by Kathi Daley
“There are some small details that would need to be addressed for this theory to play out in real life, but it is an idea worth looking into. I already planned to pull financial records for Elena and Damian, so I’ll pull them for Bloomfield as well.”
“Liv also said that there were a lot more people with access to the gallery than the four or five Elena mentioned. According to Liv, several artists had the code, including Damian and Bloomfield. She didn’t have a complete list, but she said that Elena seemed to be lax in allowing her artists to have access to their work even when the gallery was closed. I wondered about that. Elena had worked for high-end galleries for years. Surely, she would understand the importance of a tight security system. Giving out the security code to anyone who asked seems lazy and irresponsible.”
“Unless it was intentional,” Colt said.
“Exactly. Unless Elena wanted to create a situation which would make it difficult to track down a thief or killer based on the number of individuals with the code.”
“As crazy as this whole thing sounds, I wouldn’t put it past Elena to hand out the code to anyone and everyone to widen the suspect field,” Colt agreed. “Of course, we’ll need more. Something tangible that puts her at the gallery when Damian died. Even if we can prove she was behind the art thefts, we really have nothing that would demonstrate that she’d killed the man who seemed to have been her friend and possibly her partner for quite a few years.”
Colt did seem to have an uphill battle in front of him if he wanted to prove that Elena killed Damian. Maybe there would be something in her financial records. A payout or series of payouts would be a good start. I supposed simply keeping an eye on her now that she was free was another good strategy. If she actually had killed Damian, I wouldn’t put it past her to run. She had the gallery, but she didn’t really have roots that would keep her here if staying meant facing a murder charge.
Chapter 13
Thursday was the hundredth anniversary of Cedric Banning’s death. It was the day Alaric hoped to commemorate by sharing the answers to the questions he’d come to Holiday Bay to look into two weeks ago. When I’d spoken to him this past weekend, he’d shared that he had plans to go to the museum to look at the old newspapers he’d been led to understand were stored there, but the museum was closed Monday through Wednesday, so he’d had to wait to look up the information he was after until today.
Georgia and I both wanted Alaric to be successful in his quest, so we planned to leave Jeremy in charge of the inn while we accompanied the man into town. We knew he planned to check out and return home tomorrow, so we really hoped he’d find his answers today.
“So what did Colt have to say?” Georgia asked. I’d completed my phone call and reentered the kitchen while we waited for the museum to open at ten a.m.
“He said that when confronted with the evidence he’d dug up as well as the murder charge in Damian’s death, Elena confessed to the insurance fraud scheme at two of the galleries she’d worked at in the past.”
Georgia’s mouth fell open. “Really? I wasn’t expecting that. Does he know why she would do such a thing?”
I slid onto a stool. “As you know, Colt has spent the week chasing down financial information for Damian, Elena, and Bloomfield. I guess he found some interesting patterns in Elena’s records, which seemed to confirm our theory relating to insurance fraud. Elena appeared to have acted as the inside person for thefts in two of the galleries she worked at before opening her own gallery. As we’d already figured out, she aided artists whose work was highly valued yet who still struggled financially. The scheme consisted of them stealing their own work so they could collect the insurance that had been taken out during exhibits they’d agreed to participate in. The artist would collect the payout and then sell the original piece to a collector on the black market, thereby collecting the value of the painting twice. Elena would then be given a cut of the proceeds.”
Georgia turned on the dishwasher. “I guess I can see why Elena might participate in such a thing at the galleries she’d worked at in the past, but I don’t understand why she would go to all the trouble to start her own gallery and then create such a hubbub.”
“According to Colt, she didn’t. Colt said that Elena insisted that she had not been involved in the theft of the artwork that turned up missing during Bloomfield’s exhibit, and, according to Colt, he didn’t find any financial information that would indicate otherwise. Of course, the payment from the insurance company is months away and won’t occur until after they do their own investigation, but for some reason, Colt believes her.”
“So someone else stole the art?”
“That would seem to be the case.”
“And Damian?” Georgia asked.
“Colt said Elena still insists she had nothing to do with Damian’s death. She swears she left the gallery around twelve-thirty with everyone else and didn’t return until the following day when she heard about Damian’s death. At this point, Elena has been charged with her part in the past insurance scams, but it looks like the murder charge against her might be dropped. The DA seemed convinced that she would never have admitted to the fraud if she’d committed the murder. Colt isn’t as sure about that, but it’s up to the DA to decide whether or not to pursue the murder charge at this point. In the meantime, Colt is going to continue to dig.”
Georgia glanced at the clock. “I’m going to run back to the cottage and change my clothes. We’re supposed to meet Alaric out by his car in twenty minutes.”
“Okay, I’ll take the dogs out for a quick bathroom break and meet you out there.”
