What had Paul said? Wayne was ready to go public. “You don’t know what it was about?”
Greta shook her head. “They went outside to talk.”
Pluto ambled into the barn, with Dasha right behind. They both settled in near where Cam and Greta worked, Dasha striking a Sphinx pose, Pluto watching from an upright sitting position, tongue lolling.
Greta looked at them and laughed. “New best buddies, looks like.”
“Did you guys have fun?” Cam asked the dogs.
Dasha gave a little bark before returning to inscrutable. The two women worked without speaking for a few minutes, until the last flat was filled with glistening tan eggs.
Greta dried her hands and used her left hand to pick up the pencil hanging from a string above a piece of paper taped to the fridge. “Wayne always said we have to keep track of the yield.” She wrote the date and a number.
“So what were the interesting things you did when you were young?” Cam asked as she slid the flat onto the bottom rack in the refrigerator. She straightened to see Greta staring at her.
“Did you come over here to help me or to grill me?” Greta asked in a near whisper. “Why are you so damn interested in my life?”
Chapter 25
Cam strode back along the left edge of Middle Road. She always walked facing traffic, harboring a possibly irrational belief that if she made eye contact with an oncoming car, she’d be safer than if a car approached her from behind. Dasha trotted ahead of her on the leash, occasionally slowing to investigate something at the side of the road, but mostly heading straight home for his dinner. Cam carried a plastic grocery bag in the hand not holding the leash. Greta had insisted she take a dozen eggs home, even when Cam protested that she had her own hens’ eggs and that she lived alone.
Greta was an odd mix of kind and caustic, smart and suspicious, grieving and yet not seeming particularly sad. Cam was surprised at what she’d said about Wayne not sharing either secrets or his great-aunt’s money with Greta. Cam would have pegged him as more of a share-all sort, and if anybody would be the withholding type, it would be Greta. Which only confirmed what Cam already knew—that one can never truly understand what goes on in other people’s relationships.
Greta hadn’t wanted to talk about her earlier life as a scientist. Cam could understand that. She was a private person, too. She hadn’t felt she could come out and say what Ken had told her about Greta’s scholarship to graduate school. Cam had thought, since Greta had opened the door to the “interesting things” she’d done when she was young, that she’d be willing to keep talking about it. Clearly wrong.
Also curious was why Wayne had chosen last weekend to tell Paul he was going to go public. Why now? Why not a decade earlier, or next year? She shook her head. She’d likely never know. Having to keep a secret like that for all those years had to be corrosive to the soul, though.
Dasha slowed to sniff out the trunk of a swamp oak at the junction of Attic Hill Road with Middle. A black sedan crested the hill just ahead on Middle and came speeding toward them. Cam pulled Dasha in close to her at the edge of the shoulder and slid the bag over her wrist so she’d have that hand free if she needed it. Surely the driver saw them, but she wasn’t about to get run over in case he or she didn’t. As the car sped by, Cam glimpsed Paul Underwood at the wheel, and what looked like a backseat full of boys. Paul braked suddenly, pulling over behind her with a spray of gravel.
Cam turned to see him climb out. He leaned in and said something to the children, then stalked toward her with storm clouds on his face. Dasha barked at him and took an alert stance.
“What do you think you’re doing, meddling in other people’s business?” Paul stopped two feet in front of her. He folded his arms and stared.
“What do you mean?” Cam kept a firm grip on Dasha’s leash.
“I mean I had to spend all morning talking to the police about an accident that happened when I was seventeen. I was a kid.”
“Hold on, now.” Cam held up a hand. “I’m not meddling. I found a human bone on my farm and the bracelet that it had worn. I reported it. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He pursed his lips, his eyes smoldering. “Who cares what happened? It was a long, long time ago.”
“Anyway, didn’t Catriona already tell them what happened?”
“I don’t know what she told them and what she didn’t. She’s not picking up her phone. And the cops weren’t about to reveal that information to me.”
“What did happen?” It didn’t hurt to ask.
