Cheyenne came into the dining room. “I decided to have a get-together on the yacht in honor of Otto. I’d like to do it tomorrow night and invite everyone who was at the Titanic dinner.”
Yipes. “I thought you never intended to go back on the yacht.”
“I don’t want to be afraid to go on a boat. Bethany convinced me it was like falling off a horse. You have to get back on it right away, or you may never ride again.” Cheyenne went into the living room, sat on the sofa, and motioned for Val to join her. “I’ll have a bigger get-together for the people Otto knew in Washington, but all of us who were on the boat Saturday night need to find closure. And I’d like you to cater, and your grandfather and Bethany to help. Just the way you did last time.”
No way. “You mean a ten-course meal?”
“Nothing that fancy. Just a light meal. Will you do it?”
Val hesitated. Chief Yardley wouldn’t like the plan, probably fearing a murderer might be in their midst, but she could see its value. The get-together might dredge up memories of what had occurred after Otto left the table and make it clear who did and didn’t have the opportunity to shoot him. “What kind of food do you have in mind?”
“Nothing you have to fuss with. Cold platters. Cheese is fine, but no garlicky meats.”
Cold platters, cold comfort, like Val’s dinner with Gunnar last night. “We could do a high tea, with small sandwiches and desserts.”
“Perfect.”
“Any idea how many guests will be there?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’m hoping they’ll all come. Otto had gifts for them that he forgot to bring to the dinner. Personalized party favors, I guess. I’ll give them out tomorrow night to anyone who comes.”
“Do you know what Otto meant for them to have?”
“He didn’t tell me. They’re sealed in envelopes decorated with images of the Titanic. A small envelope for Trey, a larger one for Stacy, and a bulky one for Homer and his wife.”
Could those envelopes contain what he’d promised them for attending the Titanic dinner? They might accept Cheyenne’s invitation if they thought so. “Nothing for Damian and Louisa?”
“Otto put Titanic labels on two bottles of wine. He said one of them was for you and your grandfather. The other one must have been for the Browns.” Cheyenne chewed on her lower lip. “I feel I should ask Louisa, but I dread talking to her so soon after her husband died.”
Val wasn’t sure Louisa would accept an invitation from the woman she suspected of having an affair with Damian. But the larger the gathering, the better the chance of getting to the truth about Otto’s death. “Louisa may be too upset to come tomorrow night. But if you like, I can talk to her and encourage her to come. We know each other from the athletic club.”
“Would you? I’d really appreciate it. The police released Otto’s body. I’d like to spread his ashes on the bay.”
“It may not be legal to do that.”
“I’ll check. If it isn’t, we’ll throw rose petals over the side. I still need to find someone to pilot the yacht. Do you know anyone who can do that?”
Val did. Someone who should also be there. “Would it be okay if I asked Jerome? He needs closure too.” And sitting at the controls might jog his fuzzy memory. “If you have any concerns, I’ll try to get you a more experienced pilot to sit next to him.”
“No, I’m fine with Jerome.”
“I’ll call you after I talk to Louisa and let you know if she’s coming.” Val stood up. “I almost forgot. I brought the invoice for the catering balance. My grandfather said you were waiting for it.”
“I’ll write you a check now.”
Val left with the check, drove to Louisa’s house on the other side of Bayport, and rang the bell. A woman in her sixties opened the door. Val introduced herself and said she’d brought Louisa a quiche.
“She’s upstairs resting. She didn’t get much sleep last night. I’m Linda Zaharee, her aunt. I expect she’ll be down before long if you can wait a bit. Come to the kitchen. I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”
“Thank you.” Val followed her to the kitchen. Like Louisa, her aunt had thick hair, though hers was darker, with a frosting of white. Looking barely more than a dozen years older than her niece, she must have been the much younger sister of Louisa’s father or mother.
“I’m glad you brought us this,” she said as she put the quiche in the refrigerator. “We can have it tonight. Louisa’s not much on cooking, and neither am I.”
