A Month at the Shore (36 page)

George carried a tool bag with him and was as polite to Laura as a country doctor. If the man thought there was a murderer in the house, he certainly wasn't letting on.

Corinne gave him a warm smile and put aside her iron.

"Thanks for stopping by, George. The dryer's in the basement; I'll show you where. I hope you can save it. It really is an old one; we've had it since I was a child, and even then, we bought it used."

"With a dryer, there's not much that can go wrong,"
George said reassuringly as he followed her downstairs to view the patient. "We'll get it working again, don't you worry."

The phone rang and Laura, alone in the kitchen, answered it.

"Why is it that you never answer your cell?" Ken asked without a hello. "I keep leaving voice mail for you."

He sounded newly tense. She wondered if they were just taking turns being strung out, or if they wore off on one another that way.

"I dropped the phone in the koi pond a few days ago," she said coolly. "It hasn't worked since."

"I need to see you. Where can we meet?"

"Here?" she asked instantly, responding to the urgency in his voice.

"I'd rather not. How about here?"

It crossed her mind to say, "If this is a trick to get me into bed, the mood is
definitely
all wrong."

"How about O'Doule's?" she countered.

"Fine. Five minutes."

Five minutes later, she was sitting at one of the bistro tables that were crammed into the popular hangout. The noise level was deafening: on Sunday
evening,
the bar featured live music.

"
But
I didn't
realize
that," she shouted in apology across the table.

Ken moved his chair so that it was touching hers. He leaned closer to her, his shoulder brushing hers, and spoke loudly into her ear. His message was as electrifying as any whispered words of desire could have been.

He said, "I think I found something today that links Sylvia to Miss Widdich."

Laura started so violently that she whacked her drink, spilling a small puddle. She blotted the rum mix with both their napkins and simply nodded.
Tell me more, more.

Ken leaned his forearm on the table and swung his other arm around the back of Laura's chair. Anyone looking at them would have seen, at best, a couple on a hot date and at worst, a guy seriously and even obnoxiously on the make. They would not have seen two people desperately trying to move suspicion away from
a man they believed was innocent.

Over the sexy, pulsing sound of a reggae tune, Ken said in her ear, "When I was in Chief Mellon's office today, he took a phone call. A number got mentioned. I'm a banker; I can smell when a number is an amount and when it isn't. I decided he was alluding to the amount of money they found in that satchel they found in the toolshed: nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty dollars."

Laura nodded, as fiercely attentive as if he were giving her driving directions to heaven.

"On a hunch," Ken continued, "I got to thinking: assuming that the satchel was Sylvia's, where would someone like her get her hands on ten thousand dollars? She could have robbed a bank, but I
am
the bank. She could have robbed a shop in Chatham, but very few shops around here have that kind of cash—then or now. Again, as a money man, I think I might have remembered a robbery. We're not exactly a high-crime district at this end of the Cape.

"I wasn't happy about having this thought—but I wondered whether Sylvia might have been blackmailing someone she'd had a quick fling with: the mayor, the police chief. The
aging
president of the local bank," he added wryly. "She was young, beautiful, and presumably out for something, or she wouldn't have been in a backwater burg like ours. With all due respect, the wages you paid her wouldn't have been an irresistible incentive to stay.
  Nor could they have added up to ten grand.
"

Laura closed her mind to the music and the raucous conversations all around them, memorizing every word of what Ken was saying. He was building a case, and it wasn't against Snack.

"Armed with that idea," Ken said, "I spent today going through the deposit and withdrawal records at Chepaquit Savings—not so easy, since, in my infinite wisdom, I moved the bank over to a new database system recently. And guess who took out precisely ten thousand dollars on June twentieth of 1987?"

"She didn't
!
"

"Oh, she did. As for the twenty bucks that were short—maybe Sylvia dipped into the satchel for cigarette money afterward; maybe someone just miscounted. But both totals are close enough to be related. The amount, the timing—"

"The reason? What was the
reason
?" Laura said, bumping his ear in her desire for him to give her the answer to that too.

"That," he said, tucking away the lock of her hair that was tickling his cheek, "is what we're going to find out."

He paid for their drinks and they
left
in his car, leaving her pickup in O'Doule's lot. Like everything else in Chepaquit, the
ride
to Miss Widdich's was mere minutes away. It was nearly dark
.  The
secluded drive
way
to her house left Laura prickly all over with apprehension; she was grateful that this time, she was with Ken.

He parked back a few yards from the front of the porch. "
Y
ou'd better wait in the car," he suggested. "If we both confront her, she may spook."

"She
is
the spook," Laura quipped, but it f
elt wrong to sound like a smart
ass just then. "Okay," she said more humbly. "I'll sit tight."

She watched as Ken got out and went up to the gargoyle. He lifted its heavy ring and dropped it down three separate times, hard, each time setting her knees twitching. Laura was just able to make out the door opening a crack; again she saw no light issuing from the room behind. Slowly sliding lower in her seat, she strained without success to hear what they
were saying through her rolled-
down window. Was Miss Widdich aware that Laura was in the car? She
couldn't say.

Suddenly, amazingly, the door opened wide and Ken was admitted inside. A light went on after the door was nearly shut behind them. Laura was wild with curiosity, but she made herself stay in the car. Ken had already managed to get a
heck
of a lot farther than she had, and she didn't dare blow it; the stakes were simply too high.

