“Okay. Thanks anyway.” We’d have to wait and see if Tanner and Winston came up with any leads. I excused myself and slipped into the basement bathroom. Preston had a stack of reading material in a holder next to the toilet—a crossword puzzle book, a couple of fishing magazines, a home improvement magazine. Looking for the trash can, I opened the cupboard under the sink. “What do we have here?” I pulled a rolled-up magazine from the otherwise empty can—the December issue of Arts and Antiquities, the very issue I’d noticed missing from Uncle Jack’s collection. I checked the mailing label. Jack Hill.
My thoughts rioted. Why would Preston have taken it? And thrown it in the trash can? I scanned the table of contents. Not a single article pertained to Mayan vases.
By the time I exited the bathroom, Nate and Preston had wandered back upstairs. I glanced at the closed door to Preston’s workshop and engaged in a mental tug-of-war with my conscience. I had no right to invade his privacy, and no permission to search the premises. But finding that magazine had me—
A disgruntled “meow” came from the other side of the door, then frantic scratching.
“Harold, did you get yourself shut in Preston’s studio?” I turned the doorknob, but the door wouldn’t budge.
“Everything okay?” Preston called down the stairs.
I turned the knob again and this time added a shoulder bump against the door. It still wouldn’t budge. “No, Harold’s locked in your studio.”
Preston hurried down the stairs and pulled a key from his pocket. “Sorry about that. I should’ve remembered he’d followed me in there. I coaxed him downstairs because your Dad’s allergies were acting up.” Preston opened the door the tiniest crack and Harold bolted out and straight up the stairs. Chuckling, Preston reached in and flicked the lock on the back of the doorknob once more, then pulled the door closed and actually tested it.
Did he really think I’d be that desperate to peek at his project? Or was he hiding something else in there?
Nate appeared at the top of the stairs, cradling Harold. “Where was he?”
Preston headed back up the stairs. “My workshop.”
Something about Nate’s quiet acknowledgment suggested there’d been more to the question, but first things first. I hurried up after Preston, my hand fisting tighter around the rolled magazine. “Hey, I found one of Jack’s magazines in your trash can. Did you mean to throw it out?”
Preston didn’t so much as flinch at the question. A few steps into the kitchen at the top of the stairs, he turned. “Sure, one less thing for Ashley and Ben to dispose of, right?”
“Why did you have it?”
He shrugged. “Jack often passed along issues with articles he thought I’d be interested in.”
A car pulled into the driveway and Preston excused himself.
Nate, with Harold still in his arms, tossed me a skeptical look. “You believe him?”
I pulled Nate into the dining room so we wouldn’t be overheard. “I want to, especially after all my fretting in the car about suspecting Ben.”
“Uh, yeah . . . but we still don’t know what to think of him either,” Nate reminded me.
I rolled the magazine back up in my fist. “I know. I know. And I got to thinking that the night the car ran down Dad and me, Preston was the only person, besides Isaak Jackson and Tanner, who knew I wanted to figure out what Jack had called the feds about.”
I gave my head a mental shake. Listen to me—half an hour ago I was questioning whether the whole thing was a figment of my imagination. What must Nate think of my yo-yoing theories? Still . . . “Preston could’ve watched Dad head to Jack’s house and made that excuse about picking up groceries to Mom and Aunt Martha.”
Voices I didn’t recognize drifted in from the living room.
I lowered my own. “I mean, Preston had groceries in his vehicle when he gave me a ride later, but he could’ve picked those up after the hit-and-run. He didn’t show up until after the ambulance had already left.”
A dark-haired, middle-aged woman poked her head through the doorway and beamed at me. “Remember me?”
“Diana! It’s so good to see you.”
She pulled me into a warm hug. “I wish it were under happier circumstances. I was just bringing a meal over for the family, and when I didn’t find Ashley at home, I figured I’d find her here.”
