Blood Relations (16 page)

Ian

I jotted off a quick thank-you, telling him that I owed him big-time, and then put lots of exclamation marks and several smiley faces to drive the point home of just how indebted I was. Then I turned off the computer and thought about what it could mean. Jessica Huntleigh had not switched boats because of engine trouble or anything else to do with the
Purchase.
She had switched boats because she wanted to. But why? And why would her cousin have lied about the reason they switched boats?

After a few more hours of distracted work, I finally decided that it was time to call it a day. I stopped by the Murdoch Inn on the way home. Now, granted, Mr. Chapel could have said those mysterious words to me at Fraulein Krista's just to see how easily I could be manipulated. Well, he would have been happy to know that it worked. But I didn't care.

“Torie! How is your foot?” Eleanore asked as I went into her office.

“It's getting better,” I said. “I was wondering if you could tell me what room Jeremiah Ketchum is in?”

“Oh, he's leaving today,” she said. “That Jones fella left yesterday. Guess there's no reason to stay if the leader is dead.”

“They're all from around here, though, right?” I asked.

“Well, on their registration slips they filled out, I believe they all said they were from around here. Let me check.” She pulled out a big book and flipped through it. “Yes, Professor Lahrs was from Hillsboro. That's what—thirty miles from here? Mr. Jones is from Arnold, and Mr. Ketchum is from Sainte Genevieve. So, all within an hour's drive, give or take.”

“Good,” I said. “Now what room is Mr. Ketchum in?”

“Oh, he's up on the third floor, room Three B.”

“Thank you.”

As I turned to leave, Eleanore stopped me. “How are you going to get up the steps?” she asked.

“Oh, I can hop,” I said. “My foot is much better.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

And so I hopped up the steps, made my way to room 3B, and knocked. Mr. Ketchum answered after maybe sixty seconds. He looked at me as if he didn't remember who I was, and maybe he didn't. I'd only met him twice, and they were both fairly brief encounters. “Yes?”

“Mr. Ketchum, I'm Torie O'Shea. I was wondering if I could have a word with you?”

“Oh, Mrs. O'Shea,” he said. “I … you look different. Come in.”

“I guess it's the crutches,” I said. I entered his room and noticed that he was indeed in the middle of packing. A large baby blue suitcase was open on his bed, with clothes tucked neatly inside. More clothes were laid out on the large four-poster bed, and on the table by the window was his briefcase, files, and papers.

Eleanore had done this room in sort of Early American style, although the bed was a little too Victorian to fit completely into Early American decor. I love antiques, but I'm not so sure I could own a bed like that. I'd need a ladder just to get into it.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Oh, I was wondering if Professor Lahrs had said anything to you about … well, maybe that he was receiving threats of some kind?”

He smiled at me, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. “Playing detective, are we, Mrs. O'Shea?”

“Well, the sheriff is married to my mother.”

“So however I react, regardless of my guilt or innocence, it will be reported back to him,” Mr. Ketchum said.

“Something like that,” I replied. “Look, this really has nothing to do with you. Although I do find it interesting that you assumed I was trying to come to a verdict on your guilt or innocence, when, in fact, all I want to know is if Professor Lahrs received any threats on his life.”

He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. Eventually, though, he decided to talk. “Well, I certainly have nothing to hide,” he said.

Yeah, that's what they all say.

“So talking with you won't hurt anything,” he said. “To answer your question … no. Okay, you can leave now.”

I laughed at his quip but ignored it. “Did he act bizarre?”

“When didn't he act bizarre?” Jeremiah said, shoving some socks into the side compartment of the already-bulging suitcase.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he was either stoned or drunk most of the time,” he said. “Therefore, he acted pretty bizarre on most days.”

“Even in class?” I asked.

“Definitely in class,” he answered. “Jacob didn't want to be a schoolteacher. He wanted to be Jacques Cousteau. Teaching biology at a junior college wasn't exactly the road to
National Geographic.
”

“There's nothing wrong with teaching at a junior college,” I said.

“Not unless your dream is to be a microbiologist studying life in the sea for
National Geographic,
” he said, folding a pair of pants.

“Oh,” I said. “So why didn't he become a microbiologist and follow his dream?”

