Winter of Secrets

by Vicki Delany

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  Sophie first, then Alan, Molly Smith following. No one needed to ask if they’d located the missing goods. Sophie didn’t look at anyone, and Alan gave them an embarrassed grin. Smith nodded imperceptibly to Winters.

  “Found it,” Alan said. “Just a misunderstanding.”

  “What the hell.” Wendy jumped to her feet. “You can’t have found it. Someone went through Sophie’s stuff.”

  “Why are you so sure of that, Ms. Wyatt-Yarmouth?”

  “Everything’s so fucked up.” She dropped into her chair. “Can we please get this over with?”

  Ellie Carmine gave Lucky Smith a huge smile. The thought of someone’s valuables being stolen from her B&B must have been an enormous worry. She selected a gingerbread man and bit his head off.

  Lucky picked up the plate and held it out to her daughter. Smith accepted, but she shook her head when Lucky indicated the tea pot.

  “We were talking about your brother, Ms. Wyatt-Yarmouth,” Winters said, absent-mindedly rubbing his thumb against the face of his watch. “I’m sure this is going to be difficult for you, but I need to know.”

  She nodded and wiped her eyes.

  “You went skiing on the twenty-forth?”

  “Yes,” Alan answered. “All of us, except Ewan. He wasn’t here for breakfast so we left without him.”

  “Jason was with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything of interest happen at Blue Sky?”

  “Nothing I can remember.”

  “Did Jason seem to be bothered about anything? Something on his mind maybe?”

  The friends looked at each other. Sophie shrugged; the boys shook their heads.

  “He was just Jason,” Alan said, “Same as always.”

  “Did you come back to town together?”

  Rob answered. “Yeah. All of us, except for Ewan. Jason drove. He usually did.”

  “And when you got back?”

  “It was Christmas Eve. I’ve never seen a town shut down the way this one does. Every bar locked up as tight as if it were a Sunday in Saskatchewan in 1952. The restaurant in the Koola Hotel was about the only thing open, so we went there. Come to think of it, the food was about the same as they’d have served in Saskatchewan in 1952.”

  No one laughed. Outside, the snow continued to fall.

  “We got back around seven.”

  Wendy rose to her feet. She stood straight and held her head high on a long neck. “If you don’t mind,” she said. “I’d like to go upstairs now.” Her eyes were very wet. “I’m supposed to be having dinner with my parents again tonight. I don’t think I can bear it.”

  Lucky put down her cup. “Can I help you? I’ve nothing to add to the conversation.”

  Lucky took Wendy’s silence as agreement. She led the girl toward the stairs.

  The common room was quiet until their footsteps reached the upper floor.

  “Say what you want about Wendy,” Rob said. “She and her brother loved each other. I think she relied on him a lot.”

  “And, despite the way she talks about him now, she had a crush on Ewan,” Mrs. Carmine said.

  Sophie snorted. “Hardly.”

  “She’s a nut bar,” Jeremy said. “Even Jason knew it.”

  “You ate dinner at the Koola Hotel,” Winters tried to get them back on track, “and got back here around seven. What then?”

  Alan grinned and Sophie blushed and Winters took a wild guess as to what they’d been doing. Jeremy shrugged. Rob chewed a fingernail.

  “I for one,” Mrs. Carmine said, “was preparing for our Christmas Eve get together. Jason told me his family always had a light supper at midnight, and everyone opened one special gift. Over the holidays I try to create a home-like atmosphere for my guests.”

  “We watched a video,” Jeremy said. “Wendy and Rob and me.”

  “Some old Christmas movie Wendy found in the pile under the TV.” Rob nodded toward the shelves stocked with video cassettes and DVDs. “What was it called?”

  “It’s a Wonderful Life. Black and white and deadly boring.”

  “I liked it.”

  “You would.”

  “And Jason?” Winters asked, cutting off Rob’s reply. “What did he do?”

  “Went out,” Jeremy said. “Soon as we got back. Took the car.”

  “Where did he go?”

  The three boys exchanged glances.