As we approached the museum, it occurred to me that it hadn’t been all that long since the museum had been the center of its own murder investigation. Of course, by this point, the killer had been caught, the murder solved, a new director hired, and things were mostly back to normal. I hadn’t met the new director or the new volunteers who’d been brought on board after Patrick’s death but had heard that the board had things running as smoothly as ever.
After introducing ourselves and explaining what we’d come for, the three of us were shown to a table in a room at the back of the small building and provided with the first stack of old newspapers. We were each allowed five newspapers at a time, which we could view and then return for five more. As we expected, the personal columns written by Cedric seemed to grow darker as October twenty-first neared. They weren’t quite as personal and heartfelt as the entries in the diary Alaric had found, but it did seem that the mood of the daily column he wrote mirrored the mood of the diary entries he’d kept during his final days. To this point, I hadn’t actually seen the diary, although Alaric had talked about it on numerous occasions. He’d brought it with him today, however, so he could refer to it if need be as we combed through the newspapers. Seeing it sitting there on the table caused me to wonder when the dark posts had begun.
“Cedric seemed like a cheery guy in the beginning,” Alaric said. “He had big dreams and the drive and determination to make them happen. He moved to Holiday Bay when he was a young man, bought the old cinder block building and a used press, and started turning out the weekly edition. It was only two pages in the beginning, but he worked hard, and it grew to the point where he had enough income from advertisers to hire a part-time employee. Actually, more than one. He hired a series of young boys to deliver the newspaper to folks in town, and he hired Jasmine to help write some of the human interest pieces in nineteen fifteen.”
“And did it seem that there was a problem between Jasmine and Cedric right away?” I asked.
“No. Not at all. He mentions being quite happy with her work, and they seemed to be friends. He mentions them stopping off after work for a drink together on the way home, and he even mentions taking her to dinner a few times.”
Uh oh. I had a feeling I knew where this was heading. “So when did the problems seem to start?”
“The dark entries don’t really come into play until a year or so be
fore Cedric died. I know from my research that in nineteen eighteen, Cedric ran into some financial hardships, so Jasmine offered to help him out in exchange for a fifty percent share of the newspaper. I think, in the beginning, this worked out well for both of them. They had been working together for three years by this point, and seemed to have met with a level of success.”
“Did Cedric mention why he fell onto hard times in nineteen eighteen?” I asked.
“No. He never said specifically. I know he was married to my great-grandmother at that point, a woman named Arianna. I also know that my grandfather, Cedric’s son, Owen, was born in nineteen fifteen. There is mention that Owen had medical issues when he was young, so I suppose that it might have been medical care for Owen that was behind the financial issues. After Jasmine brought a cash infusion to the business, things were fine at first. Or at least they seemed fine. Then at some point during the summer of nineteen nineteen, I noticed a shift. It seemed to me, based on what I read, that Arianna may have strayed. Cedric never said as much in so many words, but he hinted at it, and he mentioned the pressure Arianna was under due to the demands of raising a sickly child while also living with limited means to deal with the child’s illness. I think this caused a rift in the marriage.”
“Did Cedric seem understanding of Arianna’s plight, or did he seem angry?” Georgia asked.
“Angry. He mentioned on many occasions that he’d begun to spend more time at the newspaper, even going so far as to set up a cot to avoid going home. It seemed that Jasmine was there for him in the beginning, but something caused a rift between them, and once that occurred, he began to drink steadily. I guess that was when everything really began to fall apart. Cedric began losing advertisers, which resulted in a loss of income, which caused even more discord between himself and Jasmine. According to what I’ve learned during my interviews, Jasmine tried to bring in an investor who was interested in buying Cedric out, but he refused to sell. Meanwhile, things at home had continued to go downhill for Cedric. He was sure that Arianna had a man on the side, and the whole situation made him miserable. More than miserable. He really did seem suicidal. He began to fantasize in his journals about his body and soul merging with the sea. He talked about being lured to the edge of the precipice and taking that final step. He began to provide detailed descriptions of what he thought death would be like. He definitely had a glorified image of death in his mind. Until I came across the article in the Bar Harbor newspaper that said he’d been stabbed in the back, I really assumed he’d committed suicide.”
“What exactly did the article you found say?” I asked.
Alaric handed it to me. It was a short piece, really nothing more than an obituary, written by a man who said that Cedric, a newspaperman like himself, had been found dead at the bottom of a bluff north of Holiday Bay after being stabbed in the back.
I let that idea roll around in my mind for a while.
“Jasmine had her baby on October twentieth, nineteen twenty, which means she would have become pregnant in mid-January if she’d had a normal pregnancy,” I said. “Is there anything either in the columns Cedric wrote or in the diary in mid-January that would indicate that he knew about Jasmine getting together with Irene’s father? Jasmine never married the man, and based on what you’ve said, she never mentioned the name of her daughter’s father. But Cedric and Jasmine saw each other every day. Maybe he knew something or at least suspected something. Maybe he even wrote about it.”
