Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Box Set

by S. W. Hubbard

  Oliver leaned forward, his face so close that Frank could see a loose eyelash on his pale cheek. He almost brushed it away as he would have done for Caroline when she was a child.

  “I understand your reaction at the moment, but you must have realized that your evidence would be important once the state police and I started to investigate.”

  Oliver squirmed and hung his head, looking no older than Matthew. “As I went back to my room that night, I saw Ray going into the main building doing the final security round of the night. I knew he would find the room and call in the alarm. So really, what could I add? Ray saw exactly what I saw, just a few minutes later."

  “What about the keys Lorrie gave you? Did you have them in your pocket all evening?”

  "W-e-e-ll, not exactly.”

  “Where exactly were they?”

  “Lorrie gave me her entire key ring, and it was big and lumpy. It jabbed into my leg when I was sitting in the boys’ rec room trying to read. So I took the keys out and laid them on the end table. Then the boys started a card game and wanted me to play, so I moved over to the card table, and the keys were left on the end table by the sofa. But they were still right where I left them at ten when I went to let Heather out, so I don’t think anyone touched them.”

  “Did you have your back to the end table while you were playing cards?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did the game go on?”

  “An hour and a half.”

  Frank stared into the young man’s eyes. “This is important, Oliver—who entered and left that room while you were playing?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, and Frank saw his hand stray back to the keyboard. Then Oliver pulled it back, as if restraining himself from a security blanket. “As I remember it, there was a lot of activity that night. Steve Vreeland passed through twice looking for Mac. And Ray Stulke came in, because we’d been having trouble with a window that wouldn’t close all the way.” Oliver grinned. “Ray got it shut, no problem. Oh, and earlier, Justin Levine came in and asked to join in the card game, but the other boys wouldn’t let him.”

  “Why not?”

  “They said he cheated. We were playing blackjack and Justin could count cards.”

  That figured, another skill to add to Justin’s dubious resume. “Did Justin stay in the rec room after you turned him away from the game?”

  “No, he made some wisecrack about our playing, then he went back to his room.”

  “Was that the last you saw of him that night?”

  “Hmm. Now that you mention it, he did come back in right before lights-out to see who had won.”

  “What about Steve Vreeland? You said he came in twice—how much time passed between visits?”

  “I’m not sure—maybe an hour.” Oliver paused for a moment. “You mean you think Justin or Steve could’ve borrowed the keys, gone to the isolation room, and brought the keys back again?” Before Frank could answer, Oliver continued, “Oh, wait! That was the night Justin ran away, the first time.”

  “Exactly. And when we brought him back and questioned him, we let him go because he convinced us that his running away had nothing to do with what happened in the isolation room. But we didn’t realize he had had access to the keys. The keys were missing—we thought they were still with Lorrie. And now Justin is gone again.” Frank stood up and glared down at Oliver. “Your information changes everything.”

  He got back to the office as Doris was ending a phone call. “He just stepped out for a minute. I’ll send him over as soon as he gets back.”

  “Send me over where?”

  “To the Rock Slide. There’s some problem with a customer who’s giving the girls a hard time and won’t leave.”

  “Threatening them?”

  The uncertainty etched on Doris’s face indicated that she had once again failed to obtain complete information from a caller.

  Frank pivoted and headed out the door with a sigh. He was eager to act on this new information, but it would only take a few minutes to check on the situation at the Rock Slide. Better safe than sorry.

  The ride to the sports equipment store was quick— in less than ten minutes, he could see the bright yellow coils of climbing rope that festooned the porch outside the log cabin-style building. There were only two cars in the parking lot. One was the old Volvo station wagon driven by the two sisters who worked there; the other must belong to the irate customer. At least he wouldn’t have to settle this in front of a crowd.

  He walked in and immediately saw a young man with a stony expression sitting in an Adirondack chair. Standing behind the counter looking equally grim were the two sisters, whose names he could never keep straight. Frank glanced from the man to the others and had a “what’s wrong with this picture” moment. For the man in the chair was none other than Pathfinder Steve Vreeland.

