by Kilby Blades
“What were they doing?” Cliff cross-examined, still sounding pissed even though two hours had passed.
“Looked like they were surveying, for the rebuild.”
“Thank fuck someone is,” Cliff mumbled under his breath. “We need to get back in business.”
But, for Dev, it didn’t sit right. He was about a thousand percent certain the escort protocols were something Brody had made clear. It didn’t matter who owned the place—you couldn’t just waltz on to the scene of a crime.
“Look—like I said, they’ve been hard to get a hold of. And we’ve gotta get back at this point.” He flipped a card out of his pocket. “Could you send this to your lab? Have them send their DNA profiles to me?”
17
The Loudmouth
Shea
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” a drawn-faced and disdainful Polly Yearns scolded Shea as she shuffled by where Shea was seated at the bar. She walked quickly for someone who never went anywhere without her cane. “And you oughtn’t to serve her, seeing as how she’s expecting.”
The octogenarian pulled no punches in glaring at the mostly finished bourbon drink that sat in front of Shea, then threw Shea another reproachful look.
“It was just a rumor, Mrs. Yearns,” Delilah explained, loudly enough for Polly to hear, which was rather loud considering the woman was hard of hearing. Delilah shook her head and pantomimed a baby belly. “Shea’s not pregnant.”
Polly leaned in a little, seeming to inspect Shea closely, looking between her midsection and her face. “She’d better not be, drinking that,” Polly spat. Then she shuffled away.
Delilah and Shea waited half a minute, until Polly was ten feet closer to the door, before both of them burst out in laughter. They’d been having fun with reports of Shea’s pregnancy since the rumor had started the previous week.
Shea had made the mistake, apparently, of not wearing a disguise to Bugaboo’s, Sapling’s best and only baby store. She’d wanted to pick up layette sets and cute blankets for Carrie’s twins. They’d both had a good laugh when Delilah told her about the story. According to some people, Shea was somewhere around twelve weeks.
“Welcome to Sapling.” Delilah’s voice was still thick with humor when she raised her glass for a toast.
“Nothing like a small-town rumor mill…” Shea trailed off, though she secretly loved it. Trudy had cackled like a hen the day before when she’d told Shea she was “glowing.” Even Dev had gotten in on the fun. She’d barely seen his face for the better part of two weeks, but a six-pack of Canada Dry and a bag of something called Preggo Pops had been boxed in with her most recent special order. The fact that speculation about Shea was grist for said mill made her feel less invisible than before.
Four afternoons a week helping Delilah in the kitchen had turned into four evenings a week with the Happy Hour crowd at the bar. Janice Brewster—the cozy mystery writer from Delilah’s shop—talked a fair bit after she’d tied on a few. Bev from the post office ordered a blue cheese olive martini every night and was doted on shamelessly by none other than Buffalo Bill.
By about six every evening, the crowd got thicker with folks who had come off shift from the mills. Conversation was easy and everyone shot the breeze. It wasn’t like the city, where people cared about what you did, who you knew and whether you were someone important. Pregnancy rumors notwithstanding, no one seemed to pry.
“Alright. I’m out of here,” Delilah announced, after downing the rest of her drink. “Off to lead the glamorous existence of a 10:00 PM bedtime. One of the many benefits of having to be up at 4:00 AM.”
The women shared a brief hug and Shea bid Delilah her goodbyes. She was busy digging in her purse for change when the familiar sound of a drink being set down in front of her caused her to look up.
“This one’s from Donna,” the bartender, John, informed Shea, before he disappeared.
Even without Dev’s promise to never let Shea pay for anything at The Big Spoon, a new set of admirers had cropped up, making the issue of Shea paying for anything herself practically moot. Once word spread that Shea deserved credit for the menu improvements at The Big Spoon, folks weren’t shy about showing their thanks.
