After everything else was done, Liss busied herself doing some general tidying up. She had no idea how much time passed before she became aware of the gradual diminution of light that meant the sun was about to set. She had just removed the earbuds when someone rattled the doorknob.
Liss gave an involuntary start and relaxed only slightly when she recognized her mother on the other side of the glass panel. She didn’t rush to let her in and was caught off guard when Vi staggered across the threshold. Her face was three shades paler than usual and her pupils were so large that they nearly obscured the blue of her eyes.
“What’s wrong, Mom? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Vi closed her eyes and pressed one hand to her heart. Her breath soughed in and out in a harsh, disjointed fashion that was difficult to hear.
“You’re shaking.” Liss slung an arm around her much shorter mother’s shoulders. “Come and sit down.”
She tried to steer her toward one of the high stools beside the worktable but Vi resisted. When she’d disentangled herself, she headed straight for the coffeepot.
“I’ll be fine in a minute. Can you heat hot water in that thing? I could do with a strong cup of tea. You do have tea, don’t you? If not, we’d better go upstairs to Margaret’s place. She always has tea.”
Now she was babbling. Something was definitely wrong, but Liss knew better than to try to hurry along an explanation. Tea was probably a good idea. She opened a cupboard and pointed out a box of Earl Grey tea bags.
Vi made a disapproving sound when she saw that it was a store brand sold by a local grocery chain. “I suppose it will have to do.”
She didn’t say another word until the tea was brewed. By then her color was back to normal and so were her pupils. The pulse throbbing at her throat looked a bit erratic to Liss but she forbore to mention it.
Vi took her first sip, grimaced, and hoisted herself onto one of the stools before she took another. The hand that held the ceramic mug was almost steady.
Liss remained standing. “Now do you want to tell me what upset you?”
Vi glanced at the door and Liss followed her gaze. Darkness had fallen in earnest and yet there seemed to be a great deal of light out there. Some of that light was red and blue and flashing.
“What’s going on, Mom?” Liss was relieved to see that both the hand tremor and the erratic pulse point had subsided.
Vi polished off the tea before she spoke. “Well, dear, while your father was having his teeth cleaned at the dentist’s, I thought I’d walk back to the town square and see how the demonstration was going. The dentist’s office on Elm Street is only a couple of blocks away. I was delighted to see that the crowd was breaking up for the night. Honestly, I can’t believe we’re having to re-fight the same old battles. It’s the twenty-first century, for goodness’ sake!”
“Mom, stick to the point. I know all about the progress advocates of equal rights and civil rights have made over the last five decades.”
“Rights that can all too easily be lost!”
Liss cut Vi off before she could go off on a tangent by gesturing toward the glass panel in the stockroom door. “Those red and blue lights belong to emergency vehicles. Something happened at the demonstration and from the state you were in when you got here, you were right in the middle of it. What else did you see when you got to the town square?”
Vi’s shoulders slumped and she stared into her empty mug. “I’ve been trying not to think about that.”
Liss waited. She didn’t attempt to comfort her mother. She’d only be rebuffed. Vi wasn’t a demonstrative person and she’d never liked to be hugged.
“In the gloaming. Such an evocative word for twilight.” Vi drew in a deep breath, then another. “Dusk, but with overtones of something. . . .”
Her voice trailed off into silence. After a moment, she shook herself and met Liss’s eyes. Hers had a haunted look.
“Just about everyone was gone, even the police who’d been keeping an eye on things, but they left a ton of litter behind. I started to pick up some of the bigger pieces, signs and such, although I’m not sure what I was going to do with them. It isn’t as if there are any trash cans in the square. I really must talk to Thea Campbell about that.”
“Mom!”
Vi put her hands over her ears. “You don’t have to shout at me!”
Liss moderated her volume, if not her tone. “Stop evading my question. What did you see that upset you so badly?”
“The body, of course.”
Liss sagged against the side of the worktable. Although her throat had constricted, she managed a whisper. “What body?”
“The one that was propped up on the merry-go-round. I thought at first that he was just resting, but when I went closer I saw the knife sticking out of his back. Isn’t it strange? He was killed in the middle of a crowd of his own supporters and no one noticed.”
“His supporters?” Liss echoed. “Are you telling me the dead man is Hadley Spinner?”
“Well, I never met him when he was alive, but that’s who Sherri said it was when she took a look at him.” Vi shuddered. “He did not have a pleasant appearance, did he? That scruffy beard made him look like a tramp.”
Chapter Six
Liss was unsurprised to find a state police detective at her door on Sunday morning, especially since that detective was someone she knew well and who knew her. She was prepared to do all she could to help the authorities discover who had killed Hadley Spinner. She hadn’t liked the man, but no one deserved to have their life cut short by a vicious killer wielding a knife.
“Come in, Gordon. Coffee?”
As Gordon Tandy stepped over her threshold, Liss regarded him with critical eyes. She hadn’t seen him for a while and he’d put on a few pounds in the interim. With a sense of shock, she realized he must be close to fifty by now. His reddish-brown hair, even worn as short as he kept it, was showing the first strands of gray. He still had the boyish good looks that had always made him appear to be younger than he was, but the years were starting to catch up to him.
