A Dark and Stormy Murder (A Writer's Apprentice Mystery)

by Julia Buckley

  19

  They decided they would take the night train, far into the north country, where no one would recognize them. Gerhard had some money stowed away with which he purchased tickets, and they boarded under a large gold moon, round as a wedding ring.

  “It’s not over,” Gerhard warned as they entered their compartment.

  She breathed more freely as she tucked against his side. “But we’re together now. That’s all that matters, even in the face of danger.”

  —from The Salzburg Train

  SAM DIDN’T HAVE long to wait. Two nights later Camilla invited him for a celebratory dinner, along with several other Blue Lake residents, including Allison and John, some of the closest neighbors from houses along the bluff, a few of the people that Sam had said he “didn’t despise,” select members of Camilla’s knitting club, and Detective Doug Heller of the Blue Lake Police Department. The two men greeted each other awkwardly in the foyer, shaking hands without making much eye contact. Camilla was dressed in a regal blue silk blouse and gray slacks; she moved among us as we stood in her library making rather stilted conversation with the other people at her party.

  Rhonda, too, was dressed up, with a white blouse and a black skirt and an heirloom cameo choker. She whisked in and out with trays of hors d’oeuvres, which I snatched more frequently than I usually would, keeping a nervous eye on Sam, who was surprisingly kind to the people who approached him, some with genuine compassion or remorse, and some with bald curiosity.

  Sam looked healthier now; I had texted him regularly to make sure he was eating, and once I had sent a giant pizza to his house. He made a point of not looking at me too often, and I was trying to do the same with him. I tore my gaze away from his conversation with two of the knitting club ladies and saw that Doug Heller was watching me with a wry expression. He stood in the corner of Camilla’s study holding a vodka lemonade. He moved toward me and clinked his glass against mine—a Diet Coke and cherry juice on ice.

  “I get it,” he said softly. “You had a lot of extra motivation pushing you to help West. Right? You’re into him.”

  “Don’t use your detecting skills on me.”

  “It doesn’t take much detecting. Anyone in here just has to look at your face.”

  “I need to be more diplomatic, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t—he won’t—be involved until it’s over. He doesn’t want the press near me.”

  “Then he’s smart. And considerate.” His words were complimentary, but his face looked resentful.

  “I want you to know that I really appreciate—”

  He held up a hand; he looked impatient. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Doug. If it hadn’t been for Sam—I would probably have wanted you to ask me out.”

  “I sort of got that impression. So I just need him out of the picture, right?”

  I smiled, because he was joking over his hurt feelings. “What’s next for you? I assume there won’t be any more murders in Blue Lake.”

  “Probably not. This isn’t a murder kind of town.”

  “You did a good job on the case; you’re a good cop.” He bowed his head at the compliment and took a sip of his drink. I studied him for a moment. “Do you think you’ll stay here? Or will people try to recruit you into a big city?”

  He shrugged. “They do try, sometimes. Right now I’m happy here. I grew up in this town. Everyone should work in a place that feels like home, right?”

  I ran an affectionate hand over the arm of Camilla’s purple chair. “Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.”

  I looked up to see Sam West had finished his conversation with the knitting ladies; before he left the room, he sent me a secret smile.

  * * *

  BY TEN O’CLOCK everyone was gone, but Camilla had requested that both Doug and Sam stay behind. She asked the three of us to join her in a little sunroom that jutted out beyond the dining room. I had never sat there before, as Camilla and I preferred the intimacy of the kitchen table or the formality of the dining area. This room, surrounded by large windows with views of the darkened forest around us, felt odd, and there was a certain tension as Camilla waved us to the table and we took our seats, sending unspoken questions to one another in the form of raised eyebrows.

  “Please, I won’t keep you long,” Camilla said, putting a pot of coffee in the center of the table. Rhonda had already left, but she’d set the table first and put out a round green serving plate covered with slices of pumpkin bread.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked at Camilla, who had carried in her laptop. “I asked you all here because we all still have a job to do for Sam.”

