Diane Greenwood Muir - Bellingwood 05 - Life Between the Lines (17 page)

“He’s really strange,” she said after she got inside her apartment and had her own door closed.

“Who? Grey Linder?” Jeff asked.

“Yes. Whenever I’m in the hallway, I feel like he’s spying on me.”

“Talk about paranoid.”

“Probably. It’s just weird. Do you ever see him downstairs?”

“He comes down in the mornings sometimes to get a thermos of coffee and whatever breakfast food we have on the counter. Sometimes I see him leave in the late afternoon. Should I be paying closer attention?”

“No, I suppose not. I guess I’m just glad that he’s not always in that little room. He gives me the creeps.”

“Creeps like you’re afraid he’s going to do something to you?”

“No, creeps like he’s just weird enough that I don’t want him in my study group because he’s always thinking of some random thing that has no context with what we’re working on and he insists on talking about it even when no one cares.”

Jeff had picked Leia up when she began rubbing on his leg. He was stroking her head and talking quietly to her.

“You should come up more often,” Polly said. “They love company.”

He followed her into the kitchen. “Can I help with anything?”

“No, you keep snuggling the cat. It’s one less animal around my ankles. I’ll do this.”

She heard a voice from the back steps, “Polly, are you up here?”

“Come on up, Henry,” she called. “Jeff and I are about to eat your leftovers.”

She heard him come up the steps and soon he was in the living room. “Hi Jeff,” Henry said and strode across the room. Jeff set the cat down on the floor and shook his hand.

“Hey, Henry. I hear you cooked last night.”

“I did and I’m just in time for leftovers.”

“Really?” Polly asked. “You have time today?”

“Jimmy and Sam are working at Frankel’s and Leroy and Ben are back at the shop. They’re on lunch, so I decided to come over and say hello.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, “Hello.”

Without asking, he began pulling glasses out of the cupboard and silverware from the drawer, while Polly sliced meatloaf and scooped potatoes and beans onto plates and put them in the microwave.

“Tea?” he asked Jeff.

“Sure, that sounds good.”

Henry took the pitcher out of the refrigerator and handed it to Jeff.

When he reopened the refrigerator and grabbed the container with the tomatoes and cucumbers as well as the butter dish, Polly poked him in the side. “You’re awfully comfortable here, cowboy,” she laughed.

“Do we need anything else?” he asked, then said, “Napkins. Oh, and salt and pepper.” He grabbed those from the other end of the counter and handed them across the peninsula to Jeff.

“How you coming on that grub, cookie?” Henry asked, and slapped Polly on the rump.

She jumped at that. “Yours is going to be the last one out if you’re not careful and you might lose a few fingers along the way.”

“Ahem,” Jeff coughed from the dining room. “Should I leave the two of you and go to the Diner by myself?”

“Not if you want to live through the afternoon,” Polly threatened, taking the first plate out and handing it to Henry. Soon food was served and they sat down to eat.

“What brings you upstairs for lunch?” Henry asked Jeff.

“I had to dig Polly out of her office. She’d gotten lost in those computer files and I was worried she wouldn’t eat.”

“You need a keeper,” Henry said to her.

“I never do this,” she protested. “Leave me alone.”

“Did you find anything more?”

Polly explained what she had uncovered. It had left her with more questions than answers, but she also knew that she’d barely skimmed the surface of the files on that flash drive.

“Polly?” Henry asked.

“What?”

“You started a sentence and then just faded away. Where did you go?”

“I wonder what I was saying. I was thinking about Thomas’s book. My copy is over here in the bookshelf.” She got up and left the table with both men watching her. She’d barely touched her food, but it was the last thing on her mind.

“Here it is.
The Case of Romeo and Juliet
. You know, I should have had Thomas sign my copies of his books. I didn’t even think of that when he was here.” She opened the front cover and grinned. “But he did. Look! He signed it for me!”

“What does it say?” Jeff asked.

“Polly, you were right. Authors give you more than you realize sometimes. Never forget that.”

“That’s cryptic,” Henry said. “That’s all he wrote?”

“Well, he signed his name.” She handed the book to him when she got back to the table.

Henry took it and pointed at her plate. “Eat something. I don’t want you to fade.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“No. I’ve got this. You two go on so I can get some work done.” Polly shooed both Jeff and Henry out after lunch. She had time before Aaron and Anita were arriving and wanted to process on what she had learned this morning. It wasn’t nearly enough and didn’t seem to point to a murderer. She wondered if maybe Thomas hadn’t been asking her to find the murderer, but his son.

She filled the dishwasher and smiled as Obiwan followed her to the back steps. They went outside and she let him wander through the trees lining the creek. It had turned into a beautiful fall day. She glanced back at the school and out of the corner of her eye, saw Grey Linder watching from his room.

