Blindfold (13 page)

While they waited, Maggie told them about the blue car.

"I know who it belongs to," Alex said when she had described it. "Alice Ann Beckwith. Better known as Chantilly."

"From the peer jury hearing?" Maggie set her glass of water on the end table. "How do you know that?"

"Fve seen her in it. Somebody said her grandmother died and left it to her. Beckwith supposedly hates it, but it's better than nothing, so she drives it."

"I think she's been following me. Fve seen that car before. Never got a look at the driver, though."

Scout shrugged. "Well, she's mad at you. We already knew that. I guess that thing out there on the porch is her idea of revenge. Maybe she wrecked the gavel, too. She was there in the gym Friday, like James."

"She might have left her fingerprints on that scale," Helen suggested. "Or on the gavel."

"The gavel's gone," Maggie said. "But we have the scale. Is she dumb enough to leave fingerprints?"

"She was smart in grade school," Helen said.

Lane shot back, "But she's dumb enough to keep getting herself in all kinds of trouble. Anyway, the

sheriff can check for prints." Of Maggie, she asked, "Does your mom know about this?"

"Not yet. She's not home. She'll freak." Maggie shared with them the information her mother had gleaned from Trudy Newhouse. They weren't as surprised as she'd thought they would be, probably because the sheriff had already planted a seed of suspicion about the basement beam.

Whit was sitting on the fireplace hearth. "You can't seriously think that Beckwith girl is responsible for kicking that beam out from under us, can you? She doesn't look like she'd have the strength to lift an eyebrow."

Maggie bristled. "I didn't say Chantilly did anything all by herself. James and his cronies probably helped her. I'll bet they're all in this together, to get back at the peer jury." She thought about that for a minute. Then, brightening visibly, she added, "Which could mean that none of this had anything to do with the renovations, after all. Maybe my mom shouldn't cancel the plans."

"Your mom is giving up?" Scout asked.

Maggie nodded. "She says she is. But maybe when I tell her what we think, how it's the peer jury that's the target here, she'll change her mind."

Helen shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "Maggie, I never said I agreed with your theory. The girl I knew in grade school, that shy, quiet little thing, wouldn't blow up a kitchen just to get back at the peer jury."

"She's not in grade school now," Maggie said testily. "And she's probably especially mad at me

because Fm foreperson. She could have overheard me telling someone I was going to help in the kitchen last night."

Whit was watching her, and the look on his face was one of amusement, which Maggie didn't understand. Until he said, "Do you do track and field, too?"

"What?"

"Well, if you're this good at jumping to conclusions, you'd probably ace the hurdles, the broad jump, and the high jump."

"Very funny. You can apologize to me when the sheriff tells you I'm probably right."

The sheriff didn't tell her that. Not even close. "Hold on there, Maggie," he said, shaking his head when Maggie had explained her theory. Her parents had arrived just ahead of the sheriff and were still tense and shaken by the "greeting" they'd found awaiting them on the front porch. Because the sheriff had arrived only a moment later, Maggie hadn't had to explain twice what she'd been thinking. Once had been bad enough. "Let's just back up here a minute," the sheriff added, sinking into Martin Keene's black leather chair. "No point in jumping to conclusions."

Maggie didn't look at Whit.

"First off, there's no law against parking at the curb out there. It's perfectly legal. Second, you didn't see anyone walking up on your porch, and I happen to know Lena Garber, your neighbor across the street, is in Hawaii, so she couldn't have seen anything. The nearest house up the street is too far

,

away for anyone to see anything, so you've got no witnesses. Third, even if that car was the Beckwith girPs, you can't prove she was driving it. Maybe she let someone else drive it. Maybe it was stolen." He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. "You gotta give me more than that, kid. I can't do diddly with what you're telling me. 'Course, we'll check out that thing on your porch, see if there's any prints, see if anyone saw someone pick it up at that to-do last night. And I'll talk to the Beckwith girl, see what she's been up to lately." He stood up, slapping his hat back on his head. "But that girl's got no love for uniforms or badges, probably won't even give me the time of day."

As he left, he said to Maggie's parents, 'The girl Maggie's talking about hasn't been afraid of anything since she hit puberty. She sure as hell isn't scared of me. She's been in and out of that courthouse so many times, we were thinkin' of puttin' up a plaque in her name, right out there in the lobby. Would, too, if the building wasn't bein' torn down."

