Edie Black lived on the side of Carson’s Mountain in an unusually shaped home built to cling to the side of the mountain. It was irregular in shape and the levels were of different shape and size. The last few yards of the narrow driveway were steep, narrow, laid with gravel and wound past a small stable where Lockem glimpsed a pair of riding horses standing at the gate watching them pass. He got a funny feeling as if the horses were assessing them as they glided by. They drove up over the last hump and arrived at a tiny circle bisected by a stone walkway leading, on one end, to an open porch and a truly massive wooden front door. Alan parked beside a red BMW. Standing on each side of the doorway to the house were two carved and painted totems that looked authentic.
On the left, as Lockem and Marjorie started up the walk, Alan noted a wide plank veranda that appeared to encircle the house. He wondered if it went all the way around. Above the veranda at the second story was a tall peaked sheet of glass that faced the lake, the valley, and a distant mountain range. A heavy log railing that appeared to circle the entire level provided a sense of security for anyone standing on the balcony.
“Nice place, from this angle,” commented Marjorie, starting up the wide stone walkway.
“We’ll have to ask for a look at the view from upstairs,” Alan responded, following her. He craned his neck to look at the high peak of the roof line above them.
The door opened as the couple stepped under the shingled canopy over the entrance. Edie stood there to welcome them.
“You feel tense,” said Marjorie, embracing her cousin. “Has something happened?”
Edie Black shook her head. “No, but I’m not getting much of a positive nature from the people here, so far. Come in, come in.” She ushered Alan and Marjorie into the large living area, shaped somewhat like a rhombus. Like the rest of the house, it had tall floor to twelve-foot ceiling windows on each side of a massive stone fireplace, built, Alan surmised, of native boulders.
The front door was on one side and led on the right to a medium-sized dining room and straight ahead to a huge kitchen with an eating counter that separated it from the living space. Edie led the way across a broad oak plank floor to the two steps leading down to where a small number of casually dressed individuals turned almost in unison to survey the new arrivals. The atmosphere was electric with tension. Nearly everyone Alan observed had a drink in hand. He saw no welcoming smiles. Expressions were neutral or reserved and one or two appeared almost angry or suspicious.
“Hooray,” Marjorie murmured, “into the lion’s den. Which one is Daniel?”
“Everyone.” Edie raised her voice in the silence. “This is my cousin, Marjorie Kane and her …companion, Alan Lockem. I’ve asked them here to help me with Sam’s…troubles. I’ll let you introduce yourselves as we go along. But first, Edwin, can you get Marjorie a drink. Alan, a glass of ginger ale?”
Lockem nodded assent.
Edwin Roose took Marjorie’s order for a Vodka martini and handed Alan a frosted glass of ginger ale. Alan favored Roose with a slight smile, no more than a lift of his lip, when he accepted the tall glass filled with amber liquid and two small ice cubes. Lockem knew the ginger ale was indistinguishable from a good bourbon or light scotch. Tonight he wanted to be fully cognizant of everyone around him. His initial assessment of these figures could be important impressions as the case went forward.
“Mr. Lockem, my name is Edwin Roose.” He extended a hand, looking Alan in the eyes. “I have the property just below and to the east of Blacks. The view is magnificent, even if we’re lower on the mountain.” His grip was firm and warm. Alan got the impression Roose was deliberately keeping his strength under control.
“I see. I suppose that’s your roof line we can see from the balcony here, is that right?”
“Yep, that’s right, although you’d have to lean over pretty far to see the hot tub on the back porch. Not that that’s a problem, you understand.”
If it wasn’t a problem, as he put it, why was he bringing it up to a relative stranger, Lockem wondered. “Maybe I can ask you, for your impressions of the accused, Sam Black.” The two men strolled toward the stone fireplace.
“Well, sure. My wife Beth, she’d be the tall dark-haired one talking to Edie over there. My wife and I have known Edie and her family, Charles and Sam, ever since they moved to town back in the ‘eighties, I guess it was. Nice family. Sam seems to be a nice boy. We were a little surprised when he came home from college that he didn’t take up the family business.”
“Oh, what was that exactly?” Lockem asked. “The family business, I mean.” He and Edwin made their way through the room to stand beside one of the tall windows to the right of the fireplace.
