Treble at the Jam Fest

by Leslie Budewitz

He shot me a knowing look. “If you’re wondering whether I know about Drake’s past, I’ll tell you what I told Ike Hoover. I researched every member of the board and all the staff before agreeing to join.” He stopped for a twosome pulling carts across the road. “It’s what I do. What I did for forty-odd years. Grant and his wife are very well connected. We need them, for access to donors.”

  Ike knew. Interesting. “But you weren’t worried about potential embezzlement?”

  “I talked to them. Made sure he was insulated from the money. And increased our insurance limits. We have our problems, but money management isn’t one of them.”

  That sounded reasonable and prudent. It didn’t completely convince me that Grant Drake had nothing to do with Gerry Martin’s murder. He was too connected—through his daughter, his work on the board, and Ann’s friendship with Rebecca, who had her own tangled connections to the late, unlamented Martin.

  “Speaking of management, curious that you fired your executive director on the eve of the festival.”

  “Rebecca? We didn’t fire her. She and Dave argued, and she quit.” He zipped into a parking slot next to the clubhouse.

  Had she told me she’d been fired, or let me think that? “Over what?” I was almost afraid to ask.

  Alden clasped his fist around the golf cart keys. “Let’s say, the extent of the festival’s future relationship with Gerry Martin. But we’re big kids. Situations become heated sometimes. She didn’t need to quit.”

  “This is a small town. It’s hard to work with people you don’t like.” Or trust.

  “Does everyone in town like you?”

  A rhetorical question, I hoped. “Point taken. Par for the course.”

  He inclined his head, as if pleased that I understood. “You know, I think Rebecca’s been good for the festival. But she’s got to become more of a community player. Now, if you’ll excuse me. Our sponsors need reassurance. I’m meeting the rep from the music school right now.”

  A few minutes later, I trekked between fairways, careful to keep to the cart path and watch for stray shots, all while projecting the Spreadsheet of Suspicion in my mind’s eye.

  Martin’s death was a tragedy, but it would not stop the festival, thank goodness. Alden had a firm grip on the money. Barber rubbed me the wrong way, as his show-off moment had rubbed Martin, and he wasn’t in the clear for the murder. He’d wanted Martin gone for his own reasons, which I was now fairly sure didn’t involve money—at least not money in his pocket. If Jackson Mississippi Boyd and his buddy were to be believed, Barber’s motivation could be as simple and as complicated as wanting to bring in bigger names, to pump up the festival. And boost his own chances for a moment in the spotlight.

  Why had Rebecca lied? Had she expected the board to fire her? Or misunderstood?

  Thinking about the board brought me back to Grant Drake. Alden knew his sins and didn’t fear them. A town that depends so heavily on the arts needs to cultivate the avid supporters and put them to work. It helped that this one had a talented daughter he and his wife desperately wanted to succeed.

  Could one of them have joined Martin for a quick walk? They were regulars at Le Panier, where Martin had gotten his cappuccino.

  With her opera training, surely Ann had the acting skills to hide nearly anything, and Grant had pulled the wool over investors’ eyes for years.

  What about their bright-eyed daughter? I wasn’t convinced that passionate, high-strung Gabby shared her parents’ ambitions for her own career, but she’d been bold enough to sidestep Martin’s plans for their set and play her own composition instead.

  I could see her running after Martin, continuing the fight for control that she’d started on stage. I could see him unleashing a verbal putdown. I could see her pushing back. When it came to picturing her pushing him off the cliff and not letting on, my visual screen went blank.

  But when it comes to life, death, and money, you never know what people will do.

  ∞

  I retrieved my car from the Aldens’ driveway. As I neared the grocery store, a glint of sun on metal caught my eye.

  “Stay,” I commanded, but the driver of the silver Volvo ignored me. She zipped out of the parking lot and zipped in front of me.

  “Criminy.” I slammed on the brakes. My blue bag and everything else on the passenger seat went flying. My skull thumped against the head rest.

