“Yep. That third bay there. Since my kids got married and moved out, the wife and I have extra space. If I didn’t rent it, the wife would fill that slot up with junk.”
“I hear ya,” Frank said, throwing Penny under the bus although she never put any junk in their garage. “Reason I’m asking is the state police have reported a rash of SUV thefts in Essex county, and I know Desmond—”
The man headed toward the garage, beckoning Frank to follow. “Don’t you worry—I take good care of that baby. I lock the garage at night, and I don’t believe in those automatic openers.” He pulled down the garage door on the empty bay to show how it locked, talking all the while.
“Desmond hasn’t taken it out all that often this year, but today he and Keith had to go to Lake placid. Not like last summer. Desmond had guests every week, and a couple of them he picked up down at the airstrip in Keane Valley. I guess last summer he invited lots of friends to come ‘cause it was the first year after he bought The Balsams back.”
Frank loved this guy. Talk, talk, talk—he didn’t even need to ask any questions. Clearly, the man knew about the history of The Balsams’ ownership.
He continued yakking as he raked up hedge clippings. “Yep, last year Desmond invited his brother, his cousins, his friends, his sons’ friends. Non-stop party.”
Interesting. Why was Desmond so inhospitable this year? And why had he invited Frank and Penny when he wasn’t inviting his close friends and family? “Why do you suppose he’s not inviting lots of people this year? The house is huge.”
The garage landlord offered Frank a sly grin and a wink. “Put a bunch of women in a house together and there’s always trouble. I guess this year, Desmond wanted peace and quiet.”
Frank was willing to keep playing the “just between us boys” card. “I’d think Desmond’s sons would want their girlfriends out at the house. Mighty lonely otherwise.”
The man elbowed Frank. “The boys come into town without the old man sometimes. One night I got up in the middle of the night to pee, and I heard the garage door go up. Looked out the window to check, and it was Desmond’s boys taking the SUV out. I figured he musta given them the garage key and the car key, so it was no business of mine.”
Frank longed to ask which night that was, but he didn’t see how he could without turning a friendly chat into an interrogation and arousing the man’s suspicions. He didn’t care if the landlord mentioned to Desmond that the police had cruised by checking up on SUV thefts, but he didn’t want the man telling Desmond that Police Chief Frank Bennett was interested in Keith’s and Justin’s movements. For now, he would file the information away. If it proved relevant, he could always come back or pass the lead on to the state police.
Frank said good-bye and left.
Once he was back in the patrol vehicle, he took a moment to call Penny and report on his conversation with Desmond.
“That creep! He can keep his money,” Penny fumed. Then her tone softened. “Remember, you’re on your own for dinner tonight. I’m going to the High Peaks Historical Association meeting. There’s some frozen lasagna you can nuke.”
Frank hung up, shuddering at his wife’s meal suggestion and decided to end his shift by driving to the Iron Eagle Inn. If he hung out in the inn’s kitchen while Edwin cooked dinner for his guests, he might score enough tastings and leftovers to constitute a meal.
A collection of Subarus, RAV4s and Volvos filled The Iron Eagle Inn’s parking lot, indicating that Edwin and Lucy Bates’s summer business was every bit as good as the Patels’ although the clientele was different. Some guests, returned from a day of hiking or antiquing, sat sipping wine on the wraparound porch of the old Victorian. Frank raised a hand in greeting but headed directly to the side door leading to the inn’s kitchen. He entered without knocking and followed the scent of garlic and fresh-baked bread to its source: his friend Edwin, deep into meal preparation.
“Hand me that platter, Olivia,” Edwin barked at his teenage daughter. She held the dish while he arranged slices of rare London Broil. “Go ahead and call them in to start their salads,” Edwin directed as he slid the platter into the warming drawer.
Olivia departed to call the guests, while Frank hopped onto a stool at the crowded kitchen’s work island. The usual cheery array of mismatched china, pots of herbs, and bottles of oils and vinegars surrounded him. “Full house for dinner?” he asked Edwin.
