Hiss and Tell (10 page)

Says the man with the fifty-foot yacht and a private peninsula,
Sunny thought.
She sighed, and decided she’d better change the subject. “So tell me more about the work your foundation does?” she asked, and predictably he puffed with pride, launching into a long spiel of success stories.

Sunny nodded and smiled at the right places, massaging Cale’s ego. Just getting onto Neal’s Neck had left her dangling in a strange position. She couldn’t afford to lose a potential ally before she even began investigating.

As soon as
the Old One returned home and opened the door after Sunny left, Shadow had darted between his legs to run outside. He’d crisscrossed the lawn and the driveway, frantically casting about for a scent and fighting back the mournful howl that threatened to erupt and tear out his insides.

Sunny was gone, gone, gone. She’d thrown him away and left, maybe forever. Shadow’s nose couldn’t even find a trace of her. This was very bad indeed. He wanted to cut loose with his loudest battle-yowl and claw everything to ribbons–houses, grass, people, he didn’t care. At the same time, he wanted to lay down and be sick. He didn’t seem to have any strength at all.

Shadow leaned against a tire, panting after his race
around the front of the house. At least here he was in the shade, out of the sunshine. The heat would have been stifling–

Wait a minute,
Shadow thought.

He took a couple of steps along the big pile of metal that blocked out the sun. Then he reared up, stretching his forepaws against the door, bringing his nose to the seam in the metal, breathing in deeply. Yes, that was a trace of Sunny’s scent. This was
her
go-fast thing.

Shadow felt a little quiver of hope. The two-legs loved their go-fast things. At least, all the humans he’d seen seemed to. When they went away, they usually hollered, climbed into these big, wheeled things, and roared off. Shadow had never seen a human just leave a go-fast thing behind.

He dropped back onto four feet, thinking hard.
Maybe Sunny wasn’t gone forever—at least, not yet,
he thought.
What should I do?

It was difficult to decide, because he was being distracted. The Old One had appeared in the doorway of the house, clunking a spoon against a can of food. Shadow sniffed the air. The good kind of fish.

He abandoned the go-fast thing, heading quickly across the grass and up the steps. He had a plan now.

First, he would eat the good fish.

Then he would keep an eye out for Sunny. She wasn’t going to leave him behind that easily.

*

Sunny finished her
first day on Neal’s Neck with mixed feelings. She felt that at least she was fitting in, or at least moving to the background where she could observe
people without having them stare at her. On the other hand, doing that meant keeping quiet, so she hadn’t really gotten her investigation off the ground.

She sent Ken her first blog post (she’d written about the sunset boat ride, which made for some good copy . . . better than how charitable foundations could be used for tax avoidance, the subject she’d initially been tempted to write about), and she figured that should help nail down her cover as a frothy celebrity reporter. She worried about the image she’d used—leaving the land and all its troubles behind—might seem a little callous, considering that one of those troubles was a dead girl. But the feeling of freedom, having the wind at your back, that was pretty good. So were the details about the amount of effort a sailboat required. Tommy Neal’s work and sweat was properly recorded.

The folks in the guesthouses kept pretty early hours. Maybe that was because the only TV was an ancient portable—no flat screen taking up half a wall. The couples started disappearing first, and no one stayed up to watch the news, either by habit or because they were sick of the media by now. Sunny was alone by the weather report and turned off the tube. She went up to her room to call her dad and wish him good night. She’d just hung up with him when her cell phone rang again.

“Just thought you should know the website has lit up like a Christmas tree in the hours since you posted,” Ken Howell reported happily. “People from everywhere are reading and leaving comments. Boston, New York, even some guy in Hawaii.
Hawaii
. I’m happy if we get someone from Portsmouth or Augusta!”

“Well, it should certainly get the
Courier
’s name around,” Sunny said.

“Yup,” Ken hesitated. “I guess I should thank you and the interns again for setting up the online site.”

“Nancy suggested it after working on the MAX site for a while,” Sunny told him. “You should thank her. I just gave advice.” She hoped Nancy wouldn’t regret her bright idea. Ollie had insisted on them putting a link from the
Courier
site to MAX. Nancy might now find herself dealing with a deluge of accommodation requests from would-be celebrity gawkers.

Maybe I should temper people’s expectations,
Sunny thought.
That would make a good topic for tomorrow’s blog,
how totally secure and inaccessible Neal’s Neck really is.