After Shea lifted her gaze to scan for Donna Martin, gave a nice wave and called out a quick thanks, she settled back in her seat to enjoy her drink, thinking she might swing by The Freshery before heading home. She’d cut down on her grocery runs, partially to resist the sheer temptation that was Acting Sheriff Dev Kingston, but also because she needed groceries less.
Fixing the food at The Big Spoon made the takeout much better to begin with. Plus, she ate more at the restaurant now. Adding equal parts of work and play to her repertoire had forced her to shuffle her schedule. She wrote at home in the mornings, got in a run or a hike by noon and got showered and down the hill just in time for her shift at two.
Shea was busy organizing her mental grocery-slash-try-not-to-flirt-too-hard-with-Dev list when a gratingly familiar voice broke into her thoughts. It was irritating in its tone—louder than it strictly needed to be given the volume of the other voices in the restaurant—and notable in the kinds of ideas it was spouting off.
“The key here is the energy supply. We’ll supplement with turnkey hydroelectric that’ll send our cost ratios way down.” Shea turned to see who was at a table situated somewhere behind her as discreetly as she could. She was surprised to see the dark-haired, puffy-faced man who had hit on her a while back and wondered what he was doing back in town.
Cautious of drawing his attention a second time, she turned her face back to the bar and angled her chair so that he wouldn’t see her in profile, not that it would do much—her hair tended to give her away. Something about the guy reminded her of Keenan.
“I still think we could go lower,” one of the men who was with him said.
“Layer it with smart energy management and smart HVAC and I guarantee you, we will. We’ll have the lowest CPORs of any other five-star resort in the state. The curb appeal of the riverfront and the efficiency advantages offered by the actual river make the value prop a no-brainer.”
This is killing my buzz, Shea thought to herself as she sipped the rest of her bourbon and tried not to listen to this blowhard drone on. She’d had just about enough of loud-talking, self-important jerks that week. Shea had gotten a call from Tasha. It wasn’t unexpected. Shea had known all along that Keenan would file a counter suit. Tasha had called it right in knowing that emotional abuse would be Keenan’s claim.
This is where things got messy—Tasha had warned her that they would. Tasha had also told her, this is where things would drag. There was a reason why rational people buried the hatchet and went for mediation. Litigated divorces could go on for months.
Shea found herself thinking about that possibility more and more—about being in Sapling for an extended stay. Thinking ahead to the winter made her nearly giddy. The Big Spoon would be transformed by wood fires, hot cider and snow. Holiday time would come with traditions. She’d already been implored not to miss this or that event. It made her cautiously optimistic that her first holiday alone had something better than crushing loneliness in store.
Being there had also gotten her thinking about parts of her initial plan—to see more of the world once she was finally free. They’d had no shortage of means but Keenan was one of those New Yorkers who didn’t think there was anything west of the Hudson. She’d vowed that travel would be part of her liberation. But Sapling liberated her in a different way. And maybe staying a while wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
18
The Dirt
Dev
“Got a question for you.” Dev set down the bin of new items he’d brought from the back of the store, a hodgepodge of SKUs that needed to be scanned in. Silvio had gone after Dev signed off on the delivery forty-five minutes before. Dev had gotten the new items on the shelf, but no one could buy them until he registered them as inventory.
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��What’s on your mind?” Betty returned, sitting in the chair she preferred, barely looking up from her yarn. The ball showed it had a rainbow color with some sort of sparkle in the thread. Dev couldn’t tell what she was knitting, and he didn’t understand how the finished product seemed to be patterning out in a perfect gradient. Clearly, he didn’t understand yarn—or knitting—at all.
“You know a handful of the Packard executives have been here. They’ve been a little hard to pin down. You heard anything about where they might be set up?”
“The Packard house.” Betty’s answer was quick and easy. “One of ‘em’s been back and forth to New York, but that’s where the other ones are staying.”