“Yes, we’ve been busy all month. Thank goodness I’ve got Olivia to help me. I don’t know what I’ll do when school starts up again in the fall.” Edwin glanced up from sautéing. “I hear you’re caught up in a murder investigation. Is that why you’re here?”
Frank poured himself a glass of wine from an open bottle Edwin was using to make a sauce. “Why would Caitlin Lupton’s murder bring me here? Do you have a confession to make?”
“I thought you’d want to ask me about Chet and Cora Flanagan,” Edwin said.
Frank came to attention. “You know them? I thought they were recluses—even Earl and Doris don’t know them.”
“Cora helped me out in the kitchen last winter during ski season,” Edwin explained.
“Man, this is my lucky day.” Frank nibbled on some nuts from a bag on the counter. “I came here to visit and score some dinner leftovers because Penny is out tonight. Now, it turns out you have valuable information for me. Tell me all you know about the mysterious Chet and Cora.”
“You’re right—Cora doesn’t talk much.” Edwin scraped sauce into a gravy boat. “ But I learned she and her husband work for Desmond Hale twelve or eighteen hours a day from mid-May to mid-October—getting the place ready early in the season, waiting on him and his guests during summer and early fall, and then closing up in October. I got the impression Desmond pays them well enough that they could take the rest of the year off, but Cora’s one of those women who doesn’t know how to relax. So she answered an ad I placed for kitchen short-term help last January.”
“How did that work out?” Frank snagged the well-done end of a London broil that Edwin had left on the carving board.
“She’s a great cook. I gave her projects and she ran with them. And what an eye! She can look at a piece of meat and tell you exactly how many servings you’ll get from it.” Edwin piled roasted vegetables on a platter and tossed three broccoli florets on Frank’s plate. “She barely said a word while we were working, but at the end of the shift, she’d accept a glass of wine while she waited for Chet to pick her up. And that loosened her tongue a little.”
“Do tell.”
Olivia reappeared, and Edwin prepared the vegetable and meat platters for delivery to the dining room. Then he turned his attention to the potatoes. “She and Chet met at The Balsams as teenagers when they both worked for Desmond’s grandfather, who they referred to as ‘the old gentleman.’”
“Are you talking about Cora?” Olivia interrupted. “She’s a weird old bat.”
Frank laughed. “Tell us what you really think, Olivia.”
“She told me this old cross-country skier dude staying here last winter was looking at me, so I shouldn’t wear a tight turtleneck because men can’t control their urges.” Olivia’s eye roll practically scraped the ceiling. “I told her it wasn’t my job to stop men from being assholes.”
Edwin dropped his spatula. “What man was looking at you?”
Olivia’s laugh trilled through the kitchen. “Oh, Dad—if I told you about every guest who gave me the side-eye, we’d close down. Go back to telling Frank about Cora and Chet.” And she headed back to the dining room.
With an uneasy glance at his daughter, Edwin resumed cooking and talking. “Then Chet and Cora worked for”—Edwin made air quotes—“ ‘the new guy’ who they despised. And they were delighted when young Mr. Hale bought the place back. Order was restored to their universe.”
“But the new guy was there for thirty years,” Frank protested.
Edwin shrugged. “They hated him.”
Olivia returne
d, waiting impatiently while her father sprinkled parsley on the potatoes. “Why do old people ask teenagers the same dumb questions over and over? ‘What’s your favorite subject in school?’ Olivia asked in a mock-quavery voice. “And if I say English, they ask what’s my favorite book. I don’t have one favorite book.”
“Tell them quantum physics is your favorite subject, and Ten Keys to Reality is your favorite book. That oughta shut ‘em up,” Frank suggested.
Olivia grinned and backed through the swing door with the platter.
“Thanks for teaching her to yank the chains of our guests, Frank,” Edwin grumbled.
“My pleasure. Now, back to Cora. Did she say anything about Desmond’s sons?”
