The Secret (Seacliff High Mystery Book 1) (14 page)

“Really?” Alyson drawled. “He doesn’t seem all that shy around Madison.”

“Madison’s been making all the moves. With her, Eli doesn’t have to initiate anything. I think he finds that easier than asking someone out.”

“So how about you? You shy?” Alyson asked.

“Hardly,” Devon responded.

“You don’t have to sit here with me all night just because you gave me a ride. If you have a girl you’ve been dying to get your arms around, now’s your chance.”

“Actually,” Devon answered, “there
is
a girl I’ve been dying to get my arms around. Come on, let’s dance.” He pulled her onto the dance floor.

Alyson and Devon danced for an hour straight before she finally insisted that she really was getting dizzy and might pass out if she didn’t take a break.

“I’ll get us some punch,” he offered. “Go find a table.”

Alyson looked around the room and saw the others still dancing, so she took an empty table and sat down, slipping off her shoes.

“Alyson, hi.” Caleb slid onto a chair beside her.

“Caleb,” Alyson said, surprised to see him. “I didn’t know if you’d make it after everything that’s happened.”

“Are you kidding? I was in charge of the decorations. There’s no way I was missing this after all the work I’ve put in.”

“The gym looks spectacular. Really.”

“I noticed you were here with Devon, but I just wanted to thank you again for everything you did for me. I still can’t believe it. It feels like I’m in some dream and any moment now I’m going to wake up.”

“Are you okay? It’s a lot to take in. Not just the money, but to have your whole family history rewritten.”

“Honestly, I don’t think everything has sunk in yet, but my mom and I talked all afternoon and I think we’re starting to get a little focus.” Caleb leaned forward onto his arms, complete exhaustion evident on his face. “I still don’t know everything that’s going to happen here,” Caleb added. “My mom and I have a meeting with an attorney who’s going to represent us. There may be a lot of legal stuff to deal with. I guess all I know for sure is that the next few weeks are going to be intense.”

“Probably,” Alyson agreed. “But hey, until you sort through everything, you still have all of this.” She swept her arm around the gym. “Maybe we could hang out sometime.”

“I’d like that. I guess the only cloud on my silver lining is that I still don’t know for certain what happened to my dad. The cops were certain he killed himself, but my mom and I have maintained from the beginning that he didn’t. With everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours, I’m even more convinced.”

“Do you know why the cops were so certain he’d committed suicide?”

“I guess he showed all the typical symptoms. He’d been stressed and depressed after finding a box of his mother’s stuff in the attic. He seemed paranoid and secretive in his last days. He wouldn’t even talk to my mom about it. The cops said that being depressed and secretive were definite signs of suicidal behavior.”

“Did you ever figure out what was on his mind?”

“Not really. I looked for the box of stuff he’d found after he died. It had a bunch of photos, old newspaper clippings, and a key to a lockbox. There didn’t appear to be anything obvious that would affect his mood.”

“Did you ever check out the lockbox?” Alyson asked.

“No. I guess at some point I decided to let the whole thing go as best I could. I didn’t want to upset my mom further by pursuing the murder angle.”

“Do you have a box number?” Alyson asked.

“It’s on the key.”

“The bank is closed tomorrow, but I think you should check it out. I’d be more than happy to help. Are you free after school on Monday?”

“I can be.”

“Okay, meet me in front of the main entrance. Maybe we’ll find the clue we need to figure out why your dad was so upset in the lockbox.”

Caleb stood up. “I’d better get back to my date. She’s starting to look a little upset. Oh, I forgot to tell you.” He paused before he walked away. “My mom and I want you to keep everything you found in the house. It really belongs to you. It was there when you bought the place.”

“Thanks, but we couldn’t. It’s your heritage.”

“We really have nothing to do with any of it. We want you to have it. And there’s no reason to sell it. We certainly don’t need the money.”

“Well,” Alyson hedged, “if you really don’t want it, my mom and I talked about donating it to the Cutter’s Cove Historical Society if we never found an heir. There are a lot of things that not only represent the history of the Cutter family but the history of the town.”

“That’s a great idea,” Caleb said. “Let’s talk more about it when we meet on Monday.”

