“But why would Jayne use a fake Ph.D.?”
“Because she never got a real one?”
chapter twenty
I finished getting into some dry clothes and was savagely scratching myself when Martha said, “Heads up.” I turned in time to catch a tube of benzocaine.
“They say it helps with chiggers, that and washing all your clothes, cause they can hang around,” she said.
I cracked open the tube and in my haste squirted some on my pants. “I hope they don’t last as long as spider bites.”
“Ten days and longer,” said Martha.
I stared at her in horror. “What do you know about them? Oh, cripes. Do they burrow? Are they still all on me? Can they bite more than once?” I frantically frisked myself down.
“It’s not the bite that itches, it’s the saliva that they inject to liquefy your skin cells so they can eat.”
“Charming,” I said.
“It’s actually pretty cool. You react to the saliva by hardening the cells along the saliva path and create a tube, just like a straw, with the chigger at one end drinking your skin cells. It’s why it’s so itchy.
“How do you know so much about chiggers?” I asked.
“Sam told me all about them when I asked why it wasn’t a good idea to bushwhack.”
“And when was that, pray tell?”
Martha looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, I forgot to tell you.” She returned to the laptop and began tapping away.
I immediately collected my bushwhacking clothes, put them in a pillowslip, and threw them outside.
“Any other zingers besides the Ph.D.?”
She looked up at me and said, “There’s a locked file labelled Sinclair/Thompson, but I can’t get into it.”
“Sinclair. Isn’t that Wyatt’s name?”
“Yeah, that’s why I thought it might be interesting. The file is brand new. Only created five days ago but it’s big, twenty megabytes.”
“Photos?”
“Could be. Or scans of some kind. I went and looked at her download history and she downloaded a lot of stuff five days ago.”
“Can’t you access it that way? Through download history?”
“No. Something’s blocking it.”
“Okay. Then let’s go for the password.”
“Her name? Birth date? Barrier?”
“Turtles?”
Martha keyed in Turtles but nothing happened.
“Halifax? Dalhousie? McGill?”
We played around for a while but nothing worked and we finally gave up. But not before a new idea had hatched in my mind.
“How are you for running interference?” I asked.
“What have you got in mind?”
“I want to see if I can find the note Stacey wrote to Wyatt, the one that Wyatt mentioned the night Stacey announced the theft of the vaccine.”
Martha’s eyes widened. “You think he kept it?”
“Maybe not, but even if he threw it away garbage is picked up from the cabins only once a week so the chances are good that it is still around.”
“How did you know that?” asked Martha.
I rustled around on the bedside table and found the letter to guests that had been left there for us to read. I gave it to Martha.
“Why do you want the note?”
“It might be the proof we need that Stacey was blackmailing Wyatt. It gives him a motive to kill her.”
“How do you propose finding it?”
“I want to search his cabin over lunch. You could be my lookout.”
Martha dumped the laptop on the bed beside her and said, “Ready when you are.”
We planned it so that Martha would head up to lunch and once Wyatt was in the mess she would come out on the balcony to signal the all clear. I sat on the front porch of the cabin but the punkies and my own incessant itching chased me inside so I watched from behind the screen door. It seemed to take forever but finally Martha appeared and casually waved her hand. I hoped no one was watching her. Waving at nobody was very suspicious.
I made my move and walked quickly to Wyatt’s cabin from mine by going behind the cabins so that I would be out of sight. Wyatt’s cabin was almost the mirror image of my own. Two beds down each side separated by a table but with two cupboards along the wall at the foot of each bed. The room was a pigsty. Clothes and shoes flung everywhere and papers strewn all over the floor. His briefcase lay on the table on top of a pile of papers and the bed was almost completely unmade, with the fitted sheet halfway down the bed. I surveyed the papers on the floor — mostly blank sheets that must have fallen off the bed and then got underfoot. I searched through them all, and all the junk on both beds, but came up empty. I dumped the garbage can on the bed and started sorting through the contents. There were a lot of scrunched up papers — it appeared he was trying to write a research paper — but finally I found it. It was a little yellow paper and on it, handwritten, was:
Your vaccine is bogus. I’m willing to make a deal. Stacey 25/9/86
Bull’s eye. I stuffed it in my pocket and headed for the briefcase. I rifled through all the papers and was just about to give up when I spied a photo. It was a scan of a newspaper clipping. The girl in the photo was Melanie — or was it Stacey? In a scrum of media. As I lifted the photo out to take a better look a godawful ruckus erupted. Martha’s voice pierced the air like a chainsaw. “Look everybody! Look! Look! It’s a screech owl!” It hadn’t exactly been the signal we had agreed upon but it worked wonders. I shoved the photo back into the briefcase, slammed the lid, and headed for the door. But I was too late. Martha hadn’t given me enough time.
“Why are you following me?” The voice was high and angry but steady and very very close.
I practically dived under one of the beds and lay there in the thick dust with a pair of stinky boots for company, waiting.