  Smith moved away from the wall.

  “Didn’t say,” Alan said, at last.

  “But you can guess,” Winters said.

  Jeremy spoke first. “He’d picked up a local girl. She was here the previous night, testing out the mattress. I assumed he’d gone to meet her.”

  “Jason and Ewan were sharing a room, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ewan didn’t have a problem with the mattress being tested in his room?”

  “I don’t know what Ewan had a problem with and what he didn’t,” Rob said.

  “Come on, Rob. I bet this cop’s been around the block more than a few times. Probably even with that young constable, eh?” Jeremy leered at Smith.

  Smith kept her face impassive; only the veins in her neck moved.

  Good thing Lucky Smith had left the room, Winters thought. Otherwise she’d no doubt want to contribute to the conversation at this point.

  “Tell me about the relationship between Ewan and Jason, Jeremy.”

  “They got on well ‘cause when it came to girls they were opposites. Ewan liked the prowl. Back alleys, back yard sheds, back bedrooms, back streets. He’d do it anywhere. With anyone. Whereas Jason liked to find a girl and keep her close, for a while. Less work that way. They were never allowed to spend the night, because Ewan would be coming back at some time. Except when he didn’t.”

  “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” Rob said.

  “He’s telling it like it was,” Alan said. His boyish smile had gone and his handsome face had turned dark. He tossed a glance at Sophie, and she studied the polish on her fingernails.

  Winters filed that reaction away for later, and spoke before they could start exchanging insults. “We know Jason went out after dinner, in the rented SUV. You assumed he was going to meet a young lady.”

  “If that’s what you want to call her.”

  “He didn’t return?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  Alan leaned up against the fireplace mantel and Sophie’d taken a chair at the other side of the room where she spent her time picking up the Christmas Village ornaments, one at a time, and turning them in her fingers. “Alain and I,” she said, “came down around half-past eleven. In my family also we celebrate on Christmas Eve. Mrs. Carmine gave us supper. We waited for them for a long time, but Jason and Ewan, they did not come. Only,” Sophie pointed at Smith with her chin, “she came. With the bad news.”

  Mrs. Carmine dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. Overhead a floorboard creaked. Lucky Smith listening from the top of the stairs.

  “This girl Jason had supposedly set up with,” Smith said. “Do you know her name?”

  “Of course,” Jeremy said. “Lorraine. The one Wendy’s always in such a kerfuffle about.”

  ***

  The front door opened with a gentle creak. Light footsteps sounded in the hallway. They hesitated and then went into the kitchen. Winters jerked his head toward Smith, but before she could take a step, Mrs. Carmine shouted. “Kathy, get in here.”

  The girl’s head popped into the common room.

  “Hey,” Jeremy said, “Come on in. The more the merrier.”

  She took small, hesitant steps forward, eyes locked on the floor.

  “Where have you been?” Mrs. Carmine shouted. “Gone for the whole day. I had to finish all the chores myself. And with my back.”

  “Sorry,” Kathy mumbled into the carpet.

  Smith stretched a kink in her neck and happened to look at Rob Fitzgerald. His face was beet red and he also
was examining the carpet as if the secret of life were to be found therein.

  Kathy Carmine stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, looking like a dog that had peed on the carpet, while Winters asked if she’d seen Jason after he’d left on Christmas Eve. She mumbled something that sounded like “No.”

  Winters glanced at Smith. She gave him a slight nod to indicate, she hoped, that she knew what was going on. And it didn’t have anything to do with the case. Of course, she was a raw recruit to this interrogation and secret signal business; she might have just told him that Kathy was a mass murderer.

  Winters got to his feet. “Thank you for your help, everyone. That’s all the questions I have at this time. If you think of anything else that happened the nights in question, no matter how minor it appears, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

  He placed several business cards on the coffee table and walked out.

  Smith followed.

  Mrs. Carmine started shouting at her daughter. “I had to make all the beds myself, and with my bad back.”

