“There is always something offensive in the details of cunning. The manoeuvres of selfishness and duplicity must ever be revolting.”
—Anne Elliot to Mrs. Smith, Persuasion
Emily had no idea what useful thing she’d find to do in Luke’s absence, but she wasn’t left to wonder long. The sound of his engine had barely faded down the drive when she heard another car approaching.
To be precise, a van, ocean blue, with THE WAVE painted in an inexpert wavy shape across the side. From the driver’s side emerged a young man with a camera. He went around to the passenger side and assisted in extracting the beached whale woman from her seat trap.
Emily shut the door behind herself and stood at the top of the porch steps. Rita hauled her bulk toward her. “I hear there’s been another murder,” she bellowed. “We’re here to get the scoop.”
Luke had not instructed her on how to handle a media assault. She fell back on her usual model of behavior: fiction.
“No comment,” she said. “You’ll have to talk to Lieutenant Richards.”
“Oh, come on,” Rita boomed. “You can at least confirm that Agnes Beech is dead.”
“No comment.”
“Rick, go get a picture of the cellar.” The young man with the camera headed toward the side of the house.
“The cellar is a sealed crime scene. No one is allowed to enter.”
Rick paused. “Go on, Rick. Don’t listen to her.”
“Mrs. Spenser, you and your tame cameraman are trespassing on private property. There is nothing for you here. Now please leave before I call the sheriff.”
“You go ahead and call your tame sheriff. He’s just the man I want to talk to. About why he hasn’t already arrested you!”
Emily felt the blood rush to her face. Her fists clenched of their own accord, and her pulse throbbed in her ears. She, so long a mistress of words, could find no words scathing enough to express her fury with this human scourge.
She was saved from spontaneous combustion by the appearance of Billy Beech from the back of the house. He advanced on Rick and Rita with all the authority of a cannonball. Even Rita quailed before him.
“Away with you forthwith, you poisonous worm! Go! Begone! Leave my mistress in peace!” He shooed them back into their van like so many chickens. He gave the van a slap on the rear bumper, and it bolted like a frightened horse.
“Billy! I didn’t know you had it in you. Thank you.”
“I am ashamed to say, madam, that female snake is my cousin and the bane of my existence. It was a pleasure and an honor to dispatch her from your presence.” He bowed—just an inclination this time, not a full-fledged marshmallow fold—and rolled back the way he’d come.
* * *
Emily divided the next couple of hours between prayer and sleep. She hated herself for sleeping at such a time, but her body demanded it after the adrenaline depletion of the morning. Yet every time she dropped off, she was awakened by Bustopher Jones’s piteous howls from the kitchen. She’d tried giving him food and water, even attempted to pet him, but he rebuffed all her advances. He preferred to be alone with his grief—though he wanted all the world to know about it.
Late in the afternoon Luke returned. He sank into Bustopher’s favorite chair—currently unoccupied—and lay back, exhausted. Emily offered him sherry, but he asked for coffee instead. She was about to call for Agnes when she remembered. She went to the kitchen and made the coffee herself. When she returned, Luke was dozing in the chair.
She stood over him, tracing in memory the lines of his youthful face, now hidden beneath the coarsening of maturity. He’d kept in good shape, but he hadn’t kept out of the sun and wind. She laid the coffee tray on an end table and ran one finger lightly around his hairline and down his jaw, reacquainting herself with the feel of him. Then she bent down and lightly kissed his brow.
He didn’t stir. She hated to wake him, but he must have so much yet to do. “Luke?” she said softly.
His eyelids fluttered, then abruptly he sat up straight, looking about as though he had no idea where he was. He turned to her and focused again.
“Did I fall asleep?” He scrubbed his face with his hands.
“Just a little. I brought your coffee.”
“Thanks.” He took the cup from her hand. She’d added one sugar but no cream. He sipped it and smiled. “You remembered.”
She felt herself flush. “I remember lots of things.”
He set the cup down. “We better save that for later, okay? Got to stay focused on the case. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course.” She took the chair opposite him. “What did our two suspects have to say?”
“Talked to the mayor first. He was easy to find, in his office. Insisted he didn’t know a thing about it. I took him through it. He got here around ten A.M. Thursday. Came to the back door to check in with Agnes. She told him to go in from the outside, which he did. Asked if he noticed anything funny—nope. Looked at the stairs—nope. Must’ve fixed the washer with his eyes closed, practically. Agnes didn’t come down; he didn’t go up. He was done in half an hour and went out the way he came, leaving the door latched but not padlocked, like Billy said. Went to the back door again and handed Agnes a bill.”
“So that’s the end of that?”
Luke rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I took him through it a couple of times. His story didn’t slip, but he was jumpy as a cat the whole time. He sounded innocent, but he looked guilty as hell.”
“Hmm. What about Brock?”
