Summerkill

by Maryann Weber

  “I’m open to suggestions. It would be nice if you could throw in a little proof, of course.”

  “Forget it.” But I couldn’t. “One night I was trying to think pairs. “Eleanor and Rodney, Rodney and Kate, Kate and Kyle, Kyle and Clete, Clete and Eleanor—I started to lose it on that combination. Now if we work in Matt and Thurman, and Johnny … Okay, proof. Is there any way you can check on whose bank accounts have been showing $5,000 withdrawals lately?”

  “Not at this point, unless they volunteer their records. It would’ve been dumb to do it that neatly, though you can always hope. And we have to remember that the person or persons who came up with the blackmail money did not necessarily take part in the killing of Ryan Jessup. Or Mariah. We may get a break this time around. Somebody might have been seen entering or leaving Mariah’s property at the right time or buying that hair dryer. Maybe there’ll be a useful fiber match. These killers gave a lot of thought to how they operated the first time. Today had to be a hurry-up job, and that’s when your mistakes go up.”

  “Mariah was on the phone a lot. Can you get a record of her calls the last several days? To look for matches?”

  “I’ll try. Still, I wouldn’t bet on the ‘who’ approach getting it done: I’m becoming more and more convinced we have to work from the why.”

  “Mariah usually made herself noticed. If we knew where she went to do her research, it would give us a better idea of what she was looking into. I can show her picture around tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather put Steve on that. City library, state, university. Departments of environment, state, commerce—where else?”

  “Transportation, probably; there was a flap about those access roads. Agriculture? The Garden Center got into trouble a couple of years back for sneaking in shrubs that were under state quarantine. I would have a better sense than Steve of what to look for.”

  “Maybe you two could do it together,” Calvin suggested.

  Baxter shook his head. “I don’t think so. If Steve gets an ID somewhere, Val, you’re our consultant. Otherwise, the lower your profile, the better. For starters, does anybody except the three of us know about this tape?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I intend to leave it that way for now. And I strongly advise you to.”

  “What’re you going to do, pass off Mariah’s murder as some goddamn stupid accident? I won’t sit for that.”

  “Take it easy. Between the marks on her shoulders and the cord without fingerprints I’ve got adequate on-the-scene reasons to treat it as a suspicious death. Because you found both bodies, there’s bound to be speculation that the two murders were connected. I’ll do my best to play that down.”

  “I thought your game plan was to make the killers nervous.”

  “It’s been revised. When this crew gets nervous, they kill people, and I’m looking at their most likely victim number three. If they think you know what Mariah wanted to discuss with you, or can figure it out—”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to stay with your sister for a few days,” Calvin said soberly. “Or at a motel.”

  “So the killers wait a few days till I come back? I’m staying here. And I want to help with this.”

  “If we need you. You’ll be safer keeping away from it.”

  “I’ll be safer when those killers are ID’d. If you don’t want my help, I’ll find something to chase on my own.”

  For such a low-key person, he looked awfully close to explosion. “You want a job? Fine!” Baxter paused for a deep breath. “Yesterday I got hold of the documentation on the Hudson Heights planning history, from application to approval. There’s a lot of paper. I’m on page three and don’t know what the hell I’m looking for. You’ve got a much better background, and you worked out there long and recently enough to relate what’s on paper to what actually happened. Look it over; see if there’s something that doesn’t jibe. Or starts any other bells ringing. I brought all the binders home, so you can work there.”

  It startled me that I could find humor in this. “I should be safe in the sheriff’s house? Okay, I’ll take a look. It may not be a total waste of time.”

  “Could you try for a slightly more positive approach? Val, I’m not ruling out the Garden Center. There may well be something corrupt or warped or both to be unearthed at that establishment. But my gut feeling says our ‘why’ is centered on Hudson Heights. You’re a night owl—how about getting started on your reading now?”