  Kathy burst into tears and darted out of the room, almost knocking Smith into the wall. Rob Fitzgerald was heading equally fast for the stairs.

  This overly decorated B&B was a proper den of iniquity.

  It had snowed while they were inside and the van was covered in the white stuff. Smith switched the wipers on to clear the windows.

  “Impressions?” Winters said, as she pulled into the street. “What about the last scene? That girl looked to me like she’d been up to something.”

  “Kathy Carmine? Up to something with Rob Fitzgerald, all right. I’ll take a guess and assume it didn’t go well.”

  “He propositioned her?”

  Smith laughed. “The opposite, I’d say. You’re a man, John; you can’t begin to understand how incredibly humiliating it can be for a girl to offer herself to a guy and be turned down.”

  “Rejection’s pretty rough for us guys too, Ms. Smith.”

  “Rough, but different. In that house where everyone is thinking about nothing but who they’re going to lay next, can you imagine trying to join the game and being rebuffed.”

  “What makes you think that’s what happened? Maybe he tried something and she didn’t like it. Maybe she was agreeable at first and then got cold feet.”

  “Maybe she walked in on him jerking off, I don’t know. Anything could have happened, but the attempted seduction and refusal was my initial impression.”

  “Nothing to do with the Jason and Ewan situation?”

  “I’d say not.”

  “What did you think about that?”

  “With all due respect, John, this one makes me glad I’m not a detective.”

  “Not a clue, you mean?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Except for Lorraine LeBlanc.”

  “I’d seen her earlier that night, Christmas Eve, on the street. She told me she was going to a party at her boyfriend’s place. I figured she was stringing me a line and was surprised to see her later, at the B&B, when I was there to inform them of the accident.”

  “She was Jason’s girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend is a generous term. If Jeremy was right, and isn’t he a charming fellow, Jason had no interest in the chase. He was happy to find a companion to bed down as and when it suited him for the duration of his vacation. Lorraine, I’m sorry to say, fits the bill nicely.”

  “How old is she again?”

  “All of sixteen.”

  “So this has to be done right. The parents will have to be present.”

  “It’s…” Smith glanced at her watch. “Seven o’clock. They might be half-sober, if we hurry.”

  “You don’t have to come. You’re off duty.”

  “Someone has to watch your back when Mrs. LeBlanc gets a look at you.”

  The van slipped a few times as it struggled to get up steep streets thick with snow freshly fallen on top of well-packed ice. A group of young people, laughing and happy, wrapped up against the cold, threw snowballs at each other as they walked into town. A Sphinx carved out of snow sat on the front yard of a house at the corner of Aspen street. It was a good four feet tall, the face perfect: strong and proud.

  “Cool,” Smith said. “Hey, I just thought of something.”

  She drove past the LeBlanc house. Lights were on in the front rooms. The driveway and sidewalk were unshoveled. “At Flavours last night, Lorraine made a big scene at the Wyatt-Yarmouth dinner party. She wanted to be included among the mourners and they were being all snotty about it. I thought they were darn mean to her, but she’d been told to leave, so I had to get her out. Her brother was there, trying to help her.”

  “You told me this earlier.”

  “She’d been wearing these nice earrings. Everything she owns is pretty cheap, lots of it from second hand shops, and she wears the usual teenage junk jewelry. At the time I thought the earrings looked expensive, definitely not her style, but I forgot about them until now. I wonder where she got them.”

  The gold hoops were just the sort of thing a girl like Lorraine would think she needed to fit in with the family of her, supposed, boyfriend. What a mess.

  Winters was thinking along the same lines. “I read in the shift reports,” he said, “that there’s been a number of thefts in the stores on Front Street lately. Your parents’ store amongst them.”

  “I answered that one. Someone snatched a pair of ski goggles. Two hundred bucks worth. Dad was fit to be tied.”

  She stopped talking. She turned right. “How relevant is Lorraine, John? No one killed Jason.”

  “That’s about the only hard and fast fact I have to cling to. Unless aliens swooped down and swapped bodies, in which case I’m giving up the job forever, Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth was alive as he drove his rented SUV into the Upper Kootenay River. The driver of the other car is positive the driver was struggling to keep his vehicle under control.”

