FIFTEEN 

We finished our dinner and cleaned up in record time. Kim was just as eager to show me the documents as I was to look at them. Since the prep counter was still covered with Gladys Montgomery’s recipes, a project that looked like it wasn’t going to get completed anytime this winter, we spread out the financials in date order on the counter we’d just eaten at.

Kim pointed to the earliest ledger. “Here’s the inception of the trust. The numbers, labels, and notations are all handwritten, as you’d expect. There were typewriters back then, but not everyone was using them for accounting.”

“Okay, I see that.”

“By the 1940s, they’d switched over to the typewriter. This must have been some tedious work for the typist. Not to mention annoying. Every time she—or he, though I’d guess it was mostly women doing this kind of work then—made a mistake, she had to fix it manually.”

“Pain in the butt,” I said. “Every typewriter has its own signature, right? Like rifling on a gun barrel, or fingerprints.” Watching all those cop dramas over the long Bonaparte Bay winters was definitely paying off. “Here’s where they got a new typewriter. You can tell because the font looks different.”

Kim nodded. “Keep going. I want to see if you come to the same conclusion I did.”

I studied the ledgers. Every few years the font changed, presumably because the office got new equipment. By the 1980s, the records were kept individually, one year to a page or pages, instead of in a running tally, and there was an unmistakable switch to a dot matrix printer, so the records were now being generated with a computer, probably stored on floppy disks. In 1986, the font changed again, this time to clearer, darker, more uniform letters.

I continued to flip through the pages, then went back to 1986. “This is where the balances start declining,” I said. I flipped some more, going all the way to the last page, which showed the paltry six-thousand-dollar-and-change balance. “How long,” I wondered, “has Jim MacNamara been practicing law?”

Kim nodded. “He joined his father’s practice in 1982. But his father died—”

“Let me guess—in 1986.”

“Yup. Pete and I bought the accounting business ten years ago, but the prior owners had been doing taxes and payroll for the MacNamaras for decades before that. We inherited all the records, so those dates were easy enough for me to check.”

“Okay,” I said, thoughtful. “So Jim MacNamara was young and inexperienced, and he made bad investments. Lost the money over the course of the years.”

I thought back to the genealogy Sheldon Todd had shown me. By the mid-1980s, the only beneficiaries of the trust—great-great-grandchildren of my nasty ancestor, Elihu Bloodworth—were pretty young, including my mother. And if Jim conveniently didn’t send statements to the beneficiaries, if they didn’t know about the trust, or know enough to ask about it, they couldn’t monitor the balances.

I thumbed through the last few dozen pages again, then looked up at Kim. She was watching me expectantly.

“The fonts,” I said. “From 1986 on, they’re all the same. They look like they were all made on the same printer.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought too. And what office keeps the same printer, and uses the same font, for more than thirty years?”

“You said you thought the financials had been altered. You think somebody went back to 1986 and retyped all the information—inserting new, reduced figures?” It made some sense, but there could be other reasons. A recent attempt to standardize the files, make them look nice and uniform, without altering the numbers? But Kim clearly hadn’t told me everything yet, because she was eyeing me over the rim of her wineglass.

“Yup,” Kim said, taking a sip of her wine. “And the only reasons to alter the documents would be—”

“To cover up mismanagement. Or theft.” Jim MacNamara. I had a feeling she was right, even though the documents in front of me were hardly proof. “So which do you think it is?”

“In his personal life, Jim was a good investor. Had a nice, diverse portfolio making a more or less steady positive return, at least from what I could see from his tax records. So I think it’s unlikely he didn’t know what he was doing when it came to the Bloodworth Trust.”

Damn him. “Which leaves us with theft. He was skimming the trust money, then he produced these fake financial reports, probably recently, since the trust would be dissolving—expiring—in a couple of months and he knew he was going to have to give Melanie and Liza, the beneficiaries, something.” Still, this was all just speculation. There was no real evidence here, nothing I could take to the police.

Kim seemed to have read my mind. “We need more, though. It might help if we could see the original documents these photocopies came from.”

That made sense. We’d have a lot better idea if the records since 1986 were a single printout. “I could ask Lydia, who’d have to clear it with Ben. But I’m not sure how I’d do that without letting them know why. Not sure I’m ready to start casting veiled accusations against Jim.”

