I was on the verge of reminding Gwen that I’d warned her about that very thing. She’d jumped down my throat when I told her to watch her step with Mackenzie. If she’d listened to my advice, she wouldn’t be facing this crisis now. But I held my tongue. How many people had tried to warn me, too, about Mackenzie?
“I bet Eleanor’s already told them about the two of you,” I pointed out. “She’s the housekeeper. She was right there. She would know, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes, and I think she’s also half nuts. She turned against me with such a vengeance when Graham and I first got together. I don’t know what was wrong with that woman—whether she was jealous or just overly protective. But I promise you, she used to look at me with absolute hatred in her eyes. It was scary.”
“That said . . . she’s still telling the truth about you and Graham being involved.”
“It’s her word against mine. No one else knows about it.”
“Actually, that’s not true.”
Gwen looked over at me. She put down her coffee.
“You? Would you really say anything—if I asked you not to?”
“It’s not just me,” I told her, avoiding a question I wasn’t sure I knew how to answer. “I think Sal caught wind of it. I already told you what he said about Chloe running the foundation. But I didn’t tell you that when I asked Sal about the Mackenzie Project he hinted that he knew it was Mackenzie who had made the big pledge to Bridgewater House. And he seemed worried. About you. About what was going to happen to this place without Mackenzie’s pledge. I don’t know for sure, but there was something about his tone of voice that made me think he also knew something was going on between you two. Or at least suspected.”
“Sal would never do anything to hurt me,” Gwen said.
“That’s not the point. What I’m trying to tell you is that you can’t control the situation. Any number of people might have seen you going to or coming from Mackenzie’s late at night. For what? A meeting about his pledge? You can’t bluff your way out of this, Gwen.”
“Just watch me.”
“What? Watch you go to jail? You could be convicted of obstructing justice if they find out you’re lying about Mackenzie. I know what I’m talking about. Please—just be honest about what happened, okay?”
She shrugged in reply. She had no intention of listening to me, I realized. She calmly reached over and opened the bag and began to peel off the waxy paper cup from a blueberry muffin. She’d always been so damned headstrong! So sure of herself. And it had always been a trait I admired. Until now.
“Where were you when Mackenzie died?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?” she said. “What is this? A practice run before I get grilled by the police?”
“I’m just curious. I’m pretty sure that everyone else I know who was involved with Mackenzie was at the Open Day event. I thought I saw you in the crowd once or twice, but I wasn’t sure. Were you there?”
“No, sorry,” Gwen said, brushing crumbs off her fingers. “I didn’t make it. Graham and I walked through the gardens together a number of times, though. Haven’t I already told you how fantastic I thought they were, Alice? You did an incredible job.”
“Where were you, then?” I persisted, aware that Gwen was avoiding my gaze.
“Home,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “I got up late—then I just lazed around.”
I didn’t enjoy catching her in a lie. At the same time I was hoping it would teach her a lesson. Make her realize what a mistake it was to think she could skirt the truth.
“I happen to know you were in Mackenzie’s bedroom around eight thirty or so. I was at the site early that morning to check on some final details in the garden. I came up to the house after that, hoping to talk to Mackenzie about the check that didn’t clear. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. But I couldn’t help it. You and Eleanor were really going at it.”
“So what?” Gwen asked. “So what if I was there early? I left right after that. I went home and, like I said, spent the rest of the morning lazing around.”
“Gwen! You just totally changed your story! Don’t you see how suspicious that makes you seem?”
“To whom?” Gwen asked, looking me straight in the eye. “Do you suspect me of something, Alice?”
“Just idiocy,” I said. “I’ve been through this kind of thing before, remember. I can’t tell you how many times I was interviewed after Richard disappeared. How many times they made me go over every little detail of our lives together, especially those weeks just before he vanished. You don’t know what that kind of scrutiny is like.”
“You got through it,” Gwen said.
“But I had nothing to hide.”
“I don’t either,” my friend insisted. “Not really. Not anything that did anyone any real harm. I’m just trying to protect my career. My future. And I think you’d do the same thing, Alice, if you were in my position.”
22
But what I’d told Gwen about not suspecting her wasn’t quite true. The news that Mackenzie’s death was under investigation—and that he might actually have been murdered—had started to change the way I thought about everyone who’d been close to him. And I couldn’t help but find Gwen’s self-serving reaction to his passing—as well as her decision to lie to the police—deeply troubling. Mackenzie’s reneging on his pledge gave her a motive, and her being at his place the morning he died gave her the opportunity. On the other hand, she was my dearest friend, and I just couldn’t imagine her killing her lover—no matter how angry and upset she might have been. Besides, it seemed to me that other people had much more obvious and pressing reasons for wanting Mackenzie gone.
Chloe for one, whom her ex-husband had been about to cut off without a dime. Lachlan for another—and for the same reason. Or, perhaps, the two of them working together. I’d heard the bitter way that Mackenzie, Chloe, and Lachlan spoke to one another. There was certainly no love lost among the three of them. And if Mackenzie was eliminated before Lachlan lost his inheritance, there might very well be a lot to gain.