Edwin emptied the last of the salad onto a plate and slid it across the island to Frank. “Only that she disapproved of all the shenanigans—her word. According to Cora, last summer the house was full of shameless young women.”
“All wearing tight clothes and corrupting those upstanding Hale gentlemen.” Frank made a neat pile of black olives on the side of his plate. “I wonder if Caitlin could have been part of this summer’s entertainment. Desmond acts like the three of them live in monkish solitude, but I don’t buy it.”
“Haven’t the state police interviewed Cora and Chet?” Edwin asked.
“According to Lt. Meyerson, the two of them were strictly name, rank, and serial number.” Frank finished his salad and looked longingly at the dining room door, hoping Olivia would reappear with some leftover London broil. “But those two can’t possibly maintain that huge property by themselves. Did Cora ever mention anyone else local who works for Desmond Hale?”
“Did Cora mention what?” Olivia asked as she shot into the kitchen balancing two nearly empty platters.
Frank took the meat from her hands and applied himself to the scraps. “Did Cora Flanagan ever mention anyone else from around here who helps out The Balsams, the big house she takes care of in the summer?”
“Yeah, I think some friend of her husband’s helped out with the heavy work.” Olivia watched as her father cut wedges of blueberry pie. “No ice cream on two of them,” she directed. Then she turned to Frank. “Cora always complained about her knees. Said she couldn’t climb steps and lift heavy stuff the way she used to.”
FULL OF STEAK, PIE, and information, Frank felt relaxed enough on the drive home to risk calling Meyerson to leave a message. Surprisingly, the lieutenant answered his phone without snarling.
Frank shared the information he’d gathered that day, then asked a question. “Any joy from your follow-up interview with Blaine Timmons?”
“That loser is a dead end,” Meyerson said. “He’s watching the news on the TV in the common room at the jail and latched onto the Lupton murder as something he thought he could use to barter with us. He doesn’t know squat.”
That might be true.
Or not.
Frank decided he could get more information out of Meyerson by not starting an argument over Blaine. “So what was the big tip about the Etheridges Desmond wanted you to know?” he continued.
Lew snorted. “Everyone’s a detective! All Hale did was Google the Etheridge family, and this popped up. One of the young men at the house that weekend was once accused of sexual assault at a frat party. We already knew all about the incident. No criminal charges filed. The college disciplinary committee handled it.”
Frank’s antenna went up. “You don’t think that has some significance? Did you follow up on him?”
Frank’s tone had been too insistent because Meyerson immediately got defensive. “The incident happened three years ago. There have been no further complaints or brushes with the law. The guy works for an accounting firm now, and he had his girlfriend with him at the family lake house. No reason to believe he had any interaction with Caitlin Lupton. And we know there were no signs of sexual assault on Caitlin’s body.”
Frank chose not to engage further with Meyerson on this point. Of course it was possible that the frat party episode had been a misunderstood encounter between two very drunk college students. But it was equally possible that this member of the Etheridge family had a propensity for violence towards women. Having a girlfriend didn’t rule a man out as a serial rapist.
Had Caitlin been raped before she was killed? The autopsy showed no obvious signs of force and no traces of semen. But Caitlin could still have had a sexual encounter that turned ugly. A woman didn’t have to be physically injured to be raped.
Frank tuned back in to what Meyerson was saying. “We’ll figure out the connections tomorrow.”
“What happens tomorrow?” Frank asked.
“Mr. and Mrs. Lupton and Rachel finally get back to New York.”
Chapter 31
“I’m ho-o-ome!”
Frank roused himself from a dream in which he tried to explain to the Trout Run Town Council why he wasn’t an enemy of the state, and his copy of J Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets slid from his lap to the floor.
“I hope you haven’t been sleeping the whole time I’ve been gone,” Penny scolded, “or you’ll be awake all night.”
“No, I ate dinner at the Iron Eagle. I just got home an hour ago. I guess I dozed off reading.”