“Took me a while to run him down. Tried the Stony Beach Inn; they said he’d checked out Wednesday night around seven and hadn’t come back. Asked around all the restaurants and taverns, found out he’d had lunch at the Friendly Fluke at one o’clock today. Nobody’d seen him in between. Finally found him on the beach, said he was waiting around till three P.M. to check back in at the Stony.”
“Did he have any explanation for lurking around my yard?”
“Said he’d lost a cuff link in the grass and was looking for it. Claimed after Billy ran him off, he’d driven straight back to town, gone to the Beach Brew for a couple of beers and a pizza, then decided on a whim to drive to Portland. Said his agent’d got him an audition for a stage play. Had the audition Thursday, but it didn’t pan out, so he came back this morning.”
“Do you believe him?”
“He’s as plausible as an abbey full of monks, but I don’t trust him. Still, I followed up on everything he told me, and it all checks out. That is, all except him driving straight to town after Billy threw him out—bartender at the Beach Brew remembers him coming in but had no idea of the exact time. So there’s nothing to say he couldn’t have snuck back into the cellar while you and Agnes were inside and rigged that tread.”
“Seems like we would have heard something.”
“What were you doing between five and six?”
“I was in here, reading. Agnes was making dinner—come to think of it, she had the radio on pretty loud. I could hear it in here. But that would be awfully bold, to be jimmying a stair just a few feet from the kitchen door with Agnes on the other side of it.”
“There’s also the chance he could’ve come back later, after you were both in bed. Brock stayed with a lady friend in Portland. She said he got there at nine, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she was lying.”
“Good point. I’d certainly never hear anything from the third floor. Agnes sleeps—slept—right off the kitchen, but I think she used earplugs to block out the sound of the sea. I like it myself, but it bothered her.”
“So Brock’s still in the running. I asked him—before I’d said anything about the cause of death—whether he’d ever done any carpentry, and he said he didn’t know one end of a hammer from another. I put one of the boys onto a full background check to see if that pans out. Should know by tomorrow.”
He sat, slumped, his elbows on his knees, hands dangling. He looked like he had as much energy as a marionette with no puppeteer holding the strings.
“You’re exhausted, Luke. Why don’t you go home to bed?”
“Can’t. Still got a ton of paperwork.” He eyed the coffeepot. “Any more in there?”
She poured him another cup and stirred in the sugar. He drank the lukewarm coffee in two gulps, then pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Dinner’s still on, no matter what.” He gave her a weary smile.
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “No matter what.”
* * *
Hunger finally caught up with her after Luke left. She went to the kitchen, hoping to find something she could nuke for supper. But not only were there no convenience foods and no leftovers anywhere in the kitchen, there wasn’t even a microwave. No shortcuts for Agnes.
But Emily did find eggs and cheese in the fridge and a couple of scones in the pantry, so she made herself a quick-and-dirty omelet. Bustopher Jones had given up howling and now crouched under the kitchen table, staring at Emily as if he held her personally responsible for Agnes’s absence. She tried speaking to him, but he only glared the more balefully.
She ate her supper in the library, which had always felt cozy to her before but now seemed huge and empty, the house around it stretching out into indifferent infinity. She washed her few dishes and then toured the house, making sure all the doors and windows were fastened and locked, before plodding up the stairs to bed. Even her tower room could not comfort her. The sea pounded, distant and uncaring, almost threatening, beyond her windows. She crawled under a pile of blankets and shivered.
Philip? she said tentatively, but he did not reply. Even Philip had deserted her—perhaps because of what had happened with Luke. Never in her life had she felt so alone.
In the morning she cooked more eggs and washed more dishes, feeling like a bumbling intruder in her own kitchen. Bustopher Jones still sat under the table, his food and water untouched. She was beginning to worry about him. He wasn’t a young cat; prolonged fasting couldn’t be good for him. But try as she might, she could not coax him out.
The house’s silence thundered in her ears. She had to get out of here, do something—but what? The investigation, such as it was, seemed to have reached a stalemate. She would have liked to do something for Agnes, but Billy had insisted he had the funeral under control, knew exactly what Agnes would have wanted and was well able to pay for it out of the legacy that would now pass to him.
The weather was uninviting—gray skies with a lackadaisical drizzle, hardly more than a mist—but she decided to go for a walk nevertheless. She wouldn’t accomplish anything sitting in the house. If she walked into town, she’d have at least a chance of picking up some useful tidbit. She threw a rain slicker over her chinos and sweater in case the drizzle decided to buck up and act like a real rain.
The mile and a half to downtown felt like three, so she treated herself to a latte at the Friendly Fluke before moving on. Several people she hardly knew stopped by her table to offer curiosity disguised as condolences about Agnes’s death. Following Luke’s instructions, she implied it was an accident without saying anything specific.
