Alana showed, and we went inside to have an early dinner. I told her about bumping into Patricia at the bar. I then told her I’d been questioning whether or not Patricia had met Olivia before the funeral.
“Why would she lie about that?” Alana asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just one of those things that seems weird to me.”
Alana just shrugged her shoulders and picked up a California roll with her chopsticks. I wasn’t sure if she found my obsession with details that seemed rather insignificant charming or annoying. Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was one of those quirks that you put up with if you want to be in a relationship with someone. So what are her quirks that I put up with? You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you?
We finished dinner, and she followed me back to Foxx’s because she said she had the urge to swim in the pool. Alana left a couple of swimsuits over at the house, but she ended up not needing one. Foxx called me on the way home to check in. I think he was a bit concerned with my mental state because I’d not yet been able to help Alana solve the Chambers’ murder. He knew I’d been stressed about it, probably even downright depressed. Perhaps my attitude and temperament had been even worse than I realized. I told him I was okay and informed him that Alana and I were heading to the house to enjoy the pool. He told me to tell her hello and to let me know he would be out for the night. Was he going to see Hani? Again, I didn’t ask.
We got back to Foxx’s place and decided to swim in the nude since we were alone. The water temperature was perfect, as it usually was. Alana asked if I wanted to watch television after the swim. I guess it was one of those things couples do when they’re in the comfort zone I referenced earlier, but then I got a good glimpse of her climbing out of the pool, and I told her we’d need to postpone the television for later that night. I climbed out after her and picked her up. She laughed and asked if I was doing my caveman routine. I told her I was and carried her into the bedroom where we made love. I don’t recall deciding to fall asleep afterward. It just sort of happened, as it tends to with males.
I woke up in the middle of the night when I heard Maui the dog whining. I looked down to the floor and saw him sitting at the edge of the bed and looking up at me. I hadn’t taken the dog for his usual nightly walk since I’d spent that time in the pool and then the bedroom. The poor guy probably had his legs crossed most of the night.
I climbed out of bed, and he followed me to the back of the house. I opened the sliding glass door, and he darted outside. I thought about immediately going to bed, but then I saw my laptop on the kitchen table. I don’t know why I decided to do this in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s that obsession thing I mentioned before, but I logged onto Facebook and started searching through Patricia’s photographs. It took me a couple of hours, and Alana came into the room just as I found what I was really looking for.
“It’s six o-clock. How long have you been up?” Maui the dog ran up to her. “Good morning, Maui,” she said, and she bent down and scratched him behind his ears.
“I wasn’t exactly sure when I got up, but take a look at this.”
Alana walked over to the kitchen table, and I turned the laptop around so she could see the screen.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“Patricia’s photos on her Facebook account. Check out who’s in the background of that shot.”
Alana leaned closer to the screen.
“Which person?” she asked.
The shot was one of those behind-the-scenes group photos you sometimes see from video production crews. After going through her Facebook albums, I learned that about half of her photos were these types of shots. Patricia had apparently worked in the film industry in Los Angeles.
“It’s Olivia Williams. Olivia told me she used to work in commercials and music videos. It turns out Patricia did too. There are several shots of Olivia throughout Patricia’s photo albums,” I said.
“You think she had to have known Olivia?” Alana asked.
“I realize there are a ton of production people and actors in L.A. Hell, probably every other person in that city is somehow related to that business, but I find it hard to believe Patricia wouldn’t have known Olivia if they worked on several productions together.”
“Then she moves to Maui about the same time Olivia moves back and ends up working for Olivia’s grandmother,” Alana said.
“Exactly. There are coincidences, but that one is ridiculous.”
“Olivia must have gotten her the job with Charlotte.”
“That makes sense, so why lie about not meeting Olivia until the funeral?” I asked.
“It’s strange,” Alana admitted. “You were up all night looking at these photos, weren’t you?”
“Not all night. Maybe only half.”
Alana looked at the Facebook photo again.
“Yeah, she had to have known her,” Alana said.
“So what do we do with this information?” I asked.
“I don’t know. All it proves is that Patricia lied to you about Olivia and nothing more.”
I looked at the laptop screen. Yeah, she lied all right, but why?
Chapter 19
Rebecca Acker
There was something about seeing Patricia and discovering she’d lied to me that reignited my passion for solving the case. Oh, who am I kidding? It wasn’t like my passion and determination had gone away. I just didn’t know where to look, and I had allowed myself to fall into a funk. I still didn’t know how to break this thing open, but I decided it needed to be approached as if I were looking for lost car keys. I just needed to start turning over anything I could find and hoped there would be something underneath.
I thought about Charlotte Chambers. She was not the person I initially thought she was. Of course, my opinion of her was nothing short of superficial, so it really wasn’t much of a surprise when she turned out to be different than I’d imagined. There were mysteries about the woman as evidenced by my discovery in the storage unit. She also lied about destroying the threatening letters. Why? What of the two letters I found in her home office? They said she wasn’t innocent and questioned who the real monster was. Were those letters in addition to the ones she told me about in Mara’s office, or were they the original two letters, and she didn’t want me to know someone had alluded to her guilt of doing something bad? It had to be bad, too. You don’t get called a monster if you fail to pay your parking tickets.
