by Amy Pershing
Carol had said Mr. Logan was a regular at the Bayview Grill, coming in once a month like clockwork. Had he been at the Grill that night? Had it been Mr. Logan who’d found Estelle’s purse?
I tried to work it all out, but I was very, very tired. It’s not every day that a girl gets in a brawl with a vicious dog kicker, then solves (sort of) a murder with a member of the local marine constabulary who then takes her ideas and kicks her to the sleuthing curb (so to speak). Who wouldn’t be tired? I’d check out that cell phone first thing in the morning, though.
The last thing I thought as I slipped into sleep was, “I’ll take it from here.”
THIRTY-ONE
Diogi woke me early, whining to go out. I could hear the crows and seagulls competing to greet the sunrise, and a gray light filtered in through the cotton curtains at the windows. At first I was disoriented, wondering what it was about the ell that felt different. Oh yeah, maybe it’s that guy sleeping on my sofa.
Gradually the events of the night before came back to me. I remembered our reconstruction of the crime. I remembered Jason patronizing me after I figured it all out and gave him all the clues. I remembered what I needed to do. I checked the time. Not yet six. Too early to talk to Mr. Logan, but I could go peek in the window of the kitchen at Bits and Bites, see if the phone was still there. If I was quick about it, Jason wouldn’t even know I’d left the house.
I threw on jeans, a T-shirt, my Vans, and the red hoodie. I let Diogi out for his wee, grabbed a granola bar that I’d bought at Nelson’s Market during a moment of madness when I’d thought maybe I should start eating healthy, took a bite, spit it out and threw the rest in the trash where it belonged. When I got back I’d make pancakes.
I peeked over the back of the couch. Jason was sleeping like he didn’t have a murderer to catch. He looked so young. I hardened my heart against him. “I’ll take it from here.” He’d had no right to make that decision. I told myself I didn’t need to feel guilty. All I was going to do was take a quick look in the window of Bits and Bites. If the phone was still there on the counter, I’d tell Jason. There was no reason to assume that the phone was Estelle’s, but it would be worth checking out. I would look in the window, and if the phone was still there, call Jason. That was the plan.
I scribbled a quick “running some errands” on a piece of paper and left it on the table.
“Back soon,” I whispered to Diogi. Famous last words.
Grumpy took some coaxing to wake up. The first time I turned the key, it made that whee-whee sound designed to drive you mad, but it eventually gave in and we lurched off.
As I turned into the gravel parking area behind Bits and Bites, my heart sank. Mr. Logan’s green Buick was parked by the kitchen door, which had been propped open with a brick. I was pondering my next step when a high-pitched shriek started up from inside, making the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
Then I recognized it as the shrill whine of a bandsaw and cursed the man’s newfound lust for life. At his age and at this hour, he should have been curled up under an eiderdown, not cutting framing for windows. Not getting in the way of amateur sleuths like moi.
Well, no matter. If he was happily working in the dining room, I could actually go into the kitchen, see if the phone was on the counter. Maybe check it out. And if he came in and saw me, I’d just say I was passing and wanted to see if he’d liked the Clarion story, then casually ask him about the phone.
I did, in fact, hope the Clarion story would drum up some advance business for him. Because looking around, I wasn’t so sure people would be flocking to this isolated place. For as far as the eye could see, there was no one out on the bay or walking the shore. Of course, it was early in the morning and the season, and the weather, which was cold and damp and windy, wasn’t encouraging for either boaters or bird-watchers. That would change in a few weeks.
I peeked in the half-open door leading to the kitchen.
It was there. The cell phone. Lying faceup on the kitchen counter.
I pulled my own phone out of my pocket. Time to call Jason, tell him to meet me at Bits and Bites. I looked at the home screen and swore softly. No bars, no cell service at all. And obviously no Wi-Fi. Which meant no way to text or call. Why does anyone live in this godforsaken place?
