“Ouch.”
“Yeah. But seeing Prine here, day after day, for the past week, I realized it wasn’t because of the money that I was still so mad. There was a while—a long while—when I thought he’d broken up my marriage.”
He stopped for so long that I practically had to bite my tongue to keep from asking questions. Some smarter part of my brain told me to shut up, and eventually he went on.
“He didn’t, of course. Not for lack of trying. He hit on my wife the way he does—did—with any halfway attractive woman who comes within a mile of him. Tried to get her to pose for one of his sleazy pictures. I tend to be a little old-fashioned and hot-headed about that kind of thing. And when I thought the same guy who was ruining me financially had also stolen my wife—”
He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly.
“But he hadn’t?” I asked.
“No. She didn’t leave me for him, or even because of him. She left me because of me. I was a jealous, controlling, hot-headed jerk.” He opened his eyes and half smiled. “Still am, I guess, but not nearly as bad as I was. I’ve learned a little. Long way to go, but … seeing him here, day in, day out, I realized I needed to work on not letting him get to me. Needed to stop blaming him for everything that had gone wrong in my life. Maybe even needed to talk to him and see if I could get some closure. In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve been doing a lot of therapy for the past decade.”
He chuckled slightly, and then it faded into a sigh.
“It’s weird, but you know what’s bugging me most now?” he said. “I was just getting to the point where having him around didn’t bother me so much. I could usually ignore him as if he was a tree or a fire hydrant or something, or even look at him without sending my blood pressure into the stratosphere. And he goes and gets himself killed, and dammit, I wasn’t finished working through all that. And before you say it—yes, I told Chief Heedles all about my history with Prine. She’d have found out from someone else anyway—a whole lot of someone elses if she did enough digging—so I thought it would sound better coming from me.”
“That was smart,” I said.
“I manage smart sometimes,” he said. “Not often, but enough. So maybe it’s selfish of me, but I want the lady painter in there teaching her class as if Prine had never used that studio. And I want Chief Heedles to have already found Prine’s killer, and I want the killer to be someone hateful and despicable, not some basically nice person who was driven over the edge by something nasty that Prine did. I want it all over with.”
“Amen,” I said.
“And even when it is, now I’ll never really know whether I could ever have gotten past it all and had a civil conversation with him. Stupid, selfish reason to wish he was still alive, but there it is.”
He flashed me a melancholy smile and ambled off down the hallway toward the great room and the dining room beyond.
I stood looking after him for a few moments. I wasn’t sure how far I believed in the new, mellower, therapy-enhanced Dante. I kind of missed the old, foot-in-mouth Dante, the Dante who’d erupt in bellows of anger one minute and gales of laughter the next. I had the sinking feeling that the chief might find this new, philosophical Dante a lot more suspicious and I wouldn’t exactly disagree with her.
And why was I so focused on my fellow instructors, anyway? I pondered it as I strolled toward the dining room. Maybe because they were a lot more likely to have known Edward Prine well enough to have a motive to kill him. The majority of the students had little contact with him, and even the ones in his class mostly seemed to shrug off his unpleasant personality or excuse it on the grounds of artistic temperament.
But there were so many of them, I thought, with a sinking feeling, as I stepped into the dining room and surveyed the assembled crowd. Nearly two hundred students, not counting the kids in Michael’s class. So even if very few of them had had enough contact with Prine to inspire homicidal urges toward him—it only took one.
“There you are.” Cordelia and Chief Heedles strolled up, both holding trays with carryout boxes on them. “Get your lunch and join us in my office. Chief Heedles wants to consult us about something.”
So much for having a quiet lunch with my students and enjoying their improved mood. I filled my own carryout box, nodding to Marty, who was standing on the other side of the buffet today, alternately glowering at his employees when they raced in with new supplies of the more popular dishes, and peering over our heads to see how the people out in the dining room were reacting to their meals.
“Looks great, as usual,” I said in my most cheerful voice.
He uttered a noise that was probably meant to be “thanks,” but only came out sounding like “unk,” and stared at me under knit brows, as if trying to decide if I was being sarcastic.
Well, we hadn’t hired him for his personality.
Cordelia and Chief Heedles were seated across the desk from each other. Cordelia seemed to be studying some papers in front of her.
“Come in,” the chief said through a mouthful of meatloaf.
“The chief has gotten into Prine’s computer,” Cordelia said.
“Actually it was Horace and Lesley Keech,” the chief said. “And they found out that in addition to the phone calls, Prine was also e-mailing Calvin Whiffletree at the Jazz Hands Art Academy.”
“The jerk,” I muttered.
“On the surface,” the chief went on. “It would appear that these are merely friendly e-mails reporting on events here at Biscuit Mountain. Including, of course, the vandalism.”
“In fact, primarily about the vandalism,” Cordelia added. “Which strikes us both as rather suspicious. So the chief wants to know if any of Prine’s e-mails reveal details that he wouldn’t have known if he wasn’t himself the vandal.”
“Which would mean that under the guise of sharing news, he’d actually be reporting on what he’d done.”
