by L. T. Vargus
“Brought you a coffee,” she said, passing the steaming cup over to her friend as she peered out at the houses on the street. “Which one is it?”
Zoe took the coffee and pointed with her free hand.
“Thirteen Sycamore Lane. The little brick guy over there.”
The house was a dinky box of a home, albeit a clean one with attractive details. Tan brick with black shutters and a well-kept yard.
“You said on the phone that Killian Thatcher has priors?”
“Just one,” Zoe said, lifting the cup to her lips and taking a sip from it. “An aggravated assault charge back when he was in college. But the charges were dropped.”
“Why?”
Zoe shrugged.
“Nothing in the file to indicate why, but my guess would be that if he’s ended up working this closely with Marjory Carmichael, he probably knows people.”
“It’s like he was born with… what do you call it?” Allie said. “That, uh, silver spoon or whatever in his mouth. Remember that show? Silver Spoons? With Ricky Schroder? Well, I kind of figure this whole deal is pretty much exactly like that show.”
Charlie wanted to ask when Allie had ever watched an episode of Silver Spoons, but that was beside the point. And there was at least one part of what Allie had said that struck her. Killian Thatcher kind of looked like Ricky Schroder.
“What do you think about this angle?” Zoe said. “About Thatcher being Marjory’s accomplice, I mean? He’s her alibi for Dutch’s murder, so right away that seems a little suspicious, right?”
“What about his alibi for the day Gloria was killed? He told me he was at Marjory’s office most of that evening.”
“That’s where it gets good. There’s a front desk with a security guard, and he confirms Killian coming and going.”
“But?”
“But there’s a back freight entrance. Marjory’s supposed to be the only one who has keys for it, but who’s to say she didn’t lend them to Killian that day?”
“What about the timeline? Could he have made it across town to run down Gloria and then back to the office in time?”
“One of the detectives timed it earlier. He could do it with time to spare.” Zoe paused to guzzle some coffee. “And I’m thinking, if it was him behind the wheel for that murder, maybe he was the one who ran you off the road. Meanwhile, realizing Dutch’s fortune was a sham, Marjory tries to take the easy way out.”
Charlie nodded.
“It’d make sense. Whole thing seems like an episode of Dateline Mystery.”
Zoe’s eyes went wide.
“Oh man, I love that show. Can you imagine if this ends up being featured in an episode? We might be on TV! On Dateline!” Zoe’s gaze softened, and she went silent for several seconds, imagining it. Finally, she shook herself from the fantasy. “So what did the husband say?”
“He said the entire affair is pretty much laid out in here,” Charlie said, pulling the journal from her bag. “And like I said before, Marjory never names him, but Trevor Steigel had no doubts that Killian Thatcher was the man.”
“That’s it, then? Marjory’s journal?”
Charlie riffled through the pages.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Anything else interesting in there?” Zoe waggled her eyebrows.
“A little whining about politics at the Lamark Foundation and some grumbling about her husband, but the bulk of it is about meeting up with her secret manfriend.”
“OK,” Zoe said. “So here’s what I’m thinking. We’ve got a little crack in the armor to work with, what with Marjory being laid up in the hospital. We need to pounce. Now. Prove that this assistant here is her lover and accomplice. With Marjory out of commission, maybe we can trip one or the other of ’em up. Keep ’em separated. Sheriff wants us to sit on Thatcher for the time being. We’ll probably haul him in and question him eventually. Especially if he makes a move to get out of town. But if we can get some leverage on him in the meantime, that’d be ideal.”
“Leverage,” Charlie said. “Like proof of the affair?”
A wide grin split the bottom half of Zoe’s face.
“Great minds think alike. I’m thinking that while we keep an eye on the guy, you finish reading the journal. See if there’s anything that might implicate him or lead us to some hard evidence of their affair. Maybe they met at a hotel or something, and we can get footage from the security cameras or something like that. Whatever it is, there’s gotta be something in there we can use once we get down to interrogating him.”
