CHAPTER
69
When Grace and B.J. got back to the Viking, the newsroom was almost empty.
“I bet everybody’s out, at the beach or something, catching rays,” B.J. grumbled. “But damn it, I’ve got to write this script, get Constance or Harry to track it, and get it edited.”
“Life in the fast lane, Beej,” Grace joked.
The producer nodded, smiling. “You should go out and do something fun, Grace. After all, you’re not getting paid for this.”
Grace shrugged. “The allure of lying in the sun is long gone for me, and the other interns don’t exactly seek me out, or haven’t you noticed?”
“Speaking of interns, I wonder if Sam has had the guts to show his face.” B.J. looked around the ballroom.
No Sam. No Joss. No Zoe, either.
As B.J. opened up his laptop to begin writing the scrimshaw script, Grace wandered over to the assignment desk. Again, Beth Terry was at the helm, this time eating chocolate fudge from a box.
“I was wondering, Beth, any sign of Sam?”
“None.”
“Do you think that maybe the police should be called?”
“Yes, Grace. I do. But Linus thinks we should wait awhile. And he’s the boss.”
CHAPTER
70
Joss Vickers was not at the beach. Though, as she came through the heavy door of the Newport Police Department headquarters and was hit by the blast of hot late-afternoon air, she was proud of herself. She had foregone the immediate pleasure of a dip in the refreshing Atlantic for her more important goal.
Crossing the street, Joss patted the pocket of her shorts, satisfied with the contents. She’d had to promise to have dinner tonight with Tommy to get what she wanted, but it was worth it. Though Tommy had said he would take a picture of them for her, Joss had insisted on seeing them herself. The pieces of evidence the police were not revealing to the public. A silk handkerchief and a single earring that had been entombed with Charlotte Sloane’s bones. Both were in good condition, protected all these years, buried in the pocket of Charlotte’s dress.
Tommy hadn’t had the courage to smuggle the earring or the handkerchief out of the police station, but he had taken them from the evidence room and showed them to Joss in the officers’ lounge area. He guarded the door, just in case, but they really had plenty of time. No one was stopping in for coffee on a scorching day like this one.
Joss got into the green Mercedes, switched on the ignition, and turned up the air-conditioning. She rummaged though her Kate Spade bag, found a barrette, and clipped her long hair up off her neck. As the cool air began to circulate through the sedan, Joss pulled the folded sheet of paper from her pocket, opened it, and began to study the sketches she had hurriedly drawn.
A golden disc, slightly smaller than a quarter, set with diamonds in the design of the face of a clock. Engraved in tiny letters around the rim were the words TIME FLIES. LOVE STAYS. The handkerchief was silk, the color of a lemon peel. She’d be sure to remember that particular shade.
Now Joss knew what the police knew, Tommy had reassured her. She’d read Charlotte’s diary and had seen the earring and the handkerchief. She wasn’t quite sure yet how she would use the clues, but she felt empowered having the insider knowledge. At the very least, she could toss the information to Linus and impress him. But that would come only later, if she couldn’t figure out more herself. If she could track down the Sloane women’s murderer or murderers, Joss could write her own ticket with any news organization she wanted. Maybe she’d give KEY News first crack, maybe she wouldn’t.
Backing the car out onto Broadway, Joss smiled, thinking about how cool it would be to be an investigative reporter. But her expression turned sullen when she spotted Grace walking along the sidewalk. Joss didn’t honk the horn or wave. Instead, she felt a wave of suspicion and jealousy as she watched Grace disappear into police headquarters.
Joss pulled out her cell phone and called Tommy. He would keep tabs on Grace for her.
CHAPTER
71
Detective Al Manzorella adjusted his brightly striped tie as he escorted Grace into a small conference room. The space was barren save for a table, four chairs, and a large mirror on the wall.
“Take a seat,” he said, indicating the office chair on the other side of the metal table. “What can I do for you?”
