Dead Drift: three small town murder mysteries (Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series Book 4)

by S. W. Hubbard

  “I’m thinking maybe I’ve been a little hard on Roy. Imagine your mom dropping you off for a weekend with your grandparents, then never coming back. And having aunts like Nancy and Karen who are nice, normal moms and yours doesn’t give a damn. No wonder Roy’s screwed up.”

  “Seems like his grandfather’s given up on him,” Frank said.

  “But not his grandma. Maybe if Roy recovers from this gunshot, he’ll finally be able to turn himself around.”

  “Possibly,” Frank said. Earl’s eternal optimism was one of his most endearing qualities and Frank had to remind himself not to shoot it down. Maybe this was the rock-bottom Roy had to hit in order to bounce back. Or maybe it was one more stop on the long downward spiral.

  “Why were you so interested in Deke’s family photos?” Frank asked, to change the subject. “Do you know all those kids?”

  “Not really,” Earl said. “I’ve never been to the Steubens’ house, but I had a feeling I’d seen some of the photos before. Weird. Like, whattayacallit?”

  “Déjà vu.”

  Frank spent two hours that night in the Mountainside Tavern, talking to Roy Corvin’s known associates, but all he got for his trouble was a raw throat from breathing in secondhand smoke and a pounding headache from trying to hear over the blare of the jukebox. Roy’s cronies, reluctant to speak ill of the almost dead, had to be prodded to talk, but the general consensus was that since Roy had fallen off the rehab wagon, he was irritable and unstable, and everyone had been avoiding him.

  Not that Frank expected anyone to own up to visiting Roy on the afternoon in question. But by getting each man propped at the bar to identify someone else as being a better friend of Roy, he’d managed to compose a list of people whose whereabouts at the time of the shooting would have to be checked. But no one knew anything about another girlfriend.

  Frank stopped back at the office to write up his interview notes while they were fresh in his mind. The fluorescent tube above his computer flickered maddeningly. He stood on his desk and jiggled it. The bulb settled into a steady glow. He sat back down and continued typing. Immediately, the light pulsed dim and bright and commenced a high-pitched hum. He typed a few more lines and decided to call it quits.

  Hopping back up onto the desk, Frank yanked out the tube. Might as well stop by the hardware store on the way in tomorrow, he thought. And better take ten bucks from petty cash now, otherwise he’d forget to reimburse himself.

  Frank unlocked the top desk drawer. Inside the olive green metal petty cash box was $23.74. He took a ten and shut the drawer.

  Then he opened it again. $23.74. That’s all.

  No gold locket.

  After a restless night puzzling over the missing locket, Frank went directly to the Trout Run Presbyterian Church for consultation with his friend, Pastor Bob Rush. He paced around the minister’s book-crammed office, laying out the details of the problem as much for his own benefit as for Bob’s.

  “And the only people who know where I put the locket are Earl, Doris, and Ardyth,” Frank concluded.

  “But if it was locked in your drawer--?”

  “Earl and Doris know where the spare key is, in case they ever have to use the petty cash when I’m out. And Ardyth is the town treasurer. She uses that key when she comes in to replenish the cash and collect the receipts.”

  “Well, it can’t be Ardyth,” Bob said. “No one does God’s work more faithfully than she does.”

  Frank might’ve rolled his eyes if he had heard anyone else described so piously, but in Ardyth’s case, Bob was absolutely right. Ardyth was a good person. Not holier than thou, just good and kind, through and through. And not a Pollyanna either. Frank wouldn’t have been able to tolerate that. No, Ardyth saw people’s flaws clearly enough, but she helped them anyway. She would no sooner sneak into the town office and take that locket than she would rob a bank.

  “I know,” Frank said. “She made such a big deal about turning it in when she found it, so why steal it back?”

  Bob shook his head. “Definitely not Ardyth. So that leaves Doris and Earl.”

  Frank dropped his head in his hands. “It can’t be Doris. She’s just too, too…”

  “Dumb?” Bob offered helpfully.