Charlie opened her mouth to agree, but before she could, the front door of the brick house opened. Zoe gasped, and then she and Charlie went absolutely quiet. They both stared at the door.
An arm swung into the opening, and then he stepped out onto the stoop, closing the door behind him.
Killian Thatcher looked well dressed as always. Polo shirt. Khakis. Slightly formal for what must be his day off. His blond hair seemed wet, long strands slicked to his scalp in a side part. He seemed to hesitate, looking both ways before he stepped out onto the front walk. Almost like he could feel their presence, even if he didn’t look their way.
His body language must have gotten Zoe’s hackles up, too. They both ducked down in their seats.
“Is he bolting?” Zoe hissed, her whisper shrill and harsh.
He didn’t move toward the car in the driveway to leave. Instead, he trotted down toward the curb. Opened the mailbox. Pulled out a wad of grocery store and fast-food fliers with a couple of envelopes tucked on top of the glossy paper.
“Not bolting,” Charlie said. “Not yet, anyway.”
On the way back, he dumped the load of junk mail in the green trash can tucked up against the side of the house. Then he disappeared back inside.
“OK,” Zoe said. “Little bit of an anticlimax there, but… I don’t know. He feels right to me. Do you think?”
Charlie could only nod in response. When she really searched her feelings, she thought it was possible. It could fit, could make sense.
“You’ll keep me posted on the stakeout?” Charlie asked, reaching for the door handle.
“Naturally,” Zoe said. “Same goes with you and Marjory’s sex journal, yeah?”
“Sure thing.”
As Charlie slid out of Zoe’s car and headed back to where she’d parked, she stared down at the journal clasped in her fingers, thinking that the truth might well lie in the pages inside.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Charlie tipped her head back, the coffee mug clinking against her top teeth, and then the dark sludge poured in. It didn’t taste good, but at least it was hot.
She slammed the mug down on the counter, refilled it, and then took it back to her desk. She could feel the zing in her eyes as the fresh caffeine entered her bloodstream, little electric throbs trying their best to wake her.
The last few nights of tossing and turning in awkward places had done their damage, however. It’d take more than coffee to undo this kind of exhaustion.
Marjory Carmichael’s journal lay open on the top of her desk. Her neat handwriting filled the pages, front and back. Small text. Long paragraphs. A slog to get through.
Cover to cover, it was a constant stream of secret rendezvouses, liaisons, interludes, and so on. Marjory was so blasé about the affair in her entries, Charlie couldn’t believe she hadn’t kept it under lock and key. The one thing she hadn’t done was use a proper name or any other kind of identifier for her potential accomplice. Instead, her mysterious lover was known simply as “he.”
Her writing style, too, left something to be desired. Something about it was so formal, so populated with tedious details, rendering even a torrid love affair dull.
We made love as the sun set. The sky overhead was a glorious pastel arrangement of pink and lavender and peach. It reminded me of a dessert I had on my last trip to Paris, a little crème tart topped with fruit and different-colored macarons.
“I’m surprised she doesn’t des
cribe her guy’s junk the same way,” Allie said. “Dear diary, his manhood reminds me of a baguette I had in Lyon. It was fresh from the oven, still warm, and slathered with locally churned butter.”
Charlie couldn’t help but snort out a laugh.
She paused to yawn and stretch, giving her eyes a short break before returning to her task. She was going back through the journal now, focusing on the various locations Marjory had written about. So far, she’d described being “in the woods” quite a few times, particularly meeting “him” there. Other passages, seemingly referring to the same instances, mentioned being “along the water” or “on the water.”
In and of themselves, these water references seemed fairly useless. When you lived on an island, you were never far from the lake. Still, the combination of woods and water seemed to be referring to a usual meeting spot. If she could suss that out, maybe it’d lead her to some hard evidence.