Since her booth here offered no refuge, she finished her latte quickly and moved on, heading vaguely toward Luke’s office—not with any real purpose, just drawn there by the magnet of his presence. Passing City Hall, which she’d expect to be deserted on a Saturday, she caught movement through one of the windows and decided on a whim to go in.
The door was not locked, but the receptionist’s desk was unoccupied. The inner door to the mayor’s office showed a crack of light.
Acting on instinct, she padded silently up to the door, paused, then pushed it open. Mayor Trimble and Vicki Landau had their heads together in front of a table by the far wall. They sprang apart when they saw her; then, in a move that looked rehearsed, both turned and leaned their backsides against the table, blocking Emily’s view. But in the instant before they closed ranks, she glimpsed something that looked like an architectural model.
Emily cast about for an excuse to give for her presence—something that would both disarm them and force at least one of them to move away from the table, if only momentarily. “Oh, hello—I was just passing and saw the light, so I thought I’d pop in and ask a favor. I’m going to need a new housekeeper. I thought one of you might know someone, or at least know how I could go about advertising. Is there a community job board or anything?”
Vicki merely glared at her, but Trimble licked his lips, eyes darting about the room. “I, uh—I might know someone. I’ll get in touch with her and give you a call, get it?”
“Couldn’t you call her right now?” That would require him to cross over to his desk and leave the table unguarded.
“Uh, no, not now. Wouldn’t be home, get it? She—uh—she works on Saturdays.”
“But if she has a job already, why would she want to be my housekeeper?”
“No, no. No job, just—busy, that’s all. Busy. Call her tomorrow.”
“What about you, Vicki? Do you know of any prospects?”
Vicki crossed her arms and tapped her red-lacquered fingernails against her elbow. “Anyone who’d want to keep house for you? No. Not likely you’ll find anyone around here who wants to be stuck in that mausoleum a mile from town. Especially with Agnes likely haunting it. You’d be much better off selling.”
Emily had a fleeting vision of Agnes’s ghost hovering over the new housekeeper’s shoulder, short-sheeting the beds and making her cakes fall. But this was no time for either spookiness or levity.
She spotted the current Wave on the mayor’s desk, which stood under the window at right angles to the mysterious table. “Mind if I check your want ads? Just in case.” She headed toward the desk.
The mayor darted forward as if to head her off, then leaped back to shield the end of the table that faced toward the desk. Vicki slid over to take his previous position, blocking both sides of the corner from Emily’s view. But in the shuffle, Emily caught a glimpse of the whole model.
It showed a stretch of coastline that looked just like Stony Beach. But at the north end of town, where her property—the greenbelt and then Windy Corner—should have been, she saw what looked like a huge hotel surrounded by a golf course, tennis courts, condos … the works.
Emily called on all her drama training from high school to act as if she’d seen nothing. She turned to the desk, unfolded the Wave, and paged through it, pausing at the classified section but not taking in a word of it. She took a deep breath to steady herself, then turned back. “Nothing there. Well, I’ll hope to hear from you tomorrow, Mayor Trimble. Thanks for your trouble. I’ll let myself out.” She strode from the room without looking back.
Safely outside the building, she leaned against the shingles, her breath coming in short gasps. So this was what they had planned! Not just opening up property for anyone who might want to come in and build, but a full-scale luxury resort. On her land. That model—and the preliminary architect’s work it was based on—must have cost a pretty penny. How could they make an investment like that without even a reasonable hope that the property would ever be theirs?
Only one answer to that. They must have believed they had a reasonable hope.
Emily fairly ran up Third Street to Luke’s office. She shoved open the door to see one of his young officers at the front desk, staring at a computer screen. “I have to see Lieutenant Richards,” she blurted, and made for the inner door, ignoring the young man’s protests.
Luke was similarly engrossed at his computer but stood when she burst in. She leaned her hands on his desk, panting. “You won’t believe what I just saw.”
“Here, sit down. Take your time.” He pushed a chair up behind her and poured her a glass of water. She sipped and then told him between gasps.
Luke frowned. “That’s motive if I ever saw one. And plenty of opportunity, both for Agnes and Beatrice. But where’s the goddamned proof?” He thumped his fist on the desk. The papers that littered it jumped, and so did Emily.
“No joy on the background checks and whatnot?”
“None so far. But we’ve mostly been working on Brock. This puts our fine mayor in the lead as far as I’m concerned.”
Emily chewed her lip. “Maybe we should have dinner at the same place they all ate the night Beatrice got sick. See if anybody remembers anything they might have overlooked before.”
“That’s where I was planning to take you anyway. Only four-star restaurant in the county. But I didn’t want it to be a working meal.”
“There is no real off duty until the case is solved. Isn’t that what they teach you in sheriff school?”
“No such thing as sheriff school, but yeah. Only it shouldn’t have to apply to you.”
“Are you kidding? I’m in this up to my topknot. I won’t be able to relax until we nail this killer, whoever he is.”