Still Water (23 page)

Baxter nodded. “You can have whatever I can give you. And you can see Ella for as long as you like. I already sent Minelli up to her house to get her some things she might need. I don’t want to make this hard on Ella, believe me, Matt.”

Unable to resist seeing how Baxter reacted Matt said, “Did you get a chance to ask around about Kate Little, to see if she might have known Bryan?”

Baxter stared at him. “I don’t know why you keep bringing her into this. She doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

Something in his manner however, struck a discordant note with Matt.

Ella looked up from her bunk when Matt was shown to the cells. He waited for Minelli to unlock the door and discreetly leave them alone, then he sat down next to her. For once she didn’t look quite so tough. She searched his face.

“Chief Baxter told me what Jerrod Gant said. It isn’t true Matt. I swear it isn’t.”

Even if he’d had any doubt about that before, just looking at her would have convinced him she wasn’t lying. “I know it isn’t,” he said, and her relief was visible. “What’s more I think Baxter knows it too.” She looked puzzled at that. “He claims he’s worried about you getting hurt. Is it true that Jake ran down your trap line?” She nodded. “Well, maybe Baxter’s right about that at least. Whatever happens, you have to look out for Jake, Ella.”

“I know.”

He smiled. “I guess we have to postpone dinner. First thing here is, you need to officially retain me as your lawyer, okay?”

Ella hesitated, then she nodded. “Okay, you’re hired.”

“Next thing is we have to get you out of here. The bad news is I can’t get you out until the hearing tomorrow. By then I’ll find a way to convince the judge that this is a crock and we’ll get you released.”

“You can do that?”

“Sure I can. I’m a hotshot lawyer aren’t I? I need to go over this statement Gant made. Any reason you can think of why he should come forward now with this story? Does he have any reason to hold a grudge against you?”

Ella shook her head. “I hardly even know him.”

Matt chose his next words carefully. “Ella, Gant says he saw you in Bryan’s house that night.” He held up his hand quickly when she started to protest. “Hear me out, okay?”

“Okay.”

“If I’m going to help you, then you have to help me too. You have to tell me everything. Everything Ella. What happened that night?”

Her gaze never wavered from his, but he could almost hear the machinery of her mind as it worked at a frantic pace. The whirring and clattering of wheels within wheels.

“I didn’t kill Bryan, Matt, I swear it. And I wasn’t in his house that night or any other night.”

He was aware that she hadn’t actually answered his question, but for now he sensed that if he pushed her she would clam up and he didn’t want to lose the little ground he felt they had made up. For now it came down to the simple question of whether or not he believed her. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Thank you,” she said, though he wasn’t sure if it was his help she was thanking him for, or the fact he hadn’t pressed her. He asked if there was anything she needed, if he should call and see her mother, but she shook her head.

“I called a neighbour to stay with her, and I spoke to Mom and told her I was okay. I’ll call her again and let her know what’s happening.”

“Tell her you’ll be home in the morning.”

Matt hoped he wasn’t making promises he couldn’t keep.

Jerrod Gant’s statement read pretty much as Baxter had outlined, and on the face of it was about as damning as the proverbial smoking gun. Matt read it through sitting at the table on his porch with a cup of coffee in front of him. He looked for inconsistencies in what Gant claimed to have seen, either in terms of timing or visual detail, and when he found none he read it through again searching for some ambiguity he could exploit. Years of experience told him that when an incident was witnessed at night and there were other complicating factors such as it being seen through a window, as in this case, and maybe from a distance, identifications could be cast into doubt. But Gant claimed he’d been standing right at the living room window, that a light had been on inside the room, and Ella had been turned towards him. No room had been left for ambiguity. Matt put the statement down. Gant was the perfect witness. Unless he turned out to be clinically blind, his testimony seemed to be incontrovertible. It was this fact more than anything else that convinced Matt that Gant was lying. His testimony was simply too perfect. It just didn’t ring true. Add to that the fact that Gant had taken so long to come forward, and the reason given for his delay was so patently weak, the whole thing had the stink of a set-up. The question was, why would Gant lie, and more immediately how was Matt to convince Judge Walker that he had.

