“NO MORE PROCRASTINATION,” ESME SAID sternly, setting a cup of coffee in front of me as I tried to clear the cobwebs from my head. “We leave tomorrow. We’ve got to pack.”
“I know,” I said, “but I hate leaving Morningside right now with all this stuff going on.”
“I don’t like leaving, either,” Esme said. “But we’re not going to the back side of the moon. We can be back here in less than three hours if need be. Hey, did you hear back from that woman, the granddaughter of Charlie Martin’s friend, what was his name?”
“Hershel Tillett, and no, she hasn’t called me back. You know how that goes. I’ll have to pester her again but there’s no urgency.”
“You lost interest already? Yesterday you were all in a tizzy about it.”
“Oh, I still want to do it, but we won’t be able to get any more interviews in before we leave town. And anyhow, Charlie hasn’t agreed to do it and I have a hunch Tony’s gonna have a hard row to hoe talking him into it.”
“Assuming Tony’s able himself. I’m nervous as a cat about what Jennifer Jeffers is going to do after they talk to him today. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s harassing him just to get at me ’cause she knows I’m fond of the boy.”
“Wow, paranoid much? First off, I think your fondness for the boy is a very new development, which I didn’t even realize until yesterday. And second, maybe we don’t occupy Jennifer Jeffers’ thoughts as much as you seem to think.”
“You know she hates us,” Esme said. “You know it. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what I ever did to her. Other than become friends with her partner.”
“I think you and Denny are a little more than friends,” I teased, expecting her to sputter.
Instead she frowned. “He’s a good man, Sophreena. I like him more than I probably ought to.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked. “You two make a great couple.”
“Um-hm. Until he finds out I’m a freak. And how long do you think it’ll be before I slip and he figures it out? You can’t have this thing I’ve got and a normal relationship, too. I’m going to have to give him up before he finds out.”
“Are you out of your mind? Look, you have perfectly normal relationships with me, Marydale, Winston, Coco, and Jack, and we all know. What makes you think it would be any different with Denny?”
“He’s a cop, with a cop’s mind,” Esme said wearily. “You’re too young to remember Jack Webb on TV saying just the facts, ma’am, but that’s a cop’s way of looking at the world.”
“Don’t you have one of your mother’s homespun expressions to cover this? Like not getting your cart before your horse or something?”
Esme considered. “Well, she used to say, ‘Don’t trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.’ ”
“Okay, that one makes my brain hurt a little, but it sounds like good advice.”
We’d gotten our computers, scanners, recording equipment, and other gear packed up and ready to go by the time Jack called to ask me to lunch. I wasn’t about to turn that down. I promised Esme I’d be back soon to pack my clothes and load the car so we could get on the road early the next morning.
To borrow from Esme’s line of patter, I enjoyed passing time with Jack probably more than I ought to. Over the past months my determination to keep my true feelings from him had grown ever stronger. But so had my confusion. Sometimes things he said or did gave me a faint hope he might feel the same. Then I’d realize it was only wishful thinking on my part.
When I heard Jack’s truck pull into the driveway, I went out to meet him. He had his boat in the back of the truck and he’d gotten out to adjust one of the bungee cords holding it in place. “You’ll be happy to hear I’m gonna repaint her,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know if you should,” I said, running my hand along the upturned hull. “I kind of like her the way she is.”
“Good,” Jack said, sheepishly. “Because I really don’t want to repaint, but I do have to make some repairs.”
“What’s this from?” I asked, looking at a hole, surrounded by some splintered wood that had been water soaked and weathered into a gray patina.
Jack smiled. “Bullet hole. When I was about nine or ten my dad shot at a muskrat that was burrowing under our dock. His shot ricocheted off a rock. Muskrat one, boat, zero. I repaired it from the inside but can’t bring myself to cover it entirely. Every time I see that hole I remember my dad’s face that day as he watched the boat slowly sink.”
I rubbed my finger in the indentation. “I saw something that looked just like this at Beth’s,” I said, half lost in my own thoughts. “In the side of their shed. I forgot to tell Denny.”
