“Even e-mail?” I asked with growing delight, because my gut told me that’s where valuable information might be.
Her grin widened. “Piece a cake.”
The ease of it gave me pause. “That includes personal e-mail?”
“Everything. If it’s in the company system, it’s the company’s property.”
“If the government went to the company, could they see everything, too?”
Sabina nodded. “It’s scary.”
“But legal.”
“Based on recent legislation, yes.”
“What about what we’re doing? Is this legal?”
Sabina didn’t seem concerned. “Probably not, but I could always say I was looking for material of my own in there. Besides, they won’t find out. Aidan is too arrogant to think I’d dare hack into the system, and Sandy isn’t savvy enough to realize it’s possible. The only one of the Meades who knows anything is James, and he sticks to his own end of the business.”
I jumped at that opening. “So James is separate? Who takes over when Sandy dies?”
“Aidan.”
“Not James?” I asked, wanting to be sure, because though TrueBlue had implied there was doubt, this went against conventional wisdom. “James is the older.”
“James might succeed if there’s a power struggle. The mill is what it is today because of him. He’s been behind everything new in the last ten years, and without new direction, the mill would have lost ground. So if Aidan takes the helm, will James leave? And if he does, what happens to the mill? They’re troublesome questions. And I don’t know the answers.”
“Do you think Sandy does?”
“I think Sandy tells himself what he wants to hear.”
“Even if it’s not for the good of the mill?”
Sabina shrugged. “He likes Aidan better than he likes James. They’re two peas in a pod.”
“Was it always that way?”
“Sandy preferring Aidan? No. It’s developed in the last couple of years.”
“Why does the town still talk of James as the heir?”
“Wishful thinking. Most everyone hates Aidan.”
Joanne arrived to prepare to open the store, seeming to be totally on top of everything Phoebe had told me to do. While she rechecked the closing charge tallies from the day before and packaged several customer sends, I put on a pot of coffee, vacuumed, and refolded sweaters. I finished just as the store opened, at which point UPS delivered four huge boxes of goods. While Joanne waited on customers, I inventoried the boxes and found an immediate problem with a dye-lot discrepancy, tops mismatched with bottoms. So Joanne and I switched; she got on the phone with the supplier while I waited on customers.
It was enlightening. For one thing, I was greeted warmly, as though I belonged there. For another, word of Phoebe’s treatment had spread. Indeed, the doorbell ting-a-linged often enough to suggest that people were stopping by as much to get news as to shop. Apparently, Phoebe hadn’t been as adept at hiding her symptoms as we thought. The townsfolk knew she wasn’t well. They were concerned.
The circle of customers around me grew until, at one point, there were six women asking questions about Phoebe, and I tried to be vague. But these women weren’t dumb. They could tell an answer from an evasion. When yet one more of them asked what Phoebe was being treated for, I gave in. Quite honestly, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. They wanted to know. And I wanted them to know.
“We suspect she has mercury poisoning,” I said.
There was a collective gasp, then a flurry of questions of the when, where, and how type.
“We won’t know anything for sure until the treatment is done,” I said. “It’s all very tentative.”
There were a few more questions, but they generally tapered off to expressions of support. I shouldn’t have been surprised when every one of those women left Miss Lissy’s Closet and began to spread the word.
After an hour or so, Sabina took over helping Joanne, while I drove to the clinic to sit with Phoebe. She was in a large room with two patients with chemotherapy drips, and there were more people checking on the three of them than I would have imagined, including Tom. He and I talked for a few minutes—talking with him was so easy that yet again I thought of Greg—before I returned to the store.
The first person to greet me there was Kaitlin. She had heard that Phoebe was at the Clinic and that Sabina and I were at the store, and she wanted to help. Joanne put her to work unloading additional boxes of goods that had arrived. I sent Sabina back to the office, and so it went. We took turns helping Joanne work the store and running to the clinic to be with Phoebe. But Sabina was as focused as I was when it came to what had now become our shared mission. Operating on Phoebe’s computer with code from her CDs, she infiltrated Northwood’s system and went looking for dirt.