“She’ll be back soon.” I introduced Diana to Nate. “When I visited in the summers as a teen, Diana was the youth group leader.”
“Have you met Marianne?” Diana asked.
I nodded.
“The poor woman. She’s inconsolable.”
I sucked in a breath, about to say I’d heard about Charlie, only to realize that wasn’t what she was talking about.
“Marianne blames herself for Jack’s death,” Diana went on.
“What?” A triple jolt of caffeine couldn’t have kicked my brain into high gear faster. “Why?”
“She and Jack had a fight over something silly that night. You know the way couples do when wedding jitters build.”
I pictured the argument taking place at the top of the steps to the beach. Marianne shoving him . . .
“It was just before her book club was due to start, so he left before they had a chance to make amends,” Diana went on, snapping me out of my wild imaginings. “She’s convinced he tripped and fell because she’d made him so upset. She can’t forgive herself that the last words between them had been harsh.”
“Oh. Yes. That’s got to be hard.” Could the cause of death have been that simple? But then, how do we explain the picture of someone’s jean-clad legs on Jack’s camera?
Ashley rushed in, her face flushed. “Have you heard anything about Ben?”
I glanced past her shoulder to Aunt Martha’s shadowed face. “The radio had something about a young man found on the beach. A possible boating accident,” she said softly.
“I checked. It wasn’t Ben,” I reassured her, hesitant to admit who it was. If the radio announcer withheld the information, the police may not have had a chance to notify Marianne and Carly yet.
Ashley collapsed onto a kitchen chair. Her coat flapped open and three bits of sea glass tumbled from one of the pockets.
Harold leapt from Nate’s arms and pounced on the blue one.
Nate lowered his head and whispered in my ear. “That’s what I wanted to tell you before. When Harold darted out of Preston’s studio, he had a piece of sea glass in his mouth.”
My gaze lifted from the pieces Ashley was scrambling to rescue to her jeans. Her skintight jeans.
13
After Diana left, we congregated in Preston’s great room, which overlooked Tisbury Great Pond. Preston stood at the window in his crisply pressed chinos and silk shirt. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in jeans.
“We can’t just stand around and do nothing,” Ashley said, sounding more worried about Ben than I would’ve expected if she were responsible for Jack’s death.
“We should be out looking for him,” she went on. “He’s always hitchhiking. He probably started off to a friend’s place when he didn’t find me or Uncle Jack home. He could’ve been hit like Mr. Jones and be lying in the scrub brush somewhere.”
“Good idea,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “Now that it’s stopped raining, we can fan out from Jack’s house in pairs.”
Mom set aside the crossword puzzle she’d been working on. “That’s a great idea.”
“Carmen’s on his way over, so he and I can walk east down the road,” Aunt Martha said.
“Ashley and I can go over the dunes to the water and comb the shoreline,” Preston offered.
“Nate, you and Serena can walk west down the road,” Aunt Martha said. “The rain will have washed away any footprints, so you’ll have to pay extra close attention to any sign the grasses have been flattened.”
My phone hummed the Get Smart theme song—code for Tanner’s calls. I excused myself and slipped into the kitchen for privacy.
&nbs
p; “Hey, we found something you’ll want to see,” Tanner said, only he didn’t sound as if I’d be happy about it.
“What did you find?”
“Where are you?”
“At Preston’s.”
“I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
“Pick me up? Where are we going? We were about to search the roadsides for signs of Ben.”
Nate must’ve been half-listening from the other room, because he stepped into view, his expression concerned.
“Somewhere where we won’t be overheard.” Tanner hung up before I could get in another word.
“I need to go out for a bit,” I said to Nate. “Tanner wants to show me something.”
“I can search with Nate,” Mom volunteered. Whether to make it easier for me to spend time with Tanner or to have an opportunity to vet Nate, I wasn’t sure. Maybe she just wanted to help. Of course, I’d have an easier time believing it wasn’t all about me if she didn’t remind me every other week that over a year ago, I’d said I’d been thinking about settling down—which in her mind meant giving her grandchildren. Since I made the mistake of saying as much in front of a roomful of women at my cousin’s baby shower, and said baby had just turned one, I clearly hadn’t been thinking straight at the time—side effect of being clocked with a can of peas by a fleeing suspect.
