“A pen name.”
Laurel looked up at him, impressed. “You have been busy.”
“I just had a few more favors to call in. William’s publisher called back, too. They haven’t heard from him, but didn’t expect to until next month.”
Together they started to walk toward Twin Oaks. “So do we pay Hamilton Lending a visit?” Laurel asked, still trying to assimilate this new information.
“Not yet,” Scott said, shaking his head. “Assuming Cecilia isn’t missing, we have no business asking around without a warrant or alarming her employees. She could probably sue us for that.”
“She was married to a man old enough to be her father,” Laurel said. Her entire picture of the woman had changed in an instant.
“And then some. He was almost ninety when he died.”
“It had to be for his money.”
“That would be my guess.”
Their hands brushed as they climbed the steps to the B and B. Embarrassed, Laurel jerked back.
“So where does William come to play in all this?”
“He’s been in Connecticut for almost thirty years,” Scott said. “My source told me he had nothing to do with his father after he left home.”
They stopped on the porch outside the front door.
“Cecilia is the CEO and major stockholder of Hamilton Lending,” he continued. “I’m guessing that either William was disowned—or he disowned them.”
Frowning, Laurel felt some of the pieces fall into place. “But now that William’s father is dead, William isn’t content to see his family fortune go to a gold digger, so he set up this meeting with Cecilia to do something about getting back his birthright.”
“I was thinking along the same lines.”
She wasn’t surprised to find that, once again, she and Scott were on the same track. “So where does the Renwick birth certificate come in? Unless maybe Leslie was adopted. Is there a way to tell?”
“Not always, but yes, she was.”
Laurel grinned at him. “Another favor?”
He nodded.
“There’s more. According to the records of the hospital named on the birth certificate, there was a Cecilia Arnett listed as a patient that day.”
“Leslie is Cecilia’s? But that doesn’t make sense. She was married. Why would she have a baby so far from home and give it away?”
He was standing so close she could feel his body heat. Touch him if she wanted to.
“How much you want to bet Cecilia had an affair or two along the way, found herself pregnant, went away to have the baby and gave it up for adoption?”
“William found out about the baby and is using the knowledge to blackmail Cecilia into giving him an interest in the company.”
“Exactly.”
She frowned and then continued. “But why are they both missing?”
“That’s where I got stumped, too,” Scott said, holding open the front door for her.
“So what do we do next?”
“Drive to Worcester, pay a visit to Leslie Renwick and see if she can shed any light on things.”
“But what if she doesn’t know Cecilia? What if she doesn’t even know she’s adopted? We can’t just go barging in there....”
With a warm finger against her lips, Scott silenced her. “We won’t let on to a thing,” he assured her. “There are ways of asking questions without giving up any information.”
Laurel’s lips were still tingling from the touch of his finger when he closed the door behind them.
* * *
SCOTT HAD A SHORT meeting with Maureen and Clint while Laurel was upstairs getting her things.
He filled them in on his progress with Cecilia Hamilton, giving, in deference to Maureen’s former profession, more information than he usually did at this stage of a case, even one that was still unofficial. He told them that he and Laurel were going to make the three-hour drive to Worcester to pay Leslie Renwick a visit.
“Have you found any evidence of recent meetings between William and Cecilia?” Maureen asked, frowning. They were in the gathering room, standing by the registration desk, and she was tapping a pencil monotonously against the top of the computer.
Scott shook his head. “So far, it looks as though they just met for the first time in at least thirty years on Saturday at the café. There’s nothing my sources have found so far. A single phone call a couple of weeks ago, but that appears to be all.”
Clint reached over and gently removed the pencil from his sister’s fingers. “News of Byrd’s disappearance hit the New Ashford paper,” he said. “We’ve already had one cancellation. Good news is it leaves a room open for Laurel.”
Scott had just heard about the article that morning. Apparently it had run in yesterday’s paper. The source appeared to be one of the guests who’d been staying at Twin Oaks the same time as Byrd. Though the police said there was no official investigation, no reason to suspect foul play, Scott still expected the story to be on the news all over this part of the state by evening.
Maureen’s face was pinched, her ponytail not as neat as it had been the previous times Scott had met her. “I’m thinking of canceling this week’s reservations,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Scott looked from one to the other.
“If either William or Cecilia was planning to blackmail the other, it doesn’t make sense that they’d both disappear,” Maureen said. “It seems more likely that something befell the two of them that had absolutely nothing to do with their reason for meeting. That something could be Carl Nevil.”
“And if it is, we’re responsible for whatever happened to William Byrd,” Clint added. “We can’t risk any more lives.”
Scott stood, arms crossed, rubbing his lip with the back of his forefinger. “If Nevil is behind this, then he already has his victim. Maybe two of them.”
Clint nodded.
