"I can use Billy for the other end, if he's available," Laura conceded. "But the bathroom floor, that's a big job, Snack. Is this really the right time to start on it?"
"Why not? There's no place else they'll let me work. If I can't find something to do, there's not much point to sticking around. I may as well take off again."
"Snack! That is not funny," said Corinne.
With a melancholy smile, he said, "You're not supposed to laugh, Rin; you're just supposed to pack me a really big lunch."
"Not gonna happen," she told him calmly. "You're staying here. I've got used to having you around."
Laura said nothing, but she couldn't help wondering what was behind Snack's bravado threats to move on. Her brother seemed increasingly antsy—understandable enough, but worrisome to see.
She pushed away her squeamishness about him and said, "So? What about that sycamore?"
"Yeah, I'll load it. But definitely get Billy to unload it. After breakfast, I'm tearing up the bathroom floor. The hell with them."
"Hooray!" cried Corinne. "You'll be another month, at the very least!" With her wooden spoon she conducted an imaginary band while she tum-tum-ta-da-da'd her way through "Hail to the Chief."
She was as up as Laura was down. Way, way up. And Gabe had stayed late. And Laura couldn't remember hearing any good-nights on the porch below her window. Smiling despite her own glum mood, she took a shot. "I see you were with Gabe last night."
Corinne stopped conducting and turned to Laura with a bland look. "Yes, I was with Gabe."
"No, I mean, you were with Gabe last night," Laura said, lifting her coffee mug in a knowing salute. At least someone around there was getting some.
Her brother lifted his head. "With Gabe? What's this? Am I going to have to challenge him to a duel?"
Snack's affection for his sister was heartwarming for Laura to see. "You'll look for any excuse to drag out Dad's shotgun, won't you?" she quipped.
"There will be no duels, and there will be no roundtable discussions about my relationship with Gabe," Corinne announced with surprising gravity. "Now shut up and eat," she said in what had become a familiar refrain. "We still have work to do."
Billy was eager to assist Laura with the deliveries; he showed up at their door less than fifteen minutes after she called him. Laura thought that maybe he was simply happy to make a little money under the table, but he seemed to be more motivated than that: he looked almost possessed by joy, as if he'd lost something and then had found it again.
Laura was glad to see him in a better mood. He'd taken the discovery of the bones very hard and had kept himself scarce since then. "Have you been having a fun time doing Founders Week stuff?" she asked as they headed out for Miss Widdich's place.
Billy nodded his shaggy head. "Yeah, it's pretty nice. Like usual. The juggling contest is my favorite part. The rain stopped just in time for it."
Laura had been so focused on the sale at Shore Gardens that she hadn't realized that there was such an event. "Who won?" she asked politely.
"Beezee. He's a caddy at Thorncrest. That's where he learned to juggle. When he wasn't caddying, I mean. He started out by practicing with golf balls. Now he's awesome."
Apparently Laura had pressed one of Billy's hot buttons: he went on to describe in great detail each of the contestant's acts, everything from juggling balls and clubs to rings and beanbags.
"But Beezee's was the best; he used torches. Those are always the best. He dropped one, but it was still awesome. It's too bad we have the contest before World Jugglers Day in June. That's when we should really have it. Beezee said that this was good practice, though. To get used to the pressure. Beezee's going to Pennsylvania to compete. He's just awesome."
"Uh-huh," Laura said, pulling into Miss Widdich's secluded drive.
She had been a little surprised when Miss Widdich ordered the sycamore; the lady needed another tree the way Pennsylvania needed more coal. Apparently there was a gap in the natural screen between Miss Widdich and a distant neighbor's new house, and the fast-growing pseudoplatanus was the tree that she wanted to plug that hole.
A strange, seclusive woman, Maya Widdich. Laura still couldn't get over what an odd couple she made with Corinne. On the other hand, the last that either Laura or Corinne had seen of Miss Widdich was in the minutes after Baskerville went dashing off with the bone. Some friend.
