Bernadine Fagan - Nora Lassiter 02 - Murder in the Maine Woods (8 page)

She nodded. “Yes. He is. Very much like his father.”

I traced the rose graphic on the placemat as I thought about that. Finally, refocusing on the information she’d given, I said, “So Stan and Lenny work for you.”

“I own the All-Season Wilderness Lodge and Campground outside of town. Stan drives the bus, takes folks to the lake and to the whitewater rafting site downriver, and Lenny’s our computer guy. Handles my accounting program, something I intend to learn.”

The waitress returned and I ordered my all-time favorite, a Maine lobster roll. No surprise there. You’d think I’d be sick of lobster rolls by now, but no, I just keep storing them away like a squirrel preparing for winter. Nick went with corned beef on rye, a New York specialty.

“You got a solid case, Nick?” Rhonda asked.

“You know I can’t discuss that,” Nick said.

“Such a by-the-books guy.”

“Doin’ my job, Rhonda.”

After lunch we headed back to the sheriff’s office, and being the persistent type I brought up Buster’s computer again.

“Did I ever tell you I was a senior computer analyst, a title that covers a lot of territory?”

“It’s been brought to my attention, but I suspect there’s some you haven’t told me.”

As we walked I ticked off my accomplishments, raising a finger for each to illustrate more clearly.

“I’ve debugged, revamped, programmed and reprogrammed. I’m proficient in Windows, Macintosh, Linux, UNIX, and DOS. I have a Masters in Computer Science.” I used all ten fingers in the ticking process. “Are you impressed?”

“I am.”

He stopped by the slanting Police Vehicles Only sign and inspected the damage. He touched the small smear of silver paint and rubbed the residue between his fingers as if it would reveal something. I studied the sign, too, a
concerned citizen, eyeing the silver paint scrap on the sign, happy to see it was a small chunk, as chunks go.

“Wonder when this happened?” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders, and gave him my best how-would-I-know look.

“The guy who’s coming
next week from headquarters probably has an Associates in Computer Technology,” I said.

Nick said nothing, just walked around the damaged sign as if seeing it from all angles would reveal the culprit. It was obvious he already had a suspect in mind.

“Do you really think Vivian murdered Buster?” I asked as he glanced from the sign to my silver truck parked down the road.

He gave me a long hard accusing stare, which did not bother me at all. I stared right back.

“Can’t say,” he finally answered.

We headed up the steps of the station house.

“If someone threatened … let’s say … to throw you into a vat of boiling oil, would you say anything then?”

“Most likely.”

“What would you say?”

“You threatening?”

“I’m not a violent person. But let’s just suppose….”

“I’d probably say I was looking at other suspects, too.”

Progress. “Who?”

He opened the door of the station house and I went in ahead of him.

“Who?” I whispered, eyeing skinny Trimble watching us from the main desk.

“Follow me.”

Anywhere, I almost said. Fortunately, I’m a little more sophisticated and held my tongue.

When we reached the hall
, away from prying eyes and listening ears, he said, “I’m looking at all Buster’s relatives and friends, and the people he did business with around town. Some of your relatives are on the list. Most have been eliminated, but not all.”

“My relatives. What relatives?”

“Your Uncle Walter is still on the list along with two of your cousins. I’ll probably cross the cousins off before the day is out.”

We continued down to the visitors’ room and then stopped.

“I don’t know Uncle Walter. Why is he a suspect?”

“I shouldn’t have called him a suspect. He’s a person of interest. He spent a lot of time with Buster over the years. I saw them in town about two months before Buster was killed. From the looks of it they were having a heated discussion. I need to find out what that was about.”

“They were fighting?”

“Looked like it. I’ll take a drive out later today and talk to him.”

Hand on the doorknob, he said in a quiet voice, “Don’t be concerned with negative feedback from my mother. The bottom line is that of all the people in this town who know you, I am probably the least eager to see you leave. I thought you knew that.”

He kissed me on the lips and opened the door, not giving me time to say anything.

Although I spent the next twenty minutes with Vivian, reporting on her brood, listening to additional instructions about this and that, and meeting her lawyer whom I figured would probably do a pretty good job, Nick wandered in and out of my thoughts like a melody that lingers long after the song has ended.

TEN

It was a rough, rocket ship ride to church with me driving Hannah’s old Pontiac GTO, the muscle car with the hair-trigger gas peddle and a peculiar device called a clutch. Hannah insisted I learn to drive it.

“You are not really a driver until you learn to coordinate the shift, clutch and gas pedal, Nora. Once you’ve mastered it, you can drive anything,” she said. “You’ll be proud of yourself.”