Nate had a hangdog look as I climbed into Tanner’s car ten minutes later. Keeping the two men in my life separate was so much easier back in St. Louis, where I saw Tanner at work and Nate at home and the two rarely crossed paths. Mom’s shift-husband/home-husband theory niggled my thoughts.
I pushed it aside and focused on the Arts and Antiquities magazine Tanner slapped onto my lap a second before backing out of the driveway. The cover image was of a Mayan Fenton Vase. “Where’d you find this?” I squinted at the mailing label—Frank Dale. “At Jack’s business partner’s? What were you doing there?”
“No, at the potential client’s house Jack visited ten days ago. It was sitting on his coffee table.”
“Is he a collector? Did you see the vase? Did he have other Mayan artifacts?”
“Uh, you’re missing the big picture here,” Tanner said as if I were more than a little slow on the uptake. He tapped the cover. “Look at it.”
“I am looking at it,” I snapped back, not bothering to keep the irritation from my voice. He could be more forthcoming. It was the April issue. Frank must’ve lent it to him. I checked the index and flipped to the article on the vase. “If Frank knew him well enough to lend him a magazine, why’d Jack take the appointment to pitch their services?” To think if I’d done more than scan the spines of Jack’s magazines, I would’ve seen this issue two days ago. And picked up whatever clue Tanner couldn’t believe I wasn’t not seeing.
Tanner reached across the seat and closed the magazine, then pulled to the shoulder and shoved the car into park. “You’re not looking.” He yanked the copy I’d given him of Jack’s vase photo from his pocket a nanosecond before I saw it.
“No way!” I grabbed the paper from him and compared it to the image on the cover. It was the exact same vase, oriented in the exact same position, sitting on the exact same surface. “It’s a picture of the magazine cover.”
Tanner made the ka-bing sound of hitting a target in a shooting gallery. “The pretty girl gets the prize.”
Sometimes he could be really irritating. “Uncle Jack couldn’t have made this. The words have been edited out. Jack doesn’t even have a computer, let alone a digital camera.”
“So who’d he get it from? And why?”
“Maybe someone gave the photograph to him and claimed he had the genuine article, asked what it would be worth to him,” I theorized, as I punched the state police chief’s number on my phone. “Hello, this is Special Agent Serena Jones again. That photo found in Jack’s pocket. Was it dusted for fingerprints?”
“Yes.” An eruption of computer keys being tapped sounded over the phone. “Here it is. In addition to the deceased’s prints, there was a thumbprint on the front of the photo and two fingerprints on the back that didn’t match his. We’re running them through NCIC to see if we get a hit.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“There is another possibility,” Tanner said as I clicked off.
“What’s that?”
“Someone planted the photo to rabbit trail anyone tempted to link Jack’s death to his call to the FBI.”
“Yeah.” I let out a self-deprecating snort. “And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.” I shook my head. “I even knew there were only six known vases in existence, all accounted for in various museums.”
“Hey, I taught you better than that.” He looked at me intently, clearly waiting for me to connect a few more dots I’d apparently overlooked.
I gasped. “Whoever printed the photo had access to a copy of the magazine!” I called Isaak and explained what we had discovered. Then I asked him to request that computer forensics check the original photo to determine if it’d been doctored from an online image of the magazine cover or was scanned from a hard copy. If it were the latter, it would narrow down our suspects considerably. “See if you can get a list of the magazine’s subscribers living on Martha’s Vineyard too.”
“I’ll make the calls,” Isaak said. “Good work.”
“I had lots of help.” I smiled at Tanner and clicked off. “Okay, so until we hear otherwise, we can assume that our man photographed or scanned the magazine cover.”