He gazed into the woods for a moment and then back at her, his anger morphing into lines of sorrow around his eyes. “Oh, what the hell. I’m screwed now, anyway.”
“Telling the truth can free you.” Where had she come up with that piece of drivel? Did it sound as trite as Cam thought it did?
“We were young. Not that much older than my own kids.” Paul rubbed his forehead as he glanced at his car. “We were drinking and getting high. We went to the cliffs over the ocean up near Hampton one night.”
Cam waited as a stiff breeze rustled through the woods. Under her windbreaker the sweat from her vigorous walk started to cool and she shivered.
“Wayne had borrowed his father’s car. We were playing a tape of Irish music and horsing around in the park up on the bluff pretending to do traditional dance. You know, like Riverdance, but it was before that, and we were all lousy at it, except for Fionnoula. Wayne was going to back up the car so the headlights would shine on us, like we were on a stage. But he put it in drive, instead. It hit Fionnoula.”
Cam gasped, bringing her hand to her mouth.
“He knocked her over the cliff. She landed on the rocks down below.” He hung his head and folded his hands, as if in prayer.
“Did you try to save her? To get help?”
He lifted his head. “No. There was no way to get down there.” Now the look in his eyes was haunted. “She never moved. We knew she was dead. As we watched, a wave crashed over her and she was gone. We panicked. We knew our lives would be ruined, too, if we said what had happened. We made a pact never to tell.”
Chapter 26
Cam and Dasha made it home without further incident, although Cam barely saw where she was walking, her mind filled instead with the horrific image of a car knocking a girl over a cliff. She had left Paul leaning on the trunk of his car staring at the road ahead.
Dasha barked as he trotted up the back steps of the farmhouse. When Cam pulled open the outer door, a large manila envelope fell onto her feet. Picking it up, she read the message written in a neat hand on the outside.
“Please see if you can make sense of these. I found them going through Daddy’s papers. Megan.”
Cam juggled the fat envelope, the eggs, and her keys to unlock the door. Preston was in the kitchen sitting on the mat in front of the stove, waiting for his dinner. She gave him a few strokes, and then fed both animals before pouring a glass of water for herself and sinking into a chair at the table. Inside the envelope was a sheaf of papers. Bank statements with Wayne’s name at the top. And only Wayne’s name. Could it be the great-aunt account? It was odd that Megan would leave them for Cam instead of simply asking her mother about them. But maybe Megan had a sense that that would only make trouble. Or maybe Wayne had mentioned something about the private account to Megan.
Pressing Megan’s number on her phone, Cam waited, but she didn’t pick up. Cam left a message asking Megan to call back, and then studied the statements. It looked like there had been monthly automatic transfers of a hundred dollars to an account at the same local bank going back almost twenty years. Next to the account number were two letters, PU. She flipped through the pages. The last one was from January, only two months ago. And the final balance was zero. She whistled.
Cam brought a half glass of wine from the kitchen and sat again. Wayne had been paying PU a hundred dollars a month—PU who had to be Paul Underwood. It wasn’t a huge sum, b
ut had been steady over the years. If Paul had blackmailed Wayne, threatening to tell about him being behind the wheel at the accident, that would explain why Wayne never shared the account with Greta, and why he couldn’t plow the extra money into the farm. What had Greta said the day before he died? That their money vanished into thin air. So maybe Wayne was also paying Paul cash out of the house account. But now that the great-aunt’s funds were exhausted, no wonder Wayne would want to tell the truth and refuse to pay Paul any longer. Especially if the alternative was selling off a piece of the cherished Laitinen farmland. Cherished by Wayne, at least.
She needed to share this information with Megan. And with Pete. Unless Paul had already told him about the blackmail, but she doubted that. Why would Paul be so desperate for money, though? He worked in sales for a big company. Surely they paid him enough to raise a family on. Although with his wife in a mental hospital, he must have expenses associated with that, and, of course, no second income in the family to help support three growing boys. But he wouldn’t risk his children’s well-being by killing Wayne to prevent him talking. Would he?