“Coffee would be great. Thanks.”
He sounded tired, as well he might. He’d probably been up all night working the case. She doubted that the extra hour they’d gained from the end of daylight savings time had helped. It only meant he’d been on the scene that much longer.
Liss had enjoyed a clear view of the crime scene from her bedroom windows. Portable lights had burned into the wee hours as technicians from the major-crimes unit gathered evidence.
Gordon followed her into the kitchen, watching her while she poured the coffee. He waited until after he’d taken his first sip to speak. “You were at work all day yesterday, right?”
“Right.” She leaned back against the counter, braced for a barrage of questions.
“See anything suspicious?”
“I’d have reported it if I had. To tell you the truth, by the time Spinner was killed I was in the stockroom, trying very hard to ignore everything that was going on in the town square.”
Gordon nodded, as if this confirmed what he’d already been told. Since Liss had talked to Sherri, albeit briefly, the previous evening, she assumed that her friend was the source of his information. She opened her mouth to ask a question and shut it again when she realized that his attention was no longer focused on her. He was staring through the window in the back door at the converted carriage house.
“Dan in his shop?”
“He’s packing up an order that ships out tomorrow.” She frowned when Gordon headed for the door, taking his coffee with him. “I thought you were here to question me.”
“Your husband is the one who lit into Spinner the other day.”
“Wait a minute! You can’t think Dan had anything to do with that man’s death. For one thing, he stayed inside all day yesterday, either in the shop or in the house. He was under orders from Sherri to keep out of Spinner’s way.”
The look Gordon sent back over his s
houlder contained both sympathy and, more alarming, pity. “You can’t be sure of that, Liss. You weren’t here. And there was certainly bad blood between them. Dan had his hands around Spinner’s throat, choking him. I’ve read the incident report.”
“I know my husband. He’s not capable of cold-blooded murder.”
But Gordon was already out the door and on his way to Dan’s woodworking shop. Liss stared after him, struggling to come to grips with the enormity of this turn of events. Gordon wasn’t just interviewing people with a view of the crime scene. He considered Dan a serious suspect in a homicide investigation.
She started to follow him, then checked the movement. Neither man would thank her for interfering. Feeling helpless, a sensation she hated, she stood in the doorway, her eyes glued to the entrance to the shop, and concentrated all her will on making Gordon come back out quickly, satisfied of Dan’s innocence.
He stayed in there far too long for Liss’s peace of mind. The stony expression on his face when he exited was not reassuring, either. She tried to tell herself that she had nothing to worry about. Gordon hadn’t brought Dan out in handcuffs. That was a plus.
Catching sight of her, Gordon headed her way, but he was not inclined to stop and chat. He handed her his empty mug and said only, “Thanks for the coffee.” Then he avoided being trapped into answering her questions, or refusing to answer them, by heading down the driveway toward the street instead of passing through the house.
Liss took the alternate route through the kitchen, down the hallway, and out onto her front porch. She was about to call to Gordon to come back when she realized that he wasn’t getting into his car. Instead, he was walking rapidly north along Birch Street, aiming straight for Patsy’s Coffee House. Liss stared at the empty mug he’d returned to her. Surely he wasn’t in need of more coffee.
Still watching Gordon’s progress, Liss sat on the porch steps and tried to think like a cop. They’d have plenty of alibis to check. Spinner had not been well liked. Joe and Stu must be on Gordon’s suspect list, too. But Patsy? Just because Spinner’s people had singled her out to harass? That seemed a stretch.
Then she remembered Patsy’s heated words after the paint incident, and that Deputy Pete Campbell had been right there to hear them. Although Patsy did have a clear view of the playground from the windows of the café, Liss had a feeling that Gordon wasn’t just going to ask her if she’d seen anything suspicious the previous day.
Liss’s hand tightened on Gordon’s mug. Patsy could have reached the merry-go-round from her front stoop in a matter of seconds. She had access to a good supply of sharp knives, too. Liss could imagine her striking out in anger, but she could not conceive of any situation in which Patsy would stab someone in the back, not even a louse like Hadley Spinner.
She couldn’t picture Dan doing such a thing either. Or Joe. Or Stu.
When Gordon came out of the café some twenty minutes later, Liss was still sitting on her front steps, waiting for him to pass the house on his way to his car.
A resigned look on his face, he came to a halt when he drew level with her. “If you’re thinking about meddling in this case, forget it. You know me well enough to be certain I’m not going to railroad anybody. Let me do my job.”
“I’d be delighted to, so long as you take a hard look at everyone out at Pilgrim Farm.”
“Any particular reason why you think one of them would kill Spinner?”
Liss shrugged. “It seems to me that familiarity might breed contempt. Spinner was a petty tyrant. The rules and regulations he set up for his followers were harsh. Resentment is a pretty powerful motive.”
“Thank you, Nancy Drew. I will keep your suggestions in mind.”
She bristled at the mockery in his voice but held her tongue. It wouldn’t help matters if she annoyed him more than she already had.
“I’m serious, Liss. Keep out of this. Have a little faith in the system.”
“I’ll try.” It wasn’t exactly a promise to butt out, but it was the best she could manage.
