by Sarah Graves
On the other hand, once she was done maybe I could crawl in there. “Bella . . .” I began. I found her disposing of a bottle of pineapple-grapefruit juice.
The juice didn’t look bad. “Bella, I want you to confirm something for me.”
She was peering at a bottle with three furry stuffed olives nestled at the bottom. “Yes, Missus.”
She looked just awful, her pasty complexion and Mixmaster-styled hair testifying to her distress. I didn’t have the heart to stop what amounted to a siege on the Frigidaire.
But I was about at the end of my rope. “I want you to tell me again whether you visited Lydia Duckworth the day Jim died.”
I was giving her a chance to change her story. If she didn’t, I was ready to tell Ellie—and Maggie, too—that I was done with the whole affair. “Bella?” I persisted.
She turned, the olive bottle still in her hand. If it had held poison lozenges I thought she might just have downed them on the spot, she appeared so distraught.
Instead she put them back into the refrigerator, which was when I realized that the worst had happened.
From the second shelf of the refrigerator the fresh lettuce was gone, but two ancient pizza slices were still there alongside a green half-sandwich in plastic wrap and a moldy hot dog.
She was throwing out good things and saving spoiled ones, which meant that even her whacked-out, self-protective shell of supercleanliness was starting to give way under the pressure.
“No,” she replied, settling the olive jar behind a grapefruit so shriveled it resembled a shrunken head.
“I didn’t,” she said, holding up a plastic container of feta cheese floating in something liquid. Not fresh whey.
Not even close. Slowly she put it back, too, dazedly as if not quite seeing it. And at that moment, it was right on the tip of my tongue to tell her that she could go home, now, that I was finished with her.
That I was finished, period. Let someone else sort out the lies, concealments, and evasions; I was tired. But then, still staring into the chilly recesses of my refrigerator, Bella began weeping—silently, hopelessly—into her hands.
And the phone rang.
“He knew, all right,” Maggie pronounced at the Blue Moon that evening. “He didn’t want me to know that he knew, but when I sprang it on him I was watching his expression.”
I recalled Bill Imrie’s inability to hide his unease that morning when I’d met with him at the bank. He’d have been okay in a formal interrogation setting where he could prepare.
But Bill was not exactly a master of the spontaneous poker face. Which could account for some of the gambling difficulties Lydia Duckworth had reported, I realized. Maybe some of the bets he lost had been on card games.
“So what did you say?” Ellie asked Maggie.
It was past ten o’clock; we’d have met sooner but Maggie had insisted on sleeping first, then eating and taking a shower, and all that had suddenly sounded so irresistible, I’d done it, too.
Now Maggie’s face glowed with the success of her interview with the bank manager. “Well, we were talking about his dad’s sawmill—did you know some of the parts in it are nearly two hundred years old?”
I didn’t, and I averted my mind’s eye firmly from the idea of Maggie’s getting anywhere near any of Imrie’s big sharp blades.
She went on. “And while I was looking at the saw, out of the blue I just said hey, I heard somebody in town has been getting these weird threatening notes, and wasn’t that, like, spooky? And he just about passed out.”
“Really,” I said evenly. “So he gave you the tour, did he? Inside the sawmill building?”
Her glance at me was triumphant. Too much so, even for the coup she’d scored.
“Yep. The house, too, upstairs and down. I know, I know,” she added at my look of disapproval. “Don’t let him get between me and the door. But I was supposed to be interested in history, and it is an old house.”
Late at night in the Blue Moon there was jazz on the sound system and the rich aroma of espresso floating darkly in the air. Across from Ellie and me in the booth, Maggie looked lovely. But there was a hectic flush in her cheeks and her eyes were full of smug, I’ve-got-a-secret happiness.
I didn’t like that. It was out of character for her. And I liked what she said next even less.
“Anyway, he recovered pretty fast and I went on to something else, so he’d think I didn’t really care about the notes. Or who’d told him about them,” she added with sudden glee.