  The suggestion drew a curious glance from Calvin and automatic resistance from me: I was not ready to go even that far into hiding. Besides, there were phone calls that needed making. “Tomorrow morning, when my head’s clearer. Roxy and I will tough it out here the rest of the night.”

  “Do you own a firearm?”

  “I’m not into hunting.”

  “Most people who live this deep in the country keep at least one around, whether they hunt or not. You might want to look into it.”

  “I don’t think so. This way I like my chances of never shooting anybody.”

  He frowned. “That patrol will be around every fifteen minutes. I’m in the village, third house in on Larch Drive. On your right, a green ranch. How early can you make it over in the morning?”

  “Is seven okay?”

  “Make it six-thirty and I’ll feed you breakfast. And Val—” He put a hand on my shoulder, looked at it with a puzzled expression. “Take care.”

  • • •

  Logically, whoever killed Mariah would not have expected me to discover her body, nor could they know about the message she’d left on my answering machine. So why would I need to take care, any more than I usually did? It’s not like I leave my doors open at night. Nonetheless, after the two men departed I went around checking that the windows were locked, pulling down shades I’d normally leave up, drawing drapes. Those couple of nights after Ryan’s murder I’d had a sense of something undesirable lurking out there, but it had been my privacy, not my safety, that felt threatened. In retrospect, I’d been considerably more indignant than uneasy. Now … At least the boys weren’t around.

  But on to my second round of post-body-finding phone calls. It was a shorter list this time, different priorities. Except for Vicky. It was after ten; on a Wednesday she should be home from work.

  Jason answered. He’d come up with a whole new slew of spinoffs on Ryan’s murder that I had to hear, but finally did pass me on through to his mother. I started to tell her about Mariah, whom she’d met a couple of times, briefly. They hadn’t taken to one another. Mariah failed to scope out much of interest, and for her part, Vicky isn’t keen on brittle, clever people, nor was she a whole lot more enthusiastic than Eleanor about the Mariah-Willem-me trio.

  Which didn’t keep her from feeling bad for me or wanting to drive right down. I told her of my early-morning assignment, and she had the breakfast shift tomorrow: we’d both be better off trying to get some sleep.

  She connected the dots, of course. Two murders within a week in an area where two murders in a decade might go as a crime wave; both victims people I knew. What had I gotten into? Just then we heard the little click that meant Jason had picked up the extension in his room.

  “Come stay with us until things settle down” was her bailout.

  I thought of Jason having a second killing to follow me around about and shuddered. “I’ll be fine here. I’m always off somewhere most of the day, and nights everything gets locked nice and tight.”

  “Still …”

  “Vicky, the main reason I called is the boys. Do you think they’ll hear, up in Speculator?”

  “Probably not, but I’ll alert Gina, just in case.”

  “There’s more. If things don’t settle down by the time they’re due back here, we’ll need to make other arrangements, for a while. My own safety I can handle, but how can I watch those two closely enough, the ground they cover in the course of a normal day? Of course we’ve got the rest of this week and all of next. Probabl
y it’ll be wrapped up by then and a non-problem. If not—”

  “No way are they moving back here!” Jason had to inject.

  “Jason, keep your ears out of other people’s conversations,” I instructed, knowing his mother wouldn’t.

  “I mean it, Aunt Val. Three days next week, like we talked about, so I can come along to the Cape. If you try to dump them on me longer than that, you’re going to be sorry.” He slammed his phone down.

  “We’ll work out something else, if we need to,” Vicky said, not quite managing to keep the weariness out of her voice. “Val, why don’t I come down after my shift tomorrow and keep you company for a couple of days? And then we could go somewhere for the weekend.”

  “Stay put. I really am okay, and I have a bunch of stuff to do. We’ll see how the weekend looks come Friday, okay?”

  “That depends if your bunch of stuff includes trying to find who killed Mariah.”

  “I thought that’s what we had a sheriff’s department for.”

  “Sure you did. I’ve known you all your life. Val, take care, please?”