“Frank could’ve done it. You said your father suspected him, right?”
“Yeah, and apparently he lends out his magazine.”
“Actually, he puts them in his waiting room. The client said he picked it up from there. You can ask Carly who else has been in for appointments since the April issue was put out.”
“I don’t think Carly will be in any condition to give us that kind of information.” I winced at the memory of Charlie’s ashen face. “Her brother’s body washed up on the beach this morning.”
“No way. What happened?”
“The operating theory is a fishing or boating accident.”
“But you think the two deaths are connected?”
“Charlie was about to become Jack’s son-in-law!” I blew out a sigh. “He was also under investigation for possible involvement in a drug ring.” Pieces started to fit together in my head. “Maybe Jack caught wind of the suspicions. He and Marianne had a fight before he headed to Menemsha Hills. They could’ve argued about Charlie, because Jack wouldn’t tolerate anything illegal going on and Marianne would naturally be defensive of her son.”
“So you think we’re talking drug dealers—not art smugglers—now?”
I massaged my fingers over my throbbing temples. “I don’t know.” I hated how hopeless I sounded. “How are we supposed to investigate when we don’t even know what we’re supposed to be investigating?”
Tanner suddenly pulled a U-turn.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to Preston’s. Seems to me Jack’s missing nephew could be the key to unlocking everything.”
I splayed my fingers over the magazine still lying on my lap. “Jack subscribed to this magazine too. And Preston would borrow them.”
“Did you show him the photo from Jack’s pocket?”
“Yeah, but nothing about his reaction struck me as suspicious.”
“All the same, let’s not tell him we’ve figured out it’s a copy of a magazine cover.”
I rolled the magazine and shoved it in the glove box. As we rounded the corner back onto Jack’s street, Aunt Martha burst out of the bushes flanking the road.
“Stop!” I grabbed the door handle and jumped from the car the instant it stopped. “Did you find something?”
Malgucci caught Aunt Martha’s hand and smacked a kiss on her cheek. “She was chasing a butterfly.”
Aunt Martha spouted a Latin name I didn’t catch. “I haven’t seen one since I visited Mexico,” she added breathlessly.
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Malgucci gleamed at her, looking as smitten as—
“Hey, does Ben have a girlfriend on the island?” I blurted.
“Ashley called every friend of his she could think of after we finished at the florist,” Aunt Martha said. “No one’s seen him.”
“At least not that they’re admitting to,” Tanner said, joining us outside the car.
I called Ashley’s cell phone. “Hey, who was that girl Ben always hung around with during high school?”
“You mean Lisa?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.” I could still picture her long corkscrew blonde curls flapping in the air as she raced Ben into the water and nine times out of ten beat him. “Is she still around?”
“Yes, the same place she’s always lived, but I already called her. She said she hasn’t seen him.”
I got the directions, then motioned Tanner back into the car. “C’mon, we need to visit Lisa.” The house was less than two miles away—nothing to a guy who backpacked across half the world.
“What makes you think she’s lied about seeing him?”
“Lisa was Ben’s best friend growing up,” I explained as Tanner drove. “She always turned down his requests for a romantic relationship because she said she didn’t want to lose his friendship if it didn’t work out.”
Tanner glanced at me, his eyebrow raised curiously. “Sounds like the kind of friend who’d cover for him.”
“Maybe. Ben could be a little wild sometimes, and Lisa was kind of his Jiminy Cricket.”
“His Jiminy what?”
I rolled my eyes. “You know? Jiminy Cricket. Pinocchio’s conscience?”
He chuckled. “Pinocchio I know.”
“Oh, that was her house,” I said as we passed it.
Tanner backed up and into the driveway, and at the sight of the dark blue Jeep Patriot sitting there, my heart missed a beat. The vehicle looked uncomfortably similar to the size and shape of the SUV that clipped Dad Wednesday night.
Over Maya Dead Body Page 12