“Precisely. For example.” Cordelia handed me a sheet of paper so I could read Prine’s message to Whiffletree:
I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that all’s not well here at La Montagne des Biscuits. Someone turned a bunch of slugs loose in the clay buckets in the pottery studio, and it was hours before all the lady potters stopped screaming “Eek! Eek!” and washing their hands over and over again. The Duchess tried to laugh it off, but I can tell she’s worried.
“The Duchess?” I said aloud.
“It suits her.” The chief smiled at Cordelia. She handed me another e-mail:
Things continue to go downhill here. It would appear that the idiot woman who’s teaching watercolors downstairs from me left her studio windows open overnight, and a thunderstorm blew in enough rain to turn all her students’ work into papier-maché. If you ask me, whoever did it should be given a medal for his service to the art world. A more talentless crop of nitwits you’ve never seen. Not much better in my class, either.
“The jerk never comes out and says ‘I put the slugs in the clay’ or ‘I opened all the windows when I knew a rainstorm was coming,’ or anything like that.” Cordelia was visibly fuming.
“But he was smart enough that he wouldn’t,” I said.
“So let’s figure out if he wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was,” the chief said. “If he revealed a detail that you didn’t make public, or reported it before you’d made it public…”
So the three of us spent most of the two-hour lunch break eating with one hand while working. Cordelia and I sorted through the dozens of texts, e-mails, phone calls, and voice messages we’d sent to each other, Chief Heedles, or anyone else about the vandalism, trying to come up with some detail Prine shouldn’t have known, or at least shouldn’t have known so early. But if there was a smoking gun in these e-mails we weren’t finding it. Prine’s e-mails reported on each incident, but did not claim or even imply that he could take credit for it, and didn’t reveal anything that couldn’t have been known by anyone at the center. Whiffletree’s replies were even more terse a
nd equally noncommittal. There was one in which he congratulated Prine for not being one of the targets and added, “Of course pretty soon they might suspect the lucky ones are actually guilty.” The next e-mail from Prine reported on finding his studio splattered with red paint. That one went on ten times as long as any of the others, and completely lacked the snidely ironic tone of the rest.
“It’s a cry of outrage,” Cordelia said.
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t wreck his own studio,” I said. “By Thursday, when it happened, even if Whiffletree hadn’t hinted at it, Prine would have figured out that we were looking much more closely at anyone who hadn’t been targeted. He’d have realized that his best chance to avoid detection was to make himself look like one of the targets. He’d do it—but he’d be mad as hell at having to do it, so maybe he vented his rage at the person he blamed for getting him into this situation—Whiffletree.”
“It’s possible.” Cordelia didn’t sound convinced.
I glanced up at the wall clock. Only half an hour of our lunch break left. I pushed back from the table and rubbed my eyes, which were tired from spending so much time peering at paper and screens.
“So, maybe Prine didn’t commit any of the vandalism.” I waved at the stack of e-mails. “Maybe he just enjoyed gloating over them to his friend Calvin.”
“Fat chance,” Cordelia said.
“Theory number two is that he committed some of it,” I went on. “But was genuinely outraged to find out not only that friend Calvin had a second vandal working for him but also that the second vandal had targeted him.”
“More plausible,” Cordelia put in.
“But a little on the complicated side,” the chief said.
“And finally, behind door number three,” I continued. “We have the theory that Edward Prine was the one and only vandal, and smart enough to fake anger and outrage when reporting on the damage he did to his own studio.”
“My money’s on that theory,” Cordelia said. “The more I learn about that man, the more sneaky, devious, and unpleasant I find him. I know it’s a terrible thing to speak ill of the dead, but that’s how I feel.”
“Three excellent theories,” the chief looked glum. “A pity we don’t have a shred of evidence to prove any of them.”
“Not yet,” I said. “But we’ll keep our eyes open.”
“And keep your fingers crossed that some of those dozens of evidence bags Horace and Lesley hauled out of here bear fruit,” the chief said. “Meanwhile, I’ve officially declared myself over my head and put in another request for help to the State Police.”
“I suppose it’s necessary,” Cordelia said. “But what if they want to shut us down?”
“By rights I should be shutting you down myself. Two murders in as many nights.”
Chapter 20
My stomach tightened at the chief’s words. I wanted to protest, but I didn’t think it would do any good. And if the chief shut the center down, I wouldn’t have to agonize over whether it was crazy to stay here with Michael and the kids. We could all hurry back to Caerphilly, taking Cordelia with us.
Of course, if we did, it would probably be the end of Cordelia’s craft center.
“I’d understand if you have to shut us down.” Cordelia sounded calm—probably calmer than she felt. “I suspect it’ll kill the center if you do, but maybe that’s inevitable. And we don’t want any more troubles.”
“‘By rights,’” I echoed. “Does that mean maybe you’re not going to?”
“Right now I’ve got all my witnesses and suspects here where I want them,” the chief explained. “If I shut Biscuit Mountain down, they’re going to scatter to the four corners of the earth.”
“Well, not quite the four corners of the earth,” I said. “I’ve been studying the student lists, remember? The majority of them are from here in Virginia, and almost all the rest from adjacent states.”
