Murder Among Crows

by B. T. Lord

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Mrs. Gardiner, I was hoping I might have a word with you.”

  Although it was natural in law enforcement to run across people who outright lied, it still angered Cammie. She hated being lied to.

  She fumed as she left the office, determined to drive out to the Gardiner farm. As it was, luck was with her. She’d no sooner pulled out of the parking lot before she saw Mrs. Gardiner exiting the Grocery Emporium across the street. She immediately stopped the Explorer and jogged over as the woman finished putting her grocery bags into the back of her Subaru Forester.

  Mrs. Gardiner was petite, with a trim body and a pair of cranberry framed glasses that fit her attractive features perfectly. She had her reddish black hair pulled back in a ponytail and looked surprised to see the Sheriff.

  “Sheriff Farnsworth,” she murmured. “What can I do for you?”

  “Actually I’m here to ask you about your jam preserves. I’ve heard they’re the best.”

  Mrs. Gardiner’s face brightened. “Why, thank you,” she gushed.

  “Is it true they’re award winning?”

  She nodded. “First place third year in a row. Do you make your own preserves, Sheriff?”

  Cammie couldn’t make toast without the risk of burning down her cabin. But Mrs. Gardiner didn’t need to know that. “I try, but I don’t know. I don’t seem to have the knack for it.”

  “I’d be more than happy to help you.”

  “Really? You’re awfully kind, Mrs. Gardiner.”

  “Please, call me Veronica.”

  “Thank you, Veronica. With your help maybe I can enter the Autumn Harvest Festival up in Mategwas.” She leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “I’d do it here, but I don’t want people voting for me simply because I’m sheriff. Up there, I can just be one of the contestants.”

  “Oh I’m so sorry, Sheriff, but you just missed the Autumn Harvest Festival. We had it this past week-end. Even though Aubrey and I no longer live in Mategwas, I was still part of this year’s organizing committee. Winning first place for my preserves was a perfect way to end my participation is such a wonderful event.”

  “Wow, that must have been a long drive home that night. Weren’t you tired?” Cammie asked, maintaining her smile which was beginning to hurt.

  “I don’t like driving at night anymore, especially when it’s so far away. One of my friends who’s also on the committee graciously allowed me to stay at her house.”

  “It must have been hard for you to leave Mategwas and move to Twin Ponds.”

  “It was. But Aubrey has always had this dream of owning a farm. Not just any farm, but one that fit his particular image of what a farmhouse should look like.” She chuckled. “Sometimes it’s not easy being married to a man who lives in his imagination. But he did it. I don’t know how, but when he saw the photograph of the Jepson farm, he told me this was his dream home. I couldn’t say no when he told me he wanted to buy the place.” Veronica looked down at her watch. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but I really must run. I’m expecting a phone call from my sister in about an hour and I’d like to get these groceries put away. She lives in Alaska and we always call each other at least every other week to keep in touch. It’s her turn to call me today.” She closed the truck and walked around Cammie. “Do let me know when you want to get together to make the preserves.”

  Cammie watched as she pulled away from the curb and drove down the street. She was struck by the fact that never once did Veronica ask about Poppie or how the investigation was going. Had she been jealous of Poppie? Was there more than a mutual interest in birding going on between Aubrey and the dead woman?

  “That was quick,” Rick remarked as Cammie entered HQ.

  “I ran into Mrs. Gardiner outside.” She told Rick and Emmy about their conversation. When she was done, Rick chortled.

  “If she only knew the truth about your cooking skills, she wouldn’t go anywhere near you and a stove.”

  “The bigger question is why Aubrey and Meredith lied about his wife being there at the dinner.”

  “Maybe they were having a ménage a trois? I’d certainly lie about that.” Cammie stared at Rick. He shrugged. “Hey, anything’s possible.”

  She inwardly rolled her eyes as she turned back to Emmy. “Call Aubrey and ask him – no, tell him to get his ass down here ASAP.”

  She started past Emmy when the young woman said, “Do you want me to call him before or after you open your email from Colin?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me he sent over the preliminary results? Hold off on the phone call for now. Hopefully Colin and his team found something that will blow this case wide open.”

  She hurried down the hall to her office. When she was gone, the two looked at each other.

  “I hate it when she’s on the warpath. You’d think she’d be used to getting lied to by now,” Rick replied.

  “Maybe the forensics report will calm her down.”

  “Shit!” came Cammie’s voice from down the hall.

  Emmy sighed. “It’s your turn to calm her down.”

  “Me?” Rick echoed.

  “Yes. I did it last time when Mr. Perkins almost ran her over. Again. If I hadn’t talked her off the ledge, she would have arrested him on the spot.”

  “He’s ninety. He shouldn’t be driving anyway.”

  The young woman shook her head in sympathy. “He’d have been so upset at the thought of being arrested, he would have had a stroke in the cell. And you probably would have been the one to find him.”

  Rick wasn’t in the mood to argue with her. His feelings were still jumbled over her phone call the night before, so he fell back to doing what he always did when faced with an emotional dilemma. He shoved it into the back of his mind.

  “Oh alright. You win.”

