“There’s going to be a public memorial service tonight at the town common, celebrating the life of young Sam Warner, beginning at six P.M.,” Ellen said, looking at an email printout. “Warner Savings Bank is a prominent member of the business community, and I expect everyone to attend. Any questions?”
Jessica had one question but didn’t want to be the brave one by asking it, but Percy Prescott decided to step up and risk Ellen’s wrath.
“If attendance is mandatory, will we be compensated?” he asked.
Amber looked at him in shock, and Jessica thought, Well, there you go. Amber was still mourning the popular and athletic student she had once known, teammate of her younger brother, and Percy was going to have none of it. Even Rhonda seemed taken aback by Percy’s directness.
“No,” Ellen said. “You won’t.”
Percy pressed on, his arms folded in front of him. “Then how can you order us to be there?”
Ellen stared back at the young teller. “Because if you don’t go, it’ll be noted in your performance review later this year. Do you understand, Percy?”
He just nodded and muttered something, and Ellen checked her watch and said, “Okay, people, let’s get to work.”
At her midmorning break, Jessica ducked outside and went to the parking lot at the rear, where she made two quick calls.
The first one went well.
“Talbot Investigations,” came a woman’s voice.
“Is Gary Talbot in?”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
After identifying herself, she was put through and said, “Mr. Talbot, I was wondering—”
“Please, no need to be formal. Gary.”
She listened to the murmur of traffic going in and out of Warner, wondered if any one of those vehicles contained a woman juggling as many problems as she was.
“Gary, thanks,” she said. “I know I said I was going to call back today to set up an appointment, but something’s come up.”
“Oh?” came the suspicious reply.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m not sure if you’ve seen the news or not, but a violent crime has taken place in Warner. A teenage boy from Warner High School was found murdered the other day.”
“Oh,” Talbot said again, but this time there was sympathy in his tone.
“You see, this young boy and his family . . . well, we were very close to them, and things are just a horrible, horrible mess. In fact, there’s going to be a memorial service for him tonight and I’ve volunteered to help out, and the wake will be coming soon, and the funeral, and—”
“Mrs. Thornton, please, I understand,” he said. “You do what you have to do. I understand, and I’m sure I can make my client understand as well.”
“That’s very gracious of you,” she said. “Thanks so much. I think I’ll be free in a day or two, and I promise we’ll set up an interview.”
“That sounds fine, Mrs. Thornton,” he said. “My condolences.”
“I appreciate that.”
The next phone call didn’t go as well. She called Ted and it went straight through to voicemail, and then she called his office and her call was answered by Paula Fawkes, the office manager.
“Oh, hey, Jessica, nope, he’s in conference right now with a couple of clients. Can I help you?”
Jessica checked the time on her iPhone, saw that she had exactly ninety seconds left to get back to work.
“I was hoping Ted had time for lunch.”
Paula said, “Oh, Jessica, he’s busy, but I’ll make sure he gets your message. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jessica said, “I appreciate—”
Paula had signed off.
What was that about?
Jessica went back to the lobby. A car honking its horn up by the common nearly made her yelp.
About one hundred fifteen miles to the northeast, in Portland, Gary Talbot leaned back in his office chair and looked out the near window to the city’s harbor. The window was smeared with dirt and seagull droppings, but the building’s owners refused to get them cleaned and he didn’t have the spare cash to have the job done himself. The woman who pretended to be his secretary was in some cubicle somewhere else in the city, being a receptionist for him and a half-dozen other small companies that needed to appear to be doing well.
Gary wasn’t doing well. He was doing okay, but with his credit card balances increasing each month and the rent going up in two months, okay wasn’t going to cut it. His office was small, with light gray filing cabinets with good locks and a framed certificate listing his official license as a private investigator in the state of Maine.
Nowhere on any of the walls was there any mention of his previous career as a Maine state trooper.
At his elbow were his computer monitor, a stack of paperwork, and a telephone. A few minutes ago he had gotten off the phone with Jessica Thornton of Warner, Massachusetts. It had been an excellent call, even though the woman couldn’t possibly know why he considered it excellent. For Gary it meant the bait had been taken, and even if she had delayed the meeting, so what? Jessica Thornton was ready to meet with him, which was a success, no matter how you looked at it.
Funny thing, his client, Grace Thornton, had left just a few minutes ago. Talk about coincidences. She was a bitter young woman who basically needed someone to bitch to, and Gary was okay with that, letting her bitch to him for a nice rate of a hundred bucks an hour. For some reason she was obsessed with her older brother and his untimely death and was convinced that her evil sister-in-law—ha-ha-ha—had been involved.
So what?
But still, the weird young lady’s suspicions about her brother’s death didn’t seem unfounded. Even though he wasn’t about to admit it to her.
Two weeks earlier Gary had gotten a heads-up phone call from an old trooper friend of his, Sarah Sundance, who was now working for the York County Attorney General’s Office.
“Gary, I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ve just tossed a case your way.”
He rubbed at his forehead with his free hand. “Sarah, my checking account just forgave you. What’s the problem?”