  Sam looked more surprised than any of us. “Camilla—you’ve done plenty for me. And I thank you for this very nice party. It turns out that people in Blue Lake aren’t that bad after all.”

  Camilla waved his comment away with some impatience. “No, no—they owed you tonight, and they owe you a lot more. Don’t think twice about that. What I mean is, your mystery is not solved, and as you told us, the district attorney in New York is still pacing around, trying to figure out how to get you back in jail.”

  Sam shrugged. “He can try.”

  Camilla opened her laptop. “We can try, too. We can find Victoria and end this once and for all. It’s our job.”

  Doug pushed his mug toward me, and I filled it. He said, “Camilla, with all due respect, it’s not our job—it’s the job of the police in New York City. We have no jurisdiction over this case.”

  She looked disappointed. “Doug. You know better than anyone that no one out there is going to find Victoria West. How hard will they even try? They want Sam more than they want her, because he made them look bad by being innocent.”

  Sam barked out something like a laugh, then took a piece of bread and crumbled it on his plate. “And I took great pleasure in it.”

  Doug’s face was stubborn. “I know that Sam is your friend, but why exactly do you think we can do what the police can’t?”

  Camilla smiled. “You are the police, which is why you are a necessary member of this team. And while you may think Lena and I are expendable, I would argue that we are the most important of all.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because we are writers.”

  No one knew what to say to this. Camilla sighed. “We have imaginations, and imagination is what is needed when plain old police work hits a brick wall. Sam would still be in jail if Lena hadn’t followed her rather whimsical inclinations. Isn’t that true?”

  “It is indeed!” Sam said warmly. “You may be right, Camilla.”

  “I am right. And Sam, of course you are needed because you know Victoria. How she thinks, what she likes, how she might act in a given situation.”

  Doug still wasn’t on board. “What exactly are you suggesting, Camilla?”

  She nodded. “I am suggesting that the four of us find Victoria West, and soon. It’s not just a matter of keeping Sam free. There is a more urgent component to this puzzle.”

  Now she had everyone’s attention. She looked back at her computer and clicked with her mouse for a moment. “When Lena told me about the picture of Victoria, I studied it. In fact, I saved the picture from the website to my own files. Then I played with it in Photoshop, manipulating the image.”

  We stared at her. I had never exactly considered Camilla a throwback to another era, but even I had not anticipated the extent of her computer savvy.

  “Why?” Doug asked.

  “Well, I couldn’t see it well, so I cropped it so that I could see her better—so that just her face filled the screen. And then I played with that image a bit. Zoomed in and out. That’s when I found it.”

  In a sudden, mutual movement, we all leaned closer to her. “Found what?” Sam said.

  She turned the laptop toward us. The
re was Victoria West’s face in close-up, smiling at us. “Here’s the picture as we’ve all seen it,” Camilla said. “But look what happens when you cover everything but her eyes.” She zoomed in until only Victoria’s eyes were visible on the screen.

  I gasped. “That’s a different picture,” I said.

  “No,” Camilla said. “Same picture, without the distraction of the smile. We were all focusing on the smile, weren’t we? Perhaps all people would. But what do you see in those eyes?”

  “Fear,” I said. It was obvious now, in the window that Camilla provided. Victoria West’s green eyes were creased with unhappy lines, and her brows were low over them, clearly expressing distress.

  Sam made a guttural sound in his throat.

  Doug said, “What the hell?”

  Camilla widened the shot again to include her smile. “At a glance she is a happy woman on a yacht. But when you isolate the eyes, you see the truth. This woman is afraid. We need to know why. And there’s a very real chance, Sam, that your wife needs rescuing.”

