False Cast: a small town murder mystery (Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series Book 5)

by S. W. Hubbard

  “But that didn’t stop you from writing to her,” the judge said.

  Anita nodded. “I should have. But I was ashamed. And scared. I thought Olivia probably blamed me for what happened. If I wrote to her first, and she wrote back telling me she didn’t want to hear from me, well, that would mean I had nothing to look forward to when I got out. So I figured, no news is good news, ya know? And nobody told me it was important to stay in touch if I wanted to get her back.”

  “Not your counselor?”

  Anita waved a dismissive hand. “Which one? I had four, and none of ‘em could remember my name. Probably each one thought the other one had told me.”

  Frank scowled. Excuses. Nothing but whining excuses. Surely the judge would see right through this.

  Anita straightened her shoulders and smiled, this time more sincerely. “That’s why when I started getting letters from Olivia last year, and they were all so nice, I got really excited.”

  A shocked murmur passed through the courtroom. Penny grabbed Frank’s arm and Edwin and Lucy looked at each other in confusion.

  The judge leaned forward. “You got letters from Olivia recently?”

  Anita reached into the frayed cloth tote bag on her lap and produced a bundle of envelopes—mostly white, some colored. “Yes, Olivia started writing to me last year and I answered every one of her letters. She sent me twelve. I sent her thirteen.”

  The judge turned to Edwin and Lucy. “You were unaware of this?”

  “Yes!” Edwin’s outraged voice was louder than necessary. “There were no letters from Albion State Prison delivered to the inn. I go out to the mailbox every day around noon. I would know if anything came for Olivia.”

  The judge extended his hand for the letters and Anita rose and handed them over. He held up a letter written in a teenage girl’s round, awkward script. “Is this Olivia’s handwriting?”

  Lucy’s face had the gray, unbelieving expression of a parent called to identify the dead body of a child. She nodded.

  “The return address on the envelope is P.O. Box 492, Trout Run,” the judge said.

  “We don’t have a P.O. Box!” Edwin protested. “We get all our mail delivered to the inn’s mailbox.” Edwin raised an accusing finger. “She sneaked those letters to Olivia behind our back, without our knowledge. Without Trudy’s knowledge. Encouraging a child to be deceptive isn’t good parenting.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Bates,” the judge warned. “Ms. Veech?”

  Anita raised her hands, palms up. “How would I know where they get their mail? Lots of people in Trout Run have post office boxes. My father always did. P.O. Box 492 is the address Olivia gave me, so that’s the address I sent my letters to.”

  Anita leaned forward in her seat and fixed her gaze on the judge. “I didn’t abandon my daughter. I’ve been writing to her regularly this whole year. I know what classes she’s taking in school. She likes history and algebra and likes the books they read in English but doesn’t like the teacher so much. She thinks Earth science is boring—“

  “That’s all true,” Penny whispered in Frank’s ear.

  “She says Edwin and Lucy are nice to her. But she misses me. I’m her mother. And I want to raise my daughter.”

  The judge rose. “I’ll need to read these letters and talk to Olivia and her advocate. We’ll find out whose P.O. box that is. I’ll have a decision on Monday.”

  Frank braced himself for tears all around but they never came. Lucy looked numb, like the sole survivor of a massacre. Edwin clasped her arm as they pushed out of the courtroom.

  Penny rubbed Edwin’s back as they huddled on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. “Let her explore this reunion with her mother, let her resolve her feelings for Anita, and once she does, she’ll come back to you. I’m sure of it.”

  “You don’t get it, Penny. This is not, ‘I’m dropping out of college to tour with my rock band.’ And when it falls apart, she goes back to college older but wiser. This is dangerous. She’s twelve.” Edwin pounded the wall with his clenched fist. “Twelve. She doesn’t know how to protect herself. She can get hurt, more than emotionally—physically. She can lose every opportunity she has for an education and a healthy, prosperous life. Am I supposed to stand by and watch that happen?”

