Far from being full of people, the parking lot of the Sweet ‘n Smoky sugar works was deserted except for one black Lexus SUV. Where was everybody?
I was about to ring the bell of the office block when the door opened.
“You!” Bethany Ford said, glaring at me.
This was how people reacted to me these days, it seemed. To know me was to loathe me.
Bethany locked the door to the office block behind her. The keys she held looked like the same bunch that Denise had fidgeted with, but Bethany’s fingernails were painted pink, not turquoise.
“I thought I told you to keep off my property,” she said.
“Well, technically, you told me to keep away from your staff.”
She gave an exasperated “Tchah!” then pulled a red beanie over her soft blond curls and yanked on her gray leather gloves.
My own head and hands were bare. Expecting to talk to her in the warmth of her office, I’d left my hat and mittens in the car, and my ears were already beginning to hurt from the cold. I thrust my hands into my pockets.
“Can we go inside?”
“No,” she said, pushing past me and zipping up her North Face winter jacket — ruby red to match her beanie — as she stalked off to the sugar shack.
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
“And I just wanted you arrested for assaulting Jim, but we don’t always get what we want.”
“I didn’t assault Jim!” I said, struggling to keep up with the pace of her long legs.
“So you say. And yet, he has broken bones and you are” — she shot a disparaging glance my way, and I had the sense that a number of unflattering descriptions hovered on the tip of her tongue — “fully in one piece.”
“Well, okay, that’s true, but —”
“Look at it!” She flung an arm out to indicate the sugar shack with its closed door and cold chimney. “The height of sugaring season, and I’ve got a shutdown.”
“Is that why no one’s here?”
“I’ve given the staff time off. My new custodian starts on Thursday, and we’ll run the boilers flat-out from then, so I told the others to take their ‘weekend’ now.”
When we reached the shed, I said, “Here, let me help you.”
Grabbing the icy handle of the red sliding door, I tugged it open, and Bethany strode inside. I lagged behind a moment to activate the recording function on my cell phone. Then, tucking it microphone side up into my outer jacket pocket, I followed her into the sugar shack, rubbing my hands together for warmth.
“Why are you still here?” she demanded.
“Like I said, I just wanted to clarify a few things, check if you could help me reconcile some inconsistencies about Laini’s death.”
And, of course, I wanted to provoke her into telling me what she hadn’t told anyone yet, and to get it recorded.
“What inconsistencies?” she asked, removing a clipboard from a hook on the wall, pushing down the wrist of her glove to check her Apple Watch, and writing the time on the form.
“The thing that bothers me most is how the different people I spoke to described Laini. For example, Kennick Carter, Carl Mendez, Denise who works here, even Hugo from the Hardware store — everyone described her as being happy. But you said she was moody, that she suffered from depression. You believed she committed suicide.”
“That’s because she did.”
Bethany turned her back on me and walked over to a stainless-steel vat as long as a bathtub and much deeper.
“In some way or other,” I continued, “everyone else said or implied that Laini hated being stuck in one place or occupation for long. She was too frivolous or too restless, or she just liked exploring more of life than any one place or person or line of work could offer her. Her brother called her a butterfly. Mendez said she was scared of being trapped. Jessica Armstrong —”
“What’s she got to do with anything?”
“She said Laini didn’t want more stakes in the ground.”
Bethany lifted the lid of the tank, and I saw it was filled with clear liquid — raw sap sucked down from the trees in the woods surrounding us.
“But you,” I continued, “you told me that Laini loved this job, that she’d finally found her niche, though you conceded that extra responsibilities tended to stress her out.”
Bethany said nothing, merely sniffed the liquid in the tank, tutted, and made another note on her clipboard.
“And you were the only one who never described her as beautiful.”
Bethany stilled for a moment, then she turned and went to the reverse osmosis machine and checked some readings on its display panel.
I followed her, wanting to see her face. “When you realized the cops might not be sold on suicide, you cast suspicion on other people. You said Carl Mendez’ relationship with Laini was rocky, implied there might even be abuse. But he said they were happy, that he never laid a finger on her in anger.”
“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” she snapped.
“You told me you’d warned Laini about Jim and made sure I knew all about Kennick’s financial woes.”