Val sat at the counter. “Are Louisa’s children on their way?”
“Her son is taking a year off from school and hiking in Australia. We haven’t reached him yet.” Linda poured coffee into two glass mugs with roosters on them. “Her daughter lives in California. She has a big job interview tomorrow. Then she’ll take the red-eye and get here Saturday morning. Louisa’s parents are also due back from Hawaii then.”
“What about Damian’s family? Are they local?”
“He comes from southern Virginia, an old mining town. His folks are dead. He never got along with his brother, and they lost touch.” Louisa’s aunt took a quart of milk from the fridge. “How about some of this for your coffee? We don’t have cream.”
“Milk is fine.” Val splashed some into her coffee. “My condolences. It’s a difficult time for all of you.”
“The kids will take it hard. My sister and her husband, not so much. They never cared for Damian.” She sat next to Val at the counter. “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but . . .”
In Val’s experience, that phrase usually preceded trashing the dead.
Linda sipped her coffee. “. . . Louisa’s well rid of him. She brought him home with her from college one summer. She refused to go back to school—just wanted to marry him. She finished college eventually, in Delaware. He got one of those online degrees. Her parents paid for everything.”
Linda talked nonstop while Val drank coffee. Louisa’s parents subsidized the houses she and Damian bought, paid for their grandchildren’s education, and tried to find a place for Damian in the family business. He was too lazy to succeed. On his own, he never held down a job for long. He lost one of them because of an affair with the boss’s wife. Louisa forgave him because she didn’t want to admit her parents were right about him.
Val wondered why Louisa’s aunt was confiding these details to a stranger. Maybe because she would rather talk about family history than yesterday’s shooting.
The floor creaked above them, a sign that Louisa had woken up.
She came into the kitchen, her eyes bloodshot from crying or lack of sleep; possibly both.
“Your friend here just brought us a quiche for dinner,” Linda said.
Louisa’s eyes glistened with tears. “Thank you, Val. People have been so kind. The neighbors and two of the gals from my yoga class brought us food too.”
Her aunt poured her a mug of coffee, said goodbye to Val, and went upstairs.
“Linda’s a good egg.” High praise, given Louisa’s esteem for poultry. She leaned toward Val and said in a low voice, “Did you mention the anonymous letter to her?”
“No.”
“Please don’t tell anyone about it. The police said they’d keep it under wraps and notify me before they made it public so I could break it to the family myself. I don’t want to tell my children if I don’t have to.”
What was worse than hearing your father was accidentally shot dead by your mother? Finding out that he too might have shot and killed someone. Sympathy for Louisa and her children flooded over Val.
She told Louisa about Cheyenne’s planned memorial on the yacht. “She hoped you’d come. She asked me to invite you.”
Louisa shook her head. “I can’t go.”
Val wasn’t surprised, but she also wasn’t ready to give up. “What the anonymous letter said isn’t necessarily true, Louisa.”
“The part about the gun was true. Are you saying Damian didn’t shoot Otto?”
“Exactly.
The letter could have been a sick hoax. Tomorrow on the yacht, I’m sure we’ll talk about what happened Saturday night. Now that a few days have passed, people might remember something that would rule out Damian as the shooter.”
Louisa’s eyes widened. “That would make this whole horrible mess easier on my son and daughter.”
With a little more coaxing, Louisa agreed to go.
When Val left Louisa’s house, she spotted Stacy half a block away, in front of the house her son was minding. She was leading Gretel on a leash. Too good an opportunity to pass up.
Gretel’s tail wagged as Val joined them.
Stacy looked less enthusiastic to see Val, managing only a ghost of a smile. “I just got an unexpected call from Cheyenne. She said you were catering her little memorial to Otto on the yacht tomorrow night. Gathering the suspects together?”
Val leaned down to pet the dog. “Cheyenne views it as a celebration of Otto’s life, not an assembly of suspects.”