  Chapter 20

  A cold, driving rain pelted the windows of Frank and Penny’s house. They had been planning to go out for a joyous celebration after the hearing, and with those plans in ruins, they found themselves at home contemplating the grim assortment of TV dinners in the freezer.

  “When will the workmen be done with our kitchen?” Penny wailed. “Every time I ask, they say ‘a few more days’. We’ve gone a month with no stove. Once that kitchen is done, I’m never going to microwave anything again as long as I live.”

  “Mac and cheese or chicken pot pie?” Frank held out two frozen bricks to let his wife have first choice.

  “That mac and cheese has seven hundred calories. You eat it.” Penny poured them each a large glass of red wine. “What’s going on with the search for Ronnie Gatrell?”

  She spoke with the feigned interest of a mother inquiring about a geography class assignment. On the ride back from Elizabethtown, they’d both been too stunned to talk about Olivia, Edwin, and Lucy. Frank knew his wife’s mind was fully focused on them, but that she still wasn’t ready discuss what had happened at the hearing. He played along by answering her question. “Meyerson has warned me off the investigation. He absolutely refuses to consider the possibility that Nancy Tomlinson conspired to help Ronnie escape.”

  Penny got interested despite herself. “So what are you going to do?”

  “If I were smart, I’d leave Ronnie to the state police.” Frank took a big gulp of wine. “But I can’t rest easy knowing Ronnie is out there. I can’t shake the feeling that someone else is going to get hurt.”

  Penny stroked the back of his hand. “Does that mean you’re going to keep looking for him?”

  “That means I’m going to keep my ears open. Meyerson can’t stop me from doing that, right?”

  “In my experience, no one can stop you from doing anything you’ve set your mind on.”

  Frank drew his hand away from his wife’s. Penny had meant the remark as a compliment, but it had struck him wrong. He thought of the morality tales he read to his grandkids. Was he the determined Little Engine Who Could? Or the controlling, know-it-all Bossy Bear? “I set my mind on placing Olivia with Edwin and Lucy. That didn’t turn out so well.”

  “Oh, Frank!” Penny busied herself with wiping the fine film of plaster dust off the table and setting out the plates. “You did what you thought was best at the time. I can’t believe Olivia has been writing to Anita for a year behind Edwin and Lucy’s back.” Now Penny’s dismay gushed out. “Why didn’t she just tell them she wanted to try again to get in touch with her mother?”

  “She must feel guilty, torn between Edwin and Lucy and Anita. And kids that age are always testing the limits of what they can do for themselves. When Caroline was twelve, she rode her bike seven miles on the shoulder of a busy four lane road to get to the shopping mall to buy a hat for a school play costume. Apparently, she’d asked her mom to take her and when Estelle said ‘later,’ Caroline took off on her own. When she didn’t show up for dinner, I went out looking for her and found her pedaling along in the dark.”

  The mention of Caroline darkened their mood even further. The microwave dinged and Frank prodded the still-solid center of his dinner.

  “And who did Olivia get to help her?” Penny asked. “What kind of adult would help a child secretly correspond with a prisoner?”

  “I don’t know, but you’d better believe I’m going to be first in line at the post office tomorrow morning to find out.”

  If it was unethical to report who owned a particular post office box, Roxanne, the clerk at the Trout Run post office, was unconcerned. She cheerfully told Frank that box 492 belonged to the Kellum family.

  “Kellu
m? Isn’t that the woman who uses a wheelchair?”

  “Yes, poor Denise has multiple sclerosis, but she can still drive her special van. Her daughter always comes in to pick up the mail so Denise doesn’t have to struggle up the ramp.”

  Frank could see where this was leading. “How old is her daughter?”

  “Jenny? Oh, twelve, thirteen, I guess. Why?”

  But Frank was already out the door.

  He had Edwin on the phone before he even made it back to the town office. “I know who was helping Olivia send the letters to Anita.”

  “Yeah, Jenny Kellum. Olivia told us last night.” Edwin’s voice, usually so animated, sounded flat and exhausted.