“I have a woman who’s been haunting us for months, wanting us to reopen a case involving her brother. He got killed in a drunk-driving accident a few years back.”
“So what’s her problem?”
Sarah laughed. “She thinks our previous employer screwed the pooch and didn’t do a good job investigating the accident.”
He found a yellow pad, started scribbling. “What’s her name?”
“Grace Thornton.”
“Her brother?”
“Bobby Thornton.”
Gary paused in his scribbling. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Because he ran a car dealership in northeast Massachusetts,” she said. “Ran a bunch of late-night TV commercials on cable.”
“Oh, yeah, now it comes back,” Gary said. “Was there another car involved in the accident?”
“Nope, single car,” she said. “Leased from his dealership. Was going to some retirement dinner in York up on I-95, struck a deer, went off the road, and slammed into a tree trunk. Dead at the scene.”
“So what’s her problem?”
Sarah said, “Okay, this is when it gets out there. Grace is convinced that her brother was murdered and that her sister-in-law had something to do with it.”
“How? Did she bribe a deer to commit suicide by standing in the middle of the highway just as he was driving by?”
Sarah laughed. “No. I’ll let her tell you herself. She’s tried two other PIs and hasn’t gotten anywhere.”
“You think I can do any better?”
“Gary, you can do anything better than most,” she said. “Don’t get pissy at me, all right? I wanted to toss you some business. You don’t like it, you don’t have to do it.”
He paused for a moment, took the phone, and rapped the end of it twice on his forehead.
Moron.
Then he went back to talking
to Sarah. “You’re the best, thanks,” he said. “What’s her contact info?”
Sarah gave him Grace Thornton’s landline number, cell number, home address, and email address. Gary read the information back and Sarah said, “Look, I’m late for a meeting. Hope this helps.”
“Thanks,” Gary said.
“And remember, what happened on that traffic stop wasn’t your fault. Okay? No matter what anyone says.”
A burning sensation started in his gut, and he felt again as if he were outside on that November night, standing at the side of the road on I-295 north of Falmouth, making a traffic stop that would end with the crippling of a young man and the death of his beloved career in the Maine State Police.
“Thanks, Sarah, I appreciate that.”
He hung up as quickly as he could, then reached out to Grace Thornton, and twenty-four hours later she was in his office.
Gary always liked to size up his potential clients within sixty seconds of having them in his office, and the first word he thought of when Grace came in was “tight.” Not that she wore tight clothes. Far from it. She had on a shapeless gray jacket and floppy black slacks, and her dark brown hair was cut in a bob—blob?—and she wasn’t wearing makeup. But her eyes were alight with a fire that meant she was either on a special mission or just crazed.
“I need your help,” was the first thing she said, dropping a thick folder on his desk.
And for the next forty minutes Grace Thornton went into a practiced spiel about how her beloved brother had died in a single-car accident on the night of July 12 on I-95 in York—a stretch of road Gary knew quite well from his previous career—and how, despite the official report saying that her brother had died from an accident caused by drunk driving, first hitting a deer then a tree, she was convinced that his wife, Jessica, was responsible. After his death it came to light that his entire estate had been left in trust for young Emma Thornton, administered by Jessica Thornton, said trust not being available to Emma until she turned twenty-one, to be disbursed by her mother. The entire trust would be available to Emma when she turned thirty, whereupon she wouldn’t need her mother to write checks from the trust fund.
Grace leaned over at this point, tapping a finger on the thick file. “Please don’t laugh at me. I can’t stand having people laugh at me. And I know I don’t have direct evidence. It isn’t there. But there’s enough circumstantial evidence that I’m sure clearly connects Jessica to my brother’s death.”
Gary just nodded. “All right.”
“Will you take on my case?”
Of course, was his first thought. His bank account and overdue rent payment for this office demanded nothing else.
“Before I give you my decision,” he said, “I need to know one thing. What’s your goal?”
“Excuse me?”
He said, “I’m sorry to say this, Miss Thornton—”
“Please—Grace.”
“Grace, I’m sorry to say this, but even if I manage to find some connection between your brother’s death and his wife’s actions, I doubt we’ll find enough to bring it to the state police or the attorney general’s office.”
“That’s all right,” she said, folding her arms, pursing her thin lips. “Just to put that bitch in her place will be enough.”
“I see.”
She glanced around his small office and said, “Excuse me, could you tell me where the restroom is?”
“Hold on,” he said. He opened the desk drawer and took out a key attached to a block of wood, which had been lying next to his snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson revolver—you never knew when some nutcase, or at least an angry male nutcase, was going to storm in here. Gary handed the key over to her. “Go out the door, take a right. It’s at the end of the hallway.”
Grace frowned, and he said, “It’s all right, honest. The building owners keep it nice and clean.” Unlike the windows, he thought.
“All right,” she said, and when she left, he leaned back, rubbed his eyes. What was that expression? She brightened a room whenever she left it.
Yeah. True.
