“Adam thinks the entire thing is weird too,” Kelly told Joe and Brian after the server brought their food to the table.
“I heard Walt asked Chris to be his best man,” Joe told her.
“Where did you hear that? I thought for sure he would ask Ian. After all, if it wasn’t for my brother, he would never have gotten that book published.”
“The chief told me,” Joe said.
“I think that’s kind of mean of him to ask Chris,” Kelly said.
“Why mean?” Brian asked.
“Seriously? If you were crazy about a woman—and we all know how Chris felt about Danielle—and then she ups and marries some new guy, and the guy asks you to be the best man? How would you like that?” Kelly asked.
With a snort Brian said, “Sort of like MASH.”
“MASH, the TV show?” Kelly frowned.
“Sure. Remember when Hot Lips gets married, her fiancé, Donald Penobscott, asks Frank Burns to be the best man?”
Kelly shrugged. “I don’t remember that. But Frank was a married man, so not the same thing.”
“The chief said Chris doesn’t have a problem with it,” Joe said.
“I think Chris has enough going on in his life right now,” Brian suggested. “I don’t think he has time to worry about an old girlfriend.”
“You mean his uncles?” Kelly asked.
“Yes. From what I understand, their trial is going on. Last I heard, one brother flipped on the other, trying to get a better deal,” Brian said.
“What about the charges here?” Kelly asked.
“It looks like they have two murder charges to get through in California first,” Joe explained. “But I haven’t been following the case.”
“Two?” Kelly frowned.
“According to the chief, they have more evidence Chris’s uncles murdered their gardener. He’s the one who owned the storage unit where they found the woman’s body,” Brian told her.
“Poor Chris,” Kelly murmured. “He loses Danielle, and his uncles turn out to be killers.”
“I’m sure all his billions are a comfort,” Joe said with a snort.
“I saw Danielle this morning. Congratulated her on the engagement,” Kelly told them.
“Even though you think it’s weird?” Brian teased.
Kelly shrugged. “She is my sister-in-law’s best friend.”
“Your brother seems rather fond of Walt too,” Joe noted.
Kelly looked up from her plate to Joe. “Remember when we were talking about how that distinct cigar smell is gone from Marlow House?”
“Not sure if it’s gone. It’s not like I go over there that much,” Joe said.
“It’s gone. I talked to Danielle about it. And she said the oddest thing. I can’t remember her words exactly. But something about how the house had finally come back to life and had gotten rid of all the ghosts.”
Brian frowned at Kelly. “Gotten rid of the ghosts?”
“Something like that. I just mentioned to Danielle that it had been ages since I noticed the smell. She didn’t contradict me. She didn’t say the smell was still there, but I hadn’t noticed. She talked about how the house had been closed up for years, and how it had taken a long time to sufficiently air out. And then she said that stuff about getting rid of ghosts—which I found odd.”
“Some people do think that place is haunted,” Joe teased.
“I know. I always found it weird that Lily never mentioned any of those stories. If I lived in a house people thought was haunted—and if odd things were happening there—I sure would talk about it,” Kelly said.
Joe flashed Kelly a smile and said, “No. You would write about it on your blog.”
Kelly picked up a French fry and shrugged. “True.” She popped the fry in her mouth.
Brian glanced at his cellphone sitting on the table and thought about the pictures it held—one picture in particular. It was of a letter he had come across at Ian and Lily’s Christmas Eve party the previous month—a letter Walt had written Ian. Brian had deleted the image on Christmas morning, after feeling guilty for taking it. It was a silly notion, comparing the writing samples of Walt to some letter written by an anonymous person months before Walt—or Clint as he was known then—had arrived in Frederickport. A person whose handwriting was eerily similar to the original Walt Marlow.
While Brian had deleted the image, he wondered if it was still in his phone’s trash folder. He knew his phone kept images for a specific number of days before they were purged automatically. He just didn’t know how many days that was.
Joe and Kelly continued to discuss Marlow House while Brian stared at his phone. Paying little attention to the conversation, Brian picked up his cellphone and tapped the icon for photos and then opened the trash folder. He glanced up to Joe and Kelly, neither of whom was paying any attention to him, but chattering away. Glancing back down to the phone, he skimmed through the trash file—and then he saw it. The image had not yet vanished from his phone. On impulse, Brian moved the file out of the trash folder.
“What are you looking at?” Joe asked Brian as they headed back to the station after lunch. Joe drove the police car while Brian sat in the passenger seat, his cellphone in his hand. “You keep staring at that.”
Brian shrugged and turned his phone off, slipping it in his pocket. “Nothing.”
“I have to agree with Kelly. I tend to think Danielle has let her sentimental feelings for a man who died almost a hundred years ago cloud her judgment.”
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Brian asked.
“Reincarnation? You aren’t suggesting Clint is the reincarnation of his distant cousin?” Joe scoffed.
Brian let out a sigh. “The older I get, the more I realize there’s a lot I don’t understand. Millions of people believe in reincarnation.”
Joe glanced briefly at Brian. “Do you?”