“He told you that?” Ellie’s slim fingertips pressed together.
“No. I figured it out. From this,” Maggie replied, digging into her satchel. She produced a small glittery object and dangled it from its chain with a triumphant flourish. “Know what this is?”
I couldn’t believe it. “Where’d you get that?” I asked when I found my voice again.
She shrugged carelessly. “I spotted it,” she answered, a mean little suspicions-confirmed edge creeping into her voice, “on the floor beside his bed.”
“Good heavens. Is that what I think it is?” Ellie wanted to know.
“Open it,” I told Maggie.
She obeyed, prying at it with her fingernail until the top popped up to reveal its contents.
“Satisfied?” she asked, a touch resentfully now, as if we didn’t quite understand the implications of her discovery.
We did, though. Maggie was the one who didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said distractedly. “We’re satisfied, all right.”
Then I looked at Ellie, and she looked at me, and the two of us got to our feet as if our nervous systems had been hot-wired together. Which in a way they were, by the object Maggie dangled before us.
It was Kris Diamond’s famous, supposedly stolen locket with the curl of her own hair in it.
“I knew she’d been out there,” Maggie revealed as we quick-stepped toward my car. “I’ve followed her there plenty of times.”
Yeeks, two more bombshells. Kris was cheating on Sam, and Maggie’s penchant for driving around late at night wasn’t just a harmless habit, something to soothe her soul.
She was turning into a stalker. “And I really doubt Kris and Imrie were out there balancing her checkbook together. Not that she could do it alone. Anyway, where are we going?”
“Have you still got my cell phone?” I demanded.
It was a clear, chilly night with the stars like ice pellets littering the sky. Across the bay, the lights on Campobello lay in a long row, reflecting on the still dark water.
“Yes,” Maggie said, producing it, “but why—?”
I took it from her, punched the button that dialed my home number. “Didn’t it occur to you that Kris might have mentioned you to Bill? That you could be in real danger?” I asked angrily.
But of course it hadn’t. Maggie was only nineteen, and nineteen-year-olds are immortal in their own eyes. Besides, the one I was really mad at was myself, for letting her do it.
Ellie pursued another thought. “Kris and Bill,” she said. “That’s how he could have gotten the notes into Bella’s house.”
“And how he could’ve gotten the skillet,” I said, listening to my phone ringing.
“Kris could’ve told Imrie when Bella would and wouldn’t be able to alibi herself, too,” Ellie added as we reached the parking lot across from Wadsworth’s Hardware Store.
“He could’ve done it at lunchtime when he leaves the bank,” I agreed. “We never really suspected Kris because she did have an alibi, and probably couldn’t have written the notes—”
“All those big words . . . but what we never considered was that she could have been someone’s accomplice,” Ellie concluded.
Both tugboats hunkered placidly at the pier, lines as thick as a man’s forearm looped over the wooden pilings. Nearby, the enormous landmark fisherman statue loomed over us.
All familiar, but all now disorientingly different in light of what I’d just learned, that Kris Diamond was i
n close and probably even regular contact with Bill Imrie.
Wade finally answered the phone, reporting that the baby was asleep; he and George had been upstairs in the shop. Sam was there but Kris wasn’t; according to Wade, she’d blown Sam off at the last minute to do something else.
Summoned, perhaps, by Bill Imrie? Because maybe Maggie thought her comment about the notes hadn’t alerted Imrie, but I wasn’t so sure.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up before Wade could ask questions; there wasn’t time for them.
“Wait a minute,” Maggie objected suddenly. “I’m no fan of Kris’s, but one thing I do know. Even she wouldn’t get her mom in this kind of trouble on purpose. Besides,” she went on, “Kris depends on her mother. What’ll she live on if her mom goes to jail?”
Sam, maybe. Or Bill Imrie. But Maggie had a point. It had seemed to me that Kris was genuinely worried about Bella. Would she deliberately set her own mother up to be blamed for a murder?