I couldn’t help myself, I swear. The lure of that phone on the counter was too much. I tiptoed in (as if anyone could have heard me against the sound of that saw) and picked up the phone, raising my eyebrows a bit at the hot-pink case wrapped around the back of it. So not a workman’s. Estelle’s? It was an iPhone like my own, not new, maybe a few years old. I tapped the home button hoping that if this was in fact Estelle’s cell, she hadn’t bothered to password protect it. The good news was the home screen came to life. The bad news was that the battery icon was seriously low.
I tapped the e-mail icon. Even with no cell service the app should open, and hopefully any saved correspondence would tell me who the owner was. Oddly, the app was blank, no e-mails at all. Or actually not so oddly if the phone belonged to Estelle. I couldn’t imagine she had a vast network of online buddies. She had used her phone simply as a phone. And as a camera. I flipped back to the home screen, which was now frantically yelling that I had less than 10 percent power.
I tapped the camera icon and hoped for the best. Yesss! Photos. Not many, maybe a few dozen, and most were of an old and rather raggedy cat. Did Estelle have a cat? I couldn’t remember. I filtered them by date and scrolled back two years. The cat again, not quite as old or raggedy. And then a first attempt at a selfie. Yessss. There was Estelle in all her blowsy glory. I was definitely holding Estelle’s phone in my hand.
I scrolled forward, knowing the juice was running very low, very fast.
Cat, cat, cat, and . . . jackpot—a couple through a window, locked in a passionate embrace. Though the window appeared to be tinted, an overhead light illuminated the pair in clear detail. The woman’s back was to the camera so all that you could see was a cap of short, straight black hair. Half of the man’s face was visible and he seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. On the man’s left hand a wedding ring glinted. The woman’s left hand, cupping the side of her lover’s face, was bare. Interesting. Was this the he and she that Suzanne had mentioned to me?
I scrolled on.
Cat, cat, cat, and then a distant shot of an old bald guy sitting on a dock at night, lights twinkling in the distance. An old man rich enough to own waterfront property. Estelle’s sugar daddy?
Cat, cat, cat, and then a snap of a very respectable-looking middle-aged woman sliding a lipstick still in its packaging into her purse. Ooh, a shoplifter, too.
I scrolled to the next shot, but only got a brief glimpse of what might have been a beach before the screen slid into darkness, the battery drained. I groaned out loud. Had that been the photo Estelle claimed she’d taken of Trey stamping on baby birds? Oh, well. All I needed to do was charge the phone up and I could be sure. In the meantime, I had enough to go on. I had photos that suggested that Estelle had probably blackmailed several people, any one of whom might have been her killer.
“Samantha?”
I whirled around, dropping the cell on the counter guiltily. Mr. Logan was standing in the doorway.
“You found Estelle’s mobile cellular telephone!” Mr. Logan said, beaming. He walked over and picked the phone up gingerly. “Maybe you could help me with it. I don’t know how to make it work. Estelle used to show me pictures of her cat on it. I thought maybe I could use it to take some photographs of my dog, Archibald. He’s a very handsome dog.”
I was touched that Mr. Logan had a dog named Archibald, but jumped in before he could continue to wax rhapsodic about the pooch. “You knew this was Estelle’s phone?”
“Well, of course I did,” he said. “I got it from her, didn’t I?”
“Estelle gave it to you?”
�
��Oh no, no,” he said. “Not exactly. You see, the other night I went to have my usual drink at the Grill—I go there once a month you know, as a show of support for Carol—and anyway, I was heading back to my car, when I noticed that the light under the deck was out. It’s just an automatic thing with me. It used to drive my wife half mad when that light was out. Sometimes kids would break it. Vandals, you know?”
Suddenly I felt very guilty.
“I hoped that wasn’t the case this time, so I went to the car to get a flashlight and then I stepped under the deck to check and do you know what I saw?”