“I was trying to be helpful!”
“I didn’t see it immediately, didn’t notice that you were doing a magician’s trick, something you’d learned as a kid in those awful pageants. You were making sure I looked in one place” — I twirled my right hand in the air — “while you executed your sleight of hand somewhere else.” I hid my left hand behind my back.
“This is gibberish,” Bethany said. “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”
“You were distracting focus from yourself by directing attention to others.”
She ignored this and marched across the factory floor to inspect a boiler and a few more tanks. I trailed behind her, tucking my hands back into my pockets. Without the boiler fires running, it was almost as cold inside the shed as it was outside.
“And I fell for it. I fell for your story and your tears and your distractions. I just assumed your version of Laini was different because you were closest to her. You saw more, or deeper, because you knew her best.”
Bethany spun around to face me. “I did!” she said fiercely. “I knew her better than she knew herself — she admitted as much in her goodbye note.”
“But then I wondered if you were the only one lying.”
“Why would I lie?”
“I know, right? It made no sense, because you didn’t stand to gain anything from her death. On the face of it, everyone looked like a better suspect than you. But murder isn’t always sensible or logical. Sometimes, people are driven more by rage and pain than by gain. And so I wondered if I’d been looking at things from the wrong viewpoint, doubting what everyone said, even doubting myself.”
“Is there a point to this rambling?”
“Because if only one specific person was lying, and that person was you, then everything slotted into place. And you’d committed murder.”
“Murder?” Bethany scoffed. “Why would I want to kill the woman who was my best friend and the most valuable asset in my business? I was going to make her a full partner.”
“Ah, yes.”
“‘Ah, yes’ — what?”
“That’s what spooked Laini, wasn’t it? Another stake in the ground. She’d been in one place too long and had been growing twitchy for a while. Mendez was getting clingy. He wanted to trap her behind a picket fence with babies and a wedding ring, pinning her down like a butterfly on a board. And you wanted to hang onto her with golden handcuffs — more money and shares in the business. She felt crowded and claustrophobic and bored. She wanted out. She wanted to be free again.”
Bethany pursed her lips and crossed her arms, holding the clipboard like a shield over her chest. “You’ve spoken to her friends for all of five minutes and you think you know her?”
“I know that she was kind and honest,” I continued. “She had integrity, so she felt bad because you were making these plans and she had no intention of being here to help you see them through. And if she was planning to leave, she might as well go immediately. That would allow Carl to find someone else, too, which was only fair since she would never give him what he truly wanted. So, she ended it with him and arrived on your doorstep, with all her bags and a head full of exciting plans.”
Bethany gripped the clipboard tightly, as though to keep herself from hitting me with it as I continued with my version of events.
“She tells you she’s off on her next great adventure — one that doesn’t involve you. She’s quitting her job and leaving cold, snowy, suffocating Vermont to start again somewhere new, preferably on the other side of the globe. She’s sorry to do this to you, so sorry she’s even brought you a massive bunch of flowers. Pink lilies, I’m guessing,” I said, recalling the pink and green background of my visions with the note, and the dying flowers in Bethany’s hall that she’d instructed her maid to toss onto the compost heap.
Bethany narrowed her eyes. “She brought me flowers because she was a houseguest. You wouldn’t know, but that’s something well-mannered people do.”
I shook my head slowly. “Nah, then she would have given you thank-you flowers when she left, not when she arrived. They were an apology, as was her note written on that pretty blue paper, telling you how sorry she was to leave you in a mess. The mess of losing a vital person in your business. The mess of trying to find someone new to take her place. Not the mess of suicide, as everyone assumed.”
“You’re delusional,” Bethany said. “I read in the newspaper that you’re a psychology student, but you should be a patient instead. I think someone should inform the university authorities that you’re unstable and not fit to help anyone.”
“Like you informed The Bugle about my assisting the police?”
She merely shrugged.
“Bitch! You were clouding the water again, so anything I came up with would be doubted.”
She marched past me, back toward the entrance of the sugar shack, saying, “I’ll be telling my contact there about this visit, too. Your wild theories and crazed accusations. Your threatening demeanor. How I didn’t feel safe until you left — which I’d like you to do right now.”