“I need to hear it from you.” Unmistakably Wyatt.
There was silence.
“I don’t know what you are talking about and I don’t want anything to do with you.”
“You can’t avoid it, Mel.”
“Don’t call me Mel. Only my friends call me that. Just leave me alone.”
It was quiet for a long time after that and I was about to squirm out when I heard a footfall on the porch. The screen door opened. I could see his feet as he came in and sat down on the bed on top of me, making the mattress sag into my face. He sat there for a long time and it was all I could do not to sneeze or itch. He took my attention off my itchy legs when he picked up his cellphone and made a call.
“Arlene, baby, how are you?”
Silence.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. The hurricane wasn’t that bad.”
Silence.
“Just a bad connection.”
Silence.
“I need you to email me those results. Everything you’ve got on Melanie. Throw in what you have on Rosemary too.”
Silence.
“No. No. I fired her.”
Silence.
“Couldn’t do her job.”
Silence.
“Get right on it. I need it yesterday.”
I heard the click of the cell shutting and then a huge sigh as he lifted his legs onto the bed. Five minutes later he was snoring away and I was stuck. I fervently hoped he wasn’t one of those guys who took really long afternoon naps. At least a dozen itches were screaming for attention and it was agony not being able to scratch. Time went by as I mentally conquered one itch after the other that kept popping up. I was beginning to cramp up. I was eyeball to eyeball with one of his boots and I idly traced the pattern with my eyes for something to do. I stiffened. There in one of the grooves of the boot was a mangled cricket. I didn’t have time to contemplate the significance of this because he let out a huge snort and sat up. I watched his feet move across the room and the sound of the screen door whining open was music to my ears. I waited a full minute before extricating myself from under the bed, franticall
y itching everywhere. The benzo whatever it was called had obviously worn off.
I crept to the door and looked out. Coast was clear and I hightailed it back to my cabin.
Martha was a mess.
“Oh, Cordi. I didn’t know what to do. He just got up halfway through dinner and left. I couldn’t think of anything else to do but cry screech owl.”
“Did anyone leave before he did?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Yeah, Mel did. Why?”
I told her about the conversation I had overheard.
“You think Wyatt found out about Stacey and Melanie and was blackmailing them?”
“But why would their relationship be worth blackmail?”
“I don’t know. But if they were about to expose him as a blackmailer, that gives Wyatt yet another motive for killing Stacey.”
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?”
“You found the note?”
“Yeah,” I said and pulled the crumpled piece of paper out of my pocket.
Martha took it from me eagerly and smoothed it out on her bed. “Looks like blackmail to me,” she said. “I wonder what sort of deal she had in mind. Money?”
“We may never know.”
“He was in danger of being exposed in the vaccine debacle and he was blackmailing Stacey. Blackmailers blackmailing blackmailers.”
“What are these numbers at the end of the note? 25/9/86,” I asked.
“Obviously a date of some kind.”
“But why a date twenty-four years ago?”
“Beats me. Maybe the year is just a mistake.”
“I don’t think so. It’s too deliberate. It’s got to have some other significance. We just have to find out what.”
I slathered myself with more benzo while Martha puttered around the cabin, hooking up her printer to her computer again and loading paper, until I finally asked her what she was doing.
“All my night-vision photos. I want to print them out.”
“You mean your new ones?”
“Yes.”
So we shared our cabin amid the noise of an overworked printer, with me on Stacey’s laptop and Martha flitting back and forth between the printer, the computer, and her bed as it slowly filled with photos. The Internet was down so I looked into some of Stacey’s files.
“Well I’ll be dammed,” I said after five minutes of nosing around.
Martha, who was peering at one of her photographs, looked up at me.
“Stacey was writing an autobiography.”
“Lots of people do when they’re given a death sentence.”
“Yeah, but think what it means. If she was writing about something someone did not want disclosed …”
“It would give that someone a motive for murder.” She dropped the photo she was holding onto the bed and said, “Did she use real names?”
I did a search for the first name that came to mind, David, and up he popped, multiple times.
“Try Melanie.”
Nothing came up.
“The file was last dated more than three months ago, so I guess Melanie was not in the picture yet.”
“If there’s some bad stuff in there on David he might take offence.”
I started searching through all the Davids, but my stomach was growling and I realized I had missed lunch. I set the computer aside, stood up, and stretched, the catlike kind of stretch that always feels so good.
“I’m going for some food.” I said and opened the screen door to an onslaught of insects.
“This is getting all over the map, Cordi. We have too many motives to narrow things down.”
“Or too many people,” I said, as I walked out and let the door slam shut behind me.
I could hear Martha’s voice trailing into the heat of afternoon as she asked me to get her a muffin and then it was quiet — the thick kind of quiet that blankets and smothers every cell in your mind, the complete absence of sound.
The mess was empty and I walked into the kitchen to check out the fridge. The only light was the one over the fridge and it gave off an eerie light that splayed shadows across the kitchen walls. I wondered when the shutters would come down.
