Death in Dark Blue

by Julia Buckley

  “Well, apparently it’s close to two hundred years old—even older than our Graham House here—and was once a fulling mill that specialized in homespun goods. It had stone walls and a high, barn-like ceiling. Some of it crumbled away, which is why Wheat Grass has that lovely back stone wall but also has the far more modern construction at the front. Adam says that it was fascinating, not just what she found, but the detail in which she found it. He had tried to look into it on his own and failed to get far.”

  “Yes, well, the other librarian raved about Belinda and called her a witch and magical and things. I’m hoping she is as gifted as her legend suggests, because we need a break.”

  The doorbell rang, and Camilla’s dogs rose from their torpor and ran to the front door, slipping and sliding on the wood floor in the foyer. “That will be Adam,” she said. “Speak of the devil. He called and asked if I would accompany him to the play at the community theater. I don’t normally go in for amateur drama, but Adam’s niece is in the production, and he wants me to see her.”

  “Oh—of course. I have to apologize; we had a schedule of work, but then this whole thing happened at Sam’s—oh, and Doug said he would come over tonight. Will you be back by then?”

  “Certainly. Adam will come, too.”

  “Okay. Should I tell Rhonda to make dinner for everyone?”

  Camilla thought about this. “We won’t be back until later in the evening. Mention that to Doug. Let’s say we’ll meet at eight o’clock, and ask Rhonda to just make a few snack-like things. Normally I would feel badly asking her that on the spur of the moment, but Rhonda can do that sort of thing with her eyes closed. She really is a gem.”

  “Okay.” I set down my empty mug and grasped the edge of her desk. “Camilla.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s bothering me that Sam never came back. This morning, we met and we both left, and I stopped at Bick’s. Then I came here, and we looked at the books, and then I went to his house. He didn’t mention that he’d be going anywhere—just told me to be on the lookout for reporters. But he never returned, and I’m wondering where he was.”

  “Just call him, dear. It doesn’t have to be a mystery.”

  “Right. Of course.” She walked out of the room to answer the door, and I sat staring at a pillow on the window seat. It was true that I could have called him at any time; my hesitation surprised even me.

  I was roused from my contemplations by Camilla’s voice, strident with indignation. “I most certainly will not!” she was saying. “And I don’t want to ever see you on my doorstep again!”

  I jogged out of the room and walked up behind her. The man on the stoop was a stranger to me; he was perhaps forty. His head was covered by a longshoreman’s cap, but when he scratched underneath it I noted that he was entirely bald; he wore a navy blue pea coat and jeans. He was smiling, as though Camilla hadn’t just yelled at him. “I understand your reluctance, Mrs. Graham, but the fact is that people are going to write about him one way or the other. I’m not the only reporter in town. And now they’ve found a dead body in his backyard. If you think that’s not news, you’re mistaken.”

  He said it in a mild enough tone, but it was vaguely threatening, and I felt as defensive as Camilla did. I stood beside her, showing solidarity, and Camilla said, “This is my assistant. Mr. West has been a friend and confidant to us for a long time, and we never once believed in his guilt, nor do we think he has anything to do with the body found in Blue Lake today.”

  “Even though it’s in his yard?”

  “A person can die anywhere, Mr. Elliott. I could walk into your yard and die there. Would that make you guilty of my death?”

  “If I had murdered you, yes.” He smiled again; he had straight teeth, but they were rather long, and made me think of a predator.

  “I am not privy to police information,” Camilla lied, “but I don’t think you should be jumping to the conclusion that every dead body has been murdered.”

  “No. But when I hear the word ‘homicide’ on the police scanner, I feel confident that it has.” He smiled again. I had to hand it to this guy—he was tenacious and smooth. He turned to me and stuck out his hand. “Jake Elliott. I’m with the Associated Press.”

  “Uh,” I said. The Associated Press. Not some little Indiana paper, as I had hoped. “I’m Lena London.”

  “Are you from Blue Lake, Ms. London?”

