by Carolyn Hart
Annie sat bolt upright.
Max frowned. “Yeah, I tried to call the chief earlier to tell him Oldham had rented the boat from you. I’ll track Frank down. If the boat’s not back now—”
Lightning erupted and the pale flash reached even to the coffee area. The rattle of the thunder drowned out Max’s words. “—God help him. I’ll call.” He hung up, then quickly punched the numbers.
Thunder exploded again, like boulders bounding down a mountainside. Annie looked toward the rain-lashed windows. To be in the open water in a storm like this…
Chapter 11
Chief Saulter’s yellow poncho glistened greasily in the rain-shrouded lights of the marina. He looked out at the choppy water. Sea and sky merged into a moving mass of dark gray. “I’ve contacted the Coast Guard. They’ll be out at first light. But if the rain doesn’t ease up…”
He didn’t finish. They all understood. It was hard enough to spot a small boat in the great expanse of the ocean on a clear fine day when the sea was calm. In a steady rain, the chances dwindled to almost nothing.
“Damn fool,” Ben Parotti observed.
Not a fool, Annie thought. An angry, brokenhearted man.
“If I’d caught you earlier…” Max began.
Saulter shrugged. “I tried to find him to talk to him. But I figured he’d turn up. Not your fault, Max.”
The rain abruptly intensified. Annie tried to imagine being out on that white-capped ocean in a boat. She scarcely heard Saulter conclude, “He ran away because he killed a man.”
Case closed. A happy ending for Samuel Kinnon. Heartbreak for Gail Oldham.
Annie slept restlessly. She was tired, so tired. Too many people, too many places, too much emotion. Phantasms drifted through her dreams:
David Oldham, looking at her with hope and fear in his eyes.
Gail Oldham, her neck distended, her mouth stretched in fury.
Bud Hatch, bullish and yet stricken.
Edith Cummings, sly and defiant.
Henny Brawley, turning away from Annie, desperately pretending it was life as usual.
Samuel Kinnon, scared to death.
Ned Fisher, self-contained and worried.
Toby Maguire, blowing a piccolo.
Jonathan Wentworth, courtly and handsome. But in that last glimpse Annie had, his face was taut and strained while his wife was amused.
Emily Wentworth, drawing on a social manner that had seen her through good times and bad.
Sharon Gibson, confident yet tense.
Ruth Hatch, eyes shiny with tears.
And a motorboat bucking huge waves, lightning streaking across the sky, an anguished cry—
Annie flailed up out of bed, but Max had already grabbed the phone. His voice was groggy, “Hello…”
The luminous dial of the bedside clock read twenty past eleven. Exhausted and drained, they’d gone to bed early, just after ten.
“Shot?” Max was on his feet, clutching the receiver. “My God, we’ll be right there.”
May Kinnon held up a splotched bath towel, once a pale blue, now streaked with blood. “Samuel—” Her face screwed up like a baby’s and tears rolled down her cheeks. She struggled to breathe.
“It’s all right, Mama. It’s all right.” Luther Kinnon pulled May close, held her tight. “Our boy’s all right, Mama.” He looked over her head at Annie and Max. “The doctor said he’ll be fine.” Luther’s voice was loud and deep. “They’re going to fix him up just fine.”
Annie knew Luther was reassuring himself. “Luther, when—”
The curtain to the emergency cubicle parted. Luther’s head jerked toward it.
The doctor—Cary Martin, a golfing buddy of Max’s—stooped a little to come under the bar. He was six feet seven with a mop of curly brown hair and bright brown eyes. His easy smile pricked the tension in the room like scissors in a balloon.
Luther and May Kinnon waited, the beginnings of relief on their strained faces.
“Samuel’s fine.” Cary’s soft-as-silk accent was pure Broad Street. “All stitched up. He’s had a shot for pain and another for infection. He won’t need surgery. He’s very lucky. The bullet just clipped his upper arm, but no muscle damage.”
May Kinnon held up the towel. “So much blood!”
“Flesh wounds bleed a lot. Same thing with ears.” Cary patted Luther on the shoulder. “He’s real drowsy now. But you can come in and see him if you like. We’re going to keep him overnight.”
Max looked at the doctor sharply.
“Hi, Max, Annie. It’s okay,” Cary said. “Chief Saulter thinks he’ll be safer here. There will be a policeman outside Samuel’s door.”
