And now Doreen was gone. And so horribly.
What she ought to do, Sophie thought, was head straight back to Portland, as soon as that police officer said she could go. Let the land be sold to developers. Let their bulldozers smash down the cabins and the lodge, obliterate the landscape Sophie remembered in her dreams, tinted sepia. Let two-hundred room resorts with concrete balconies rise in place of the grass and wildflowers and shrubby coastal growth that had, so long ago, been Sophie’s playground.
But however powerful the yearning, she realized she couldn’t do that. She’d meant what she said to the police chief. She owed more to Doreen Stedmann than she could ever repay, but this would be a start. Besides…once she saved Misty Beach, she never had to see it again.
In the meantime – she picked up the inadequate listing of donated items – she was going to have to work harder than she’d ever worked in her life to pull off this auction, scheduled for the second Saturday in July.
Chief Colburn didn’t show up until two o’clock. Not until she opened the door to him did Sophie realize she’d been a little bit nervous about his reappearance. Even through her shock and nausea that morning, she had felt a startled moment of awareness that left her unnerved.
He was maybe six feet, not enormous but a great deal taller than her own five foot four. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, rangy in build with the kind of saunter that was unconscious to men who had the “it” factor. He was a guy who knew where he was going and how to get there. Why there happened to be Cape Trouble was a mystery, but it might be merely a way station on his journey to bigger and better things. Or she supposed he could be a local boy for whom this was home, although she didn’t remember him from her long-ago summers or, more recently, from her visits here.
He had dark hair, shaggy and a little wavy, and eyes of such a dark blue she’d first thought they were brown. His nose was a little too big for a long, lean face, his mouth wide. It was hard to estimate his age, given the lines permanently carved in his forehead.
And for some reason, he made her body hum.
He looked her over when she let him in, a frown deepening some of those lines on his forehead. “You okay?”
“Yes, of course I am.” Lying about her feelings was instinctive, but unnecessary at the moment, she realized. Probably not even smart. He’d wonder if he didn’t see grief. “Coping,” she said more honestly. She studied him. “Are you done out there?”
“Done?” he said wryly. “We’ve hardly begun. But yes, we photographed, fingerprinted and removed your aunt’s body.” He hesitated. “There’ll be an autopsy.”
“I assumed so. Where was she taken?”
The nearest decent sized hospital, apparently, was in Tillamook. She nodded at that news.
“It’ll be a week or more before we can release the body, but you can start thinking about where you want to bury her and planning a service.”
Oh, God. For some reason, she’d blanked her mind to all of that. She knew why, of course – she hated funerals with a passion. But, heaven help her, Aunt Doreen would want one. She was a church-goer and had so many friends.
“I’ll talk to Doreen’s pastor,” she said.
“I notice you don’t always say ‘aunt’.” The question – and it was a question – might sound casual, but she doubted it really was. He was a cop investigating a death.
“The relationship, as I told you, was a little more tenuous than that. Saying it always felt awkward to me. She said she was just Doreen, so mostly that’s what I called her.”
“Your stepmom alive?”
Oh, dear God, Sophie thought, appalled. “Yes. I’ll have to call her. They weren’t close, but still… Um, can I get you a cup of tea? I’m afraid I’m not a coffee drinker, so I don’t have any.”
“What I’d really appreciate is a sandwich, if there’s any chance you have the makings. I should have grabbed some lunch on the way, but I didn’t.”
“No problem. Aunt Doreen…” the pause was infinitesimal, “stocked the kitchen for me.” She led the way to the tiny kitchen, and took out croissants and French rolls, cheese, turkey, tomatoes and lettuce. She tried not to let herself think about Doreen carrying the grocery bags in, filling the refrigerator and cupboards in anticipation of Sophie’s arrival.
When Chief Colburn asked if she’d eaten, Sophie realized it hadn’t even occurred to her to do so.
“You should have something. You need to work on a full stomach.”
Work? She hadn’t thought of it that way, and supposed she should be grateful he hadn’t said, If you’re going to be grilled, it should be on a full stomach. After all, weren’t relatives the first suspects? He had to be intrigued by the fact that Doreen had died barely twelve hours after Sophie had arrived in town. Or…had she died last night, after leaving Sophie here?
The hand holding the bread knife went still. “Had she been dead long?”
“About two hours, is the medical examiner’s best guess so far.” His deep voice was kind, his eyes searching.
After a moment she nodded and went back to slicing.
He settled down with what she thought was a contented sigh on one of the pair of chairs on the patio, a whopping big sandwich on his plate.
They ate without much conversation. He made a few comments, including, “Marge is taking this hard.”
“Were they good friends?”
“I don’t know about that.” He seemed to consider it. “Not friends, I don’t think. She’s feeling responsible. It was her place. There are a few video cameras monitoring activity, but your aunt’s unit is in one of the blind spots. Turns out the camera that records arrivals and departures was conveniently damaged, too. One camera shows your aunt’s car when she arrived, but the angle and quality is too lousy to let us get much of a look. I’ve got someone working on it in hopes we can see if she had a passenger.”
