I had checked the laundry basket, my drawers and under the bed, and was feeling around the drum of the dryer for a missing pair of panties — my favorite white lace ones — when my phone rang.
I grabbed it off the counter and answered, “Garnet speaking.”
“Hi, this is Kennick Carter. We met yesterday at Dillon’s Café in Main Street?” His voice was deep, with a slight Southern lilt.
“Oh! Hi. Look, can I just apologize for my mother ambushing you like that. It was rude. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ve been thinking about what she said, though. Can we meet and discuss whether you could possibly help me?”
“Really?” I said, taken aback. “I mean, okay, sure. When? Where?”
“Would now work for you? I don’t know this town very well, but how about that Tavern place at the bottom of the hill, near the pond?”
“Give me a few minutes to finish what I’m doing.” Translation: give me a few minutes to change out of my scruffy sweatpants and stick some makeup on my face. “I’ll meet you there at two-fifteen.”
I gave up the underwear search — clearly my panties had joined that black hole of lost socks and hair ties that lurked in the ether — and got dressed. I was in two minds about taking this gig. On the one hand, I was curious to learn more about Laini Carter’s life and death, and to check out the man Ryan said would be the chief suspect if her death had been a murder. On the other, I was terrified of falling into my mother’s loopy world of foolishness and never being able to climb back out. For now, curiosity was leading by a nose.
When I arrived at the Tuppenny Tavern, Kennick Carter was already waiting, leaning up against a black BMW. I studied him as I walked over. He was tall, with a thin face and the same black hair and pale skin as his sister. He wore a long, beautifully tailored camelhair coat that I immediately coveted, and expensive-looking leather shoes, but I could see why Judy had called him rakish. The too-long hair, the dark shadows under his eyes — and the world-weary expression in them — and the way he held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, gave him a slightly dissipated look. He looked like a modern-day Byron, only with a mole high on his left cheek where the poet might have worn a beauty patch.
His gaze flicked between my eyes, but he made no comment on their mismatched colors, and he didn’t offer to shake hands. Interesting. He wasn’t wearing gloves, so was he a germaphobe or just lacking in manners? Or was he wary of making skin-to-skin contact with me given what my mother had told him about my getting psychic impressions from touch?
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Yeah.” He pinched his cigarette out between his fingers and tossed the butt in a trashcan. A muscle worked in his cheek.
“Should we go inside to talk?” I asked.
“It’s too crowded and noisy in there. I’d like a little more privacy for this,” Kennick said, giving me a strange sideways smile, his face turned away but his eyes still on mine. “How about down there?” He indicated the elevated pier that stretched over the beach and jutted a good thirty or forty yards into the pond.
I shivered. The afternoon was white with cold. Icicles dripped from the roof eaves, and a thick mist ghosted in off Plover Pond. I would have welcomed the cozy interior of the tavern and something hot to drink, but the customer is king and all that, so I merely fell into step beside him.
“Your mother says you have second sight?” He spoke without any hesitation or doubtful inflection, like he thought her claim was entirely credible.
“Look, I should warn you, she exaggerates horribly. I’m not a licensed private investigator. I’m not even sure I’m a psychic. I sometimes see and hear things, but I really have no idea what I’m doing.”
“She said you’d had a vision about my sister.”
“Yeah, a couple, I think. At the quarry, I got a strong feeling that she’d been there with somebody, and that they were arguing. I don’t know who it was, or what they were talking about, but I felt … I think she was pushed.” I glanced across to gauge his reaction, but he said nothing. “And then yesterday I had another vision.”
“What was that one about?”
“Your sister had a necklace. I think it was given to her by her boyfriend.”
Kennick shrugged. “If you say so.”
“Oh, I was hoping you could tell me more about it. It had a very unusual design.”
I described the wagon-wheel shape of the diamond pendant.
“That sounds like a chakra,” he said.
“Aren’t those supposedly energy zones in the body?”
For all my mother’s ramblings about chakras, I still had no very clear idea what they actually were.
“The wagon wheel — usually with sixteen spokes, sometimes with eight — is the emblem of the Roma. It symbolizes constant movement and progress. It resembles the Hindu chakra wheel as a nod back to the Roma people’s Indian origins.”