  For several minutes after we hung up, I sat staring at the phone, thinking about who else I should tell about Mariah, who it wasn’t too late in the evening to call. It took little time to get down to the one name I already knew. Reluctantly, I dialed Willem’s number.

  Vicky claims she’d never get entangled with a man she couldn’t pick up the phone and call. Far as I know, she’s held to that, though you could argue she’s sometimes put up with worse inconveniences. In principle, I held our tacit “don’t call me, I’ll call you” arrangement in contempt. In practice, I hadn’t experienced much trouble getting used to it. You have to discover your own tolerance level—sometimes it surprises.

  The phone rang twice. As the third ring began my finger inched toward the disconnect button. Kate’s voice intervened.

  “Kate, could I speak to Willem, please? It’s important.”

  There was no immediate response. Finally, she said “I had to put up with things for the sake of the Garden Center that I don’t have to put up with anymore. No, you cannot speak to Willem, and I will not give him a message. I want you to leave us alone.” With that, she disconnected.

  I could call back, but she’d have the wit to terminate before the answering machine kicked in and I voiced a message Willem might hear. I could drive over—wouldn’t that make for a delightful scene? Well, it was his system we were stuck in. If he really wanted to be his own man, it wasn’t that hard to acquire, or conceal, a cell phone.

  CHAPTER 15

  I might as well have told Baxter I’d be over at six A.M. Hell, four. The amount of time I spent lying prone in bed that night couldn’t have totaled an hour. My super-charged body was beyond settling into a static position, and now there were two corpses competing for behind-the-eyelids images. One of them kept restarting a crying jag.

  I’m a big fan of cognitive therapy. When fair-to-middling agitated—a not uncommon condition—I can usually course-correct by pulling the situation apart into bite-sized components, listing their possible ramifications, and then building the picture back up again, sensibly reorganized. But when big-time agitation sets in, I can’t diagram Jell-O.

  Thus I launched into my repertoire of exercises: deep knee bends and sit-ups and jumping jacks and squat thrusts, everything I could remember from my old jock days. I processed all available laundry and mopped the kitchen floor. Declaiming poetry was a bummer, the passages that stick in my mind being more turbulent than uplifting, so I danced along with the Francescatti/Casadesus version of the Kreutzer Sonata—and kept bumping into things. Pacing the porch I focused on identifying wildlife sounds, until some began to seem suspiciously un-animal-like. Then it was back to the exercises. It wore poor Roxy out, trying to be companionable.

  I greeted the dawn of a chilly, heavily clouded morning both wired and enervated. Looking something like that too, apparently, judging by Baxter’s “Up all night, huh?” greeting. He didn’t strike me as being all that crisp and crunchy himself, I told him.

  Which was true. In barely a week I’d logged enough time in the presence of his water-off-a-duck persona to develop some sense of its subtleties. And limitations. His night might not have been as physically active as mine, but I doubted it was significantly more restful.

  Driving over, I’d played at predicting what he would choose to surround himself with. Nothing in the way of elaborate furnishings or strong colors, I thought. Like his clothes, his house would be utilitarian, bland, presentable but not spiffy. There was probably a basketball hoop in the driveway for his daughter. The front yard would be overgrown foundation plantings and weedy grass.

  I’d nailed those last two points, and the smallish RV parked on the back-around fit right in; a trailered boat wouldn’t have surprised me. I was also pretty much on the money about housekeeping standards, unless he’d spent a significant portion of the night tidying up. As to style of decor … Well, inside it was the most wooden house I’ve ever seen. By that I mean wood-filled, not stuffy. While all the furniture had a discernible purpose, the designation “utilitarian” would have been way off. There wasn’t much in the way of elaborate shaping or carving, but somehow even the plainest country-style pieces had a feeling of elegance. Outside, it was your standard ranch. Inside, it was a very strong house.

  “You made all this?” I guessed, remembering Mariah’s Shaker bench. He had ushered me to a seat at the well-knotted pine kitchen table. Bacon was nearly cooked in a skillet; four eggs lay ready on the counter. One by one he neatly broke them into the skillet.

