Hiss and Tell

by Claire Donally

  Randall wasn’t giving up so easily. “And I think there’s more to it than just another case. You say the sheriff was a politician. That probably means he knew the local political dirt, maybe even something about the Kingsburys. What if he was trying to get information out of another blackmail victim?”

  Sunny said nothing. She was tired, but the alcohol had burned off and her mental facilities felt very clear. Too clear, maybe—she was putting things together into a picture she didn’t like.

  The sheriff might’ve been more of a politician than a cop, but he wasn’t a complete idiot, she thought. If he assumed he was going to talk to a murder suspect, wouldn’t he have been warier? Wouldn’t he have kept his gun handy?

  But if, as Randall suggested, it were a blackmail victim, Nesbit might not have seen the violence coming. He might easily have gone to a secret meeting, maybe a political meeting, with his jacket all zipped up.

  If that were true, then Lieutenant Wainwright, Will, and all the other cops were going at the case all wrong. They thought that Eliza Stoughton’s death was the result of an unpremeditated attack by someone personally associated with her. Whereas if Randall was right, Eliza had been being blackmailed by someone with a number of pigeons on his string. Sunny hadn’t considered it before, but given all the people assembling for this get-together, another blackmail victim could be present. How would such a person react to Eliza asking about ways to get out of the Taxman’s web? Maybe he shut her up to keep her from drawing attention to the extortion scheme. And then, when Nesbit tried to follow up . . .

  Sunny shuddered, but stayed silent. That means that someone on Neal’s Neck has a secret worth killing for—twice.

  13

  The late hour had become even later, well past midnight, by the time Will delivered Sunny to the checkpoint at the edge of Neal’s Neck. She noticed there was only one state trooper now standing beside the sawhorses.

  That roused a comment out of her tired brain. I guess if the ninety-nine percenters were going to attack, this would be the time to do it. Hope Lee Trehearne has his own private troops on high alert.

  She gave Will a good-bye kiss and started around the roadblock, heading for the guesthouse. That’s when Sunny discovered someone else was still awake and alert. Priscilla Kingsbury rose from where she’d been sitting on the fieldstone steps leading up to the front door. Apparently she too had shaken off her tipsiness. Her face was sober and concerned.

  “Are you all right?” she asked in a low voice as Sunny approached. “We heard sirens, and the trooper on duty said that a cop had been found dead in his car. It wasn’t your—your friend, was it?”

  Sunny shook her head and Cillie heaved a sigh of relief. “I stayed up to see you. I was afraid—”

  “It was Sheriff Nesbit.” Sunny’s voice sounded harsh in her ears.

  Priscilla’s face showed her shock. “I used to meet him, sometimes. It sort of came with the territory, working in this county—especially with his wife working on the food pantry with the 99 Elmet Ladies.” She shook her head, still digesting the news. “He seemed like a nice man.”

  Yeah—nice to a Kingsbury, said Sunny’s brain reflexively, but she didn’t voice the unkind thought out loud. She hadn’t liked the man much, but nobody deserved Nesbit’s fate. Besides, there were other things she needed to warn Cillie about.

  “You remember the state I was in—hell, the state we all were in?” Sunny said. “Seeing the sheriff dead shocked me sober, but Lieutenant Wainwright could still smell the beer on me. He even asked what drinking game we’d been playing. So don’t try lying when he asks what we were doing earlier. It won’t look good.”

  “But why would he ask—” Cillie broke off, if possible, looking even more shocked. “He can’t think that anyone here—”

  “To quote the man, ‘The proximity is suggestive.’ He can’t ignore looking for a connection when two people get killed barely a couple of blocks apart.”

  But Cillie’s concerns were closer to home. “If Grandfather finds out about the beer pong, he won’t be happy.”