Charlie took a sip of her coffee. The heat tingling as it crossed her tongue. She got back to reading.
I guess we went a bit overboard with the Cabernet last night, and he had a bit of… “trouble” when it came time to perform. Thankfully, there was still some of the Viagra left from when we experimented with it last year. I’d considered throwing it away, but decided it might come in handy, so I’d tucked it in our little hiding spot. A lucky move, or his overindulgence might have spoiled our evening.
Allie snorted. “No one likes a soggy baguette.”
Over the course of the next hour and a half, Charlie’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier. The tiredness only strengthening no matter how much caffeine she threw at it.
The words squirmed on the page. Tired eyes flicking back and forth, trying to chase them down. Mentions of the woods or the lake woke her up some at first, but the endless drone of banality had worn down the effect.
She was nodding off when the phone rang. That finally jerked her awake. She checked the display: Zoe.
She thumbed the button. Brought the phone to her ear. “Hey Zoe.”
“Tell me you’ve got something definitive in that journal.” Some note of distress in Zoe’s voice caught Charlie’s ear.
“Not yet,” Charlie said. “Why?”
“Looks like Killian Thatcher is making a move. For real this time.”
“What do you mean? He ran?”
“Tried to. Bought a plane ticket to Switzerland at a travel agency here on the island. We had to arrest him before he left our jurisdiction.”
Charlie sat forward in her chair. Suddenly, she was wide awake.
SIXTY-NINE
Charlie’s chair squeaked as she rolled it back from the desk. She switched the phone to her right ear, considering what it might mean that Killian Thatcher had been trying to flee the country.
“But this is a good thing, right?” Charlie said. “In that it makes him look pretty guilty, I mean.”
Zoe sighed.
“Sure. But it also means we now have a ticking clock. We wanted to slow-play it, watch him while we gathered info. But now that we’ve got him in custody, we have forty-eight hours to charge him or let him go. So if you can find anything in that damn journal, we need it like ten minutes ago.”
Charlie’s eyes flitted over the journal still lying open before her, those tightly packed lines of tiny text.
“I’m working on it. It sounds like they had some kind of regular meeting place, and I might be able to figure out the location.”
“Anything concrete, you let me know right away. Something dramatic would be great, but any kind of leverage would be a help. Armed with some info, we can lean on him a little bit. Get under his skin. Give him the impression that we already know everything, that resistance is futile, so to speak.”
“Well, I’ll keep at it,” Charlie said, already feeling a renewed sense of purpose. “You got him sitting in the interrogation room now?”
“Oh yeah. We’ll let him stew a bit. He hasn’t lawyered up yet, so at least there’s that. He seems oddly calm so far. Personally, I don’t care for the too-cool-for-school act, but I’ve learned to not read too much into that kind of thing. Anyway, I’ll let you get back to it.”
Charlie hung up, and her index finger traced along one of the scratches on the heel of her hand. The tiny cuts from the broken glass had all scabbed over, and she’d removed the bandages this morning.
She freshened her coffee and returned to the task at hand. Marjory rambled on about a disagreement at work for a few pages—something about putting together a pamphlet and needing some quotes, someone forgetting to bring in a magazine that seemed to slowly get blown out of any sensible proportion.
Then Charlie found something useful. Her eyes snapped to the word “boat” and raced down the page.
We were on the boat again this afternoon when calamity struck. We went way out in the water, the way he likes to do, out so far you can’t see the shore any longer. It was sunny enough when we disembarked, but that changed all too quickly. Storm clouds gathered above us, the sky gone black. The water grew choppy, waves flinging themselves at the boat.
And then the sky opened up, and the heavens wept with incredible gusto. It poured. A forceful deluge unleashed, something biblical about it, a wrathful God out to punish. It didn’t seem like drops so much as sheets of wet pounding the boat, watery explosions splashing up everywhere around us. We were both soaked to the bone within thirty seconds.
