TWENTY-NINE 

It took another ten minutes for the EMTs to reach the room in the servants’ hall. Liza insisted on going to find them, despite the fact that she was also quite ill, because she knew the castle better than anyone and was unlikely to get lost.

Sure enough, when Bill Belanger from the Bonaparte Bay Volunteer Fire Department finally came through the door, he was all apologies. “We didn’t know where to find you,” he explained. “This place is huge.”

Liza dropped into a chair. She was clearly spent. “The police are here, with reinforcements,” she said then tipped her head back and waited her turn.

Bill started barking orders to the two other members of his team and they set to work. I held Cal’s clammy hand. My daughter was here. She was safe. And I thought she was going to be okay.

Relief lifted the fog from my mind as the EMTs worked. Angela Wainwright. Piper Preston, or Prudence Patton, or whatever her real name was. Piper had worked for both Angela Wainwright and Franco Riccardi. And now it was clear she had also been working for Lydia Ames and probably Ben MacNamara too. Piper was the link, the unlikely connection between the Bloodworth Trust and the oldest known Thousand Island dressing recipe. Whether she knew that or not was anyone’s guess.

Though it pained me to do so, I pulled out my cell phone, set it on my knee so I wouldn’t have to drop Cal’s hand, and dialed one-handed.

“Hawthorne,” a brusque voice said.

“This is Georgie Nikolopatos. You need to go pick up Zach Brundage and Piper Preston. She also calls herself Prudence Patton. Tim Arquette from the BBPD has Lydia Ames here. She killed Jim MacNamara. And you might want to bring in Angela Wainwright. I’m not sure how deeply she’s involved, but Ben MacNamara was behind the attacks on Franco Riccardi and me, at the very least.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “You must have been completing your detective training on the down low,” he finally said. “Sorry we don’t have any openings on the force right now.”

Man, he was annoying. I should have called, well, anybody but him.

“But I’ll look into it. Thanks for the tips.” He rang off.

*   *   *

Two days later, I plunked myself into an orange pleather chair in the family lounge at Bonaparte Bay’s small hospital. Liza and Melanie, who were being discharged today, sat across from me as we waited for the final paperwork to process. Cal and Caitlyn, being younger and generally more resilient, were back at the Bonaparte House already, having been let go yesterday.

The nurse had been found in a separate room, groggy but alive, zip-tied to a chair as I had been. Dr. Phelps promised that none of the five women would have any lasting effects from their poisonings or their ordeal.

“So what happened?” Melanie demanded. “I’m getting very tired of this hospital. And there wasn’t even enough time to get another camera crew on-site to make it worthwhile.” Last time she’d been here, after she’d been shot, her daytime drama had written a special storyline for her and filmed on location. She was probably up for a Daytime Emmy for her performance. She’d never won yet, but maybe this was her year.

I pulled a couple of bottled waters from my shoulder bag and set one in front of each woman. “Drink,” I ordered. “You’re off your IVs now and you need to keep hydrated.”

Liza complied. Melanie gave a huff and an eye roll. She must be feeling generous with her scorn today. Normally, I liked to do these debriefings with a glass of wine and some kind of delicious snack, but the hospital vending machine seemed to be fresh out of both.

“From what I’ve been able to piece together, Lydia Ames, who’s now in the county lockup, engineered everything. As you know, she worked for Jim MacNamara for years. When she found out he was skimming from the Bloodworth Trust, she demanded to be let in on the action. According to our new lawyer, who I went into St. Lawrence County to get—”

“Good idea,” Liza interrupted. “Better to have someone a little farther removed from all this.”

“That’s what I thought too. Anyway, according to the new lawyer, Lydia was the one who came up with the idea of altering the trust documents to hide the missing money. It’ll take months before all the various bank accounts can be traced. Lydia had her own, Jim MacNamara had his own, plus most of the money is probably in offshore accounts under assumed names, or buried inside shell corporations or something.”

Melanie gave another eye roll. “Do we even know if there’s any money left?”

“The lawyer’s just getting started. We won’t know that for a while.”

“I guess,” Melanie said dramatically, “my summer stock theater at our old family farm will have to wait. Unless I can charm some investors . . .” Her gaze went toward the windows overlooking the St. Lawrence River, no doubt thinking who in her acquaintance might be charmable. I certainly wasn’t.

“Maybe we can talk about that later,” Liza said, her voice thoughtful.

“Back to the story—” I gave Melanie what I hoped was a pointed stare. Which she ignored. “When Jim MacNamara took up with Jennifer Murdoch, Lydia thought Jim was going to try to cut her out of the deal. Jennifer was demanding, and pushy, and she had Jim wrapped around her little finger. It wasn’t too big a leap to think that Jim might start trying to pressure Lydia into giving up some of her share of the money. Maybe Jim had something on her, something that hasn’t come to light yet.”

