My eyes narrowed on the Chief. Mina was in an emotional state as it was. I couldn’t let him upset her even more.
“Mina doesn’t know anything because he never kept his date with her last night,” I reluctantly admitted. “I know because she came back to the store late. They were supposed to meet for pizza, but he never showed up, so I waited with her while her roommate drove over to pick her up and take her home. I’ve already spoken to her about it.”
“Was Johnny at your bookstore at any time last night?”
“Johnny came to the store, stayed awhile. But he left before we closed and, as I said, never came back to pick up Mina.”
“He left alone?”
I felt cornered. But I couldn’t lie about something that had been witnessed by people other than just me. “No,” I said in a soft voice. “He was on the sidewalk outside the store . . .” I looked down, hating Ciders for making me admit it. “He was talking to Angel Stark the last time I saw him.”
I heard Bud release a disgusted breath. I couldn’t meet his eyes.
Ciders cleared his throat. “Bud, maybe you and I should finish this conversation somewhere in private.”
Bud exhaled again, but this time in defeat. He shook his head. “There are no secrets in this town, and Pen and Sadie already know some of what’s going on, as you just figured out.”
Then some of the old fire rekindled behind Bud’s eyes. “We’ve leveled with you, Ciders. Now it’s time for you to level with us. What is going on? Why did you want to search my truck?”
“Bud, we just found a body floating in the pond. The body of a young woman. From the condition of the corpse, the State forensics people say she hasn’t been in the water more than ten or twelve hours, maximum, which means she died late last night or, more likely, very early this morning.”
“What does this have to do with me? With Johnny?”
“We found a length of yellow rope around the dead woman’s neck. The same stuff you sold at your hardware store,” Ciders replied. “It appears the killer used that rope to strangle her.”
Bud pointed in the direction of the pond. “That construction site out there has a length of that same damn rope. Anyone could have gotten it from there.”
“I checked the rope at the site,” the Chief said evenly. “There’s only one bolt securing the area. Both ends of that bolt of rope still have the plastic tabs attached—which means that length of rope has never been cut. So the killer probably got that yellow rope from somewhere else.”
“Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that rope. But anyone could have bought yellow rope like that,” insisted Bud. “Maybe the killer bought it last season when yellow rope was everywhere, or in another town that still sold it . . .”
“Bud,” Ciders began. “I know all about your nephew—the conviction, the parole, and about the suspicion of murder charges that were leveled at Johnny in that big Newport heiress death last year. The Bethany Banks case.”
I was surprised. So was Bud Napp.
“We’re not all Keystone Kops,” said the Chief, “despite what our local letter carrying Jeopardy! genius here thinks.”
Seymour harrumphed, and Chief Ciders continued, “Bud, when your nephew moved here, his parole officer notified me of Johnny’s criminal record and his place of lodging and employment. I never bothered the kid out of respect for you . . .”
“You and I both know that those murder charges were dismissed,” Bud pointed out.
“That’s right, Bud,” Ciders replied. “But they were dismissed on a legal technicality, not for lack of evidence.”
Bud’s face reddened. “There was no real evidence or they would have tried Johnny anyway!”
Chief Ciders nodded. “I know, and I understand how you feel. But the woman in the pond . . . she was strangled. Just like Bethany Banks. And until we locate Johnny, and have a long talk with him, he’s the main suspect now, which means I have no choice but to issue an All Points Bulletin for the arrest of your nephew on suspicion of murder.”
“Wait a minute!” Bud cried. “Murder of who?”
Angel Stark, of course, I thought to myself. She had to be the lady in the lake—unless, of course, some other woman had been carrying around Angel’s room key, which was technically within the realm of possibility. So I wasn’t surprised when the Chief said . . .
“Angel Stark, of course. Technically she’s not yet identified. But since Mrs. McClure volunteered to help ID the body, we can settle the matter of the woman’s name right here and now.”