Then there was Eleanor. She fed and cared for Mackenzie. She had daily access to his house. She knew his habits intimately. She’d trusted and admired him, and he’d paid her back by ruining her and her son financially. And she was so tightly wound emotionally. It wasn’t hard to imagine her snapping under extreme pressure, losing control, lashing out.
There were others, too, though they seemed more far-fetched to me. Tom, for instance, whose wind project Mackenzie had stopped dead in its tracks. And Sal, who’d obviously lost a bucketload of money to a man he’d once considered a friend. Plus Sal had loved Gwen, but had been forced to sit by and watch her fall under the spell of a powerful rival.
It wasn’t until the next day that I realized there was another person I hadn’t considered whom some might feel belonged on the growing list of suspects.
I knew and liked Ron Schlott, Woodhaven’s chief of police. He was a genial, hail-fellow type who was a couple of years younger than me, a son of the man who’d been the police chief when I summered in Woodhaven as a girl. The family seemed to have a tradition of public service; Ron’s brother, Brian, headed up the town’s highway department. Ron was jowly and big-bellied, his police belt riding low on his overburdened hips. He knocked on the door of Green Acres around eleven o’clock the following morning. With him was a compact, balding man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a blue blazer.
“Hey, Alice,” Ron said when I opened the screen door. He turned and nodded to the man at his side. “I’d like you to meet Lieutenant Vincent Erlander. He’s the state police detective in charge of the investigation into Graham Mackenzie’s death. You got a few minutes?”
“Sure,” I said, opening the door wider for them to come in. I asked Mara to bring out some folding chairs from the storage area. We set them up in front of my desk, and Ron and the detective took their seats.
“I’d like to talk to you, too,” Erlander said as Mara started back to her side of the room.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him, sitting down at her computer, which effectively blocked her from view. Erlander turned in his chair and narrowed his eyes in her direction, but then turned back to me and opened up a well-worn leather-bound notebook.
“Okay, just some basics to start,” he said, clicking on a ballpoint pen, then taking down our names, addresses, phone numbers, nature of our work, years in business, etc. Mara contributed her information from behind her terminal without missing a beat, but at the same time continuing to click away at her keyboard. This clearly irritated Erlander, who struck me as somewhat humorless and short-tempered. A couple of times I noticed Ron shift unhappily in his chair when Erlander was particularly brusque.
“When did you first meet Graham Mackenzie?” Erlander asked after he’d completed the background questions.
“Sometime in mid-March,” I told him. “I don’t remember the exact date.”
“March twentieth,” Mara volunteered. “Your appointment was for four o’clock.”
“Mackenzie’s been in the area for a year or two,” Erlander pointed out. “But this was the first time you’d come face-to-face with him?”
“Yes. We traveled in somewhat different circles. He called to talk about a business proposition.”
“His housekeeper called, actually,” Mara corrected me. “Eleanor. But you’ve spoken to her already.”
“Do you think you could manage to come around and join us?” Erlander said. “I prefer not to have to communicate with a disembodied voice.”
“All the schedules and stuff are on my computer,” Mara replied. “I’d just have to come back here anyway to look things up.”
Erlander shook his head silently as he jotted something down, but he continued without further debate.
“I take it this meeting was to discuss putting in the big garden?”
“Yes,” I told him. “He offered me the job that evening.”
“From what I understand, it was a pretty sizable undertaking. A real coup for your business—especially considering how small and relatively new it is.”
“That’s right.”
“And you liked the man, too—am I correct?” Erlander asked, pen poised as he looked across at me.
“I take it you read the Examiner article,” I noted drily. “I offered that opinion before I knew about my client’s many financial problems and possibly underhanded dealings. But, yes, for most of the time I knew him, I was impressed by Mr. Mackenzie. He was full of life and enthusiasm for things that mattered to me. He was very knowledgeable about landscape design and supportive of my work. It was hard for me not to like him.”
“And he must have been pretty impressed with you, too,” Erlander said. “From what I understand it’s quite an honor to have a garden selected for an Open Days event. That was a real feather in Graham Mackenzie’s cap.”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t want to do it at first. I think that his business problems were beginning to catch up to him by then. He probably knew it wouldn’t help his public profile to have all this expensive new landscaping on view when his company was doing so badly.”
“Really?” Erlander said. For the first time, I think what I’d told him didn’t jibe with the impression of Mackenzie he’d already formed in his head. “So why did he go ahead with it?”
“I’m not sure, but I think he did it as a favor to me.”
“That’s a pretty big favor, if your assumption is correct.”
“Well, actually, we’d become . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to overstate the case, but I couldn’t think of a better word. “. . . friends. Or at least friendly. We had some things in common.”
“He knew about your husband, then?” Erlander asked, turning over a new page in his notebook. “You two talked about what happened?”