It was obvious there were things she didn’t want me to know. She probably didn’t think I needed to know them at the time. I understood that. Nobody wants to tell someone their secrets, especially some guy she had just met at her lawyer’s office. She was desperate and scared. So what was the secret, and who could possibly tell me what Charlotte had wanted to stay buried?
I knew I’d never get anything out of the remaining members of the Chambers family. Maybe they didn’t even know the secret or secrets. There was one person, however, who might.
I decided to start with Rebecca Acker. Why had Trevor told me she was dead? It was time to find out, or at least try to find out. I called the Acker Foundation and attempted to set up an appointment to see Rebecca. I was told she generally didn’t accept meetings anymore, and that I was better off seeing the current director of the foundation. I called a second time and told them to please relay to Rebecca that it was a matter regarding her son. They got back to me later that day and scheduled an appointment for the following day.
I booked a flight for Oahu. I didn’t tell Alana what I was doing. She’d have thought I was crazy. The flight from Maui is pretty quick, as I’m sure you can imagine. It actually took me way longer to drive the rental car from the airport to Honolulu, where the Acker Foundation was located. I know I sometimes complain about the traffic on Maui, but it’s nothing compared to Oahu. Honolulu is traditionally listed as one of the top-five worst cities for traffic. I think Los Angeles and Washington D.C. are a couple of places that always beat it.
The Acker Foundation was in a small but impressive building. It was made of huge panels of glass and thick beams of polished metal. Large palm trees surrounded it. There were even huge tropical plants and smaller trees inside the lobby. I guessed they were able to thrive inside since the building resembled a greenhouse.
I waited in the lobby for close to an hour. I didn’t know if the lady was just busy or if this was some sort of strange power play. Eventually, a young woman, maybe only twenty, came out and led me back to Rebecca’s office. The office also consisted of glass and metal. The back wall was entirely glass, and there were so many thick tropical plants on the outside that it looked like the building was backed up to a rain forest. I sat in her office for another half an hour before she showed. Yeah, this had to be a power play.
I stood when she finally arrived. In a way, she reminded me of Charlotte Chambers. She was about the same age, and she had that air of confidence and resolve that Charlotte had possessed. She didn’t shake my hand, but instead, she walked right past me and around to the opposite side of her desk and sat down. I sat back down on the chair in front of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lady had my chair lowered a few inches just to further increase her psychological edge.
“So, Mr. Rutherford, how much money are you here to ask for?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“Your message said this was about my son. So how much do you and he want?”
“Trevor doesn’t know I’m here, and I don’t want any of your money.”
I thought about yelling “Take that!” when I saw the look on her face. I won’t say I’d gained the upper hand. In fact, I wasn’t even sure there was an upper hand to be gained, but I could tell she’d just gone from being certain she knew what this was all about to being incredibly off-balance. I sensed it wasn’t a position she normally found herself in.
“Then what is it you want?” she asked.
“Trevor told me you were dead,” I said, hoping to further throw her off.
“I’m not surprised.”
I told her how I’d recently been to the cemetery and saw the gravesite of her husband, Edward Edelman, and how the absence of her name on the gravestone was my first clue that everything was not as it seemed.
“Edward wasn’t my husband. Well, he was at one point, but he was my ex by the time he died.”
“Are you aware of all that’s going on with the Chambers family? The media on Maui is having a field day, but I’m not sure if that interest translates over here. I’m rather new to Hawaii, and I must admit I don’t have a good sense for how connected the islands really are.”
“Charlotte’s murder made the news here. I wasn’t really aware about her two children dying. I try not to think about that family. What is your interest in them?” she asked.
I gave Rebecca the short version of my involvement, starting with my initial meeting with Charlotte and then making my way to Joe’s drug overdose and Bethany’s suicide, if you wanted to call it that.
“So you’re a private investigator and not with the police?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
Rebecca hesitated, and I could tell she was debating on whether to toss me out of her office, but she didn’t. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. Perhaps I’d piqued her curiosity.
“I thought you’d come here to tell me that you and my son were starting a new business. I thought you were going to ask me for money.”
“I assume you’ve funded some of his start-ups before,” I said.
“More than I can remember. They’ve all failed miserably.”
Is there another way to fail? I asked myself.
“Did you also fund his recent boat-building company?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About two years ago.”
“I saw the business when I met with him. He does beautiful work, for what it’s worth.”
“It’s worth nothing. That’s the problem. Who’s going to spend money to buy a boat that looks like an ancient Hawaiian canoe?” she asked.
“You may be right. From what I could see, there weren’t exactly a lot of customers beating down the door.”
“There never are with my son.”