  * * *

  AFTER MUCH DISCUSSION, we agreed with Camilla. Victoria West was potentially in danger, but we had no evidence of that other than her eyes in a photograph. Sam, after a close study of the picture, grudgingly agreed. “This does make her look afraid. And I’ve seen her afraid many times. She insisted on watching horror movies, for one thing, even though she disliked them, and this—it’s authentic fear. I am amazed that you found this, Camilla.”

  “There was something wrong about the image. It bothered me. Now I know what it was: a basic disagreement between the top half of her face and the bottom—and of course the top is in shadow, which makes it even harder to see.”

  Doug nodded, looking interested. Once again, the cop in him could not resist this new mystery. “So the question is, what’s she afraid of? She’s on a yacht, she doesn’t seem to have been physically abused or starved. She’s wearing what looks like a designer bikini. What’s the threat?”

  “That is the question,” Camilla said, sighing and closing her laptop. “Along with many others. One: where has she been? Two: why did she let the world believe Sam committed murder? Three: did she have the option of telling the world otherwise? Four: is she being held against her will? Five: is that why she is afraid, or is it some other reason? Six: what is Nikon?”

  Doug leaned back in his chair and played with his coffee cup, his face moody. “This is troubling. Camilla, I admit, at first I thought you were really out in left field, but—I agree with almost everything you said. Except one thing. I’m not convinced the word ‘Nikon’ is important.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged and turned to West. “You said it was something you saw on her phone, right? But we type all sorts of pointless things into our phones, especially when we’re texting people. It could be nothing at all. She could have asked a friend what sort of camera she recommended.”

  West nodded. “True—but that doesn’t explain her reaction when I happened to read the word over her shoulder. She acted like I’d invaded her privacy. Like she had a secret.”

  “I think it’s worth pursuing,” I said. “And frankly it’s the only clue we have to pursue, aside from chasing down the yacht, which apparently no one knows the name of, and that’s the one thing the police probably are doing, at their own pace.”

  “Which could be glacial,” Doug said. “Depending on how much they want to find this woman.”

  Sam looked solemn. “They want to find her—or find out it was a misunderstanding, and the woman isn’t Vic at all. There are some pit bulls in the DA’s office who really want my blood.”

  “Blood,” I said.

  They turned to me. “What?” Doug asked.

  “They said the blood on the floor in Sam’s apartment was Victoria’s, but did they test it for drugs?”

  Everyone looked at me blankly. “Why would they do that?” Doug asked.

  I pointed at the computer. “Camilla, can I borrow that?”

  She slid it across the table, and I opened it up and did a quick search for Taylor Brand’s blog. “Remember this blog?” I said, showing them the picture. “It’s the one with the picture of Victoria that made me realize she was the woman on the yacht. But there’s another post—one that her friend Taylor made around the time Victoria disappeared. Here it is. And all these people made comments underneath. One of them, from an anonymous poster, says this: ‘If you want to find Victoria West, follow the money and the drugs.’”

  Sam’s brows creased, but Doug shook his head. “So what? That’s an anonymous poster on the Internet. That means nothing.”

  “Maybe. But if someone has been detaining her, wouldn’t that be one way to do it? To drug her, or keep her addicted to drugs? I don’t know a lot about it, but ever since I read that post I’ve wondered . . .”

  “It would at least be worth checking, wouldn’t it?” Camilla said, her face thoughtful. “If the girl were being drugged, and that blood contained her DNA, then they would be able to determine the drug content as well. Sam, did they give you any information about the blood?”

  Sam rustled himself out of some deep thoughts and said, “No. But I will certainly be asking through my lawyer. And you should all know that I have a private detective named Jim Harrigan who’s been looking for Victoria for the last year. He has the picture, too, and he’s currently in Greece, trying to get information. I’m going to tell him everything we came up with.”

  Camilla nodded. “Meanwhile, keep us privy to the reports he’s giving you. We may get new insights into the whole thing.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and held up the mug in a sort of grim toast. “We’ll solve this for you yet, Sam. It’s the least we can do.”