  “Hello, Steve, ladies. What seems to be the problem here?”

  “I’ve been cheated,” Steve said in a flat voice.

  The girls immediately began jabbering in response, interrupting each other in their eagerness to tell Frank their side of the story.

  "He’s trying to make a return without a receipt.”

  "He mighta bought it on sale—”

  “He wants his money back, but we can only give store credit.”

  “Without the receipt we can’t—”

  As the girls’ voices grew shriller and louder, Frank saw Steve’s lips move but no sound came out. He thought he might be counting to himself.

  Finally they paused for breath and Steve spoke again in that uninflected tone. “The merchandise still has the tag. It has never been used. I paid full price. The receipt must have fallen out of the bag.” He kept his eyes focused on a display of ice crampons as he talked.

  Frank could see why this debate had reached a standstill. By asking a few questions of both parties, Frank determined that Steve had paid by credit card, got the girls to look up the transaction, and had them credit Steve’s account. It seemed to him that reasonable people could have figured that out without the help of the police, but he’d seen more trivial matters escalate into violence. And in truth, the sisters at the Rock Slide had done him a favor. He wanted to talk to Steve Vreeland, especially in light of what he’d learned from Oliver and Greta Karsten, and Payne wouldn’t willingly give him the opportunity to see the young man on campus.

  Frank held the door of the store open and ushered Steve out to the parking lot.

  “Thank you for your assistance." Steve gave a curt nod and headed toward his car.

  “Say, do you have a minute?”

  Steve paused and turned slowly.

  “Do you remember a kid named Tristan Renfew from your days at the Langley Wilderness School?”

  Frank thought he detected a slight break in Steve’s wooden demeanor. The kid’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down before he answered. “I knew him. He’s dead now.”

  “Committed suicide, I believe?”

  Steve stared at the Rock Slide’s hanging sign, which creaked in the stiff breeze. “It was an accident.”

  “He died in an isolation room, just like Heather, didn’t he?”

  “Paul Petrucci killed Heather. Nothing like that happened to Tristan.”

  “What did happen to him?”

  “He refused to accept the program. He resisted it, and his resistance brought him down.”

  Frank felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold, gray weather. How could Steve be so utterly unsympathetic to another young man whose troubles must have been so similar to his own? He had completely bought into the notion that Tristan’s horrible death was his own fault.

  “Did you spend much time with Tristan in the weeks before his death?”

  “I participated in all the encounter sessions to help Tristan admit his transgressions and accept accountability for his actions.”

  Did you ever notice that you were pushing the poor kid right over the edge? But Steve wasn’t the one to blame; he had
n’t been calling the shots.

  “What about Jake Reiger—was he involved in Tristan’s, uh, treatment?"

  “He was Tristan’s interventionist.”

  “His what?”

  “He led an intensive one-on-one intervention to try to bring Tristan in line with the program’s goals."

  “Obviously he failed.”

  Steve’s hands clenched and he rubbed his right thumb and forefinger together over and over. “Why are you asking all these questions about Tristan and Jake? Paul Petrucci killed Heather, and he must’ve set up that bear attack, too. None of this has anything to do with Tristan Renfew. He had an accident.”

  “The night that Heather was taken to the isolation room, did you visit the boys’ rec room?” Frank asked.

  Steve appeared relieved to have left the subject of Tristan Renfew. “Yes. I was looking for Mac. He wasn’t there; he was in the girls’ dorm.”

  “But you went back to the boys’ rec room again.”

  Steve continued to stare straight ahead, his eyes not quite focused on Frank. “Yes. It's not entirely appropriate that Oliver participates in the boys’ recreation activities. I wanted to be sure he implemented the proper lights-out procedure.”

  “Did you happen to notice a set of keys lying on the end table by the sofa?”