“Why would you need to tell him?” Jack asked. “Blaine wasn’t shot. And I doubt it was a bullet hole anyway.”
“I’m pretty sure it was,” I said, fishing my phone from my bag. “And the wood around it was still light colored; it hadn’t weathered. I don’t know that it had anything to do with Blaine’s death, but if there was a gun, if Blaine had a gun then maybe—” I caught myself before I said any more out loud.
Jack gave me a peculiar look, but he didn’t ask questions. We got into the truck and he drove slowly toward the diner. I called Denny but he was unavailable so I texted a message. “I hope that means he’s in the interrogation with Tony,” I said.
“Yeah, about that,” Jack said. “I got a call from Detective Jeffers this morning asking if Tony had ever been to my place, my business, I mean.”
I groaned. “What did you tell her?”
Jack shrugged. “That yeah, he’d been over and filmed a little, though he was mostly interested in asking about the golf course and its operations since that’s our biggest client and a huge player in Morningside’s development.”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “I was holding my breath figuring she was going to ask if he’d ever been back where we keep the tarps, but she didn’t.”
“Had he?”
Jack shrugged again. “I suppose. He’d been all around the place, but I couldn’t tell you if he took any particular notice. And anyway, after what Esme said last night I wasn’t going to volunteer anything.”
I wished Esme could hear him say that. No hesitation. As if whatever Esme said could be taken to the bank.
“I’m still freaked out about that tarp being found at my place,” he said. “I’ve been turning this over in my head for days. I’m convinced somebody put it there to hide it in plain sight. A tarp’s harder to get rid of than you might think. Up on Crescent Hill there are no commercial properties, so no Dumpsters. I suppose somebody could have put it into a trash bag and slipped it into someone’s trash can, but they’d need a trash bag handy, right? And they couldn’t dump it in the lake with the body. It would’ve floated to the surface and attracted all kinds of attention.”
“I’ve been thinking about how it was folded. Is your method special?”
“Well, no. I mean we didn’t invent it or anything. It’s just the way we do it. Painters sometimes fold their drop cloths that way, too. It would be like your preference for how you knot your scarf,” he said, reaching over to yank the one I had looped around my neck. “Our way lets you tuck in the final fold so it’ll stay through handling. If you fold them in simple squares they soon get messy.”
“Boy, would you appreciate Beth’s toolshed,” I said, describing its state of tidiness.
Jack nodded. “Good tools should be respected.”
As we met a car on Front Street the driver’s hand lifted off the steering wheel in the Southerner’s ubiquitous two-fingered wave. I didn’t think much of it at first, since the gesture is almost automatic whether the driver knows you or not, but then I realized it was Daniel. I turned just as he passed and then I saw Alan Corrigan in the passenger seat.
“Alan’s still here?” I said, more musing than question. “That’s the second time I’ve seen them together this week. What do you suppose that’s all about?”
“Alan’s going to invest in Daniel’s restaurant when and if he can get enough other capital together to start it up.”
“And how do you know this?” I asked.
“Bonnie told me,” Jack said. “She said she’d invest herself if she had any extra cash. I understand Blaine hit the roof when he found out Alan was in.”
“When did he find that out?” I asked. “It might be relevant to the investigation.”
“Naw,” Jack said. “That was weeks ago. They had a big dustup about it but in the end Blaine told him if he wanted to throw his money away to have at it.”
“Sounds like they patched up their differences then,” I said, feeling oddly disappointed.
“On that score, I guess,” Jack said. “But Blaine had another bone to pick with Corrigan. Everybody knows Blaine and his parents were at loggerheads over what his parents were doing to help Madison.”
“Yeah, and what’s that got to do with Alan?”
“Sterling Branch didn’t want the family lawyer to handle this for some reason. I think maybe he was on Blaine’s side of the argument. So Sterling hired Alan to come down and set up an amended trust for Madison. That’s one reason Alan was here the night before Blaine died, and even then Blaine was still thinking he’d be able to talk Alan out of doing the job for his parents.”
“Wow, Miss Bonnie tells you everything, does she?” I said, a twinge of jealousy working its way along my shoulder muscles, kinking them tight.