Cam’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since her tuna sandwich hours ago, and it had been a full afternoon of work and walking. She perused her refrigerator, which didn’t yield any likely dinner unless she fixed an omelet. She desperately needed to go grocery shopping tomorrow. If Judith was arrested and this case was a wrap, Pete should be free for a nice Saturday night home-cooked meal. She found her phone and pressed his number.
“Any chance of meeting me for a quick dinner out?” she asked, after greeting him.
“Hang on a minute.”
Cam heard voices in the background, then Pete came back on.
“Sure. I can get away for an hour. How about the Japanese place in Port Plaza?”
“Perfect. See you in fifteen?”
“Perfect.”
“Wait, make that twenty. I need to get the hens closed in before I leave.”
“Twenty it is.”
Pete popped the last piece of sushi into his mouth and chewed with a dreamy expression on his face. Many of the tables in the small restaurant were occupied and most of the counter stools, too. Behind a counter, a chef never stopped slicing and arranging planks full of sushi. A waitress wearing a kimonolike top scurried back and forth from the kitchen. The air was warm and smelled deliciously of seaweed, sizzling meat, and something sweet.
“You really like that stuff, don’t you?” Cam asked. She finagled a piece of tempura sweet potato almost into her own mouth, and then lost control of the chopsticks and dropped the morsel on her plate.
Pete laughed at her. “You can use a fork, you know.”
Cam stabbed the batter-fried slice with the point of the chopstick. “I never got the hang of chopsticks, but I feel like I should. Especially if we’re going to be coming to places like this.” This time the sweet potato made it into her mouth.
“I do love sushi. Even though my father was from Greece, he served in Japan in the US Navy after he immigrated here. He taught me to use chopsticks when I was five.”
“Well, you can have raw fish.” Cam shuddered a little. “Give me a nice cooked meal any day.” She sipped her green tea.
Pete drained his own cup of tea and set it down. They’d agreed to not talk about murder until they finished their dinner, but that time had come.
“Is the Judith thing going to stick?” Cam asked. “Are you going to be able to make an arrest?”
“No.” Pete shook his head. “She’s already out. That woman brought a high-powered lawyer up from Boston.”
“That’s too bad. Do you think she did it?” Cam glanced around, glad the adjacent tables were unoccupied, but she lowered her voice, anyway. “Killed Wayne?”
“I’m not sure. The evidence is looking like it. But she’s quite adamant that she never went over there that morning.”
“And your commander—is he still on your back about solving it this week?”
“Of course he wants to have it all wrapped up. Who wouldn’t? I think he was bluffing about demoting me, though. Just wanted to make sure I stayed on top of the investigation.” He pressed his lips together as he shook his head. “As if I wouldn’t, anyway.”
“Did you get the truth out of Catriona or Paul about the accident?”
Pete cocked his head. “No, but how do you know we talked to Paul?”
“He told me. Dasha and I were walking home from Greta’s—”
“You were at the Laitinen farm again?” Pete frowned.
“We were out for a walk and stopped by. I helped Greta with the eggs. And I learned a few interesting things.”
Pete set his jaw in his hand, elbow on the table. “I clearly can’t stop you. So you might as well fill me in.”
A couple with two children in tow walked in, to the waitress’s high-pitched voice calling, “Irashai! Welcome!” She bustled in from the kitchen and seated them at a table in the far corner.
Cam told Pete that Greta didn’t seem to know about the accident. “She said Wayne had gotten an inheritance from a great-aunt but that he hadn’t shared it with her,” Cam continued. “Then, when Dasha and I were walking home, Paul drove by with his sons. He stopped and was angry with me about telling you he was involved in the accident. But get this, Pete.”
“Yes?”
“He told me exactly what happened on that night.” Cam gave Pete the details about the drinking and pot, the dancing in the park on the bluffs, the headlights, and Wayne losing control of the car, knocking Fionnoula onto the rocks, and then her being swept into the ocean. “The three made a pact never to tell what had happened. They were teenagers and terrified of the consequences.”
