Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Box Set

by S. W. Hubbard

  “Private school? I thought you bought this house because it’s so close to that nice elementary school in town.”

  “Exactly. The public schools here are terrific.” Caroline paced around the kitchen, waving her hands as she spoke. “But suddenly Eric says the boys won’t get into Harvard if they don’t go to the right prep school, and they won’t get into the right prep school unless they go to the right kindergarten. It’s crazy, and I want no part of it.”

  Frank happened to agree with his daughter about the SUV and the private school, but surely this wasn’t enough to end a marriage. “All married couples have disagreements, honey. Maybe you should see a marriage counselor.”

  “I found a wonderful counselor. We went once, and Eric said he didn’t like her and wouldn’t go again.”

  “So you’re divorcing him?” Frank couldn’t keep the disapproval out of his voice.

  “It’s not the car and the school, per se,” Caroline tossed the wild tumble of curls out of her eyes. “They’re symbolic. It just shows how far apart we’ve grown.”

  Oh, symbolism. Now they were wading into deep water. All he knew was his grandsons were about to become statistics, part of the fifty percent of children brought up in a broken home. And he didn’t like the symbolism of that, not one little bit.

  He studied his daughter silently as she stormed around the kitchen, collecting sticky cups and spoons and slamming them into the dishwasher. All her life he’d tried to protect her from her own headstrong impulses, rarely with any success. He’d lectured and threatened and cajoled, but she’d always had to make her own mistakes before she learned anything. He supposed she’d inherited that from him. He didn’t want to sit back and watch her make this mistake, but he didn’t know what to do to stop her.

  He wanted to deliver a sermon about the sanctity of marriage vows, the necessity of commitment, the obligation she bore to her sons. Instead, he asked her a question.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”

  The anger drained out of her and she stood before him with her head hanging. “I didn’t want to disappoint you. You’ve always been so proud of me. I’ve never screwed up like this before. And you and Mom had the perfect marriage—I never thought it would be so hard.”

  It was true; she had led a charmed life. Even when he’d thought she’d fail, she hadn’t. He rose and held her in his arms, rubbing her back like he used to when she was a child. Eventually he began to tell her a story. A story about another young woman who had made a mistake and hadn’t wanted her parents to know. Another girl who hadn’t wanted to disappoint the parents she loved, and had paid the ultimate price.

  Caroline pulled away and dried her eyes. “Oh, Daddy, that’s so sad. What would you have done if I’d gotten pregnant when I was single?”

  “We would have supported you in whatever decision you made: keep the baby, give it up, have an abortion. Just like I’ll support you now, whatever you decide.”

  She smiled at him shakily. “But you do have an opinion.”

  “I think you should try a little harder. Find a different marriage counselor. Keep working at the problems.”

  Her eyes welled up again. “I don’t think it will do any good. I’m not sure I love Eric anymore.”

  “Your mother wasn’t sure she loved me, but she stuck with me.”

  “Oh, Daddy, Mom adored you and you know it.”

  “Sure, all the time you can remember. But those early days were rough. We got married too young, had you too soon, never had enough money. I was always working, or in school. I remember your mother looking me in the eye and saying those very words. ‘I’m not sure I love you anymore.’ ”

  He had her hooked now. “What did you do?”

  “Luckily, we were too overwhelmed to start a divorce, and eventually things got better. I finished my degree. She started to teach. We had more money. Most of all, we each stopped trying to win every argument.” Frank studied the mechanism of a pepper mill he’d picked up from the table. “I guess when all the other stuff dropped away, your mom decided she loved me after all. Thank God.”

  Cautiously, he looked up. Caroline’s eyes blinked rapidly. “I love you, too.”

  Chapter 25

  Frank drove the fifteen miles between Caroline’s house and Neil Golding’s, loudly singing his favorite old hymns.

  “Sometimes I get discouraged, and think my life’s in vain;

  But then the Holy Spirit restores my faith ag-a-i-n.”