Devon walked over and set two glasses of punch on the table as Caleb stepped away. “I didn’t want to interrupt. How’s he doing?"

“Totally wigging out, I think, but he’ll be okay. It’s a lot to deal with.”

“How much money do you think he inherited?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he knows. Must be a lot, though, to prompt someone like Steven Laslow to go all ballistic over it.”

“Yeah, that was pretty intense. I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks to Tucker. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. I’m seriously thinking about taking him everywhere I go from now on.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring him tonight.”

“I might have, if I thought I could get away with it.”

At school on Monday, the gang gathered at their usual table in the cafeteria. It was a warm, sunny day, and they were making plans to go to the beach the following weekend when Caleb hurried over and sat down. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

“What?” Mac asked.

“After I got home on Saturday night I decided to take another look at the stuff in the attic and found this,” Caleb held out a small black journal.

“What is it?” Mac asked.

“A diary of sorts left by Mary.”

“Wow, really? What does it say?”

“The diary covers roughly a year’s time. The first entry was on the day my dad was born and the last was on the day she married Michael Wellington. The most interesting entries are the ones around the time of her marriage, but I wanted to read you a couple of others. It’s really given me some insight into the situation. The first entry was dated August 10, 1955.”

Jonathan was born today. He is so beautiful. I never knew I could feel such a deep and pure love. When I look at him I am filled with the certainty that I would do anything for this beautiful child. I think his arrival has affected Barkley too. He tries to act indifferently to the tiny baby who has his eyes, but I can see the softening of his face whenever he looks at him. The delivery was difficult. Barkley thought it best we kept the baby’s birth a secret, so I delivered at home. I know Barkley wants to send us away. He says it’s for our own good, but I don’t agree. I have a year to change his mind.

“There’s an entry a day for a year,” Caleb informed the group. “There’s one toward the middle I wanted to share.”

I woke up late this morning after a restless night’s sleep. I hurried to the nursery, sure that poor Jonathan would be screaming his head off. I found him changed and fed and playing a game with Barkley that only the two of them seemed to understand. I watched them unnoticed for quite a while. When Barkley lets his defenses down his face glows. After seeing them together my heart is filled with hope. I am certain he won’t send us away at the end of the year, as our original agreement dictates.

“Oh my God. That’s so beautiful and so sad.” Alyson wiped a tear from her cheek.

“There are a lot of other entries that really touched me, but the most relevant ones seem to be just prior to Mary’s marriage to Michael.”

Barkley is insisting we follow through with our agreement for me to marry an old friend of his, Michael Wellington. I hoped his love for Jonathan would soften him and allow us to live as a family. I’ve tried to make our relationship work. I truly love Barkley, and I want Jonathan to know his father, but I grow weary of the secrecy and isolation. I have given it much thought, and though it breaks my heart, marrying Michael and giving Jonathan a legal name is the right thing to do for my son. Tomorrow I will marry this stranger and leave the home I have known for the past year, never to return. I am concerned about this arrangement, but it’s what Barkley wants. It pains me that Jonathan will never bear the Cutter name. After everything that has happened, maybe it is for the best.

“There’s more,” Caleb shared.

Today I married Michael Wellington. It was a brief ceremony with only Barkley, Michael, myself, and the minister present. It is my wedding night and I am alone in a strange house with only my son. Michael said his brief vows, signed the marriage and birth certificates, and then left abruptly. I doubt I’ll see him again. It has been arranged that our marriage will be dissolved in one year’s time. As I sit alone, I have to wonder why Mr. Wellington agreed to go through with this farce. The two men did not seem particularly close. In fact, there was measurable tension between them. Why would Mr. Wellington tie himself to a woman he does not know for a whole year as a favor to a man he clearly has no fond feelings for?

“I’m not sure that helps us to identify my dad’s killer, but I thought you all would be interested in the story.”

“We are. Thanks for sharing.” Alyson placed her hand over Caleb’s.

“We still on for the bank?”

“I’ll meet you after school.”