“Yeah,” I said as we piled into the car. “You could be right about that. But she’s no rocket scientist, remember?”
The Fiat’s tires squealed as I pulled out. But the hell with it, I was in a hurry.
“That’s why I’ll bet Kris had no idea what she was really doing,” I went on as we roared up Washington Street and out onto Route 190, headed for Imrie’s place.
“But now,” I added as we took the turn onto Kendall’s Head Road, climbing the steep curves until the whole of Passamaquoddy Bay spread darkly out below, “now she could be the only one who knows what Imrie’s really been up to.”
And if I were Imrie, once it occurred to me that Kris was my weak spot, I was pretty sure I knew what I would do about it.
And soon. Maybe even tonight. When the lights of his place came into view, I slowed the Fiat until its engine was a mild purr.
“Whatever she knew, though,” I went on as we pulled to the side of the road, “and whatever Bill told her, by now Kris could be figuring out the truth.”
“Maybe he said Bella would think Jim was behind the notes, and that would help get rid of Jim somehow?” Maggie theorized aloud.
“Sure. And later, when Kris knew different, her complicity in delivering the notes would keep her silent,” Ellie added. “The fact that she was involved in Jim’s murder whether or not she’d realized it . . . that would probably be enough to scare her into shutting up. For a while . . .”
“So she’d be afraid to tell the truth about what she’d done, once she understood it?” Maggie said slowly. “Maybe hoping it would all work out okay without her having to confess her part?”
From her face I saw that she could relate to this notion: her own recent experience with Jim Diamond’s body had made it terribly vivid for her.
“Yeah, something like that,” I said.
I got out, taking care not to slam the car door. “But Imrie must have known from the start he couldn’t depend on Kris to keep her mouth shut forever. And now that we’ve been asking questions . . .”
“He’ll be getting nervous,” Ellie concluded grimly.
Quietly we walked toward Bill Imrie’s farmhouse. Ahead in the darkness its windows beckoned, glowing warmly like the lights in a cottage out of a familiar fairy tale.
Kris’s car wasn’t in the driveway. We made our way down it anyway, and across the path to the front door.
Inside, music was playing. It was Funkhouse II, the same CD I had admired at the Blue Moon. But now its impressionistic keyboard/percussion sound had a sinister tone, like the score of some particularly literate postironic slasher film.
I just hoped we weren’t walking into one of the really scary parts.
The door stood open about an inch.
Chapter 14
Uh-oh,” Ellie said softly.
The inside of the house looked like one of Imrie’s saw blades had ripped through it. Chairs were overturned, dishes shattered, and a leaf from the dining room table had been smashed right through one of the windows.
Ellie went over and turned the music off. But the resulting silence wasn’t any more pleasant. “Kris?” she called.
No answer. Nothing moved. A sheet of white paper lay on what remained of the table.
“It’s a note,” Ellie said, snatching it up. “I think . . .”
Swiftly I scanned the thing over her shoulder. “This is a confession.”
“That sneaky little bastard,” Ellie said. “All this time he’s been playing the goody-goody . . .”
“But what’s it say?” Maggie demanded.
“It says he was in on the check-forging scheme with Jim Diamond, that he told Kris so, and then Kris threatened to tell on him unless he got rid of Jim Diamond for her, that’s what it says.”
I thought a moment. “But that doesn’t sound right.”
Ellie agreed. “He didn’t even want to talk about how he was innocent in the check fraud. So why tell Kris he was guilty?”
Our eyes met. “So maybe,” I postulated, “he didn’t write this?”
Maggie caught on. “Maybe she did?” Then, “Oh, my god,” she breathed, pointing at the floor. “Look!”
It was blood, smeared on the floor in a path leading ominously to the kitchen. There it pooled briefly by the phone, then led out the side door, where the trail disappeared in the darkness.
“Switch a light on,” I called back to Ellie, who stood behind me in the doorway.
The yard light mounted over the door blazed suddenly across the lawn, revealing the faint blackish shine of more blood on the grass. Maggie appeared beside me.