Despite the full effort of the windshield wipers, Max peered uncertainly ahead. “I know this road.” He was exasperated. “We should have—oh, here we are.” The car slowed to a crawl. Max nosed his car onto the road leading to the Kinnon house. Around the second curve, a patrol car blocked the way, its headlight beams a bright swath against the forest darkness.
Max stopped the car. A slicker-clad policeman approached, his hooded brown poncho shiny with rain.
Max punched the window button. Rain spattered inside the car. “Officer—hey, Billy, it’s us. The Kinnons asked us to come out and check with the chief.”
Billy squinted through the rain. “I don’t know, Max. It’s a crime scene. I’ll see what the chief says. We’ve got the road blocked.”
Annie, bouncy with the sheer relief of Samuel’s narrow escape, resisted the impulse to offer a Speak your Mind: Oh, gee, Billy, it’s so clever of you to tell us since we might otherwise never have noticed the patrol car parked across the road.
Billy trotted to the car, slid into the front seat. In a minute, he returned. “Chief said no cars, but if you want to walk the rest of the way, it’s okay. He said to keep to the middle of the road.”
Annie and Max walked swiftly. Even though each carried a flashlight, it was several shades darker than hell once out of sight of Billy Cameron’s patrol car. Their feet squelched in the mud. Tall pines crowded the edge of the road. Ferns reached out to flick beads of cold water at them. The rain was steady, although no longer a downpour. This time, however, Annie was dressed for the elements with a slicker and rain hat to keep her warm and dry. The wind soughed in the pines, but the trees no longer bent and cracked.
In the wavering beam of her flashlight, Annie saw two possums, a raccoon and five deer before they reached the end of the road. It was well past midnight and obviously party time for the forest denizens.
The Kinnons’s two-story wooden house was built up on stilts. Lights blazed from every window. A flashlight beam bounced along the east edge of the yard. The front of the house faced south.
Max cupped his hands and shouted. “Frank?”
The bobbing flashlight continued its steady survey. The front door opened and Frank Saulter rattled down the steps, pulling up the hood of his yellow slicker. Saulter strode toward them. When he reached them his tired face was irritated. “Tell Luther everything’s under control. And we don’t know who the hell shot Samuel. Whoever it was got out, quick. There’s nobody out here now but cops and owls and damn wet raccoons. Just ran off a couple of ’em trying to open the garbage.”
Raccoons are as adept as Houdini in opening containers others wish to keep shut.
“So I can tell Luther and May it’s okay to come home?” Max managed to sound as if he were part of an official delegation.
“Sure, sure. But we won’t be done for a couple of hours yet.” Saulter’s voice was edgy. “And we’ll have to come back when it’s light to get shots outdoors.”
“That’s fine. Luther wants to cooperate to the fullest. Listen, Frank, we don’t want to get in the way. Maybe you could fill us in on the investigation and we’ll report back to the hospital.”
Annie watched admiringly. Was it Max’s lawyer background that gave him an unassailable air of officialdom or was it simply that he was a white male?
; “Samuel okay?” Saulter still stood in their way.
“He’s fine. The bullet grazed his upper right arm. No serious damage.” Max looked past Saulter. “Where did it happen?”
A whistle blew shrilly.
Saulter blew out his breath in an irritated spurt. “I don’t have time to baby-sit. Don’t touch anything. Don’t walk anywhere you see crime tape. And keep quiet.” He turned away, breaking into a heavy lope toward the side yard, where the flashlight beam pointed into a thicket of bamboo. Annie and Max followed at a discreet distance.
“What’ve you found, Lou?” Saulter squatted beside the stocky, smaller officer holding the flashlight.
Annie recognized Officer Pirelli’s round face under the brim of his hat.
“There’s where he waited, Chief.” Pirelli had a high, musical voice. “Look how the bamboo’s crushed down.” The light zoomed along a trough in the center of the bamboo thicket. Broken yellow stalks formed a springy platform.
Saulter swiveled to look toward the house. “Good view,” he muttered. “Easy to see people moving around in the house. Let’s say the guy waited here. Maybe for a couple of hours from the looks of that bamboo. But why the hell?”
“Figuring out where everybody was, Chief. He waited until Samuel was settled.” Pirelli pointed toward a window on the east side of the house. “He wanted a clear shot.”