Backing the truck alongside the house, Laura snugged it as close to the planting site as she could get. She saw that, as agreed beforehand, the immensely wide hole had been dug and the soil amended. By Miss Widdich? All that remained was for Laura and Billy to muscle the tree into the planting hole, fill it, tamp it, and beat it. They had three other deliveries still to make.
They attached the portable ramp to the pickup, and then Billy positioned himself behind the tree dolly. He put the brake on lightly to keep the sycamore and its heavy root ball from roaring down the ramp, and slowly eased the dolly to the ground using his massive size and strength as a counterweight. No one else Laura knew could have done the job, except perhaps her father in his prime.
Getting the root ball positioned properly took even more strength; Laura and Billy pushed, shoved, and pried until she, at least, was exhausted from the effort. Billy was drenched by the time they were done, but he still wore that cheerful, indomitable smile. He probably had strength enough left to plant a whole row of the blessed things. He began to fill in the rest of the planting hole while Laura and Miss Widdich squared up. The job was harder and had taken longer than Laura had thought when she verbally quoted a price; but she had to honor it.
"Could I have a glass of water?" asked Billy when he was done.
He was sweaty, dirty, and not the most appealing guest to invite into a house. Miss Widdich smiled thinly and said, "Wait here."
Laura would have liked to finish the deliveries and get home and into a shower, but she waited, rather awkwardly, with Billy outside while Miss Widdich fetched his drink. Billy hummed a tune as he looked around the lush, thriving garden. Flowering shrubs seemed to be everywhere; the smell of lilacs was pervasive.
Suddenly Billy pointed to a corner of the garden and said, "Oh, look at that. Miss Widdich has a compost pile too. Not a very big one, though, compared to yours," he said, dismissing it.
Laura knew he meant it as a compliment. "Well, we have a much bigger operation at the nursery, Billy. You can see why we'd be able to make a much larger compost pile."
He chewed on his lip for a minute and then said, "I hope you don't feel bad about, y'know, what was in yours."
"I don't feel good about it, Billy," she admitted with a weak laugh.
Miss Widdich approached slowly with a very tall glass of water and handed it to Billy, leaning both hands on her cane while she watched him drink. She looked as though she were expecting him to steal the glass when he was done.
He downed the water in one long series of gulps. "Thank you, that was good," he said, handing it back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, leaving a horizontal streak of dirt across his chin.
And then, out of the blue, he turned to Laura and said, "Can you keep a secret?"
It was an odd request and unlike him. "I guess so," she said, glancing at Miss Widdich. It couldn't be much of a secret, since someone else was there.
Billy took his cue. "Can you?" he asked the older woman.
Miss Widdich seemed equally tentative as she muttered a yes.
"You know when Baskerville found those bones that time? I was really scared," he admitted.
Laura said, "I know, Billy. We all were."
"But not as much as me, I bet. After I got home, when I was in the kitchen, my hands started shaking. Like this," he said, vibrating his fingers in a demonstration.
"That's not unusual, Billy," said Laura. "Sometimes things do hit you later—"
"Because! That's when I remembered about Sylvia, that's why I started shaking!"
Laura and Miss Widdich gasped audibly at the ment
ion of Sylvia's name, but it was Laura who said, "You remember Sylvia? So many years later?"
"Yeah. Who could forget her? Not me."
"What is it that you remembered about her, Billy?"
He hung his head and said, "Well, it was kind of stupid, really. I remembered it all wrong." He looked at them both with sad green eyes and said, "One time she had a big fight?"
When Laura merely stared, he added, "With Snack?" as if he were hoping she remembered.
"Oh," said Laura faintly. "I didn't know."
"And then later I fell asleep in the van, and when I woke up—it's so stupid," he muttered, but he finished his confession anyway. "When I woke up, I saw someone in the fog dragging something heavy into the compost pile, and I didn't know what it was. but then when Baskerville found all the bones, I thought for sure it was—"
He giggled self-consciously, inappropriately, and said: "Sylvia."
"Oh, God in heaven."
