“That makes two of us,” Doug said.
I pointed at the card. “If Taylor didn’t bring this to you until now, it’s because she thought Victoria was dead until very recently. And yet she held onto the card, so she must have known, somehow, that it was significant, and not just some prank.”
The men nodded, seemingly lost in thought.
“But if Victoria wrote it,” I added, “then she was under duress. Why else write only one word, coded? In case someone found it and wanted to know what it was about? This card, addressed to her best friend, was her way of giving a clue. But she couldn’t risk being exposed, so she had to make it inscrutable and leave no return address. That still points to a Victoria in danger.”
Doug looked at me with what seemed like grudging respect. “That’s a good point. We need to add this to our list of tasks. Find R. Acie.”
Sam clamped a friendly hand on Doug’s shoulder. Another first. “Can you come over tonight for dinner? We owe you one for coming over so quickly.”
“I, uh, actually have a dinner date this evening,” Doug said, his face reddening. Then he lifted his chin with an almost defiant expression. “I’m meeting up with your librarian friend. We’re going to compare research notes to see if we missed anything.”
“You’re going out with Belinda Frailey?” I asked, surprised. “Well, that’s great! She’s brilliant, and she might just be the key to this whole investigation.”
Sam’s look held the slightest tinge of irony. “I hear she’s a lovely woman,” he said.
Doug looked uncomfortable. “I need to get back. Strayer is enough like a rat that I’m afraid he’ll bite through his cuffs.”
We laughed and walked with him out the door. Doug waved and headed for his car.
“Well, I guess we have at least solved the mysteries behind the doors of the Red Cottage,” I said, with my best guess at a Nancy Drew tone.
“Not quite,” Sam said, stopping in his tracks.
“Why?”
“Because we don’t know one very important thing: who was the man who yelled at Taylor in her cottage the night before she was killed?”
10
People rarely see their own lives as carefully constructed plots, but Margot had started to see hers as one, especially when that plot twisted in an unpredictable and painful way.
—From Death on the Danube
WE WALKED OUT the door of the Red Cottage, and I saw someone I knew hovering on the sidewalk, as though about to visit Janey Maxwell. It was the tall, leather-clad librarian I had met on the day that I had talked with Belinda Frailey. I scoured my memory for a name.
She seemed surprised to see me, and perhaps a bit unhappy to see me as well. I said, “I know you—it’s Jeannette, right?”
She took a step forward and offered a handshake. “It’s Janet Baskin. We met at the library, right? How are you, Mr. West?” She shook Sam’s hand, as well.
“It seems we all wanted to visit the Red Cottage today,” I said in an attempt to make conversation. She looked disconcerted, and then glanced down the sidewalk, as though tempted to run away.
“No, uh—I was just—did I see that reporter leaving in a police car?”
“You mean Ted Strayer? Are you familiar with him? Yes, he was just arrested,” I said, not trying to keep the pleased tone out of my voice.
Janet Baskin’s face seemed to grow pale. “Did—do you know what happened?”
Sam seemed to take a new interest in her. He moved closer to our conversation and said “Mr. Strayer was obstructing a police investigation.”
“Oh.” This seemed to disappoint her.
Sam looked as though he was about to question her further, but a black car pulled up beside us, and a tall, heavyset man emerged and began retrieving bags from the trunk with a self-important aura. He wore a gray flannel coat with a pair of dark pants and a fleece scarf.
After a moment, Sam said, “Caden.”
The man looked up, focused in on Sam, and narrowed his eyes for a moment. Then he walked toward us and said, “Sam.”
Sam said, “I’m so very sorry to hear about Taylor. I have no idea why she was here or what happened when she got here.”
So this was Caden Brand, Taylor’s brother. I watched him as he studied Sam, seeming to make a decision. I turned to see what Janet Baskin’s reaction was, only to find that she was gone. I hadn’t even noticed her slipping away; she was nowhere in sight.
