“The cops always think the worst,” Maggie said, “of everybody.”
“Not Scott,” Hannah said.
Maggie shook her head, but didn’t respond.
They sorted the files and envelopes into piles representing people they did or didn’t know, then dead people, and people they wanted to protect.
“I don’t care what happens to Brian, but this would kill my mother and father,” Maggie said, putting his envelope and file in the pile to take.
Hannah was still not completely convinced they were doing the right thing.
“But what if we’re questioned about taking this stuff?” she said, in kind of a whining voice.
“Why do you think I brought the gloves?” Maggie asked her, irritated. “This is no time to chicken out on me.”
Hannah just sat there.
“What?” Maggie asked her impatiently.
“I’m worried we’re going to get in trouble. This isn’t just about us protecting our friends and families from being embarrassed, this is dangerous. Somebody may have killed Theo over this stuff, and now we have access to it. I don’t want to get whacked on the head the next time my back is turned.”
“Okay, we take the stuff that may hurt the people we love, we leave everything else, and we immediately go to Scott and say, ‘Caroline told us about this room, blah blah blah.’ He’ll tell Tiny Crimefighter, and then the county will come and get everything else.”
Hannah looked dubious but she said, “Okay.”
They heard a noise. It was kind of a thump, which could have been snow sliding off the roof, or someone in the house. The hairs stood up on Maggie’s neck and Hannah’s face lost all its color.
“What was that?” Hannah whispered.
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They put everything they weren’t taking with them back the way they found it, more or less, and gathered up everything they wanted to take. Maggie shut the safe but didn’t lock it.
“It will save them time,” she told Hannah, who looked ill.
They checked the room for anything they’d missed or left behind, turned out the lights, and descended the way they’d come, as quietly as they could, listening for more sounds but hearing nothing.
They wheeled the ladder out of the closet back to the library and then put all the boxes of Eldridge Point merchandise back in. Hannah found a grocery bag in the kitchen in which to carry the evidence they were taking with them.
There was another thump, and it sounded like it came from upstairs.
“There’s someone in the house,” Hannah whispered.
“Maybe it’s Willy Neff.”
“Maybe it’s the murderer.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Hurry.”
They quickly put their coats and boots back on and pulled their yellow gloves off, replacing them with woolen ones. Maggie felt paranoid but resisted the urge to go back and check their trail through the house. She used the entryway rug to wipe up the water from the snow that had come in with them, locked the front door behind them, put the key back up behind the lantern, and ducked back under the police tape. Hannah took their bag of blackmail to the truck.
Even though they wanted nothing more than to get as far away from the lodge as possible, Hannah quickly let the dogs out and fed them. Maggie stood in the driveway between the truck and the barn, watching for anyone who might leave the house, but saw no one. After putting the dogs back in their kennels, Hannah and Maggie ran to the truck, got in, and quickly locked the doors.
Once they were back on Pine Mountain Road, Maggie remembered to tell Hannah Caroline said she should go ahead and find homes for the dogs if she could. Hannah just shrugged. Maggie could tell her friend was worried, and when Hannah was worried, she got quiet. Neither said more than a few words to the other all the way down the mountain. The weather got worse as they descended. Hannah was an excellent driver, and had a lot of experience driving on bad roads, as Maggie had, but it was still a scary descent.
Once in town, Hannah pulled in behind Maggie’s car in the alley behind the bookstore and waited for Maggie to get out.
“Are you mad at me?” Maggie asked.
“No, I’m scared,” Hannah said. “And you might as well know right now I’m telling Sam everything.”
“Okay, okay,” Maggie said defensively. “If Sam says we should do it differently we will. I will wait to hear from you before I destroy anything or call Scott.”
“Good,” Hannah said, and took a deep breath, letting it out with a whoosh. “Sam will know what we should do.”
She smiled at Maggie but still looked worried. Maggie took the grocery bag with her and waved to Hannah as she left, saying, “Be careful.”
Inside her bookstore Maggie saw there were no customers and her staff members weren’t doing any work. She checked the weather forecast, saw it was only going to get worse, so she sent everyone home and closed the store.
Alone in the place with the music turned off, Maggie could hear the wind howling outside, and suddenly the building felt too empty. She was still mad at Scott, so she called her brother Patrick and asked him to come over, saying she had something she urgently needed to show him. She was relieved when he arrived, even though he immediately helped himself to half the case of baked goods, piling everything up on a tray along with an extra-large hot chocolate. Maggie made him bring it all upstairs to her kitchen after she carefully locked up the deposit and set the alarm.
“Why are you so freaked out?” he asked her as they went up the stairs.
“Wait and I’ll tell you.”
Patrick followed her down the long hallway of her apartment and sat on a kitchen chair with his tray of goodies in front of him on the table. Maggie sat the grocery bag of blackmail evidence on the table and put the kettle on while she told him about Caroline’s call, and what she and Hannah had done.
Patrick pulled everything out of the bag and looked through it while Maggie made tea and talked. When she got to the part about the photographs of Ava on the wall, and he looked at the photographs, he got really quiet. Maggie showed him the loan documents and explained how Brian used life insurance on his newborn son, wife, daughter, and home, as collateral on a loan. Patrick stayed silent, but Maggie could see him clench and unclench his jaw.