I "Weil, it ts," Sheila Keene said firmly, and Maggie saw her friends exchange looks. The looks weren't ones of disappointment. But then, she hadn't expected that they would be. "Just as well." Sheriff Donovan pulled the door open. "A plaque would fire that girl up, and makin' Alice Ann Beckwith mad is not a smart thing to do, believe me. If we had coyotes in these parts, the farmers out around where she lives would be more afraid of her than they are of the coyotes." To Mag-----

girl. You let us handle her, you hear? Like I said, 111 talk to her. Just don't expect her to be happy about it."

Maggie didn't answer.

When the sheriff had gone, taking the disgusting scale with him, Maggie's parents considered canceling a planned engagement that night. "Your brother won't be here, either," her mother said worriedly. "He's staying over at Clark's house."

Maggie insisted they not cancel their plans, saying she wasn't going to be alone. Her friends would stay. "Anyway," she told her parents, "the word will spread around town that the renovations are being canceled, so if you're right and I'm wrong, we can quit worrying. If everything that's happened was aimed at stopping your plans instead of getting back at the peer jury, all this awful stuff should stop, right? So relax, go to your party, and I promise I'll relax, too. And I mill now that the sheriff has taken that repulsive thing away."

"Mrs. Bannister bought that scale," her mother said absentmindedly. "Paid a fortune for it. I suppose she'll have to wait a while for it now." Shaking her head, she went upstairs to change into party clothes.

When they had gone, Maggie and her friends watched a video, a comedy that eased the tension and made them all laugh.

But when it was over, in that sudden moment of quiet as the tape began rewinding, she could feel uneasiness in the air again.

"Hey, relax, everybody!" she surprised herself

by saying. "No more renovations, no more problems, and we'll probably get our rec center, right? As for Chantilly Beckwith, I still think the sheriff will take care of her. Justice will triumph, right? Doesn't it always?"

It was Alex who said solemnly, "Not always. It didn't for Dante Guardino."

"Oh, jeez, Alex," Scout groaned, "don't get started on that! It's old news."

They all knew about the case. Everyone in Greene County knew. It had happened three or four years ago. The bludgeoning death of a young girl . . . just thirteen ... by her sixteen-year-old boyfriend, driven to violence by jealousy, according to newspaper reports. The boy, who lived on one of the area farms, had been tried as an adult, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. He'd escaped from the old courthouse jail the night before he was to be moved to the penitentiary, and had never been caught.

Maggie and her friends had discussed the case occasionally. Their opinions were divided. Helen and Scout, who had known the older boy slightly through 4-H, had believed him innocent at first, saying the Dante they knew, however slightly, hadn't seemed the murderous type. But when he escaped, they had changed their minds. Their reasoning was, if he'd been innocent, he would have waited for the "system" to correct the injustice done him. So he must have been guilty all along. Alex and Maggie still believed him innocent, as did Lane, although she said she didn't see what difference it made what they thought. "A jury of his peers found him guilty and he was sentenced. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?"

"I knew him," Whit said now. "I knew Dante Guardino."

They all turned to stare at him.

"And I followed the case. Read everything that was ever printed. His attorney didn't do squat for him. Guardino would have been better off acting as his own lawyer, even though the theory is that anyone who does that has a fool for a client."

"You knew him?" Scout sounded as surprised as the rest of them felt. "How could you have known him? Dante was from Arcadia, lived there all his life. And Fm from Muleshoe, right next door. Helen's from Updown, and Lane lived in Sugar Hill for a while, and Alex still lives in Thompson. The only townie here is Maggie. How come none of us ever ran into you?"

"I've lived in Muleshoe, at Picadilly, just a stone's throw from you, Scout, since I was twelve," Whit said.

Scout's jaw came unhinged, and Lane gasped. "Picadilly? That's your place?" Lane asked, clearly awestricken.

Whit laughed. "Well, it's not mine. We lived in Shaker Heights until I was eleven, and then my dad decided I'd be better off in the country, so he had Picadilly built. Took a year. But we spend almost as much time back in Cleveland as we do here. My mom is a city girl. She doesn't really dig fresh air and roosters crowing at sunup."