  The stone that had weighed his heart for these last few months had crumbled. Not that he didn’t still worry about this crisis in Caroline’s marriage. But at least now he had a focus for his worry, instead of being plagued by constant uncertainty. And now he knew the problem wasn’t him.

  “There is a balm in Gilead to soothe the sin sick soul,” he sang as he swung around bends in the road leading through the prosperous town. “Balm in Gilead” was the song that had brought him and Estelle together. She had heard him harmonizing on the tenor line as he sat behind her in church. She’d turned around and smiled. And the rest was history.

  Estelle hadn’t learned until much later that he’d only gone to church that Sunday to try to finagle an introduction to her. By that time, she’d taken him on as a project, trying to train his voice and tame his ornery disposition. The poor woman hadn’t had much luck with either, but she’d never stopped trying.

  Frank reached a crossroads and took a left toward Nyack. Neil Golding had been quite friendly on the phone yesterday, almost as if he were hoping someone else in law enforcement would be coming to talk to him. In a few minutes Frank pulled into the circular drive in front of Golding’s McMansion. He rang the bell and listened as the Westminster chimes echoed out to him. A man in his early thirties soon opened the door and ushered him into a cavernous, and completely empty, foyer. Through an archway, Frank could see a preschooler gleefully riding a plastic trike on the polished hardwood floor of what would have been the formal living room, had it contained any furniture.

  Neil Golding followed Frank’s glance. “We let Joshua ride in there. After all, it’s his house too. Come on back here—I’ll get you a soda.”

  Frank followed him to the rear of the huge house. Neil seemed awfully chipper for a man whose father had recently been murdered. They settled themselves on plush sofas in the family room. Toys encroached from every side—dolls and trucks galore, stacks of videos, bins of art supplies, a miniature kitchen, a tool bench, basketball hoop and even a child-sized doctor’s office.

  Frank pulled out a GI Joe that poked him from behind a cushion. “This is quite a set-up you’ve got here.”

  “I know it’s too much,” Neil said. “My wife yells at me. But I want Josh to have everything I missed out on as a kid. My brother and I never had anything to play with but wooden blocks and this awful homemade play-doh my mother used to mix up.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The floodgates opened. Probably Neil Golding’s wife and friends were sick of hearing about his deprived childhood, but Frank was a fresh audience. He couldn’t have shut Golding up if he’d tried. He heard about how Golding and his brother had been forced to attend a dangerous urban public school to show solidarity with the underclass, and had been denied every simple pleasure of American childhood, from Gilligan’s Island reruns and Wonder Bread to Little League and Juicy-Fruit.

  Neil Golding leaned forward, breathless with his recitation of injustice. “Once, my little brother Danny wanted this stuffed dog. He looked at it every day in the window of a store on our block. A gentle, soft, cuddly puppy—what could be wrong with that? So my mother bought it for him for his birthday. When Danny opened it he was so excited. And my Dad took it away from him and returned it to the store. You know why?”

  No choice but to bite. “Why?”

  “Because it was made in China. The factory probably exploited its workers. That was my father—you couldn’t win with him. I’ve never forgiven him for that. And for what he
did to my mother.”

  This was getting closer to the mark. “What was that?”

  “For twenty years she did his bidding—living in that crummy apartment in Red Hook, working in the Green Tomorrow office without pay. And how did he repay her? He dumped her for that bitch, Meredith.”

  “How did he meet her?”

  “She was a Green Tomorrow volunteer, just like all the others. He’d had affairs before. My mother knew about them, but they always blew over. But not Meredith—she got him by the balls. I don’t know what she has, but for the first time in his life, my father was in the passenger seat and Meredith was behind the wheel.”

  “Well, she is attractive, and she seems like she might come from money, no?”

  Neil snorted. “Pretty, rich girls from Vassar and Smith were my father’s stock-in-trade. No, I think it was because she’s an even bigger bullshit artist than he was.