Maureen looked from her brother to Scott. “If Nevil is behind this, any one of our guests could be next.”
“She’s right,” Clint agreed, fingers in the front pockets of his slacks.
“I wouldn’t cancel any reservations just yet,” Scott said. “As soon as you do, you’ll be confirming that there’s a problem here and you stand to lose all your fall bookings.”
“We aren’t going to put our financial concerns above the welfare of innocent people,” Clint protested.
“I don’t think you will be,” Scott told them. “If Owen and Carl Nevil are behind this, they aren’t going to be stupid enough to do anything else right away. Not while everyone’s watching the place so closely. Besides, there’s no point. They haven’t gotten the full benefit from their first hit yet. No need to waste another.”
Maureen had to know that as well as he. She was probably just too spooked at the moment to be thinking objectively.
She was frowning. “How convinced are you that Owen’s behind this?” she asked Scott. “On a scale of one to ten.”
“Two, maybe three, but only because he’s not available for questioning.”
She nodded. “Then I guess we just sit and wait.”
Scott was going to do everything he could to make that excruciating period of waiting as short as possible for her.
* * *
THE DRIVE ACROSS THE STATE of Massachusetts was a beautiful one. The first hints of gold and red appeared in the dark green canopy of trees that shaded the highway, and the brilliant colors of the distant meadows had deepened, sure signs of the approaching fall.
For the first part of the drive, Laurel and Scott reviewed the evidence they had so far, this time with Laurel’s tape recorder running. They ended up right where they’d been the day before—desperately needing to know more.
If William and Cecilia’s disap
pearance had nothing to do with their reason for meeting, then where were they? Could it be that someone was after one of them and got two in the bargain? And why had the Renwicks’ names been whited out on that birth certificate?
When Scott’s cell phone rang about half an hour after they’d left Cooper’s Corner, Laurel hoped for good news, until she saw the disappointment cross Scott’s face.
“The fingerprints lifted from Byrd’s room were inconclusive,” he said, ending the call.
“If we’re working with a professional, they would be,” Laurel said, voicing what they both already knew.
“There also just might not have been any clear prints because there weren’t any clear prints.”
She supposed, but too many things were adding up to keep pointing to simple happenstance.
“You know, rather than a random crime, someone could easily be after Cecilia. She’s worth a bundle.”
“Which explains the security level at her house,” Scott added.
“The guy could have been waiting at her house for her to arrive.”
“Though I hope you’re wrong, the explanation fits.”
She’d been hoping Scott would find a hole in her logic. Watching as the Massachusetts landscape whizzed past her window, Laurel tried to find the optimism she’d held on to for the past couple of days. But her heart filled with dread as she thought of the older man, now missing for four days. If something bad had happened to him, if he’d suffered...
“What reason are we going to give Ms. Renwick for showing up at her home?” Laurel asked, needing a different track for her thoughts.
She’d done some laundry at Twin Oaks and was wearing her white slacks again with her favorite black short-sleeved sweater, but wished she’d chosen something else. The day was turning out to be very hot.
Scott shrugged, one hand on the wheel, the other resting along the window beside him. “I don’t know for sure, yet,” he said. “But I won’t lie to her. I can’t tell her the whole truth, of course, but I’m always honest.”
Laurel knew that about him—the newspaper article he’d had published without her permission notwithstanding. She remembered the time he’d sideswiped his dad’s car pulling out of a fast-food drive-through. The elder Hunter had assumed that someone had dinged the car in a parking lot, leaving Scott off the hook.
He’d confessed, anyway, and had to submit to an entire Saturday afternoon of driving through pylons with his father in the parking lot of Theodore Cooper Elementary School.
“Does that mean we tell her you’re a cop?” Laurel asked, hating to worry the woman when they didn’t really know for sure yet that there was anything to worry about.
She was relieved when Scott shook his head. “Until this case becomes official, we’ll leave my profession out.”
“Can we tell her that we found her birth certificate in the room of a bed-and-breakfast in Cooper’s Corner and wanted to return it to her?”
He grinned at her. “You’re better at this than you let on. That would be a great place to start. We can use that to lead into asking her if she has any idea why it might have been there.”
“And what do we do if she asks whose room we found it in?”
“We tell her that no one was in the room at the time.”
“Which is technically true, but...”
“In this case, ‘technically’ is going to have to do.”
“And what do we do if she pushes for more information?”
His jaw tense, Scott stared straight ahead. “Assuming we’ve ascertained that she knows she’s adopted, we tell her as much of the truth as we know. It’s her birth certificate we’re holding. She probably has the right to know.”
When he put it like that, Laurel couldn’t argue. She just would rather not be the bearer of bad news. She knew how horrible it felt to be the receiver.