“Meatpacking. Ed Black, Charles’ father, ran a locker in town and gradually grew it to be a well-known slaughter and packaging operation. It’s known all over the area.”
“I see. And what did Sam do? Before he was arrested, I mean.”
“He bummed around a little and then he started a small investment operation, I guess you’d call it. Stock trading. He did all right, I guess. Anyway, I’ve made a few bucks with him.” Alan wondered how Roose defined ‘a few bucks.’
“I take it Mrs. Black, Edie, doesn’t run the packing plant.”
“No, sir. She sold a piece of it to a Boise company and they handle the daily operations. Edie is still on the board.”
The tall pretty brunette Roose said was his wife, Beth, beckoned and Roose moved away, leaving Lockem alone beside the fireplace. That was all right with Alan. He wanted to engage as many of the people present as possible on a casual basis. He smiled across the room at Marjorie who caught his eye and gave him a slight finger wave. He knew she’d be making her own assessments of the people present and later they’d compare impressions.
Edie Black claimed his arm and drew Lockem to a foursome standing on the other side of the fireplace.
“Beautiful view you have, Edie. The younger woman smiled at Alan over the rim of her glass. “I really do envy you every time I come over. I told Henry we should have negotiated for this piece.”
“Alan, these are the Yardhams, Henry and Tammy.
“Tammy, I’m only a hundred feet higher here and you wanted a big piece of flat land, remember? Unlike your property, I have no table land.” Edie drifted away after her introduction. She smiled, a nervous flicker that came and went like a mother wren.
“Exactly,” interjected Henry, taking Alan by the elbow. “Look at this view. I told Tammy she wouldn’t have been happy here. No lawn to speak of without removing a lot of trees. We didn’t want to do that.” Tammy nodded her assent. Her grey eyes studied Lockem over her glass. He sensed a calm but watchful mien.
“Of course, that was before the houses were built and before Jack Ketchum drove his ‘dozer through our places.” Henry Yardham was a soft-appearing pudgy man, a couple of inches shorter than Lockem and shorter than his wife, Tammy who could look Lockem straight in the eyes. She swiveled her head away to scan the room and giving Lockem a cool measuring look while taking a drink from her glass. He looked back and smiled at her.
“Henry, you’re right, of course, but our access to the road is more difficult.”
“I haven’t seen the path Mr. Ketchum scraped out,” Alan took the offered opening. “How much damage did he actually do?” At the raising of Ketchum’s name there was a change in the air. Lockem sensed the group’s attention shifting and people drew nearer where he and Henry were standing. Edie Black looked up from the kitchen counter and one hand rose to her mouth.
“Yeah, tell ‘im about that damn road, Henry,” growled a voice from the other side of the room.
“All right, Derek.” Henry paused to take a breath and probably organizes his thoughts. “It’s different for different properties,” he started, raising his voice slightly so everyone could hear. “Ketchum drove a steep, twisting path from the middle of his property down the mountainside for about two miles.”
“I’ll show you on the map,” somebody remarked.
“I’ll have it out in a minute,” Edie responded from deep in the kitchen.
“Thing is,” Henry continued, “it’s pretty steep in places and if there’s any snow or ice, the road will be dangerous at best.”
“I remember the road was pretty winding on the way up here, “Marjorie said. “Several rather sharp bends. You made it that way so it was longer but not so steep, is that right?”
“Correct.”
Marjorie smiled. “Being a flatlander I don’t know much about plotting mountain roads.” There were chuckles and smiles and a lessening of the repressed anger. Alan saw the arm and hand of a man he couldn’t identify creep slowly up Beth’s side to rest on her waist just above her left hip. He thought it a rather intimate gesture and wondered about it, since he could see her husband learning against the back of a chair across the room from her.
Henry Yardham regained center stage. “Most of the road he scratched out went along the edges of property, fortunately, but he took out some lovely old trees, and the forest was part of the reason we all wanted to build up here. You’ll see from the plat that Ketchum appears to have deliberately trespassed on everybody’s land.”
“That’s right,” growled Derek McKinnon. “An’ I can tell you that if the road he carved out was built, there’d be times in the winter when it’d be impassable. More’n one.”
“We had spent a whole lot of time drawing and redrawing lines to be fair, to give everybody the views and the forests they wanted.”