I did not think it was necessary at all, but to please her, I learned. The results were hard on the passengers.

Heads were thrown back, the aunts bounced in their seats, and Agnes yelled “Whoo-hoo” every now and again. We arrived early, a fortuitous thing, or so I thought at the time.

The church, a white trimmed brick building just past the Community Center, was a beehive of activity. According to the display board in the vestibule, the senior citizens’ meeting was in the basement, the wedding rehearsal in the main section, and the choir practice in the loft. The choir director arrived while I was reading the meeting information, and Ida introduced us.

“Henry, meet my niece, Nora Lassiter. She wants to be part of the choir.”

Smiling, I reached out and shook hands with the heavyset man. He had a soft clammy hand, and a long face that included three chins.

After some small talk we climbed the creaky wooden stairs to the old choir loft where he requested I sing something so he could place me in the correct section.

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” I assured him. “I’m an alto. Just stick me around that section somewhere.”

“Use this hymnal. You may want to sing something
in here. Or, you could sing something of your choice, a popular song perhaps?”

“I’m an alto,” I said again, accepting the thick book and peering over the railing at the wedding rehearsal below. The couple looked so happy, laughing, smiling, touching. The scene reminded me of my own wedding plans which fell apart in dramatic fashion when my cheating groom-to-be showed his true colors.

“Begin when you’re ready, Nora.”

I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of old wood that held the dampness of a hundred harsh winters.

Stalling, I cleared my throat as a rare wave of shyness swept through me. I sang like a bluebird when I was alone, but an audience was something different. To delay a bit, I planted the hymnal firmly on the wide railing and flipped pages as if I were looking for something. I had no idea of what to sing. Zip and zero. My mind was blanker than a chalkboard over summer vacation.

“Anytime you’re ready, Nora,” the director prompted from his seat at the organ, sounding a little impatient.

I considered telling him outright that I was here to meet the other choir members and figure out who kissed Buster under the weeping beech tree.

Voices at the base of the stairwell cut into my thoughts. If I didn’t get started I’d have the whole choir as my audience. Below, a woman who was probably the mother of the bride, placed her hand over her heart as if she were about to say the pledge to the flag. Watching her, I blinked nervously a few times, then burst into song.

“Ooh-oo, say can you see … ”

Heads turned. With wonder etched on their faces, the wedding party looked up, the mother of the bride still
holding her salute, but now with her mouth open. It was like I was on stage at the Super Bowl, the cynosure of all eyes.

“
by the dawn’s early light … ”
I sang out.

I heard rushing footsteps on the stairs, so I sang a little faster, even though I knew I’d never finish before they entered the loft.

“
What so proudly we hailed … ”

So far, so good.

It happened when I reached
the rockets red glare
, the most difficult part of the song for me because of the high notes. I realized too late that I’d started way too high. My voice squeaked and cracked. Before I inhaled my next breath to try and fix the problem, two things happened, which would have scarred me for life had I been younger and lacking the thick skin I now possess.

First,
the choir director slammed both chubby hands on the organ keyboard shattering the church calm and producing more of a blast than the original rockets probably produced, and startling me out of my socks.

Second,
I recoiled just enough to knock the heavy hymnal off the railing.

The unfortunate woman below never saw it coming.

The police arrived before the EMTs, Nick in the door first, blazing a path through the senior citizens, the wedding rehearsal folks, the choir and whoever else happened to be in the vicinity of downtown Silver Stream at that hour. Word spreads fast around here.

“Stand back. Give the woman some air,” he ordered, sending me a look that morphed from suspicion to censure in the blink of an eye. I suppose the fact that I was crouched next to the victim with my hand rubbing her arm as I whispered words of encouragement contributed to his snap judgment; that and the damn overhead light which spotlighted the scene, as if anyone needed that light to show the audience where we were.

As Nick knelt by the victim, his voice was gentle. “Rhonda. Can you hear me?”

Rhonda’s eyes finally fluttered open. “Hi, Nick. I got coshed on the head.”

Nick smiled at her. She turned her head and looked around at the gathered parishioners, and me. The light emphasized the shine in her light brown hair, which haloed her face giving her an ethereal look.

“Rhonda, I’m so sorry,” I said.

She gave me a wan smile.

Nick asked her a few basic questions to check for obvious brain damage and she came through with the correct answers.

In my peripheral vision—I certainly had no intention of looking directly at her—I saw Arianna broadcasting her disapproval with a look that did awful things to her mouth and narrowed her eyes into mean slits. If she looked in a mirror now, she’d probably scare herself. I experienced a strong urge to flip her the bird, something I hadn’t done in years. I was too dignified for such stuff, and in church.