  “When he met her, he was just about burned out. He’d been doing this environmental protest gig for two decades, and what did he have to show for it? Everyone recycles their soda cans; meanwhile, the planet’s burning up. Meredith came along with all these ideas for flashy, symbolic campaigns to get media attention and raise money. She breathed new life into Green Tomorrow, and she convinced my father that he couldn’t get along without her.”

  “You seem to know all about it. I thought you were estranged from your father?”

  “When I was in college, I used to work in the Green Tomorrow office in the summers.” Neil rolled his eyes. “It was the family business. So I was there when Meredith first came on the scene. After he left my mother, I didn’t speak to him for over two years. But when I started dating Robin, my wife, she thought I should try to patch things up.” Neil sighed. “She comes from a nice, normal family—she just didn’t understand.

  “So I started to see him again. But Meredith always found a way to horn in. I couldn’t stand the way he kowtowed to her. And I couldn’t listen to all her crap about email broadcasts and Web rings and media alerts. I never thought I could be nostalgic for all those candle-light vigils and rainy protest marches.”

  “It sounds like Meredith was taking over Green Tomorrow, pushing your father out.”

  Neil shook his head. “No, not that extreme. He needed her, but she needed him too. Meredith has no people skills. She’s too abrasive. My father’s charm is what rallied the troops, kept the reporters interested.”

  “But you stopped seeing him again?”

  “We argued over that stunt Meredith organized out in Colorado.”

  “Bombing the earth-moving equipment? I thought it was some local supporters who got carried away?”

  “That’s what Meredith put out in her public statement. But behind the scenes, she was crowing about how she’d pulled it off.” Neil shook his head. “She could’ve got someone killed!

  “I never saw him after that. He came here to visit Joshua—I stayed at the office. Robin was worried I’d be devastated that we were on bad terms when he died. But you know what? I heard the news and I didn’t feel a thing.”

  Chapter 26

  Frank strode into the office the next morning with an air of determination that warned Doris to stay out of his way. He flung open the door to his inner office in time to see two heads huddled over some papers on Earl’s desk snap up.

  “Hello, Melanie,” Frank said as he glared at Earl. “What can I do for you?”

  “Uh....nothing. I was just leaving.” Melanie fumbled for her purse, exchanged a long, soulful glance with Earl, and scuttled out the door.

  “Do you see that girl morning, noon and night? Do you think you can find time to wedge a little work into your schedule?” Frank snapped.

  “Sorry.”

  “What time does Katie Petrucci start up that nursery school of hers?” Frank barked in response.

  “I see the moms dropping off their kids at nine.”

  “Good. I’ll head over there now and catch her before she starts working. Then I’m going over to the Cascade Clinic.”

  He gulped down a cup of Doris’s bitter brew, shuddered, and headed out the door to the Presbyterian Church. No one was in the church office, and Frank headed down the hall toward a door covered with construction paper leaves and letters that spelled Fall into a Good Book. Walking into the room without knocking, he found Katie and Dee-Dee Peele setting out art supplies.

  “Good morning, ladies.”

  Deedee looked up and smiled. Katie looked up and glared.

  Probably he shouldn’t have referred to them as “ladies.” He kept forgetting the rules. “Painting pumpkins today? That oughta be fun.”

  “The children will be here soon. Is there a point to your visit?” Katie demanded.

  Deedee looked shocked at her friend’s rudeness. “I think I’ll go to the kitchen and see to the snacks,” she said, and scurried away.

  Frank picked up a small pumpkin and passed it from hand to hand. “I hope there’s no hard feelings about the protest last week. I just want you to know we’re working hard on trying to track down that truck. You haven’t had any more trouble, have you?”

  Katie shook her head. “A few nasty phone calls, but you have to expect that as an activist.”

  “You went to NYU, I believe someone told me. Is that a very politically active school?”