When he saw the photos of Brian and Phyllis he shook his head, saying, “Good ole Phyllis.”
When he looked at the letters he said, “That’s Sean’s handwriting,” immediately, and Maggie realized that’s why it had looked so familiar.
“So ‘G’ must stand for Gwyneth,” Maggie said, and they both curled their lips and said, “Ew.”
“I don’t want to read them,” Patrick said, putting them aside. “And you shouldn’t either.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No wonder he spent every summer up there with them,” Maggie said. “He was always nice to Gwyneth while we all hated her, but I never thought it was anything more than that.”
“Sean always was a weird duck,” Patrick said. “I never saw him have a date in high school.”
“He must have been pining for Gwyneth the whole time.”
Patrick looked thoughtful for a moment and then shrugged, saying, “That’s one explanation.”
He sat the folder on Knox aside, saying he didn’t care about that idiot. He also didn’t want to see the photos of Doc, Ed’s father, or the fire chief.
“Burn it all,” he said. “They’re worse than dirty, they’re dangerous.”
Maggie told him Hannah was going to ask Sam what they should do.
“Why should Sam decide?” Patrick demanded. “This is about our family, not his.”
Maggie agreed, but said, “It won’t hurt to listen to his opinion, even if we do ignore it afterward.”
Patrick agreed Ava should see the loan papers, but their mother and father should not.
“And we burn the pictur
es of Brian and Phyllis,” Maggie said, and Patrick shrugged.
“It would only prove something she already knows.”
“What about all of Ava’s pictures?” Maggie asked.
Patrick was studying the photograph taken through Ava’s bedroom window.
“Patrick,” Maggie prompted. “I asked you a question.”
“Let’s give her back the ones he obviously stole, like her baby pictures,” Patrick said, “and burn the cut up ones and the ones he took without her knowing. They’ll freak her out.”
“He must have been obsessed with her. It’s so creepy.”
“She was never involved with him,” he said vehemently.
Maggie said, “Calm down, I know,” but privately, she wondered. She also wondered who it was in bed with Ava in the photo Patrick was studying so closely.
Her sister-in-law Ava was an enigma to Maggie. She was a good mother, a hard worker, a devout churchgoer, and Maggie had never heard her say an unkind word to or about anyone. Maggie did think she often played on other people’s sympathies, especially Patrick’s, as the long suffering, abandoned wife and mother, but she had never done anything Maggie could look back on now and say, “Ah hah! That must have been when she was secretly meeting Theo!”
Ava was rarely away from her bed and breakfast business or her children, and she volunteered at both the church and the grade school with any free time she had. Just because she was gorgeous, and wouldn’t gossip or make fun of people like Hannah and Maggie did, they tended to roll their eyes and call her “Saint Ava” behind her back. Maybe she was just what she appeared to be. Maggie wished she knew.
“I think if I had our brother Brian in front of me right now I might kill him,” Patrick said, as he studied the loan papers.
“You were always saying you wanted to kill Theo and now he’s dead,” Maggie said. “You might want to watch what you say.”
Patrick glowered in response and said nothing more. Maggie didn’t for a moment suspect her brother Patrick of killing Theo. She could more easily imagine Brian doing it, especially now that she knew what he was capable of doing to his own family.
Brian was the first-born, and the apple of their mother’s eye. He had inherited Grandpa Tim’s red curly hair and bright blue eyes along with his ability to charm the pants off just about any female he set his sights on. Grandpa Tim was a good man, but no one could say he was a faithful man, especially when he was a young man.
Ava may have won Brian by being the prettiest and the most tenacious of his girlfriends, but she was not able to tame or shame him into being a good husband and father. Although Brian was her brother, Maggie never liked him, and he’d barely acknowledged her presence as long as she’d known him. He may have chased and bedded the female locals, students, and tourists, and wrapped his mother around his little finger, but Maggie thought he didn’t actually like or respect any woman. To Brian a woman was a plaything to be used and discarded, or a nag to be avoided and placated.
“Where are we going to burn all this stuff?” Maggie asked Patrick.
“You leave that to me,” Patrick said, and they began sorting everything into ‘burn’ and ‘not burn’ piles.
Hannah called and put Sam on the phone.
“Concerning the flammable materials,” Sam said. “I think you should go ahead and burn all of it, and not save any of it. It would be dangerous to leave any of it lying around.”
“Gotcha,” Maggie said, and got tickled in spite of the seriousness of the situation.
Hannah got back on the phone.
“The goose will fly at midnight,” Hannah said before she hung up, and Maggie was relieved to hear her friend’s sense of humor was back.
She looked at Patrick and said, “Sam says burn it all.”
“Let’s hide the stuff we want to keep first,” he said.
Maggie put Sean’s letters in between the pages of a large book of art photographs on her bookshelf, and hid the Knox folder behind some books on the same shelf. Patrick folded up the loan documents and slid them down inside his shirt. Maggie tucked Ava’s baby and childhood pictures into the front of one of her photo albums, where they seemed to belong. The rest went back in the grocery bag, and they left by the back stairs so Maggie didn’t have to disarm the bookstore alarm system.