  We all nodded agreement, including Doug Heller, who made eye contact with Sam, his expression grave and slightly remorseful.

  * * *

  HALF AN HOUR later both men departed and Camilla and I cleared away the dishes and the leftover bread. “Camilla, you are amazing,” I told her. “We never would have had this revelation if you hadn’t sensed something amiss. It’s so subtle, really, when you see the photograph as a whole. But when you study the discrete elements—it’s fascinating.”

  “We can say the same thing of your searching online. You and I have, perhaps, that extra sense, attuned to the things that others might not notice. We seek a solution, and our minds are helping us do that.”

  I noticed that, despite the late hour, Camilla was walking with a bright energy, and her eyes were glowing. “Camilla—you certainly are spritely this evening. Is this due to a certain lunch with Adam Rayburn?”

  She grinned. “Lunch was very nice, but I must confess it’s not Adam that has me feeling so energized right now.” She rinsed out the coffeepot and started to dry it with a dish towel. She turned to me, pot in hand, and I saw her young self in her face.

  “The fact is, Lena, there’s nothing so exciting as a real mystery—I’ve always thought so! Don’t you agree?”

  20

  They met Hermann-Josef at the harbor at midnight. The long-lost brothers embraced, and Gerhard took Johanna’s hand and helped her board the Pontoporeia, named for a sea nymph, while a mass of stars glimmered above them. The air was fresh and cold, but their hearts were warm as they contemplated life together in a new land, young and free, with their lives yet to unfurl before them.

  As the yacht made its slow, graceful way out to sea, Johanna gave silent thanks that she had summoned the courage to board the Salzburg Train, the first step in a journey that had led her to this place, these people, this chance.

  Now another journey would begin, and she had chosen her direction.

  —the ending of The Salzburg Train

  CAMILLA HAD ORDERED me to sleep in the next morning, assuring me that she would do the same. “It’s the first day you haven’t had some terrible stress weighing down on yo
u, and I want you to relax. Daydream, enjoy the scenery out the window, pet that purring ball of fluff who keeps getting under my feet,” she had said with a smile. “Doug will be doing the morning shift on our latest project, so we have some time to ourselves.”

  I woke and did as she advised, stretching out under my warm covers and studying the little cat face of the sleeping Lestrade. The trees outside, growing bare but still adorned by some colorful and determined leaves, bowed to me with the pressure of the wind. I lay back on my pillow and closed my eyes, luxuriating under my comforter. Everything would be better from this point on. I would find ways to spend more time with Sam; my father would come to visit me and tour Blue Lake; Camilla would finish her novel and I would see its publication; and soon, very soon, we would solve the mystery of Victoria West.

  My eyes opened again. It was no use; I wouldn’t be falling back asleep. It was best, despite my determination to lie in, to get up and start my day. I reached for my phone and sent a quick text to Sam: Good morning. I’m thinking of you.

  I set the phone down, climbed out of bed, leaving Lestrade to his slumbers, and headed for the shower. Camilla had replenished the fragrant French shampoo, and I indulged in this and some lavender soap while I gazed at distant Blue Lake, and the vast sky above it, through the small shower window.

  Downstairs I found coffee and warm muffins on the dining room table. Rhonda was chopping vegetables for a lunch soufflé and singing a song to herself that I thought might be from a musical. I peered into the kitchen and waved at her; she lifted a hand, still singing. I returned to the table and sipped at hot coffee, enjoying the sunlight that speckled the tablecloth.

  Camilla did not appear, but I could hear her voice in the office, murmuring into her phone. It sounded like a business call. I glanced at my watch: nine thirty, which meant it was ten thirty in New York.

  I took one of the muffins, fat with blueberries, and ate it appreciatively. Then, in a moment of pure decadence, I ate another one. I poured more coffee and took my mug out of the room, down the hall, and to Camilla’s doorway. I peered in; she was off the phone, but studying something at her desk.