“I looked upstairs,” she said. “No one’s there. But from the window you can see Kris’s car behind the barn. That’s where she always puts it when . . .”
When she’s here. Which she was now; maybe hiding, because she was guilty of all this.
But maybe hurt. Or worse. Something bad had happened here, that was for sure, and the blood trail suggested that afterward someone had been trying to get to the barn, perhaps to the car.
“We should call Bob Arnold right now,” I said, turning to go back inside. “Somebody needs an ambulance.”
But Maggie had gone ahead of me down the barn path. “Oh!” she cried. Ellie ran with me to where the girl bent over something.
No. Not something. It was Bill Imrie. And from the amount of blood spreading blackly out around him, I knew he must be dead. Even so, I crouched hastily by him, hoping against hope.
But a small hole darkened his shirt, more blood staining it. He had no pulse, and his throat when I touched it was cool.
“He’s been shot,” I reported. And he’d been here a while. Which didn’t make sense, either. If Kris had shot him, why was she still here? And . . .
“Where’d she get a gun?” Ellie wondered aloud.
I wondered that as well. I was even more curious as to whether she still had it, and was aiming it at us from somewhere in the darkness.
Out in the fenced yard the goats milled uneasily as if they too knew something was wrong. “Ellie,” I began nervously. “Maybe we should . . .”
But before I could finish, we heard it: machinery running in the barn. Next came a metallic whang! I recognized from Wade’s workshop: the sound of a big round blade starting to turn.
Someone had turned on the circular saw in Imrie’s sawmill. “Go,” I ordered Maggie. “Call Bob Arnold, tell him we need him out here immediately.”
She ran toward the house as I looked down at Imrie again. A dozen possibilities ran through my head. Had he tried to silence Kris and had the tables turned on him? Or had she been behind Jim Diamond’s death all along, with Imrie as her fall guy?
Then it hit me: Ellie. She’d already crept to the open door of the barn, and was peeking in.
And she didn’t belong here. “Ellie, you get back to the . . .”
Car, I intended to say. Out of danger. But she just waved me urgently closer, then slipped inside.
The noise of the machinery in the barn was shockingly loud. Hear
ing protectors dangled on a hook by the door, but I ignored them. The last thing I needed was to know even less about what was going on here. Anxiously I scanned the interior of the barn, looking for Ellie.
The saw mechanism and the conveyor belt feeding the blade were on the far side of the big, open-raftered enclosure. Above, a set of fluorescent tubes flooded the place with harsh white illumination, turning the spinning saw blade to a disc of silvery light.
The barn smelled sweetly of sawdust and, faintly, of something else. Ellie appeared beside me so suddenly I gasped. I waved her out but she shook her head stubbornly. So together we moved among the piles of sawed hardwood.
As Ellie took another step into the maze created by the lumber, a sound came from behind us. A loud sound, but that saw was still running and in the thunder of machinery I couldn’t identify it.
“Maggie?” I began tentatively over my shoulder.
Then I stopped. Two new thoughts hit me and neither of them was cheerful. One, that the smell I’d been noticing was gun oil.
And two, that it wasn’t Maggie standing behind me.
It was Lydia Duckworth, her neat pageboy hairdo disheveled and her lower lip, devoid of lipstick, beginning to swell. Imrie had slugged her, it looked like, in their struggle.
But .22-caliber beats a knuckle sandwich just about every time. Lydia had already fired once; that was the sound I’d heard. Now she smiled unpleasantly, waving me toward her with the gun.
“I guess you’re not here to protect us,” I shouted over the roar of the saw. I kept my eyes on the gun she held. “Or have I got that wrong, too?”
I couldn’t have said what kind of gun it was. One of those rocket launchers I’d been wishing for a few days earlier, maybe.
Right now it looked big enough to be one. And her hand was surprisingly steady. “You weren’t really drunk when you called me, were you, Lydia?” I asked.