The rest of the day was endless for Alyson as she feigned interest in the basketball game she participated in during PE and the word-processing document she completed during computer lab. As soon as the final bell for the day rang, Alyson hurried over to the benches in the front of the school, where they had agreed to meet. Trevor and Eli had football practice, so it was just Alyson, Caleb, and Mac that headed to the bank.

As it turned out, the bank president was away on a fishing trip, but the head cashier, Mrs. Partridge, had heard about Caleb’s inheritance and was willing to allow him access to the box, provided he had the key. After accessing the box, Caleb pulled out an official-looking document.

“It’s Barkley’s will. It leaves his entire estate and the Cutter fortune to Jonathan Wellington.”

“I wonder why Barkley never told Jonathan about the will,” Alyson said.

“Maybe Mary knew,” Mac speculated. “She did, after all, have the key to the lockbox. After Mary’s death, Steven Laslow must have realized that there was no one who knew about the will other than Barkley, and for whatever reason, he hadn’t made any effort to contact Jonathan. As the years went by and no one accessed the lockbox, Laslow must have thought he could embezzle the Cutter fortune and no one would be the wiser. Then Caleb’s dad found the key among Mary’s things, went to the bank to see what was in the lockbox, and discovered his true heritage. At that point he became a threat.”

“How do we know my dad even checked out the lockbox?” Caleb asked.

“I wonder if they keep a record of who’s accessed each box and when,” Alyson mused. “Let’s see if the cashier can help us.”

Mrs. Partridge informed them that a log was indeed kept. After checking the computer files she told them that Jonathan Wellington had accessed the box on July 21, 2002; prior to that, no one had accessed it since it was originally opened in August of 1956.

“My dad was here the day before he was killed,” Caleb whispered.

“So we have a motive, but how do we trace it back to a murderer?” Alyson asked. “Unless Steven Laslow will admit to doing it.”

“Let’s take the will and get out of here,” Mac said. “If there’s an inside person at the bank we might be being watched right now.”

They headed to the school library to continue their discussion. Luckily, it was as empty as it always seemed to be.

“What now?” Mac asked.

“Someone must have known that Jonathan had found the will,” Alyson began. “As far as we know, the only people who might have known that Jonathan accessed the box are bank employees. Do you think he would have told anyone else?”

“He didn’t even tell me or my mom,” Caleb reminded them.

“Okay, so assuming that bank employees are the only people who knew, unless Steven Laslow really is guilty, someone at the bank must be the murderer,” Alyson deduced.

“I feel like all the evidence we need to figure this out is right in front of us. We just have to put it all together,” Caleb said.

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” Mac said with a sigh. “The guys should be done with practice soon. I’ll see if they can meet us to help work through the details. The library is going to close soon; we should meet somewhere else.”

“I’m starving. Let’s head over to Pirates Pizza,” Caleb suggested.

“I’ll tell the guys to meet us there when they’re done.” Mac got up and gathered her stuff. “I have my own car, so I’ll meet you guys there. You can go on ahead and get a table.”

“Now that you’ve inherited all that money, you can get yourself a car of your own,” Alyson said as Caleb climbed into the passenger seat of her Jeep.

“Yeah, maybe I will. Everything has happened so fast. It’s hard to get my head around it.”

“Give yourself time,” Alyson counseled. “A lot has happened in a very short amount of time. It’s going to take some getting used to.”

Mac joined Alyson and Caleb at Pirates Pizza a few minutes later. Trevor wandered in alone not long after that.

“Eli called home,” Trevor explained. “He and Devon have a command performance for dinner because one of their old family friends showed up for a visit. Eli said he’d call when they were done, probably around eight.”

“Okay, then it’s just us.” Alyson pulled a yellow legal pad out of her backpack. “Let’s order, then we can get started.”

They ordered an extralarge Pirates combo, four salad bars, and a pitcher of soda.

“Now, where do we start?” Mac asked.

“Let’s just walk through what we know from the beginning,” Alyson suggested.

“The very first thing that happened is that someone broke into Alyson’s house,” Trevor pointed out. “It coincidentally happened the night after we first started sorting through the contents of the attic. If someone suspected there was incriminating evidence in the house why not break in sooner? Possibly even before Alyson and her mom moved in?”