“I agree. But I do have something. I looked up one of these supposedly failed mutual funds, and guess what? It was actually making money during the time period where these financials show a loss. So I’ll do some more digging on the other funds and get as much as I can for you. That’s solid information.”

Now, maybe, we were getting somewhere. “Yeah. Go ahead. Keep track of the hours you spend on this and get me a bill. I’ll make sure somebody pays it.” Me, my mother, Liza—maybe we could bill MacNamara’s estate? “But even if we find fraud, what do you think the chances of us actually recovering any money are?”

Kim set down her glass and looked me in the eye. “Impossible to say. He could have spent it, given it away, diverted it to some anonymous foreign bank account, converted it to cash and stuffed his mattress—”

“Mattress.” The word made me think of Jennifer Murdoch and the affair she’d been having with MacNamara. Was she mixed up in this somehow? Was MacNamara stockpiling money so he could run away with Jennifer? Maybe she was putting pressure on him? Did he need money to put the Silver Lake real estate deal together? Maybe. But he’d been skimming for years, if our theory was correct, and Jennifer and Silver Lake had only come up recently. Still, it bore consideration.

And how much did Jim’s son, Ben, know? He’d said his father always handled the trust himself. They’d needed a locksmith to open the filing cabinet. I supposed Ben could have staged that, but it seemed like overkill.

There was another question that needed to be asked, not that I expected Kim to have an answer. “Do you think Jim’s death had anything to do with the money?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But money is a powerful motivator.”

Didn’t I know it. Suddenly, I wished I was back in my nice, safe cocoon of a few months ago, neatly dividing my life between the tourist season and the off-season, mothering my daughter, being Sophie’s daughter-in-law and Spiro’s wife, at least on paper. I’d never heard of the damned Bloodworth Trust. And people didn’t die because of it.

But there was a little thing—okay, a big thing—called justice. I’d never really thought about it till now. But figuring out what was going on here, then taking it to the police, was the right thing to do.

And I was done with people messing with my family. Fed up with dishonesty and greed and violence and death. Tomorrow I’d light a fire under Sheldon, the genealogist. The sooner I confirmed what was in the legal file about the descendants of Elihu Bloodworth, the sooner I could check that, at least, off my mental list.

My cell phone rang, pulling me out of my thoughts. Across the prep counter, Kim was picking up the documents we’d laid out. I connected the call. “Hello?”

“Georgie? This is Marielle Riccardi.”

Franco’s daughter. “Yes. How’s your father?” My heart rate began to tick up. I hoped she had good news.

“He’s got a concussion and a dislocated shoulder. He’ll be all right. I wanted to thank you for helping him. And to ask you a favor.”

“Of course.” I realized, too late, that I probably should have waited to hear what the favor was before agreeing to it.

“We’re still at the hospital, and they’re going to keep Dad overnight. I don’t want to leave until he’s settled for the evening. Would you mind going to the Casa di Pizza and putting a note on the door that the restaurant is closed for two weeks? There’s not enough business this time of year to justify trying to find a temporary cook to take Dad’s place so we’ll just close up.”

“I’ll do it tonight,” I said. I’d ask Kim to accompany me, on the off chance Deputy Tim Arquette was wrong about the assaulter not still being in town. “Is there anything else you’d like me to do? If you’re going to be shut down, someone should go over and clean the perishables out of the fridge and straighten up, at least, so anybody looking in the window doesn’t see the mess and look at it as an invitation to break in.”

“Would you?” Marielle sounded relieved. “Dad will probably be discharged tomorrow. I’ll be bringing him home with me and I need to fill prescriptions and get extra groceries and get my house set up. And, oh yeah, run my business.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “I’m happy to help.” It wouldn’t take long, and I was pretty sure Franco would do the same for me.

“I’ll drop the keys off in the morning, if that’s okay. And Georgie, thanks.” She clicked off.

I filled in Kim about Franco’s condition. We packed up the trust documents and she followed me to my office, where we typed up a sign and printed it off. I located a plastic sheet protector and some duct tape, then we bundled up, checked and double-checked the alarm, and headed off in Kim’s car for the Casa.

