A Side of Murder

by Amy Pershing

  bn drnkng & no prf or rsn y

  “‘Eck cluh ree sah,’” Krista said obligingly, and looked up at me blankly. “Means nothing to me.”

  “Keep going,” I said.

  “‘Sid three—’” cl she began, but I interrupted her before she could go any further.

  “Three!” I said triumphantly. “You read I, I, I as the Roman numeral three!”

  “Indeed, I did,” Krista acknowledged. “So what?”

  “What else can the Roman numeral three be read as?”

  Enlightenment dawned. “The third,” Krista said slowly.

  “Exactly,” I said. “As in?”

  “As in Tyler Gorman the third,” Krista said, scribbling it down on a pad of paper in front of her: Tyler Gorman III. “Trey. So you think your mother was referring to Trey Gorman?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “And why do you think she was referring to Trey Gorman? I mean, aside from the coincidence that he had her notebook in his possession, probably by accident.”

  “Because I’ve had more experience reading my mother’s notes than you have,” I explained. “I haven’t figured it all out. But some of it is suggestive.”

  I pointed to the first line: ek cl re sa. “I read this as ‘EK call about’—re means about—‘SA.’”

  Krista looked serious and nodded. “Go on.”

  I pointed to the second line: sd III stpng on pps.

  “‘Said Trey stepping on pee pees.’” I looked up at Krista. “I admit I don’t know what pee pees are.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Krista said briskly. “Keep going.”

  I stared hard at the next line: bn drnkng & no prf or rsn y.

  “‘Been drinking and no proof or reason why’?” I guessed.

  Krista shook her head slowly. “Even in your translation it doesn’t make any sense. Trey was stepping on pee pees? What does that even mean? And who’s EK? And who’s SA? And who’s been drinking?”

  “Estelle Kobolt,” I said triumphantly. “EK is Estelle Kobolt, of course. And SA isn’t a who, it’s a what. Skaket Acres. And if history is any guide, it was Estelle who’d been drinking. And whatever she was accusing Trey of, she had no proof that he’d done it or, if he did, any reason why.”

  What I didn’t say was that this might be further evidence that Estelle was in the habit of digging up dirt about people. I wanted Krista to think my interest was in Trey and Skaket Acres, not Estelle. Maybe that way she wouldn’t shut me down.

  “Oookaaay,” Krista acknowledged slowly. “That sounds like Estelle.”

  I reached across Krista’s desk and pressed the speaker button on her phone, then started punching in numbers.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  “What we are doing is going straight to the horse’s mouth,” I announced. “We are calling my mom.”

  Krista sighed. “Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”

  The phone on the other end started ringing.

  “You’ll see,” I said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It took a bit of time to actually go straight to the horse’s mouth. After ten rings, there was radio silence for three seconds, then a kind of scrabbling noise and then my mother’s voice.

  “Hello, hello, hello?” she yelled into the phone.

  “Mom, it’s me, Sam.”

  “Is anybody there?” she responded. This was par for the course. I waited patiently while she swore quietly to herself, realized that she had the sound off on her end, punched it on again. We went through the whole “hello, hello, hello” and “Mom, it’s me, Sam” routine again, this time more successfully.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, her voice anxious. This is always the first question. Always.

  “Everything is fine, Mom,” I said. Before I could get any further, she interrupted.

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on, sweetheart. Let me get your dad. He’d never forgive me if he missed you.”

  Krista and I waited while my mother searched the house for my father (who was, of course, in the garage) and while the two of them figured out (for about the hundredth time) how to put my mom’s phone on speaker.

  “Sam? Is that you, honey?” my father shouted.

  “Hi, Dad. Yeah, it’s me. No need to shout, I can hear you fine.”

  “Is everything okay?” he shouted.

  I sighed. “Everything is fine. I’ve got Krista here, too.”

  “Krista!” both the ’rents shouted simultaneously. “How are you! Is everything okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes,” Krista said, rolling her eyes at me. “Everything’s great. We, Sam and I, we just wanted to ask you, Mrs. Barnes that is, about something . . . something work related.”

  And suddenly my helpless, technology addled mom turned back into a professional journalist. It was a relief quite frankly.

  “Absolutely,” she said firmly. “How can I help?”

  “Mom, do you remember what story you were working on in the days just before Dad’s heart attack?”

  She said nothing for a moment, but I could almost hear the wheels whirring in that steel-trap brain of hers. Veronica Barnes never forgot anything about her work.

  “Yes,” she said definitively. “That was almost exactly two years ago. I was looking into the specs for the septic system at that proposed development on the old Skaket camp.”

  Krista raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Any new developments and resorts planned for waterfront are subject to strict regulations because their septic’s gravel disposal fields are so close to the water,” my mother continued. “The big danger, of course, is nitrogen seepage and algae blooms.”

  “Right,” Krista said, pulling a notebook over and beginning to take notes.

  “I was checking with the Conservation Law Foundation to make sure the developers, Gorman Properties, had presented an accurate discharge estimate, based on similar projects.”