Maggie felt much safer now that she was with her brother Patrick. Not only was he big and strong, but he also exuded the confidence of someone who always comes out on top in any physical contest. They walked down the alley and up Pine Mountain Road to the Rose Hill Bed and Breakfast, where they found Ava folding towels in the kitchen while Charlotte and Timmy watched television in the small family room.
Patrick swept six-year-old Timmy up in his arms and pretended to throw him out the back door into the snow, while Charlotte, a dignified young lady of twelve, tried not to look as if she wanted to say, “Me next! Me next!”
Patrick swung Timmy down and gave Charlotte a big smacking kiss on the cheek, to which she squealed and Timmy told his Aunt Maggie, “That’s a cartoon kiss.”
Maggie happened to turn and catch Ava looking at Patrick with such tenderness and love in her expression that it felt like an invasion of privacy to observe it.
Patrick spent a lot of time with Ava and the kids after Brian left, and both Charlotte and little Timmy were especially close to him, but Maggie wondered when Ava’s dependence on Patrick had turned into something, well, so romantic? How had she missed that happening?
If it was true her mother would not be a bit happy about it, Maggie was sure. Bonnie still expected Brian to turn up one day with a good excuse for leaving, and for everything to go back to normal. Bonnie’s favorite theory was Brian had been knocked unconscious and had amnesia. No one else was on board that particular denial train, but she held fast to her belief in her son’s innocence despite all evidence to the contrary.
Maggie watched television with the two kids while Patrick took Ava to the front room. After ten minutes or so, they came back, and Ava’s eyes were red from crying.
Patrick said goodbye to the kids, said, “We have some work to do,” to Maggie, and went out the back door.
Ava squeezed Maggie’s hand and mouthed, “Thank you,” to which Maggie mouthed back, “I’m so sorry,” before following Patrick out.
“Wait up!” Maggie yelled, and caught up to her brother at the end of the walkway to the alley. “Where are we going?”
“If you need a fire, you go where the fire experts go.”
“Not the fire station,” Maggie protested, but Patrick ignored her.
Maggie had a lot of questions she would have liked to ask her brother about his relationship with Ava, but she knew from experience he would not discuss anything so personal or private with her. Although they loved each other, and were fiercely loyal, she and her brother were not that kind of close.
Instead of going to the front door of the fire station, Patrick led his sister around behind it, where a large metal barrel used to burn trash sat on the edge of the parking lot. Patrick took the grocery bag from Maggie, put it in the barrel, pulled a flask out of his back pocket, and with a flourish, emptied the contents over the bag.
He then took a metal lighter out of his jacket pocket, lit a receipt he found in one of his other pockets, and said, “Stand back!” in a dramatic way before dropping it in the can as well.
There was a whoosh and Maggie could hear the paper catch fire and start to crackle and burn. Patrick performed a silly dance around the barrel to make Maggie laugh.
They waited until everything burned, and then Patrick threw some snow in to make sure the fire was out.
“And throughout all that no one came out to see what we are doing,” Maggie said, gesturing at the firehouse, which was staffed by local volunteers.
“They’re all sleeping or watching TV,” Patrick said.
“Or drunk,” Maggie said crossly.
“Said Miss Priss,” Patrick said. “Lighten up, why don’t ya?”
&nb
sp; Maggie saw Rose Hill’s only squad car roll slowly down Peony Street, turn in the alley behind the police station, and creep toward them. As it pulled up next to them, a darkly tinted window slid down and Scott eyed them suspiciously.
“What in the world are you two up to?”
“We thought we saw a UFO land in the field over there and we came to check it out,” Patrick said with a straight face.
Scott looked at Maggie and said, “You look guilty. You better come with me.”
Patrick said, “You’re on your own, Sis,” and jogged away down the alley.
Maggie walked around the car and got in on the passenger side. Scott’s scent rolled over her and she fought the swoon, but it was stronger than she was. When he asked her if she would like to go for a ride she said, “Sure.”
The roads were bad, but there were crews out plowing. As they drove slowly around town, Maggie did not ask him how his date with Sarah was. She didn’t trust herself not to throw a screaming fit and fling herself out of the car no matter what his answer might be.
“Caroline called last night,” Maggie said instead, studying Scott’s profile in the light of the dashboard and streetlights. He looked so handsome.
“What did she say?” he asked.
Maggie hesitated. It felt so warm and comfortable between them right then, but as soon as she told him he would be angry. However, she knew from experience if she lied now he’d find out eventually, and would be even angrier.
“Caroline said there was a secret room in the lodge where her great grandpa kept his bootleg booze. She told me where it was, and I thought you might want to go out there and take a look.”
Scott stopped the car, put it in park, and turned halfway around in his seat to look at her.
“Where were you and Hannah today?” he asked her. “I looked everywhere for the two of you and neither of you answered your cell phones.”
“We went out to take care of Theo’s dogs,” Maggie said.
“And?” he asked, eyebrow up.
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