  Camilla’s voice was crisp. “We don’t have to tell you one word about ourselves, nor do we need to subject our good friend Sam West to any more media intrusions. I will call the police, Mr. Elliott, if I think you are harassing Mr. West in any way.”

  Jake Elliott shrugged. It was cold out, but he looked somehow comfortable in the icy air. “Mrs. Graham, I am not some crazy paparazzo who is willing to do anything to get a story. However, it is my job to find out what’s happened here. It would be better for me, and frankly for Mr. West, too, if that story were told by someone who is intelligent, someone who likes and respects him, someone who understands the nuances of the situation. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Camilla hesitated. Jake Elliott made a convincing case; one way or another, Sam’s name was going to get back into the papers. Would it, in fact, be better for us to confide in Elliott now rather than let the gossips have at Sam, especially if this latest murder made the pendulum of public opinion, which had only very slowly swung in Sam’s direction, now veer back again in the face of fear and prejudice?

  Before she could answer, Adam Rayburn came walking up the path behind Elliott. “Hello! Am I interrupting something here?” Adam asked, his eyes assessing. He watched Camilla, mainly, to gauge her reaction to her visitor.

  Camilla sighed. “Adam, this is Jake Elliott, a reporter from the Associated Press. Mr. Elliott, this is Adam Rayburn, the owner of Wheat Grass.”

  Elliott stuck out a gloved hand. “I had lunch there. You run an excellent establishment.” With just two sentences Elliott had won over Adam, whose face creased into a pleased smile.

  “Thank you! We work hard to keep it that way.”

  Camilla nodded. “Mr. Elliott, I will speak with you tomorrow afternoon—perhaps around two o’clock? Tonight I have a previous engagement with Adam here. And I’d like to ask that you stay away from Sam West until that time, as well. If you can do that, maybe I can persuade Sam to join me for the interview.”

  Elliott’s brows rose and his eyes gleamed with excitement. “Mrs. Graham, I would be most grateful—but I think it is a good opportunity for you and Mr. West to shape the narrative properly.”

  That one bugged me. “There is no need to ‘shape the narrative.’ We’ll tell you the truth, and so will Sam, and you can tell it to the world. That’s your job, isn’t it? To determine what is true.”

  He studied me with thoughtful brown eyes; they held a hint of suspicion. Camilla seemed to sense this, because she said, “Oh, and before you go, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind showing me some identification?”

  His lip curled up on one side. “Not at all.” He took out his wallet and retrieved a card, which he held up for our inspection. It looked authentic, and I wasn’t sure if this made me feel annoyed or relieved. “You can also call the A.P. office in New York, if you’d like to verify my identity.”

  “We may do that.” Camilla was still stiff, but her voice was grudgingly respectful.

  Adam, on the other hand, shook Elliott’s hand again and encouraged him to have more meals at Wheat Grass. “Mention my name to the waiter and tell him I said to give you the special discount,” Adam said, ever the salesman.

  Elliott grinned, nodded, and made his way down the path, looking like a mariner headed down a gangplank to a waiting ship.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Camilla said. “I fear we can’t avoid them anymore.”

  “Go inside before you catch a chill,” said Adam, gently pushing us both
backward into the warm hallway. He shut the door behind him and then kissed Camilla on the cheek. Her face grew rosy, as it always did when Adam romanced her. We walked into Camilla’s office, where she had recently stoked the flames in the fireplace, and Adam sat down in another plush chair. “I’ll just quickly change,” Camilla said.

  “I’ll be here,” Adam said, his voice cheerful.

  I walked to his chair and touched his arm. “Nice to see you, Adam.”

  “You too, Lena.”

  “I hope you don’t mind—Camilla asked me to make a few arrangements, and I have to do some of them from my computer upstairs.”

  “Of course not. Do what you need to do; I’m happy resting in front of the fire.” The dogs came to sit beside him, sensing perhaps that he intended to stay awhile. Rochester’s ear was inside out, which meant that he and his brother had been wrestling. I tweaked it back into shape and smiled at Adam.