He brought his chair forward. The funny thing was, after nearly an hour of her blabbing at him, Grace was right to be suspicious. Nothing solid, nothing you could ever take to the attorney general or the state police. But enough to badger this Jessica Thornton and maybe squeeze something out of her as well. A nasty thought, a bad thought, but his supply of good thoughts had drained since he had been forced out of the Maine State Police.
He waited.
The thick file was in front of him. He pulled it over, started flipping through it. He found stuff that made sense. Copies of little news briefs listing the accident and Bobby Thornton’s death. Copies of the accident report. Photographs of the accident scene. Autopsy report.
Ugh, he thought. Imagine going through an autopsy report for your older brother. Gary was an only child, but his skin crawled at the thought of doing that for a close relative.
He dug deeper into the files. Weather reports. Copies of advertisements placed in the Portland Press Herald and the York County Coast Star, looking for witnesses to the accident. Damn, the woman had even gotten copies of the maintenance records from the Maine DOT for that stretch of highway!
From a distance he heard the restroom’s toilet flush.
One last thing. Folded-up paper. He had time to unfold it, saw . . . It was the trust paperwork. But attached to it were a number of printouts from various websites, and he gave them all a speedy glance, seeing instantly what Grace was up to.
He folded the papers, returned them to the folder, and pushed it back across to its original position on the desk.
The door opened and Grace Thornton came in and sat down heavily in the chair.
“You were right,” she said. “The place was nice and clean.”
“Good.”
Grace said, “I need a decision, and I need it now. Will you take on my case?”
“Yes, I will.”
Something that appeared to be a smile creased her face. “Thank you.”
He explained his rate, what he would do and where he would go, and she quickly signed the contract for his services.
Gary motioned to the thick file. “I’d like to have you leave that, if you don’t mind. I need to see what work you’ve done so I can start by knowing what’s what.”
That odd expression on her face faltered. She took the thick folder off the desk and placed it in her lap, as if she were placing it in quarantine.
“I’ll get the paperwork copied and sent over to you.”
He decided to have a little fun. “You can leave it here.”
“No, I’ll have copies made.”
“Grace, I’m a professional, and—”
Her voice grew sharp. “I said I’d make a copy!” Then she seemed to realize that she had gone too far, and she tried to smile again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You can tell I’m . . . passionate. I’ve spent more than a year researching this. It’s taken a lot of effort, a lot of setbacks.” She patted her rough hands on the cardboard. “I can’t stand not having this nearby. I’ll make a copy of everything, get it to you straightaway.”
He nodded. “That will be fine.”
She gathered up her folder, went to the door, and turned and said, “Thank you. Thank you for taking on my case.”
Gary said, “You’re welcome.”
Thinking, Crazy lady, I know what you’ve got in there, and this is my case. Not yours.
Now Gary Thornton opened the thick folder of accident and weather reports that had been couriered to him nearly two weeks ago. He was not surprised to see that the internet printouts that had been attached to Bobby Thornton’s trust paperwork and that provided a roadmap to Grace Thornton’s future plans were missing.
He had been counting on it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was crowded at the Warner town common, which surprised Jessica. She knew Sam Warner had been popular in high school—even if Percy Prescott was bi
tter over his treatment by Sam and his teammates—but there were at least two hundred men, women, and students crowded around the circular bandstand that during the summer months hosted the Warner High School’s jazz band every Wednesday night.
Greeting folks walking into the grounds of the oval-shaped common were groups of two and three high school varsity cheerleaders, handing out packets of matches and long thin candles with a piece of round cardboard slipped halfway up. Standing by themselves, heads down, feet not moving, were a crowd of young boys in blue-and-white wrestling jackets: Sam’s teammates, here to support and mourn their teammate and captain.
She made her way toward the bandstand, octagon-shaped, with a roof supported by a set of pillars. Jessica nodded and whispered hello to a number of parents and bank customers she recognized. She looked around, wanting to see if Ted had shown up. He had promised to meet her by the bandstand at 5:45 P.M., and Jessica checked her iPhone: it was 5:51. Where was Ted?
Up on the bandstand was a minister, standing with his arms around a couple who looked tired and shrunken.
Something seized in Jessica’s throat. Sam’s parents.
To lose a child to an accident—a drowning, an accidental drug or alcohol overdose, a car accident—that burden could kill a mother or father. But to have your child, your love, your life, murdered?
Jessica couldn’t look at Sam’s parents anymore.
Near them was a coatrack holding what looked to be Sam’s wrestling jacket, as well as a sound system and the principal of Warner High School, Michael Glynn, who was looking down at a folded-over piece of paper. A few feet away was a large photo, mounted on cardboard and held up by an easel, that showed Sam in his tight blue spandex wrestling singlet with a white W on the chest, standing in some gym, a round gold medal hanging from a red, white, and blue ribbon around his neck. Sam had his arms folded; his biceps were clearly defined, and he had a cocky grin that said that even at his age everything was safe, everything was planned, and his bright future was preordained.
Until a gunshot had cut him down in the town forest two nights ago.
You Will Never Know Page 8