  He managed to look simultaneously proud and sheepish. “There’s a lot of it, isn’t there? I keep meaning to pare down.”

  “You’re very good. Do you ever work on commission?”

  “I’ve got several pieces in the works and a list of others promised. Who knows when I’ll ever get to them? Sheriffing is hell on leisure time. It’ll be my second career when I retire.”

  “Sounds like a natural. When do sheriffs get to retire?”

  “This particular one in three years, two months, and five days. There’s a twenty-year pension you can opt for in county law enforcement.”

  “By then you’ll probably be having so much fun you’ll reup,” I said, the idea of retiring at or around the age of forty being not immediately admissible.

  He laughed. “By and large, the citizens who draw the attention of a county sheriff’s department are not fun people. There are occasional exceptions.”

  “I hope. Anyhow, Calvin says you get your fun solving puzzles.”

  “True, but that’s not one of the more time-consuming parts of being a sheriff. Or a deputy; you don’t get as bogged down in the bureaucratic bullshit at that level, but there’s an awful lot of small stuff to wade through. Maybe I’ll pick up a P.I. license, too, when I retire, and take only interesting cases. A dual second career: I’ll bill myself as the woodworking detective. The investigative woodworker?”

  “Tell me in minutes how much sleep you got last night.”

  “Never mind.” He distributed the contents of the skillet onto two plates, carried them over, and sat down. “I was going through that Hudson Heights material, trying come up with things for you to think about.”

  “Such as?”

  “You said you three were talking about innocent deceptions Monday night. How about not-so-innocent deceptions? The overall main area of concern about Hudson Heights was the environment, right? Could there be something they’ve misrepresented as being environmentally sound? Something critical they agreed to do but are trying to sneak out of? How about a big negative turning up unexpectedly, that they’re desperate to hide?”

  “All possibles, I guess, though the middle one would be hard to bring off, with the kind of spotlight they’re in. Do you have any specific pointers?”

  “That’s your assignment. Start from day one, think about things that got changed. Things that went wrong.”

  �
��How about this?” I countered quickly. “I’m familiar enough with the project, it shouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours, tops, to flag and at least scan all the pertinent environmental sections. I’ll work up a time line, a graphics sequence. This might give us both a better sense of how to proceed than having me start with Big Black Binder Number One and plod on through—how many of them are there?”

  “Twenty-three, I think I counted.” He smiled, resigned. “Realistically, many more than you’re going to suffer at one sitting. Okay, deal. I’ll pop back around here between nine and ten.” He picked up his plate, which I was surprised to discover was empty, mine being relatively untouched, and rose. “I’ve got to get going. All the Hudson Heights stuff is in my study. Give me the keys to the Bronco. I’ll move it around behind the garage.”

  “I can take care of that.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “Yeah, but this way I get to keep my keys. See you later.”

  It was hard to even think of settling down in such a dense atmosphere, but after a bit I did venture beyond the kitchen to locate his study. It had a comfortable enough chair and a view out into a back yard that looked to be mostly baseball diamond. It did not have what I would mean by “all the Hudson Heights stuff”—twenty-three binders, yes, but not a single rolled-up site plan. Scratch the graphic history, for the time being. I had much too much paper to process.

  I kept squirming, wanting more air and fewer heavy black binders around me. But a deal was a deal.

  When Baxter reappeared around a quarter to ten I was ready, though not usefully enlightened. There’d been time to stretch my legs and make a closer inspection of all that furniture, glance into the garage he’d converted into a woodworking shop. Only his bedroom escaped being crowded. The man definitely needed a bigger house.

  I’d set up shop on the kitchen table, arranging the yellow Post-it-flagged binders in three stacks that I’d mentally labeled “Possibly worth checking out more closely”; “Doubtful, but if you still haven’t come up with anything”; and “Only in desperation.”