  “Any chance the car was tampered with?”

  “The inspectors have been over every inch of the vehicle. Nothing wrong with it, they say, other than a crushed roof and broken windows. And a lot of water damage. Ray Gavin and his guys have fingerprinted the whole thing.”

  “They can do that, through water?” She took a right.

  “They can do just about anything these days, Molly. I’m glad I wasn’t a detective in the bad old days before ballistics and fingerprinting and such. Water’s not a problem. The surface dries and the prints are still there. But they don’t even have to wait for it to dry, Ray used a powder suspension, and he had more prints to lift than he’ll ever know what to do with. It was a rental car, so it’s covered in all sorts of different prints.”

  She turned right again.

  “If anyone’s looking out the windows of the LeBlanc home,” Winters said, “they’ll be calling 911 to report someone casing the joint.”

  “The LeBlancs would let their house go up in flames before they called the police for help. Unless they could find a way to blame it on us.”

  “Pull into the driveway, Molly. We’re here to ask Lorraine if she saw Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth on the evening of December twenty-forth. All part of a normal inquiry. We’re not here to accuse her of anything, so you can put way your truncheon and rubber gloves.”

  “If you insist.” Deciding she couldn’t get the van into the snow-choked LeBlanc driveway, she parallel-parked in front of the house. Parking on the unplowed road wasn’t all that much easier.

  They were scarcely out of the van before the door to the house opened. Harsh yellow light illuminated Gary LeBlanc from behind.

  “Always a pleasure, Moonlight,” he said. “Sorry, but I don’t know your friend.”

  “Sergeant John Winters, Trafalgar City Police. You are?”

  “Here I thought Moonlight was bringing a pal ‘round for a party. Something like bishops and hookers, or maybe cops and villains would be more appropriate, considering the state of her uniform.”

  Smith had almo
st forgotten that she was still wearing ski pants and the hand-knitted red gloves and hat her maternal grandmother had given her for Christmas.

  “I’m Gary LeBlanc, as no doubt Constable Moonlight told you, Sergeant. What can I do for you?” His feet were planted solidly in the doorway, his arms akimbo and his chest puffed out.

  Winters glanced at Smith. Take it.

  She tried to swallow without appearing to be doing so. To get the high-pitched voice that was her curse to drop an octave or two. “Is Lorraine at home?” she asked. That came out well.

  “Maybe.”

  “Gary,” she said. “We’re attempting to find out what a certain man did recently. We’ve been told he might have visited Lorraine, and Sergeant Winters would like to ask her about it. That’s all. We’re looking for your help, not to accuse Lorraine of anything. Or you either.”

  She shouldn’t have added that last sentence. It implied that she had something to accuse him of. Which she didn’t.

  “Can I make a confession, Moonlight? I always thought you were the cutest, and definitely the most together, girl in school. I could never get up the nerve to tell you what I thought. Perhaps I should have, maybe things would have worked out differently.”

  “All that is of no relevance,” she said. The night was sharply cold and her coat was unzipped, but suddenly she was boiling hot. Why on earth was Winters not stepping in to give her a hand? He might have turned to stone, for all the help he was.

  “Is Lorraine at home?” she said.

  “I am.” The girl poked her head through the V between her brother’s arm and his body.

  “Get back inside,” he said.

  “They know I’m here. Let’s get it over with.” Lorraine pulled her head back.

  Gary stepped to one side. “Sorry Moonlight, cop guy, but I’m not inviting you in. Come here, Lorraine. We can talk on the porch as well as any place else.”

  “In full view of the neighbors?”

  “Shocking, eh? They’ve probably never seen cops at this door before.”

  Winters still didn’t say anything. Smith cursed him and bumbled on. “Are your parents at home?”

  “Strangely enough, no. My dear step-father has been called away on an important business matter to Vancouver, and Mama’s visiting her sisters in, shall we say, Toronto.”