“I have something that I thought could be important to your investigation of the deaths of Charlotte and Madeleine Sloane.” Grace clasped her hands on the table in front of her.
“And what would that be?” Detective Manzorella asked, taking a seat across from her.
“I had a conversation with Madeleine Sloane on the night she died.”
“Were you a friend of hers?” The detective’s eyes searched Grace’s face.
“No. Well, yes, I suppose I was, or I could have been.” Grace fumbled with the words. This detective was going to think she was a crackpot.
“Let me start again,” Grace requested, taking a deep breath. “I only met Madeleine for the first time Saturday, the day that her mother’s remains were identified. I’m here with KEY News, doing an internship on KEY to America. We went to Shepherd’s Point to see what we could get on the Charlotte Sloane story, and that’s when I met Madeleine.”
“Who is we?” The detective wrote in his notepad.
“A KEY producer named B. J. D’Elia and me,” Grace answered, hoping that she wasn’t bringing B.J. into this. She hadn’t even told him she was going to the police, much less what her conversation with Madeleine the night of the clambake had been like. Grace had promised to keep the talk with Madeleine confidential, but it was different now. Now, everything that Grace had ever been taught had led her here, to the authorities. It was her civic duty. She had to tell the police what she knew. With Madeleine dead, there was no longer any confidence to keep, especially if Grace’s knowledge could help find out what had happened to the young woman.
“Go on,” urged Detective Manzorella.
“Well, we talked a bit at Shepherd’s Point, and I guess you could say we hit it off. We had something in common. Both of us had lost our mothers.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” Yes, thought Grace, my mother would approve of my coming to the police. It’s the right thing to do. She took a deep breath and continued. “Anyway, Madeleine did a short interview with us. She was adamant that her father didn’t kill her mother.”
Detective Manzorella’s face remained expressionless as he listened. Oliver Sloane had been the prime suspect all these years, though there was never enough to bring him in. The fact that, on the night she disappeared, Charlotte went back to Shepherd’s Point instead of going to Seaview, the marital home she shared with Oliver, made everyone think that she had been running away from her husband.
Since Madeleine’s death, many of the other guys in the station house were beginning to be less sure of Oliver’s guilt. If Charlotte’s and Madeleine’s deaths were connected, it was hard to swallow the idea of a man killing his own daughter.
Still, Oliver couldn’t be counted out, and Al wanted the focus to remain on him. Though he wasn’t at the clambake, it would have been easy enough for Oliver to approach Madeleine at the Forty Steps.
“The reason I really came here is to tell you about the conversation I had with Madeleine at the party that night.” Grace paused as she twisted her hands on the table. “Madeleine had been drinking a bit, and she spoke quite freely to me.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she felt that, deep down, she might know who her mother’s killer was.”
Detective Manzorella peered sharply at Grace. “What do you mean, ‘deep down’?”
“Madeleine said she had been having dreams about when she was a little girl on the night her mother disappeared.”
“And?”
“And the dreams had been becoming more vivid.”
Grace recounted what she could rememb
er of Madeleine’s conversation. The little girl awakening to find her mother writing in a diary. The single earring slipped inside the pocket of Charlotte’s evening gown. Madeleine being tucked back in bed only to get up again and listen to a one-sided telephone conversation. Following her mother down to the gate to meet the caller, the headlights of the car hiding the driver, at first, from view.
“But Madeleine felt like more was coming back to her,” Grace finished. “That the memory of the driver was right within her grasp. Could it be possible that Madeleine had figured out who had killed her mother and that the killer had to get rid of her because of that?”
Grace sat back in her chair, spent, her story told. On the other side of the wall, Officer Tommy James watched through the glass. He had listened to her entire tale.
CHAPTER
72
Kyle decided to close the shop a little early. That was his prerogative as owner. He enjoyed the fact that he could do as he pleased. Now that Cloris had left him, he was freer than ever.