They were the first words that Miss Widdich had spoken. As for Laura, she was speechless.
"But Mr. Barclay said that the bones were there for way longer, so I was wrong. Don't tell Snack, okay?" he begged them both. "He could get mad if he knew."
He giggled uncomfortably again; clearly he was having second thoughts about letting them in on his secret.
"Billy," Laura said with a fierce scowl, "it's wrong to go around telling people something you know isn't true. I'm really surprised at you. Surprised and ashamed! How would you like it if I went around telling people that I thought you were the one who hit that dog last week and left it wounded on the side of the road?"
Billy's eyes got wide. "I didn't do that!" he said, horrified by the scenario she'd drawn. "I would never do that!"
"I know you didn't do it. And Snack didn't kill Sylvia. No one killed Sylvia! She quit her job and moved on. She was restless, a wanderer. She had lots of jobs before she came here; she used to brag about how many. Everyone knew that. Really, I'm so disappointed in you, Billy!" she said, hitting him with everything she had. She had to stop him from going around sharing his little so-called secret with anyone who'd listen. And in Chepaquit, that would be virtually everyone.
"But ... I said I was wrong," he said, crushed by the reprimand.
"Don't say anything about it, Billy. To anyone. Come on, let's finish our deliveries."
Laura was almost afraid to look at Miss Widdich, who had stood in rigid silence during the exchange. She was expecting to see shock, but all she saw was a very blank stare.
Chapter 25
The three of them were sitting in the sample twig chairs outside the garden shop, looking as out of place as B-list guests at a Hamptons wedding: Snack, Corinne, and Kendall Barclay himself.
Pulling up in the delivery truck, Laura's heart went up and plunged back down and landed on its side. She had no idea what to make of the fact that they were out there and not in the house—until she looked over and saw the official-looking van parked in front of their wide front porch.
The police must have returned with a warrant. If that was true, then the death investigation had become a homicide investigation at last. There was a grim inevitability to it, Laura knew, but it still came as a jolt to her system.
As she parked alongside Ken's little black Porsche in the customer parking lot, Billy took one gawking look at the assembled group and said, "Gotta go!"
Without waving his usual ebullient greeting to everyone in sight, Billy hurried away to his car—feeling guilty, no doubt, that he'd already spilled his secret.
Laura felt bad for the way she'd scolded him, but not bad enough to regret having tried to put the fear of hell in the man: all they needed was Billy running around telling people that he once believed he'd seen Snack dragging Sylvia's body into the compost pile. Never mind the fact that—according to Billy, who'd heard it from Ken—the bones were there before Sylvia was even born; no one was going to remember that part of Billy's chilling little tale.
Tense as she was, Laura could see that the three in the twig chairs weren't exactly all sweetness and light either. With his chin on his chest, his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out, Snack resembled nothing so much as a grounded teenager. Corinne looked mopey too, sitting sideways in her chair with her legs looped over its arm and listlessly snapping off last year's seedpods from a summersweet bush behind her. Ken, ever the gentleman, rose to his feet as Laura approached; but even there, she saw a certain droopy tension in his demeanor.
Feeling like something the cat dragged in herself, Laura collapsed in the chair that he'd vacated and breathed in a noseful of fragrant lilac. It revived her, somehow, as the sight of Ken just then could not. He'd stood her up twice, and he'd kept her in the dark about Billy's so-called secret.
Three strikes. He was out, as far as she was concerned.
He looked edgy and tentative. Welcome to the club, she thought. It made her feel as though they were playing on a level field. For once.
She said to him, "When I grow up, I want to be a banker. You never work."
It brought a quick, wry smile. "Laugh all you want. When the bank goes under, so may your loan," he quipped.
Snack let out one of his world-weary snorts.
Laura avoided looking at her brother, and he continued to avoid looking at her.
She nodded tiredly toward the house and said to Corinne, "And to what do we owe the pleasure of those guys poking through our lingerie?"
"I don't know," her sister said, looking all at sea. "They showed up with a consent warrant that they asked me to sign. Then they asked Snack to stop tearing up the bathroom floor. Then they started going through the house. I have no idea what they're looking for."