  “Keys? What keys?”

  “The keys to the isolation room. They were lying there that night. Several people had access to them. Someone used them to go and kill Heather.”

  “Paul—”

  “I doubt it.” Of course, Paul had his own key to the isolation room, but Frank was interested to see Steve’s reaction without that piece of information.

  For the first time in their conversation, Steve’s eyes met Frank’s. “What’s going on? How could what happened to Tristan and Jake and Heather be connected?” There was a rising note of hysteria in Steve’s voice. “Paul’s the one who killed Heather. He did it because he hates Dr. Payne and he wants to make the school look bad. He knows Dr. Payne is going to fire him as soon as he can find a replacement. So Paul wants to see us fail.”

  Frank could believe Paul hated Payne and wouldn’t mind discrediting the school, but he couldn’t imagine him sacrificing an innocent child to ruin the academy. But what if Paul had hatched some plan with Heather and Justin that went horribly wrong? Could one of them have killed her accidentally? But it still didn’t make sense.

  “I'd be more likely to buy this idea that Paul killed Heather if the body hadn’t been hidden,” Frank continued. “Why not leave it there to be found right away if the point was to create a scandal?”

  Steve just stood there, glowering.

  “Moving Heather’s body was very risky. Paul didn’t have a reason to take that risk. And now I know that you and Justin Levine had access to those isolation room keys.”

  Frank’s words wrought a bizarre change in Steve Vreeland. His eyes bulged, his fists clenched, and his breathing came in short, raspy puffs. He looked to be holding in enough steam to blast himself clear to Lake Champlain.

  Finally, he blew. “I hid Heather’s body!”

  Chapter 31

  “I was scheduled to help Randy with Group Encounter after dinner,” Steve said. “I realized I didn’t have the notebook in which I record transgressions. I had been showing it to Mac earlier in the day, and I forgot to get it back from him.” He looked down at his clasped hands. “It was very careless of me.

  “First I looked for Mac in the boys’ dorm, but he wasn’t there. I went to check his office. He wasn’t there either, but I saw a light shining into the hall upstairs. There would be no reason for a light to be lit on the second floor of the admin building at that time, so I went up to check.”

  Steve shut his eyes. A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. He took a deep breath before continuing. “The light was coming from the open isolation room. Heather was in there. The room was covered with blood. I ran to her. She was warm. I couldn’t see where the blood was coming from. I checked her pulse. I couldn’t feel anything.”

  Frank watched him. Most people showed signs of stress when they recounted finding a body; some even became physically ill. Steve spoke like a soldier reciting name, rank, and serial number.

  “I started CPR, but in a few minutes I could tell that it was useless. She was dead.” Steve clenched his teeth; the tendons in his neck grew taut. “I couldn’t believe that stupid bitch had killed herself.”

  Frank drew back. He’d been in interrogation rooms with gang executioners and cop killers, but this guy scared him as much as any hardened con. “You made the decision that she couldn’t be saved yourself? You didn’t call for help?”

  Steve’s face regained some of its former impassivity. “I’m very well trained in first aid. I could see there was nothing more to be done. The important thing became how to protect the academy. Mac couldn’t afford another scandal. I moved Heather’s body to the crawl space behind classroom 210. My intention was to leave it there temporarily until I could bury it in the forest. I planned to go back to the isolation room and clean up the blood, so it would look like Heather had simply run away.” Steve frowned. "Of course, an escape wasn’t good either, but it was better than a suicide. Heather’s parents would believe she’d run away, with her history.”

  “How did you know how to access that space behind the classroom?” Frank asked.

  “Ray Stulke showed it to me when he first started working security. He noticed the little removable panel that had been put in. He said it must be in case there was ever trouble with the pipes or wiring, but that a kid could hide in there. He wanted us Pathfinders to be aware.” Steve bobbed his head in approval. “Ray is very attentive.”