“I can’t imagine what that has to do with—” I began to object. I already felt that Erlander’s questions had become overly personal, but this one seemed particularly intrusive and embarrassing. Though I was well aware that everyone in town knew what Richard had done, no one ever broached the subject. I noticed that Ron had taken a sudden interest in his fingernails.
“It’s a simple yes or no question, Mrs. Hyatt,” Erlander replied. “Did you or did you not talk to Mr. Mackenzie about your husband’s disappearance?”
“Yes,” I told him, my temper hanging by a thread. “I did. But I don’t see what any of this has to do with your investigation.”
“Really? I find that surprising. Your husband perpetuated a massive financial fraud and then vanished. Mr. Mackenzie is being investigated for possible fraudulent activities and has met a suspicious end. As far as I’m concerned, that kind of coincidence requires at least a question or two.”
Was he hoping to get a rise out of me? Or was he just naturally snarky and insinuating? I couldn’t tell, but I knew it wouldn’t do me any good to get in an argument with him. Erlander reminded me all too clearly of the agents and detectives who’d swooped down on me after Richard’s disappearance and worked me over hour after hour, day after day. I was so vulnerable and terrified then. I had no idea how to deal with that kind of pressure. But when I wept and protested—or when I let them see how angry their endless questions made me—it only made matters worse. Sensing my fear and shame, they would redouble their efforts, no doubt convinced they could wring something out of me after all. I knew enough now to try to answer Erlander simply and clearly. To attempt to show no emotion. I reminded myself that as a police investigator, he was sanctioned by the state to pry into whatever subjects he deemed necessary, no matter how out of line I thought they might be.
“Yes,” I said, folding my hands in my lap. “I see your point.”
“Well, thank you,” he said with a tight little smile. “Now, perhaps you could tell me when you first discovered that the check for the second half of Mr. Mackenzie’s payment to you didn’t clear?”
“How did you hear about that?” I demanded.
“When did you first learn about it?” Erlander asked again, as if I’d just said something he didn’t understand.
I glanced across the room to see Mara peeking around the computer screen, but she moved back out of sight when I caught her eye.
“The day before he died,” I said.
“I understand it was for a lot of money. You must have been pretty upset. Did you try to contact Mr. Mackenzie about it?”
“Yes,” I told him. “Of course I was upset. I went to his place early on the Open Day morning to oversee the installation of the railing around the waterfall. I decided to go up to the house afterward to ask him about the check.”
“You were right there that early? Right above the pool?”
“Yes, but the whole mountain was fogged in. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me.” Then a shiver went down my spine. I once again felt that ominous sense that had overtaken me as I made my way through the mist that morning. “Are you telling me that Mackenzie was already down there? That he was there the whole time?”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Erlander says. “I’m asking you about your whereabouts that morning. Do you remember seeing anything unusual?”
His aggressive, almost accusatory tone was tinged with excitement now. I was telling him something he didn’t already know. And it was something important. He’d stopped writing and was leaning forward in his chair.
“No. But, as I said, it was hard to see. I spoke to the contractors who were putting in the railing for a few minutes. And then I went up to the house.”
“What time was that?”
“Around eight thirty or so.”
“And what happened then?”
“Mackenzie wasn’t there. His housekeeper didn’t know where he was.” Erlander hadn’t
asked me who else might have been there, just what had happened, so I decided I didn’t need to mention that I’d overheard the fight between Gwen and Eleanor. “The volunteers from the Garden Conservancy arrived soon after that, and we started setting up for the event.”
Erlander went back over my early-morning visit to the garden a few times, obviously trying to jog my memory about what I had seen. But I’d already told him everything I could remember. I explained what Nate and Damon had contributed to the garden design, and Mara supplied Erlander with a printout, including contact information, of every subcontractor and supplier who’d worked at one time or another at Mackenzie’s.
“Anyone you know of who had a beef with your client?” Erlander asked.
“Plenty of people stood to be hurt by his business problems,” I replied, “as I’m sure you already know. And others had reservations about his ‘fracking’ practices, which he was a great proponent of. But I can’t imagine that either of those things would be reason enough to kill him—if that’s what happened.”
“If indeed,” Erlander said, swinging around in his chair to face the back of Mara’s computer. “And what about you? Anyone you know of who had a problem with Mr. Mackenzie?”
“Nope,” Mara said.
Erlander waited, still turned in Mara’s direction, as if he expected her to add something to her terse reply. After a moment or two of silence, he swiveled back around to me.
“Okay,” he said. “What can you tell me about digitalis?”
“What?” I asked, uncertain if I’d heard him correctly.
“Di-gi-tal-is,” he said. “What can you tell me?”
“Well, it’s a tall spikey plant with fingerlike flowers,” I replied, trying to make sense of this line of questioning. “Its common name is foxglove. If grouped properly, it can be a nice choice for a garden border. But I find it often doesn’t last more than a season or two in our climate zone.”
Bleeding Heart Page 18