Then Chief Ciders faced me. “Penelope, you and I are going to take a little walk . . .”
CHAPTER 13
Lady in the Lake
“I still ain’t heard who killed Muriel . . .”
“Somebody who thought she needed killing, somebody who had loved her and hated her . . .”
—Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, 1943
THE LESS SAID about the next half hour, the better. Suffice it to say that a corpse that has been strangled in summer and submerged in water for “only about ten or twelve hours” has pretty much lost all resemblance to anything human.
Black swollen tongue, blue-gray skin mottled with angry red-black patches, stringy, mud-soaked clothes and hair, and the incongruity of a bright sunflower-yellow rope embedded deep into the puffy flesh at the throat—the victim was not a pretty sight. And I’m not even bringing up the insects.
Through features like hair (long and copper), eye color (brown), and items like clothes the woman was wearing (that one-of-a-kind Betsy Johnson pink and green sundress with the lace-up corset and gauzy skirt), I became convinced the corpse belonged to Angel Stark, and told Chief Ciders and two officers from the Rhode Island State Police crime scene unit exactly that.
“From her fingerprints and dental records, the crime lab people should be able to positively confirm her identity within a few hours,” Ciders told me as we walked back to the Inn together.
“Sadie and I really have to get back to the bookstore,” I told the Chief. “We left poor Mina on her own for the last two and a half hours.”
A few minutes later, Ciders released us all, saying he’d be over to the bookstore soon to get a corroborating statement from Mina. Bud offered Sadie and me a lift back to the store. Seymour decided to tag along as far as the post office. Fiona returned to nurse her stricken husband, whom she’d “put to bed for a long nap.” It was a solemn, quiet group who trudged out to the Inn’s parking lot and piled into Bud’s Ford Explorer.
After we dropped Seymour at the local post office, Bud pulled up in front of Buy the Book. I was surprised when he cut the engine and followed Sadie and me into the store.
For a summertime Saturday afternoon, the place was fairly busy, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I spied a familiar face at the register alongside Mina. After bagging a bundle of paperbacks and passing them to the customer, Linda Cooper-Logan gave us one of her big, open smiles. In her late thirties, Linda still wore her short platinum hair in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties. These days, she usually favored long flowered skirts and a copious amount of silver bracelets, but on this warm afternoon she wore cut-off denim shorts and a chocolate-brown “Bakers Do It Early” T-shirt, which was dusted with flour.
“Boy am I glad to see you,” I gushed.
“Not half as glad as I was,” said Mina.
Linda dismissed my thanks with a wave of her hand. “I brought the pastry over for tonight’s meeting and saw a line of customers, so I volunteered to fill in until you guys got back.”
Linda and her husband, Milner Logan, operated the Cooper Family Bakery, a small but profitable bread and sweet shop down the street from Buy the Book. Linda handled the comfort foods, and Milner the fancy French stuff. (He and Linda had met when Milner was teaching a cooking school class in Boston on the art of French pastry.)
“Honestly, I can’t thank you enough,” I told her.
“So what’s going on? I’ve got to know,” Lind
a asked.
Yeah, said Jack Shepard. I’m with the blonde porcupine—What in hell happened at Bird-Woman’s lace-doily nest?
I was about to reply when I looked beyond Linda’s shoulder, to see the look of worry and apprehension on Mina Griffith’s face. Mina, in turn, was watching Bud Napp and Sadie head toward a set of comfortable chairs near the back of the store, speaking in hushed tones as they went.
I took a deep breath and broke the news to Linda and Mina about the discovery of Angel Stark’s body along the wildlife trail near Finch Inn. I also told them that Victoria Banks, Bethany’s sister, was also missing. Linda was intrigued, but as I expected, Mina took the news hard. Harder still was the next bombshell I dropped on the poor girl.
“Chief Ciders believes Angel was strangled, murdered—and he thinks Bud’s nephew Johnny had something to do with it.”