  “Yeah, but lots of crooks are dumb. Doris is transparent. She’s like a cartoon character—I can practically see her thoughts floating in a bubble over her head. If she stole it, she’d give herself away.”

  The two men sat in silence.

  “Earl?” Bob said finally.

  Frank squirmed as if spiders were crawling over him. “I can’t accept that. His work has improved dramatically. He’s doing great at the Academy.” Frank shut his eyes. “He’s really coming along.”

  “Yet you have doubts,” Bob said.

  ”Something he mentioned the other day. Apparently he’s dating Molly Lynch.”

  “The dentist’s daughter?”

  “That’s the one. What if he felt the need to impress her? You know – support her in the manner to which she’s accustomed.”

  “A young woman like Molly wouldn’t want some quaint old locket,” Bob said. “Besides, Earl would be smart enough to know his girlfriend couldn’t be seen wearing stolen goods.”

  Frank sighed. “He’d also be smart enough to know how to fence it. Trade it in for something flashier, or get cash for a night out in Lake Placid.”

  “Is he that crazy about her?” Bob asked.

  “I don’t know. Or maybe he needed money for some family emergency. Earl’s passionately loyal to his family. But I can’t believe he jeopardize his career as a police officer for something so stupid. Not after he worked so hard to get into the Academy.”

  Frank stood up and crossed to the window. He looked out at the town green, where the crocuses planted by the garden club were bowed down under the weight of the promised spring snow. “I don’t give a damn about that stupid necklace. I just hate that three people I like and trust are the only ones who could have taken it.”

  “Morning, all,” Doris chirped.

  Frank jumped as she came up behind him, twitchy as a cat at the vet.

  “Did I mention I ran into Ardyth the night before last, taking a casserole to Mrs. Philhower? I told her you had the necklace locked up safe and sound.”

  Frank watch Doris’s every gesture, completely keyed into her patter for the first time in their working lives together. He felt like a spy in his own office, a narc for internal affairs. No wonder everyone despised those guys. Was she testing him? Trying to determine if he discovered the loss?

  “The ad will be in today’s paper. Maybe someone will call.” Doris chatted on, as excited and optimistic as a child with a raffle ticket.

  “I almost described it to my husband last night, but then I caught myself. I remembered what you said about not spreading around what the locket looks like.” She turned an imaginary key in front of her mouth. “Loose lips sink ships!”

  Frank could barely stand to watch her. No way Doris knew the necklace was gone. No way she had taken it. He glanced over at Earl.

  The kid’s fingers flew over the keyboard, his eyes locked on the terminal screen. Was Earl pretending not to hear Doris, or did he have her tuned out, as they both usually did? Doris returned to her desk while Frank tapped a pencil on a pile of papers and listened to the rapid click of the keys. He realized how much he’d come to rely on Earl as a sounding board, testing out ideas, thinking aloud. Keeping this secret felt ridiculously like infidelity.

  The locket nonsense was distracting him from the real work of finding out who shot Roy Corvin. He wanted to shove the matter aside and forget about it, but sooner or later Doris would open that drawer and…

  Frank’s tapping became so agitated that the pencil bounced out of his hand and sailed across the room.

  Earl looked up. “What’s bugging you?”

  “Nothing.” Frank replied too quickly. “Here, I made a list of Roy Corvin’s friends. You follow up on the first four. See
where they were when he was shot.”

  “No problem.” Earl took the list, giving Frank a puzzled look as he went out the door.

  Frank sat and stared at the remaining names on the list. Two of them had had some trouble – drunk driving, a domestic disturbance – but that had been a couple of years back. They were good guys, working men – a little rough but basically decent. He would check them out, but he doubted it would lead to anything. Frank reached for the phone. Maybe Bill McKenna would remember something else, now that the shock of discovering Roy’s bleeding body had subsided.

  Bill tried his best to be helpful, but he had little new to offer. He hadn’t noticed any car other than Tiffany’s at Roy’s house in the days before the shooting. He hadn’t heard the sound of arguing – his shop was too noisy. Roy had never confided his problems.