Scout said, "I watched that place go up. I couldn't believe how big it was. Bigger than my house, even." There was unabashed envy in his voice. Until Picadilly was established, Scout's family had owned the nicest country home in all of Greene County.

The house at Picadilly was impressive, an enormous structure made of stone and white frame, set back far from the road, surrounded by rolling green lawns, all of it encompassed by a pristine white wooden fence that stretched for miles. It was truly gorgeous, all of it, and Maggie had often wondered what it looked like inside. She was convinced there had to be a sparkling pool, probably a tennis court, too, somewhere on the grounds. That explained Whit's October tan.

His statement that his parents spent a lot of time in Cleveland explained a lot, too. No one in Felicity knew the Whittiers well. Maggie hadn't even known they had a son. Her mother had tried, more than once, to get Mrs. Whittier to join the Women of Heritage group, with no luck. "They keep to themselves," she had told her family, "and maybe that's just as well. Most of us would be uncomfortable around people with so much money."

"L.F. Whittier may be a famous judge," her father had said matter-of-factly, "but he puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like me."

"I can't believe," Lane said now, "that you've lived out there that long and none of us ever ran into you." Her tone was heavy with regret.

Maggie hid a smile. Lane was thinking of how

much time she'd wasted. If she'd known Whit was at Picadilly that whole time, she could practically be engaged to him by now, and her college boyfriend would be history.

Whit shrugged. "I already told you, I went to Cutler Day. Not to the local schools. My parents drove me, so I never rode on a school bus. It looked like fun to me ... rowdy fun ... the kind you don't find at Cutler Day. And I never joined 4-H because except for my dad's horses, animals are not a part of life at Picadilly." He smiled ruefully. "My mother. Dog hair, you know, gets on everything, and chickens and pigs are dirty, and cows terrify her. I couldn't see my dad letting me take one of his valuable thoroughbreds to a 4-H meeting." The smile widened into a grin. "It always amazed the hell out of me that he'd even let me ride them."

"If you didn't go to grade school here, and you weren't in 4-H, how did you know Dante?" Alex asked.

"We bought hay from his dad. Dante came with him on deliveries. He was older than me, but he didn't seem to care about that. Neither did 1.1 liked him. He was smart, and had a sense of humor ... except when it came to that girlfriend of his. Sometimes, when he brought the hay himself, without his dad, she tagged along with him. I never saw in her what Dante did. She seemed kind of sly to me, like a fox. When she didn't come along, he talked about her all the time. I was only thirteen and thought girls were stupid, but Dante was so far gone, he couldn't see straight. I still don't think he did it."

"You're crazy." There was derision in Scout's voice. "There was a ton of evidence against the guy."

"AH of it circumstantial." Whit wasn't giving an inch.

Neither was Scout. "Yeah, well, Dante was good with animals, but he had a temper. I saw him lose it once, when a dog at the county fair went after the calf Dante was showing. Man, he was furious! And I never met that girl, that Christy, but everyone in the county knew she ran rings around him."

"Do we have to talk about this now?" Maggie cried impatiently. "Don't we have enough going on here now*! Why do we have to rehash an old crime?"

The boys subsided guiltily. But the conversation about violence had unnerved Maggie again, and she decided to send them all home.

Only Whit stayed behind.

Just the same, I don't trust her . . . not quite. She's feeling scared right now, but that might not last. She could change her mind again.

That can't happen. Just to be on the safe side, maybe I'd better think about insurance. Something to keep her focused on tearing that place down.

Then I can relax. At last. They'll raze the building, pour a ton of cement over what's left, and bury a page of the past forever. And all of my bad memories with it.

Now, how do I put the final nail in the coffin of that building?

merited, depositing his load on the kitchen counter. "Everyone else is glad. But not you?"

"I just don't think it's right to give in to bullying," she said firmly. She stashed a half-empty bottle in the refrigerator, and turned to face him, leaning against the refrigerator door. "And isn't that what this is? The broken gavel, the bloody scale, the beam collapsing ... if the sheriffs right that it wasn't accidental, and then the explosion. If they really were done on purpose, and if it really was because someone doesn't want the old courthouse to stand, then it's just the worst kind of extortion. I thought extortion was illegal."