A Month at the Shore (33 page)

He giggled uncomfortably again; clearly he was having second thoughts about letting them in on his secret.

"Billy," Laura said with a fierce scowl, "it's wrong to go around telling people something you know isn't true. I'm really surprised at you. Surprised and ashamed! How would you like it if I went around telling people that I thought you were the one who hit that dog last week and left it wounded on the side of the road?"

Billy's eyes got wide. "I didn't do that!" he said, horrified by the scenario she'd drawn. "I would never do that!"

"I know you didn't do it.
And Snack didn't kill Sylvia.
No one killed Sylvia! She quit her job and moved on. She was restless, a wanderer. She had lots of jobs before
she came here; she used to brag about how many. Everyone knew that. Really, I'm so disappointed in you, Billy!" she said, hitting him with everything she had. She had to stop him from going around sharing his little so-called secret with anyone who'd listen. And in Chepaquit, that would be virtually everyone.

"But
... I said I was wrong," he said, crushed by the reprimand.

"Don't say
anything
about it, Billy. To anyone. Come on, let's finish our deliveries."

Laura was almost afraid to look at Miss Widdich, who had stood in rigid silence during the exchange. She was expecting to see shock, but all she saw was a very blank stare.

The three of them were sitting in the sample twig chairs outside the garden shop, looking as out of place as B-list guests at a Hamptons wedding: Snack, Corinne, and Kendall Barclay himself.

Pulling up in the delivery truck,
Laura's heart went up and plunged back down and landed on its side. She had no idea what to make of the fact that they were out there and not in the house—until she looked over and saw the official-looking van parked in front of their wide front porch.

The police must have returned with a warrant. If that was true, then the death investigation had become a homicide investigation at last. There was a grim inevitability to it, Laura knew, but it still came as a jolt to her system.

As she p
arked
alongside Ken's little black
Porsche
in the customer parking lot, Billy took one gawking look at the assembled group and said, "Gotta go!"

Without waving his usual ebullient greeting to everyone in sight, Billy hurried away to his car—feeling guilty, no doubt, that he'd already spilled his secret.

Laura felt bad for the way she'd scolded him, but not bad enough to regret having tried to put the fear of hell in the man: all they needed was Billy running around telling people that he once believed he'd seen Snack dragging Sylvia's body into the compost pile. Never mind the fact that—according to Billy, who'd heard it from Ken—the bones were there before Sylvia was even born; no one was going to remember
that
part of Billy's chill
ing
little tale.

Tense as she was, Laura could see that the three in the twig chairs weren't exactly all sweetness and light either. With his chin on his chest, his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out, Snack resembled nothing so much as a grounded teenager. Corinne looked mopey too, sitting sideways in her chair with her legs looped over its arm and listlessly snapping off last year's seedpods from a summersweet bush behind her. Ken, ever the gentleman, rose to his
feet as Laura approached; but
even there, she saw a certain droopy tension in his demeanor.

Feeling like something the cat dragged in herself, Laura collapsed in the chair that he'd vacated and breathed in a noseful of fragrant lilac. It revived her, somehow, as the sight of Ken just then could not. He'd stood her up twice, and he'd kept her in the dark about Billy's so-called secret.

Three strikes. He was out, as far as she was concerned.

He looked edgy and tentative.
Welcome to the club,
she thought. It made her feel as though they were playing on a level field. For once.

She said to him, "When I grow up, I want to be a banker. You never work."

It brought a quick, wry smile. "Laugh all you want. When the bank goes under, so may your loan," he quipped.

Snack let out one of his world-weary snorts.

Laura avoided looking at her brother, and he continued to avoid looking at her.

She nodded tiredly toward the house and said to Corinne, "And to what do we owe the pleasure of those guys poking through our lingerie?"

"I don't know," her sister said, looking all at sea. "They showed up with a consent warrant that they asked me to sign. Then they asked Snack to stop tearing up the bathroom floor. Then they started going through the house. I have no idea what they're looking for."

"They
have no idea what they're looking for," Snack said. "I ought to know; I followed them from room to room."

"And you, Mr. Barclay?" Laura was angry and hurt and in no mood to be either tactful or adoring; she wanted to know why Billy was in Ken's confidence and she was not. "What're
you
up to? Your new best friend just ran away, in case you didn't notice," she added, unable to hide her irritation from him.

"Ah, hell," Ken
muttered
. "So you know."

"I know. Miss Widdich knows. I expect that by dark, all of Chepaquit will know."

"Know what?" asked Corinne. "What're you talking about?"

"Ken, would you like to do the honors?" Laura said, leaning her head back on the chair and nailing him with a perky, insolent smile. It was pointless to try to keep Billy's story from Snack and Corinne; they were bound to hear it sooner or later.

She was gratified to see that Ken looked discomfited. His color was rising, and a frog seemed to have lodged itself nicely in his throat. There was just a hint of the old class geek peeking through that handsome, clean-cut facade—enough
, in fact,
to take the edge off her resentment. How could you stay mad at someone who had the decency to feel embarrassed by his actions?

"I didn't handle the thing with Billy as well as I might have," he said, mostly to Snack. "I should have come directly to you and told you what Billy told me. I was hoping to just nip the damn story in the bud,
but
obviously that didn't happen."

He recounted the story, only in more detail, that Billy had told Laura and Miss Widdich.

Corinne was scandalized; Snack, immobilized.