“The Roma people?”
“The Romany. The people who disrespectfully get called ‘gypsies.’”
“Laini liked Romany things?”
“Sure. She was Romany after all.”
“What, like literally?”
“Yes. Well, she was born Romany, but hasn’t — hadn’t — lived that life for many years. I guess hardline Romany would have considered her a gorger, or gadji.” At my blank stare, he added, “Non-Romany.”
“Wow.”
We’d reached the end of the pier, and we both looked out over the pond. The surface was a lattice of thin, fractured ice floating on water as dark as death. Gripping the handrail, I pulled my gaze away from the water and stared instead in the direction of the far bank, now lost in the drifting mist.
“Tell me about your sister. Who was she?”
“We come from a long line of circus folk. My father ran a circus, Carter and Cooper, which mostly worked the southern circuit — Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas, though once we went all the way through Tennessee and Kentucky to Illinois. Never again — too cold.” He shivered at the memory. “Laini rode the ponies until she grew too tall. Then she did the poodle act and juggling. It didn’t really matter what she did, though. She was so beautiful that people came just to watch her, rather than the act.”
“What did you do?” I couldn’t resist asking.
“I was no good in the ring, but I had a good gig with a shell game in a side tent.” He gave me that odd sideways smile. “As a little boy I had such a cute, innocent face that it was hard for the rubes to realize I was cheating. When I grew older, I manned the ticket office. By then, my father was grooming Laini to become ringmaster. I think he wanted her to take over the business eventually.”
“Not you?” I asked. He was, after all, the older brother. “Or your mother?”
“She died when we were young.” He tapped a cigarette out of a crumpled packet and lit up. “But being a circus boss wasn’t in Laini’s nature. Or maybe it was too much in her nature, because she never wanted to be tied down to one thing. She was a good kid, but as she got older, she got … restless. Even packing up the tent and moving to the next town wasn’t enough change for her, because the circus and its people stayed the same, you know?”
I nodded. I might not know about an itinerant lifestyle, but I knew about having to pack up, leave the past behind and start afresh someplace new.
“She left when she was nineteen, did a couple of years at college,” Kennick said.
“Studying what?”
“Marketing, but she didn’t finish her degree. Every now and then she’d come back to the life for a year, maybe two, and then she’d skip off again. When my dad died and we finally wound down the circus, she moved to New Orleans with me. Got a job running promotions for the big aquarium there. She did very well for herself, too — she had a good head for business, and she could sell ice to an Eskimo. But after a few years she got restless and ran off with a cattle baron from Colorado to play at being a rancher’s woman for a while.”
I brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “How’d she wind up in Vermont?”
Both the land and the culture of New England seemed about a million miles away from balancing on a pony in a Louisiana circus.
“She knew Bethany Ford — the owner of the syrup business where she worked? — from when they were kids. They got in contact again a couple of years ago, and Bethany offered her the marketing position at Sweet and Smoky. So Laini shed her chaps and leathers, put on a business suit, and came up to this godforsaken frozen neck of the woods you call Pitchford.”
“Is this where she met her boyfriend — Carl, I think his name is?”
“Carl Mendez, yeah, I think so.”
“They weren’t married?”
“No, she wasn’t the marrying type.” Kennick took a long drag on his cigarette, blew it out sideways from the corner of his mouth. “Laini was … like a butterfly, flitting from bloom to bloom, drinking life’s nectar. She didn’t want to be caught and pinned down in anybody’s collection.”
“Like a butterfly,” I repeated softly, feeling like I was finally getting a sense of who the dead woman had been.
“Perhaps butterfly isn’t the right word. It makes her sound superficial, which she wasn’t, not really. She always jumped in with both feet — into every job, every relationship, every gig. She immersed herself, learned what there was to learn, threw her whole heart into the place and the people. But always, sooner or later, she moved on. Started over in a brand-new life.”
“She sounds impulsive.”
“I guess.”
“Impulsive people make rash decisions.”
“She didn’t kill herself, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said flatly.
“Are you sure of that? If she had problems at work, or in her relationship …?”
