by Amy Pershing
But Helene wasn’t done.
“Just a second there, Nancy Drew,” she said. “I’ll take care of the cleanup. But am I right that, as far as Trey Gorman knows, you are the only person who’s aware of what’s in that notebook?”
I felt a chill go through me. “I guess so,” I said. “I didn’t tell him that I’d shared it with Krista.”
Helene grimaced. “Okay. You go. I need to make a quick phone call.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. But the horn honked again, more insistently this time.
“Thanks for the meal and the talk, Helene,” I said. “You’re a lifesaver.”
I turned to my faithful companion, who was sulking under the table because nobody had shared her lobster with him. As if. “Come on, Diogi,” I said. “Time to go home.”
It wasn’t until I was walking back to Aunt Ida’s through the gathering dusk that I began to feel a little uncomfortable at the thought of being alone in the house that night. Of course, I reminded myself, I had Diogi to bark any intruder into submission.
Miles was sitting in his truck with the driver’s side window down. I waved and started over to him.
“How did it go?”
“Very satisfying,” Miles said. “Big old dead squirrel in there. I threw the carcass in the briar patch so Diogi wouldn’t roll in it. That gutter should work fine now. You’re lucky, you know. Your house is actually pretty solid.”
“Aunt Ida’s house,” I corrected him automatically, but he was still talking, using words like pointing and flashing and other incomprehensible terminology. But I let him go on, nodding encouragingly here and there because that’s what you do with friends. Especially friends who snake your drainpipes.
When he’d exhausted the topic of renovating Aunt Ida’s house, I waved him off. “Thanks for being a buddy,” I said.
He gave me a thumbs-up and I stood there like an abandoned child as my friend left me to deal with . . . well . . . whatever it was I was dealing with.
* * *
* * *
In lieu of a walk, I threw Diogi’s disgusting tennis ball for him about a bazillion times until it grew too dark for him to find it. I was just turning to go into the ell when I again heard the crunch of tires on shells. Miles coming back to get something he’d forgotten? Or Trey to “finish this”?
Neither, as it turned out. It was a white Ford Explorer with familiar lettering along the side. It was the Harbor Patrol vehicle.
The Explorer pulled up next to Grumpy at the end of the driveway. I walked over to the driver’s side and peered in the window. Jason was sitting there doing that very, very still thing of his, just looking back at me. The circles under his eyes betrayed his exhaustion, and I felt my heart ache a little. This was a man who needed to be taken care of. He worked too hard.
Oh no, girl. Do not go there.
I hardened my heart and rapped on the glass. Jason lowered the window. He still said nothing. It was unnerving.
“What are you doing in my driveway?”
“No idea,” he said tiredly. “Ask Helene. She called, told me to come out here. She said she was worried about you. Why would she be worried about you?”
I sighed. “It’s a long story. You better come in.”
Once Diogi got over the miraculous appearance of the Man with the Boat at his house, Jason and I settled down to business. I lit a fire in the woodstove and made some coffee. This was going to take a while.
Jason settled into one end of the couch with a soft grunt. “So much better than the front seat of the Explorer.” He stretched his long legs out toward the fire, leaned his head back, and ran a hand through his tangled hair, which did exactly nothing to tame it.
I handed him a coffee cup. “Helene told you to come here?”
“Yup,” he said, sipping his coffee gratefully. “This is really good coffee.”
“You have to get the grind just right for a French press,” I said, sitting as far away from him as I could get and still actually be on the couch. “Too coarse and you don’t get enough flavor, too fine and you get way too much sediment.”
“Well, you got it just right then.” That half smile of his again. But the eyes still looked tired. “Tell me why Helene is worried about you.”
“It’s Trey,” I said and stopped. Well, this is awkward.
“You and Gorman looked pretty friendly to me.” Was Jason just a teeny bit jealous?
“You were the one who literally threw us together,” I reminded him. “Going full throttle in a no-wake zone. And you the harbormaster.”
