Rose Hill (10 page)

“I don’t believe you had anything to do with Theo’s death,” Scott said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to keep you in the loop with what’s going on, but I can’t give Sarah any reason to shut me completely out, you understand?”

Ed’s jaw worked a bit, but he looked Scott straight in the eye as he responded.

“My job sometimes places me in difficult situations, too. I do understand.”

“I need your help with something, off the record. Way, way off the record.”

Ed looked surprised.

“I’d be glad to help, Scott. You know you can trust me.”

Scott showed him the photocopy of the threat card and the photo.

“Holy cow
,” Ed said, sitting down on a stool at the worktable. “This is one I took. Where did this come from?”

Scott told him about finding it in Theo’s unopened mail.

“So he never saw it.”

“I don’t see how he could have.”

“Who do you think sent it?”

“That’s what I need help with. Who would have copies of your photos from that summer?”

“I didn’t get multiple copies of my prints back then; I couldn’t afford it. My Dad sent my rolls of film to the place that developed the photos for the paper. My prints and negatives came back with his, and the cost came out of my delivery money. Look at the date stamp on the front and the company imprint on back of the paper; this is the original.”

“So who had originals of your photos?”

“Well, you, Brad, Sean, maybe your mom or Sean’s mom. My dad had some. Thing is, I don’t remember giving this photo to anyone. Doesn’t mean I didn’t, I just don’t remember.”

“I haven’t looked for any at my house, but I don’t remember having it either.”

“That leaves Brad and Sean.”

“Would you have given any to Caroline or Gwyneth?”

“Maybe Caroline, but I don’t remember doing it. I was beneath contempt as far as Gwyneth was concerned.”

“I guess someone could have stolen it from you, without you knowing.”

“Gail Goodwin cleans my house, but I can hardly picture her as a photo thief and poison pen writer. Other than Gail and you, Sam and Patrick are the only people who come to my house.”

“Well, think about it, and let me know if you remember anything.”

“Lots of people thought Theo murdered Brad,” Ed said, “but who would go to the trouble of sending him a threatening letter, and why now?”

“It’s just too much of a coincidence in the timing,” Scott said. “It has to be connected.”

“Does Sarah think I sent it?”

“Sarah’s not too impressed by it. She thinks it’s just a prank.”

“Have you talked to Margie at the post office?”

“No,” Scott said. “I’m putting that off for as long as I can.”

Ed chuckled, saying, “I can see why.”

Scott stopped in at the Rose and Thorn again, where Ian had just returned from school bus duty and was enjoying his first beer of the day. Instead of resenting the older man’s strong views, Scott found himself glad to have someone with whom to discuss the case. With his best friend a suspect, he needed someone to bounce ideas off of, and Ian, for all his opinionated bluster, had been a pretty good chief of police, could keep a confidence, and knew everyone involved. Scott went over his notes with Ian, and Ian gave him a few suggestions.

“Doc Machalvie is a good doctor and an old friend,” Ian said, “but he is enough like his brother, Stuart, to bear watching.”

“Really? I would’ve thought they couldn’t be more different. Doc is such a gentleman and Stuart’s so… ”

“Greedy? Manipulative? Conniving?”

“All that. Doc, on the other hand, is always going out of his way to help people, whether or not they can pay.”

“Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was supplying Theo with prescriptions for imaginary ailments.”

“For money?” Scott asked.

“Doc likes to gamble a bit, and may have found himself in a tight spot. Or maybe Theo found out something about Doc which would hurt him if it got around.”

“Blackmail?” Scott said. “Do you know what it could be?”

“I might,” Ian said. “Let’s just say I once caught Doc in a place he had no business being, with a person I was surprised to see him with, doing something he wouldn’t have wanted his wife to know about. I got the feeling it wasn’t the first time.”

This gave Scott a lot to think about. Theo as a blackmailer, on top of cheat, arsonist, and all ‘round bastard, was not that big of a stretch.

“You’ll have a hard time finding someone who isn’t glad Theo’s dead,” Ian said. “Most folks will think whoever did it, did the whole town a big favor.”

Scott stopped by Doc Machalvie’s office, above his brother’s pharmacy, and found him filling out paperwork. He greeted Scott warmly and asked him to sit down.

“I thought when I went to medical school that I’d spend most of my time healing sick people,” he said. “I actually spend most of my time referring people to specialists and filling out forms for health insurance companies.”

Scott asked him about Theo.

“Ah, yes,” he replied. “Someone from the county sheriff’s department was here asking about him, as well. What an awful thing to have happen, even to a fellow as unappetizing as Theo. His father was a good friend to me when I was just starting out, and I always felt it was a pity the younger son drowned and not Theo. Life is such a mystery to me. I shared his records with the deputies who came with a search warrant; do you need to see them as well?”

“No,” Scott said. “I want to know if you had any personal dealings with Theo outside of your doctor/patient relationship.”

Doctor Machalvie looked surprised, and more than a little offended.

“What are you insinuating, Scott?”

Scott felt the rebuke and it made him incredibly uncomfortable.

“Any business dealings, investments, leases, things like that,” he said.

“Heavens no,” Doc said. “Business deals are my brother’s forte, not my own. I personally found Theo repellant, and would not have given him two nickels for a dime. I can’t think of anyone who will miss him.”

“I have to ask everyone this,” Scott said. “Where were you the night Theo died?”

Doc took a deep breath and appeared to think very carefully before answering.

“I was at home in bed with my wife,” he said finally. “I’m pretty sure the lodge meeting was the night before.”

“It was,” Scott said.

“Well then,” Doc smiled broadly and stood. “I guess we’re all done here and I can get back to my forms.”