  “I suspected he must have lost his job, but I didn’t like to ask,” Bill said. “I figured I’d give him one more month on the rent before I made him leave. ‘Course the phone company wasn’t that generous. They had already cut off his service.”

  “How do you know?” Frank asked.

  “When I found him I tried to call for help from his house, but the line was dead, so I had to run back to my shop. But I got to give our rescue squad credit. They got there awful fast.”

  Frank’s grip on the phone tightened. “Yeah, they sure did.”

  “Doris!” Frank bellowed for the secretary before the receiver was back in the cradle. “Check the log. What time did Bill McKenna’s call reporting Roy’s shooting come in?”

  “At 4:47.”

  “And what exactly did you do next?”

  “I told Earl, and he headed right out.”

  Frank nodded. He remembered glancing at the clock as he and Earl had pulled out of the parking lot that afternoon. It had been 4:49. They had arrived at Roy’s at 5:02 – yet the volunteer rescue squad, which was also coming from the center of Trout Run, was already there working on Roy when he and Earl had showed up.

  “Then I called it into Roger from the rescue squad,” Doris continued. “But the funny thing is, Roger’s wife told me he was already on the way. Someone else must’ve called him directly.”

  “Yeah, someone. The shooter.”

  Roger Einhorn confirmed that the call reporting Roy’s injury had come not from Bill McKenna or Doris, but from a woman – “screaming hysterically so I could barely understand her.”

  Frank smiled. The solution to Roy Corvin’s shooting required nothing more than a request to the phone company to see whose phone had made the call. In less than half an hour he had the answer.

  “Esther Neugeberger?” Frank repeated. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes sir, that’s who the cellular number is registered to.”

  Esther, an elderly lady hobbled by arthritis, certainly hadn't made a quick escape from Roy Corvin's house. Ten minutes of rambling, confused conversation with her revealed two salient facts: she hadn’t used her cell phone since April, when her car stalled at the supermarket, and she now had some help with her housework. Tiffany Kass.

  Frank leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He might have known finding Roy’s shooter couldn’t be that easy. But at least he knew the shooter was a woman, a woman who was upset about what she had done to Roy and didn’t want him to die. A woman who grabbed a stolen cell phone at Roy’s house and used it to call for help. Frank reached for the phone again. He should call Earl back in—he was on a wild goose chase following up on Roy’s male friends. Frank let his fingers slip off the phone. Easier to have Earl away and occupied than to be with him, pretending neither of them knew about the missing locket and what its theft meant to Earl’s future in law enforcement.

  Tiffany's suspicion that there was another woman in Roy's life seemed increasingly probable, so Frank set out to talk to the one person he had not yet asked about Roy’s love life – his grandmother. Talking to Connie Steuben entailed a long drive to the hospital in Plattsburgh, where she was keeping a vigil at her grandson’s bedside.

  Frank felt his lunch curdle in his stomach at the first whiff of hospital air. He could cope with the stink of an autopsy better than this aroma of impending death. The intensive care unit bore uncanny similarities to a maximum-security cell block: bright lights, constant noise, relentless scrutiny. Wire and tubes shackled the patients as effectively as chains. Frank finally spotted a familiar, careworn face: it was Connie Steuben, sitting beside an inert form.

  “Hello, Connie. How’s it going?”

  The question was purely rhetorical. Connie’s sunken eyes and stringy hair told the tale of too many nights spent dozing in the hospital’s hard, leatherette chair.

  “Why are you here?” Her face was too haggard to register any further worry.

  Frank told her about the hysterical woman’s call to the rescue squad. “I think she might be the shooter. Do you have any idea what women he was seeing other than Tiffany?”

  Connie shook her head and stroked her grandson’s face. Even with the beard grown during his hospitalization and the tube forcing air into his lungs, Roy retained his handsome profile. “He always had girls chasing him, even in kindergarten. But he never stuck with any of them, not even the nice ones. I stopped keeping track. He was always searching, searching for something more. More love to fill up the hole in his heart.”

  “What about your daughters? Would they know anything?”