  But I’d missed hitting the Volvo, and no one had hit me. “It’s all good,” I said out loud, trying to convince myself.

  I drove down Hill Street, heart racing, and slipped the Subaru into my usual spot behind the Merc. My stuff had spilled all over the floor, so I went around to the passenger door, opened it, and picked up the bag. Beneath it lay a guitar pick earring. Brown streaks on black, like the one I’d found on the lane by my cabin. But that one lay upstairs on my desk.

  A sense of fear and dread began a slow crawl up my spine.

  Twenty-Six

  It took two cups of hot chai to warm me up.

  The earring lay on my desk next to the muddy twin I’d found Tuesday morning. Had my new find been in my bag, or my car?

  And how had it gotten there?

  Only one other person had been in my car recently, not counting the guys.

  But I could not imagine a reason Zayda would have been in the woods near my house the night of the storm.

  I grabbed my phone. My thumbs flew. Lose an earring in my car?

  She must have been on her lunch break. Even seniors, even in the run up to graduation, weren’t allowed to use their phones in class or passing periods.

  Don’t think so! she texted back.

  I grabbed my bag and rifled through all the detritus I’d scooped up and stuffed in it. An empty CD jewel case. The cord for my iPod—I wondered where that had gone. Two tubes of lip balm. And a three-by-five card with a note in precise, blocky handwriting.

  You have your dream. Don’t destroy mine.

  Whose dream? And how had the note gotten where I would find it?

  I set the note on my desk next to the earrings. Had the same person lost both earrings during the storm, one on the road, the other in my car?

  But why mess with my car? To scare me, to warn me off the case?

  It gave me the creeps, it did.

  It’s a natural reaction, when someone asks about an earring, to reach up and finger your own. I could not imagine the time, or patience, required to weave the earrings Tracy wore today, countless tiny yellow, blue, and red beads in an intricate chevron pattern.

  “No clue,” she said. “Guitar pick earrings are common. Did you ask at the Playhouse? And where did you find them? One’s clean, one’s filthy.”

  “That is where the guitarists are,” I said, ignoring her last question.

  But the note made the earrings more than an item for the Lost and Found box. I labeled another plastic bag.

  At the sheriff’s office, a patrol deputy I didn’t know told me that Ike had gone to Missoula for the autopsy on Martin’s body. “Shoulda been done by now, but they had a backlog. And Deputy Oakland is out on call. Dog poop dispute.”

  “That stinks.”

  That made him smile. I explained where I’d found the earrings and index card, and the possible link to Martin’s murder. Head tilted, he listened, then reached for the bag. Read my notes. Slapped a chain of custody form on the desk and started to explain the drill.

  “I’m familiar with it,” I said and initialed where he pointed, acknowledging that I’d collected the evidence and transferred it to him.

  “You’ll be hearing from the undersheriff or Deputy Oakland,” he said.

  “I’m planning on it.”

  Then I climbed back in my trusty Subaru and headed for the hills.

  Well, the horse barn first. Hills later.

  ∞

  The Lo
dge, as everyone calls Caldwell’s Eagle Lake Lodge and Guest Ranch, is everything you’d expect in a Montana dude ranch, and more. I parked by the main building, a classic log structure with a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and a slate patio overlooking the lake. Guests stay in honest-to-goodness cabins, and Western touches surprise the eyes—an old stage coach kids can climb on, a buffalo skull in a garden bed. Not too rustic, not too manicured—it’s all just right.

  Thank goodness for something “just right.”

  Truth be told, I wasn’t in the mood to ride. I’d have much rather stayed in my shop, playing with jam and soap. But after making a point of reminding Kim at the concert that we had a riding date, I couldn’t very well cancel.

  And this might be my only chance to convince her to stay. I wasn’t doing it for Ike. I was doing it for all of us.

  In high school, my grandparents bought me a horse and the Caldwells let me keep her here. These days, they let me ride whenever I want, and I always choose Ribbons, a sweet-tempered chestnut mare. When I reached the stables, she greeted me with a soft neigh and a roll of her neck.