Saulter reached for the big flash, then stood. He moved the beam inch by inch over the glistening strands of broken bamboo to the knee-high clumps of ferns. “Look, those are broken.” The light followed a trail of bruised and drooping ferns to an old live oak with low spreading branches. “Tomorrow we’ll get pictures of the bamboo and the ferns, then we’ll check out the tree. We might find snagged cloth, something. And maybe some footprints.” He didn’t sound hopeful. This was rough ground with matted vegetation.
Max gently poked Annie, nodded toward the house. They slipped away, leaving Saulter and Pirelli by the bamboo. Max led her on a roundabout route, avoiding any ground between the sniper’s lair and the house. Instead, they walked up the oyster-shell front path. “You can bet the guy didn’t come up the path. Before or after.”
“Where are we going?” Annie whispered.
Max kept his voice low. “Let’s take a look at the room where Samuel was shot.” He walked swiftly and she hurried to keep up.
“But how will we know—”
Max gestured at the live oak tree. “Has to be a room on that side of the house. If Saulter yells at us, we’ll say May asked us to bring her a sweater. Then we’ll get out before Saulter throws us out.”
The steps creaked. They wiped their shoes on a mat. The front door was open. Max pulled open the screen door and they stepped into the central hallway. A dining room opened to the left, a living room to the right. There was no sound except the gentle splash of rain. The house had the unmistakable silence of space empty of humankind, but there was evidence of habitation everywhere—a pair of glasses on a sideboard, a partially open umbrella tucked in a corner. In the living room, a half-full coffee mug sat on a side table, a tipped-over basket spilled out bright yarns, a magazine lay crumpled beside a sofa.
Bright yellow crime-scene tape was strung across the second doorway on the right. As they walked down the hall, Annie noted spatters from wet rain gear and the occasional smudge of mud on May Kinnon’s spotless floor.
Crime tape barred them from the game room where they had gathered Friday night after the general’s murder. The grandfather clock ticked slowly, steadily. Family pictures were tucked on tables, atop the piano, on the television set. There was the rocking chair where May Kinnon had sat and the small Windsor chair that Miss Dora had selected. Annie and Max had shared the green-and-beige-plaid sofa. Luther had paced the floor.
Tonight they looked at an overstuffed easy chair, beige checks on a light green background. A paperback book lay on the floor in front of the chair, its cover spattered with blood. Blood had stained the chair, dripped onto the wooden floor. The chair faced the doorway with its back to the windows. The upper pane of the south window was shattered. Pieces of glass glistened on the floor.
Annie felt suddenly queasy. “Max, Samuel’s head—”
She didn’t need to finish. It was easy to picture Samuel relaxed in the comfortable green chair, reading. He must have been leaning on the armrest, the back of his head and a portion of his shoulder and arm visible.
Samuel reading and out in the rainy darkness, someone climbed a live oak tree and waited and watched and finally, resting the gun on a branch to steady it, squeezed the trigger.
Annie leaned inside the doorway, careful not to touch anything, and craned to see the pine wall. Splinters fanned out from a pocked spot about four feet from the floor. It looked as though the slug was still embedded in the wood. She scanned the rest of the wall. Only the one mark. And the floor was untouched. Samuel must have jolted out of the chair and dropped to the floor, out of sight.
Annie wondered if the crack of the shot had been loud, startling. Or had it merged into the noises of the storm and Samuel’s first warning had been pain and the shower of his blood?
Coffee. Hot, strong, energizing. Annie’s eyes burned with fatigue. They’d caught a little sleep but not much. She’d tossed and turned and finally wakened with an uneasy sense of some fact that she knew but hadn’t understood, something terribly important. And sad. Upon awakening the sense of urgency fled, leaving weariness in its place.
Annie sat at the kitchen table and sipped coffee and looked at the blank sheet of her notebook, waiting for some thought, any thought worthy of being recorded. Through the archway, she could see Max at his desk in the study. Funny to see him there so intent in wrinkled blue pajamas. Papers littered the desk.