  That should be the least of our troubles, Sunny thought. But all she said was, “You’d better tell the others, too. I suspect tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

  *

  Her prediction proved only too tiresomely true. Sunny got only a few hours’ sleep after a marathon phone call with her father discussing what had happened to the sheriff. Mike’s enthusiasm for politics diminished considerably now that it had turned from bare-knuckles to bloody. He wanted her off Neal’s Neck, but she argued to stay. What kind of reporter would she be, turning her back on a mystery—and a story like this?

  She won that difference of opinion, but it didn’t feel much like victory, dragging herself out of bed to head down to the state police barracks. The good news: the clothes she’d unpacked yesterday didn’t smell as stuffy, and Priscilla had been able to get hold of a lint roller and an iron for Sunny to use. The bad news: Sunny had to wear one of her limited supply of suits for her trip. And Lee Trehearne was on hand to see her off in one of the compound’s town cars, his expression mixing a self-satisfied “I told you so” with violent dislike.

  Just the memory of Trehearne’s evil eye kept Sunny sitting in a stiffly uncomfortable pose until she was about half a mile away from the compound. Don’t relax too much, she warned herself as she finally sank back into the upholstered seat. You don’t want to doze off.

  To keep herself awake, she mentally edited the statement she was going to write down for the troopers. Sunny decided to tactfully evade the subject of beer pong, and merely say that the younger members of the gathering had been entertaining themselves by the pool.

  They arrived and Sunny asked her security guard/driver to wait while she took care of her business inside. If they decided to hold onto her for questioning, she could send the car back then.

  Sunny had half expected to find herself in an interrogation room with a pad and pen. Instead, a young trooper led her to an empty office with a desk. She sat down to work on her story. Will had said that the blood at the murder scene was still fresh, so Sunny contained herself to the events of that evening. She mentioned that Beau Bellingham had left the group fairly early, and that Peter Van Twissel had departed some time afterward, accompanied by Carson. She couldn’t put a time to the bridegroom’s return, having been too busy launching her big beer pong assault to check her watch.

  I hate to flag them as possible suspects, Sunny thought, but this is too important to start fooling around.

  She wondered what kind of alibis Cale could offer for the rest of the family.

  After a final read Sunny decided she’d done the best she could. She signed the statement, turned it in at the front desk, and found herself dismissed with the warning that Lieutenant Wainwright might want to talk with her again.

  Sunny’s eyes did sink closed on the sixteen-mile return ride, but she made a determined effort to rouse herself before she arrived back at the compound. She needn’t have bothered. The guesthouse was empty except for a note from Priscilla inviting her to breakfast in the boys’ accommodations. Sunny went over there to find most of the guests around a large and somewhat scuffed dining room table. Apparently the furniture gets harder use here in boy-land, she thought.

  Peter certainly looked the worse for wear. He was horribly hungover, extremely apologetic for his embarrassing behavior the night before, and barely able to stomach any breakfast. He had to excuse himself hurriedly when Tommy Neal suggested he try hitting one of the leftover bottles of beer as hair of the dog.

  Sunny looked after Peter with a certain amount of sympathy. But that soon faded as she found herself considering Peter Van Twissel in quite another light. He’d shown himself to have quite an ugly streak when he drank beyond his limits. How much had he imbibed on the day that Eliza Stoughton was killed? He was the only male in the party that Eliza hadn’t w
ound up fighting with—at least, not in public. So motive was open. As for means, Sunny remembered how strong his bony fingers had looked—and how easily they’d curled into fists. As for opportunity, well, she’d thought of that before. Assuming he was aware of the surveillance cameras, he certainly had the computer savvy to wipe any evidence from the hard drives.

  But seeing him pale and hunched over this morning, he seemed as though he couldn’t harm a fly. Most likely, the fly would win. Could Peter really look so natural after killing two people? For that matter, could he have dragged himself out of bed to meet with Frank Nesbit? Or could the sick bit have been an act? Peter had seemed pretty drunk; even his nasty side had seemed real enough.

  Carson came in to apologize for Priscilla—she’d been hijacked by Fiona Ormond for wedding business. “I think they’re talking about cakes, and Fiona wanted Cillie’s opinion of the local bakeries.” He paused for a second before asking, “How did it go with the state police?”