“I can’t imagine why.” Penny plonked the 700 page tome on the coffee table. “Here’s something much more interesting to wake you up. Remember how Desmond told us his grandfather lost his fortune and The Balsams in a stock market crash? The truth is a little more complex. The old man actually gave up the house before the stock collapse.” She paused for dramatic effect. “He lost it in a poker game.”
“He bet that great house on a game and lost?” Frank shuddered. “Man, I wouldn’t want to have to come home and tell my wife that news! You learned that at the Historical Society meeting?”
“Yes. Everyone’s been following the news stories about us discovering Caitlin Lupton’s body at The Balsams’ dock. So when I arrived, they pounced on me for information. And then they started trading stories about The Balsams. The hardcore history buffs know all about that house. Penny folded her arms across her chest and grinned. “Turns out, I learned more than I gave up.”
“I thought you said the tall tales traded at those meetings were more historical fiction than historical fact,” Frank reminded her.
“I plan to do some fact-checking. But several reliable people at the meeting confirmed the poker game story.”
“So when Desmond bought The Balsams back, did he buy it from the man who won it in the game?” Frank asked. “Turns out Edwin knows Chet and Cora and said they hated the previous owner. If they knew he won the house in a poker game, that would explain their animosity.”
Penny pushed up her sleeves and opened her laptop. “That’s what I plan to find out. I’m going to call in some favors from my librarian friends at universities and big city libraries who have access to the big online academic and news databases.”
As she typed, Penny kept talking to Frank. “The other thing I learned at the historical society meeting was about the Trimont Logging Company. I was telling everyone that we were trapped at The Balsams when the storm blew up because the house can only be accessed by boat. But one of the guys whose special interest is logging in the Adirondacks said that the logging road built by the Trimont company isn’t as grown over as Desmond claims. He says you can get a truck or a jeep within a few miles of the house and go the rest of the way by ATV.”
AS PENNY PREDICTED, Frank had a hard time sleeping, but not because of his evening nap. The prospect of finding the land route to The Balsams kept his mind racing and his body tossing.
If a boat hadn’t been required to bring Caitlin to The Balsams, then the three Hale men were back in the running as suspects in her murder.
And so was Regis Kendall. He could have started driving north immediately after his carry-out dinner and taken this new land route to The Balsams, arriving in the early dawn hours in time to kill Caitlin.
Before dawn, Frank
gave up on sleep and went downstairs to begin planning. When Penny awoke, she found her husband in the kitchen with topographical maps of the High Peaks spread over the kitchen table. She ate her bowl of granola standing up.
“Are you going exploring over there all alone? Wouldn’t it be better to take Earl along?”
“I can read a map.” Frank traced his finger along the path he believed to be the logging road. “I have a compass. I’m not going to get lost.”
“Yes, but Earl has a lot of experience—"
“Today is my day off. Earl is on duty. This trip has nothing to do with Trout Run law enforcement.” Frank’s voice had a sharp edge, but Penny didn’t let up.
“Then shouldn’t you go with someone from the State Police?”
Frank tossed his reading glasses onto the map. “Do you have any idea how long that would take to set up? And then what if your friend is all wrong and the road stops nowhere close to The Balsams—I’d never hear the end of how I wasted precious state police resources.”
“Promise me you’ll at least tell Earl where you’re going. Because if I have to call out a search team to look for you, I won’t even know where to tell them to start.”
Frank folded the maps. Then he filled two water bottles and grabbed some energy bars and an apple. “I’ll tell him.”
Then Frank unlocked the gun safe where he stored his service weapon.
“Why are you taking your gun?” Penny asked her question in a higher octave than the rest of their conversation.
Frank strapped the weapon on. “I’ll be back before dinner.”
He left without kissing his wife good-bye.
Chapter 32
By the time Frank passed through Verona, the sun was finally up. He stopped at Stewarts for gas and a cup of coffee, and decided he should text Earl before he lost cell phone coverage. Despite his annoyance at Penny’s fussing, he admitted she was right. He and Earl had a brief exchange—he imagined his partner was still in bed—and Earl encouraged him to take some pictures and send them when he found the old logging road.
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