Threads of Evidence (21 page)

Chapter 45

 

—
The Modern Priscilla, Home Needlework and
Everyday Housekeeping
magazine, May 1918

 

 

 

My brain, still foggy from lack of sleep, chose to focus on the (relatively) good news.

I sat in my car a moment, taking in the view of Camden Harbor. Two boys in kayaks shouted to each other. A black-backed gull screamed. The scent of ocean breezes and salt water filled my car and my consciousness.

My visit with Sam Gould had been interesting, but it hadn't given me any clues to Jasmine's death. He'd known she was pregnant. She'd told him the baby was his. (Did that explain why she'd rejected Jed's proposal?)

I didn't know. I pulled out the little notebook I'd been carrying and jotted a few notes. Who hadn't I talked to who'd been on Skye's list?

Carole Simpson—now Carole Simpson Fitch, Jed's wife—and Linda Zaharee. I had an appointment (or Skye did) with Linda this afternoon at four o'clock.

Meanwhile, Pete Lambert wanted to talk with me. I dialed his number.

“I don't know what I can help with, Pete. The fire started before Patrick and I got back from dinner.”

“That's what I thought. But so much was going on last night, I wanted to check with you. So you're certain Skye left before you got back to the carriage house?”

“She'd gone to the Winslows' house across the street to report the fire.”

“But you didn't know that when you arrived at the carriage house.”

“Patrick and I assumed she was still inside. She hadn't gone to dinner with us because she was tired. She'd planned to go to bed early.”

“You didn't see anyone else around the place?”

Pete was checking off possibilities.

“Contractors' trucks have been around both the big house and the carriage house during the day. But last night the only cars there were mine and the Wests'.”

“So when the fire broke out, Skye West was the only one at the carriage house.”

“She said she'd fallen asleep, and that the smoke woke her up.”

“She was lucky,” Pete commented. “Did you smell anything at the fire?”

“Smoke. Fire. Wood burning. I wasn't paying attention to specific odors.” The place was burning down! Why would I have been sniffing?

“I've tried to reach Skye at the hospital. She's the only one who might have seen or heard anything unusual before the fire started, but right now she isn't thinking about the fire. She's thinking about her son.”

“Have you any ideas?”

“That's still being investigated. It doesn't seem electrical. Did Ms. West smoke?”

“I never saw her smoking. Do they think she set the fire?”

“They're covering every angle, from accidents to arson.”

“She loved the estate. She was planning to fix it up and live in it.”

“So I've been told.”

“Pete, if that fire was set, then it's the second time in a week that someone tried to kill Skye.”

Our connection went silent. Then, “You're talking about that dead hummingbird? I can't see a dead bird has anything to do with a fire. By the way, what're you doing in Camden this morning? I thought you'd be home, recuperating from last night.”

I hesitated. Then I told him. “Skye's convinced Jasmine Gardener was murdered forty-five years ago. She's asked me to talk with Jasmine's friends who were at that party in 1970. I was in Camden talking with one of them.”

“You mean, for the past few days you've been running around town dredging up past history, getting people excited about that old Jasmine Gardener story?”

“That's right.”

“You realize that, on the slight chance that girl was murdered, you've been turning over rocks covered for years? That if she was murdered, you may have alerted her killer? That what you've been doing could have driven someone to make sure Skye West and her family leave town . . . permanently?”

“Then may I request . . . no, order you to stop playing amateur detective, and forget 1970? Experts on fires are investigating what happened here. The Wests are in Boston. You need to go home. Go work on your needlepoint or plan your grandmother's wedding. Leave the crime fighting to people who know what they're doing.”

“Yes, Pete.” There was no sense in arguing with the man. But if Skye and I had started a ball rolling downhill, I wasn't going to stop it just when it was picking up speed. “But you'll keep in mind what I said? If you find the arsonist, you may also find a killer.”

“If you should talk with Skye West, ask her to call me, please?” Pete asked.

“I will,” I promised. That was all I promised.

I sat back, thinking about that telephone call.
Arson? Who would have started a fire in the carriage house?

I left a message for Sarah about Patrick and headed back to Haven Harbor. My appointment with Linda wasn't until midafternoon. I could fit in visits to both Carole and Dave before that.

Chapter 46

 

—Stitched by Betsy Warren, age fourteen, at a young ladies boarding school in Portland, Maine, 1805 (Embroidery was often taught at such schools.)

 

 

 

An hour later I turned into the driveway of the Fitch home.