He enjoyed being a bachelor again, and surely didn’t miss his wife’s constant nagging. She wanted things from him that he just couldn’t or wouldn’t give her. She was always complaining about his lack of responsiveness, in bed, in conversation, in emotion, in everything. Cloris was forever asking what he was up to, insinuating that he was hiding things from her. Kyle didn’t miss her badgering one bit.
Turning the bolt on the front door, he surveyed the shop with satisfaction. Business was good, even more lucrative since he had established his website, expanding his customer base worldwide. Clients were finding him; he didn’t need to search for them anymore. And that was a damned good thing, since Cloris was bleeding him dry in alimony payments. Thank God, she hadn’t had a clue about the other money he had stashed away.
Yes, life had been pretty good the last few years, but that was changing now. The discovery of Charlotte’s bones and Madeleine’s death were panicking the local population and intriguing the media. The visit from those two from KEY News this afternoon had unnerved him. He was especially crazed that Grace Callahan had come up with the smart-ass suggestion that he demonstrate how to test for fakeshaw. Hoisting himself by his own petard didn’t set well with him. But now, what was he going to do? Refusing the request could cast suspicion on him. He’d have to go ahead and do what they asked tomorrow morning and pray for the best.
The pressure was on the police to solve the cases, and Kyle was worried about that as well. If the cops came to his door, he didn’t want to be caught with any incriminating evidence.
It was time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Kyle went from display case to display case, selecting the perfectly executed plastic pieces and removing them, rearranging the real scrimshaw objects to cover the spaces on the black velvet.
It was time to clean house.
CHAPTER
73
Her head was throbbing. When Grace got back to the hotel from the police station, she went directly to her room, not even stopping at the ballroom to see what was going on. She wanted to take a shower and lie down.
Opening the door to her room, she groaned as she noticed the red light blinking on the telephone next to the bed. Whoever it was, she didn’t feel like talking. Not even to Lucy and certainly not to anyone who wanted her to do any work or run an errand for KEY News. She needed some downtime.
She undressed, peeling away her perspiration-dampened T-shirt and stepping out of the jean skirt she had thrown into her suitcase at the last minute. She wished she had brought another one. Maybe, after a little nap, she’d take a walk up the block to the Talbots she had noticed, or down to the Gap she had heard was on America’s Cup Avenue and see what they were selling. She definitely needed a pair of khakis to get through this week.
Grace went into the small bathroom and searched her cosmetics kit for the travel-size bottle of Advil. Shaking out three tablets, she swallowed them down with a mouthful of water from the spigot at the sink. She pulled back the shower curtain and adjusted the water temperature to a soothing lukewarm. She stood beneath the spray, letting the water pound against her scalp. After a good ten minutes, she began to feel some relief.
Wrapping a bath towel around her body and twisting another, smaller one around her head, she went to the bed and pulled back the spread. Grace sighed with gratitude as she slipped beneath the cool, white sheets.
But the light on the phone still blinked, insisting that it be answered. She reached for the receiver, jabbed at the keypad, and smiled as she listened to B.J.’s voice. He sounded a bit nervous.
“Hey, Grace. It’s me. Bartolomeo Joseph. I’m finished editing our piece on the scrimshander and I’ve decided that we’ve worked far too hard today. We need to have some fun. So, I was wondering, if you don’t have other plans, if you’d like to go out for a nice, relaxed dinner. How does a little summer sushi at the Candy Store sound? Afterwards, I thought we could go out and listen to some music on Bannister’s Wharf, maybe do a little dancing. I know I’d really like that. I hope you would, too. Call me on my cell.”
It sounded like an actual date. She wasn’t big on raw fish, but the thought of spending an evening alone with B.J. made Grace forget about her headache.
The Candy Store had been the hangout of choice for generations of the Newport sailing crowd. The dining room was wide open to the harbor and Narragansett Bay, with a long bar running the length of the room. An overscaled antique “pond yacht” hung on the wall behind the bar, dominating the room.
