“Was Heather a special friend of yours?”
Justin looked as if he’d caught a whiff of something rotten. “Hardly.”
“Some of the other kids seem to think you were close.”
“Well, Heather might have considered me her special friend, but the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
Another rejection for Heather. Frank continued asking questions about the position of the campsite and how much of the attack Justin had seen. The boy was sitting up straighter now, and Frank saw shrewd intelligence in his eyes.
"You think there’s a connection between what happened to Jake Reiger and what happened to Heather, don’t you?” Justin asked.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. But now I really wish I’d made it onto that bus in Keene Valley.”
Chapter 20
Although the long day of interviewing hadn’t produced any concrete results, Frank left the academy feeling slightly optimistic. It was possible that Heather had been encouraged to pull a stunt in the isolation room, and that Lorrie was either in on it or had fled in a panic. If so, the whole mess would be resolved sooner rather than later, because he didn’t think either one was clever enough to remain on the lam for long.
Frank decided that attending tonight’s hymn sing and pie social was the best way to project an air of confidence that the problems at the academy would be cleared up shortly. He arrived in time to see Matthew Portman’s siblings, Rachel, Clarice, and Ernie, file into the Fellowship Hall. Their father, Henry, was nowhere in sight.
He chatted with a cluster of men at the back of the hall, made sure Reid and Ardyth noticed his presence, and followed Mary Bixley into the kitchen to find out exactly where she planned to place her pie on the buffet table. On the way out of the kitchen, he eavesdropped on Bernice and Helen Meisterson.
“That Lydia has her nerve. She’s in there barking out orders like the kitchen belongs to her alone. Imagine telling me my lemon meringue doesn’t need to be in the fridge!”
“Calm down, Bernice. You can’t really blame her. Ardyth is busy out front, and Lydia took up the slack.”
“Humph. I tell you, we wouldn’t have these power plays if Pastor Bob would just get married. It’s the minister’s wife’s job to be in charge of all the social events.”
“So true. But Bob’s been here for three years, and he hasn’t shown the slightest interest in any local girls.”
Bernice scowled. “Mighty slim pickins there. But you know who would be perfect.. .” She leaned toward her friend and whispered.
Helen’s face lit up as Frank slipped past them. “You’re right! Penny Stevenson would be marvelous for Pastor Bob!”
So, even the old biddies saw Penny as the perfect match for Bob. He must be the only one who couldn’t make the connection. He shook his head. Penny pouring tea at the annual Presbyterian women's luncheon—that, he’d pay money to see.
Suddenly the lights flickered and the fluorescent tubes on the right side of the Fellowship Hall ceiling went out, while the adjacent kitchen was plunged into total darkness. After a split second’s stunned silence, a high-pitched cacophony broke out.
“Oh, no!”
“Who plugged both coffeepots into the same outlet?”
"Lucille, why did you turn on the microwave when the coffee was still perking?”
“I didn’t know that I shouldn’t.”
“Everyone knows!”
Frank unclipped the flashlight from his belt as he made his way to the basement stairs. Passing the kitchen, he called to the ladies to unplug the coffee. As he made his way across the dank basement toward the circuit breaker, he could clearly hear the ladies above, still clucking.
“What was the big rush to warm up that apple crisp? The coffee needs to finish first. I told her ...”
The breaker box was on the far wall. He soon passed all the way under the kitchen and the ladies’ voices receded. He shone his light ahead and saw the box, with two circuits tripped. He flipped them back and waited for a second to make sure they wouldn’t trip again. As he stood in the absolute silence of the basement, two new voices began speaking above him.
“Tell Dad he can relax. We don’t need the money anymore,” a woman said.
The voice, young and edgy, was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“What do you mean? You’re not going to give up and let the bank take the house, are you?”
“Don’t worry, Mom, we’re not moving in with you.” The note of bitterness was unmistakable.
“Katie! That’s not what I meant. I told you we’d try to help you, but things are tight for us, too, right now. I sure don’t want you to lose your house.”
