Joey wiped his face with the sleeve of his counselor-sized Camp Saskee-wee-wit T-shirt, twisting the sleeve in one hand and ducking his face to it.
“I thought that was the end of it, but sure enough, here comes Lance and his woman, just like Kenner said. Couple weeks later. Everybody stops at our place, you know, especially city people, they see those woods ahead. I see the look in Truck’s eyes and I go to Lance, you know, there’s dangerous beings in these woods. Tried to warn him. He didn’t get it.”
George said, “So Lance and Gina take off into the forest. Your dad goes after them?”
“Not until a couple days later. We argued some more. Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure Truck got right on the phone to track down Kenner, to cut his own deal with him.”
“Yeah,” said George, “he got in touch with Kenner before Lance showed up. He opened accounts at twenty banks, from Harkett to Bainbridge.”
“OK, that’s what he was doin’ instead of fishing, then.”
George said, “Then Kenner got this Leland Harris from Seattle to deposit five thousand dollars in each one.”
Joey said, “One thing, Truck’s not stupid. He’s a chump, but he’s not stupid. All that money in one place’d make people talk.”
“What’s a chump?” asked Petey from my hip.
“Quiet, honey,” I said.
“A chump,” answered Joey Preston kindly, “is a guy who sells off his dignity.”
I began to like Joey Preston.
“What happened at the gorge?” prompted George.
“Well, you know Lance had got a head start into the woods. He got mixed up with Bonechopper’s gang, I’m sure that was quite the sidelight for him. Time Truck caught up with him, I’d caught up with Truck. If I’d been one minute later it would’ve been over. There were the three of us having it out on the lip of the Harkett gorge. I knew Truck hadn’t taken his gun along; I wondered why. I think Kenner told him not to use a gun, wanted the death to seem like an accident.”
“Yeah, I see,” said George.
“He’d already whacked Lance a good one, and Lance was there dazed. On his hands and knees, I remember, trying to clear his head. It all happened pretty fast. I got into it with Truck, tried to walk him away from Lance and calm him down. He caught me off-guard. I really didn’t think he’d try to kill me. I thought I could talk to him.”
“But he turned on you?” said George.
“He had him a club he’d made from a tree branch, and he just whaled me with it, straight to the head. So quick, so sudden, I saw stars. Next thing I know I’m halfway down the gorge, on that ledge, my leg is busted, and I see this—something—flying past my head. It was Lance, screaming. I call to my father to help me. He looks down at me and says Boy, I want you to think about what you just did. Like I’d done something wrong! Well, to him I did, trying to stop him from doing something he wanted to do. I go Truck, help me. He just—turned away. My own real father. That was it.”
“Wow,” murmured Petey, without his usual exclamation point.
Joey said, “I’m gonna hear that scream of Lance’s for the rest of my life. Don’t seem to bother my sleep, but I think about it.”
I said, “And you’ve been lying here all these days fighting with your conscience about giving up your father?”
I noticed that George hadn’t quite put himself that far into Joey’s shoes yet. He shot a respect-ray in my direction.
Joey Preston said, “Yes, ma’am, I could’ve been of some more information to you. I knew you all thought I did it, you and Daniel anyway. I don’t blame you. For all you know I’m making this all up right now. Weren’t no eyewitnesses, no security cameras out there in the woods. Not yet, anyway. They got ’em in the stoplight in town, I can tell you.”
“I know you’re not lying,” said George quietly.
“I gotta admit Truck’s not much, leaving me to die on that ledge. But even if he’s a true murderer, he’s still your father, you know? I was lyin’ here hoping—I wouldn’t have to give him up. Somehow. I don’t know what I was hoping.”
“Joey,” I said, “I found a chainsaw in the equipment shed.”
He opened his eyes. “Oh, yeah?”
“Would you have any idea whose it was?”
“Gosh, I’d expect there’s prob’ly a lot of old junk lying around this—”
“It wasn’t old, it was modern and clean and full of gas and oil. Quite the mystery, I feel.”