Later on Henry came over, and he brought with him a plate of tomatoes from his garden, beaded with drops of moisture after he’d washed them.

“Do you know this Jerrod Gant?” Matt asked.

“Sure,” Henry said. “He runs the marine repair shop along the south shore.”

“What kind of guy would you say he is?”

Henry finished eating and began to roll a cigarette, filling the paper with shreds of tobacco and deftly twirling it between his fingers to form a tube. “To tell the truth I never had a lot of time for Jerrod. He’s lived here all his life, but somehow he never seems to make much of anything he does. Married some girl from one of the other islands, though I never understood what she saw in him.”

“You think he could invent something like this?”

“Some people will do just about anything when their back is up against the wall in my experience. I doubt that marine shop of Jerrod’s has paid its way in the last little while. I don’t know why that would make him invent a story like that if it wasn’t true though.”

“Maybe I should ask him,” Matt said.

“Maybe you should,” Henry agreed.

The house where Gant lived was on the north road, several miles past Stillwater Cove. In his statement Gant claimed he’d been setting snares in the woods behind the cove when he’d heard a shot. Matt thought about that as he drove. A man hears a rifle shot, then makes his way to the closest house where he looks through a window and sees a woman he recognizes holding a rifle over the body of a man he also recognizes, whose house this is. Then he simply turns away and says nothing for more than a week. It didn’t only not make sense, it was almost laughable.

Matt slowed as he drew close to where he figured the turning to Gant’s house must be, and in the gathering gloom he picked out the wooden sign and mailbox in the headlights beside the trees at the side of the road. He made the turn and followed a rutted track for about a quarter of a mile until he came on a small house with a wrap-around porch at the front that had partially collapsed and was propped up at one end by wooden crates. In the yard out front, which consisted of an irregular patch of brown grass and a tangle of weeds growing through the rusted remains of an old truck, was a small Ford sedan that had seen better days. There were lights on in the ground floor windows, and as Matt climbed out of his car the front door opened and a splash of yellow light fell on to the porch and slanted across the steps to the yard. The silhouette of a figure was framed in the doorway.

“Hey,” called a woman’s voice. “Is that you Chuck?”

“Mrs. Gant? My name’s Matt Jones, I’m a lawyer.” He stepped into the light at the bottom of the steps so that the woman in the doorway could see him.

“Oh,” she said.

“Hi, are you Mrs. Gant?”

“Yes,” she answered uncertainly after a pause.

“Mrs. Gant, I’m looking for your husband.” She looked at him blankly without responding. “Jerrod? Is he home?”

“He’s gone away.”

“Away? Do you know how long for?” Matt stepped up on to the porch as he spoke and he got a better look at her. She was quite young, maybe in her mid-twenties, which surprised him because from what Henry had told him he’d figured Gant to be middle-aged. She had dark blonde hair that was cut badly and hung about her face in straggly lengths, and she was wearing an old pair of jeans and a shirt that wasn’t tucked in. Her eyes were small and pale in colour, and she stared at Matt warily, like an animal that’s getting ready to jump any second. Matt smiled at her, thinking if she didn’t have the look of somebody who was so inherently suspicious of strangers she might even be pretty in a way.

“He didn’t say when he’d be back.” She made no move to invite him in, and in fact the way she stood squarely in the doorway she gave the impression of wanting to keep him out.

“Well, do you know where I might find him?”

Beyond her he could see into a kitchen-cum-living room. A big scarred wooden table dominated the space, around which were half a dozen chairs, none of them matching. The rest of the furniture that was visible appeared old and worn.

She shook her head. “He didn’t say where he was going. Sometimes he goes off looking for work on the other islands. Usually he’s gone a day or two. Three maybe.”

“And you don’t know anyplace I might reach him?”

“I didn’t even know he was going until this afternoon.”

“Mrs. Gant, your husband made a statement today to the police about an incident he claims he witnessed about a week ago. It seems kind of strange that he would have just up and left.” The woman stared at him, but didn’t respond. “Do you know anything about what your husband saw Mrs. Gant?”