Brand stuck out his hand, and Sam shook it. “Thank you, Sam. I’m going to take you at your word, because I always felt you were an honest person, and I’ve learned recently that I can’t trust anything the press says about you.”
Sam nodded. “True.”
“Still, it’s a troubling coincidence, Taylor appearing here in your backyard. Taylor dying at all.” He shook his head in disbelief, and some grief flashed in his eyes. Or was that a show? For the briefest of moments he seemed surrounded by an aura of insincerity, an indefinable something.
“I agree,” Sam said. “I know the police are determined to get to the bottom of things. It seems that Taylor wanted to ask me something about Victoria, and might have thought she had a clue about Victoria’s whereabouts.”
Brand’s eyes widened. “Oh? And what was this clue?”
Sam wasn’t about to divulge police information. “We have no idea,” he said.
Brand nodded. “Well, I’d better park in a legal spot and go inside. I have some grim tasks awaiting me.”
“Did you just come from the airport?” I asked.
Something flickered in his eyes. “Uh—no. I was actually at a conference in Indianapolis when I heard about Taylor. I just drove down.”
I wondered why he hadn’t arrived in Blue Lake sooner. It had been two days since I’d found poor Taylor Brand in the snow. Sam was wondering this, too, I could tell, but all he said was, “You’ll want to talk to the detective in charge of this case—Doug Heller. I’m sure he has as many questions for you as you have for him.”
For a moment I felt a sense of confrontation in the air. Perhaps I was just reading vibes that weren’t really there, because a second later the men were shaking hands again, Caden Brand was marching his bags to the steps of the Red Cottage, then returning to his car to bring it to the lot beside the building.
Sam and I waved and began walking toward Wentworth Street. When we were a block away from the Red Cottage, Sam said, “We need to talk to Heller.”
“Why?”
“This guy is suspicious.”
“I felt that! But I didn’t know why. In what way do you mean?”
He stopped to face me; our breath made clouds of condensation on the cold air. “He was in Indianapolis, yet he waited all this time to come here? That’s a red flag. Maybe he’s arriving now because he already drove out, had a fight with her the night before she died, and then left the next day. Maybe he killed her.”
“You think he’s the yelling man? Why would he kill his own sister?”
Sam shrugged. “Some things never change. When Taylor was in college, she always talked about her older brother. They were both rich, privileged kids, and each resented the other’s existence. I don’t know if things were different a decade later, but back then? They hated each other.”
“Wow.”
“I was glad to get away from his grieving brother act, because I wasn’t buying it.”
“That’s so sad. She was his family.”
“Yeah.” Sam’s eyes grew distant and melancholy, and I felt sure he was thinking of his own family, all lost to him now. “You would think that meant something, Lena, but to some people, it doesn’t. Their father is still living, and now Caden will inherit everything in the will.”
“Oh. Motive, then. And why isn’t the father here?”
“He’s old, and ill, I think. Caden will likely bring the
body back to New York, or have it shipped there when the autopsy is finished.”
“The body,” I said, feeling melancholy myself. Months earlier, when I had discovered Taylor Brand’s blog, I had indulged in some uncharitable thoughts about her. I had assumed she was rich, sheltered, selfish, vain. But since I had found her in the forest, I had felt protective of her.
We walked back to Wentworth Street, where reporters still lingered, clearly hoping for another glance at us. I had experienced only one interaction with the press, and I was already tired of them. Sam had been right, of course, in his efforts to keep our relationship a secret.
“Oh, great,” I said. “Time to run the gauntlet again.”
Sam’s jaw tightened, and we began to walk, but suddenly a car pulled up next to us, and a window rolled down, revealing Doug Heller in the driver’s seat and Belinda Frailey in the passenger seat. She looked concerned.
“Get in,” Doug said.
We did; despite the fact that the reporters took pictures and video of us climbing into Doug’s car, I was relieved that we would have clear sailing up the bluff. Doug drove to the barricaded street, and when the press got too close to the car, he rolled down his window and said, “Disperse or be arrested.”