“Because the attic door was rusted shut,” Alyson realized. “I only managed to get it open the night before my first day of school.”

“So who knew it was open?” Trevor asked.

“Well, all of us, Eli, my mom, and Chelsea.”

“Maybe it was Chelsea who broke in.” Mac gasped.

“It couldn’t have been Chelsea.” Trevor drummed his fingers on the table. “There must be someone else who knew.”

“Well, the guy who fixed the stairs,” Alyson added. “They were all rotted out, so my mom had them rebuilt.”

“Who fixed the stairs?” Mac asked.

“My mom hired a contractor who was referred to her by the manager at Cutter’s Cove Market. I guess it was some friend of his. She asked him for a referral because he sold home repair supplies.”

“So assuming it wasn’t any of us or Chelsea, let’s write down the contractor and the store manager as possible suspects,” Mac said. “What next?”

“I guess the next thing that happened was the threatening note someone left for Alyson at the diner,” Trevor continued.

“Threatening note?” Caleb asked.

“After we first interviewed Ben Wilson we stopped to have a bite to eat, and while we were at there, the waitress handed Alyson a note a man had asked him to give her. It warned her to back off and mind her own business.”

“So someone must have known you were snooping around at that point,” Caleb pointed out.

“We’d just started,” Trevor answered. “In fact, our trip to talk to the folks in town was really our first attempt at tracking you down.”

“Other than Ben, who else did you talk to that night?” Caleb asked.

“The clerk at Cutter’s Cove Market. She’s the one who told us to talk to Ben when we asked about Mary. What was her name?” Alyson asked.

“Gladys,” Trevor filled in for her.

“Let’s add her to the list,” Caleb said. “That makes two connections to Cutter’s Cove Market.”

“So what’s next?” Mac asked.

“We found the bank records, which suggested that Steven Laslow and/or Jason Mastin was embezzling from the Cutter Trust,” Alyson added.

“And let’s not forget that Steven Laslow tried to kill me,” Caleb reminded them.

“Which pretty much implicates Steven as the embezzler,” Alyson confirmed.

“How do you suppose he even found out about me, or that you’d figured out who I was?” Caleb asked. “Who else did you talk to?”

“Well, there was Stella Townsend,” Alyson remembered. “But she can’t be the murderer. She really seemed to want what was best for Caleb. Steven Laslow probably knew about the will. Once we started asking around about Mary and a possible child, someone must have tipped him off that we were looking for an heir. Still, that doesn’t explain how he knew the heir was you unless he already knew.”

“My father was killed the day after opening the lockbox. Someone at the bank has to have been involved in some way,” Caleb pointed out.

“Probably the bank president,” Trevor commented.

“Fishing,” Alyson exclaimed. “When we went to check the lockbox they told us the bank president was fishing. When we talked to the clerk at the market she said the owner was fishing. I know a lot of people fish so I might be reaching, but maybe they’re friends. If so, maybe they’re in on it together.”

“Okay, so we might have a link between the store and the bank,” Trevor said.

“Wait a minute.” Alyson sat forward abruptly. “You said your father died of a drug overdose. The drugs had to have come from somewhere. The market has a pharmacy in the back; I noticed it when I was waiting for you to talk to Gladys.”

“Yeah, that fits,” Caleb said excitedly. “My dad was found at home in his easy chair with the suicide note and empty bottles of sleeping pills and painkillers. The thing is, neither my mom nor I knew he was taking either one. Maybe someone slipped him the drugs, then set the scene to look like a suicide.”

“Okay, this is what we know,” Alyson summarized, “Devon said there were two sets of prints on the suicide note. One was your mothers,” she glanced at Caleb, “and the other set was unidentified. If we assume that the prints belong to the person who killed your dad we just need to match the prints to the four suspects we’ve identified: Steven Laslow, the trust administrator, probable embezzler, and attempted murderer of Caleb; Jason Mastin, suspected accomplice of Steven’s, president of Heritage Industries, and vice president of the bank where the embezzlement trail began; the president of the local bank; and Mr. Sheldon, the store owner. Steven is in custody, so they have his prints, and as banking executives, I’m sure Mastin’s and Owen’s prints are on file.”