“My God,” Mina choked. The shock was too much and she broke down. Linda took over the register, and I brought Mina upstairs to privately comfort her with a cup of tea and a shoulder to cry on. I hated having to tell Mina the truth, but I knew it would be better for her to hear it from me than Chief Ciders, when he sought her statement.
Mina didn’t say much, just sipped her tea and said that she couldn’t believe this was happening—that Angel was dead and Johnny was being sought as a likely suspect.
“I admit he was really stupid to go off with Angel like that,” said Mina after blowing her nose, “and I was really angry with him . . . but, Mrs. McClure, I really like Johnny. Up until last night, he’s been the kindest, sweetest guy I’ve ever gone out with.”
I nodded. “I’m glad,” I said, “but I really don’t know Johnny.”
“He spent hours last weekend helping my little brother and his friends build a treehouse, which he knows how to do because for years he’s volunteered his time to Habitat for Humanity to help build low-income houses. He loves his uncle, and I know he cares about me . . . he told me so . . . he’s a good guy, Mrs. McClure, he . . .”
Mina began to cry again. Then she shook her head. “One minute with that stupid Stark girl would tell anyone she’s trouble,” murmured Mina, wiping her nose. “I don’t know why he went off with her like that.”
As I poured the last of the tea for Mina, I felt the slightest whisper of a cool breeze on my cheek. You know this is a frame job, don’t you? said Jack in my head.
“I want it to be,” I silently told the ghost. “But is it really? How can you be so sure Johnny isn’t guilty? Jack, I’m afraid Johnny just isn’t as ‘nice’ a guy as he wants Mina and his uncle to believe.”
You could be right. But there are an awful lot of notes in play here . . . and it’s a kind of tune I’ve heard before.
After Mina dried her eyes and insisted on continuing her shift—she said it would help keep her mind off her worries for Johnny—we went back downstairs to the store.
Bud and Sadie were still deep in conversation, and things seemed fairly quiet. I thanked Linda for her help. She went on her way, and Mina took over the register.
“I think we need fresh stock on the new release table,” I told her. “If you cover the counter, I’ll take care of it.”
“No problem,” said Mina, blowing her nose one last time as I headed toward the archway leading to the Community Events space. I crossed the empty room, then strode quickly down the short corridor, past the restrooms. When I got to the storage area, I called to Jack, hoping to continue my communication with the gumshoe from beyond.
“You were saying that someone might be trying to frame Johnny . . . ?”
Like an original van Gogh, doll.
The storage room was nothing fancy: a plain white box with stacked cartons of books waiting their turn to be placed on the selling floor and an old wooden desk from the store’s early days against one wall—which we now used to hold office supplies. The room felt warm and a little bit stuffy when I’d walked into it, but Jack’s presence had dropped the temperature and the air around me felt comfortably cool. Too bad his ghostly presence couldn’t be constant and in every room, I mused to myself; the store would save a fortune in air-conditioning.
Very funny, said Jack, overhearing.
“Come on, Jack, don’t get testy.”
The cool air suddenly got decidedly colder. I shivered as a mini whirlwind swirled around my thin sleeveless cotton blouse and bare shoulders, seemed to whisper at my ear. You remember that dream I gave you last night? There’s a case file in those boxes that’ll finish the story. Look for the file marked “Stendall.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have the time for that right now.”
Make the time, baby. The files are five feet away.
Jack was right, of course. After his still-unsolved murder here in 1949, one of Jack’s acquaintances, a young reporter named Timothy Brennan, took possession of his files—and created an internationally best-selling series of books featuring the hard-boiled private detective Jack Shield. On every dust jacket, Brennan boasted that the Shield stories were based on Jack Shepard’s case files (a boast Jack wasn’t exactly keen to learn about).