That man was creepy. He made her think of the creepy old man in the creepy old house that every kid ran from in every small town. It had been a little old lady for her. Whenever she would walk from school to her friend’s house, they passed that one home where everything was dilapidated. The grass was uncut, weeds overran the yard and vines crawled up the house. The only time they ever saw the old woman was when she came out to get her mail and she was as unkempt as her home.

Now that Polly was older, she wondered what
might have happened if someone had just been friends with the poor lady. When she lived in Boston, there was a woman, Gladys Black, who lived next door to her. She was bent over and used a walker and Polly’s first encounter with the woman had been at the end of a cane. Gladys yelled at her for making too much noise while she was moving in, but Polly had taken the woman cookies and whenever she saw her in the corner grocery store, carried her bags home for her. It didn’t take long for Gladys to invite Polly in for coffee. She would pull out her recipe card collection and tell Polly stories about the different things she had cooked for her husband over the years. There were cards from Gladys’ mother and those meant more stories from her childhood. She had also collected salt and pepper shakers and before she died, gave Polly a pair of her favorites, a Snowman and Snow woman Goebbels set. They were tucked away in a Christmas box and Polly couldn’t wait to get them out. They always sat on her table through the season.

Polly glanced back up and Grey was gone from the window. Obiwan had done all he needed to do and headed for the horses.

“Obiwan, come.” Polly commanded. He stopped, looked at the horses in the pasture and then back to her.

“Come,” she repeated. She could almost see him sigh dejectedly as he began trotting toward her.

“You’re such a good boy,” she told him. He sat down and she bent over to ruffle his head. “You’re a good boy. Let’s go in.”

He followed her back to the apartment and curled up on the bed, knowing she was leaving again. She grabbed her laptop and went out the front door.

Back in her office, Polly continued reading the manuscript of Thomas’s first book. There had to be a reason it was on the disk. She scrolled to the end and there wasn’t anything that seemed out of place. The story ended and that was that. She scrolled to the end of each chapter and couldn’t see that he’d done anything differently with them. It all seemed perfectly normal.

“You are quite engrossed in
your work.” Polly looked up to see Aaron Merritt standing in her doorway.

“Hi,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I can tell.” He sat down in the chair across from her.

“Is Anita with you?”

“She’ll be here in a minute. She was right behind me.”

Polly sat back and looked at him. He was a huge presence in her office. When he stood, he was over six feet tall. His big barrel chest and immense upper arms and forearms made him seem bigger than he really was. His hair was just beginning to grey and when it did, it would be very attractive, accenting the full head of dark hair that he kept quite short. He didn’t go for a military buzz cut, but it was always neatly trimmed to his head.

“Can you tell me anything more about Thomas’s murder?” Polly asked him.

“I think we might be able to explain a few things to you. Lydia said that you had done some work on the files he gave you and I’m hoping that between you and Anita, we can understand what we have here.”

“Did I hear my name?” The bouncy, young tech came into Polly’s office. “I’m sorry it took me so long. Adam desperately needed me to show him how to order pizza online.”

“What?” Aaron demanded.

“I’m kidding.” She smirked at Polly. “I just ordered it for him.” She pulled her laptop out and slipped behind Aaron to the other chair.

“Maybe we should go into the conference room,” Polly said. “We can hook the computers up and see things on a bigger screen.”

“Wow,” Anita said. “Boss, get the name of her supplier. We could use that.” She let Aaron stand and walk out first, then followed him.

Polly stopped in Jeff’s office, “We’re going to be in the conference room
. You don’t have anything scheduled, do you?”

“No
, it’s all yours.”

They shut the door to the conference room and Aaron pulled the blinds closed before sitting down.

“Secret stuff?” Polly asked.

“It’s probably better to be safe than sorry. We still don’t know who killed Thomas Zeller.”

Polly plugged her laptop into the system and projected her screen on the wall in front of them.

“What have you done here?” Anita asked.

Polly explained how she had sorted things according to the Edgar Allan Poe poem.

“That’s awesome, boss. It should
really help us.”

“I only made it through the first stanza,” Polly said. “I got busy stitching the photo together and then I was sidetracked by his manuscript.”

“This will make it much easier to work on those photographs,” Anita said. “We had bits and pieces all over the place. I printed them out so people could put pieces together, but we didn’t know how many photographs and how many pieces we had for each.”

“I think that Thomas and Nelly had a son,” Polly said.

“Nelly? There is no Nelly in these files.”

“That’s the girl he met in San Francisco. She left in nineteen sixty-nine. Something bad happened, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

Anita reached over, clicked into a file, and opened a PDF document, “This is what happened. We’re waiting for the rest of the police reports. They don’t have everything digitized and we’ve had to put in a request, but since it was a cop, they haven’t shuffled it all the way to the bottom of their cold cases.”

“What’s a cop?” Polly asked. “What happened?”

