twenty-three

When Francine joined Charlotte in the basement, Toby had both his laptop and William’s tablet open. He was wearing a headset, the microphone in front of his lips. Francine could hear what he was saying, but it made no sense to her. They might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

“He’s communicating with his friend,” Charlotte whispered. “The one who’s the expert hacker.”

Toby looked from one screen to the other. “I’ll try it one more time with the Frankenstein variation on the sequence,” he said. He typed something into William’s tablet. The screen lit up. Francine could see icons on it. “Got it!” Toby announced. “Thanks for your help, Ace.”

Toby signed off and spun around in the chair so that he faced the two women. He had a wide smile on his face. “What do you want the new password to be?”

“I don’t want there to be a new password,” Francine said. “I want it to be the old password. This needs to get back into William’s car. At least, eventually. If it has a different password, she won’t be able to get in.”

“Francine, think,” Charlotte said. “If Dolly has already noticed that it’s gone, then she’ll know something’s up when she finds it again. If she hasn’t, then it likely means she didn’t know it was in there, and she won’t ever notice that it’s gone. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s our tablet now.”

Francine couldn’t help but feel how similar this was to the way Charlotte had obtained Friederich Guttmann’s iPod, and how it held the smoking gun that eventually flushed out his killer. She hoped this didn’t turn out like that. The tablet was here, and they should probably read the book William was writing, if they could find it. But she didn’t have to make the decision Charlotte wanted her to make about not returning it, not if the password didn’t change. “It stays the same, at least for now.”

“I’ll write it down for you,” Toby said. “It’s kind of interesting.” He picked up a pen and scrap piece of paper and jotted down itstheWATER. He handed it to Francine. “The password is case sensitive.”

Francine stared at it. “Curious password.”

“Given that the symbol for water was carved in the message under the bridge, yes,” Charlotte said.

“But we don’t know what the significance is, do we?”

Charlotte shrugged.

“Can you find out if William was writing a book on the history of Parke County?” Francine asked Toby. “We were told he spent hours and hours at the library researching it.”

“I’ll need some kind of keyword to search the database.”

“Try water and see what comes up.”

Toby found the manuscript pretty easily. Water was a common word in it. He also found several emails. Unfortunately, William used a different password for his email program so they couldn’t get into it.

“I could try to break that code, too, but I’d need the tablet for a while,” Toby said.

Before Charlotte could say anything, Francine said, “No. Bad enough we’re reading his book. We’re not going to do the email thing.”

Toby showed them how to get into the manuscript. “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Actually, yes,” Charlotte said. “There’s something that’s been bothering me, and I think you might be able to help.”

“What now?” Francine asked.

“I thought about this when Joy pulled out those photos earlier today of you and Jonathan. Zed had to know it was the start date of the Covered Bridge Festival. With all the problems with the law he’s had when he’s tried to run people off his property, would he have fired on us when we were on public property? He couldn’t be sure we were a part of whatever William was doing there.”

“But I thought that you thought he had something to protect.”

“I did,” said Charlotte. “That’s where we were wrong. I don’t think Zed would fire on us unless he was certain we were a danger to him. And anyone who was with him would do the same. Therefore, the second person, the one who fired on us, was not with Zed.”

“You say that as though you have a suspect in mind.”

“I don’t, but I have a motive in mind. The person who fired on us was there to rendezvous with William. William and whoever his friend was had expected that if Zed had found him on the property, there would be consequences. So the friend was there to provide cover fire, if necessary, so William could escape.”

“And why did the friend fire on us?”

“Also cover. What if William was supposed to descend into the creek? Only he’d gotten injured, but the friend didn’t know that because he couldn’t see it. All he could see was that someone else was there, someone possibly with Zed, and William needed additional cover to get back to the rendezvous spot.”

“I think you’re overthinking this, but even if you aren’t, what’s the point?” Francine asked.

“What’s bothering me is why we never had someone blow up the photos to see if we could see the shooter. Those photos were taken with a camera with a lot of pixels. Toby here could probably blow those up and find out who the shooter is. Where are the photos Joy took of you and Jonathan? They faced the direction the shots were coming in from.”

“That would have been at quite a distance, Charlotte. I don’t know if it could be magnified enough and still have the definition to see who it is.”

Toby’s head stopped bobbing between the two women. “There’s only one way to find out. Get me the photos and let’s scan them in.”

Francine clenched and unclenched her fists as she watched Toby methodically search the background of the photograph of her and Jonathan in a compromising position. Part of her hoped he wouldn’t find anything. She couldn’t imagine how bad it would be if these photos got out into the public realm, which she knew would happen if he spotted anything unusual and they had to turn them over to the police. On the other hand, she could use a break in trying to solve the mystery of who shot at William.

Toby went to the limit of the photograph’s resolution. It allowed them to clearly view much of the brush along the creek, but not to the point of distortion. He used his finger on the touchscreen to drag different segments of the photograph into view. Every time a new segment showed up, they all studied it.