“I think she’s lonely,” Jack said. “And she doesn’t have any family around so she’s had no one to lean on through this whole thing. She sits out on her back deck every night now, even when it’s cold outside. She just sits out there and looks up at the stars. I think she’s worried about losing her life savings, too, if things don’t pan out with the settlement. Or maybe it’s something altogether different bothering her; I don’t know. She doesn’t tell me anything about her private thoughts.”
That pleased me more than it should have and the guilt moved in. “I hope she’ll be okay,” I said. “I’m glad she has you to talk to. She’s seems like a nice person.”
The diner was crowded and we threaded our way among the tables to grab the last available booth. When I slid in I spotted Marydale and Winston sitting at a far table with Madison Branch. They were deep in conversation and hadn’t noticed Jack and me come in. Madison looked upset or confused, or maybe angry. It was hard to tell with her. She had an unnaturally flat affect and the way she carried her body was a little off-kilter. Madison had always been a little different. She was an artsy type but thus far she hadn’t been able to channel her abilities in a focused direction. I’d seen some of her paintings and she was talented, but the subject matter she chose indicated she was also troubled.
I wanted to observe Madison but it was a private conversation, and I had no business intruding, even visually. I grabbed a menu and studied it, though I knew it by heart.
Jack and I each ordered the soup du jour, and since this jour was Wednesday it would be a luscious thick cream of mushroom. I order a salad to go with it, out of sheer guilt, but Jack had no such compunction and asked for a side of double cheeseburger.
Jack asked about the job in Wilmington, which I expected to be a straightforward gig. “We’ll interview the family members,” I told him, “then spend the rest of the time on research and sourcing. No heritage scrapbooks, no filming. No scanning or indexing. They just want a well-documented pedigree chart and a decorative family tree. I don’t think we’re going to have any skeletons pop out of closets on this one.”
“Sounds a little boring,” Jack said, hacking his newly arrived cheeseburger into half-moons.
“Yeah, well, I could use a little boring after Olivia’s job.”
As we ate our lunch I checked my phone every few minutes. This is behavior I abhor in other people and Jack—properly—called me on it.
“I know, I’m sorry. I was hoping to hear something from Tony. I’m worried.”
Jack nodded. “With good reason, I’d say.”
I saw Madison Branch get up to leave. She hugged Marydale, then Winston, and gathered up her things. She seemed less agitated than she’d been when we came in, but I wasn’t sure I was reading her right. If the buzz around town was to be given credence, she’d brought home a prescription drug addiction along with her other issues. Marydale said she’d been working hard to get herself clean and healthy again.
Winston spotted Jack and after the waitress brought their bill they came over to our booth. We exchanged what little bits of news we’d collected since last night, which wasn’t a lot. They didn’t offer up anything about Madison and I didn’t ask, though I wanted to.
When they were gone I got that odd vibe again. “Do they seem weird to you?” I asked Jack.
Jack frowned. “Weird?”
“Acting strange?”
Jack puckered his lips, thinking. “Nope, they seem like always.”
“I hope so,” I said, watching as they walked back across the street to Keepsake Corner.
* * *
“News,” Esme pronounced as I came into the kitchen.
“Good news or bad news? Is it Tony?” I asked, holding my breath.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry, sugar. But Denny promised he’d call me the minute he could. No, my news is about the job in Wilmington and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. Mr. Markum’s daughter called. We’re going to have to reschedule. Her father’s in the hospital.”
“Is it serious?” I asked.
“Appendicitis. And I gather there were complications. He’ll be okay, but he’ll be hospitalized for at least a week. I told her we’d have to check our calendars and get back to her.”
“Poor man. But I can’t say I’m disappointed to postpone, with all that’s going on here right now.”
My cell phone rang and a beat later the special ringtone Esme had recently assigned to Denny started singing into the room. Salt-n-Pepa’s “Whatta Man.” I made a mental note to tell Denny to call her on the phone sometime when they were together so he could hear it. I fumbled my phone to look at the screen and saw Tony’s number displayed. I pushed the talk button and asked if he was okay.