“Oh,” he said. “Would it be a Stihl brand, by any chance?”
“With a two-foot bar. Well cared for. Sharp.”
“Oh boy. Well, you caught me.”
“What?”
Joey twisted his forelock in his fingers. “That’s my saw.”
“It is?”
“Ma’am, you see this camp?” He paused, evidently waiting for me to answer.
“Yes. Yes, Joey, I see this camp.”
“No, I mean really see it. Truck and I were fixing to dismantle these cabins for their old growth. These beams, haven’t you noticed how good they are, how high the ring count is per inch, how solid? The planking too.” He gestured.
“Uh—”
“This wood is three-hunnerd-year-old Doug fir. The cedar’s at least a hunnerd, a hunnerd and fifty, the shakes and shingles outside, in my estimation. Built out of anything else, these cabins would’ve melted down in ten years. In this climate? I toted that saw in a couple days before this whole business started. Was gonna get going right away, but it started raining so hard I’d have drowned the engine. So I left her.”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t realized how practically every stick in every cabin was sound, beneath the dust and dead bugs. I should have been amazed at the hardiness of these buildings.
Joey said, “The moss and lichen on the exterior pieces are nothing, you just scrape that off and get virgin wood. You know how much people in cities pay for this stuff?”
“You were gonna steal it?” asked Petey, shocked.
Joey looked at him steadily. “If I left this wood here—well, the way I see it, it’d be criminal to leave it. A real honest-to-God waste.”
“So you’d sell it?” I asked.
“Yes ma’am, sell it. Truck and I agreed to split whatever we got for it.”
“And you’d do what—buy a new pickup with your share?”
“Ma’am,” Joey answered patiently, “no, not to buy a pickup truck with. I’d—I’d just as soon not say, actually.”
“That’s too bad, Joey,” I said. “Because we’re well past the point where anyone gets to keep any more secrets.”
He cleared his throat and thought for a while. Then he manned himself up. “Well, if I don’t tell you, you’ll think somethin’ bad.” He sighed. “You might have noticed how run-down the sheriff’s office is.”
“I guess so.” I remembered the floor creaking beneath me, and I remembered the disapproving squeak of Deputy Grolech’s desk chair.
“It’s just a prefab. Nothing to it. Now I suppose it’s a total loss from the flooding. Well, I was gonna make an anonymous donation so they could fix it up. Sheriff Craig, he don’t shake down strangers who come through here, so he’s got what he’s got. Be nice for him and the deputies to have a better place to work out of.”
It hit me. “The deputies.” The girl in town. “Deputy Grolech?”
Joey looked away.
George looked at me.
I remembered the sturdy Deputy Olive Grolech and her demi-mullet hairdo, her beefy shoulders, and her ladybug earrings.
I said, “I think it’s lovely of you to want to do something nice for Olive and the other personnel at the sheriffs office.”
He gave me an embarrassed nod of thanks, still in love with Olive Grolech, still too humiliated to even speak her name.
“Uh, in any event,” I told him, “I borrowed your saw.”
“You borrowed my Stihl?”
Petey’s hat moved at my elbow. He took it off to listen, his face lifted to the roof.
We all became aware that the storm had slackened. It was quite dark now.
“What’s that?” said my boy, his frequency tuned slightly higher than the rest of ours.
“Honey, I don’t—”
A searchlight hit the cabin, then our ears and sternums felt the concussion of a gigantic helicopter pulverizing the air directly overhead.
Petey clutched my legs, but we grown-ups all heaved a collective sigh of relief.
Chapter 32 – Bertrice’s Epiphany; Sheriff Craig Works the Angles
Bertrice de Sauvenard had never liked Kitty Harris, but at a time like this, you bake something and take it over. Yes, even though one could afford to send anything, a homemade nut bread or a meat loaf delivered personally carries human warmth. The little things.
She put the foil-wrapped meat loaf in the Harrises’ cavernous fridge.
Kitty was sitting on one of her white couches staring knob-shoulderedly through the window at the Space Needle without seeing it.