“Still might as well be the four corners of the earth as far as my investigation is concerned.” The chief sighed. “I don’t have the time or the money to chase them down.”
“But won’t that change now that the State Police are getting involved?”
“Not really. They’re stretched pretty thin themselves. So far, the only resources they’ve been able to send are one detective to help me with the investigation and two troopers to help patrol. Which reminds me—can we find some rooms for them up here at the center?”
“I’ll see who I can rearrange.” Cordelia stifled a small sigh and reached for the notebook that held her room and campsite charts.
“That’s another reason not to make you close the center,” the chief said. “If I did that and then told them all not to leave town, where would they all stay? Every bed-and-breakfast in town is filled as it is.”
“So we stay open for now.” Cordelia sounded more hopeful. “Provided we can find room for your three state police.”
“You stay open with precautions, and it’s not just the State Police. I’m borrowing a few officers from neighboring jurisdictions to help secure the center. Well, the building, at least. Nothing much we can do about your camping ground. So we’ll have officers patrolling—maybe a dozen of them if I’m lucky.”
A dozen officers—I liked the sound of that. Maybe staying wasn’t crazy after all.
“Of course, it’s not as if we can tell everyone to lock up their tents,” the chief added.
“But we haven’t had any vandalism or murder in the campgrounds,” Cordelia pointed out. “It’s all been in the center.”
“That was my thinking.”
“It would be a lot easier to get at someone in the campground,” I said. “But it would also be almost impossible to make sure you weren’t seen. Our campers are an observant bunch. One night last week Josh had an upset stomach and we had to take him to the bathroom three times. By the third run we had half the campground asking if he was okay and offering over-the-counter medicines and unsolicited advice. So if the killer thinks he can creep into a tent, off someone, and slink away unseen, then he probably hasn’t spent much time in the campground.”
“That was more or less how I saw it,” the chief said. “Everyone is more exposed in the campground, including the killer, resulting in relative safety. And the news that we’ll have law enforcement officers patrolling there should help.”
“I hope your borrowed troops aren’t trigger-happy.” For that matter, I hoped the Riverton officers weren’t either, but I didn’t think the chief would appreciate my saying so. “You’re going to warn them that not everyone creeping about in the middle of the night is a murderer, right? Because this place can be a hotbed of activity at night. Quite apart from midnight bathroom visits, you have Grandfather leading his nighttime nature walks and sneaking out to spread garbage to attract the gulls, the lovelorn herb student sneaking out to meet whomever she’s meeting, perhaps other amorous couples seeking privacy—”
“And you checking on every suspicious noise.” The chief seemed to be smiling.
“I’ll try to restrain my snooping tendencies.” Unless, of course, the suspicious noise was anywhere near the caravan, in which case I’d be all over it. “And let’s remember to warn Dad. I think if he hadn’t been so tired last night from all the nature walks, he might have been snooping around like Victor Winter, and we might be trying to solve his murder.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Cordelia said.
“Good,” I said. “Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“I’ll be frank with you,” the chief said. “Maybe the biggest reason for keeping everyone here is the hope that the killer—or killers—will do something stupid to give himself away.”
“Or herself,” I added.
“Or herself,” the chief agreed. “We’re continuing to interview people and probe into everyone’s background, but we’re not finding much that helps us. Just about everyone who knew him loathed Prine, but that’s not really much of a motive for murder. Th
e other people involved in that craft store with him still resent his part in its failure, but it’s an old grievance.”
“Check on their financial status—I understand some of them could still be broke because of it. That’s—”
“You told me. I’m checking on it.”
“Good.” Not just that she was checking on it, but that she didn’t seem annoyed at my asking. “Because if any of them are having financial difficulty, they might still be pretty ticked at Prine, even after all these years. It’s not an old grievance if it’s still causing you grief.”
“So how does poor Victor fit into all this?” Cordelia asked. “Because we seem to be focusing rather exclusively on Prine. Meg and I, at least—I’m sure you’re investigating Victor’s murder as well.”
“Without much luck.” The chief frowned and shook her head. “So far I’ve found no reason for anyone to want him dead. And no reason to believe he was in contact with Jazz Hands or Smith Enterprises or anyone else who might have it in for Biscuit Mountain. He’s divorced, no kids, no apparent enemies. Does something bureaucratic at an insurance company. Takes classes and eco-tourism vacations in his free time.”
“Mildly annoying but mostly harmless,” I said.
“Exactly. So it’s looking more and more as if he’s collateral damage. He’s a mystery reader, like your father. I suspect he was snooping.”
“The wrong place at the wrong time.” Cordelia shook her head sadly. “Poor man! It’s not much of an epitaph, and I have a feeling it was the story of his life.”
“Maybe,” the chief said. “But I intend to keep on digging. Meanwhile, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to have the State Police investigator speak to everyone after dinner. I assume that’s the best time to get the whole crowd together.”
“There might be a handful missing,” Cordelia said. “Most of the people eat here, even if they’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast in town, but a few take off right after class.”
Gone Gull Page 16