Me? I had to find people who would talk. To some extent, my past efforts had been blind. If I hoped to find something soon, I had to narrow the list of those I approached. That meant finding people who had in fact been at either the Clubhouse or the Gazebo in the days immediately prior to the fire.
I began with a visit to Sam, catching him as I had two weeks before, just as he was setting off to play golf. “You’re ruffling feathers,” he said around his cigar as he gathered his things, “but I love your spunk. Whaddya need?”
“I want to know who held events at either the Clubhouse or the Gazebo immediately preceding the fires at each. That’s the kind of thing you print in the Times. When you report on town events, you tell where they took place. I want to go into the archives again.”
“You have the dates?”
“I do.”
Sam went to his office door and bellowed, “Angus!” I had thought the place was deserted, what with the Times having come out that morning, but a fair-haired, bespectacled boy showed up at the door. Sam pointed at me with his cigar. “She needs information. Research the archives for her, like a good kid. She’ll give you the dates and the place.”
Pleased, I not only gave him that information but also my cell phone number. While he went to work, I visited Marsha Klausson at The Bookshop. As always, the scent of honeysuckle welcomed me, but if that hadn’t done it, her personal warmth would have. “Did I tell you I had to reorder all three of your books?” she asked the instant she reached my side. “We’ve had a rush on them since Omie died. Must have been seeing you there at the diner that made people curious.”
“Is curious good?” I asked cautiously.
Mrs. Klausson nodded. “They’re intrigued. You were a big name before, but they’ve always associated you with Grace. I think they’re starting to see you as different, and it’s about time. You’re very different from Grace.”
I was starting to think so myself. When I was a kid, I never disagreed with Grace. Now I did.
But I wanted to hear Mrs. Klausson’s take on it. So I asked, “In what ways?”
“Grace had an edge. It showed in her writing. People were either really good or really bad. You’ve always been more nuanced. You see the middle tones in people. You’re more constructive.”
“Constructive?”
“Perhaps practical is a better word. Yes, you rebelled. But you were always more into finding solutions to things. Your books do that. Your characters grow.”
“So, here’s a question,” I said, because there was definitely a solution that I needed right now. “You helped organize the Middle River Women in Business, didn’t you?”
“I certainly did. There were six of us who got it going—Omie, Elaine Staub from the home goods store, the realtors Jane and Sara Wright, and, of course, your mom.”
“Elaine died,” I realized the instant she mentioned the name.
“Yes. Several years back. She had a rough time at the end. If it wasn’t the flu, it was colds, even pneumonia or shingles. That’s painful, you know.”
So there was another person whose death might be related to a long-ago exposure to mercury. “And the Wrights moved
away,” I said, pulling that vague thought from my past reading of the Middle River Times.
“Yes. They weren’t very old, but Jane suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. When it got bad enough so that she had to struggle to work, they moved to Arizona for the warmth and the sun. Jane died a year or two ago—nothing to do with the arthritis, it was her heart. Sara has stayed out there.”
“And she’s well?”
“Far’s I know. We exchange cards each Christmas, but she’s made a whole new life for herself. I believe she found a well-to-do widower. She sounds happy.”
“So of you six women, four have died and two are healthy.”
“Yes.” The bookseller frowned. “It is frightening, the fragility of life, isn’t it? Jane wasn’t old. Your mother wasn’t old. Nor, come to think of it, was Elaine.”
Omie had been old, I reminded myself, but not as old as her parents had been. I was feeling like I was getting somewhere. “Do you remember when you started meeting at the Clubhouse?”
“It was before the fire.”
“Right before the fire?”
“Oh yes. I remember thinking how lucky we were that we weren’t there at the very time. The fire started in the kitchen while the meal for a meeting was being prepared. It wasn’t for our meeting, but it might have been. We did meet that week.” She frowned again. “Twice? Why am I remembering that? Was the fire on a Monday?”
