerate a few years ago and reopened. It’s now bigger and better than it ever was,” Noreen said.
“So what happened to Paul and Ronnie?”
“Mr. Bloomfield asked them what they’d like to do. When things were slack at the canning factory, Paul worked as a fill-in bartender for the former owner of The Bay Bar. The old man knew it was up for sale, and he bought it—drove a pretty hard bargain for it. Then he sold it to Paul for a song. Still, it took him eight years to pay off the loan, but you won’t ever hear Paul say a bad word about any of the Bloomfields.”
“And Ronnie became their butler?” Tori asked.
Again Noreen shook her head. “He wanted an education. So the old man paid for him to go to Cornell and their school of hotel management.”
“Wow, I wish I could have gone there,” Kathy said. She’d gotten a good education in the same discipline, only for a much lower price at a state school.
“And then he became a butler?” Tori asked again.
“Not quite. Ronnie did the same as Kathy—started by assistant managing a motel in Syracuse. He bopped around the state for a while. I guess he loved the work.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Kathy muttered, but then it was what she learned on the job that encouraged her to go into business in the hospitality business for herself.
“So how did he become a butler?” Tori insisted.
“Well, he … kind of … got shot.”
“What?” Kathy practically yelled.
“Yeah. Seems someone tried to rob one of the places he was managing. Ronnie would have given him whatever money was on the premises—but the guy had an itchy trigger finger and shot first. He fled the place with no cash—and they caught him hours later. He didn’t realize there were cameras in the parking lot and lobby.”
�
��What an idiot.”
Noreen nodded. “He got fifteen years in jail, and Ronnie lost his taste for managing hotels. So he took a course and became a butler,” she said, giving Tori a nod. “When Lucinda heard, she hired him on the spot. He’s been working for her ever since.”
“Are they friends?”
“You’d have to ask Lucinda that,” Noreen said. “I’ve never spoken to the woman.”
“What do Paul and Ronnie think about Charlie reappearing? Did they know he was in the area?”
Noreen shook her head. “No. I think Ronnie would have gone berserk if he’d known.”
Tori couldn’t imagine Collins, as Lucinda called him, going off the wall. The time she’d seen him he’d been so reserved, kind of like an automaton.
“Are Paul and Ronnie still friends?” Kathy asked.
“Not really. He comes into the bar now on a regular basis on what Paul calls spy missions for Lucinda.”
“What do you mean?”
“He sits in a corner with a redneck hat on, listens to the gossip, and then reports what he hears to his boss.”
And that was probably how Lucinda knew about the deal Shepherd had proposed to Tori. It all made sense now.
“Did you know Anissa was hired to clean out Mark Charles’s rental cabin?” Kathy asked.
Noreen shook her head.
“Yeah, Kath and I helped her. And Kathy found a card that Lucinda had written to Charlie saying ‘luv you always.’”
Noreen frowned. “I doubt it.”
“I can show it to you—later. It’s over at Tori’s house in our office. I was going to turn it over to Detective Osborn … but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
“From what Paul told me, they barely knew Lucinda. But—it seems Charlie was obsessed with her. In fact, he kind of stalked her.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“He took pictures of her in high school, hung them in his locker. Everybody knew he had a crush on her, but she wouldn’t give him the time of day. He tried to date her, but he wasn’t in her league, if you know what I mean.”
“Where did he get the Valentine’s Day card?”
“It must have been a phony,” Noreen said.
Tori wasn’t so sure. She took a sip of her tea and found it had gone cold. She set the cup down. “What do you—and more importantly Paul—think happened to Charlie?”
Noreen shrugged. “We don’t know what to make of his actual death. But Paul did say that Charlie changed after high school. He hated working in the canning factory. Thought it was beneath him. He stopped hanging around with Paul and Ronnie. Well, by that time Paul and Ronnie had stopped hanging around with each other much, too. They both had girlfriends and they didn’t like each other. Paul later married his girl.”
The first wife, Tori knew. Noreen was his second. They’d only been together about six years.
“What were the circumstances of Lucinda’s … attack?” Kathy asked.
“That’s something just weird. Paul and Ronnie ran into each other up at the Point, and they were both leaving the bar when they heard a woman scream. That’s when they found Charlie raping Lucinda behind a Dumpster at the restaurant next door.”
The same one Kathy and Tori had gone to just the other night.
“She’d been to dinner with friends and left the restaurant to walk to her car. Apparently, Charlie had seen her enter the place and waited for her to leave. She rebuffed his advances one time too many, I guess and….” Noreen didn’t finish her sentence.
Rebuffed him one time too many? That almost made it sound like it was Lucinda’s fault she was raped. For too many men, the answer “no” was simply not enough.
“Anyway,” Noreen continued. “Paul and Ronnie beat the tar out of Charlie. Someone called the cops, and there was a deputy in the village on another call and he got there soon after, but by then, Lucinda’s friends had whisked her away. Paul and Ronnie told the deputy about the rape, but they didn’t report who the victim was. Charlie wouldn’t admit to anything.”