The clock said seven but rain still drizzled down and the morning was as gray and indistinct as an old lithograph. The phone was ringing off the hook, but Max ignored it, letting the machine pick up:
Ring. Luther Kinnon’s voice swelled with relief and gratitude. “Max, Samuel’s fine, just fine. Says it isn’t nearly as bad as the time he cut his leg open with a fish knife. Chief Saulter just left. He wanted to know about the sounds Samuel heard from the willow trees. Apparently the word’s out all over the island about Samuel talking to you. The chief figures that’s why someone came after him…”
Annie scrunched down in her chair. Nobody, she thought defensively, had told her not to tell anyone. And so yes, okay, she’d happened to mention the bit about the willows to Laurel and to Pamela Potts and to Gail Oldham and to Edith Cummings and to Sharon Gibson. Yes, the island grapevine could well have spread the word from house to house. Everyone could have heard. There was only one exception: David Oldham, who’d headed out into the sound early Saturday morning and not been seen since.
“…Now, listen, Max.” Luther’s tired voice was insistent. “Tell everybody you see. Samuel doesn’t know a thing he hasn’t told the police. He’s told Chief Saulter every scrap he can remember about that night. Got that? He didn’t see anybody. He heard a kind of laugh—ugly, Samuel said—and maybe a whisper, and he doesn’t know if it was a man or woman or maybe it had nothing to do with the shooting. Get the word out, Max.”
Annie doubted that Samuel Kinnon would go home anytime soon. Luther and May would be sure of that. Not until the murderer was found. But surely the murderer would relax. After all, if Samuel knew anything he would have told the police. Samuel should be safe enough now.
Ring. Ned Fisher said stiffly, “Is the visit from the constabulary courtesy of you, Max? I want to go on record that Toby and I were home all evening. And yeah, I had some wet stuff in the washroom. I had to go out and break up a cat fight. Stan’s getting old but he’s pretty definite about his territory and that damn Manx next door doesn’t get the message. And yeah, the phone rang a couple of times but we chose not to pick it up. It’s still a free country, isn’t it? And I don’t work for the library twenty-four goddamn hours a day. And I don’t care what people a
re saying, Toby wasn’t anywhere near those willows. Samuel sure as hell didn’t see him.”
Annie scrawled in her notebook: Ned pissed. And worried. And it sounds like what Samuel heard in the willows got better and better as the story made the rounds.
Ring. Laurel’s husky voice was crepe-edged. “ ‘We are in God’s hand.’ ” A pause. “Certainly the news that David is now free of suspicion was very welcome. I’ve been to Gail’s house this morning. Poor child had almost no sleep last night. I brought her home with me and I’ve tucked her in bed. I’ve promised to wake her if there’s any word about David. Do please let me know, Annie.”
Annie looked toward the windows and the gray day. How well would a search-plane pilot be able to see? And how seaworthy was the little motorboat in last night’s storm? Could David Oldham have slipped back onto the island to shoot Samuel? It was conceivable but unlikely. Where would he get a second gun? Where, as far as that went, would he have obtained the first gun? Why would he go back out on the water in a storm? And how would he have heard about Samuel’s talk with Max?
Ring. Chief Saulter was brisk. “Max, when you pick up this message, see if you can figure out how many people you—or Annie—told about Samuel and the willow trees. If we can trace the stories, we might be able to eliminate some suspects.”
Had the chief ever tried to catch confetti in a wind tunnel? Annie ranged the suspects in her mind: Ned Fisher, Toby Maguire, Edith Cummings, Jonathan and Emily Wentworth, Sharon Gibson, Henny Brawley, Gail Oldham. Annie was willing to wager the bookstore that every one of them had heard of Samuel’s comments. The chief was searching out a dead end.
Ring. Edith Cummings sounded serious and not the least bit sardonic. “My God, Annie, I just heard about Samuel Kinnon being shot. What’s going on? I’m getting scared.” Or was she hoping for a return call and a lowdown on the status of the investigation?
Ring. Miss Dora’s raspy voice was thoughtful. “I knew Samuel was innocent. It’s unfortunate that it took a shooting to prove me correct. I am glad Frank is such a thorough officer. He carefully searched the Kinnon house. There was no trace of wet clothing or wet footprints, which would have been unavoidable had either May or Luther fired the shot, but they were both, as Frank put it, bone-dry. There are some puzzling aspects to the assault. May and Luther live on a dead-end road. They didn’t hear a car all evening. Of course, a car could have been parked far up the lane. But Frank believes the assailant spent quite a bit of time in a lair, watching the house—”