“It looks as if Thomas got his hands on part of the police report. His name is on here too, but only as a bystander. And that must be Nelly’s name: Eleanor Marie Farber. She was implicated in the murder of a police officer, Bartholomew Andrew Davidson.” Anita was pointing to words on the screen.

“Murder? What happened?”

“There are other reports in here,” Anita said, clicking another file open. “There were a series of drug raids in the Haight in the summer of 1969. I did some searching on this. After 1967, there were too many people and too many drugs out there and crime was out of control. You can see that Thomas was picked up here,” she clicked another file open, “and here, too. He did short stints of time. He wasn’t dealing, just possession. He was bailed out by … ” she scrolled down the page. “Yes, both times by Eleanor Farber.”

“Which folders did you find these in?” Polly asked.

“Looking at the organization you’ve given them, they are spread throughout all of the … what did you call them? Stanzas?” I found them all and just put them together to try to get a picture of what he was researching.”

“Did you find information on the woman and her son?” Polly was beginning to get excited. With someone else to talk to about what she had found, things were
making more sense. Details were falling into place.

Aaron said very little while the two girls moved back and forth between the files. Finally, he stood up. “I am going to let the two of you keep working. If you find something that I need to know about, call me.”

Polly scooted her chair back. “There’s nothing else you can tell me about Thomas? You don’t have any idea at all who did this?”

Anita reached across and tapped Polly’s knee. “There was someone else involved in the killing of that police officer. We are wondering if he might have tracked Thomas here.”

“What was his name?” Polly asked.

“There were other people named in the report. Two of them were taken into custody and two of them, Eleanor Farber and Douglas Winters got away. These two,” she pointed to mug shots in a file that Thomas had scanned, “both said that Douglas Winters was the one who pulled the trigger. They claimed to have nothing to do with it, they were just in the room when it happened. They also said that Eleanor Farber didn’t do anything, but she ran, so it’s been an open case on her.

“Those two spent a few years in prison,” Aaron said. “Their families hired lawyers who eventually got them off. We don’t know where they are now, either.”

“So four people were in a room when a police officer was killed and none of them can be found?” Polly asked.

“That’s about the gist of it,” he said. “We have some prints from the room here, but we haven’t found the knife and we haven’t come up with any good information from your card key database. The prints don’t match the two men who were imprisoned. We’re at a standstill unless you come up with something in those files.”

“I thought Thomas was asking me to find his son,” Polly said. “I didn’t realize he had all of this other information on here.”

“That may be all that he is trying to do, Polly. Maybe he was trying to clear Eleanor’s name. But she would have to come forward for that to happen. They need to ask her questions about what happened that night. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. It’s not over until it’s over.”

Polly sighed. “We’d better get to work.”

“Don’t stay too late,” Aaron said to Anita. “I know you.” He left the room and shut the door.

She giggled at Polly. “I tend to get involved and forget that it’s time to go home.”

“Me too. So, what if I start pulling all of the picture pieces together. My online software doesn’t stitch them together perfectly, but at least we can see what we have.”

“That sounds good. I’m going to tag my files with your stanzas so that I can get things in a better order. We’ll meet back here in a little bit?”

“Sure. That sounds good,” Polly laughed. They would be sitting at the same table together, but sometimes concentration caused a person to be elsewhere. She opened the folder for the second stanza, copied out each jpeg file, then rearranged them until she had a picture and then did the same thing for each of the other stanzas. The boy continued to age and the woman, though she got older, never lost her innate beauty.

The first picture was the only one with a city sign in it. The others were various attractions. She supposed they probably
were related to whatever community the family had lived in.

Anita showed no signs of coming up for air, so when Polly finished the last photograph, she opened the second stanza, hoping to find some names and maybe a city. If Thomas kept to the pattern, the first folder would be school things for the boy. After opening a few PDF files, she realized that the boy’s name was now Allan and his mother’s name was Rowena Singer. They were living in Tutwiler, Mississippi. Another small town. Allan had started kindergarten in nineteen seventy-four. There was a class picture and he looked to be about the same age as the boy in the first picture she’d uncovered.

She made some notes and moved to the third stanza. The boy was now named Roderick - or Rick. His mother’s name was Madeline Clark. They moved to Cardington, Ohio, just before his sixth grade year. There were no school pictures, but the photograph that was located in the second stanza would have been of a boy between the ages of eleven and twelve.

That made sense. Nelly was probably sending these pictures after they moved
out of a community. She could only imagine that frustrated Thomas to no end.

The fourth folder began in 1984. Troy and Helen White moved into Davisboro, Georgia, as he began his sophomore year in high school. Polly spent some time looking at the picture Thomas had received after they left Ohio. She could see that the boy was his son. It was in his lips and his eyes. This must have destroyed her friend. Her heart ached for him, but there was nothing she could do now except figure out how to solve this.