By the time we got back to the cabin, we were shivering and completely saturated, clothes and hair alike. So wet that even when we stripped down, a sheening layer of water clung to every inch of our skin. Our bodies shook like mad, teeth chattering. We hopped into the hot tub, which stung like crazy at first, and it still took a good five or ten minutes to stop the trembling.
Charlie’s eyes drifted back up to the beginning of that last paragraph. She read it out loud.
“By the time we got back to the cabin.”
Cabin. The meeting place—along the water, in the woods—was a cabin.
SEVENTY
Charlie’s hand shook as she found Trevor Steigel’s name in her contact list and punched the button to call him. With her hands half-numb, it felt like the phone was levitating next to her ear, a floating object mashing itself to the side of her face.
He picked up after two rings.
“Ms. Winters. I suppose I should have known I’d be hearing from you again.”
Charlie winced at the mild tone of annoyance in his voice.
“Yes, sorry to bother you, but I had a quick question.”
“Go ahead.”
“In Marjory’s journal, she mentions a cabin in the woods. And of being out on the water in a boat. Does that sound like somewhere familiar to you?”
“Of course. She must be talking about our vacation home on Lake Huron.”
“Vacation home. Right.”
“It’s right at the tip of Michigan’s thumb, not far from the town of Bad Axe. More trees than humans up that way. That was the idea, I suppose—have a place to get away from it all. No cell service. No internet. The only real link to the outside world is the landline.”
Charlie remembered hearing mention of the cabin before. It was where Marjory had been headed when Gloria had been killed.
Her mind whirred, trying to think of a way to ask her next question without being too direct about the affair.
“Do you think it’s possible Marjory was using the cabin as a… um… meeting place?”
Trevor made a noise. Not quite a chuckle, but almost.
“It’s funny. Marjory always calls it a cabin, but this is more like a full-blown lodge—the mansion version of a cabin. Anyway, she’s always really loved it up there. We had a big to-do for Dutch’s seventy-fifth, and Marjory chose that as the location. Naturally, he didn’t care for being cut off from technology for more than a few minutes and only stayed one night as I recall. Anyway… I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out that she’s been using it for her dalliances. Unlike her father, she r
eally, truly loves it out there.”
Charlie was practically bouncing in her chair now. She had to stop herself from shouting the next question.
“Would there be any way to confirm when she might have been up there? I was thinking if it’s a gated community, there might be a log to track the comings and goings.”
“Well, I think maybe I’ve failed to get across exactly how rural this place is. The biggest town for seventy miles has a population of around two thousand souls. I wasn’t exaggerating about the trees. They probably outnumber people a thousand to one up there. Maybe more. So no, there’s no gate. There’s not even another building within four or five miles, I’d guess. It’s just the house, the lake, and a whole lot of nothing.”
Charlie grimaced and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I see.”
“But to answer your first question, I installed a state-of-the-art security system up there,” Trevor continued. “I know Dutch hates that kind of crap, but, well, I ain’t Dutch. I’m not going miles away from civilization unprotected.”
Charlie’s eyes snapped open.
“Cameras?”
“Absolutely. Cameras everywhere. Video and audio. I even paid extra to have them set up a bank of monitors in a utility closet. Looks like something out of a spy movie. Anyway, it’s all motion-activated. Being that we sometimes go months at a time without using the place, the cameras and hard drives only kick on when someone enters one of the rooms. Anyway, yeah. There should be plenty of video of, well, whatever she’s been up to of late.”
Charlie plucked a pen from the mug on her desk and went to work scrawling down the address and some basic directions to the place.
“There’s a keypad next to the front door,” Trevor said. “I’ll text you the code.”
Charlie thanked him and was already halfway out the door and unlocking Frank’s car before she’d hung up the phone.
SEVENTY-ONE
The tires juddered over the pocked bridge to the mainland. Charlie used voice commands to dial Zoe as she drove.