Toby abruptly stopped. “There. Right there. Someone’s in the brush.” He pointed to the spot.

“How in the world did you spot that?” Charlotte asked.

“He has young eyes.” Francine brought her face close to the computer screen, tilting her head up trying to put the face in the sweet spot of her glasses. Once she did, she was fairly certain who it was. The thought made her straighten up. “Can you blow this up any more?”

“If I do, it will only distort the image. You won’t see it any more clearly.”

Francine felt Charlotte poking her. “Out with it. I can tell by your reaction you know who that is.”

“It’s Dolly. William’s wife.”

“Yes!” Charlotte crowed. “My hypothesis fits. She was there to cover him, and we were the wild card. They were going to meet at the Roseville Bridge, but we showed up. She couldn’t explain what she was doing there, so she hid. And then William is discovered and is chased out of the cornfield. She’s horrified, but she can’t do anything about it without giving away the fact that she’s there.”

“Because if she does,” Francine continued, “that raises the issue of what they were trying to do.”

Charlotte, whose voice had gotten loud with excitement, now dropped a notch. “Which is what? Retrieve a diary? Steal a vial full of water? It sounds weak.”

Francine scratched her head. “It does. Zed so much as told me the diary belonged to William. And it’s difficult to believe they would put so much into water samples.”

For a moment, both of them were silent. Then Charlotte pointed back at the screen. “We don’t know that it was, in fact, the water. What we do know is that William was there, and now we know Dolly was there.”

Toby played with the keyboard. “I’ve cropped that part of the photograph and saved it as a separate file. I want to go back and look at the video Joy took after the shooting began. I want to see if she has anything else pointing in that direction.”

“To see if Dolly is still there?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes,” Toby said. “And to see if she’s carrying a rifle.”

A half hour later, after fast-forwarding through the video and a cursory examination of the photographs, Toby came to a disappointing conclusion. “The part of the creek Dolly was in was too far out. It never came into Joy’s video. She focused on William’s fall and Jonathan’s rescue, and that was all down by the creek.”

“I’m not giving up on this line,” Charlotte said. “We could still establish something from the ballistics. Francine, what do you know about Dolly? Does she have a rifle? Could she tag a squirrel from a hundred yards or is she lucky to hit the side of a barn from fifty feet?”

Considering that Charlotte had a rifle and was a scarily bad shot, Francine thought it wasn’t right for her to demean someone else. “I don’t know if Dolly has a rifle or whether she’s a good shot. But while I hate to stereotype anyone, Dolly is from Kentucky and the Appalachian area. If I had to guess, I’d guess that she grew up shooting.”

Charlotte put a finger in the air. “I knew it! Now we just have to get Roy motivated to investigate her. The police have the bullets that were used to shoot up the bridge. Proving they came from Dolly’s rifle—”

“If she even has a rifle,” Francine cautioned.

“—will be a snap. They do it all the time on CSI.”

“There’s such a thing as self-incrimination, Charlotte. Dolly will be wary, and the crime here is William’s death. If, as you hypothesize, Dolly was protecting him, that doesn’t make her guilty of the crime.”

Charlotte checked her watch. “I wonder if Joy could get Roy back here so we could show him what Toby uncovered. Once he sees that Dolly was there, I bet he’ll want to question her as much as he wants to question Zed.”

Francine thought about that. Just how important was this anyway? William running out of the cornfield with a vial of clear liquid and her grandmother’s diary still only boiled down to trespassing. The clear liquid was a more vexing problem, but not necessarily indicative of a crime. Or was Zed hiding something? Was he the source of some kind of terrible pollution that William and Dolly were collecting proof of ? Unfortunately the vial was now in the hands of the police. There had been a mason jar of something they’d pulled out of William’s car, possibly the same thing, but they couldn’t be sure since she’d insisted on putting it back. The itstheWATER password made her think twice, but in the end, the only thing she could rationalize was trying to get the water analyzed.

“I don’t think we have enough to call Detective Stockton tonight. Let’s try him in the morning when he’s on duty.”

Charlotte was clearly disappointed, but then she brightened. “You’re right. We should wait until morning. In fact, we should wait until after your appointment with the lawyer. We might have more information then, and more information is always good.”

Toby held out William’s tablet. “What do you want to do with this?”

Charlotte made a grab for it. “I’ll take it,” she said.

Francine was one step ahead and snatched it away just before Charlotte’s hand got there. “I know it was through your efforts we’ve obtained this, but as William’s cousin I claim dibs on it.” Charlotte started to turn red, so Francine said, “Why don’t you read over my grandmother’s diary? I read it last night, but I was very tired. Maybe I missed something in it.”

That seemed to pacify her. “Is it hot?”

“Lurid,” Francine answered, “at least for that time period.”

“All right,” Charlotte said, and she grabbed the photos of Francine and Jonathan off Toby’s Apple computer. “But I get to keep the photos too. Consider it blackmail material.”