“Tuesday.”
Her eyes brightened. “Tuesday. I remember now. We were going to meet for breakfast that day—Tuesday—but called it off because a stomach bug was making the rounds. The others—Alyssa, Elaine, Omie, and Jane—all had it. Sara and I had been sick the week before, so we missed the lunch meeting on Friday. That’s how it was.”
“If that’s how it was,” I said, repeating the story to Sabina at noon, “there’s a distinct possibility that one of those buried drums sprang a leak that Friday. Mrs. Klausson and Sara missed the meeting because, coincidentally, they had the flu. When the others got sick, it was assumed they had the flu, too—but remember, acute mercury poisoning produces flulike symptoms. Maybe others had similar reactions—you know, the cook, the waitstaff. When the powers that be at Northwood saw this, they knew they had a problem, and they knew just what it was. So they burned the place down. That gave them an excuse to clean up underground and rebuild with no one the wiser.”
“And Mom and the others who were sick?”
“The acute symptoms let up, the mercury drifted to different organs and lay dormant for years, then erupted as chronic mercury poisoning in the form of immune deficiency disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and, in Mom’s case, Parkinsonian symptoms. All four of the women who were at the Clubhouse that day are dead. That says something.”
“But not about Phoebe. Do we know if she was at that Friday meeting?”
“I asked Mrs. Klausson. She thought and thought, but she wasn’t there herself and had no recollection of hearing that Phoebe was. Phoebe wouldn’t have worked all that long for Mom. She certainly wasn’t a seasoned businesswoman at the time. So why would she have been there?”
“I don’t know. So we still don’t know where she was exposed.”
I glanced at the computer. “Have you had any luck there?”
“I’ve found lots of chatter, but nothing usable. I was hoping to find e-mail from Aidan either to his father or to James mentioning mercury, but there’s nothing yet.”
“You said Sandy isn’t a computer person. Does he e-mail?”
Sabina smiled dryly. “He e-mails like Aidan does—tells his secretary what he wants sent and she does it.”
“Maybe the secretaries would talk with us?”
Sabina was shaking her head even before I finished. “Dire loyalty,” she said as my cell phone rang. “They like their jobs.”
I fished the phone from my purse. It was Angus calling from the newspaper office. Pulling up a pad of paper, I wrote as he spoke. According to the Times archives, four events had been held at the Clubhouse and the Gazebo in the days immediately preceding their fires. Thanking him profusely, I closed my phone and put the list before Sabina. At the same time, I pulled out my original list of ill people and set it alongside the other.
“Can you match any up?” I asked.
Sabina didn’t have to look long. She placed a finger at a spot on each list. “Here. Susannah Alban has had one miscarriage after another. And here. The Alban-Duncan wedding was held at the Gazebo two days before the fire.” Stricken, her eyes met mine. “I know about Susannah’s miscarriages, because the first of them coincided with one of Phoebe’s miscarriages.”
“Was Phoebe at the wedding?” I asked, hoping, hoping.
But Sabina shook her head. “Susannah’s more my friend than hers. Ron and I would have been there, except that the wedding was really small, and afterward we were grateful. The guests all had food poisoning. It was a hot day in August. The food was sitting in the sun. It made perfect sense.”
It certainly did, just like the WIBs having the flu, which was going around town at the time. “Any others?” I asked with growing excitement. TrueBlue was going to love this.
Sabina refocused on the lists. A minute later, she pointed again, one finger to each list. “Sammy Dahill. Rotary Club meeting. Sammy was chairman of the club a while back. I only know it because he lives on our street. He’s had kidney problems.”
I knew about those kidney problems. They had been reported in the “Health Beat” column of the Times. “Omie said that runs in his family. According to the paper, three generations of Dahills have had kidney problems.”
“That’s true,” Sabina acknowledged, “but what the newspaper doesn’t say is that Sammy was adopted.”
“Adopted? Why didn’t Omie know that?”