He looked momentarily uncomfortable. “I had bad guys to catch,” he said. He didn’t even try to make it sound believable.
“Good,” I said, “because Trey may, in fact, be a bad guy.”
Jason sat up, all his earlier ease gone. “Tell me.”
So I told him. I told him about finding my mother’s notebook in Trey’s car, and what it had revealed. I told him about what I’d learned from my visit to Suzanne. Jason listened with the still intensity that I was beginning to expect from him.
When I got to the part about Trey following me home, trying to snatch my bag from me, I thought I saw Jason’s eyes narrow slightly, but otherwise he remained impassive. Even when I mentioned my threat to fillet Trey like a fish, no response. Even when I told him about that moron kicking my dog, he barely reacted except to reach out and give Diogi a soft pat on the head. Which was more than I got, I thought. That’s how bad things had gotten. I was jealous of a dog.
I told him about talking with Helene and our theory that Trey might have drowned Estelle to silence her once and for all.
Jason nodded. “It makes sense.”
“I agree,” I said. “But something bothers me. . . .” I hesitated.
“Tell me,” Jason said, putting his coffee cup down and leaning toward me, his forearms on his legs. “I’m beginning to understand that when something bothers you, there’s a good reason for it.”
I figured that was about as close to an apology as I was ever going to get for his earlier dismissal of my concerns. Which was fine. I would take it.
“Why wait two years to kill her?” I couldn’t believe I was talking like this, thinking like this.
“Didn’t Trey tell you the delays on the Skaket Point development were getting expensive? Estelle was just one more drain on his pocketbook, and with the town meeting coming up, she was not exactly someone he could count on to keep her mouth shut. Not only could he no longer afford Estelle, he could no longer risk having her alive at all.”
“So why was Trey so concerned about my mother’s notes?” I asked. “Presumably, if he drowned Estelle, he has her cell phone and therefore the incriminating photo, so he has nothing to worry about. A scribbled page of unfounded claims isn’t proof of anything.”
Jason nodded thoughtfully. “But he was worried. So maybe he doesn’t have Estelle’s cell?”
“Seems likely,” I said. “But how could that be? How do you murder someone for her cell phone and then not take it?” I could hear the irritation in my voice. Not at Trey, but at myself. Every time I had a “feeling” about something or someone, I got blocked by an inconsistency.
“Take it step-by-step,” Jason said calmly. “You get to the answer by taking it step-by-step. You know the scene, you know the characters. Visualize it step-by-step.”
Hoo boy, this was not going to be fun.
THIRTY
But I tried. I visualized it.
“Under the old deck would be a good, quiet spot to meet.” I stopped, suddenly overcome with embarrassment. Jason knew only too well what a good, quiet spot it was. But he was too intent on getting to the bottom of the current mystery to be distracted by old history. Unlike some of us.
“Agree,” he said, then waited for me to go on.
“Estelle could get t
here by boat, and under the deck it would be private because if the light was off, it would be dark.” Really, Jason? None of this brings anything back?
Jason just said, “It would be good to know if the light was always off or if that was unusual. If, for instance, the bulb had been deliberately unscrewed.” Instead of smashed with a rock.
But Jason was busy working it all out. “So maybe the usual drill was whoever got there first unscrewed the light bulb, put it somewhere where it wouldn’t get broken, then put it back in when they left.”
“Okay,” I said, following that train of thought. “So Estelle gets there first, takes out the light bulb. She’s a chain-smoker, so she’s smoking while she waits for Trey. She’s probably near the concrete breakwater, so she can flip the butts into the water.” Just like when she spied on you and me.
“And where’s her purse?” Jason asked. “Estelle was old-school. She never went anywhere without her purse.” So he did remember that much. Estelle’s proudest possession was her crocodile handbag. I’d never liked it any more than I had liked her. It had a varnished bamboo handle and, Estelle bragged, was made of real crocodile skin. I’d pointed out that crocodiles were endangered, and she’d laughed in my face and said they could have her handbag when they pried it out of her cold dead hands. Which, it occurred to me now, was kind of what had happened.