“Either way, I don’t suppose it’s a stranger,” Sophie commented. “I mean, there are tourists in town, but how would any of them know Doreen or the storage facility?”
“There are fliers up all over town trumpeting the Save the Misty Beach campaign and asking for donations,” Chief Colburn pointed out.
“But…we talked last night. She didn’t say anything about getting together with someone this morning. Why wouldn’t she have?”
“Because it wasn’t planned? Maybe she got a call late last night or this morning. Or somebody could have stopped by.”
“I suppose so.” Sophie set down the remains of her own croissant sandwich. “Am I a suspect?”
“Not at this time.” His eyes were keen on her face. “You’re one of the few people whose movements seem to have been monitored rather closely. I made a couple of calls, found out what time Doreen left you here last night, when your light went out, when you were first spotted stirring this morning. Neighbors noted you departing, I know you stopped at Mist River Coffee for a grande chai tea, and exactly what time you let yourself through the gate at the storage place.”
Sophie had been listening to this in alarm. “People are watching me?”
“Small town.”
“God. That’s creepy.”
He only grinned. The effect with that sexy mouth and the crinkles beside his eyes made her heart bump uncomfortably. “That’s Cape Trouble.”
“Yes, I know, but still…”
“It is creepy,” he agreed. “I’m getting used to it, but I can’t say I much like knowing people are keeping an eye on me at all times.”
“You haven’t been here forever?”
“Less than a year.” He eyed her. “Came from California. San Francisco P.D. I read about the job opening, thought this sounded like a peaceful place.”
Sophie looked down at her sandwich. “I suppose it is, most of the time.” Although not in her experience.
“Yeah.” He reached across the wrought iron table and removed the now mangled remnant of her croissant from her hand. “I need your help, Ms. Thomsen.”
“Sophie,” she said. “Nobody else is a stranger around here, so we might as well not be either.”
That mobile mouth smiled. “Good. I’m Daniel.”
“Not Dan?”
“No.” A ghost of some emotion passed through his eyes before he blanked it. “Full name’s Patrick Daniel. Daniel was my father’s name, too.”
“Was?” she asked, made careful by what his voice didn’t reveal as much as by what it did.
“He died when I was a kid. After that, I decided I’d rather be Daniel than Patrick. How about you?” Clearly, he didn’t want to talk about his dad or the significance of him appropriating the name. “Family name?”
“I think my mother just thought Sophie was pretty.”
“It is pretty.” His voice came out husky.
Their gazes caught. Sophie held herself very still. Then he cleared his throat. “About that help.”
“Tell me what you need,” she said simply.
*****
He hadn’t been one hundred percent honest, of course. She seemed pretty unlikely as the killer to him, but he couldn’t be sure yet. Getting from this cottage out to the storage facility, then back here without a soul seeing her would have been quite a challenge in a place as nosy as Cape Trouble, fog or no. In asking for her help, he was putting his money on the accuracy of all those busybodies. Which wasn’t to say that if this murder had been planned by Ms. Thomsen, for some as yet unknowable reason, she couldn’t have found a way to slip out there and return unseen.
There were other arguments against her complicity, though, including the abortive search of the stuff in that rented space. Sophie Thomsen was apparently slated to have unlimited access to every single donation. Why would she need to ransack it now?
Still - something to keep in the back of his mind.
Not surprisingly, she knew considerably more than he did about the auction and the entire fundraising effort.
“The current owner of the property says that he knows his uncle would have preferred keeping the land in its natural state. Apparently the uncle had had offers over the years and turned them down. The heir is trying to honor Mr. Billington’s wishes.”
He studied her. “You sound as if you knew this Billington.”
“I did. A long time ago.” Only by a certain constraint in her voice did he guess she’d rather not chat about the old guy.
“How about the current owner?”
“He was an adult and I didn’t have much to do with him.”
He was an adult. Interesting, Daniel thought. Had she grown up in Cape Trouble? At the moment, though, he couldn’t see how her history was relevant to his investigation, so he returned the focus to the fundraising effort.
Sophie told him there had already been some substantial monetary donations, and that a group similar to the Nature Conservancy had agreed to pay up to half the purchase price and would both own and administer the land thereafter. “There’s still a substantial gap, though,” Sophie said, “which the auction will help fill. Doreen’s goal for it was two hundred thousand dollars. She was hoping for a lot more than that. Half a million was her dream.”
He stared at her. “How the hell is that possible?”
“For one thing, it’s to be held in Portland, not here. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Actually, no. I hadn’t paid that much attention.” He didn’t wanted to say that he’d assumed the whole campaign was next best thing to a joke.
“From what Doreen told me, they’ve brought in some pretty amazing donations so far,” Sophie continued. “Somewhere in there is a piece of Dale Chihuly glass, for example.”
Even he recognized that name.