They didn’t disperse, but they moved back a couple of yards—enough to allow us access to the private road. I looked back to see the barricade put quickly back in place by the officers on duty. “How long will we have to put up with them?” I asked.
Sam pressed my hand. “It might be a while.”
“And it might get worse,” Doug said. “But we’ll be on top of them.”
Belinda turned around from the front seat and said, “Hello, Lena. I have some more information for the London File. That’s why Doug picked me up.”
“We need to talk,” Doug said. “Let’s wait until we get to Camilla’s, so we can clue her in, too.”
This was both intriguing and frightening. I looked at Sam, who shrugged. He was in the dark, as I was. He said, “Caden Brand just came to town. Or so he says.”
Doug didn’t miss Sam’s intimation. “You think maybe he was here on a secret visit? Maybe around the time his sister died?”
“I’m not ruling it out,” Sam said. “You should know they’ve never liked each other.”
“Duly noted. I’ll seek him out after we have our talk.”
I felt impatient. “Doug, what’s happening with Nikon? Haven’t they found him yet?”
We were pulling into Camilla’s pebbly driveway. Doug parked, then turned to face us. “This is the problem: Lazos is definitely out and about on a yacht, but he most likely bought it from someone else and didn’t register it. Why, I don’t know. He may be escaping detection by changing the flags he flies. If he’s in American waters flying, let’s say, Greek colors, then American ships won’t detain him, unless they notice that he has an American hull number. And even that we can’t be sure of.”
“But he’s in all these magazines and pictures,” I protested. “He’s a public figure.”
“Yes and no,” Doug said. “Belinda has actually found very few pictures of him. And they only got those because—” he pointed backward, toward the reporters—“you saw how persistent they can be. Sooner or later they get their picture. As you two have recently found out.”
My cheeks grew warm, remembering the pictures that Doug had obviously seen, but Sam laughed. “True enough,” he said.
“And one has a certain amount of anonymity on the water. There’s so much distance to cover. Remember the missing plane in Malaysia? The one they never found? Think of how much ocean they searched, and yet that huge vehicle simply disappeared.”
“But that’s because it was swallowed by the ocean. Nikon is floating on top,” I protested. For some reason this made everyone laugh.
“I know it’s frustrating, especially for you, Sam,” Doug said. “And we’re about to add to your frustration. Let’s go inside.”
• • •
CAMILLA WAS SURPRISED to see us all, but she ushered us to our usual table, and Rhonda, who had been making lunch, brought us all coffee and biscotti.
Doug had seated himself next to Belinda, who clutched a small file. If I hadn’t been studying them so closely I wouldn’t have noticed the way he touched her arm, or the tiny smile that escaped her as she stared down at her folder. With surprise, I realized that the dinner they were having this evening was clearly not their first date. Had they gone out, I wondered, after our last meeting at Camilla’s? I recalled that Belinda had been jealous that I knew the town policeman she and Janet Baskin called “Inspector Wonderful.”
She and Doug were the perfect pair, but something about their relationship, if indeed they had one, was troubling me. I wasn’t sure why.
“So what exactly are we facing now?” Camilla said, after sipping her coffee. “Clearly there’s been a development.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Doug. “Belinda called me this morning and said she needed to show me something. I just got around to it, since I had to arrest a certain reporter who has been a pain in my ass since he got to this town.” Doug scowled. “And I have to say, you all are keeping me on my toes this week.”
He did look a bit pale and tired; was it only his workload, I wondered, that had him losing sleep?
Doug pointed at Belinda. “I’m going to let Belinda explain.”
She nodded. “I told Lena that I’d keep hunting for any articles or images that might be pertinent to the investigation, or that might have anything to do with Nikon Lazos or Victoria West. I kept scanning photographs from recent issues of any yachting magazines or that sort of high-life publication.”
We nodded at her, waiting for the ball to drop.