I was lucky. Carole Fitch answered the door. I wondered what she'd looked like in 1970, when she'd dated Jed. Now she was heavyset, with straight hair cut so short none of it touched her round face. Maybe she'd been on her way to the Y to work out. Yoga pants might be in style in some places, but Carole hadn't attempted to be stylish. Her sweatpants hung loosely around her wide hips, although the Common Ground Country Fair T-shirt she was wearing was a size too small.

“Yes?” She looked at me, obviously trying to remember who I was. That happens when you've been out of town for ten years. “Angie Curtis?”

“That's right. Do you have a few minutes?”

“I'm sorry about your mother. I went to her funeral last month. I wasn't a friend of hers, but I wanted to pay my respects to your grandmother. How's she doing?”

“She's fine, thank you.”

She was puzzled, I could tell, by my being on her doorstep. I suspected her husband hadn't mentioned my visit to his office the day before.

“May I come in?”

She opened the door and gestured toward the living room. “I was on my way out. But you're welcome to stay a few minutes.”

“This won't take long.” I smiled.

Carole Fitch sat on the edge of a wide armchair. Her husband would have fit comfortably on the large seat. Carole wasn't tiny, but the chair still looked too big for her.

“I'm sorry to bother you. You know Skye West bought the old Gardener place.”

She nodded. “I've known that for a while. My husband was her agent.”

“You may have heard she's interested in compiling a history of the estate. She asked me to help her. I've been talking to people around town about what they remember about Aurora, and about the Gardeners.”

“I'm afraid I can't help you. I have nothing to contribute to your project.” She started to get up.

“But you were about the same age as Jasmine Gardener. You and your husband both knew her through the yacht club.”

She sat down again. “We did. But my husband knew her much better than I did. Of course, that was years before we were married.”

“Of course. So you didn't spend any time with Jasmine?”

“Sometimes. As you said, we were in the same group of friends. We all went places together. But she wasn't a special friend of mine.”

“What did you think of her?”

“Please don't put this in your history, but I always thought she was a spoiled bitch. She wanted what she wanted, and she was used to taking it. She thought of herself first. She didn't care about other people unless they helped her get what she wanted.”

“That's a pretty strong statement,” I replied.

“I know. We shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But it's always driven me crazy how people who hardly knew her talked so much about her after she died. She was seventeen and she died. That should have been the end of it. Here it is forty-five years later, and you're asking me about her. She should rest in peace. Her life was over years ago. People should focus on the living, not the dead.”

“You were at that last party, at Aurora.”

“Everyone I knew was.”

“Was Jasmine drinking that night? Heavily?”

“She was drinking more than she should have been. I didn't notice at the time, but later, when people said she'd been drunk and fallen and hit her head, I believed it. We were all drinking that night. Or smoking. Or both.”

“So you don't question how she died.”

“She drowned. That was all there was to it.”

“Your husband was the one who found her.”

“And it's given him nightmares for years, I can assure you. Jed was one of those under her spell that summer. He followed her around. I swear, he would have done anything that girl told him to do. Stay up so late he didn't show up for his job the next morning. Drink too much. Miss football practices when he should have been preparing for his senior year. He missed out on major scholarships because of that girl. If it hadn't been for her, there's no telling what he could have become.”

“You loved him then, didn't you? Someone told me you'd dated Jed before Jasmine did.”

“That's no secret. And I was better for him than she was, despite her money and her fancy clothes. I loved him. Jasmine only knew what she thought was best for herself.” Carole looked over at a wedding picture of herself and Jed taken many years ago. He was still young and handsome; she was beautiful, looking at him as though she couldn't be happier. “It took Jed a while to figure out I was the best woman for him. But we've had a good life together. I don't often think about Jasmine anymore. Jed was young then. He had dollar signs in his eyes. He liked Jasmine, of course. But he also thought being with her would be a lot easier than sweating on the football field and studying 'till all hours.”

“So he was dating Jasmine for her money.”

“That's what I thought then, and that's what I think now. No matter what he, or anyone else, says, Jasmine's death was the best thing that could have happened to him.”

Chapter 47

 

—Exodus 27:16, King James Version

 

 

 

I thanked Carole Fitch for her thoughts.

She hadn't been a Jasmine admirer.

Could she have been her murderer?

She'd been a jealous girlfriend. And Elsa and Beth, Jed's sisters, had agreed with what she'd said about Jasmine's influence on Jed: it left him unprepared to compete for the football scholarship his friends and family were hoping he'd earn.

But that didn't make Carole a murderer. Despite what everyone had said about Jasmine, I didn't see anyone as a killer.

Maybe she had drunk too much and drowned, just as the police had determined at the time.

Next stop: Dave's house.