  “What about the blood? You didn’t get a chance to clean it up?”

  Steve fidgeted with the zipper of his jacket. “It was hard to fit her through that little opening.”

  Yes, it would’ve been easier if she had crawled in, but she was dead, remember?

  “Then I had to get the panel back in place, and I had trouble with that.” Steve exhaled a little grunt of self-disgust. “By the time I was done, I needed to get to Group Encounter. Missing it would have raised too many questions—I had to let the blood go. I figured you all would think Heather had injured herself trying to escape.”

  “You didn’t know that Lorrie and Justin would also go missing.”

  “No, it muddied things. Made everyone more suspicious.” Steve’s eyes narrowed. “Especially that bitch reporter.”

  “What about MacArthur Payne? Did you tell him what you did to help him out?”

  “No!” Steve twisted around to face Frank. His cold eyes were alive with passion now. “No, Mac knew nothing about this. It was my idea. I did it to help him and the school, but it didn’t turn out the way it should have. That's why I’m telling you now.”

  He reached out and grabbed Frank’s wrist. “You have to help him. You have to get this cleared up so everyone knows it wasn’t Mac’s fault. None of it is Mac’s fault.”

  Fifteen minutes with his wife in the visiting room of the county jail brought about the confession that a team of state troopers had been unable to elicit from Paul Petrucci. Now he sat talking to Frank and Meyerson, his handsome face at once dejected, relieved, and defiant.

  “All right, let’s go over this from the top,” Frank said. “You say Dawn approached you about being her paid inside informant. And since you disapproved of Payne’s educational methods and needed the cash, the opportunity was too good to pass up.”

  “Yes. She called me out of the blue in September. I hadn’t heard from her since we graduated from college.”

  Frank and Lew exchanged glances. “So she was on the trail of this story before anything suspicious happened at the academy?”

  “She said she wanted to do an investigative report on abuses at tough-love schools, and she needed inside information. She said she’d be getting information from other schools like this, as well.”

 
“And paying for it?”

  Paul shrugged uneasily. “I know it’s unorthodox. Dawn says the Beat is trying to upgrade its journalistic image by doing more serious pieces. That’s why she came to work for them. She knew this could be a hot story, but she hasn’t established all the sources she needs, so ...” Paul’s voice trailed off. He knew his justification for taking the money was feeble at best.

  “You got the money as cash payments. Are you sure it was coming from the Beat?” Frank asked.

  Paul looked puzzled. “Well, yeah—where else could it be coming from?”

  “Payne claims his ex-partner Glen Costello is out to ruin him. Couldn’t the money for your information be coming from him?”

  Paul grew very still. Frank watched as a tiny muscle near his right eye jumped. It was the reaction of a highly intelligent man who realizes he’s been hoodwinked.

  “The lawyers—” Paul’s voice emerged as a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. "The lawyers said they were the legal team from the Beat and they could get me off if I just kept my mouth shut about the payments.”

  “I’ve talked to Dawn’s editor,” Frank said. “He’s never heard of the lawyers who were representing you. He also hasn't heard from Dawn in two days. He says that surprised him because she’s been so hot on this story, she’s even been covering some of her own expenses. Apparently she sees it as the story that’s going to make her journalistic career.”

  Paul pulled himself together for one last offensive. “Of course he would say that—he’s not going to admit he’s been paying for a story.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll keep pursuing that line. Right now I need to know one more thing from you. Dawn Klotz wrote her first story about the possibility that Jake Reiger’s death was not accidental at a time when no one knew about the bacon grease on the sleeping bag except the state police, me, the DEC, and Payne. How did she get that information?”

  “I told her,” Paul admitted.

  “And how did you know?”

  Paul paused to think. “We were all sitting around talking about it in the staff lounge the day after the attack. Steve, Oliver, Randy, Lorrie, Ray—I think that’s all.” Frank leaned forward. “Who brought it up? Who mentioned the bacon grease first?”