I shook my head no. There was no point in trying to get a word in anyway. Mr. Logan was on a roll and I was busy enough just trying to make sense of what I was hearing, which wasn’t easy since the fellow had a habit of asides and discursions that needed real concentration to follow.
“Estelle’s handbag—you know that crocodile one she was so proud of?—well, it was sitting on that old workbench. But no Estelle. I thought she must have come down for a smoke and left it there by accident. That had happened before when she worked for me, especially if she’d had a few cocktails after her shift, you know?”
He stopped and looked at me expectantly. What was I going to say? Well, no, what actually happened, Mr. Logan, was Estelle was being drowned no more than a few feet away from you?
“So what did you do then?” I said instead.
“I took the bag with me, figuring I could drive over to her place the next morning and give it to her.” Mr. Logan’s face clouded. “But the next day I heard about her accident. I knew she didn’t have any family, so there wasn’t anyone to give the handbag to.” Of course. It hadn’t occurred to Mr. Logan to give the bag to the police because he didn’t know there was any reason to. As far as he (and everyone else who had read my story in the Clarion) was concerned, Estelle had died in a “tragic accident.”
“And then I looked inside,” he continued, “and saw her mobile cellular telephone and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but that’s when I thought maybe I could keep it and learn how to use it to take pictures of Archibald so I can show them to people.” He stopped for breath, then added, “Maybe you could teach me?”
“I’d be happy to teach you how to use it,” I said. Which was true. When all this was over, I would introduce Mr. Logan to the wonders of cell phones. Just not this particular cell phone. “But the thing is, it needs to be charged up. It’s all out of power. It needs a charger.”
“Where do I get a charger?” Mr. Logan asked.
“I have one at home,” I said. “I tell you what, I’ll just take the phone, charge it up, and bring it back for our first lesson.”
Mr. Logan looked at me oddly, and I wondered if I sounded as fake as I felt. “Can’t you just bring the charger here?” he said.
Okay, second best option. I mean, it wasn’t like I could rip the phone out of his hand. And it wasn’t going anywhere.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”
Again. Famous last words.
THIRTY-TWO
I was pulling out from Levi’s Way onto Route 6 when my cell rang. I knew it was Krista because who else would think nothing of calling me at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. Well, she’d just have to wait. I grinned as I pictured her, probably in her office, impatiently tapping her foot, waiting for me to answer, shaking her head in irritation, her sleek black bob swinging like a bell around her face.
Her sleek, black bob.
The photos in Estelle’s phone. Something had bothered me—there had been something, someone familiar. The man and the woman kissing. The man’s face had been only half visible and only the back of the woman’s head could be seen. The back of her sleek, black bob. Krista had a sleek, black bob. I’d noticed it particularly yesterday, as she was leaving the office, her hair like a silk curtain around the nape of her neck. The woman in that photo was Krista. Was Krista having an affair with a married man?
I thought about Krista dolling herself up on a Thursday night but with no plans for the weekend. In my limited understanding of married men who have affairs, they tended to spend weekends with their wives and children, weeknights with their girlfriends.
And, yes, Krista could certainly be having an affair with a married man. I didn’t find this particularly shocking. Not because I didn’t think it was wrong—I thought it was very wrong—but because it was Krista. Krista had always played by her own rules. Krista always went after what she wanted.
Did Krista know that Estelle had that photo? Had Estelle tried to blackmail Krista’s lover with the threat that she’d reveal their affair to his wife? Was that why Krista had tried to get me off the story?
And now all I could think about was who was Krista’s married lover? It occurred to me that even if Krista no longer confided her love life to me, she probably still did to Miles. Miles was a big “no judgments” kind of guy. I needed to talk to Miles. He’d be up, even at this ungodly hour. He was a farmer.