Dev picked up a handheld scanner and swiped in the first item, concentrating for a second on cross-referencing the number of units in stock and entering it into his system. What he’d really been asking was where and whether the Packard executives had been seen around town during the day.
“Cliff offered them a conference room down at Number One, but they barely use the space. You can’t get any of them to pick up their phones or answer their calls. It’d be nice to know where we can find them while we’re sorting out things at the mills. They’re really slowing down the investigation.”
The quick raise of Betty’s eyebrow meant that little tidbit was going into her gossip bank. Dev would have to be more careful. Though, now that she knew his reasons, Dev had no doubt she would be on closer watch.
“I get the impression they’ve been holing up there in that mansion. It’s big enough for them to work. Though, word has it, there’s been more partying than working. They bought up a bunch of liquor and there’s been some girls.”
Dev stopped his scanning long enough to throw Betty a look. Because not everyone’s word was worth something. “You know I gotta ask. Who told you all of this? And it’d better not be Jane Bixby.” Dev smirked.
Betty took her eyes off of her knitting for a second to send a plaintive look to Dev. “Now you know I never would’ve mentioned anything I didn’t think was true. I thought she was a credible source.”
Dev had no doubt that Jane Bixby “mentioning” that Shea had been seen buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of baby clothes and was presumed to be expecting was behind what three-quarters of the town thought they knew.
“Alright—then, how do you know all this?”
Dev couldn’t very well write in a police report that he was getting information from the town gossip. He needed to follow her source until he heard from actual witnesses with credible intel. Misinformation was harmful, and not just to criminal investigations.
Dev hadn’t liked the feeling when he’d heard that Shea was expecting. He hadn’t liked wondering whether pregnancy cravings had something to do with all those special orders for odd foods, even though he already had a good explanation. And he hadn’t liked swallowing his pride and going to Delilah to hear the story, or the desperation he’d felt in needing the truth.
“Phoebe Tran told me,” Betty reported. “You know…Stanley Tran’s mother? The one who works with you on that economic council? You know Phoebe owns that cleaning service, right?”
Dev hadn’t known that, but he nodded, thinking he knew where Betty might be going. “Did they contract her to clean the Packard house?”
“She’s been contracted with Packard for decades. Goes up and cleans the whole place every month, like clockwork. Every single year, Packard renews. She’s got contracts with plenty of the Elk Mountain folk—the same thing, of going in monthly to clean then coming in to clean more frequently whenever they come to town to use their place.
“Only, nobody ever stays on the Packard estate. She goes in to clean the dust and run the water and stop the place from falling into disrepair. There’s other maintenance Packard brings in, like pest control. But, according to Phoebe, nothing’s been moved—not a plate in the cupboard or a chair pushed out from a table for someone to sit. She says it’s eerie—dated furniture, almost like a period museum. The house hasn’t been used or visited in years.”
It answered quite a few questions Dev had thought about himself. Clearly, he had been wrong to assume they wouldn’t be staying up at the Packard place. The helicopter had been in and out at least four times and Packard and his entourage had only been seen on and off in town. According to what Brody had eavesdropped, they had business with some contractors in Denver, which made sense if the team was there to project manage the build.
“You know anything about Gil having a contract with ‘em?”
Gil owned the property management company most vacation home owners used to maintain their properties.
“No,” Betty said. “But I’m thinking he’s worth a call.”
An hour later, Dev hadn’t called Gil, but Brody had come to get him in the cruiser. He wanted them to go together to survey Number Ten and Number Five. Number Ten had been the first of the mills to get hit and was the first on deck to go under construction. Whatever this was, Brody wanted Dev to see it. He promised to have Dev back at the Spoon in time to help Delilah. After the lunch rush, Silvio would be there with his delivery in the afternoon.
“When’s the last time you were up here?” Brody wanted to know as they pulled up to Number Five.
Dev couldn’t exactly recall. “Weeks,” he concluded.
“It rained most of last week.” Brody kept talking as they both got out of the car. “So why are these tire marks fresh?”