“Do you stay in contact with Trevor?”
“No, the last time I spoke with him was when he asked for the money for the new company.”
“Do you know why he would have told me you were deceased?” I asked.
“Trevor hates me. He thinks I ruined his and Eddie’s life when I left. Trevor’s a grown man now, but he still can’t let go of the past.”
“Were you married to Edward Edelman when he was involved with the Chambers Hotel?”
“Are you kidding? I gave him the money to build that hotel. My family owned the land the hotel was built on.”
“Did you have any involvement with the hotel beyond that?” I asked.
“Not really. I wanted Eddie to be successful on his own. We’d met in college. He had a lot of ambition. He knew I came from money, but he seemed determined to forge his own path, which I admired. We got married, and I had Trevor not long afterward. My father wasn’t too keen about it all, but I was young and in love, so I didn’t listen. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“Why was your father against the marriage?” I asked.
“My father was an uneducated man, but he had the kind of smarts that only hard knocks can give you. He was the one who built the family fortune. He recognized Eddie for what he really was.”
“Which was?”
“Someone who had the ambition but not the know-how and certainly not the drive to gut it out when the going got tough,” she said.
“Since you weren’t involved with the day-to-day running of the hotel, how well did you know the Chambers family?”
Rebecca scoffed. “Well enough.”
I waited for Rebecca to elaborate but she didn’t, at least not immediately. I studied her eyes closely. This may not make a lot of sense, but I thought I could see through them – all the way to her thoughts that were furiously running though her mind. She knew something, and it was big. I was certain of that now. I just didn’t know if she’d share it with me.
“Charlotte described her husband, Millard, as a brilliant man. Was that a fair assessment?” I asked.
“Millard didn’t have a lot of good qualities. What he did have was a sense of survival, much like a cockroach.”
“Why did your husband have a falling out with him?” I asked.
“Why do any two people have a falling out? It’s never one thing,” she said.
“True, but usually there’s a tipping point, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Rebecca didn’t reply.
I paused a moment and then said – “I know about Joe Chambers. I’m sorry if that’s a sensitive topic.”
“It still hurts, even after all of these years,” she said.
“I assume that was why you left Edward and why his business partnership with Millard fell apart.”
“Our marriage was already over by that point. Eddie wasn’t the man I thought he was, and I had lost interest in him quickly. I won’t say I drove him to Charlotte. We were still married, and he shouldn’t have cheated on me, but I wasn’t exactly giving him what he needed. He wanted to be wanted - adored, actually. I wasn’t willing to do that. I couldn’t and wouldn’t fake how I felt.”
“When I first met with Charlotte, she told me she’d received letters in the mail that threatened her life. She also told me she burned them, but I found them in her home office. They weren’t threats, not exactly. They seemed to point to Charlotte’s role in something. I don’t know what it was, but they described her as a monster and not being innocent.”
“I’m sure the Chambers family can tell you. It’s not exactly a secret among them.”
“The Chambers family isn’t talking, and I want to figure out who killed Charlotte.”
> “What does it matter? The woman is gone,” she said.
“I’m not sure how you can say that. Whatever she did, she was still human. She deserves justice.”
“Justice? We all deserve justice, Mr. Rutherford. That doesn’t mean we’re going to get it, and I’d debate your statement that Charlotte was human.”
“What happened? I know you know,” I said.
“Charlotte was not innocent. She was only interested in maintaining her lifestyle. That’s why she went back to him.”
“To who? To Millard?”
“I’ll give her this. She figured out Eddie way faster than I did. Once she realized the money came from me and not Eddie, she dropped him.”
“Did your ex-husband lead people to believe you weren’t behind the funding of the hotel?” I asked.
“I don’t think he ever lied about it and denied I was the source of the funds. He just never brought it up. It’s a man’s world. It was back then, anyhow. People just assumed the money was from Eddie. They assumed he was the self-made man. Do you know how many businesses my ex tried to start after the Chambers Hotel? Even more than Trevor. They were all failures too, just like Trevor’s. Unfortunately, Trevor inherited his father’s knack for business.”
“The affair and the birth of Joe Chambers…is that why Charlotte isn’t innocent?”
“Joe has nothing to do with this. He never did. You’ve been looking at the wrong Chambers if you’ve been concentrating on him.”
“Who should I be looking at?” I asked.
“The girl. I don’t even remember her name anymore.”
“Bethany.”
Rebeca nodded. “Yes, that’s it.”
“What is it about Bethany?” I asked.
Rebecca said nothing. It felt like a full minute went by with neither of us saying a word. I tried to get her talking by asking another question.
“You said earlier that Millard was not a man of good qualities. What did you mean by that?”
“Oh, he knew how to run the hotel, and he certainly knew how to bully Eddie. He got what he wanted in the end. He got the property, the business, and his wife back. I guess you could say he won. Where’s that justice you were talking about before?” she asked.
Blood like the Setting Sun: A Murder on Maui Mystery Page 19