  He walked down the corridor, paused at Cammie’s office door, turned, went to the coffee machine and poured himself a large cup. “Liquid courage,” he whispered before walking back towards her office.

  Cammie was staring into space when Rick entered.

  “Bad news?” he asked as he sat down opposite her.

  “More like no news.” She looked at him. “Poppie’s cell phone showed a call to Meredith and Kevin Baker the day before they left for Twin Ponds. And one to Aubrey when they arrived at Twin Ponds.”

  “Seems to me the calls to Meredith and Kevin were to let them know about the white crow. Her call to Aubrey may have been letting him know they’d arrived.”

  “That would be my guess. Nobody on the team found the matching earring, either at the murder scene or in Poppie’s room, which confirms my worst fear that the killer may have taken it as a trophy. He also repeated what Doc already told me about the trajectory of the bullet. He believes the killer stood between the vee in the trees when he or she shot Poppie.”

  “Well, we figured from the beginning this was personal,” Rick said.

  “This just points more in that direction. I’m going to forward the email to Emmy so she could print out the photos.”

  “Doesn’t look like Poppie had much of a social life if that’s all the phone calls on her cell.”

  “Have you found out anything more on her?”

  “She was the only child of a prosperous businessman who owned a chain of furniture stores throughout Maine and New Hampshire. She married a vice president of a large multinational manufacturing company and moved to Portland, where they had Hannah two years later. They lived a very comfortable life in one of those McMansions in an affluent part of town.”

  “Is she still married?” Cammie asked, recalling not seeing any ring on Poppie’s finger and wondering if that was something else the murderer took.

  “No. They divorced in 2014. Soon after, she moved to Mategwas.”

  “2014? That’s the year Hannah died.”

  “Sometimes a couple can’t handle that kind of tragedy. Instead of bringing them together, it tears them apart.”

  “Have you tried contac
ting Mr. Beresford?”

  Rick nodded. “He’s out of the country on business. They’re building a plant in China and he’s there until the middle of October. I’ve asked his company to contact him and have him call us. No word yet. Emmy did a Google search on Poppie’s address in Mategwas and her nearest neighbor is three miles away. We’re still in the process of calling them, but so far the ones we have reached all say the same thing. She was a very private person who kept very much to herself. I spoke to Kevin Baker this morning. His statement was no different from the others. He only saw her when they went bird watching.”

  Rick suddenly got up, left the office and returned a few moments later with a Xeroxed photo. He showed it to her. “This is her house.” Cammie took the photo and saw a small house set in a clearing, surrounded by acres of dense forest. “It’s 1200 square feet on a 12 acre lot,” he explained.

  “She picked the perfect place to make sure she was left alone,” Cammie muttered. “So it’s safe to assume she wasn’t a social butterfly.”

  “If she was, there’s no record of it, nor is anyone talking.”

  Cammie sat back in her chair and looked across the office at the victim board. “I wonder if the death of her daughter, and the break-up of her marriage, turned her into a hermit of sorts. She lost everything in the space of a year. The emotional pain may have been too much for her to handle. It became easier to retreat than to deal with people’s pity or sympathy. It would certainly explain her unwillingness to talk about herself, or to let anyone get close. Meredith seems to be the only one who got even remotely close, and all they did was look for birds.” She lowered her head and wearily rubbed her eyes.

  Rick immediately felt her mood go from being frustrated to falling into a deep sadness. He knew she could be prickly as well if people got too close to her, but what the heck. The most he risked was her telling him to mind his own business.

  “What’s wrong, Cam?” he asked.

  She took a long time to answer. When she did, it wasn’t quite what he expected. “It’s just so heartbreaking, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. “Here is a woman who seemed to have had everything. The executive husband, the McMansion, the affluent lifestyle. Then a tragedy occurred and she retreated from the world. The only thing she cared about were birds.” She stood up and crossed over to the victim board where she pinned up the photo of Poppie’s house. She then looked at the picture of Poppie with her arm around Hannah’s shoulder, a glimpse of a happy mother with her smiling daughter. “I wonder what she was like before her world turned upside down. Was she a vibrant, lively woman? Did she get to travel with her husband? Travel on her own? Travel with Hannah? Did she have any hobbies? Did she have a huge life? Was she so shattered by what happened to Hannah that her world shrunk down to watching birds through a pair of binoculars? Is that what her life became? Or better said, is that the world she created for herself? This quiet, isolated existence?”

  Rick didn’t know what to say. This was exactly what Cammie’s father had done. He’d suffered an emotional upset so jarring that he’d isolated himself in the cabin she now lived in, trying his best to keep the world at bay. If he remembered correctly, this had happened when she was ten years old. He could only guess at the damage to Cammie’s psyche when her father coldly turned his back on her. And her mother.

  Although they’d worked closely together for almost two years, he didn’t know much about her past. What little he knew came from the gossip that quickly spread about town when she suddenly returned to Twin Ponds after being away for fifteen years. About her ill-fated relationship with the famous hockey player Eli Kelley, whose murder she’d had to solve the year before. About her even more ill-fated marriage to a Neanderthal by the name of Harlan Barrow which ended abruptly, resulting in her disappearing from town in the middle of the night. He knew there were many paths that led out from these major occurrences in her life - paths that remained locked away in her soul. Much like Poppie Beresford.