  “It’s a big school—some people are politically engaged, others just care about parties and grades,” Katie answered as she struggled to pull a bag of art smocks off a high shelf.

  “Nathan Golding lived in New York City.” Frank handed the bag down to her. “Did you meet him when you were in college?”

  “I didn’t meet him there, but I heard him speak. He was very inspiring.”

  “So you got involved with Green Tomorrow?”

  Katie shook her head and paused from filling cups with yellow paint. This little walk down memory lane seemed to be warming her up a bit. “I kept in touch with their activities. But at the time I was totally committed to helping the people of Peru, who lived in poverty under an oppressive, U.S.-backed regime. I was in Peru for almost two years.”

  Frank nodded sympathetically, and picked up the blue paint to help fill the cups. “You have to choose your priorities. So after that, you moved back here, started a family. Probably didn’t have much time for activism when the kids were babies, huh?”

  Katie sighed. “You tell yourself you’re not going to let children totally change your life...”

  “But they do,” Frank finished her sentence with a smile. “You love ‘em, but they soak up your energy like little sponges, don’t they?”

  “Exactly!” Katie looked pleasantly surprised at his perception. “But starting this nursery school was my way of combining my commitment to my children with my commitment to build a better world. You see, we offer a non-sexist, non-racist, non-authoritarian approach to learning...”

  “And that’s just what this town needed,” Frank chimed in. “Get the kids away from those violent TV shows, right?”

  Katie set down her paint and leaned across the table. “You wouldn’t believe how much TV these kids watch!”

  Oh, he was playing her like a fiddle now. If he could just manage not to blow his advantage. “So, I imagine your curriculum here also includes information about the environment?”

  “Of course, and that’s how I got interested in Green Tomorrow again. I was up late one night, searching for environmental stuff on the Internet I could use in class, when I stumbled across Green Tomorrow’s web site.”

  Frank had already visited the site and he knew there was nothing on it about Raging Rapids, or even the Adirondacks in general. “And did it have anything useful to you?”

  “Oh, nothing I could use for school, but I did sign up to be on their e-list to receive advisories about important environmental issues.”

  “And you received news about the protest against Raging Rapids on that list?”

  Katie hesitated. “No, I got an email directly from Nathan
one day at the end of August. He said he was going to be in our area and wanted to meet with local supporters.”

  “To talk to you about Raging Rapids?”

  “He didn’t mention it in the email; he told me about it when we met. Why?”

  He could feel her beginning to turn on him again. “Katie, did you ever ask him how he first got interested in Raging Rapids? I mean, what even made him think to look there for environmental problems? It’s a pretty obscure spot.”

  Katie got that “I’m ready to start spouting a lot of left wing hot air” look. “Nathan’s always been concerned with threatened species. With the Bicknell’s Thrush’s habitat being destroyed right here in Nathan’s home state, I don’t think it’s at all surprising that he’d get involved.”

  “Well, if he’s so worried about that bird, how come he didn’t protest the building of the Extrom house?”

  Something in Frank’s question made her pause; she cocked her head like a dog that hears something his owner can’t. “I’m, I’m not sure. . .”

  Encouraged by the hesitation, Frank pressed on. “The state police think someone local may have killed Golding. Like one of you protesters, or Abe Fenstock. But—”

  A door slammed and high-pitched shrieks echoed down the hall along with the thunder of dozens of little feet. Shit! Just when he was making headway. Deedee appeared in the doorway with a crowd of kids.

  But Katie seemed to stare right through them. “Deedee, please lead them in circle time. I’ll be right back.” She motioned for Frank to follow her across the hall to an empty Sunday school classroom.

  Katie sat at a round table and ran her fingers though her wild, curly hair. She cradled her head in her hands and stared at the scarred tabletop. A minute passed in silence.

  Frank cleared his throat. “As I was saying, Abe didn’t even know what Green Tomorrow was up to until after Golding was killed, did he?”

  Katie looked up and met his eye. “Stan knew.”