  He did look content—far more peaceful and happy than when I’d first met him. Camilla’s companionship had done wonders for Adam Rayburn. He even looked younger; I wondered if he was gradually dying the gray out of his hair.

  I waved and jogged up the stairs. Lestrade, who had been so lazy that morning, was still lounging on my bed, although he had clearly taken a play break from a giraffe toy that lay nearby.

  “Been having fun?” I asked.

  He yawned hugely.

  “That’s how I feel, too,” I said. I grabbed the phone from my desk, moved to the window seat and dropped into it, composing a text to Sam. Where were you? Did you find Doug at your house? Do you know what happened? Where were you, Sam?

  It was repetitive, but it reflected my agitation, which was good. I hoped Sam would be forthcoming with the answers I sought.

  I went to my laptop, where I had been researching anything I could think of to lead me to Victoria West. I tried to recall the search terms I had used months earlier when I had first stumbled upon the photograph that saved Sam from prison. I pulled out the notes I had taken initially about yachts and yacht culture. There were all sorts of interesting little facts and tidbits, but they were all random; nothing linked them to Victoria West or Taylor Brand or a yacht called Nikon.

  I had a list of yachtsmen pulled from various Google searches—American business tycoons and celebrities with names like Arthur Vandenhall III and Brace Lawrence Atkinson of the Atkinson Oil Company. I had accrued a list of foreign names from searches I’d done about Greek islands, some of which had popped up when I paired the search with the term “Nikon.” I stared blankly at the list of nearly unpronounceable names like Vladislav Bogomolov, Zephyr Kalahalios, N. Leandros Lazos, and Albrecht Iverson. I had looked at this list before; it wasn’t bringing me anything new, but of course I could show it to Belinda Frailey and ask if any of these people had appeared in her searches, as well.

  I remembered what Camilla had said about Taylor’s former boyfriends. One of them had been rich. What was his name? He was a banker’s son, she’d said. I clicked a few search terms into Google and came up with the name Philip Winters. Ah yes: Camilla had said Taylor dated his son, whose name was Alexander.

  On a whim, I searched “Alexander Winters” and “yachts.” Several images and articles came up in response, one of which was a picture of a dark-haired man standing on a large white vessel called Antigone. I found the original page, linked to the New York Times.

  The caption read: Alexander Winters christened his father’s yacht Antigone this weekend before the family took the vessel out to the Atlantic for a week-long journey.

  “Lah-dee-dah,” I said. My phone vibrated next to me, and I picked it up. Sam had written, I got home around noon. Doug was still there, and I heard the news. Still in shock. Do you want me to come over?

  I wrote back briefly, telling him about the meeting at eight o’clock. He agreed to join us, and I pushed my phone away. For some reason I didn’t want to converse with him any further. I wasn’t angry, but some lurking emotion made me want to avoid him.

  I looked back at my computer and at Alexander Winters’s smug face. I was tired of looking at rich people on yachts, tired of wondering about their secret lives, tired of fearing that some dark alternate reality lay behind these pictures, and that somehow Victoria West had been caught up in a web she had not noticed until she had stumbled into its very center, a relatively innocent fly.

  If Victoria had been caught in some dark secret that took her to some far-flung island, then what had brought the sophisticated Taylor Brand to Blue Lake, Indiana? Had she indeed come to visit Sam West, or had someone lured her for reasons unknown?

  Poor Taylor. She could not have known that she would meet her demise in the cold, anonymous woods of a town she had never been destined to see. Only Sam West seemed to link her to this place, and it was on Sam West’s property that she had died.

  How would the majority of people react once that fact became public? Might Doug consider keeping it a secret? Did Jake Elliott have to tell people where she died? Did the site of one’s murder have to be shared with the general populace?

  I sighed. Lestrade was still yawning on my bed, obviously bound for another nap before he played again.

  “I think I’ll join you,” I said, and I climbed under my covers with the intention of sleeping away my worries.

  To my consternation, I lay awake, and the image in front of my eyes was that of Taylor Brand, lying still and broken in the snow, her eyes directed at a sky she could not see.