Liza said, “Let me guess. The trust was almost empty at that point, because between Jim and Lydia, over the years, they’d diverted nearly all the money. And since the trust was about to vest in February, and it was quite possible that one of us was going to question what had happened to the millions that were supposed to be there, Lydia decided to make a preemptive strike. She killed Jim, using Zach Brundage to set up Russ Riley.”

I nodded. “Right. And because Jim MacNamara had been Russ’s lawyer the last time he’d been in trouble, Lydia knew that Russ was the perfect fall guy. He had an ax to grind against my family, and she knew about the argument Russ had had with Jim. It was simple for her to have Zach go to the police saying he’d overheard the argument.”

“And then,” Liza said, “she set about getting rid of the rest of the heirs to the trust. Some, like our cousins Big Dom and Doreen, were already gone, killed by people with their own interest in the trust.” She swallowed, no doubt remembering who had killed Doreen and why. She went on, “And she hired Piper Preston to poison our food, either to weaken us, or to kill us outright. If there were no heirs, there would be no one to question what happened to the money. Or at least no one who would care all that much.”

“And Lydia was good at altering documents,” I said. “She could have directed the authorities to Jim’s skimmed investments, after she covered her own tracks, of course. Jim was dead, and so, in her scenario, were all the heirs. Lydia was banking on the fact, pun intended, that Jim would take the whole blame and no one would look closely at her, a mere assistant.”

Melanie was still looking out over the water. I had a feeling she was probably wondering if she could pull off Blanche DuBois and how much it would cost to put on Streetcar. But she surprised me by pulling herself back into the conversation. “What about that little brat, the son?”

“Ben’s up to his eyeballs too,” I said. “In salad dressing. He was working with a company called Tripler Enterprises to put together some kind of licensing deal with one of the big home shopping channels.”

“Tripler. Triple R,” Liza said. “River Rock Resort? Angela Wainwright?” I was pleased to see her take another sip out of the bottle of water.

“Right. Angela needs money to fix up the River Rock and pay the mortgage on her condo. So she, or Ben, or both of them together, came up with this idea to trademark Thousand Island dressing. To make it stand out, they needed an original, proprietary recipe—or at least one they could say was an original recipe—until they could get the stuff through the trademark process and into production.”

“Seems like a dumb idea,” Melanie said matter-of-factly. “Stuff’s been around for a hundred years. How much could it be worth?” She examined the nails on her right hand and frowned. She’d be wanting a manicure when she got out of here.

“Yes and no,” I said. “If she could get the name trademarked, she could hold every restaurant owner along the river hostage. According to the new lawyer, if she owned the trademark, she could try to prevent all of us from offering Thousand Island dressing on the menu. Of course, we could call it something else, but it’s a tradition here. One of the things that makes us who we are. She might even be able to take on some of the national salad dressing brands, make them pay her to use the name. There was potential for some money, even if it wasn’t guaranteed.”

“Angela’s not the type to physically hurt anyone. So who beat up Franco and ransacked his restaurant?” Liza asked.

“The new lawyer says that Ben MacNamara confessed to doing it, that Angela wasn’t involved. Once his father was killed, Ben got desperate. He’d been working on the salad dressing deal, but now he needed it to go through immediately because he couldn’t figure out how to access the Bloodworth Trust money his father and Lydia had skimmed. He used Piper as a go-between with Angela, because he wanted to keep the potential trademark and licensing quiet until the paperwork was filed and didn’t want anyone guessing what they were doing.”

Liza nodded. “He probably didn’t know where his next paycheck was coming from.”

“Right. He needed that money even more after his father died, because he wanted to try to take over the Silver Lake development project. If he could have managed it, he would have set himself up for life.”

“So what happens to all the clients of that law firm?” Melanie said. “Including us. Are we just out of luck?” She had moved on to examining the nails of her other hand.

“Our new lawyer says that since Jim is dead, and Ben is likely to go to jail for assault and battery—maybe even attempted murder—the state bar counsel will have to appoint another attorney to come in and contact every client the MacNamaras had, inform them of what happened, and help them find new representation.”

Liza leaned forward and patted my arm. “I can’t really miss what I never had, so it won’t be too hard for me to wait to see if any Bloodworth Trust money ever shows up.”

“Speak for yourself,” Melanie said.

Liza ignored her. “Not that it wouldn’t come in handy, with my repair bills coming up. But I’m more concerned about you, Georgie. How much longer will you have to wait for your divorce?”

The same thought had crossed my mind. I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure freedom is in my sights.”