“Right,” I said. “She would have had a handbag with her if only to carry her lipstick and Kools. And these days her cell phone.”
“So, a handbag or a shoulder bag, you think?”
“Well, back in my day”—our day—“it was a handbag. That crocodile thing. Maybe she still carried it. Those bags were made to last forever.”
“So let’s assume she still has the same bag when she’s meeting Gorman. She’d probably want a smoke while she waited, so she’d have put the bag down on something while she got her cigarettes and lighter out. Where, then? Maybe on the ground?”
“Believe me,” I said. “I know from my dad that nobody of a certain age puts anything on the ground if they can help it. Creaky bones protest.”
I tried to think back to the night Estelle had spied on Jason and me. Where was her handbag when she’d been taunting us? I was pretty sure there’d been no bag on her arm when she’d been illuminated by her lighter. So, she’d put it on a table or something like that. I caught my breath. Something like a workbench. That heavy, scarred workbench where I used to sit while Jason talked and paced.
“There was a workbench!” I cried. “Don’t you remember?” I was so excited I forgot that we weren’t supposed to be talking about the past.
“Yes, I remember,” Jason said quietly. “But that was then. What matters now is if it’s still there.” For an insane moment I thought he was speaking metaphorically about our relationship.
As if. Pulling out his cell phone, Jason began scrolling. “I have some photos I took that night of the area near where she was found.” Click, click, click. “Yup, here it is. Under the deck. The workbench. Probably too heavy to make moving it worthwhile. And, look, there’s the light bulb.” He handed me the phone. The camera’s flash showed it all. The empty light socket, the bulb tossed onto a pile of old burlap sacks, the concrete breakwater with the water lapping against it, the workbench just a foot or so away.
I nodded and handed the phone back to him and continued with my re-creation.
“So, she’s been standing next to the breakwater, smoking, her handbag beside her on the workbench. It’s after dark, so the boatyard would be closed, but it’s during the dinner rush, so it would be unlikely that anybody working at the Grill would be out there and any patrons arriving are parking and coming in on the other side of the building.”
“And if anyone saw Trey when he arrived, they’d just assume he was there to eat,” Jason added.
I nodded. “They’d been meeting there for months, and never had a problem. Estelle would be completely at ease, even a little looped, waiting for Trey to arrive.”
I gulped and stopped. This was where our little exercise was going to get tough.
“It might have been an accident,” I hedged.
But Jason wasn’t having it. “Maybe when she first went in,” he acknowledged, “maybe she stumbled and fell. But the water was about four feet deep at the breakwater. How likely is it that a woman who had been living on the bay her whole life couldn’t hold herself up in four feet of water with the wall of the breakwater right there to support her? And why didn’t she call for help if she needed it?”
I nodded miserably. Putting the horror into words was making things way too real. But it had to be done.
“So Trey gets there and somehow Estelle falls off the breakwater, either accidentally or intentionally,” I continued. “And I guess we have to think intentionally, given Trey’s desperation. Trey jumps in after her and . . .” I swallowed hard, then forced myself to continue. “He holds her head under. I can’t imagine she was any match for him.”
“So, the logical thing to do next,” Jason interrupted, “would be for Gorman to climb back over the breakwater, grab her handbag, and get the hell out of there.”
“Except he didn’t,” I said.
“He didn’t what?”
“He didn’t take the handbag. Don’t you remember the whole problem here? If he has the handbag, he has the cell phone. And if he has the cell phone, he has the photo Estelle was holding over him. Ergo, why would he care about my mother’s notes? Ergo, he doesn’t have the handbag, cell phone, or photo.”