Scott was mollified, as he was intended to be, and left the office knowing he had let himself be handled, but at a loss as to what to do about it. He just couldn’t picture Doc Machalvie stalking Theo with a baseball bat.

Later that evening
, Knox’s wife Anne Marie was awakened, still high and very drunk, by her husband, who dragged her out of bed, and then dressed her in the clothes she’d worn earlier in the day.

“Where we goin’?” she asked him, repeatedly, but he just hummed to himself and would not answer.

He slung her up over his shoulder, carried her to the garage, heaved her not so gently onto the backseat of his car, and shut the door. Cradled in the soft, warm leather, she allowed herself to drift, listening to the classical music Knox always played when he drove.

Maybe he was taking her to rehab again, she thought. It hadn’t been too bad; the spa part had been relaxing, and she had lost some weight. She felt dizzy but not sick, which was exactly the feeling she liked best, most often followed by unconsciousness or sex, although sometimes she’d wake to find both seemed to have happened without her remembering. 

She lost track of time as he drove, but she was conscious of the curves in the road, and the swaying motion of the car lulled her to sleep in the warm, leather cocoon. She woke up to a sudden blast of cold air upon her lightly clad body, and it was enough of a shock to her system to sober her up a tiny bit. Knox hauled her out of the back seat, leaned her back against the side of the car, and then lightly slapped her face until she protested.

“Pay attention to me,” he said. “I’m getting out here and you have to drive yourself home.”

Anne Marie looked around; they seemed to be parked on the side of Pine Mountain Road, the nose of the car pointed downhill. It was dark, snow was pouring down, and Knox seemed to be insisting she drive somewhere. He pressed the keys into her hand and walked away to where she could see another car was waiting farther up the road, facing in the opposite direction.

“Hey!” she yelled, and the effort caused her to slip and fall into the snow bank created by the snowplows.

“Shit!” she shrieked. “Knox! Come help me up, ya big jerk!”

She heard the other car pull away, going uphill, toward Glencora. She struggled out of the snow bank and stumbled against the car.

“Knox!” she screamed after the disappearing taillights, “I can’t drive; I’m drunk!”

This struck her as really funny, and she laughed out loud before saying more quietly, “I am so screwed.”

She had dropped the keys when she fell, and now had to scrabble in the darkness on her hands and knees, feeling around with rapidly numbing fingers until she finally found them in the snow. She let herself in the driver’s side of the car, shivering uncontrollably, covered in wet snow from where she’d fallen. She started the car and turned up the heater, almost falling asleep as soon as she was warm.

“No, no, no, no,” she told herself then, pinching her arms. “Must stay awake.”

She glanced in the rear view mirror as a car passed her, but it wasn’t Knox. It had been a familiar car, but whose?

“Jerk,” she said to the rearview mirror, although Knox was long gone.

What kind of crazy game was he playing? She closed one eye to try to halve the double vision plaguing her and when that didn’t work, shook her head, trying to clear it, which only made her dizzier. She was sensible enough to know she couldn’t stay there with the heater running. She’d run out of gas eventually and freeze to death.

“All right,” she said out loud, and pressed the satellite assistance button, but nothing happened.

“Bastard,” she said, thinking Knox must not have paid the bill. She looked for her purse to get her cell phone, but her purse wasn’t in the car.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, rubbing her eyes in an attempt to get them to focus.

She considered her options, now that she realized the jerk was not coming back for her, and no one knew where she was. Snow alternating with freezing rain was falling, and Anne Marie knew it was only a matter of time before the road became dangerously icy. She put the car in drive.

“I can do this,” she said. “Leave me on the side of the road, will you? I’ll show you.”

She pulled the car off the narrow shoulder and began her descent of Pine Mountain.

After a long day of running around chasing leads but not getting very far, Scott called Maggie to see if he could come over, and she told him to come up the back way to her apartment. She was cleaning, she said, and when he got there, she was scrubbing the bathroom floor. She took off her rubber gloves and put the kettle on in the kitchen, while he brought her up to date, sitting at her kitchen table. Once seated with a pot of tea and two mugs between them, she looked at the photocopy of the threat in the card, and shook her head at the image of the young boys, including her brother Sean.

Sean was now an attorney who worked as a trust officer and estate planner for a large national banking corporation in Pittsburgh. The way Maggie described it, Sean created hiding places for rich people to store their money so their heirs did not have to pay huge amounts of taxes, but Scott thought there was probably more to it.

Maggie insisted Scott needed to talk to Sean about the card and photo.

“We all thought he was probably out there the day it happened,” she said, frowning. “He and Brad were joined at the hip every day and night that summer. He said he spent the whole day working with Brian at the service station and Brian backed him up. The thing is, he never stepped foot in the station if he could help it, and he and Brian couldn’t stand each other. We all thought it was fishy, but neither of them would budge on the story.”

“It was the first time something really bad happened to one of us,” Scott said.

“After Brad died, Sean was so upset that Mom sent him out to Uncle Curtis’ farm for the rest of the summer. Hannah said he spent every day in the woods, and would come home filthy and starved at sunset. Everyone just left him alone to get over it.”

“We didn’t know what to say to him,” Scott said. “He didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

“He got really serious afterward, and just worked his tail off in school; got a scholarship, graduated early, left us, and never looked back.”

“I hate to make him look back, but I have to.”

Maggie pushed her chair back, stood up, and stretched. Scott admired her, even dressed in sweats, but didn’t let her catch him doing so. She reached for the phone to call Sean, and even though the smile of pure affection and pleasure on her face when she got her brother on the phone only lasted a second or two, Scott was completely undone by it. He just had no resistance to this woman, no matter how many times she rejected him.