  “And had they?” I asked. I was beginning to get excited. I’d completely forgotten about pee pees and Estelle. Sewage treatment! This was the stuff of cover-ups!

  “Absolutely accurate,” my mother said. “If anything, they had overestimated the septic needs in an excess of caution.”

  Talk about a letdown.

  “So, it was all kosher,” Krista said, pushing her notebook away.

  “All kosher.”

  Which, in hindsight, made sense. My mother wouldn’t have given up on the story if things hadn’t been kosher. No matter how many heart attacks my dad had.

  “Mom,” I said. “The reason we’re asking about this is because we . . . found . . . were looking at . . .” I just couldn’t face trying to explain Trey and the saga of the traveling notepad.

  I started again. “We’re just doing some follow-through on the latest plans for the development, and I was looking through your old notes and saw something about an EK? Did someone named Estelle Kobolt call you?”

  “You mean the woman who drowned last week in Alden Pond?”

  I should have expected her to know all about that. Old journalists don’t die, they just read it all online.

  “Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard. I knew I should tell her and Dad that I’d found the body, but something held me back. “Her. Did you talk to her back then? Something to do with Trey Gorman?”

  “Oh yeah,” my mother said with a little laugh. “Well, sort of. She’d been drinking or was high on something and she called me with some wild story about Trey killing piping plovers.”

  PPs. Piping plovers. “Killing them how?”

  “She said she was out on her boat and saw him up on that dune at the old camp, the high one over the beach, stomping on the chicks, she said.”

  “But that’s awful,” I exclaimed. Who stomps on baby birds? I didn’t want to believ
e it of Trey. I mean, the guy had his issues, but surely he wasn’t a bird killer.

  Then I reminded myself that I was, at least temporarily, a journalist. If piping plovers were nesting on the Skaket dune, no one living at the proposed Skaket Acres would be able to use the beach through most of the summer. And that, I suspected, was a deal breaker. But still, Trey killing baby birds?

  “Estelle had to be at least a hundred yards away,” I pointed out. “She might have been able to see him, but those chicks are tiny and the nests are just shallow holes in the sand. Could she really see what he was stepping on?”

  “Exactly what I asked her. She said she could see it by zooming her cell phone’s camera,” my mother said. “But I just couldn’t take her seriously, you know? She was rambling—she really seemed to have it in for Trey, kept calling him ‘that snotty preppie.’ Finally, I just told her that unless she had some proof, one, that piping plovers actually nested in that area, which to my recollection they don’t”—a hazy memory tugged at me, something from last Sunday’s dinner, then drifted away as my mother continued—“and, two, unless she could send me a photo of Trey actually destroying nests or birds or whatever, I couldn’t help her. She said she didn’t have the ‘first frigging idea’ how to send anything from her cell phone, but if I came to the Inn she’d show the photo to me. Then I said if she really had something to show me, she could bring the phone to my office. Then she called me an asswipe and hung up.”

  “Niiice,” I said.

  “I’ve been called worse,” my mother said dryly. “And actually, I’m glad I didn’t follow up on it because she called me a few days later, sober as a judge, and took it all back. Said Trey had stiffed her on a tip at the Inn and she wanted to get back at him.”

  “That sounds like Estelle all right,” I said.

  “She said she saw him on that dune and came up with that piping plover story. The new conservation restrictions had just come into play, so everyone was talking about it.” In my mind’s eye, I again saw my father’s note about the editorial favoring protecting the nesting grounds. “She told him she was going to call me, make trouble for him. I’m guessing he, in turn, reminded her about libel laws. Once she sobered up, she called me back, retracted the whole thing.”

  Krista looked at me and made a cutting gesture across her throat.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry to interrupt your day. We’ve gotta go. We just wanted to check on that.”

  “Well, it’s important to keep in mind that even though most whistleblowers are trying to do the right thing, there are always a few who just like making trouble,” my mother said, ever the objective journalist. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t telling the truth. But in this case, it was pretty clear to me that there wasn’t any ‘there’ there.”

  The rest of the conversation was basically me trying to get off the phone while my parents tried not very subtly to find out what my plans were for the rest of my life. I danced around that for a while until Krista finally stepped in with a “Great to talk to you, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes!” and punched the off button on the phone.

  “So that was much ado about nothing,” she said to me.

  “I guess,” I admitted reluctantly. Maybe I should try again with Krista, now that we had what looked like a pattern of Estelle of at least threatening blackmail. “But I have a bad feeling about this. There’s a couple of things that bother me—”

  “Don’t start,” Krista said, raising a hand like a crossing guard. “Unless you have something substantive to base your bad feeling on, I don’t have time for it.”

  She didn’t have time for it? We were getting close to proof that Estelle was a blackmailer, and she didn’t have time for it? What was she afraid of?

  “What I do have time for is another restaurant review,” Krista said firmly. “How about that new Thai restaurant in Chatham?”

  If you want to distract me from any subject at hand, there’s no better way than to say the words “Thai food.” I absolutely love, love, love Thai food. Give me a plate of good pad Thai—very spicy hot and not sweet—and I am your slave for life.