  Sunny kept her answer brief, just mentioning the pen and pad. She wasn’t about to give another impromptu course on dealing with police interrogations.

  Speaking of which . . . Sunny shifted her gaze to the front-runner in the suspects sweepstakes. Beau Bellingham was awake but still wearing the same rumpled surgical scrubs he’d probably slept in. Did he not own any other clothes? Sunny wondered. It’s not like he’s on call out here. When anyone spoke to him, he replied in monosyllables. His expression was stiff, almost sullen, but the way his eyes darted around the room showed that he was on edge.

  He knew already that the cops had their eyes on him, Sunny thought. Having another flimsy alibi isn’t going to help, even if he doesn’t have much in the way of obvious motive.

  During the course of the day, each member of the group was brought in for a talk with Lieutenant Wainwright. Otherwise, they worked quietly to clean up the area of last night’s party, collecting the empty bottles, rinsing them out, and adding them to the recycling boxes outside the kitchen of the big house. The Styrofoam ice chests could be broken up and put in the trash, after the water remaining from the ice had been poured off. A generous collection of full bottles also remained, which wound up in the refrigerators of the guesthouses. Carson reported that the Ping-Pong table was already gone when he went to scout the area after rising. Cale Kingsbury must have been up and on the move even earlier.

  Of course, Sunny had another job as well—getting out another blog post. The hard-news reporter she’d been wanted to focus on the murder near the premises. Kind of hard to shoehorn a subject like that into coverage of a festive event, she thought.

  While she sat in her room, wrestling with trying to tie the two diametrically opposed concepts together, Priscilla popped her head in. “Just wanted to check how you were doing.” She made a game attempt at smiling. “After last night, I figured you might want to rest a little more.”

  Inspiration struck. “You said you knew the sheriff when I told you what happened,” Sunny said. “How about the rest of your family?”

  “Well, Grandfather had some dealings with him. Political fund-raising dinners and, of course, security for the property here. In fact, he’s going to issue a statement about the sheriff in an hour or so.”

  “How about your brothers and your uncle?”

  “They knew him in passing, I guess.”

  Sunny nodded. “Here’s what I’d like to do for today’s blog post. I don’t think we can ignore what happened last night. So I’d like to have each member of the family—the folks from Maine—respond to this new tragedy, losing a neighbor during what should be a happy time.”

  Cillie might work for a nonprofit foundation, but she came from a family of politicians. “That might work pretty well.”

  “Great,” Sunny told her. “Let’s go listen to your grandfather and see if we can crib anything from his statement.”

  It seemed like déjà vu all over again. Sunny stood in the same grassy area, facing the hastily assembled platform. This time, though, she was hiding behind the stand of bushes with Priscilla Kingsbury instead of Caleb. Sunny had been fast asleep for the Kingsbury’s official statement regarding what they called Eliza Stoughton’s “mishap.” Ken Howell had attended, however. According to him, the Kingsbury lawyer, Vincent Quimby, had done the talking. She spotted both Ken and Randall in the crowd of the usual media suspects.

  A moment before the appointed hour, a golf cart appeared on the path from the big house—the cart with the senatorial seal on the windshield. It came to a stop, and Senator Thomas Neal Kingsbury emerged, with Lee Trehearne behind him. The Senator stood very erect in his summer-weight suit, but his steps were careful as he climbed onto the platform. Trehearne attended him like a mother hen until Kingsbury finally waved him away. For the first time, Sunny got a sense of the man’s age. Maybe he really is just hanging on until he sees a relative in the White House, she thought.

  As he approached the microphone set up at the front of the platform, the Senator’s habitual quirks kicked in. But this time, his studied poses and vocal cadences made sense. There really were cameras on him.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’ll keep this brief. You all know my family has gathered here for a wonderful event. We’re all very saddened by this senseless tragedy. None of us has any idea why this terrible thing happened to Sheriff Nesbit, or how. What I do know is that Frank Nesbit was a fine public servant and a good man.”