  He was proud to be working alongside such an excellent officer. She’d handled cases that would have sent him over the edge. She had that instinct for reading people, for knowing when they were lying, or when they were telling the truth. In the investigations she’d had to handle since becoming sheriff, she had yet to fail in catching the guilty party. No matter how painful or distressing it was for her personally, she always came through. Yet for some inexplicable reason, he was suddenly filled with concern over this particular case. He didn’t know why, but he worried about its effect on her. Was it touching too close to home for her? Was she identifying so much with the victim – with the life Poppie had chosen – with the life that, for the grace of God Cammie might have chosen for herself – that she’d find it impossible to pull back? Would this case open up old wounds, old hurts from her father that had yet to be healed? Would this be the case that sent her over the edge?

  If that was true, he wouldn’t be able to handle it. He didn’t have the law enforcement experience she had. Nor was he any good at all this emotional shit. Look at the mess with Emmy. He couldn’t even tell her how he felt about her because he didn’t know how he felt about her. How pathetic was that? And now his boss, the woman he admired, whose skills at her job he so wanted to emulate, was teetering on the brink of losing herself so completely in a case that he honestly didn’t know what to do. He did know one thing, however. He couldn’t be the emotional coward he usually was. He’d need to keep a close eye on her and make sure she didn’t go off the deep end investigating the life and death of Poppie Beresford.

  He was also going to have to stick his nose where it didn’t belong and get Jace up to speed. If there was one man who could pull her back from the edge, it would be Jace. And if need be, he’d be there to pull Jace back while Jace was pulling Cammie back.

  All he had to do was walk forward into that minefield of emotions and feelings, without fear or trepidation.

  Oh God….

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “What were you doing last Monday evening?”

  Cammie and Rick were seated in the interrogation room. Across the table from them sat Aubrey. He was dressed in jeans and a checkered sweater and appeared relaxed and unaffected by the fact that he was being questioned by two police officers.

  “I told you. My wife and I had a small dinner party for Poppie and Meredith.”

  “Was there a special occasion for the dinner?”

  “It was just to welcome them to Twin Ponds. We haven’t seen them since we moved. I thought it would be nice for them to see our new home.”

  “At the dinner, did Poppie tell you what time she was going to be in the forest? I’m sure she would have liked you to tag along to show her precisely where you’d seen the white crow.”

  “She didn’t mention it. She knew me enough to know that when I’m writing, I work into the wee hours of the night. I have a better chance of not being interrupted. I don’t usually get out of bed until at least ten in the morning.”

  “Who cooked dinner?”

  Aubrey looked confused to be asked, in his mind, such a trivial question. “Veronica is the cook. I’m afraid I’m pretty hopeless in the kitchen.”

  “What did she make?”

  “Pot roast, with candied carrots and whipped potatoes. Nothing fancy, but it was enough to satisfy our hunger.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Birds, of course. That’s what we always talked about whenever we got together.” Aubrey looked at his watch. “Sheriff, I’d really like to sit here all afternoon and answer your questions, but as I explained to you the last time we spoke, I’m up against a deadline. Can we therefore get to the point of all this?”

  Cammie leaned forward in her chair. “Alright, Aubrey. I’ll get to the point. Why did you lie to me?”

  His eyes widened in surprise. And fear. “What do you mean?” he asked, trying his best to remain casual.

  “We have witnesses placing your wife at the Autumn Harvest Festival in Mategwas on the nig
ht of the dinner. That’s a two hour drive from Twin Ponds. We know she didn’t return home until the next morning. So, unless she managed to get into Magic Calico’s bag of tricks and learned how to be in two places at the same time, you lied to me and I want to know why.”

  “Did you talk to Veronica?” he suddenly demanded.

  “Does it matter?” Cammie countered. “Are you afraid she’ll be upset that you used her to cover up something you obviously don’t want me to find out about? Or are you afraid she’ll discover something you don’t want her to find out about?”

  “You’re making it sound worse than it is,” he answered defensively.

  “Then suppose you tell me why you thought you had to cover up the fact that your wife wasn’t there that night? Did you even have a dinner for Poppie and Meredith?”

  “I did!” he exclaimed before realizing what he said. He instantly sat back in his chair. His face turned pensive as he debated what he should say. Finally, he raised his eyes until he met hers. “There was nothing nefarious about it. As I said, I invited them over and we talked about birds.”

  “So why did you say your wife was there when she was actually two hours away?”

  “I panicked. I didn’t want you thinking that I’d had something to do with Poppie’s death. I thought it would sound more suspicious if you knew my wife wasn’t there.”

  Cammie and Rick exchanged glances. They both had the same thought – Aubrey was lying through his teeth. But there was no way to prove it. Not yet.

  “Did you know Poppie was going to be in the woods the morning she died?”

  “I know what you’re trying to do, Sheriff. I’m telling you, I had nothing to do with what happened to Poppie,” he insisted. “I swear I didn’t.”