“Yes, that is my fear. I wonder what the police think.”
“Sam said the FBI is involved. But it doesn’t sound as though they’re communicating much with him. I suppose they all still vaguely suspect him of being involved in her disappearance.”
“It seems to me we’ve been wasting time with all of our phone calls and e-mails in the past few weeks,” she said. “Perhaps it’s time to return to your original searches—the ones that helped you find Victoria West in the first place.”
“A bit more Internet investigating?”
“Yes, I think so.” She rubbed her forehead again. “There, it’s getting bit better. I’ll also need you to look at the first draft of the new book.”
“Oh, Camilla! You finished it?”
“Yes. It was a pleasure to write, actually. I’ve set it in Budapest, for the most part. James and I spent a summer there once. So many memories, and many of them came back as I was writing this, exploring the landscape of my past.”
“You have had a remarkable life.”
“Yes. I’m lucky.” She turned to her desk and rounded it again, finding her seat and the work she had left to congratulate me.
“Camilla, before we get started—I wonder if I can just put one of these copies through Sam’s mailbox? He told me to stay away, so I won’t talk to him, and if anyone asks, I’ll just say I’m delivering it for you.”
“Of course you can. He’ll be very proud of you, I know.”
“And I’ll mail one to my father tomorrow morning. He won’t believe it. He told me he already saw the image online, but this will be a first—holding it in his hand.”
“My parents were most proud of my first book. They had the cover image framed, and then I was asked to send another so that they could bring it to the local pub for their celebrity wall.”
“Oh, wow! And who were the celebrities on the wall?”
“Just me,” she said, smiling. “My parents started the idea, you see. But it never really took off. They just kept adding my book covers. Quite flattering.”
“I want to go to that town and eat lunch in that pub,” I said. I wasn’t joking.
Camilla nodded. “When we go on tour, we’ll visit there, and I’ll show you.”
“That would be the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me.”
She looked wry again. “Go and deliver your book. Then we’ll get to work.”
“Someday I will make you accept my hero worship. You’ll sit up on a big float in a Blue Lake parade, and I’ll toss confetti at you and people will kneel along the pathway to acknowledge your genius. And then, in the park, I’ll erect a giant screen and show images of all of your books, and we’ll hire voice artists to read passages to the crowd.”
My mentor sat up straight in her seat and glared at me. “I could not imagine anything more horrifying.”
I laughed, and she said, “Go, Lena.”
I jogged out of the room and put my coat back on. I still wore my industrial strength boots, and these took me safely down the stairs and along the carefully shoveled path. Camilla hired a local company to plow the road up the bluff and our whole driveway, so the walking was fairly easy all the way to Sam West’s place. I stood at the foot of his drive, noting that the trees, burgeoning with colorful leaves when we first met, were now dark and bare, and his house was visible between the branches. It, too, looked dark and rather forbidding. I tromped up the driveway, ready with my excuse: I’m Mrs. Graham’s assistant. She asked me to deliver this to Mr. West. But there was no one along the path; no paparazzo with a camera, no reporter hovering in the trees, no spy with a telescope. Just winter silence, and snow crunching under my feet.
I climbed Sam’s steps and opened the little swinging door to his mailbox. I shoved the book through and heard it plop satisfyingly into the box in the porch. Then I turned around and paused, scanning the scenery as Sam would see it each day as he left his house. Blue Lake was visible as a line on his horizon, across the street and beyond Camilla’s house. The rest of the scene was elemental and satisfying: white snow, dark branches bending in a cold wind, clustering clouds of grayish white against a blue-gray sky, and a rocky path that led upward. I scanned the forest around me, wondering if he ever saw deer, and noted that there was something in the woods to the west of his house, bulky and still.
Could I have stumbled upon a sleeping deer? Surely there were no bears here in Blue Lake, and yet the hide of this animal seemed black and furry. Fearful, yet curious, I crept closer, my boots squeaking slightly on the snow. Ten feet away, I saw that this wasn’t an animal. It was too still. Inanimate. And there was something broken about it, like a sack of garbage had been thrown from the top of the bluff that rose majestically behind Sam’s house. Various thoughts flickered through my mind. Rotted, molding trash? Rejected swatches of material? Some sort of fur-covered piece of furniture?
My curiosity got the better of me, and I pushed myself to walk those last few feet. Then everything came into perspective, and I let out something between a gasp and a moan. The black furry thing was a long woman’s coat, not black after all, but dark blue; it looked both warm and expensive. Underneath it was a woman, or what had been a woman when she lived. She was clearly dead now, lying broken, unnatural, a dark and terrible contrast against the bright white snow.
“Oh, God,” I moaned. I think I added, “I’m sorry,” to her because her eyes were open and staring at the pale sky. I felt her loss strongly in that instant before I fumbled for my phone and pressed a name that, thankfully, had already been entered into my directory.
He answered in a moment, his voice casual. “Hey, Lena. What’s up?”
“Doug,” I whispered.
“Lena?” He was alert now.
“There’s a dead woman.” My voice croaked away into nothingness.
“Who’s dead? Where?”