So she sat where she was, and she tried to spin different scenarios in which someone like Miss Widdich would give someone like Sylvia ten thousand dollars, and how that could result in Sylvia's death.

Ken was looking at a woman who had been crying. Her eyes were puffy and red, and her white hair had broken free in places from the bun that usually held it together on the back of her head. The tears had obviously gone on for a while: a mound of crumpled wet tissues covered most of the square oak table next to the sofa, and the Kleenex box was on the floor, empty. On a low wooden table in front of the sofa, a plate held the remains of curled orange peels, a half-full glass of milk, another plate with some saltine crackers on it, and a bottle of gin without a glass to pour it into.

Miss Widdich had clearly been having a very bad day.

She seated herself on the moss-colored sofa and then commanded Ken to sit down. Her voice was thick, maybe with drink, probably with emotion.

Ken chose a straight-backed wooden chair, the least comfortable one in the near-dark room; he did not want to get overly cozy with the woman. Nonetheless, she looked so ill-used that it was easy for him to sound sympathetic. In a way, he was.

After he explained his discovery
, with a creative embellishment about currency serial numbers
, he added softly, "They'll be able to put two and two together pretty quickly, Miss Widdich. It's just a matter of time until they figure out the connection between you and Sylvia. I've only been following the money trail. I don't know what else the authorities have discovered, but you can bet that if they have your money, they have a lot else besides."

He felt safe in adding, "Sylvia was Canadian; they know that much. And more."

Maya Widdich's face looked as thoroughly crumpled as one of her used-up tissues. From grief or from fear? Ken couldn't tell. She was simply too inscrutable for that.

"Sylvia didn't have a gun sticking in your back when you withdrew the money on June twentieth, 1987, or
the bank
would have had a record of it on
camera
," he said in a wry tone. "Clearly you were not robbed by her."

Miss Widdich nodded in wordless agreement, and he said more gently, "So the other, more
plausible
assumption is that Sylvia was blackmailing you because she was your illegitimate daughter."

She bowed her head on the word "daughter," and Ken felt a thrill of electricity fly from her to him that was downright hair-raising. He'd always made light of the local rumors that Maya Widdich was a practicing witch. The name, the hair, the black clothing; her seclusion and her quaint obsession with herbs—it was all a bit too over the top for him. He had a sense that women of Wicca were somehow more everyday about it. He pictured them in sweats and sneakers and buying day-old bread at the supermarket, just like everyone else.

Now, suddenly, he wasn't so sure. The hairs that had decided to stand up on the back of his neck were slow to ease down.

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

Without looking up, she shook her head, but he pressed on anyway. "We both know that 1987 wasn't 1957. Surely no one would have held it against you that you'd had to give up a baby for adoption, once they'd found out." He wanted to add, "
Especially
you," but he settled for saying, "It's hard for me to understand why you gave in to Sylvia's blackmail threat. I'm puzzled by that."

"It wasn't about simple blackmail," she muttered.

"What was it, then?" he asked softly.

Maybe it was his sympathetic tone, maybe it was his candor that broke down her reserve, but she said in an unexpected growl, "It was the
way
that I gave her up!"

Something in her voice had Ken imagining the infamous scene in
Rosemary's Baby.
Goosebumps rolled over him in waves as he said, "How do you mean?"

Again she shook her head. He waited. She hugged herself as if she were cold. There was a fringed wine-colored throw on the back of a nearby armchair that Ken considered fetching for her, but something made him hold back. If she were shaky enough and miserable enough, she might just tell the truth.

Suddenly her head came up sharply and she fixed Ken with as penetrating a look as he'd ever had in his life. It shot into him like an arrow and lodged squarely in his throat. He was dizzy from the force of it, angry from the power of it, and something else: aware. Instinctively and against all rational thought, he understood that this was a woman who had dabbled in black art. Maybe she was now reformed, maybe she'd put away her psychic gifts—but she had strengths, still, to be reckoned with.

Without preamble, she began her tale.

"My grandmother was a midwife. She's the one who delivered the baby and cut the cord. But she was old and in failing health
... often disoriented," Miss Widdich murmured.

"Three days after the baby was born, I wrapped her puny little body in towels, and I put her in a cardboard box. Then I folded the flaps over it. It was November, in northern Saskatchewan. You can imagine. I put on my grandmother's coat and hat, and I wrapped a scarf around my face, and then I set the box upright in my grandmother's shopping cart. I wanted people to think I was a homeless person as I wheeled the cart to a nearby convent. It wasn't far to go, and that was a good thing, because I was very weak. I was fifteen."

Ken blinked. Running through the math, he calculated that in that case, Miss Widdich would have to be in her early fifties at best. She looked in her seventies.

"You're surprised," she remarked, narrowing her eyes over a thin, acerbic smile. And then she continued.

"I laid the box on the step by the back door. I was afraid to ring the bell, so I waited across the alley behind a car. I thought maybe someone would just
... divine that she was there. They were nuns, weren't they? If they were any
good,"
she said with a sniff, "they would have known. But no one came."

She went on with her account, speaking in a low voice that was calm and devoid of emotion. "It was quiet in the alley. The baby was quiet. I wondered if maybe she had died. But then she began to cry, softly at first, more of a whimper. Still no one came. It began to snow, heavily. I could see the snow getting inside the hole between the overlapping flaps. She cried more loudly then, and for a long time. Finally someone opened the door. It was a very young nun, hardly more than my own age; she had a bag of garbage that she was taking out.