So I decided on a little detour before going home for the phone charger. I took the second Fair Harbor exit off Route 6 and steered Grumpy around the traffic circle onto Tanner Road, which led me back to the farm that had been in Miles’s family for generations. I rolled past neat rows of bushes that in summer would be heavy with blueberries and raspberries, then past the long plastic greenhouses that sheltered early lettuces and other microgreens and finally past the brown, furrowed fields that would produce those wonderful Cape Cod turnips.
I turned Grumpy into the driveway and pulled up in front of the weathered barn that housed the farming equipment, including an ancient tractor that Miles spent hours tinkering with just to “keep it going one more season.” To my certain knowledge, “one more season” was now almost ten.
As I parked the car, Miles came out of the barn, wiping black machine oil off his hands with a grimy red bandana. Trotting alongside him was Fay Wray, an exceptionally intelligent, beautifully trained Australian shepherd with fluffy, silky black fur that set off the smooth white bib of her chest and the brown and white patchwork of her face. Miles claimed that Fay Wray knew at least fifty commands, including “Go get Daddy a beer from the cooler.” Diogi, in contrast, sort of knew three commands: “Shut up.” Sometimes “Sit.” And, apparently, “Go get Helene.”
Fay Wray greeted me with all the restraint one would expect of such an accomplished dog. No jumping and slobbering for her, just a friendly wag of her butt (Aussies usually have bobbed tails) and a little nose snuffle in my outstretched hand. Miles greeted me with an exuberant bear hug. It is a sad thing when a man is less dignified than his dog.
“So what brings you to the lower forty?” he asked as he led me into the farmhouse and back into a kitchen that hadn’t changed since Mrs. Tanner had had it “done” in 1962. Same white-enameled metal cabinets, same black-and-white enameled table surrounded by four chrome kitchen chairs with red vinyl seats.
“I need some information,” I said as I settled myself at the table and took the mug of coffee that Miles had poured out for me without asking. We’d sat at this table with mugs of coffee more times than I could count.
Miles nodded. “Information about what?”
And suddenly I was uncertain. “Not what,” I said. “Who.”
“Okay, about who?”
“Krista,” I said miserably.
Miles looked at me apprehensively. I think he was afraid I was going to start crying on him again. “And what information do you need about Krista?” he asked carefully. “I mean that you can’t ask her for yourself?”
“I need information about her love life,” I said, even more miserably.
“Ah,” Miles said slowly. “Her love life. I see. Yes, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to ask her yourself, seeing as every time she talks about one of her little flings you go all pink in the face and flustery.”
“There’s no su
ch word as flustery,” I said.
“There is now,” Miles said.
“But you’re right,” I admitted. “She stopped confiding in me a long time ago because I used to get . . . perturbed.”
“Flustery,” Miles corrected me.
“Okay, flustery. But I need to know who she’s been seeing, Miles. Don’t ask me why, but it’s important, really important.”
Miles gave me a long look. “Okay. I don’t think you’d be asking if it wasn’t important. And knowing what I know, I can see how it might be.”
“What do you know?” I asked. “Please, I promise it won’t go any farther, but I have to know.”
“Well, she hasn’t mentioned him in a while, but I know she was seeing Curtis Henson.”
I almost fell off my chair.
“Curtis Henson? Curtis Henson the district attorney?”
Miles nodded. “None other.”
So not just Krista who had looked vaguely familiar. Curtis Henson, too.
“But he’s old,” I said. “He’s got to be at least twenty years older than Krista.”
“Really?” Miles said. “That’s your objection, that he’s old?”
I smiled ruefully. “No, of course not. I don’t know where that came from. But I do object to the fact that he’s married.” I put my face in my hands.
“Oh dear,” I whispered, almost to myself. “This is not a good thing. This is not a good thing at all.”
“No, it isn’t,” Miles agreed. “Even I do not think this is a good thing. I never thought so. And I told her so. But you know Krista, she always knows better. It’s a no-strings-attached kind of thing, she told me. Nobody was going to get hurt. They were very discreet.”