She suggested as much to Ken, who immediately gave his assent. “Let ’em follow all the excitement on our site via your blog.”

Laughing, Sunny glanced at the time and said, “Okay, Ken. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.” She clicked her phone shut and sat on the bed to put her shoes back on. It was shift change on the roadblock—time to talk with Will.

She went down the stairs and out the door, spotting Will’s friend Hank Riker taking over one of the positions at the roadblock. He gave her the barest of nods as he adjusted his Mountie hat. Sunny’s response was equally guarded. They’d both silently decided it was better not to let on about their connection.

Out in the street past the sawhorse, Ben Semple sat in a Kittery Harbor patrol car. He also pretended not to know Sunny as she passed and took a left at the next intersection.
A block later, she spotted another patrol car, this time with Will behind the wheel.

Sunny opened the passenger side door and slid in. A moment later, Will started the engine, and they moved quietly through the shaded, shadowy streets.

“So how’s it going?” he greeted her. “Did any of the folks in the fortress up there let slip a crucial clue?”

“Not hardly,” Sunny admitted. “Has any of your professional police work uncovered anything?”

“It’s mainly state police work,” Will admitted with a sigh, “passed along by Hank.”

“Did you get anything from MOM?”

Will shrugged. “My mom usually told me to shut up and do my homework.”

Sunny rolled her eyes at Will’s sense of humor. “I meant Motive, Opportunity, and Means.”

“Yeah, yeah. Motive still looks pretty short. Eliza Stoughton came to Neal’s Neck because she was dating Beau but didn’t have much to do with the Kingsburys. She was also friends with Priscilla and her matron of honor, Yardley, but it doesn’t seem like she knew the husband, Tommy, that well.”

“Well enough to get into an argument with him,” Sunny pointed out, “as well as with Carson de Kruk.”

“True, at least according to the rumors. And if we accept manual strangulation as the means of death, it would indicate that a male did the deed,” Will said. “Which leads to opportunity. Priscilla gives Carson an alibi.” “Apparently, they were together, but not exactly sleeping.” Will waggled his eyebrows, though his voice grew more serious as he went on. “Lieutenant Wainwright estimates
the time of death as between shortly before midnight, when Eliza was last seen alive, and one-thirty, when her body was discovered. The Neals also have a joint alibi, having tucked themselves in together.”

“How about the guy who brought her here—Beau Bellingham?”

“He says he was asleep, alone,” Will replied.

“That doesn’t look good for Beau,” Sunny said. “He’s a big guy. He wouldn’t have had a problem strangling Eliza, or lugging her body around to dispose of it.”

“Yeah, he’d be suspect number one, except the security footage doesn’t show anyone leaving the guesthouses.”

That got Sunny sitting up straight. “You mean they’ve got surveillance cameras set up inside the compound?”

“Not as fancy as that ring of steel thingy you had in New York City,” Will said. “What is it, more than four thousand cameras, I read somewhere.”

“That wasn’t
my
ring of steel,” Sunny told him. “That was in lower Manhattan, and I lived in Queens.”

“Well, this is Wilawiport, and it comes down to the same old question—security versus privacy.” Will shrugged. “This is supposed to be the family hideaway, and they don’t want to be on candid camera all the time. So the surveillance is set to protect the perimeter, not monitor the occupants.”

“Which means the private road, the checkpoint, and what else–the guesthouses?”

Will nodded. “The front and back yards. Anybody sneaking around there should have been recorded, but when Wainwright and Trehearne checked the hard drives,
they only saw Eliza leave a dark house, and then—nothing. Nobody in or out, not even a squirrel.”

Sunny frowned in thought. “But as you say, the security is facing outward, to keep intruders away. If you were inside the perimeter . . . The cameras around the guesthouses cover the front and back.”

“As I said,” Will frowned, too, trying to follow her logic.

“And I suppose there must have been coverage along the side of each house where they faced the neighbors,” Sunny went on.

“There’s a tall board fence, no greenery to hide in, and cameras along the whole thing,” Will assured her.

“How about the opposite side of the house, behind all these lines of defense?” Sunny asked.

Will opened his mouth to answer and then stopped. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “There’s no side door.”

“But there are windows,” Sunny pointed out.