“Yeah, I’m good,” he said, though his tone implied that wasn’t entirely true. “I was wondering if I could stop by this afternoon to show you some stuff, a rough-cut preview of Olivia’s video and more of that last interview with Charlie. I know you’re going out of town tomorrow but it wouldn’t take long.”
“Come over now, ASAP,” I said, not bothering to tell him our plans had changed.
Esme had stepped out onto the patio to talk and she came back in, hugging her sweater tighter around her to erase the chill.
“Well, apparently they didn’t arrest him,” I said.
“Not yet,” Esme said, gesturing with the phone. “Denny convinced Jennifer she didn’t have enough to hold him and that the DA would not be pleased if she made the arrest on evidence this flimsy. But she’s still got the bit between her teeth.”
Tony’s motorcycle pulled into the driveway a few minutes later and Esme and I both went out, peppering him with questions before he could even get his helmet off.
“It wasn’t bad,” he said. “Well, it was bad, but I’ve had worse. Your guy,” he said to Esme, “he’s okay, but that woman is a—” He stopped.
“A buster of some tender part of your anatomy?” Esme said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, that,” Tony said with a tired smile.
Esme, it seemed, had warmed not only to Tony, but to the video format as well. And from the snippets I’d seen so far it had warmed to her, too. She was great at voice-over, her voice warm and full of inflection and resonance. Mine, on the other hand, was small, like me, and came off sounding like a cartoon rodent. She was also good at scripting, where the cadence and rhythm were much different than the cut-and-dried parlance we use for our family history reports.
I wasn’t yet absolutely sold on the idea of adding video scrapbooking to our list of services, but I was keeping an open mind. Tony set up his laptop on the coffee table in the living room and after some finagling of wires and remotes, managed to get the picture up on our TV screen. He started Olivia’s video scrapbook with some clips from the old Crawford movie.
“The company is still in business,” he said. “They got swallowed up by a bigger company years ago, but I was able to get permission to use the clips.” He brushed his hair back off his face. “I was gonna use ’em anyway, but since this is a portfolio piece I wanted everything legal-eagled.”
He’d cut in the footage he’d taken yesterday, positioning the camera at the same angles as the old shots. “We’ll have to do some voice-over here,” he said, turning to Esme, naturally, “and then here we slide into Olivia’s part.”
Olivia came onscreen, telling what she knew of her family history, then there were interviews with Daniel and with Beth. Then came Esme’s narration of Olivia’s family history and those Ken Burns–style pans of the scrapbooks.
Now I was sold.
When I didn’t speak for a moment Tony interpreted my silence as disapproval.
“You hate it,” he said.
“No, Tony, I’m just speechless. This is better than I ever expected; no offense.”
“None taken,” Tony said. “As long as you like it. We’ve got more work to do on it, but so far, so good.”
“So far, real good,” Esme said.
“I know you don’t have much time, but let me show you some clips from the interview with Charlie, too.” He ejected a disk from his computer and popped in another one.
“Relax,” I said, telling him about our cancellation. “All we’ve got to do this afternoon is unpack the stuff we already packed.”
“Okay, cool. Maybe after you see this you’ll buy into this project, too. Keep in mind this is all raw footage.”
Charlie’s now-familiar face appeared on the screen. He was stiff, almost sullen, in the beginning, but slowly mellowed as I coaxed him along in the interview.
When the screen went blank Esme sat back on the sofa. “Okay, well, now it’s my turn to say I’m convinced. You’ve got an interesting story there.”
“Especially if my hunch is right,” I said.
Tony gave me a quizzical look and I told him what I’d found while searching for information about Hershel Tillett. “And based on that, I’m thinking Charlie may have been one of Hershel’s underaged friends, or maybe even one of the cousins. I’ll keep digging. And if Charlie Martin, or whatever his real name is, was a boy soldier, don’t you think that makes his story even more compelling?”
“Depends on how young he was, I suppose,” Tony said. “Lots of boys fresh off the farms fought that war. Or when you think about it, pretty much every war.”
Esme groaned, and when I looked over there was the hand across her forehead again.
“I know, it’s not right,” she murmured.
Tony shrugged. “I know it’s not right, but that’s just the way it is.”