Alaric picked up the diary and thumbed through until he found the January nineteen twenty entries. I watched his face as he skimmed the entries and couldn’t help but notice his look of interest deepen to a frown.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There is something. Cedric penned an entry on January eighteenth about making a huge mistake. He doesn’t pen another entry until March twenty-sixth. I’m not sure why I never noticed the gap before. I guess I wasn’t looking at the dates.”
“And when he begins writing again,” I asked, “what sort of tone do you notice?”
“It seems fine. Not overly optimistic, but not dark either. The dark entries begin to show up in late September. I don’t know what happened at this point, but there are a lot of skipped days, and those days he did pen an entry to his journal, his depression seems very evident.” Alaric looked toward where I was sitting. “Is there a reason all this is so important? If Cedric was stabbed in the back, he was murdered. What difference does it make if he was happy or sad, or if he was getting along with Jasmine or in the middle of a feud with her? Unless, of course, you do think she killed him or had him killed.”
“Actually, I think that Cedric may have been Irene’s father,” I said.
Alaric’s brow furrowed. “Her father. But Cedric was married.”
“To a woman, who it sounds as if he didn’t love, who very well could have been spending time with another man. It sounds to me like Cedric began working late and even stayed over at the newspaper to avoid going home. It also sounds as if, in the beginning, Jasmine supported him. She was both a friend and a business partner to him. Maybe she tried to comfort him, and perhaps that comfort turned to something else. It does sound as if things really fell apart after January, which is when this brief affair most likely took place.”
“So Jasmine realizes she’s pregnant and decides to cut things off with Cedric, which sends him spiraling,” Georgia picked up the thread. “He begins to drink even more heavily than he had been, and the financial situation gets worse. Jasmine goes looking for an investor and finds one, but the only way the man will invest is if Cedric is gone, and he is given half ownership. Cedric’s half. Jasmine thinks this is a good solution, but Cedric says no, which creates even more of a rift with Jasmine. Cedric becomes even more depressed. Maybe he didn’t know the baby was his. Perhaps Jasmine lied and told him that she’d been with another man. Or maybe she lied to him to protect him. To protect herself. To protect her baby.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” Alaric said.
“At this point, we’re just telling a story,” Georgia responded.
“It does make sense,” I said. “After Jasmine realized she was pregnant, she broke things off with Cedric, possibly even telling him the baby belonged to another man. This sent him over the edge, and things went from bad to worse. Maybe it was at this point that he started to fantasize about death. It sounds as if he’d even picked out a place and means of death, but something was tying him to this world, and he wasn’t ready to go through with it. Then Jasmine had her baby, and what? He couldn’t deal with the fact she’d been with another man, so he headed to the bluff he’d already picked out and jumped?”
“What about the whole stabbing in the back thing?” Alaric asked.
“It would help if we had a police report or something that actually described how Cedric died,” Georgia said. “All we have at this point is one man who seemed to have been Cedric’s friend making a reference to Cedric being stabbed in the back. What if he didn’t mean that literally? What if he meant that Cedric was betrayed by someone important to him, which caused him to jump from the bluff and end up on the rocks north of Holiday Bay?”
None of us spoke, but Georgia’s idea about the stab to the back actually being a metaphor for what happened to Cedric rather than an actual stabbing did make a lot of sense. He’d seemed to have been in a lot of pain. It seemed as if he’d begun to fantasize about death. It seemed as if he’d even imagined exactly how it would all play out, but had just been waiting for the right time. Or maybe suicide wasn’t something he was going to do, but simply thought about. What if something happened the day Irene was born to send him totally over the edge?
“If Cedric loved Jasmine, and she was carrying his child, the fact that the baby was born shouldn’t have caused him to act on the death fantasy,” I said. “However, if he believed that the baby was his, and when she was born, he could clearly see that she wasn’t, that might have given him a reason to take the leap he’d been planni
ng in his head for months.”
“Naya does look as if she could have had an ancestor of color,” Alaric said.
“So maybe Jasmine became pregnant, and Cedric was sure it was his,” Georgia jumped in. “Maybe Jasmine let him believe the baby was his or maybe she told him right up front that it wasn’t. There was a rift between the two, but maybe Cedric believed deep down that once the baby was born, he and Jasmine would find their way back to each other for the good of their child.”
“But then the baby came, and it was evident that the father was black, so Cedric lost all hope and killed himself,” I concluded.
“It all works as a story, but I’m afraid there is no way to prove any of this,” Georgia said.
Alaric leaned back in his chair. “No. I guess there isn’t. Anyone who would have known for sure what happened is long dead. But I have learned a lot about my great-grandfather, both good and bad. And I have met a lot of wonderful people who have set aside time from their day to talk to me and help me figure this out. I don’t feel that this trip was a waste. I suppose I will continue to look for answers, but even if I never find out another thing about what happened, I feel that I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. I leave tomorrow and don’t want to miss out on Georgia’s cooking tonight, so perhaps it’s time to let it rest.”