“He doesn’t tell me anything.”

Matt wondered if it was really possible that she didn’t know what he was talking about, which is the impression she gave. “We’re talking about a murder Mrs. Gant. Your husband claims he witnessed a murder. He didn’t mention that to you? That’s a little strange don’t you think?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” she insisted doggedly.

Matt was perplexed at her attitude. It was clear she didn’t want to talk to him.

“Mrs. Gant, this is a serious matter. I’d like to come in and talk to you about it. Can I do that?” She hesitated and he could see her thinking about the fact that he was a lawyer, weighing up whether he was just asking or whether he had the power to insist.

“You might want to do it now, rather than come down to the court in the morning,” he prompted.

Reluctantly, she stood aside. “Place is kind of a mess.” She waved him vaguely towards a chair. As she closed the door, she peered into the darkness outside, as if she was looking for somebody there.

Matt didn’t get much out of Lucy Gant that was directly useful. It turned out that she’d been telling the truth when she said that her husband didn’t tell her much. Matt formed an impression of a young woman, even younger than her years, married to a man fifteen years older than her, stuck out in the woods in a run down house, without much money on an island where she had few friends. She came from another island in the north, where her circumstances had probably been even worse. When Jerrod Gant had offered to marry her, she saw it as a chance to escape. She now seemed inhabited with a mixture of disillusionment and resignation. She chain smoked as Matt asked her questions, stubbing out one cigarette after another. She seemed nervous about something, but she answered without guile, and he didn’t think she was holding anything back. She simply didn’t know, and she seemed uninterested and completely lacking in surprise that her husband might come home one night and fail to mention that he’d just witnessed a murder.

“Do you remember that Monday night?” Matt questioned. “Can you remember what time your husband came in?”

She thought for a moment, and then lit another cigarette. “Sorry. The days seem all the same I guess.”

He asked her a couple more questions, and then figuring she couldn’t tell him anything else he gave up on her. As he rose to leave she smiled for the first time, as if she had passed a test of some kind and was glad it was at an end. She kept glancing at the door and went over to open it as if she was in a hurry to get rid of him.

“Well thanks for your time.” Matt gave her a card. “If your husband should show up, tell him to call me. Or if you think of anything.” She took the card but didn’t look at it.

“Okay.”

Matt went back to his car and as he left he looked back as the door closed, and he imagined her going inside and throwing his card in the trash.

The hearing before Judge Walker was at ten, and Matt spent the hours from six in the morning until then trying to substantiate his conviction that Gant’s testimony was at best unreliable, at worst a complete fabrication. He called at Jerrod Gant’s workshop, which was, as Henry had told him, situated on the south shore a little way past the town boundary. It was the first time Matt had been in that direction. The Ash river flowed into the sea here, and the inlet was protected by a natural harbour. This was where Howard Larson planned to build his marina and then later on the services and business that would support the people and craft who would use it. Extending further south the shore was rocky, and the broad meadow-lands that rose gently inland towards the low wooded foothills beyond made perfect housing sites. Along the shoreline the views out over the gulf were spectacular. Wooden stakes marked out lots and Matt tried to envisage all this buried under concrete, the grass and wildflowers ripped up and replaced with roads and gas stations and pizza restaurants.

Gant’s Marine was announced by a peeled and blistering sign over a dilapidated shed on the banks of the river inlet. It was part of a small light industrial area. A slipway led down to the water, and some rusting pieces of machinery lay half buried in the mud at the water’s edge. Matt tried the wooden door but it was locked and the place had about it a forlorn air. He went to the building next door where a red truck was parked outside. A sign read “Decoy Auto Repairs’. A man was bent over the front of a jeep inside, with the hood up and a light hanging overhead. He straightened up when he saw Matt, and when Matt asked if he’d seen Jerrod Gant around he shook his head, then came outside and looked back along the inlet.

“His boat’s gone. He keeps it here so he must’ve gone off somewhere. Try tomorrow, or mebbe the next day.”