Brian shrugged and leaned back in the seat, staring out the windshield. “Not really. But I think you and Kelly are overlooking the fact Marlow seems to have genuine feelings for Danielle. I keep thinking of how he looked at Chris’s uncles when he walked in the interrogation room with her. If looks could kill.”
“I must have missed that. I was too busy watching Chris’s uncles topple out of their chairs. Realizing Chris and Danielle were still alive and that they were probably going to be charged for attempted murder, obviously shook them up.”
“That is one explanation,” Brian muttered.
“I suppose living under the same roof for almost a year, it’s not surprising they became close.” Joe sighed.
Brian smiled and looked over to Joe. “So you’re finally ready to accept Marlow and Danielle as a couple?”
“Don’t say it like that. It’s not that I was ever jealous. I’m with Kelly.” With both his hands firmly on the steering wheel, Joe drove the car down the street.
“Of course not,” Brian said under his breath.
“But Danielle is a friend, and just because we didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean I don’t worry about her. After all, I still feel pretty crappy about how I handled everything back when her cousin was killed.”
“You made up for it when you came forward as a witness after Stoddard was murdered. Hell, I don’t feel guilty for any of it, and I was more than ready to lock Danielle up back then. We were just doing our jobs, and she looked guilty as hell.”
“Maybe she did. But she has been through a lot.”
“Yeah right. She has more money than she knows what to do with—is marrying a guy who seems crazy about her. Boatman is doing fine. Anyway, she’s a bit like a cat, always lands on her feet.”
“I thought you liked Danielle?” Joe asked.
Brian shrugged. “Who said I didn’t like cats?”
When they returned to the police station, Brian left Joe in the front office as he made his way to the evidence room. He needed to delete the picture of Marlow’s letter from his phone—completely—before someone accidentally saw it. How would he ever explain why he had a picture of a private letter from Walt to Ian on his cellphone?
On Christmas morning he had decided not to compare Walt Marlow’s handwriting with the anonymous letter stored in the evidence room. After all, the entire thing was silly. He was letting his imagination run away with him. Looking back, he realized he could have permanently deleted the image from the phone on Christmas instead of just sending it to his trash file to be automatically purged days later. But he hadn’t done that. He hadn’t managed to bring himself to totally trash the evidence, and now he was going to compare the letters and then move on. After all, he was confident that once he actually compared the two letters, the handwriting samples would be nothing alike. Just because Clint Marlow—or Walt, as he now wanted to be called—signed his name just like his cousin of the same name didn’t mean they would have the same handwriting. Of course, the letter he was about to retrieve was not written by the original Walt Marlow. That would be impossible. But he remembered the handwriting was eerily similar to a letter Marlow had written almost a hundred years before.
Brian unlocked the evidence storage room, walked in, and turned on the overhead light. It had been a year ago last June that someone had broken into Danielle’s safe. Nothing had been stolen, but it looked as if her guests, the Sterlings, had been the perpetrators. Some anonymous person had foiled their burglary attempt and had locked Mrs. Sterling in the bathroom and bound Mr. Sterling in Danielle’s bedroom, leaving him incapacitated with the Missing Thorndike safe and sound.
Whoever it was had left a letter on the bathroom door explaining what had happened. The identity of the author was never discovered, and briefly Brian wondered if Chris had foiled the robbery and, because he didn’t want attention, had left an anonymous note instead of coming forward. Yet Chris had been in Portland that day, so it hadn’t been him.
The Sterlings had claimed it had all been a publicity hoax perpetrated by Danielle. Without being able to identify the author of the letter, it was impossible to prove what had really happened that day. To confuse matters, the handwriting matched an old letter they had found in Danielle’s room—one written by the original Walt Marlow, who had been dead for almost a hundred years. Some speculated that whoever had left the note intentionally copied Walt’s handwriting.
It took Brian just a few minutes to locate the case file. He removed it from the cabinet and shuffled through its papers. Until this moment, he had forgotten there had actually been two notes written that day. One was left on the bathroom door, the other with the Missing Thorndike. He found a copy of each note and removed them from the folder.
Setting them on a desk, he turned on the lamp, brightly illuminating the pages. He then removed his cellphone from his pocket and opened the image file of the picture he had taken on Christmas Eve.
Enlarging the image, Brian leaned close to the paper letters, comparing the cursive handwriting. Swallowing nervously, he felt his chest tighten. The handwriting on the letters left at Marlow House that day matched the letter Walt had written Ian.
Brian closed his eyes for a moment and then remembered what Lily had said when the FBI had questioned her about the notes and their likeness to the old letter.
Special Agent Wilson had asked Lily, “Are you trying to tell me Walt Marlow wrote those notes this morning?”
Lily had said, “No. What I’m saying, either someone with remarkably similar handwriting to Walt Marlow wrote those notes, or else Walt Marlow’s ghost wrote them. You decide.”
Licking his suddenly parched lips, Brian stared at the image on his cellphone. Without a second thought, he deleted it, this time permanently, before returning the notes to the evidence file.