Bertrice knew it was too early to say, I know you can’t believe this now, but it will get easier with time. It will.
The circumstances were just too bizarre, just too impossible. So she simply took the stunned Kitty’s elfin hand and sat holding it.
“Why?” said Kitty. “Why?”
She’d lived a night of hell and looked it, that first wave of shock and grief. It was barely eleven in the morning now; the family hadn’t gotten in yet.
Why? was a question Bertrice de Sauvenard certainly could not answer, though she could take a pretty goddamned good guess. Why indeed would someone wait next to Leland Harris’s car in the Silver Coast parking garage last night, shoot him five times in the chest, then cut out his tongue and toss it on the hood of his Jaguar?
Robbery had evidently not been a motive.
“What was he doing at the office on a Sunday night, anyway?” asked Kitty, her voice trembling. She mashed a tissue to her eyes. The tissue box was a silverplate boutique cube that was holding its polish well, under the circumstances. “Not that he isn’t dedicated, you know,” she added reflexively.
“I imagine,” Bertrice suggested in a gentle tone, “he was working on the hotel in Bangkok, his pet project. They’re half a day ahead over there, so he was talking to them on their Monday morning.”
The police were questioning everybody, of course. Bertrice had expressed shock and disbelief. She said nothing about Ivan Platonov or George Rowe; she wouldn’t until she had spoken to Rowe. She had not heard from him since he hurried off three days ago.
The all-sky-blue picture Bertrice had heard of hovered serenely on the wall. Maybe it would give Kitty some comfort, she had wanted it so badly. But for now Kitty sat lost in grief, and Bertrice tried to think of something nice to say about Leland.
“Leland knew so many ins and outs, business-wise.”
“Mmph,” responded Kitty.
“I remember how good he was to Little Kenner when he came in to do that school project.”
Faintly, Kitty said, “What?”
“You remember, don’t you?—when Little Kenner came in to do a report on Silver Coast for his high school class? I remember him all skinny and nervous in his suit and tie. Big Kenner made a big deal out of it, I remember somebody took pictures, there’s even one in the lobby, like mayor-for-a-day. Leland took Kenner to lunch, took him under his wing, and told him all about the company. I would’ve thought—”
“He never mentioned that,” said Kitty. “Not that I remember. How nice.”
“Oh, yes, Big Kenner told me they spent quite a bit of time together for a while after that. You remember how they used to go off and talk at our picnics, so seriously! In fact, I sometimes wonder if Leland felt Kenner was the son he never had.”
Kitty Harris made a baffled sound. She remarked with the exhausted candor of grief, “I don’t think he even liked your son.”
“Really? Really?”
The Harris condo was already starting to get stuffy. The housekeeper lurked nervously with nothing to do, and Bertrice persuaded Kitty to give her the rest of the morning off. Tomorrow she’d need her more.
When Bertrice got out of there, she left her car at the Harrises’ building and walked, wanting to walk, drinking in the salt air that was blowing in off the Sound, wet with minerals and growth. The fierce early winter storm had passed, and the city seemed even cleaner and more wholesome than usual.
She wore driving moccasins and her favorite coat, the white wool that swung and made her feel like a movie star, and it was good to walk, the air tasted so lively and pure. She swung her hands in their black kid gloves.
My God, she hadn’t taken a deep breath in days. Now she straightened her back, expanded her chest, and let the cool air rush into her body. Her mind, she realized, must have been a bit muddled, because the world appeared quite literally clearer now. The edges between buildings and objects were more distinct; the crimson jacket of a man walking toward her vibrated with redness.
She turned uphill, wanting the resistance, her legs strengthening against the sloping concrete sidewalk. The enormity of Leland Harris’s assassination began to sink in. God, how abominable. Never again would Leland pluck at his sprout of gray hair atop his eggplant head; never again would he saunter into a subordinate’s office with his stupid greeting, “Hey there, hi there, ho there!” Never again would he order a new suit, vomit off the stern of Bertrice’s sailboat, make love to Kitty.