“And it wouldn’t hurt to ask if they were covered.” Will considered the situation for a minute. “I’ll bring it up with Wainwright. At this point, Bellingham has to be the prime suspect, with Peter Van Twissel as the dark horse. He’s the only member of the wedding party Eliza didn’t tangle with. If she wasn’t with Bellingham, maybe she made a rendezvous with Van Twissel, who also has no alibi.”

He shook his head. “It all probably boils down to who was sleeping with whom, and when. This case is turning into the kind of thing you might expect from a dive bar like O’Dowd’s, not in the run-up to a millionaire wedding. Arguments plus alcohol, things go too far, and a girl winds up dead.”

“What was the argument about?” Sunny asked.

“Not sure,” Will replied. “Apparently from the moment they arrived, Eliza kept sniping at Beau until he finally told her to shut up, and then the war began.”

Sunny shifted uneasily on her seat. “That’s not much of a motive.”

“As I said, it’s more like something out of O’Dowd’s.” Will shrugged. “Except there, it probably would’ve been settled with broken beer bottles. Not every murder involves a criminal genius. Sometimes it’s just an angry drunk.”

“Unless there is another motive.” Sunny bit her lip. “One that does involve a criminal genius . . .” She dove in. “Uh, I must have mentioned my old boss on the
Standard
.”

Will looked at her for a moment. “The one you were dating?”

She nodded. “He’s up here, supposedly covering the wedding prep, but he’s actually following another story.” Sunny briefly outlined what Randall had told her about the Taxman.

“And your ex . . . colleague really believes this stuff?” Will looked about as willing to accept the story as Sunny had been when Randall first told it to her.

“He does,” Sunny replied. “And he was asking for my help, as someone who knew the local scene.”

“Then I guess I’d better talk to this Randall guy,” Will said quietly. “Hear what he has to say firsthand.”

Sunny dug out her cell phone, scrolling through the “contacts” lists.

“You still have him on speed dial?” Will’s voice got a little sharper.

“It’s my old phone from New York,” she told him. “Lots of numbers from my past life are still on it.” She found Randall’s cell number and clicked on it. From the blurry “Hello?” she got, it sounded as if he must’ve zonked off right after the late newscasts. But Randall woke up pretty quickly when he realized who was calling. “Change your mind about working together, Sunny?”

“No,” she told him, “but I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Randall agreed to meet them at a 24-hour diner outside of Wilawiport in twenty minutes.

He must’ve had a room nearby, because by the time Sunny and Will arrived at the diner, Randall was already at one of the Formica-topped tables, glancing around, almost bopping in place to the jukebox music. Sunny wasn’t sure whether his energy came from eagerness or from the cup of coffee already in his hand. But all trace of animation left Randall’s face when he spotted Will’s police uniform next to Sunny.

“We were just discussing a story—a theory. Why would you go and make it official? Guess you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a real journalist,” he said sourly.

“Oh, this isn’t official,” Will said as he and Sunny took seats on the other side of the table. He stared at Randall, but it wasn’t his usual cop gaze. It was the look of a male checking out competition.

“Randall MacDermott, Will Price.” Sunny was determined to get the introductions done correctly and politely.

Unfortunately, Randall declined to play along. “Price,” he said, “the man who would be sheriff, right?” He met Will’s stare with the same kind of look, then glanced back
at Sunny. “And your friend on the force. I’ve been using other sources for local background since you weren’t interested.”

Great,
she thought.
They’re both going caveman. What’s next? Is Will going to drag me out by my hair?

But Randall donned his bland reporter’s mask as he returned to Will. “I’m sure, given your political aspirations, that solving a case like this would be a big deal.”

“The only thing I’m interested in is finding out who killed a young woman,” Will told Randall in a flat voice. “As the case stands now, things don’t seem to hang together.”

Randall nodded. “Even in their scandals the Kingsburys are more staid than this.”

“I understand you think there might’ve been an element of blackmail in Eliza Stoughton’s life,” Will went on, ignoring Randall’s comment.

“Randall suggested the blackmailer might be out on Neal’s Neck,” Sunny added, then broke off the conversation as a waitress came over to get their orders. Will asked for coffee. Sunny, mindful of the late hour, ordered a lemonade. The last thing she wanted was to be kept up with coffee nerves. Their drinks quickly arrived, along with a refill for Randall, who’d taken the moment of silence to regroup. “As I said, it’s just a theory.” Now that his story had gotten out, he’d apparently decided to downplay everything.