“I know, I know. But Paul says he’s worked it out. We don’t need to borrow anything from you.”
Frank looked up at the floor joists, through which the sound of the voices traveled. Katie and Paul—it must be Katie Petrucci talking to her mother in the little back hallway that ran from the kitchen to the bathrooms. It seemed the bank was threatening to foreclose on Katie and Paul’s house; he hadn’t realized their money problems were so serious.
“But how did Paul work it out?” Katie’s mother asked. “You said the bank wouldn’t budge.”
“Look, he got the money and we don’t need a loan from you. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?"
Bob Rush had switched on the microphone at the podium on the stage and was urging people into their seats. Frank headed down the main aisle but discovered that the only seats were either all the way in the back, or in the front row next to the three Portman children. A tough choice. A seat in the back would allow him to slip outside after a while until the pie appeared. On the other hand, he honestly wanted to see Matthew play. He took a deep breath—in for a penny, in for a pound—and sat down in the front-row seat next to Ernie.
Easily six-foot-three, Ernie had huge hands and feet. He turned his head toward Frank and studied him without reservation. Apparently Frank passed muster. Ernie grinned broadly. “Hi, I’m Ernie. That’s my little brother up there.” He pointed to the stage, where Matthew had taken his place at the piano. Ernie waved, but Matthew looked over the heads of his family in the front row, scanning the crowd. Frank guessed that he must be looking for Oliver Greffe. He hadn’t noticed the music teacher in the hall, and with his car in the shop, it seemed unlikely that he would make it to the hymn sing.
Ernie elbowed Frank. “What’s your name?”
“Frank.”
“Okay, Frank, you have to promise to be real quiet while my brother plays, okay?”
“All right, I will.”
But Ernie couldn’t heed his own advice. He chatted loudly with Frank throughout Pastor Bob’s introduction and welcome, until his sister, Rachel, leaned across Clarice, tapped Ernie on the knee, and held her finger to her lips.
“Yeah, right,” Ernie said. “We have to be quiet,” he told Frank.
The hymn sing started out quietly, with “Be Thou My Vision.” Frank helped Ernie find it in the hymnal, but after singing the first familiar line with gusto, Ernie’s voice petered out. When Frank glanced over at him, Ernie was holding his hymnal in front of his face, but peering up at the ceiling. Could he read? Maybe a little, but probably not well enough to follow the lyrics, Frank suspected.
The folding chair was hard, the hall was stuffy, and Ernie continued to fidget. Bob announced another hymn from his spot at the podium. This event needed Billy Crystal as emcee, and Bob was more like Al Gore. Frank began to regret not taking the seat in the back.
But then Pastor Bob made a quip about Martin Luther, and a few people laughed. Emboldened by his success, he disconnected the mike from the podium and started strolling around the stage, bantering with Matthew as he introduced the next hymn.
Before long, Bob had tapped his inner Jay Leno. He called the little children in the audience forward to sing “Jesus Loves Me” and cheerfully let them upstage him. He rounded up a crew of foghorn baritones to sing the refrain in “I W
anna Be a Christian.” And he brought down the house when he hand-selected the primmest Presbyterian ladies and got them to sway and clap their hands to “Ride the Chariot in the Morning.”
Against all odds, Frank found himself having fun.
But Ernie, who’d been so affable when Frank had first sat down, now grew cranky. He pulled his hymnal away from Frank and refused to let him help find the hymns that Pastor Bob announced. He shuffled loudly through the pages and dropped his hymnal with a clunk several times. Finally Rachel switched places with her younger sister to try to settle Ernie down, but he pulled away from her, too.
“And now,” Bob said, “let’s join together on number 181, ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.' ”
“No!” Ernie leaped to his feet. “No, I don’t want to sing that one. I don’t like that song.” Rachel tugged at her brother’s sleeve, but he shook her off. “I want to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ Play ‘Amazing Grace,’ Matthew— that’s my favorite.”