  Yup, Sunny’s cynical reporter alter ego commented, just like every other dead politician who wasn’t caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Along with all of my family, we extend the most heartfelt condolences to Frank’s wife Lenore. It’s a very sad business.” He stood looking saddened for a long moment, about enough time for a TV reporter to recapitulate when and where the statement was being made in the cutaway back to the studio. Then Kingsbury said, “Thank you very much. No questions, please.”

  Of course, that didn’t deter the more hard-boiled press professionals. They responded about the same way Shadow would on being offered a plate of prime tuna. Randall MacDermott was the first reporter who managed to pitch his voice to cut across the noise and be heard. Whatever his other shortcomings—and Sunny had a long list—he was a real reporter, she thought admiringly. “Senator,” he called, “do you think there’s any connection between the sheriff’s murder and the death of the young woman on your property?”

  The look Kingsbury sent Randall would have quelled a lesser man. Then the Senator pulled himself together and walked back toward his golf cart, not even dignifying Randall’s shot with a “no comment.” In a moment, he was gone.

  “A little on the brief side, but you can see how he handled all the main points,” Sunny told Priscilla. “I think you’d want to work some personal recollection into whatever you say about the sheriff. You’re here working for the foundation. Is there something he might have done to help?”

  “He twisted some arms when it came to fund-raising,” Cillie said as she led Sunny over to the big house. “Let me see if I can come up with a better way to say that.” They found the older generation preparing for lunch. Cillie’s older brother Tom frowned when Sunny made her pitch but nodded his head as he thought it over.

  “Okay if I do this off the cuff?” Tom Kingsbury asked. Sunny held up a small cassette recorder. “It’s been a while since I was involved in politics up here in Maine, but I certainly remember Frank Nesbit. He was a good friend and supporter to my grandfather—loyal, too. He stuck it out on the Senator’s last campaign, and when Cale lost on his reelection bid.” Tom suddenly stopped. “Better cut that. We don’t really talk about my grandfather’s last campaign, so many people turned their backs on him. Same thing with Uncle Cale’s stint in Congress. Can I start over?”

  Sunny nodded. Tom frowned in thought for a moment, then said, “It’s been some time since our family took part in politics here in Maine. But I re
member Frank Nesbit, and not just as a good friend and loyal supporter of my grandfather. As sheriff, he represented everything that local public service should be about. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see him on this trip, and sorrier still for what happened to him. We Kingsburys would all like to express our sympathy to Frank’s family.” Tom cocked his head. “Okay?”

  “That’s fine,” Sunny said. “Thanks, Governor.”

  When they approached the eldest brother, Lem, he turned to his wife. “Deborah, do we have anything to say?”

  She responded with a prompt but obviously prepared party line. “We join with the Senator in his sorrow at the loss of a good man like Frank Nesbit. While his life was an example of public service, his death shows how dangerous law enforcement can be. Family to family, we grieve with the Nesbits.”

  The Senator himself declined to add anything. He gave Sunny a moment’s frowning consideration, and then said, “I’ve already made a statement on that subject.”

  Case closed, Sunny thought. Go away.

  She thanked the Senator, then she and Cillie beat a quick retreat. On their way out of the house, they bumped into Cale Kingsbury. When Sunny asked him for a statement, he waved her recorder away. “Nothing I have to say would carry any weight. You had more contact with the man, Cillie. If you can say he helped with the foundation in any way, that would be good enough for me.”

  It took a while to weave together the more professional pronouncements from the Kingsburys with Priscilla’s more heartfelt memorial, but in the end Sunny was pleased with the results. Along with a nice portrait of a subdued Cillie and one of Ken’s shots of the Senator at the mic, it made for a nice, respectful posting. Once that was accomplished, Sunny felt justified in putting her feet up for a while and trying to catch up on some of the sleep she’d lost. The afternoon shadows were stretching more toward evening when she awoke. Her drowsy eyes seemed to see a familiar silhouette outlined against the window. Shadow?