He was right where I'd suspected he'd be: in his poison garden. I assumed the plants he was pulling up (with his gloved hands) were weeds. “Dave? I got your message.”

He stood up, brushing the earth off his long pants and long-sleeved shirt. He'd once told me he had to “suit up” to take care of his garden. Some of the plants, like poison ivy, no one would want to touch. “Glad you got my message,” he said. “I called as soon as I confirmed my tests.”

“I was in Camden.”

Dave left his garden and walked toward me. “I'm ready for a sit-down. Some iced tea or coffee?”

“Iced coffee would be great.”

“You sit, and I'll bring us each a glass,” he said, indicating two red Adirondack chairs under a maple tree.

I sat, glad to have a few minutes to think. It was still early in the season, but some of Dave's plants looked as though they could take over the garden. In one corner lilies of the valley had almost finished blooming. I remembered his warning about them. If you picked the flowers and put them in water, the water could kill a child or an animal who drank it. I couldn't imagine a child drinking out of a vase. But a cat or a dog? Sure.

And now he'd detected arsenic in or on moose hairs. Not any moose hairs, but moose hairs that had been stitched into a needlepoint picture. Arsenic? Moose hairs? Just one of those would be strange enough.

Dave came back with two frosty glasses.

“I remembered you didn't take sugar in your coffee. I hope that's true of iced coffee, too,” he said.

“It is. You have a good memory.” I took a good sip of the drink. I hadn't realized I'd been thirsty.

“Let me tell you about the moose hair,” he said.

“Please.”

“The hair was mammalian, of course. Natural hair is always mammalian, although I wondered for a few minutes whether I'd looked at what you'd given me too quickly. That maybe it was a fiber of some kind, not a hair.”

“But it was hair.”

“Definitely. I did some more research and found it was from a moose.”

“Which makes no sense. Why would Millie Gardener have stitched moose hair into her embroidery?”

Dave nodded excitedly. “That's what I thought. It made absolutely no sense. But hair, even hair from a moose, is usually flexible. Even soft. This hair was stiff. Of course, it must have been flexible when it was woven into the embroidery. But I couldn't figure out why it was now hard. So I put it in a little water to soften it. At first, I tried cold water, but that didn't help. Then I put it in warm water and. . . presto! It became soft.”

“I can't believe you spent so much time on a piece of hair that might have gotten into the panel by mistake,” I said, a little amused at how seriously Dave had taken this.

“I had a hunch. A crazy one, but a hunch. Some substances dissolve more easily in hot water than in cold. One of them is arsenic. And I remembered hearing students saying Mrs. Gardener thought her daughter was poisoned.”

“True,” I said, sitting up a little straighter. Should I tell Dave about the hummingbird? I decided not to. At least not yet.

“Arsenic is one of the easiest poisons to test for.” Dave nodded as he spoke. “So I did, and, sure enough, there was arsenic in the warm water I'd soaked the hair in.”

“It can't have been a lot of arsenic,” I said. “In one hair?”

“Not enough to kill anyone, if that's what you're thinking. But moose hairs don't come one at a time. If there were more hairs, and they were all soaked in arsenic . . . arsenic is very potent. It only takes a hundredth of an ounce of arsenic to kill someone.”

“I know arsenic was an important poison historically. But you hardly ever hear of anyone being poisoned by it today.”

“You can't buy it at a hardware store anymore. But it's still used in some manufacturing. And since it occurs naturally, traces of arsenic are even in our drinking water. Here in Maine, and other eastern states, especially in rural areas where there were family graveyards in the nineteenth century, arsenic, which was used as a preservative for bodies of men killed in the Civil War, has sometimes leached into the ground, and then into the groundwater.”

I shuddered. But Dave was on a roll.

“During the nineteenth century, arsenic was used as a basic preservative. Angie, are there any mounted animals at Aurora? Or were there, before you cleaned the place out?”

I stared at him. “Yes. And, yes, one was a moose head.”

He nodded with satisfaction. “I don't have to test those to know one place the arsenic could have come from. Beginning in the eighteenth century, arsenic was a basic tool of taxidermists. They mixed arsenic with plaster of paris and rubbed it into the skin and hair of animals or birds they wanted to preserve, or sometimes dipped whatever they were preserving into an arsenic solution. Either way, the arsenic prevented decay. Even moths wouldn't harm their work. It would kill the moths or other insects.”

“So . . . you're saying . . .”

“Someone could cut a small piece of a preserved animal, or even its stuffing, so no one would notice, soak it in water, and get an arsenic solution that could kill someone.”

Elsa Fitch had bought two of those preserved heads at the lawn sale. I hoped she knew they contained poison.