“They’re not only hitting up locals, you know,” she continued. “They’re going for people throughout the Northwest who are known to be sympathetic to ecological and conservation causes. Auction tickets are two hundred dollars, which lets out people without some decent money to spend.”
So much for his belief that Doreen Stedmann was a crackpot – a nice lady whose enthusiasm was admirable, but still a crackpot.
Sophie didn’t know much about the financial donations already made, except that there was some sort of escrow account at Oregon Coast Bank. And that much of the money consisted of pledges rather than actual, in-hand cash. “But I’m sure someone else on the committee can tell you more about that,” she added.
He copied down names and numbers from her list of auction volunteers rather than taking it from her. She also showed him the itemization of tangible donations, which even he could see was poorly organized.
“I can tell you from experience that this list doesn’t cover half of what’s in that storage space,” she said. “Plus, Doreen has mentioned things to me not listed here. I’m going to need to start from scratch, looking at every single donation, describing it and assigning a value as well as a catalog number. I’ll be using a program called Auction-Tracker that’s already on my laptop. It also allows us to enter the names and contact info for auctiongoers, their bid numbers and so on. The cashier function means it can handle the entire event from beginning to end.”
“And this is what you do for a living,” he said, intrigued.
“No, actually I work on events for a major corporation headquartered in Portland. Some are designed to show off products, some to entertain customers, shareholders.” She shrugged. “But I got my start in the business with a company that does put on auctions for non-profits, and I’ve continued volunteering time to a couple of organizations that depend on their auctions.”
“Yeah? What are those?”
Her expression didn’t change, but he could feel her reluctance though her hesitation was brief. “One offers refuge and services to teens living on the street, and the other is a no-kill animal shelter.”
Creatures, human and otherwise, that on some level were lost or abandoned. As he’d hoped, her choices told him something about her. Once he had more context, he’d know what it meant.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve talked to everyone on this list. Then you can get in touch and set up a meeting or whatever you have in mind.”
“When can I get back into the storage unit?”
“You sure you can bring yourself to work in there?”
“I don’t see that I have any choice.” She spoke slower than usual for her, as if she was thinking aloud. “I wonder if there’s a vacant unit the same size or even bigger? I could move the items as I look at them.”
Daniel nodded. “That’s a good idea.” He hesitated. “I’m going to be looking over your shoulder, you know. Somebody was hunting for something in there. They might have found it, but they might not have, too.”
“Then why didn’t they keep looking?”
“There was a risk that someone would show up. You, for example. Could be your aunt had mentioned that you were meeting up with her there. He killed her, searched frantically, panicked.” He didn’t have to add, Or found what he was looking for.
Her shudder reminded him that he wasn’t talking to another cop, hardened to death in its uglier forms.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but she shook her head.
“You didn’t say anything you shouldn’t have.” She stared into his eyes with such intensity, he couldn’t have looked away. “I need you to find out who murdered her. Don’t let them get away with it.” She swallowed, and finished more softly. “Please don’t.”
“I’ll do my damndest,” he said. “That’s all I can promise.”
For what felt longer than the few seconds it actually was, she continued to study him. At least she dipped her head. “Thank you.”
He rose to his feet. “Do you know who your aunt’s heir is?”
“I am.”
“You’re sure?”
“If she’s changed her will, she hasn’t told me. I don’t actually think she has that much. She owned a garden center for years. Sold it, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago? But that’s not what you’d call
a high profit business. She’s lived ever since on the proceeds and whatever she had from her own parents. I’m not sure if she’d started getting Social Security yet. She does own her house, and that’s it as far as I know.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know I have to search it.”
“I…assumed. Do you have her keys?”
“Haven’t located them yet. They’re not in the car.”
She told him where her aunt’s hide-out key was. It was all he could do not to say, Why bother to lock at all? Putting a key in a place that obvious was all but an invitation to burglars. Usually when he said something like that, though, people here shook their heads at him with pity for his jaundiced, big city thinking.
He wondered if Doreen Stedmann’s murder might make some locals a little more careful from now on.
*****
The tiny living room was crowded with only three people in addition to herself, Sophie couldn’t help noticing. Aunt Doreen’s house wasn’t much bigger. She’d have to find out where the full auction committee had been meeting.
Daniel – Chief Colburn – had called her just after five to let her know that he’d spoken, at least briefly, with everyone on the list she’d given him. She could feel free to call them now. No, he told her, he hadn’t learned anything meaningful as yet.
Hannah Moss’s name had been starred, and Sophie knew Doreen had considered her a co-chair, so Sophie’s first call was to her. She was the one to suggest a get-together tonight, and brought the other two women with her. Sophie was touched that they’d come with lasagna, garlic bread, salad and red wine in hand.
“I’m sure people will be bringing you food like crazy the next few days,” the oldest of the three had told her. “That’s what we do around here. But Chief Colburn,“ she gave a sniff that seemed to hold disdain, “has kept word from spreading as fast as usual, and we knew you wouldn’t want to cook tonight.”
Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) Page 3