Matthew sat with his fingers frozen above the keyboard, looking frantically from his brother to Pastor Bob. Although startled, Bob recovered quickly. “You’re right, Ernie. ‘Amazing Grace’ is one of my favorites, too, and we’ve waited too long to sing it. Let’s all turn to number 154 now—‘Amazing Grace.’ ”
Ernie sat down with a satisfied thump. After a slightly shaky intro, Matthew launched confidently into the melody. Ernie made no effort to open his hymnal, but for the first time that evening, he sang.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found.
Was blind, but now I see.
He had an amazingly resonant baritone. By the end of the first verse Frank stopped singing so he could hear Ernie more clearly.
Whatever musical gene had touched Matthew had also been bestowed on Ernie. His voice rang out clear and perfectly on pitch. Soon, other people around him had stopped singing also, and Ernie’s voice rose above those at the rear of the hall. He had every word of the hymn memorized and never missed a beat. He sang with pure, unbridled joy.
Pastor Bob watched Ernie in wonder. As Matthew neared the end of the fourth verse, Bob approached the piano and whispered something in his ear. Matthew finished the verse and stopped playing.
Ernie took a breath to launch into the fifth verse, then paused in confusion. “Hey—there’s more to sing!” Pastor Bob walked up to Ernie and led him onto to the stage. “I don’t know how well those of you in the back could hear Matthew’s brother, Ernie, singing this hymn. But he has a beautiful voice and I’m going to ask him to sing the last verse of “Amazing Grace” as a solo with his brother to accompany him.”
A big grin spread across Ernie’s broad, blank-eyed face. He looked at Matthew for approval, and Matthew smiled back in encouragement. They launched into the fifth verse in perfect synchronicity.
“When we’ve been here ten thousand years...”
If there was a dry eye in the house after the last note faded away, Frank didn’t know what heartless soul it belonged to. There clearly could be no more singing after the showstopping performance, so Pastor Bob escorted Ernie and Matthew off the stage and signaled the ladies to bring out the pies.
Frank made a beeline for the strawberry rhubarb and snagged a big wedge, then sat in companionable silence with Randall Bixley and Art Breveur, whose wives were both behind the serving table. Contentment washed over him. He owed Ardyth and Reid a thank-you for pressuring him to come. There was nothing like loud singing of familiar tunes with a great accompanist to pick up your spirits. And who would’ve thought ol’ Bob had it in him to be such a showman?
Across the packed room, he spotted a familiar profile. A young woman much taller and slimmer than the two ladies she chatted with lifted her head and looked toward him. Her face lit up, she waved, and began working her way through the crowd. Frank rose to meet halfway—she must have arrived after the singing had begun. But before he could move, she sidestepped the last cluster of pie eaters blocking her path and headed straight for Bob Rush.
Most of the hymn sing crowd had driven off when a loud, mournful wail cut through the night air, interrupting the final good-byes spoken on the church steps.
The siren calling together the members of the Trout Run volunteer fire department echoed against the mountains in a long steady crescendo, tapered off, and began its climb again. Within minutes, pickup trucks were racing down Route 12 to the fire station. Frank jumped in the patrol car and followed them.
A fire, especially one beyond the reach of the ten hydrants on the town water system, almost always resulted in a total loss of property. The town had one tanker truck, but it didn’t hold enough water to put out more than a small kitchen fire. If the burning house was located near Stony Brook or a pond, enough water could sometimes be pumped to put out the fire before the building was consumed, but usually the members of the fire department could do little more than stand alongside the despondent owners and watch the structure burn.
Frank arrived as the ladder truck was pulling out of the firehouse, and he followed it as it sped out of town, past the Stop’N’Buy and the Mountain Vista Motel. In his rearview mirror, Frank caught the occasional flashing light of the pumper truck following them. Soon the lead truck careened to the right, down High Meadow Lane, and within minutes, Frank could smell smoke. He knew where the truck was headed.