After Brennan was also murdered here a year ago, his son-in-law, who subsequently took over the writing of the still-popular series—and owed me the favor of a lifetime—agreed to let me keep the original files here for him in storage. His only condition was that he first review them himself so he could Xerox “selected files” that interested him. I assumed the ones selected would be precisely the ones his late father-in-law hadn’t yet gotten around to exploiting for his fictional Jack Shield book series.
A week ago, the promised boxes finally arrived, and I had been hoping for the time to go through them—a part of me even fancying the idea that I myself might be able to puzzle out some theories about who might have killed Jack and why. But finalizing the Angel Stark appearance had left me with very little free time to peruse the files. And now that she was dead and Bud’s nephew the prime suspect, I really didn’t have the time.
“Couldn’t you just give me the shorthand on that case?” I asked Jack as I gathered and stacked on a handcart an array of hardcovers and paperbacks that made up the most recent releases by various publishers.
The shorthand is that this Johnny was obviously framed for the Bethany Banks murder. Legal technicalities can throw out confessions and incriminating statements, but if he’d really done the deed, there would have been enough physical evidence on the body for the DA to put him on trial. What seems more likely here is the frame didn’t stick—the locals didn’t have the stomach to look hard at the sons and daughters of any powerful, well-heeled families and the deb’s real killer got off. Except now your authoress was trying to keep the case alive in the public eye—so she gets bumped and once more Johnny gets blamed.
“You’re saying the person who killed Angel also killed Bethany?”
That’s the bet, honey. Not a sure thing, but if it were a horse, I’d give it pretty decent odds.
“Who then?” I asked.
Who were the people around Angel last night, who were also around Bethany the night she was murdered? Besides the old man’s nephew, of course.
“Kiki . . . she was at the reading. And she was staying at Fiona’s inn last night, too, which is where Angel was staying.”
Who else?
“Let’s see . . .” I grabbed a box cutter from the desk near the door and slit open a carton of All My Pretty Friends. I piled five books on the handcart and flipped through the sixth until I got to the color photo insert.
“Angel claims there were plenty of people at the party but only a small circle who had strong motives to kill Bethany. Bethany’s fiancé, Donald Easterbrook, was one . . .”
I studied the photo, which looked like the typical candid shot found in any photo album of a young man hanging out on an athletic field. Sporting jeans, a rugby shirt, and effortless posture, Easterbrook was tall and muscular with short, dark hair, blue eyes, a strong, square jaw, and a broad, easy-going smile. According to
the caption, Easterbrook was the offspring of an aristocratic, polo-playing father and a wealthy Brazilian mother. The combination had produced a strikingly handsome young man.
“He’s described in the caption as a ‘young prince of Newport,’ ” I murmured. “Hmm . . . very JFK, Jr.”
Who?
“John Kennedy, Jr.?” I replied impatiently.
Baby, I need more.
I winced, realizing to whom I was talking. “Sorry, Jack—before your time. JFK, Jr. was the famously good-looking son of a famously charismatic president who was assassinated in 1963, an event that gave their family legendary status in America ever since. The son died in a tragic small-plane accident—”
Collision?
“No, he wasn’t instrument rated, but he tried to fly through overcast skies at night anyway. Refused to change plans even though he got a late start and the weather warned of visibility problems. Apparently, he lost his bearings and flew right into the ocean.”
Got it. He’s what we’d call a victim of the carefree, careless class. They like to roll the dice, take their risks, for an entirely different reason than the street punk, but fate often gives them the same outcome.
I sighed. “Well it was a national tragedy, I can tell you. JFK, Jr. was a charismatic young man, and the country loved him almost as much as his father . . . It looks to me like Easterbrook has the same features as the late president’s late son, who was very popular with the ladies, too, by the way. Easterbrook’s also engaged to Kiki now,” I noted. “And Kiki is apparently also my cousin, through marriage, but let’s not go there—”
You may not want to go there, doll, because it’s another motive for Kiki to have killed Bethany—if she was in love with this super stud Easterbrook and wanted him for herself. Did you see Easterbrook at the reading?
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