“A senior moment? But it makes kidney problems mighty coincidental, wouldn’t you say?”
I struggled to contain myself. “More importantly, what would Sammy say?” I gathered my things. “I’m going to go see him. And Susannah. If one or both are willing to talk, we’re in business.”
Neither would. Susannah, for one, had her hands full caring for three children under the age of five, all adopted after so many miscarriages. She was convinced that the problem at the wedding had been nothing more than food poisoning. After all, she said, she and her husband both worked at the mill at the time, the Meades had paid for the wedding, and those in attendance really couldn’t complain about a few stomach cramps. Moreover, the Meades had been extraordinarily generous when the children arrived, even transferring Susannah’s husband to the Sales Department and letting him work out of the house when a sleeping disorder (yet another possible by-product of you-know-what) made work at the mill a risk.
As for Sammy Dahill, he owned the printing company that printed not only stationery but annual reports and marketing material for the mill. He claimed not to remember whether there had been a general illness following a meeting of the Rotary Club in March of ’89. Too many years had passed, he said.
Personally, I didn’t believe him. Memory was a convenient excuse.
Starving by now, I picked up a bag of chocolate pennies and, eating as I went, headed for the clinic. But I’ll bet you’re wondering where Marshall Greenwood had gone. I certainly was. He had been harassing me right up until Omie died. It didn’t make sense that he would suddenly stop.
So I asked him. No, he wasn’t following me. There was no sign of him at or around Susanna Alban’s or Sammy Dahill’s, but after I left News ’n Chews, I spotted him parked in front of the Sheep Pen. He actually appeared to be minding his own business. Swinging around the corner, I pulled over behind the cruiser and swallowed down a chocolatey mouthful as I parked and walked up.
“Hey,” I said, smiling at him through the open window. I could see on the passenger’s seat the crumpled Sheep Pen bag that suggested he had just eaten some kind of bar fare—likely chicken fingers or nachos; still, I held out the bag of pennies. “Want one?”
Marshall eye
d me with distrust. “What’s in ’em?”
“Pure chocolate.”
“You didn’t add anything?” he asked in his usual rasp.
I couldn’t decide if he was serious. But I was remembering what Mrs. Klausson had said that morning about my being more nuanced in my judgments of people. So I smiled again. “I should have, after the trouble you gave me last week. But I really am not an ogre.” To show him there was nothing but pennies in the bag, I ate one myself.
This time when I offered, he helped himself to a few. He didn’t thank me, but I didn’t need thanks. “Are we friends now?” I asked.
“That depends,” he said.
I leaned closer, spoke more quietly. “On whether I’m going to tell the world what I know about you or Normie or Hal Healy?”
Trite as it sounds, Marshall did have a deer-in-the-headlights look just then. “What’s Hal Healy done?”
“I’m not telling, because that’s my point. I don’t do that, Marshall. We all have our personal little secrets—our personal little problems. I don’t care about those. It’s not why I’m here. I am not writing a book, and even if I were, I wouldn’t write one about you. So if that’s why you were after me, please don’t be. You are perfectly safe.”
He thought about that for a minute, then said a grudging, “You’re safe, too, even without that assurance. You have friends in high places.”
I straightened. “Who?”
He shot me a crooked smile. “You tell me about Hal, I’ll tell you about your friend.”
It was a test. Did I betray people, or did I not?
I did not. And it was far more important that Marshall know this, than that I know who had spoken on my behalf. Besides, it wasn’t that great a mystery. I knew it wasn’t Sandy Meade, and it sure wasn’t Aidan. There was only one Meade left who had enough clout to get Marshall off my back.
James. I had been trying not to think about him.
Not wanting to now, I simply said, “Checkmate.” I held out the bag. “A few more for the road?”
Marshall took a handful, which left precious few for me, but my hunger had been eased, my craving satisfied for now. Returning to my car, I drove on to the clinic. I hadn’t been with Phoebe for more than five minutes when Tom appeared at the door and hitched his head. I joined him in the hall.
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