Jason nodded. “So who has it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But what if it happened like this? He’s in the water with the body and suddenly he hears footsteps on the gravel, someone coming under the deck. It’s dark. Whoever it is probably can’t see him. But just in case, he sinks down and pushes the body farther under.”
“It would have been hard to keep that body under water,” Jason pointed out. “There was the air pocket created by her foul weather gear. It would have been like trying to keep a balloon underwater.”
Suddenly I remembered. The snail. The mud on Estelle’s face.
“You remember we wondered how she got that mud on her face, the snail on her cheek?” I didn’t want to go on. It was horrible. I didn’t want to think about it. In fact, I didn’t want to think about any of this. But what I wanted really didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was getting to the bottom of how Estelle had died.
“He did more than hold her under the water. He held her down with his foot, facedown in the mud.”
Jason nodded. “If he was wearing sneakers, I doubt there’d even be noticeable bruising. But I’ll ask for that to be checked. Go on.”
“Trey stays still, only his head above water. He waits until he hears the footsteps recede. He lets the body come back up to the surface, turns it over to check that his victim is well and truly dead, then climbs back up on the breakwater to grab the handbag. But it’s not there.”
Jason nodded. “It’s with whoever came by while Trey was hiding in the water. You’re right—it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“But if somebody found a handbag under the deck, wouldn’t they have brought it up to the restaurant, reported it?” I asked.
Jason looked at me with enormous pity. “You really are almost ridiculously naive sometimes.”
“You think they stole the purse.”
“Of course they stole the purse,” he said. “It’s the only explanation that fits the facts.”
“And now Trey has a murder on his hands but not the cell phone he did it for,” I said flatly. “Which means that the only piece of evidence that links him to the victim is my mother’s notebook.”
“Which brings us,” Jason said, “to the reason Helene called me.”
I just looked at him inquiringly.
“Gorman could come back,” Jason said. “Po
lice protection would appear in order since your sole defenses are a dog who thinks that barking is the limit of his job responsibilities and your trusty chef’s knife.”
Oh god, oh god, oh god. Jason had seen the YouTube video.
While I was trying to absorb this latest humiliation, Jason went out to the Explorer, then came back into the ell carrying a canvas duffel bag.
“What’s that?” I asked rhetorically.
“A duffel bag.”
“I can see that. What’s in it?”
“Stuff. Toothbrush, clean clothes for tomorrow.”
I shook my head. Maybe I hadn’t heard him right. “Tomorrow? You think you’re spending the night?”
For the first time, Jason cracked a smile. “I have my orders,” he said.
Oh god, oh god, oh god.
“You can’t stay here,” I gabbled. “Aunt Ida’s house is a wreck. There are daddy longlegs everywhere.”
Jason laughed outright. “Here,” he said, patting the couch. “I’ll sleep here.”
No way you’re sleeping on that couch, buddy, I wanted to say. That couch is exactly six feet away from my bed. The thought, I have to admit, was vaguely thrilling.
And then he said it. Again. “And tomorrow I’ll take it from here.”
And just like that, the thrill was gone.
* * *
* * *
It wasn’t much of a sleepover. No lights-out confidences, no binge watching Doctor Who, no giving each other manicures. I was exhausted and Jason, who, he explained, was on call for the weekend, already looked drained. I didn’t really think that Trey had plans to come back and murder me in my bed but the truth was, I was glad to have Jason there. Even if I was once again pissed off at him.
But tired as I was, sleep wouldn’t come. Over and over again, I replayed the day’s events in my mind. Over and over again, I went through our reconstruction of what might have happened between Trey and Estelle. It made sense, but now something else was bothering me. An image in my head. A cell phone where there shouldn’t have been one. On a cluttered countertop. The kitchen counter at Bits and Bites. Why did Mr. Logan—who by his own admission didn’t even know how to use cell phones—have one in his kitchen? It clearly wasn’t his, so whose was it? It was unlikely to be Estelle’s. Unless . . .