Brody had parked in an odd spot, a little bit off to the side of where he usually did. Sure enough, parallel mud tracks indicated a large truck. Boot prints from at least three different sets of shoes were also clear to Dev’s trained eye. More telling than the boot prints were a fourth set of prints—smooth-soled ones that were completely wrong for this terrain. The owner of the fourth set of prints didn’t have the experience or good sense to know what to wear to a construction site.
“You see any signs of forced entry?” Brody quizzed.
“No obvious ones,” Dev said, approaching the large padlock on the outside of the fence.
“Yet, these footsteps resume directly inside. That means, whoever was in this truck didn’t hop the fence or cut the lock. They had a key and they walked right in. I’m guessing you didn’t give ‘em a key, sheriff?”
Dev shook his head and put his hands on his hips. “Nope.”
“Well, I sure as shit didn’t,” Brody returned. “When I realized they’d been here, I didn’t want to enter the area. I thought both of us should be here for this.”
“Take pictures,” Dev commanded and left it at that. He didn’t like to feed Brody’s imagination. Only, it seemed less and less like Brody was imagining things. Dev walked slowly and carefully around trodden areas as the two men perused the site. The hulk of the ruined mill sat empty and cold. It had yet to be demolished. It was odd to be there without it standing and odder still that the flow of the river was the only sound. That, plus the shutter of Brody’s camera, as he shot photos and documented their tracks. Near the riverbank, one more dip pattern in the soggy soil was recognizable: that of a surveyor.
“You know the problem with all this,” Dev trailed off a few minutes after they got into the cruiser. He’d been silent—maybe even brooding as he thought it through. “They’re not doing anything illegal. And the longer we keep the investigation open, the more they’ll say they have a right to be on the scene. It’s been three months and we haven’t made an arrest.”
The thought weighed on Dev more and more every day. Everything about the Packard executives was halfway suspicious but he couldn’t prove a thing. He’d looked into the company’s financials—used every bit of business training he had to search for even a tangential motive. He hadn’t been able to find a single one.
“They’ve got something to do with it,” Brody insisted yet again. “Hire someone to plant the explosives, blow up their own mills, get the insurance money and get off scot free. Who says they’re even gonna rebuild all these mills?”
“The fact they’re surveying the land and asked for the blueprints and have been to see builders says that’s exactly what they’re gonna do.”
Brody still looked pissed, and Dev didn’t like to feed Brody’s theories, but saying out loud what he was thinking couldn’t hurt. Soon enough, he’d have to share his theory with Cliff.
“They’ll build in more automation this time,” Dev said. “Save on workforce costs. Make it so they need fewer people on the floor.”
“Well, there you go!” Brody sputtered out as if Dev had stumbled on the motive itself.
Dev shook his head. “Not so fast. I ran some numbers on that. Building a plant like that would cost twice what they’ll get out of the insurance settlement. Even saving on workforce costs, it would take them fifteen years to recoup the capital cost of building modernized mills.”
The car fell into silence as they came upon Number Ten—a fair bit away from the other plants, on the other side of the river, up a long, meandering road on an isolated hill. It was the site of the first accident and far away from the other mills. Brody parked in his usual spot. They got out of the car in silence.
“Now what do you see?” he asked.
Dev looked down at the ground. “Nothing.”
Brody looked at Dev meaningfully. “That’s exactly right. This one’s been down three months. But there are no signs of entry—no surveying or evidence that anything’s going on, even if this is the only one that’s authorized for a rebuild.”
“So they’ve been here all this time and they’ve only been to Eight and Five?”
This, too, was suspicious.
“I escorted them here to Ten, that first week they came—but just once. I think it’s fair to say that they’re focused on Eight and Five. The question now is, why?”
Better call Delilah, Dev thought, thumbing on his phone as soon as he got back into Brody’s car, half an hour later than Brody had promised to have him back.