  5

  After the man left, thoughts of him lingered in her mind, especially the kindness in his expression contrasted with the urgency of his hand on her arm. He was afraid for her, but unwilling to say as much. She studied the gray sky outside her window and was reminded of his eyes.

  It was then that she knew she trusted him.

  She would run, as he advised.

  —From Death on the Danube

  WE MET IN what I had come to consider Camilla’s war room: a formal dining room with high glass windows and a view of the bluff and the distant Blue Lake. The only other time I had been here had been two months earlier, when we four had met—Sam, Doug Heller, Camilla, and I—to discuss the idea that Victoria had not disappeared of her own volition. Camilla had showed us pictures, and she spoke persuasively of her theory that Victoria, for whatever reason, was afraid.

  Two months later we were still pursuing that premise, and now we were faced with a new and terrible complication. Victoria’s best friend had come to our very doorstep, and she had been killed here. Why? We sat solemnly around the table, along with Adam Rayburn, who had been admitted into our relatively secret society because Camilla trusted him implicitly, which meant that we trusted him, too.

  I stole occasional secret looks at Sam, who tried to smile at me but instead looked miserable. He saw the writing on the wall, as did we all. The news would be out tomorrow, and Sam West’s name would be back in the headlines for the third time in his life, and for the third time it would be unwelcome.

  “Doug, I know you can’t tell us everything, but this complicates matters greatly. We were operating on the assumption that whatever danger lurks out there affected only Victoria. Yet here is poor Taylor, who made no secret of the fact that she was Victoria’s devoted friend, and now she is dead,” Camilla said, warming her hands on a cup of coffee.

  “She wrote on her blog that she was coming here to apologize,” Doug said, wielding a toothpick and making a thoughtful set of circles in the mustard sauce on his plate. He’d eaten very few of the little chicken wings that Rhonda had put out, along with dipping sauces and various other hors d’oeuvres. None of us seemed to have an appetite except for Adam, who was clearly assessing Rhonda’s cooking skills.

  “She has a gift,” he murmured. “I should have her at Wheat Grass.”

  No one paid any attention to this, and Adam grew silent, thinking his own thoughts and o
ccasionally patting Camilla’s hand.

  Sam straightened in his chair. “Just to clarify, I never saw her. I didn’t even know she was in town. How did she get here? Doug, do you know?”

  Doug took out his phone and scrolled through some notes. “Her flight left New York yesterday morning. She landed in Indianapolis three hours later, then rented a car and drove out to Blue Lake. She checked in at the Red Cottage last evening, and had a bowl of soup at Willoughby’s for dinner. She retired early. She wasn’t up and around for long the next day before someone found her and killed her.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Doug sighed. “Listen, I’m investigating this murder as I would any other murder. After tonight, I’m not going to be able to check in with this group. I mean, I have to work independently of you.”

  “What about our search for Victoria?” Camilla asked.

  “I’m still on board for that; but I can’t be discussing an open murder investigation.”

  “Of course, we understand that,” Sam said. “But I’ll tell you all again—I had nothing to do with this. And I believe that someone wants all of Blue Lake—all of America—to believe just the opposite. It’s diabolical, really, because the suspicion of me never really went away. It was forced out temporarily by the reality of Victoria’s picture. But now people will be happy to retrieve it from those narrow little places in their hearts and cast me as the bad guy again.”

  No one said anything; it was clear that we all agreed with Sam, even if we didn’t want to.

  Doug studied him. “And you’re sure that she didn’t contact you in any way, or explain why she might have made such an effort to come out and see you?”

  Sam shook his head. “No. I’ve had no contact with Taylor. I only knew about her blog because Lena and Camilla showed it to me. I didn’t make a habit of reading it, since she was yet another person who was willing to believe the worst of me.” His lip curled slightly in apparent disdain for Taylor Brand. He realized too late that this might look inappropriate, and he held up a hand. “I know, I know—bad to admit that I didn’t like her, but I didn’t. She made a lot of trouble for me and that’s hard to forgive. But I wouldn’t murder her any more than I would harm any human being. I’m not the sort who could do that.”