  “Did she say why she suddenly started writing to her—, to Anita?”

  “Olivia just said she’d been thinking about her mother and wanted to know how she was doing.”

  “But why did she hide—”

  “Why? Because she’s twelve.” Edwin’s voice got louder. “Because she’ll never fully recover from seven years of neglect. Maybe because her grandfather was a paranoid lunatic and she’s got some of his DNA. I’m surprised you don’t have the answer. You were so full of insights when you persuaded Lucy and me to foster Olivia.”

  How was he supposed to respond? “Edwin, believe me, if I had known this was even remotely possible, I would never have—”

  “Forget it.” Frank could hear the clatter of meal preparation over the phone line. “I’m sorry I lashed out, Frank. I know there are no guarantees with kids. If we’d have had a biological child, she might’ve gotten a brain tumor, or been paralyzed in a car accident, or gotten snatched by an alligator like that poor kid in Florida. Terrible things happen.”

  Frank felt like a sock had been stuffed in his mouth. Terrible things did happen to kids sometimes. The only way to survive parenthood without losing your mind was to convince yourself the terrible thing would never happen to your child.

  And now it had.

  “Don’t feel guilty.” Frank strained to hear Edwin’s final words. “I wouldn’t have traded our time with Olivia. Not even to avoid this pain.”

  When Frank walked into the library with lunchtime sandwiches the next day, he saw a man sitting beside Penny at the Circulation desk computer. His black glasses slipped down his nose as he stared at the screen and bit his lower lip. Then his fingers burst into furious typing. Then more staring and lip-biting. Penny watched as if he were blowing molten glass.

  “Lunch delivery.” Frank plonked the bag from the Stop ‘N’ Buy down on the desk, making them both jump.

  “Hi, honey! Guess what? Gage is helping me fix my problem with the catalog. Or I should say, Gage is fixing it and I’m just watching in awe and wonder.”

  The guy bobbed his head without tearing his gaze away from the computer screen. Another flurry of keyboarding ensued. Penny had been complaining about the endless hours she spent on the phone with a tech support person in Bangalore trying to get the bugs out of the library catalog system. Now it seemed someone had come to fix it in person.

  “Your vendor sent a technician clear out to Trout Run?”

  Penny’s peal of laughter disturbed an old lady reading in the corner armchair, who scowled over the top of her bodice-ripper. “No, he doesn’t work for the software company. This is Gage Shelby, Leon’s son. He’s doing me a favor because he’s so smart.”

  With a final rat-a-tat of the keys, Gage leaned back in his chair, revealing a t-shirt that read, unaccountably, Trampled by Turtles. “That should do it.” He was lean, and despite the glasses, looked fit. He rose with a smile and extended his hand to Frank. “I hear my dad couldn’t manage to sell you a house.”

  “He could have sold Penny a house. And he could have sold me a house. He just couldn’t sell us both the same house.”

  Gage laughed, but Frank didn’t think he sounded all that amused. “That’s the problem with the real estate business in the High Peaks. The great properties never seem to be on the market at the time qualified buyers want them.”

  “Dilapidated money pits are certainly in good supply,” Frank offered.

  “It takes a lot of marketing skill to sell those. And hand-holding.” Gage sat back down next to Penny and arched his back, stretching the t-shirt across his chest. “I learned the hard way that while I had plenty of ideas about marketing, I wasn’t very interested—or good at—hand-holding. Not like the old man.”

  Frank wondered if Gage was still working or intending to join them for lunch. Did Penny know what Trampled by Turtles meant? Frank worried that she did.

  “Gage has been telling me that his original life plan was to come back to Trout Run after college and partner with his dad in the real estate business,” Penny said.

  “But that didn’t work out?” Frank pulled up a chair. He didn’t have much time for lunch, but despite his impatience to dig into his meal, he was curious about this man who’d given Anita Veech a job.