  Connie fussed with the bedcovers. “The girls don’t bother with Roy anymore. Not since the drugs and the stealing. They side with their father.”

  Frank thought of the family pictures on the Steubens’ wall. Karen and Nancy looked like Deke – broad, solid, placid. He imagined them forming an unyielding barrier against their nephew’s restless, urgent needs. Or a united front to protect their parents.

  Frank placed his hand on the old woman’s plump shoulder. “Why don’t you let me drive you back to Trout Run? You need a good night’s sleep.”

  Connie shrugged out of his grasp. “No. I can’t leave Roy. I’m all he’s got.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Frank return to the office to find Earl and Doris huddled over the drawer containing the petty cash box.

  Doris jumped, so used to being scolded by Frank that she assumed she must’ve done something wrong.

  Earl glanced up from fitting the key in the desk drawer lock. Frank watched the scene unfold with the sense of helpless inevitability he felt when a deer sprang in front of his car. The locket wouldn’t be there. The three of them would confront one another. The crash would come.

  Frank heard the cashbox click open.

  A moment later, the gold locket hung glimmering from Earl’s fingers.

  “I think I may have found the woman whose picture’s in the locket,” Earl said. “I need to see it again to be sure.”

  Frank felt words ready to surge out, but he choked them back. Relief at an impossible reprieve washed through him. All this worry for nothing. But at the same time, in a deeper part of his brain, confusion throbbed. Was he getting senile? How could he have overlooked the locket? But no – he’d dumped out the box and searched the entire drawer. Two days ago that locket hadn’t been there.

  Now Earl was trying to pry the delicate thing open, without success. Doris took it from him and sprang it with her fingernail. Her brow furrowed, her jaw dropped, her eyes saucered—a dead ringer for Olive Oyl.

  “It’s empty! The picture’s gone!”

  At least this time, Frank didn't have to bother concealing his shock. He wasn't crazy – the locket had been gone, and now it was back. But he was wrong – wrong about why it had been stolen. Wrong, all wrong, to have suspected Earl. He felt a hot rush of shame race up his neck into his cheeks. He turned his head away, sure that Earl could read every despicable thought it had ever contained.

  Doris hadn’t stopped babbling. “Who took it? Did you, Frank? Why would someone take just the picture? Who could’ve got into that drawer? I swear I didn’t tell
a soul, not a soul.”

  “Okay, Doris – don’t worry about it. A little mix-up. I think I hear someone in the outer office.” Frank nudged her out toward her desk, then shut the door and faced Earl.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Remember when we were at the Steubens’ house and I said I felt like I’d seen those photos on the wall before?” Earl began. “Well, today I was tracking down Roy’s friend Butch Farley, the plumber, and I found him working on a job. And the house where he was working had a whole wall of photos, just like the Steubens’, except arranged better, like a timeline. And I saw one of the same photos there as the Steubens have hanging in their house.”

  “Where? Whose house were you in today?”

  “Ardyth Munger’s. See, that’s why I had déjà vu. Because I’ve been to Ardyth’s house lots of times, and whenever I’m there I like to look at the old pictures on her wall. The town green with horses and buggies going through it, Ardyth’s dad on wooden skis. But this picture is from later – right before the photos switch over from black-and-white to color.”

  “So you’re telling me the photo from the locket is also hanging on Ardyth’s wall and the Steubens’ wall?”

  Earl shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. That’s why I wanted to look at the locket picture again. I think I recognize the woman from the locket, or really, the dress from the locket, because you can’t see her face that clearly. The two photos at Ardyth’s and Deke’s have a woman in that dress standing next to a man in uniform.”

  Earl held the necklace up to eye level. “But it’s not the man in the locket. It’s a different soldier – I’m sure of that.”

  Frank sneezed. “Have you found it yet?”

  “Hold your flashlight steady,” Pastor Bob said. The two men were combing through the archives of the Presbyterian Church, hampered by clouds of dust and the dim glow of a 40-watt bulb in the file room ceiling. “I think I’m in the right year. Yes, here it is: July 12, 1952, Constance Fortier married to Deke Steuben.