“She’s in the forest behind Sam’s house. She’s not from Blue Lake.”
“Don’t cry, Lena. Go to the road. I’ll be there in five minutes, and you can show me where.”
“Yes. Oh, God.”
He hung up, and I stole one last look at her; I don’t know if I was torturing myself or just feeling curious, or if perhaps I was making sure of something. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again. “You didn’t deserve this.”
I turned and walked toward the road, forcing myself to breathe deeply while I waited for Doug Heller and his team.
I did not look at her again, but I didn’t have to. I knew who she was.
3
She realized, soon enough, that she could rely only upon herself for a way out of trouble, and yet she had no idea what that way might be. She decided to put her faith in ingenuity and the spirit of inspiration.
—From Death on the Danube
I STAYED ON the side of the road while they worked; Doug came to me eventually, in note-taking mode, his little tablet device in his hand. “I know it’s cold out here. I’ll let you go soon. But we want to get this done in daylight.”
“People will come sooner or later. They’ll see her,” I said, feeling protective.
“No. We closed off the road at the foot of the hill. No one’s getting in.”
“The reporters are here. From all over, probably. Marge Bick told me about two of them. They have no respect. They’ll hike in through the trees.”
He put an arm around me. “You’re trembling. Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better. I’m just—really offended. That she had to go through that. That she had to die at that young age. And it looks as if it was such a violent parting from the earth.”
Doug nodded. “You’re getting poetic, so I know this is upsetting you. I’ll send you home with Officer Goggins, and Camilla will make you some hot chocolate or something.”
“Ask me your questions first.”
He studied my face, the
n nodded and looked at his iPad, lifting his stylus. “You were right. She’s not from around here. But she has no purse, no ID on her. Have you ever—”
“She’s from New York,” I interrupted.
His head shot up, and his brown eyes locked onto mine. “You know who she is?”
“Yes, I think so. I’ve never met her.”
“Who is she, Lena?”
“Remember when we had our sort of round table at Camilla’s house, and we talked about Victoria West and how we realized she was in trouble?”
“Yes, of course. Camilla knows I’ve been working on it in my spare time. So does Sam.”
“Well, at the time you asked how I knew about Victoria, and one of the puzzle pieces was that photo of Victoria on the blog. It’s what helped us identify her on that yacht.”
“Yes, yes, I remember.”
I pointed in the direction of the dead woman, covered now with some kind of tarp. “Her blog.”
“What? You mean that’s Victoria’s friend?”
“I think it’s Taylor Brand, yes. It looks like her. I’ve read her blog a lot since I first discovered it, looking for clues or ideas about Victoria. Taylor had a certain style, and even if I didn’t recognize her face, I’d recognize that coat. It’s the sort of thing she’s always wearing in the photos.”
Heller did some clicking around on his computer; I peered over his shoulder and saw that he had pulled up the blog. There was Taylor Brand’s photograph. “Ah,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re right, Lena. We’ll try to get someone in New York to come down and make a formal identification.”
“Or they can give Sam permission to make it. He knew her, right? She was his wife’s best friend.”
“Yes,” Doug said, and his face grew troubled.
“This will be bad for Sam, won’t it?”
He put the iPad in his big coat pocket. “As you said, she’s his wife’s best friend. He’s just been cleared of killing Victoria, and now her friend is dead in his yard. Yeah, it looks bad. But it also looks convenient.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning if I were going to kill someone in this town, I might want to make it look like Sam West did it. It sure would get the attention away from me, whomever I might be.”
“Are you sure someone killed her? Maybe she just had some kind of attack, or tripped and fell, or . . .”
Heller shook his head. “She was murdered,” he said.
“How do you know?” Again, I felt a mixture of dread and curiosity.
Doug looked back at his team; he clearly wanted to join them. “I can’t really go into it, but the evidence suggests that she was pushed. From up there.” He pointed to the top of the bluff, where a scenic overlook curved around right over Sam’s property and all the way down the giant hill. If she had fallen from the path, it meant that she had plunged perhaps forty to fifty feet.
“I think her legs were broken,” I said.
“Yes.” His voice was grim. “But so was her neck, so she likely didn’t feel any pain.”
“What is happening? This can’t be real. She was just some woman in a picture on the Internet, and now suddenly she’s here, and—Oh my God.”
“What?” He leaned toward me, alert.
“She had posted something about how she was going to come here. She intended to apologize to Sam. Look at her blog.”
He tapped the computer again and found the post. “I owe you an apology, and I plan to make it in person soon . . .” Doug looked grim. “She posted this three days ago. Which means anyone in the world could have read this and known that she might show up in Blue Lake.”
“This is scary, Doug. What’s going on here?”
“I don’t know.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Go home. I’ll come to see you and Camilla tonight, and we’ll talk. We’ll ask Sam to come, too.”
“I thought this was over. I thought it was all over.”
Doug wanted to comfort me, but I could see that his eyes were darting back to the scene, where he felt he should be. “I’m sending you home.” He lifted a hand. “Darrell! Come and see Miss London back home to Graham House.”