The maître d’ showed them to a table at the side against the rear wall. Grace noticed that all the other tables were occupied.
“This place must be good,” she said as she spread her napkin on her lap.
“Yep. I’ve heard it’s one of the ‘musts’ in Newport,” said B.J. “I hope it lives up to its billing.”
As they waited for their wine to arrive, Grace wanted to get it out of the way. It would either relieve her or ruin the evening, but she was certain she had to tell B.J. about her visit to the police. Not only had she brought his name into things, but she wanted to confide her concerns. Yet she told herself to be careful not to make him feel that she was leaning too heavily on him.
“Here’s to you, Grace,” he said, holding his glass toward her. “You’ve been making work a lot more enjoyable for me.”
Trying to decipher the meaning of the toast, Grace smiled as their glasses touched. Maybe this wasn’t a date after all. Maybe this was just one colleague dining with another. She hoped not. She was feeling more and more attracted to the man who sat across from her. It wasn’t just physical, though with his high cheekbones and angular jaw, B.J.’s face was certainly appealing. But he was also smart and sophisticated, yet down to earth. He didn’t take himself too seriously. Not like Frank at all.
“Should we look at the menu?”
“Yes.” Grace nodded. “But you’ll have to guide me. I don’t know much about sushi.” Oh God, she sounded like Jan fawning over Frank. Inwardly, Grace cringed, and she pinched herself under the table.
“How about we try some of almost everything then?” B.J. suggested.
Grace looked up from the menu. “I’m game, but I’ll have to pass on that Dancing Eel Roll.”
“Done.” B.J. laughed as the waiter came to take their orders. “We’ll have some pan-seared tuna with ponzu sauce and that salad of crab, octopus, conch, and shrimp in kimchi sauce to start, and a double combination platter with the California rolls, sashimi, and sushi.”
Halfway through her second glass of wine, Grace made her announcement. “I went to talk to the police today, B.J.”
His brown eyes widened a bit. “‘Bout what? Did you tell them that Sam is missing?”
“No, I didn’t think it was my place to go into that, though if Sam doesn’t show up soon, somebody’s got to tell them.” She shook her head. “No, I wanted to tell them something that might help in the investigation of Madeleine Sloane’s death.”
“I don’
t understand. What?”
B.J. listened intently as Grace described her conversation with Madeleine at the clambake.
“Whoa,” he sighed as she finished. “If Linus knew that you were sitting on this and that you went to the cops with it instead of telling him, he’d go ballistic. This is just the sort of thing he’d kill to have on the show.”
“I’m not going to tell Linus, B.J. I have no desire to be interviewed on KEY to America about what Madeleine confided in me. It was a private conversation, and I don’t want to exploit it. I only told the police because I thought they should know. It could help in the investigation.”
He smiled appreciatively, reached across the table, and covered her hand with his. “You’re a good girl, Grace Callahan. I don’t know if that kind of thinking is going to score you points in this business, but I admire you for it.”
Grace was taken aback by the thrill she felt at B.J.’s touch, a vaguely familiar feeling, now, here again, vital and exciting. The last years with Frank had been passionless. It had been a long time since she’d been touched by a man—you couldn’t count the hugs she routinely got from her father. Grace didn’t want to kill the mood, but before things went any further, she had to tell B.J. that she’d mentioned his name. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but you never knew how somebody would react when the police were involved. Grace would dread talking to Frank about something like this. He never wanted to get involved in anything that had any chance of causing him problems or complications.
“The police asked who was with me when I met Madeleine at Shepherd’s Point,” she said softly. “I told them you were.”
“No problema. Let them come talk to me if they want to, Grace. I have nothing to hide.” He wrapped his hand tighter around hers.
The steel band was playing on the wharf when Grace and B.J. came out of the restaurant. Caught up in the heady feeling caused by a combination of the tropical beat, the warm night air, and her companion for the evening, Grace took B.J. up on his offer of another drink.
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