“I gathered that from Catriona’s interview, even though neither she nor Paul would say exactly what went down that night. He should have told me. They both should have.” He drummed the table with his fingers, frowning again.
“Here’s something else.” Cam reached across the table for Pete’s hand. “I think Paul was blackmailing Wayne all this time, because Wayne was the driver who hit Fionnoula. Megan dropped off an envelope full of Wayne’s bank statements at my house today. She asked me to look at them. I think it was the account holding the money from his great-aunt, and he was paying someone with initials PU a hundred dollars a month for the last twenty years. And maybe cash, too. Greta said she didn’t know where their money went, that they never had enough.”
Pete sat up straight. “That is interesting, all right.” He squeezed Cam’s hand and let it go. “Why did she want you to look at the statements?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t trust Greta? I wasn’t there when she left them, so I didn’t get a chance to ask her.”
“I’ll check it out,” Pete said.
“Paul told me Wayne was going to go public. I think the money ran out, and he wasn’t about to sell his land to Judith so he could keep paying Paul. Do you think Paul could have killed Wayne?”
“He had an alibi for the time of death. That’s why we didn’t suspect him all along. But maybe . . .” He stared over Cam’s shoulder.
“Maybe what?”
The waitress hustled by, laying their check on the table.
Pete examined it and left cash in the folder. He gazed at Cam. “His alibi is his oldest son. He said his dad was home making pancakes for them. Paul could have coerced him to lie, though.” Pete nodded slowly. “We’ve already been digging deeper into that story.”
Chapter 27
Cam sank onto her couch and drew her knees up. It had been a day full of talking. To Sim, to Tam, to Megan. Ken Wallace, Greta, Paul, Pete. Way too much interaction for a native introvert. She picked up the New Yorker magazine and flipped through, scanning for the cartoons, smiling at one that depicted every person in Times Square walking around texting while using red-tipped white canes to avoid obstacles.
The magazine rustled in her hand. Why had she ordered green tea with dinner? Its caffeine always made her jittery
. She turned to an article about the increased use of drones in a number of areas of life, from police surveillance to news gathering to observing how crops were growing on megafarms. The article also described how owning a drone had turned into an expensive hobby. Certain customers who bought one of the remote-controlled hovercraft to play with didn’t fully read the instructions, and often crashed it into a building on its maiden flight. The software aspect of the systems interested Cam, but the article didn’t go into any depth about how the devices were controlled.
She tossed the magazine on the coffee table and headed to the kitchen, bringing a glass of chilled Chardonnay back to her desk. Maybe doing farm-related desk work would calm her down, that and the wine. She shrugged on the thick sweater she’d left on the back of the chair. The sunny day had turned into a cold, clear, windy night by the time she’d driven home from the restaurant, and the last time she’d filled her heating oil tanks the amount on the bill had made her choke. Soon enough the furnace wouldn’t be kicking on, but for now, she’d rather bundle up than turn the thermostat any higher than the sixty-five degrees she usually set it to during the evenings.
Staring at her spreadsheet of farm tasks for the next couple of months, Cam narrowed her eyes. She’d set up an ambitious plan for spring planting. She should be able to till at least one of the fields if it didn’t rain or snow again. Working wet soil destroyed its natural structure of air pockets and turned the earth into a brick. If she got the side field tilled up tomorrow, she could get the early peas direct seeded into the ground. Seed potatoes would go in next, since they also tolerated cool soil and even light frosts.
Sipping the wine, she checked her expenditures and income file. If the summer CSA filled up, and if she got that greens contract with Phat Cats, she might be able to hire someone as regular help, at least part time. She’d already landed a contract with the Food Mart to supply them with tomatoes and other produce for the summer, and so far the farm-share program was about half spoken for. It looked like a few hours of publicity work was in her near future, not something she cared for in the least, although Alexandra had been a big help in the past with setting up the Web site and even designing the farm logo.
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