“It was an accident,” I told Nick in a voice a few decibels above a whisper. “I knocked the hymnal off the railing.”

I bit my bottom lip and looked up to the choir loft where Henry and his three chins were assessing the situation.

Nick followed my gaze, then stared at me.

“A hymnal,” he said, picking up the book beside Rhonda and hefting it in his hand. “This one?”

I nodded.

“Heavy,” he said softly.

“The rockets red glare triggered the whole thing,” a wedding party member said. “Those are hard notes to reach and she wasn’t hitting many, anyway.”

“No, it was when the organ boomed,” another countered.

“Yes, that scared us all,” declared the woman I’d tagged as the mother of the bride.

“Did she make the choir?” I heard someone whisper behind me. The reply came in the form of a few mean snickers and some quiet laughter. And in church, of all places.

“Enough,” Nick commanded. “You’re upsetting the victim.”

Heck, they were upsetting me.

The EMTs rushed
in, and within minutes they scooped up Rhonda and ferried her away on a gurney. The crowd scattered and Nick took my arm as the aunts approached, worried frowns on each face. Arianna blocked our way and inclined her head at Nick, indicating she wanted a word with her son.

If he hadn’t been holding my arm I never would have noticed his minute hesitation. I wasn’t imagining it. He grasped my arm a little tighter before releasing it to talk to his mother. Had I heard someone refer to her as General Arianna Renzo?

I couldn’t tear my eyes away as she whispered something in his ear. I had no idea what she said, but when Nick stood back, hands on hips, one leg slightly bent in what I’d come to think of as the Nick stance, and shook his head at her, she didn’t look pleased, which pleased me.

He returned in less than a minute. “We need to talk, Nora. Let’s go outside where no one can hear.”

“Does this have to do with what your mother said?”

Walking hurriedly, he spared me a glance that held the smallest hint of a smile, but he didn’t answer. When we were out of earshot, a few feet from the monstrous weeping beech with the low droopi
ng branches where the aunts saw Buster kissing some woman they were sure was not his wife, he wasted no time getting to the point. “Okay. Tell me what you’re doing here.”

“I wanted to join the choir.”

“Try again.”

“I like to sing.”

He nodded yes, but his expression said no, he did not buy that for a second. “What do you know that you haven’t told me?”

“You’re pushing.”

“I haven’t even started. For openers, you could be obstructing a murder investigation.”

I scoffed in disgust. “If I tell you
, I won’t be able to find out what I need to find out.”

“Try me. Tell me what’s so important about the people in the choir.”

“Could we make a trade?” I suggested hopefully.

At his arched eyebrow expression, I explained, “Your mother’s input in exchange for my choir business?”

His expression was a telling reply.

“You look vexed,” I said.

“Nobody says vexed. It’s a ridiculous word. Now, tell me what I want to know.”

“Or else?”

“Yes. Or else. Big trouble.”

I sighed for effect and kept my smile hidden. “It’ll sound too far-fetched to you.”

He waited, holding my gaze with a cool-eyed, nuclear winter stare that probably pressured some criminals into confessing. It affected me in a completely different way, one which he may not have intended at all. Or maybe he did. It was a hard call.

The look had nothing to do with my decision to tell him what I knew.

“The aunts saw something a while back that might be important,” I began.

We were a quiet bunch going home in the car that evening, until I finally said, “Henry could have simply requested that I stop singing. Something like ‘okay’ or ‘enough’ or ‘that’ll be it’ would have done the trick.”

“Oh, I agree,” said Hannah. “No need for him to get so dramatic and pummel that organ as if he were practicing for the Golden Gloves.”

“He’s temperamental about his music. Wants everything note-perfect,” Ida said. “Hannah and I were in
choir for a short time and quit because of him. Such a taskmaster, thinks he’s leading the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or something.”

“I told Nick why I was there, but he didn’t seem interested in pursuing that angle. I’ll have to find another way to discover who Buster was having an affair with.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the solution popped into my head. “How long has Rhonda been in the choir?” I asked the aunts.

“Hire? I doubt she’s for hire,” Agnes said. “She’s got her own business.”

“No, I don’t mean her camping business. I’m talking about her singing.”

“They’ve hired her to sing? In the choir? Never heard of such a thing.” Agnes huffed. “What is this world coming to?”

“No, no, no,” Ida corrected.

“She’s been in the choir for several years,” Hannah said. “I think we can guess what you plan to do next. A wicked good idea. Visit Rhonda and see what she knows. Let us know how we can help.”

After repeating the conversation to Agnes, Ida said, “Nora, I think you’ve hit on the perfect solution.”

“Yes, I think I have.”