  “Nope.” Gage tapped a pencil on his knee. “Dad told me the business wasn’t big enough to support us both, but I was sure the old man was just doing it all wrong.” He poked his heart with the pencil. “I’d be able to grow the business. I soon learned that my undergrad courses in marketing didn’t really apply in a rural economy where there’s too much supply and not enough demand. Dad was right, as always.”

  “So you switched to computers?” Frank asked.

  “Not really. I moved back to Boston where I still had college friends and got hired by a high-tech start-up to do their marketing. Then I became marketing VP at another high-tech firm. I still consider myself a marketer first and foremost, but I’ve picked up some programming skills along the way.” He smiled at Penny. “Enough to fix a glitchy database, at least.”

  “VP of marketing in Boston sounds like a nice life for a young guy,” Frank said. “What made you come back here?”

  Gage directed a dreamy gaze to the big window at the rear of the reading room, which offered a panoramic view of the Jay Range. “My heart is in the mountains. Always has been. I was born and raised in Trout Run and my time in Boston just served to confirm that this is where I want to make my life.”

  Gage seemed lost in thought contemplating the view. The birch and maple on at the lower elevations were flushed with a light, bright green that contrasted with the darker green of the conifers above them on the slopes. A lovely scene, true, but Frank still didn’t understand how Gage had been able to return to his hometown. He prodded for answers. “So you packed in your big job in the city to open a business here?”

  Gage swiveled around. “I got lucky. Some shares I was holding skyrocketed in value just at the time when I got the idea for my new app. I cashed out and moved. I can do the work from anywhere, so I might as well start living the dream.” He stood up. “I’m keeping you from your lunch.” He picked up a stack of books on the desk and turned to leave. “Thanks for your help with the research, Penny. Nice meeting you, Frank.”

  Gage loped out of the library, hugging the books to his chest.

  Frank handed over the bag of sandwiches. “I’m starving. I thought he’d never leave.”

  Penny unwrapped hers and examined it with a frown.

  “Did I forget something?” Frank asked.

  “No, it’s okay. I just don’t care for yellow mustard, remember?”

  Estelle had loved yellow mustard. Penny liked brown. My God, would he never keep it straight? “I’m sorry. Do you want to trade?”

  “No, it’s fine.” She used a plastic knife to scrape mustard off her bread as she continued talking. “Gage is such a great guy—smart and accomplished. He’s just the kind of person Edwin and Lucy would normally love to meet. But that’s out of question given the Anita issue.”

  Frank told Penny about Jenny Kellum and his conversation with Edwin. “So many situations broke against Edwin. If Olivia hadn’t befriended a girl whose mother couldn’t collect her own mail…if Anita hadn’t taken that coding class…if Gage hadn’t hired her�
�” Frank shook his head. “I still don’t understand—what exactly is his business and why did he hire Anita, of all people?”

  “He came up with this idea for an app that helps hikers and bikers calculate exactly how much food and water they need to pack for a trip depending on the heat and their weight and the speed they’re traveling.” Penny ate a bite of her sandwich. “And he got some angel investors to back him. So now all he needs to do is finish the programming and the marketing and those are things he can do from right here in Trout Run.”

  “You seem to know quite a bit about him. He told you all that while he was checking out his books?” Frank tried to keep his tone light. He didn’t want to sound like a jealous old fool, but he hadn’t cared for the way Gage Shelby looked at Penny.

  “Oh, this isn’t the first time he’s been in.”

  Penny chewed a mouthful of turkey and cheese, keeping Frank in suspense. Was the library Gage Shelby’s home away from home?

  “I’ve been helping him with some research.”

  Frank glanced at the stacks, filled largely with romance and mystery novels, local history, and nature guides. “Research? The closest thing you have to a high-tech book here is Excel for Dummies.”

  Penny clapped her hands in amusement. “Not research for his business. Genealogical research. Gage’s family has lived in Trout Run since 1832. He’s fascinated by all the economic forces that have shaped the area. The rise and fall of the logging industry. The failure of subsistence farming. The influence of tourism. And in the process of researching that, he’s told me about himself, and how he’s working to create some new economic opportunities in town. Pretty neat, huh?”