  But I wasn’t fooled or happy about Krista once again fobbing me off the Estelle inquiry. It wasn’t like Krista not to follow up on a dodgy story. But I figured I had time to think that one out.

  I figured wrong.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The evening was drawing down as I drove back to Aunt Ida’s. In spite of my best efforts, I couldn’t stop replaying the coldness in Jason’s eyes when he’d roared past the Milagro. As I crunched into the driveway, I was actually looking forward to seeing Diogi. I really needed a little unconditional positive regard.

  Diogi greeted me at the door and performed his role to perfection. He didn’t care that I’d been caught almost kissing a man who, as it turned out, I really didn’t like all that much by a man who, let’s face it, I liked a lot and who now didn’t seem to like me at all. Diogi, however, was like Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary—he liked me just as I was.

  When we were done exchanging greetings, I said to him, “I would love a glass of wine right about now. Why don’t you go find Helene?” I didn’t really expect him to go find Helene, of course. I was just doing that thing where you talk to your dog because it’s nice to have someone to talk to. But Diogi cocked his head at the sound of Helene’s name and then took off through the hedge like a man on a mission.

  Sure enough, in about two minutes he was back with the lady in question. My neighbor was wearing what can only be described as harem pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Fortune favors the brave.” Best of all, she had a glass of wine in her hand.

  “Hey!” she shouted as she came through the bushes, “Diogi seemed to think I was needed.”

  I laughed and said, “He’s smarter than he looks, that dog.”

  Helene lifted her glass to me. “You want to come over for a drink on the deck?”

  She didn’t have to ask twice. I grabbed a leftover bottle of wine from Sunday’s dinner and followed her back through the hedge.

  I’d seen the house next door once or twice as a child, before the yew bushes got too thick. But back then I’d been well primed by my great-aunt to view its boxlike shape and spare lines as somehow an affront to traditional Cape architecture. I came through the sandy path between the bushes and stopped short.

  Looking at the house now, I could see that, in fact, with its simplicity and focus on function, it both echoed those traditions and made them work in new ways. First of all, it was not a large house. It was modest, really, in the old Cape fashion. The roof was flat, though, not peaked, and slanted up from the front of the house to the back, giving it a decidedly mid-century modern feel (which was not surprising, since it had been built in the sixties). And, yes, the side of the house that faced the pond was essentially a wall of glass. But the rest of the house was sheathed in traditional cedar shingles, with crisp white trim outlining the windows and doors. There had been no attempt to create a grass lawn, but I could see that in the summer the grounds would be a lovely tangle of native plants like wild roses and beach plums. The front door was painted a brilliant and, needless to say, untraditional neon yellow, but I was very pleased to note a conch shell next to the front step. I was willing to bet it held a spare key.

  Helene led me into what was essentially one large living space whose ceiling soared to almost double height at the wall of windows overlooking her deck and Bower’s Pond beyond. The kitchen area was to the left, dining area to the right and, ahead of us, a low-slung couch and two equally low-slung chairs faced the expansive view of water and sky.

  “I love this,” I breathed.

  “I love it, too,” Helene said. “I knew as soon as I saw it that we were meant to be together.” She laughed. “Of course, I said that about my ex-husband, too. But this has been a much better marriage.”

  Diogi, Helene, and I sa
t companionably on her deck, watching the sun setting in great red and gold streaks over the pond. We chatted about books for a while, and she promised to hold the new Lisa Scottoline for me when it came into the library.

  “And in return,” I said, “I’d like to invite you to be my guest at the new Thai restaurant in Chatham next week.”

  “Will you be providing another dead body?”

  Helene’s sense of humor, it struck me, was sometimes in questionable taste.

  “Oh dear God, I hope not,” I said, taking a big gulp of my wine. “The one I already found is being such a pain.”

  Helene must have heard the unhappiness that I was trying to keep out of my voice.

  “Really,” she said thoughtfully. “In what way?”

  So I told her the whole story, beginning with that fateful kiss twelve years ago with Jason up to today’s almost smooch with Trey.

  “Is your life always going to be marked by ill-considered snogging?” Helene asked, only half kidding. “First you tell me about this Trey’s dysfunctional family and how you don’t really trust him because he’s still under his unpleasant father’s thumb, and then you make out with him in public?”

  “Almost make out,” I corrected her. “And, believe me, it gets worse. Wait until you hear the other rumors about this guy.”

  I told her the tale of the traveling notebook and gave her the gist of the phone call with my mother, adding, “So we already knew that Estelle threatened to blackmail my father and now we know that she tried the same trick with Trey.”

  “And got nowhere,” Helene pointed out.

  “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t bleeding somebody else dry. And maybe they got tired of it.”

  Helene nodded thoughtfully.

  “So, am I crazy?” I asked. “Because both Jason and Krista are really keeping me at arm’s length on this. McCauley, too, but I don’t expect anything from him.”

  As we’d been talking, the sky had faded to a pale lilac, then cloaked itself in deep purple. The stars began to come out.