Watching Scott’s hand on the steering wheel, Laurel was struck with how absolutely horrible it must have been for him to be the one to tell her about Paul’s death.
At the time she’d only been able to think about the fact that Paul was gone, and it had taken her a long time to comprehend that.
But Scott had suffered a loss, too. His brother was dead, and before he could grieve, he had to break the news to Laurel.
He’d told her with such gentleness, such love and compassion. She wondered where, in the midst of his own pain, he’d found so much strength to give to her.
Gratitude filled her heart to overflowing. Gratitude and love for this man who’d been such a good brother to her—better, she was sure, than if she’d had the biological sibling she’d always longed for.
Sometime before she went back to New York, she was going to thank him for that.
* * *
“TELL ME SOMETHING,” Scott said now, his brow clear as he relaxed back, one hand on the wheel, the other casually thrown across the armrest between them. “How is it that you can always figure out the right way in to other people’s thought processes?”
She turned off her tape recorder.
“I’ve spent my life fitting into other people’s lives.” Survival in the foster system meant having to quickly ascertain, in every new environment, just what the family needed. Why they were opening their home to her. Her only hope of being able to stay awhile was to answer that need.
“That sounds painful.”
“Not really.” Laurel slipped out of her sandals and put one foot up on the corner of the dash. “When you make those around you feel good, you’re generally making yourself feel good, too.”
“Is that what you did with Paul?”
“No,” Laurel sighed. “He was the exception.”
Scott didn’t say anything so she continued. “Paul was the first person I can remember who tried to please me before I even thought about trying to please him. When we were together, he was always concerned about my comfort, both physically and otherwise.”
“You were always doing things for him, too.”
“Of course. I loved him.”
“I looked out for you.”
Her heart rate sped up at the intimate tone, and to her dismay, her stomach churned with desire.
“I know you did,” she said softly. And then, out of self-preservation, she reminded both of them, “Your dad did, too. You guys were a first for me.”
“But there’ve been others since?”
Laurel thought about that. “No,” she finally said. “There’s been no one since.”
* * *
SCOTT HADN’T MEANT the conversation to turn so serious. After the night before, he’d been determined to do exactly the opposite. But he just couldn’t leave well enough alone.
“What about you? And your needs?” he challenged. “Don’t you sometimes just need things for yourself?”
“I only need to be able to do what I can to make the people around me happy so they’ll keep me around.” A smile accompanied the words. She was joking.
But Scott knew there was truth in those words.
Frustration welled up inside him. He loved her. He could give her the security she’d always craved. The sense of belonging.
And yet he knew it was the one thing he’d never have the opportunity to do.
* * *
AS THEY CROSSED the state, the landscape—and the road signs—began to change. Orchards gave way to bogs. Advertisements for sugar bush tours and roadside stands selling maple syrup gave way to signs for cranberry-harvesting tours, a cranberry museum and the Massachusetts Cranberry Harvest Festival.
The bogs were impressive, stretching as they did for acres and acres.
“Did you know that for every acre of cranberry bog, growers have an additional four acres of supporting land?” Scott asked.
She frowned, looking out at the bo
g they were passing. A sprinkler system was completely soaking the land, except where workers appeared to be pulling weeds. She’d been living on this side of the state for several years, Laurel thought, yet she knew practically nothing about the cranberry industry.
“Supporting land?” she asked.
“Wetlands, uplands, ditches, flumes, ponds—sources for the fresh water supply the plants require...”
Scott continued, rattling off statistics like an audio encyclopedia. Facts about the berries, the growers, the economics.
Laurel absorbed the information, fascinated by how much Scott knew. He’d often regaled them with a wealth of nonessential facts. Paul and his father had humored him, but Laurel, feeling like a little kid, had soaked it all up.
“Because pollination is essential to a cranberry crop, growers use an average of one to two beehives per acre of bog,” he added.
Laurel looked out the window for the hives, knowing that Paul would have teased her for doing so.
It wasn’t that Paul had been mean—or even small-minded. He’d just enjoyed teasing her about her voracious need to know everything. But he’d also told her he’d loved her unending curiosity.
Paul was extremely intelligent. His IQ was probably genius level if anyone had cared to find out. But his knowledge was as focused as his life had been. He knew everything about the things that affected him and little about anything that he couldn’t use directly.
Scott, on the other hand, knew all kinds of interesting facts that had no practical application other than broadening the mind and fostering an appreciation of life and the larger world around him.
The bog stretched as far as she could see.
“I wonder how they harvest all that.”
Scott shifted, stretching one long leg. “A couple of different ways, depending on what they’re going to use the cranberries for.”
“You going to tell me what they are?” she asked, with a nudge to his arm when he left her hanging there.
It felt good touching him.
It also felt good to listen as he told her about the harvesting methods and the wildlife in the bogs as well.
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