  “Hello, girl. Miss me?” I ran one hand down her mane, then scratched behind her ears and rubbed her nose. An eight-hundred-pound pussycat.

  Kim was already inside the tack room, gathering her gear under the watchful eye of decades of Rodeo Queens, our official portraits hung on the wall. If I’d been her, I’d have made the chief wrangler take mine down, but she hadn’t messed with tradition.

  Or more likely, Caldwell pride kept her from acknowledging that she’d been outdone on horseback by upstart me and that it bugged the horsehair out of her.

  Thank goodness we were past that, I thought, after we greeted each other. I knew now that losing the rodeo championship to me hadn’t been the reason she’d broken off our friendship.

  Fifteen years is a long time to misunderstand the woman you once considered your best friend.

  A few minutes later, we rode out of the corral, Ribbons content to follow Chukkers, Kim’s big bay, up the trail. The mare stepped easily around the soft muddy spots. Alongside the trail lay a fallen spruce, eighty or ninety feet long, the fresh saw cut stinging the air. The Lodge’s crews must have spent hours cleaning up after the storm.

  The horse’s breath came smooth and steady as we climbed the switchbacks. The shadows were cool, and I was glad for my fleece and the slicker rolled up behind me. A few larch and aspen punctuated the dense dark green stands of pine, fir, and spruce, and I drank in the delicious spring smell.

  Eventually, the trail broke out into a flat-rock clearing and a valley vista. We paused, still mounted.

  “How could anybody see all this,” Kim said, “and not believe in heaven?”

  “You need to come home. To stay.”

  “And do what? Wrangle horses for a living? Spend my days shepherding guests? Make sure they have a good time and don’t get kicked in the head by a colt or knocked off a sailboat into the lake?”

  “You need to go back to the sheriff’s department.”

  Chukkers stepped sideways, then forward, responding to Kim’s slightest movement.

  I barreled on. “You’re a good cop, Kim. It’s the work you were meant to do.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, then whirled her horse around and broke into a canter.

  Ribbons craned her neck, asking me what to do. “Slow and steady, girl,” I said, and we moseyed up the trail.

  We found them at the stream, swollen with spring runoff. Chukkers drank thirstily, while Kim pitched pine cones into the water. I dismounted and let Ribbons join her buddy.

  “Look, Kim, I know you think I don’t know why you became a cop—”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  “So tell me.”

  “I thought for sure you’d be on Kyle’s side, begging me to come home and take my place at the ranch. Since you gave up your life for your family business.”

  “Is that what you think? No, I came back to Jewel Bay and the Merc because it’s what I wanted. I’m living my dream.” Part of it, anyway. No point bringing up my quandary over Adam and Tanner. “You love horses, but you’re not burning to run a guest lodge. Your passion is justice.”

  “And if I went back on the job, would that stop you from investigating? You scare me half to death. You got lucky, and now you think—”

  “Is that what you think, when I succeed? That I got lucky?”

  “Erin, don’t pick a fight. You’re smart and determined, especially when danger threatens what you love, whether it’s people or this place. But that’s not the same as training.”

  I sighed. She had a point. “See what I mean? You look back to when my dad died and you see a mistake, but it put you on the path you were supposed to take.”

  She let out a long breath and slouched on a giant boulder, folding her arms. “Things change.”

  In an instant, everything can change. A car hits a patch of ice on a bridge. A man tumbles down a rocky cliff. Or a woman sees the light strike the zipper on a friend’s jacket.

  And in that instant, I understood something else. Adam wouldn’t be Mr. Right if he didn’t take his commitments to his friends seriously. I loved that about him. Now I saw that Tanner had made his plans for the future not to force Adam to move back to Minneapolis and make T-shirts. But because he trusted Adam to manage a situation too big and daunting to figure out himself. Tanner had known instinctively that he had to focus his energy on recovering. On living. Not on making plans for what would happen if he died.