“How do you look at it?” Stacy didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve been doing research today, and not just for my book. This isn’t the first time you and your grandfather have dabbled in amateur detection.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, giving no hint of her attitude toward amateur sleuthing.
Val smiled. “Then it won’t come as a shock that Granddad and I have researched you. Did you know Andrea at Virginia Tech?”
Chapter 21
Stacy took a long moment to answer Val’s question about Otto’s sister. Nothing unusual about that. Otto’s ex-wife never spoke without thinking. “I met Andrea when I was a senior. We knew each other as neighbors rather than friends. She and I lived on the same floor in an off-campus apartment complex.”
“Was that where she fell from the balcony?”
“No. That happened at another apartment building during a party Andrea and her friends attended. I dropped in, but didn’t stay long. Lots of drinking and some drugs. Not my scene. Before cutting out with my boyfriend, I tried to convince Andrea and her roommates to leave with us. They didn’t.” Stacy tugged gently on Gretel’s leash and led the dog in the opposite direction from Louisa’s house. “I found out about Andrea’s death the next morning, my graduation day.”
That would put a damper on the celebration. “Any witnesses to what happened at the party?”
“No sober ones. Dozens of people saw Andrea on the balcony, but no one had their eyes on her at the moment she fell. The police wanted to interview a townie who’d crashed the party, but couldn’t locate him. He’d peddled ecstasy and come on to Andrea. I saw a sketch of the guy on TV before I left town after graduation. Handsome dude with a great body. I’d noticed him, but not talked to him.” Stacy stopped walking as Gretel inspected a tree. “I found out weeks later through one of Andrea’s roommates that she had alcohol and ecstasy in her system. After circulating the sketch, the police identified the missing man as a drug dealer called Demon. They never found out his real name or where he lived.”
Val’s heart quickened. Demon could be a nickname for Damian, a handsome dude even in middle age and the man assigned the role of drug pusher in Otto’s mystery game. “Did drugs play a role in Andrea’s death?”
“Not in the sense that she died of an overdose or from tainted drugs. Alcohol and drugs in her system probably contributed by making her careless. Her death was ruled an accident.”
“Otto must have known you were at that party.”
Stacy shook her head. “I didn’t meet him until more than ten years later. When he found out where I’d gone to college, he asked if I’d ever run into his sister. Andrea became a bond between us, though I hadn’t known her well.” Gretel turned the corner to search for new smells, and Stacy followed. “The grieving brother blamed the drug dealer and was obsessed with finding him. Otto had a copy of the police sketch and showed it to me regularly. He was convinced that someday one of us would run into the man who caused Andrea’s death.”
Val now knew why Otto had invited the couple he’d just met and the wife who’d divorced him. “Did Otto tell you he’d seen that man at the Protect the Bay Barbecue? That’s when he met Damian.”
“Otto didn’t say that, but the timing fits. We’d had almost no contact for eight years, since our divorce. About two weeks ago, he called me out of the blue and invited me and Trey to dinner on his yacht. He asked me to let him know if one of his guests looked familiar.”
Otto, the lawyer, had been careful not to lead the witness. “Did you recognize Damian as Demon?”
“My memory of the drug pusher is hazy, but I’d looked at Otto’s sketch enough to say that Damian could have been the man in that sketch. I thought hard about whether to tell Otto even that much, because I wasn’t sure what he would do with the information. I even considered saying I recognized no one, but Otto would have known I was lying. He was good at reading people, and I’m not a good liar.”
Val remembered Bethany’s comment that Stacy had been distracted at the table. Possibly she’d been pondering what to tell Otto. “You must have realized, as Otto’s game went on, that he planned to expose Damian at the end.”
“So it seemed, but I didn’t understand the point of it. After three decades, Damian couldn’t be prosecuted for selling drugs, much less held responsible for a girl’s accidental death. Thirty years ago he was younger than Trey is now. Young men do stupid things.”
Like drugging the pilot of a yacht, as Val suspected Trey had done. “Did you say that to Otto?”