“That’s why all the lots are weirdly shaped. There isn’t a rectangle in the bunch.”
“Remember how the surveyor complained?”
“Trouble was, Ketchum never came to any of the meetings.” Derek McKinnon heaved himself out of his chair and leaned aggressively forward, his rumbly voice tinged with discontent. “I even tried calling him to get his input but he blew me off.”
Lockem could tell from the reactions that was news to some of the people in the room.
“Folks, I’m going to want pictures of before and after the dozer went through. It will be important, I think, to be sure the court understands the apparent motivation for Ketchum’s murder.” Lockem paused and swept his solemn gaze over everyone in the room. “But you have to remember the downside.”
The silence that ran through the room was profound. It lasted for all of thirty seconds and then Edie Black shifted where she stood and said softly, “Downside? I don’t understand.”
Marjorie Kane, with a glance in Lockem’s direction, stood up and went to her cousin’s side. Her heels clicking on the hard tile floor was suddenly the only sound. “Edie, we’re here to help your lawyer defeat the prosecution. To keep Sam out of prison. To prove him innocent.”
With hardly a beat, Lockem picked up the narrative, as his neutral gaze swept the room. It was a favorite tactic. “The way for us to do that, is to prove he didn’t shoot Jack Ketchum.”
“Yes, of course,” Henry Yardham interrupted. “What’s the down side of that?”
“If Sam didn’t kill Ketchum, somebody else did.” Alan, slowly waved one hand across his body to indicate the entire room, and sipped his drink. He contemplated his glass, looked up at his audience and then went on. “The best way to save Sam from prison is to find the real killer. Somebody in this county pulled a trigger that sent a bullet into Jack Ketchum’s chest.”
“Maybe, somebody in Grand Lac,” said Marjorie softly.
“Maybe somebody in this room,” said Alice McCracken. Her words fell like stones, and then the protests started.
Lockem waited for several minutes, watching, observing, cataloguing, as did Marjorie from her vantage point standing beside her cousin. Henry Yardham took control of the conversation after a few moments of general murmuring.
“Okay, okay. I’m sure Alice didn’t really mean to accuse anybody here, right?” Yardham glanced at her, but she was silent, lips parted as if caught in an embarrassing comment. “I understand you have already met with the Sheriff and visited the place…” Yardham licked his lips as if they had suddenly gone dry. His glance flickered and skipped around the room. “…the place where Ketchum’s body was... found.”
“That’s correct.”
“Can you tell us what you learned, Mr. Lockem?”
“Sheriff Carter was cooperative but not very forthcoming. Understandable. What I may have learned is not yet certain. I still have to put the facts and what I observed into context. There is much more we need to ferret out about this murder. There’s a good deal I still don’t know. The site wasn’t protected and I understand that Mr. Ketchum’s body wasn’t discovered for a day or so. The Sheriff indicated that he isn’t entirely satisfied with the forensics.” He paused and sipped his flat ginger ale. “If that sounds a little pedantic, I apologize. I have a tendency in early stages of a situation to take an academic stance.” He sipped again, watching the people around him.
“Murder,” echoed Tammy Washington. “I know poor Sam is indicted for murder so I suppose that means it couldn’t have been an accident, right? I mean, a long rifle shot? Maybe the rifleman didn’t even know he shot someone.” She waved her hand and sloshed a little of her drink on the floor. Alan noted that she didn’t seem even slightly embarrassed.
He said, “Your local law enforcement is convinced that it was a deliberate act. The killer knew who he or she was aiming at.”
Shudders rippled through the group. “Well, “grumbled the large bearded man sitting at the dining room table. He stood up. “I didn’t come here today to be accused of murder, however obliquely.”
Lockem smiled slightly, directed a signal glance at Marjorie. “I don’t believe that’s what Alan did,” she objected calmly.
“I submit I just pointed out that if Sam isn’t guilty as we all here believe, somebody else is, that’s all. I wasn’t making an accusation against you or anyone else.”
The man, moving ponderously toward the entrance, grunted something unintelligible, and went on out, closing the door softly behind him.
“Derek McKinnon,” said the man beside Alan.
“Always cranky,” murmured Tammy Washington. “I bet we haven’t exchanged more’n a dozen words since we all moved up here two years ago.”