What confidence she had in Gordon’s methods wavered when she saw him walk past his car and head for Stu’s Ski Shop. She knew he had to conduct interviews. She understood why Stu had to be questioned as a suspect. She knew Gordon was an honest and thorough cop. But it was hard to watch him focus on people she felt certain were innocent.
* * *
Long before the demonstration in the town square and the murder of Hadley Spinner, Liss and Dan had made plans to have supper on that Sunday evening with her parents at the winterized camp where the MacCrimmons were living until they decided whether or not to move into the new senior citizens’ housing being built on the outskirts of Moosetookalook village. It was after dark when they set out on the eight-mile drive. The last mile was over a rutted dirt access road where the headlights of Dan’s truck provided the only illumination.
Most of the camps that lined the lakeside had already been closed up for the season. Even Patsy wouldn’t use her place, right next door to the camp Mac and Vi were renting, once the snow flew. Aside from Liss’s parents, only two hardy families intended to spend the winter months on the shores of Ledge Lake.
Staring out of the truck window at a bleak, shadowy landscape, Liss found herself dreading the hours ahead. Socializing with her mother was always something of a trial, since they so rarely agreed about anything, but tonight she was especially aware of looming conversational pitfalls. Dan had refused to talk about being questioned by Gordon, and Vi was sure to want to discuss the murder. She’d think she was entitled to speculate about it, since she’d been the one to discover the dead man on the merry-go-round.
There were other perils as well. Any time they were together, Vi managed to find one of Liss’s hot buttons to push. It was an innate talent. At some point during the evening ahead, Liss was going to end up snapping at her mother.
These days, she tried very hard to be careful what she said and to let Vi’s most opinionated statements go unanswered. She made a concerted effort not to upset her mother, even though Vi never returned the favor.
When her parents announced that they were returning to Moosetookalook for good, Liss’s first thought had been that there was some health issue behind the move. Neither of them were spring chickens, but they both insisted they’d come back because they missed their old hometown and were tired of life in the sunbelt. They’d even, Vi claimed, missed Maine winters.
Although Liss wanted to believe them, she wasn’t certain she should. Vi had lived with high blood pressure for years and Mac suffered from arthritis. His condition had been the reason they’d moved to Arizona to begin with. He’d had a number of joints replaced since then, to the point where he called himself the bionic man, but Liss knew his neck still bothered him, and his ankles, too. And Vi? Who could tell? Unlike most people her age, she never took the question “How are you?” literally.
The truck slowed to a crawl as they approached their destination. Liss kept her eyes peeled for the lights from the camp. When they reached a level area clear of shrubbery on the lake side of the dirt road, the beam of the headlights picked out the name MacCrimmon in bold red script on the small, hand-painted sign Liss’s mother had nailed to a tree. Dan pulled in next to Mac and Vi’s car with inches to spare. The slope dropped off steeply a foot in front of his bumper.
Just as Liss reached for the door handle, Dan spoke. “Before we go in, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Liss tensed as she swiveled around in the seat to face him. A full moon had risen and shed enough light into the interior of the cab to make out his solemn expression.
“A confession?”
Her ill-conceived attempt to lighten the mood sank into a deep, dark abyss. For a moment she thought Dan was going to tell her to get out so he could drive off somewhere alone. To her relief, he just shook his head and started again.
“Aside from what happened the other day, Gordon had another reason for talking to me. I don’t know how he f
ound out. Hardly anybody knows about it.”
“Knows about what?” Liss’s overactive imagination was already providing her with a frightening selection of possibilities. “Who else did you throttle?”
“Nothing like that.” Dan gave her hand a squeeze. “And I need your promise that you won’t mention this to Dad or Sam.”
“I won’t. But if it’s something Gordon is aware of—”
Dan gave a short, humorless laugh. “If he arrests me, all bets are off, but since I didn’t kill Spinner, I’m hoping that won’t happen.”
“Okay. So what’s the big secret that I shouldn’t share with your father or brother?”
Dan took a deep breath. “It was right after Spinner showed up in Moosetookalook. Fourteen or fifteen years ago. I was working with Dad and Sam at Ruskin Construction. My sister wasn’t married yet.”
Liss had been away, touring the country in Strathspey, and her parents had already left for Arizona. That had been a time in her life when she’d had zero interest in her old hometown. If she thought of Dan at all, it was as one of the many boys in her class in school. His father and siblings hadn’t even registered on her radar.
“Go on. Is this about Mary?”
“Yeah.” He ran his free hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “She was at loose ends. Kind of a rebel, if you can picture it.”
Thinking of the woman Mary Ruskin Winchester was now, Liss couldn’t, but the sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach told her she wouldn’t like where this story was going.
“One of the men who came here with Spinner made a play for her. Next thing I knew, she was all set to join up with that bunch. When I found out about it, I went ballistic. I went out there and hauled her back home.”
“Let me guess. You had to beat someone up to get her away?”
“There was an . . . altercation.” He sounded sheepish. “As it turned out, though, Mary was already having second thoughts. She dragged me away before I could do any serious damage and made me promise not to say a word to Dad or Sam. I never have.”
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