"They have no idea what they're looking for," Snack said. "I ought to know; I followed them from room to room."
"And you, Mr. Barclay?" Laura was angry and hurt and in no mood to be either tactful or adoring; she wanted to know why Billy was in Ken's confidence and she was not. "What're you up to? Your new best friend just ran away, in case you didn't notice," she added, unable to hide her irritation from him.
"Ah, hell," Ken muttered. "So you know."
"I know. Miss Widdich knows. I expect that by dark, all of Chepaquit will know."
"Know what?" asked Corinne. "What're you talking about?"
"Ken, would you like to do the honors?" Laura said, leaning her head back on the chair and nailing him with a perky, insolent smile. It was pointless to try to keep Billy's story from Snack and Corinne; they were bound to hear it sooner or later.
She was gratified to see that Ken looked discomfited. His color was rising, and a frog seemed to have lodged itself nicely in his throat. There was just a hint of the old class geek peeking through that handsome, clean-cut facade—enough, in fact, to take the edge off her resentment. How could you stay mad at someone who had the decency to feel embarrassed by his actions?
"I didn't handle the thing with Billy as well as I might have," he said, mostly to Snack. "I should have come directly to you and told you what Billy told me. I was hoping to just nip the damn story in the bud, but obviously that didn't happen."
He recounted the story, only in more detail, that Billy had told Laura and Miss Widdich.
Corinne was scandalized; Snack, immobilized.
Laura found herself interrupting Ken just to reassure them both. "Fortunately, we now know, thanks to Billy—if no one else—that the bones have been there for a couple of generations. Let's hope people remember that part when Billy goes blabbing his disproved, silly theory."
"Uncle Norbert," Corinne whispered. "It had to be him. He was around here forty years ago."
Snack said contemptuously, "Oh, come on, you could just as easily say it was Dad; he had the same vile temper. And anyway, why does it have to be a Shore who did it? There's got to be a murderer or two somewhere in the world who's not a member of our immediate family."
Brave talk. But Laura was watching Ken, and she wasn't liking what she was seeing. He was stand
ing—presiding—in front of the three of them, hands in his back pockets, thumbs hooked outside. He was looking down, listening or thinking intently.
"The reason I told Billy about the age of the skeletized remains," he said to them, "was to reassure him and quiet him down. The thing is—"
He looked up, and the pain in his face was evident for all of them to see. "The thing is, that initial time line has now been revised downward. The ME hadn't taken into account how active a compost pile is as an agent of decomposition. It turns out that he was off by twenty years or more."
"Gee," Snack said contemptuously, "the guy sounds like quite the expert. Next, he'll be telling us the bones were put there last weekend."
"There's corroborating evidence, Snack," Ken said quietly. "The body was put there no earlier than 1987."
"That's when Sylvia worked here!" Corinne blurted.
"I know," Ken said. "Billy worked the dates out for me."
For the first time since he'd returned home, Snack looked cowed. "No one's going to believe a half-wit," he murmured.
"Don't call him a half-wit," Laura said faintly.
"Okay, a three-quarter-wit. Come on, Laur," Snack coaxed with a sickly smile. "Billy is ... Billy. He's a good guy but he's Billy, for crissake. He talks to deer. On occasion, to trees. I'm amazed that he could even come up with such an evil-sounding scenario."
"It's entirely possible that he did actually witness a crime being covered up," said Ken. "Literally."
Snack jumped to his feet; he looked around, ready to run. "This is nuts. This is really nuts! Are you telling me that because Billy has a nightmare and someone else comes up with a date—? Where the hell did they get a year? I suppose the body was buried with a laminated newspaper?"
"Trust me, they have hard proof."
Laura's head was spinning. She had no idea whether she should be thanking Ken or running him over. "You seem to know everything about this case," she hissed. "Why don't you just tell us who did it and spare us the wait?"
"If I knew, I certainly—"
A Month at the Shore Page 23