“She’d just have packed her bags and moved on.” He turned his back to the pond, leaning against the rail. “She didn’t even want to be in one place after she died. Last year, she came down to New Orleans to visit me for a few days, right? We drank too much bourbon and got maudlin. Started talking about death, what we wanted to happen with our bodies after we died. I told her I wanted a full-on New Awlins jazz funeral with a horse-drawn hearse and a brass band bringing up the second line of the parade.”
“And what did she want?”
“No funeral and no burial. ‘Cremate me, and then fling my ashes into the air and let them be carried wherever the four winds take them!’ That’s what she said.”
I picked at a splinter of wood sticking up from the railing. “Do you know any problems she might have had, anyone who might have wished her ill?”
“No. We’d get together once or twice a year, but we didn’t have regular contact.”
“I see. And — look, I’m sorry to have to ask you this — but do you know who benefits from her death?”
Looking uncomfortable for the first time, he finished his cigarette and flicked it into the pond. I frowned down at where it sizzled on the water — I didn’t approve of littering.
“Well?” I asked.
“Isn’t it usually the woman’s partner who kills her?”
“Who inherits her money?”
“I do.” Again with that sideways smile. It was starting to unsettle me.
“All of it?”
“Nobody can find a will. It doesn’t look like she ever made one. Typical Laini.”
“So, she died intestate, and you’re her next of kin?”
“That’s why I want to hire you. If it was murder, they’ll look at me first. I want you to prove my innocence.”
Or to make it look like you want to prove your innocence, I thought, trying to peel the jagged sliver of wood off from the railing and succeeding only in driving a splinter under my thumbnail. I pinched it out using my front teeth and pushed my thumb down hard on the rail until the nail went white, a thin streak of red bisecting the nailbed.
“Speaking of hiring, what do you charge?” Kennick asked.
I had no idea. I racked my brain, trying to remember what private eyes on TV shows quoted as their rates, and came up with nothing but a sense that I was a complete fraud.
“Why don’t we see what I find out first, before I take any of your money?” I said.
“Okay, but let me give you something for expenses in the meantime.”
Taking out his wallet, a black leather one with a tiny horseshoe discreetly stamped on one corner, he counted out five twenties and handed them to me.
“You’re a gambler. You like to bet on the horses?” I said.
His head snapped around to me in surprise, and his fingers fumbled as he made to return the wallet to his pocket. It fell to the ground, and I quickly bent to retrieve it.
“You saw that? You just got a vision?”
“I saw this” — I tapped the horseshoe motif — “and yesterday you were reading the racing results.”
His shoulders relaxed a little. “Oh.”
Had he been worried about what I might have intuited?
My fingers, still clutching his wallet, tingled. My scalp tightened, and my eyes began to water.
A torn betting slip crushed underfoot.
Bitter cursing.
Resentment.
“But you’ve been down on your luck recently.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
He took the wallet from my hands, the wariness back in his face. “You’re the real deal. You’re a reader.”
He pushed off from the rail and began walking back up the pier. I strode to catch up with him. Our footsteps sounded strangely muffled on the wooden boards as, ahead of us, the red glow of the Tavern’s neon sign emerged from its veil of mist.
“What do you do for a living?” I asked Kennick.
“I’m a financial advisor,” he said with a bitter laugh and another sideways smile.
I said nothing, but it seemed to me that a financial advisor with a gambling problem was like a shop teacher with missing fingers.
“So,” he said as we reached the parking lot, “what’s your plan of attack?”
“Sorry?”
“How will you investigate this?”
Good question.
“Um, I need to speak to Laini’s boyfriend, I guess, and the people who worked with her.”
“I’m on my way there now — to the syrup factory. You can come with, and I’ll introduce you to Bethany Ford if you like?”
“That would be great, just please don’t call me a psychic detective.”
I walked with him to his BMW, which even I — no car expert — could tell was an expensive model. Kennick Carter clearly liked to project the appearance of someone who was financially successful, even though the reality might be very different. I wondered if there were more discrepancies between his appearance and reality.
He unlocked his car with a remote and opened the passenger door for me.
“Get in,” he said.