The wind was even colder than it had been just a couple of hours ago, a thing I wouldn’t have thought possible if I hadn’t lived through a few decades’ worth of North Country winters. Snow from the recent storm we’d had blew up in a white whoosh against the car as we pulled up in front of Franco’s restaurant. I envied Sophie—and my daughter, Cal—in Greece right about now. I wondered when Cal was coming home. She was supposed to call when she got her flight, but I hadn’t heard from her yet.

“Want me to help?” Kim said.

“No sense both of us freezing our butts off. Keep the heater running and I’ll be right back.” I braced myself, then opened the door.

Tearing off the four pieces of tape required me to take off my gloves, and my hands were numb by the time the sign was on the door. I jammed my hands into my pockets and looked in the window, but it was too dark to see anything. I returned to the car, shut the door, and leaned forward in my seat to put my hands over the heating vents, which were blasting precious hot air.

“Ready to go home?” Kim put her hand on the shifter.

“May as well,” I said. “Do you mind driving me around back? I just want to double-check that Tim locked the door after he was finished.”

Kim drove to the end of the block, then up Vincent Street. “Scene of the crime,” she said without humor. We were nearing the building that housed MacNamara and MacNamara. The sign over the door, which hung on an old-fashioned wrought iron rod perpendicular to the exterior of the building, swung violently in the wind. A light was on in the office. I checked my watch. It was nearly eight o’clock at night—way past business hours. Now that he was in charge, had Junior developed a work ethic?

Just as we passed the building, the door opened and a figure came out onto the street. The cut of the coat was definitely feminine. Whoever it was had her hat pulled way down and her scarf pulled way up. She stood at the curb, apparently intending to cross the street. Kim pulled to a stop to let the woman cross in front of us. The headlights illuminated her, but it was impossible to make an identification, bundled up as she was.

Kim spoke first. “A bit late for a legal appointment, especially with Jim MacNamara not even in the ground yet. I wonder who that is?”

The woman got into a light-colored compact car parked a few yards in front of us. The lights blazed up, cutting through the November darkness.

“It’s not Lydia,” I said. “That woman is too tall.” She was about the same height as Jennifer Murdoch, though. Had Jennifer come back to harangue Ben about the videocamera?

Kim started forward again. She drove as slowly as she could past the parked car. I looked into the windows but they were opaque, still defrosting. I didn’t recognize the vehicle.

“Do you have to get home right away?” I said. “Let’s drive around the block and see if we can figure out where she goes.”

“Ooh, are we on a stakeout? Count me in,” she said gleefully.

“I honestly don’t know. But I don’t trust Junior.”

Kim drove up Vincent Street to the next intersection, made a right, then increased her speed and made another right back onto Theresa. She pulled back onto Vincent. The taillights of the vehicle were visible up ahead. I glanced at the law office as we passed for the second time. The lights were now off. Ben must have parked around back because there was no other vehicle on the street.

We followed the car at a distance, which wasn’t difficult since the streets were empty. A few minutes later, the car pulled in at the River Rock Resort.

Kim parked and turned to me. “Now what?”

“Beats me.” Sheldon Todd was staying there, so I supposed I could follow the mystery woman in on the pretext of my needing to speak to him. But it was late enough that Angela, or whoever she had at the front desk, would think it odd, my showing up now. And what would I say if I ran into the woman? “Excuse me, but who are you and why were you meeting with Junior MacNamara after hours?” I didn’t have that kind of moxie.

We stared up at the shabby façade of the River Rock. There were half a dozen cars in the lot. The lobby was lit, but there were only a couple of upstairs windows illuminated. We watched, but another window didn’t light. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything. The woman might not have gone directly to her room, or she might just be checking in, which would take longer. Had Jennifer and Steve Murdoch had another fight? That would explain her checking into the River Rock. If it was her.

“You may as well take me home,” I said. “We aren’t going to find out anything else tonight, and you’ll want to get home to Pete.”

Kim dropped me at the back door of the Bonaparte House, then waited while I went inside before driving off. I locked up, then went straight to bed, too tired to even be creeped out about sleeping here, where a murder had occurred one floor down. It had been one heck of a long day.