Laura found herself interrupting Ken just to reassure them both. "Fortunately, we now know, thanks to Billy—if no one else—that the bones have been there for a couple of generations. Let's hope people remember that part when Billy goes blabbing his disproved, silly theory."

"Uncle Norbert," Corinne whispered. "It had to be him.
He
was around here forty years ago."

Snack said contemptuously, "Oh, come on, you could just as easily say it was Dad; he had the same vile temper. And anyway, why does it have to be a Shore who did it? There's got to be a murderer or two somewhere in the world who's not a member of our immediate family."

Brave talk. But Laura was watching Ken, and she wasn't liking what she was seeing. He was standing—presiding—in front of the three of them, hands in his back pockets, thumbs hooked outside. He was looking down, listening or thinking intently.

"The reason I told Billy about the age of the skeletized remains," he said to them, "was to reassure him and quiet him down. The thing is—"

He looked up, and the pain in his face was evident for all of them to see. "The thing is, that initial time line has now been revised downward. The ME hadn't taken into account how active a compost pile is as an agent of decomposition. It turns out that he was off by twenty years or more."

"Gee," Snack said contemptuously, "the guy sounds like quite the expert. Next, he'll be telling us the bones were put there last weekend."

"There's corroborating evidence, Snack," Ken said quietly. "The body was put there no earlier than 1987."

"That's when Sylvia worked here!" Corinne blurted.

"I know," Ken said. "Billy worked the dates out for me."

For the first time since he'd returned home, Snack looked cowed. "No one's going to believe a half-wit," he murmured.

"Don't call him a half-wit," Laura said faintly.

"Okay, a three-quarter-wit. Come on, Laur," Snack coaxed with a sickly smile. "Billy
is ...
Billy. He's a good guy but he's
Billy,
for crissake. He talks to deer. On occasion, to trees.
I'm
amazed that he could even come up with such an evil-sounding scenario."

"It's entirely possible that he did actually witness a crime being covered up," said Ken. "Literally."

Snack jumped to his feet; he looked around, ready to run. "This is nuts. This is really nuts! Are you telling me that because Billy has a nightmare and someone else comes up with a date—? Where the hell did they get a year? I suppose the body was buried with a laminated newspaper?"

"Trust me, they have hard proof."

Laura's head was spinning. She had no idea whether she should be thanking Ken or running him over. "You seem to know everything about this case," she hissed. "Why don't you just tell us who did it and spare us the wait?"

"If I knew, I certainly—"

"Here comes
Gabe
!
"
Corinne said, and for the life of her, Laura could not be sure whether her sister thought it was good news or bad at that particular moment.

They waited in resounding silence as Gabe pulled in beside the pickup truck. Compared to them, he looked reasonably carefree, smiling a greeting that encompassed them all but that dwelled on Corinne. He went one better, coming up to her and slipping his arm lightly around her for a first-time-ever public kiss. Corinne smiled shyly and cast her look downward, the picture of confused desire.

Gabe was dirty and his shoes were covered in caked-on mud. He'd been working the earth, a match for Laura in every way except for the six-pack of Budweiser that was hooked through his fingers.

"I've just knocked off for the day," he explained. "I stopped at Smitty's Package on my way home to a shower—but you guys look like you need a beer even more than I do."

He knows as much as Ken knows
,
thought Laura.
And he feels bad for Corinne. That's not good.

Snack held up a hand and Gabe broke out a can from the plastic retainer and tossed it to him; Corinne, Ken, and Laura passed on his offer. Gabe had to have seen the van parked in front of the house but politely wasn't commenting on it.

Corinne felt obliged to tell him about the warrant anyway. She was still talking when they heard a shout from someone standing in front of the run-down toolshed. Almost immediately, two men who were in the house left through a side door to join him. One of them carried a camera.

"They could curb the enthusiasm a little," muttered Snack, holding the can to explode away from him as he popped its tab.

"Does this mean they're done with the house?" Corinne wanted to know. "Can I start supper? I don't want to turn on the oven if they're going to be fingerprinting the stove or something."

Now what?
thought Laura. What could they possibly find in an unused tool
shed that had been filled with rusty, obsolete farm tools for as long as she could remember?

****

A bag filled with money, that's what.

The investigators didn't tell them that, of course. They simply walked down to t
hem and held up an old satchel-
style, Gucci-looking bag whose fake leather corners were torn brown plastic.

"This belong to anyone?" one of the investigators said, holding up the filthy, dust-covered bag in his gloved hand.

"Not me," Corinne said quickly.

"Nope."

"I've never seen it before," said Laura.

"We'll be taking this," he informed Corinne. "I'll need you to sign for it."

He didn't sound either arrogant or mean, but Laura hated him anyway. She hated all of them and wanted them all to go back to tracking down their serial killer or hit man or whoever it was they were looking for before Baskerville entered the scene with a woof and a bang.

She said dryly, "Can we have our house back now?"

"Anytime you want," one of the men answered, which was no answer at all.

The investigators were walking past Laura when Snack said after them, "I wouldn't go packing my Jockey shorts in that thing; it's bound to be filled with bugs. You'd be better off hopping over to Wal-Mart for a new one."

"Thanks for the tip," one of them said without looking back.

Laura could see by the way he was carrying the satchel that the guy felt sure he was going to have the last laugh. Staring at the bag, she suddenly understood why.

She waited until they were well away, then turned to her brother and said, "What is it with you? Do you have a death wish or something? Do you have any idea what's in that bag?"