Her thoughts jumped to George Rowe. She had hired him as an investigator, and he was turning out to be a protector as well. As soon as they’d uncovered the Platonov connection with that phony hotel deal, this had happened. Did it have to happen?
She realized that Harris had been more of a threat to her than she’d imagined, perhaps still was. God in heaven: perhaps still was. She didn’t even know what that meant, but she felt it. The sidewalks were busy with early lunch seekers. She kept walking uphill, and soon had more elbow room.
Embezzlement was one thing. Fraud was one thing. What had been Harris’s ultimate goal?
The pieces were trying to fall together in spite of her reluctance to acknowledge them.
Leland Harris wanted more. He wanted the ultimate more: control of the Board of Directors.
Her boys wanted more. Kenner had always been the needier one.
Yet she and Big Kenner had loved them equally—hadn’t they? Had given to them equally, at least?
Hadn’t it all evened out, over time?
Kenner had never been satisfied with her efforts on his behalf. Could that be why she favored Lance? You’re not supposed to favor one child, but you do. Big Kenner had favored Kenner. She had favored Lance.
That’s just the way it worked.
Big Kenner was gone. Little Kenner was now no one’s favorite.
You have to be your own favorite.
Her thoughts swirled with the breeze whipping around the buildings of Seattle. Kitty had said, “I don’t think he even liked your son.” And this was just so odd, so against the impression Leland had given her and Big Kenner.
Something was wrong.
A link existed, somehow, between Kenner and Leland that she didn’t understand, though it had begun a long time ago. They had something...unsavory...in common.
How could skimming from her wealth have ever satisfied Leland Harris? How could she ever satisfy Kenner?
She thought about Kenner’s stunt with his monogrammed, blood-soaked shirt. Everybody after her money. The money. Big Kenner’s money.
But until this moment she hadn’t realized that to Kenner—and to Leland Harris—she had stopped being an ATM to tap and tap and tap.
She’d become an obstacle.
This realization struck her so hard she staggered. She put out a gloved hand to steady herself against the nearest building. She felt the coldness of the stone facade through her glove. Her fingers gripped the rough rock as if it were a cliff she must not lose hold of.
Her phone rang in her purse.
&nb
sp; She knew who was calling, and while she did not know exactly what George Rowe would tell her, she knew that in a few seconds nothing would be the same, ever. Which version of hell would be hers today? He would want to meet with her in person, but she would insist he tell her now, for she wouldn’t be able to bear the delay.
She eased her eyes to Puget Sound, there at the foot of the street, the water so blue today after having been chopped lead for weeks. She thought of her little sailboat nudging on its mooring lines. The thought of being buoyed by it, slicing through the waves, the fact that the boat would be there, the salt water and islands and the open sea beyond would be there—always—no matter what happened today, were the only things that gave her the strength to pluck that phone from her bag and answer it.
_____
Sheriff Harold Craig eased himself through a jagged hole in the plate glass window of GB’s Garage, the floodwaters having done their blind blundering damage and receded. The concrete oil pit was still full of water, of course, a witch’s brew of floating grease and crud. The high-water mark reached almost to the tops of the roll-up doors. He picked his way through sodden clumps of junk, wood scraps, metal jumbled on the mud-coated floor. Good soles on his duty boots, but still he moved carefully.
He had, of course, been the one to handle the case of the dead professor from Tacoma who’d been pulled out of the Harkett gorge a little over a week ago. He’d interviewed the two climbers who’d found him, and they’d described having seen a man with a mark on his face in the area. The only man in Harkett with a mark on his face noticeable from a distance was Truck Boyd. However, he’d gone over to the garage and talked with Truck and not gotten the intuition he knew anything. The overall problem being that nobody knew exactly what day this hiker had died, nobody knew whether he’d fallen on his own or been bashed or pushed—the coroner had not determined that—nobody knew anything.
It was harder to read Truck’s face after his disfigurement, but what beef could he have with some stranger from Tacoma?
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 91