  But he never meant for Adam to give up his life, any more than my mother had meant for me to give up mine when she asked me to come home and run the Merc. Any more than I meant to let Kim walk away from the career she loved.

  I stood and took a step toward her. “Don’t you dare stop being a cop. Don’t you dare give that up because of some twisted idea that you owe me and my family your sacrifice.”

  Her mouth fell open and she shook her head. “You don’t understand. I only became a cop because of what I did to your family.”

  “You didn’t do anything to us. Don’t you get that?” I was shouting and I didn’t care. “The only person responsible for what happened to my father is the killer. You were a kid who misunderstood what you saw. And it was too painful, so you hid it instead of speaking up. You weren’t being malicious. You were honestly torn. I don’t blame you. None of us blames you.”

  Her blue eyes filled, her jaw on the verge of a quiver. “How can that be true? Your parents treated me like another daughter, and I—”

  I knew what she was going to say, and I couldn’t let her. “No. You did not betray us. I know you. You could never do that.”

  She slumped back against the rock and buried her face in her hands. She was sobbing now. I stepped closer, my hand on her arm.

  “Kim, if you truly don’t want to rejoin the department, don’t do it for us. But I’ve seen you work. I know how good you are at it. If one good thing came from my father’s death, it’s you discovering your passion. At least, that’s how it looks to me.”

  At the edge of the water, Ribbons let out a soft neigh, and I took my oldest, dearest friend in my arms while she cried.

  ∞

  “I need to get to the Merc,” I said, after we finished grooming the horses and stashing our tack.

  “Five minutes won’t hurt. Cookies and lemonade,” Kim said. Like we were kids again.

  “Five minutes. The Drakes baffle me,” I said as we walked toward the Lodge. “They’re pushy stage parents, hoping to create a brilliant career for their daughter, but what else are they after?”

  “And did he join the board for purely charitable reasons, or is he working some other angle?” Kim said. I’d told her everything I’d learned on our ride back.

  “Marv Alden seems confident that Grant can’t get to the money or d
o the festival any harm. They’re social climbers, determined to be important, whether it’s New York society or the little town in the big woods.”

  Kim opened the side door and we walked in to the dining room. Kyle emerged from the kitchen with a fresh tray of Snickerdoodles. “Perfect timing,” he called.

  I poured a glass of iced tea spiked with lemonade. “Kyle, you know the Drakes, don’t you? I think they stayed here Gabby’s first year at the festival.”

  “She’s blond, former singer.” He drew a shape in the air with one hand. “He wants you to know he used to be important. One kid, more interested in her guitar than the horses or the pool.”

  “And here I thought you never stuck your nose out of the kitchen.” I reached for a cookie.

  “I’m trying to be more involved with the entire operation.” He pulled out a peeled-log chair and sank on to the leather seat. “And rope my cousin in, too. But seeing the two of you together makes me think that’s not going to happen.”

  Kim and I sat across the table. “What else can you tell us about the Drakes?”

  “Not much.” His lower lip jutted out as he considered the question. “Nice enough, in that ‘we’ve made it’ way. More status-conscious than most of the local rich boys, but that may change after they’ve been here a year or two.”

  Not uncommon. “Any tensions that you’re aware of? Between them, or with anyone else?”

  “Now that you mention it—” He sat forward, teasing tone gone. “We’re doing some catering for the festival, and today I ran the lunches up to the Playhouse. The mother and daughter were in the lobby. I don’t think they saw me. The kid was saying something like ‘don’t try to buy me a new teacher—I’ll find my own.’ Not sure that makes sense.”

  I shifted my jaw and tapped my teeth together, thinking. “Yeah. Yeah, it does. Thanks.”

  “Sure.” He shook out his ball cap and ran a hand over his hair. “What’s going on? You two can’t be up to any good.”

  “Nothing,” I said at the same moment as Kim pushed back her chair.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I need to tell my dad first. Erin, thanks for the ride and the conversation. It means more to me than—well, I think you know.”