The officer put a hand under my elbow and walked me home; my mind was darting around to various thoughts, and I was barely conscious of the journey. Soon I was climbing Camilla’s steps and thanking my escort, and only when I was in the warmth of Camilla’s living room did I realize what had been bothering me: Sam had never returned home.
• • •
“WE’VE MISSED SOMETHING,” Camilla told me, her expression brooding as she frowned into her mug of hot chocolate.
“Doug saw the blog. He said anyone could have read it and realized that Taylor Brand was going to show up in Blue Lake. They could have been watching for her.”
“But why?” Camilla asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe—I don’t know—someone has a grudge against Sam and Taylor both?”
She shook her head. “There should be no connection to Blue Lake, none at all. And yet this is where that poor woman has died. If this were a book, Lena, we would know that there was some association that we had not seen before—something linking her to this town.”
“Well, Sam does. I mean, he was her best friend’s husband, and she wronged him and wanted to make it right.”
“But that doesn’t give anyone motive for murder, does it? Which means there’s something else.”
Camilla’s mind was working, too, and her brown eyes moved from her hot chocolate to the window that provided a view of the wintry front yard. Her gaze stayed there, as though she could read the truth in the scenery. “What did Sam say?” she asked, shifting her gaze to me.
I cleared my throat. “He never came home. I assumed he was going straight there after we met at Allison’s house, but . . . I never saw him. Doug wanted to talk to him, I could tell.”
“He’ll be a suspect, of course.”
“Doug said it was convenient. He’s not going to be as quick to suspect Sam this time, not after he ended up being wrong last time.”
“Yes. I see.” She took a sip of her drink, and we sat in silence. She roused herself enough to say “Lena, are you sure you don’t want some hot chocolate?”
“No, no, thank you.” My throat felt tight, and my heart was still pounding a bit too quickly. I moved restlessly in my seat. “Camilla, what can we do?”
She nodded her approval. “You’re like me—a woman of action. And there are things we can do. Yesterday this woman was not a part of our equation, nor was she an element of our research. Now she is. We’ll return to her blog and read it more carefully. We’ll look into any connections she may have had to Sam and his wife, other than friendship. We have to find that missing piece. Puzzles are so frustrating when you don’t know the final picture, aren’t they? But it’s getting clearer. Yes, it is.”
“I guess I’ll start reading the blog,” I said.
“If you’re willing, Lena, there’s something else I’d like you to do.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll start on the blog right now, but I wonder if you would go to the library. Perhaps they have some methods of research that haven’t occurred to us. Focus on Taylor Brand, the Sam West trial coverage, Victoria West. And, of course, Nikon, our ever-elusive Nikon.”
“Sam said that he and his investigator had found a yacht by that name. They worked for weeks to contact authorities and have it boarded. It was a dead end.”
“Don’t look so bleak. As long as we’re hunting, we have hope. And we have not yet begun to hunt.” Camilla’s face was intense, full of lively intelligence and a tiny gleam of enjoyment. She couldn’t help the fact that she loved puzzles; she had been genuinely grieved to hear about Taylor Brand’s death.
“I’ll be happy to go to the library. I’ve only been there once since I’ve been in Blue Lake, and I
would like to explore it further.” I stood up and stretched in the warmth of her living room. “I’ll get my gear back on.”
“Do you want to lie down first? Have a quick nap? The cold tends to sap a person’s strength, and you’ve had a difficult day.”
I patted her affectionately on the arm. “Maybe when I get back. First things first.”
I put my coat and scarf back on and slipped my feet back into my boots; then I made my way out the door and crunched through the snow, bound for the library on North Wentworth Street. When I spied it on the snowy horizon, I was impressed with its rather Gothic look against the gray-blue winter sky. I marched toward the building with a quickened pace, feeling an inexplicable sense of urgency. By the time my feet hit the well-shoveled stone stairs, I was determined to accomplish something—anything—that could help in the investigation.
It was quiet in the library today; that hadn’t been the case at my last visit, which had coincided with a story time event, for which about twenty little children had assembled with their parents. They had a lively, loud discussion of Skippyjon Jones, and then they drew their own versions of Siamese cats and Chihuahua dogs to hang in the library windows.
Today no children were visible, and the few people I saw were either engrossed with computers, their heads covered by giant earphones, or scanning the enormous shelves of books. I hesitated, wondering where to start. Claim a computer myself? But I could do online work at home. Look for books? Journal articles? Something on microfiche? The newspaper morgue? But what, exactly, was I looking for?
“May I help you?” The woman before me, whose nametag said “Janet Baskin, Librarian,” looked nothing like a typical librarian you’d find in a little Indiana town. She was tall and thin and wore faded blue jeans with a man’s white shirt and tie, over which she wore a black leather vest. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she had a number of piercings—two in each ear, one in her nose. This last was a small diamond chip, and to my surprise I thought it looked rather good with the rest of her ensemble. She was perhaps thirty years old. I might have thought she was in some sort of a cappella group or a stylish motorcycle gang, but when she talked she gave herself away. If a voice could sound intellectual and bookish, her voice did.
Death in Dark Blue Page 3