“As Doug said, there are very few images of Lazos, but I did find one in an issue of Islands magazine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it—I certainly hadn’t. It caters to the rich, and each issue costs almost forty dollars.”
Camilla gasped and shook her head.
“Anyway, this issue had photos of a summer party thrown by some industrialist, and Lazos is mentioned in a caption. I had it blown up.” She slid a photocopy of the picture to each of us. I studied mine with interest. There was Lazos, looking silver and handsome and wealthy, smiling his white-toothed smile as he held a drink in one hand and clapped a friend on the shoulder with the other. The caption read N. Leandros Lazos, holidaying in Ithaca with his friend Georgios Poulos, spent the morning at the Monastery of Panagia Kathariotissa, saying a prayer with his wife and enjoying a splendid view of Ithaca and its crystal water.
Belinda said, “It makes sense that he’d be in Ithaca, because it’s not as big a tourist destination as some of the Greek Islands, but it’s undeniably beautiful. He lives the high life under the radar. You notice, too, that he was ‘holidaying with a friend,’ so that he’d be traced only to that person’s yacht, not his own.”
“It says ‘his wife,’” I said.
Doug nodded, darting a look at Sam. “Right. Which means he either tells people he’s married to Victoria West, or he married her.”
“Wouldn’t that make him a bigamist?” I asked.
Doug shrugged. “Maybe when you’re as rich as Nikon you don’t care about the pesky little rules other people have to follow. We can’t find any record of a marriage, though.”
Sam sniffed. “This guy looks like a playboy. How do we know this ‘wife’ is even Victoria?”
Belinda cleared her throat. “There was one other picture, and this is the one that creates a complication.”
She passed out a second photocopy, and the table erupted with gasps and shouts. In this picture Lazos, at the same event, stood smiling with his arm wrapped possessively around a beautiful woman in a white dress who was obviously Victoria West.
What none of us had expected was that this woman was clearly pregnant.
/> 11
It was the uncertainty that she thought might kill her at the end—not the running or the fear—just the terrible, terrible waiting in the void of the unknown.
—From Death on the Danube
JAKE ELLIOTT’S STORY came out the next day; I read it in Camilla’s copy of the New York Times, but it was also in both the Indianapolis Star and the Chicago Tribune, which were also on her kitchen table. I sat in the wintry light of early morning, sipping my coffee and studying the page with such intensity that I didn’t notice when Rhonda arrived and started cooking breakfast, nor when Camilla left me alone, sensing that I needed to process the material individually.
The front-page picture was one of Sam standing in front of Blue Lake. It was a head and shoulders shot in which he looked human; approachable, but unsmiling. The caption read, Sam West stands in front of Blue Lake in the Indiana town of the same name, which he has called home since his wife’s disappearance. The headline above the photograph read “The Long Persecution of an Innocent Man.” In a lengthy, many-sectioned story, Elliott had come out strongly in Sam’s defense, pointing out the utter lack of evidence that Victoria had died, the public’s willingness to jump to immediate and dire conclusions, the prosecutor’s determination to put West behind bars in order to serve his own career. In addition, Elliott pointed out Sam’s quiet dignity, his unwillingness to speak badly about his wife even while he must have wondered if she had conspired against him, and the inexplicable reality of Victoria’s blood, found in Sam’s New York apartment.
In a second section, subtitled “The Work to Be Done,” Elliott suggested that the police and other officials had real work to do. That they had done an injustice, for more than a year, to both Sam and Victoria West, by charging down the wrong path and leaving two people stranded, their lives on hold, while certain figures basked in the glory of the television cameras. The piece was a strong indictment, especially of the New York Police Department, the New York District Attorney, and the friends and colleagues of Sam West who had been so willing to turn on him when he had come under scrutiny. He mentioned Taylor Brand and the blog that she had used to castigate West on a regular basis, her intensity fueled, it would seem, by her grief at losing a friend.
Death in Dark Blue Page 11