The gates of the North Country Academy were already wide open and the procession sped up the long driveway. A cluster of people stood outside the main administration building, watching smoke billow out the second-story windows. As Frank got out of the car, he saw MacArthur Payne speak briefly to the fire chief, Andy Kubash, before the firemen adjusted their oxygen masks and charged into the building.
The people surrounding Payne were all staff members; at this hour the students were presumably all safe in their beds. “The building is empty?” Frank confirmed as he walked up.
“Yes, Ray was doing his final check when he smelled smoke, then saw a cloud of it in the second-floor hallway,” Payne answered.
“You’re sure no one’s in the isolation room?”
A spasm of irritation crossed Payne’s face, but he answered levelly, "All the students are in their dorm rooms. They’ve been counted twice.”
Payne winced at the sound of shattering glass as a fireman broke a large window and signaled to the crew below to direct the water there. Several of the men were unrolling long lengths of hose to reach the stream that bordered the property. Flames were briefly visible in the room with the broken window, but after about twenty minutes the clouds of smoke started to thin out. Soon, a sooty Andy emerged from the building.
“Think we got it under control. Most of the fire damage seems to be confined to two rooms at the end of the hall. 'Course you’ll have smoke and water damage throughout, but that can’t be helped. Lucky this old building is mostly stone and solid plaster—the fire didn’t spread too much.”
“Any idea what started it?” Frank asked.
Andy grimaced. “Can’t be positive—we should get the experts in—but I’d say an accelerant was used.”
Payne’s gaze flicked rapidly from Andy to Frank. "Surely not. Surely it was just faulty wiring. The building is so old—”
“Definitely not electrical,” Andy said. “I’ve seen enough of those in my time.” Then one of the other firemen called to him, and Andy went back into the building.
Frank watched Payne, who was swallowing hard as if fighting off nausea. Oliver stepped forward from the crowd of school employees milling around anxiously.
“Come on, Mac,” he said gently. “There’s nothing else you can do here tonight. Why don’t you go back to your house and try to get some rest. There will be a lot of work in the morning.”
Payne looked at the music teacher for a moment, as if trying to place who he was. Then he nodded and allowed himself to be led away.
The firemen were starting to roll up their hoses,
so Frank assumed it must be safe to enter the building. The big stone-floored foyer was undamaged except for water and streaks of soot. He made his way up the granite staircase, sidestepping puddles. At the end of the upstairs hall he could see the worst of the damage: two classrooms whose wooden doors were now charred skeletons and whose plaster walls were blackened.
Frank followed the sound of voices and found Andy and another fireman in the last room on the right. Andy was in the far corner pointing something out.
“You see this?” He pointed to a scorch pattern on the floor. Then he looked behind him to a wall that, unlike the others, had buckled and seemed close to collapse.
“This wall is made of Sheetrock, not plaster,” Andy said. “Looks like they built a new interior wall here at some point—there’s space behind this.” He motioned to the other fireman. “Better knock this down so we can be sure there’s nothing smoldering back there.”
The fireman swung his ax at the charred and soaked wallboard, which crumpled inward between the two studs. A terrible smell rushed out at them, entirely separate from the acrid scent of smoke.
Frank’s stomach lurched as he stuck his head through the opening and looked down.
The blank, distended eyes of Heather LeBron stared back up at him.
Chapter 21
MacArthur Payne sat on a wine-red leather wing chair, cradling his shaved head in his hands. His face drained of all color, the veins crossing his temples stood out like roads on a map. “My God, I never thought Glen Costello would go this far to get back at me. To kill a child ...” His voice cracked and he twisted away from Frank.
Frank watched him in a cold fury. He remembered Payne dismissing Heather’s pleas for help as an Academy Award-winning performance. Well, who was acting now? He’d never believe another word this man said.
But what was the point of raging against Payne? He had no one to blame but himself for what had happened. He could’ve prevented Heather’s death if only he had listened to her, asked more questions, believed in the poor kid.
Blood Knot: a small town murder mystery (Frank Bennett Adirondack Mysteries Book 3) Page 15