“But people did know,” Tori insisted.
“Sure, but nobody, least of all Lucinda, wanted to go on record to report it.”
“And that’s why old man Bloomfield was so grateful to Paul and Ronnie,” Tori guessed. “They’d stopped Charlie, and then kept the whole thing quiet.”
“They did lie, saying they didn’t know the woman’s identity,” Noreen said, “and Paul has no qualms about keeping quiet.”
“And since there was no ‘victim’ to press charges, he was never going to be prosecuted, either,” Kathy said.
“You got that right. But the whole thing was moot anyway when Charlie disappeared less than a week later.”
“Hmmm,” Tori muttered.
Noreen picked up the napkin from her lap and folded it, placing it beside her now-empty plate. She glanced at her watch. “Wow, look at the time. I need to get back to the bar and get the French fry grease up to speed for tonight’s dinner crowd.” She stood. “Thanks for the tour of the inn. You’ve done a terrific job with it. And thanks for the lunch. I wish I could do more than burgers, wraps, and soups. Your brides and guests will be very lucky indeed to be entertained at Swans Nest.”
Kathy’s grin was so wide Tori worried her face might crack.
“I’m sorry to run out on you when you’ve got dishes and everything.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m here to help,” Tori said. “And this has been the best meal I’ve had in a while. I’m hoping there’re leftovers, and if there are—I’ve got dibs on them.”
They walked Noreen to the door, exchanged hugs, and promised to see each other soon. Then Kathy closed the front door and looked at Tori. “Well?”
Tori shrugged. “We know more than we did this morning.”
“Yes, but what does it all mean?”
“I don’t know. But there’s one thing that wasn’t mentioned.”
“And what’s what?”
“Charlie Marks’s cause of death. Once we know that, it could just give us a lot more questions.”
22
Kathy and Tori collected the plates, cutlery, glasses, and serving dishes from the dining room and brought them into the kitchen, then while Kathy rinsed, Tori stacked them in the dishwasher. While they worked, Tori told her about the vehicle that sank in the bay.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I sure hope they put a buoy up if they can’t pull it out pretty quick.” Tori changed the subject. “What are we going to do about that Valentine’s card?”
“I suppose I really should give it and that other piece of paper I found to Detective Osborn, and then we can ask if the medical examiner has determined Charlie Marks’s cause of death.”
“Do you actually think he’d tell us?”
“If he doesn’t, it’ll be made public at some point anyway.”
“Holy smoke,” Tori said. “The Times of Ward County might be reporting it in the current issue. That could be what the receptionist was hinting at the other day. The issue was supposed to be delivered to our mailbox today.”
Kathy looked at the clock on the wall, the hands on its face pointing to the roman numerals of two and six; in other words, two-thirty. The mail usually arrived late in the afternoon. “We’ll just have to wait a bit longer.”
“And in the meantime?” Kathy asked.
“You should call Detective Osborn.”
“Why me?”
“You were the one who found that card and the paper,” Tori reasoned.
“You’re right,” she conceded. “And in the meantime, you should call Lucinda Bloomfield.”
“What for?”
“To talk.”
“About her being raped?”
“Well, maybe not that, but you can talk around the subject.”
“How?”
“You’re a teacher—you know how to get people to think outside the box.”
Tori ignored the statement. “I don’t know her number.”
Yeah, Bloomfield Properties. Tori pulled out her phone and looked up the number online.
“And what do I say to whoever answers the call?”
“That you want to speak to Lucinda, of course.”
“They’re not going to give me the number,” Tori said.
“Then ask them to pass on a message for her to call you.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Just call,” Kathy ordered.
Tori picked up the phone and punched in the number. It rang three times before it was answered.
“Bloomfield Properties: Avery Simons at your service.”
“Mr. Simons? This is Tori Cannon. We last spoke last Saturday when Ms. Bloomfield invited me to tea at her home.”
“Of course.”
“Uh, Ms. Bloomfield asked me to contact her about a business proposal.”
“Ah, yes. She’s been waiting to hear from you.”
“I don’t have her number. Can you please give it to me?”
“Why don’t I have her call you?” he said instead.
Naturally. “That would work,” Tori said, resigned.
“Fine. She’ll be in touch.”
But before Tori could say “thank you,” Simons had ended the call.
“Well?” Kathy asked as Tori punched the phone’s end-call icon.
“Mr. Simons is going to have her call me.”
“And what do you want to bet the number will be blocked?”
“No bet because you’d win.”
Kathy nodded. “Then how long do you think it will be before she calls back?”
“An hour or more. She probably won’t want to look too eager.”
“Uh-huh,” Kathy said.
“And I’ll bet she’ll expect me to jump at the chance to talk to her.”
“Then maybe you should stall her.”
“Why?”
“If nothing else, it would show that you’re not desperate to seal a deal.”
“I’m not,” Tori protested.
“And you shouldn’t be willing to mortgage your future for the pittance Shepherd wants to give you.”
“Lucinda already told me she wants almost as much.”
A Reel Catch Page 15