I shuddered as I passed the door to the walk-in cooler, imagining Stacey in there all cold and lifeless.
In all that contemplation I didn’t hear Darcy come in. He said “Hi,” and his voice practically splattered me all over the ceiling.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
I tried to be nonchalant about it, but the fact was that anybody coming at me in the dark scared me.
“I just spoke to the police. It’s still mayhem on the mainland and the living take precedence. It looks as though we were lucky here — we got the edge of the storm and the mainland got the brunt. A lot of buildings have been damaged and a lot of people killed. And they are short of staff. The long and the short of it is they couldn’t give me a time when they would come. Between you and me I think they’re being slow because we have decimated their crime scene.”
“That’s a harsh word.”
“Well, it’s true.”
I had to admit he had a point. He reached out and opened the fridge and took out a pitcher of milk.
“A lot of people are complaining to me about your persistent questioning.”
I didn’t deign to answer. Instead I blocked him from closing the fridge, reached in, and pulled out a plateful of muffins and some apple juice.
“I found a copy of Stacey’s will.”
“Oh, Jesus — you never give up do you?”
“It says you get three percent.”
“So?” No surprise there. And no comment about three percent being a piddly amount. He knew about the lottery and he knew about the will.
“So, three percent translates into more than a million dollars, but you knew that already, didn’t you?” When he didn’t answer me I said, “Did Stacey tell you?”
Instead of filling a glass with milk he put the pitcher down. “I am her clerk, her general dogs’ body, her valet, her secretary. There is not much that she did that I didn’t know about.”
“Like the lottery?”
“Yeah. She won Lotto 649 when she was thirty-five and has been hounded ever since by speculators, charities, con artists.”
“What about Melanie and Stacey?”
Darcy picked up the pitcher and poured himself some milk. “You know about that?”
“That Stacey is Melanie’s mother? Yes.”
For a moment I thought I saw a flash of something cross his face but whatever it was that was bothering him, he hid it well.
“Jayne told me that something happened to Stacey when she was younger that changed her outlook on life. Was that something Melanie?”
Darcy looked at me, mouth open, and I could tell he was searching for the right words. “Yeah, you could sort of say that.” He had a habit of using that phrase.
When I pressed him for more information he clammed up.
“What about the crickets?” I said into the growing silence.
“Crickets?”
“Stacey’s snake. Did she always keep it in her cabin?”
He looked at me curiously. “No, it was always at her cottage.”
“Except the day she died.”
“Yeah. She brought it from the cottage because of the hurricane.”
“And the crickets? Where did they come from?”
“A wholesaler on the mainland. I brought her the box the evening she died. We keep them in the walk-in fridge.”
“And she spilled them.” It seemed sort of sad somehow that one of the last things Stacey did was chase after some liberated crickets whose chirping was driving her crazy.
“Yeah, but she must have got them all because I don’t remember seeing or hearing any when we found her body.”
“Not all of them,” I said under my breath. “Not all of them.”
chapter twenty-one
I left Darcy and sat down at one of the lines of tables in the mes
s. The rows reminded me, with a shudder, of Madeline, the little kid’s story about an orphanage that had so disturbed me as a child; all those neat little rows of perfectly made beds, so devoid of humanity. I shoved Madeline out of my mind and found an old copy of International Wildlife. I was reading it while eating my second muffin when I heard someone coming down the hall toward me. I looked up and squinted but they were backlit and I couldn’t see who it was. I coughed to let them know I was there, my meeting with Darcy still forefront in my mind.
Despite my warning whoever it was gave a little squeal, just like a mouse, and then said, “Is that you, Cordi?”
“Just having a snack,” I said. “I missed lunch.”
“Yeah, we noticed.” Rosemary. “Where were you?”
I made a mental note to try and teach myself not to volunteer information when it wasn’t asked for.
“Just lost track of time on the beach,” I ad libbed.
She went into the kitchen and rummaged around before she came over and joined me, carrying a plateful of cookies and a Diet Pepsi. The two seemed incongruous together somehow, but I suppose she could have been one of those people who like the taste of Diet Pepsi. She certainly didn’t need the diet part of it. Or maybe she was diabetic? In the dim light of the mess I could hardly make out the injuries to her face and I caught myself staring. So did she.
She gave me a tentative smile. “The swelling’s gone down,” she said.
“Or maybe it was never there?”
She almost choked on her cookie as she turned to stare at me. “Why would you ever say that?”
“I overheard you and Wyatt talking. He as much as accused you of telling people he beats you.”
“So?”
“So are the bruises makeup?”
She stared at the cookies on her plate and I watched her swallow hard several times.
“Do you know anything about men who beat women?” Her voice was low and even. “Sometimes you have to placate them to avoid another beating. That’s all it was. Survival. I was just telling him what he wanted to hear. He’s a dangerous man and I wouldn’t put it past him if he killed Stacey.”
“Why do you say that?”
Dying for Murder Page 17