Stacy nodded. “I also told him that even if Damian was Demon, he’d turned his life around and become a family man with a responsible job.” Stacy stopped walking as the dog sniffed around a bush. “I find Damian’s job as a poultry industry lobbyist repugnant. I thought he should be nailed for condoning cruelty to animals, not for breaking the law years ago.”
When could Stacy have given Otto her thoughts about Demon? Before dinner, she could have whispered yes or no about recognizing the drug pusher, but she hadn’t been alone with her ex long enough to give him a complicated answer. The first time she could have spoken to him in private was after he left the table and she followed him out of the saloon. She’d lied by saying she hadn’t seen him outside.
No point in confronting her about it. Val wanted to stay on good terms with Stacy to find out why she’d snapped a picture of the wedding portrait. “After the shooting at the Brown house yesterday, you were staring at Damian and Louisa’s wedding picture. Did that settle the issue of whether Damian was Demon?”
Stacy wrapped the leash around her hand. “I didn’t need to stare at the groom in the portrait. One glance at it told me Otto was right about him. I was focused on the bride.”
Val took a stab at what had interested her about the bride. “Louisa has changed. Her hair is different now, and her cheeks are fuller, but her eyes are the same, don’t you think?” When Stacy nodded, Val sensed more to come. “Why did you snap a picture of the portrait?”
Stacy glanced sideways at Val. “I needed that photo to research Louisa. She was at the party thirty years ago.”
Val stopped dead. Granddad had noted that Louisa graduated from the University of Delaware. Maybe she’d visited Virginia Tech or started college there and then transferred. Val caught up with Stacy at the corner. They crossed the street. “Did you know Louisa back then?”
“I’d seen her a couple of times hanging around the building where Andrea and I lived, but I didn’t know her name. After I saw the Browns’ wedding picture, it occurred to me that one of Andrea’s roommates might remember Louisa. I e-mailed the photo of the wedding picture to Jackie, the only roommate I could locate.”
“Did she remember Louisa?”
Stacy nodded. “Jackie called me and gave me an earful. In her freshman year, she was assigned a triple dorm room with Louisa and Andie. That was Andrea’s nickname in college. Louisa was the odd one out. She started calling herself Louie so she’d have a name that sounded vaguely masculine, like Jackie and Andie. She joined
the same clubs as Andrea, bought the same clothes, enrolled in the same classes, and tagged after her everywhere.”
Val shuddered. “Creepy.”
“Exactly the word Jackie used. Jackie and Andrea moved off campus in their sophomore year and shared an apartment with two other girls. Louisa was disgruntled at not being included and continued to dog Andrea, who called her the little woman. Can you guess why?”
“Because she’s not very tall?” Nor was Val, and she wouldn’t care to be referred to that way.
“Also because her name was Louisa May Purty. The only Louisa May anyone has ever heard of is the one who wrote Little Women.” Stacy stopped at a street corner to let a car go by. “Thirty years ago at that party, when I was urging Andrea to leave, Jackie said, Here comes the little woman again. Andrea refused to leave because she wouldn’t give the little woman the satisfaction of ruining her evening.” Stacy crossed the street. “Andrea’s death hit Jackie hard. She didn’t want to go back to Tech for her junior year, but her parents insisted. She was also afraid Louisa would glom on to her next, but Louisa didn’t return to Tech.”
That fit with what Louisa’s aunt had said. “I heard Louisa came home from college one summer with Damian and refused to go back to school. That explains why the police couldn’t locate the drug dealer. He’d fled the state and ended up seven hours away.” One thing puzzled Val about Stacy’s story. “You didn’t recognize Louisa as someone from college because she looks so different now. Didn’t she recognize you?”
“I doubt it. The only time I got a good look at her was at the party, and she was focused on Andrea. I left right after Louisa arrived.”
The similarity between Andrea’s fall from the balcony thirty years ago and the situation in Otto’s mystery game must have been obvious to Louisa. “Are you going to tell the police about Otto’s sister and her connection to Damian and Louisa?”
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