He shrugged. “That, I don't know. But he didn't. This thing with his great-grandfather was supposed to give him his big break.”

“What do you mean?”

“Danny Jones was documenting as we went,” he said. “I guess Jacob thought he could make a documentary out of it, and of course make some major discovery, submit it to whoever it is you submit those types of things to, and he'd be on his way.”

“Oh” was all I said. I thought for a moment. “What do you mean ‘major discovery'?”

He hesitated.

“Oh, don't tell me the diamonds,” I said.

He said nothing.

“How major would that be?” I asked. “Everybody already believes they're down there anyway. I mean, that's not much of a ‘discovery.'”

A noise came from outside. It sounded like a car crashing. I gave Mr. Ketchum a signal to wait just a minute while I looked out the window. I pulled the curtain aside and saw that a car had backed into a parked car down in the lot below. “Oh man, somebody backed into a blue Cavalier.”

“Blue Cavalier?” he said. He moved to the window. “That's my car!”

He all but ran out of the room, leaving me standing above the table with his briefcase sitting on it. Okay, I told myself that I would not go through the man's briefcase. That would be a complete and utter violation of his personal rights, and I would not do that. Not to mention that Colin would have my butt in a sling, and I wasn't sure I could walk on crutches with my butt in a sling. But I could look at the papers that were already out on the table.

I glanced down, perusing the papers quickly.

And I was amazed at what I saw. Letters and documents, dated from 1919 to 1922 or so. And signed by the captain of
The Phantom.

A few moments later, I was down the steps and on the front porch of the Murdoch Inn. Mr. Ketchum stood beside his car, rubbing his head in disbelief. I didn't recognize the car or the woman who had backed into him, so I assumed she was a tourist. She was a small woman, in her mid-forties, and she kept apologizing over and over.

“I know. I heard you say you didn't see the car,” Jeremiah said. “But really, lady, it's a big blue thing in the middle of all of this white stuff. How could you not see it?”

I carefully walked over to the car and the steadily growing crowd. “You need me to call the sheriff?” I asked.

Mr. Ketchum rolled his eyes heavenward. “Yes, please,” he said. “Great. Just great. First my wallet was stolen … now this. How am I gonna explain this to the deputy?”

Walking around the front of his car, I viewed the damage from the driver's side. His entire back bumper had been shoved up into the trunk. The woman hadn't just hit the car; she'd walloped it. She must have been doing fifteen miles an hour in reverse to do that much damage.

I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and leaned on the hood of the car for support. My foot was better, but there was no point in deliberately putting weight on it if I didn't have to. Something caught my eye on the dashboard. Deputy Miller's voice came on the line.

“Yeah, this is Torie,” I said, peering closer to the dash for a better look. “We've got a fender bender out here at the Murdoch Inn.”

“Okay, we'll send somebody out,” he said.

Thrown haphazardly on the dashboard was a speeding ticket. It wasn't a Granite County speeding ticket—ours don't look like that. And trust me, being the stepdaughter of the sheriff does not make me exempt from tickets, so I would have known one of ours when I saw it. I leaned a little closer to the glass and saw that it had been issued a few days ago. I stood up straight and thought a moment. Then I leaned in for a closer look. It had been issued the same day that Jacob Lahrs was killed. And it looked as if it was Jefferson County issue. That was just to the north of New Kassel.

“Well, Mrs. O'Shea, are the police coming?”

“Yes,” I said, pulling my attention away from the dash. “They're on their way.”

Twenty

On Thursday morning, I paid a visit to Sheriff Brooke.

“How stupid do you think I am?” the sheriff asked.

“You know, my mother always told me never to ask questions that I didn't want to hear the answers to,” I said. “You might consider her advice.”

He sat behind his desk in his brown-paneled and thoroughly depressing office at the Granite County Sheriff's Department. Next to the phone sat a photograph of my mother, taken on their honeymoon, and one of my kids sat off to the right on his desk. On the wall hung one of those posters with all the NFL helmets on it. Indoor-outdoor carpeting just sort of added to the aura of “built in great haste.”

“Look—”

“No,
you
look,” I said. “I don't have access to everything you do, so I don't know what you found in Jacob Lahrs's room and what you didn't, but I'm telling you, I saw what I saw.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose; he was getting one of his Torie headaches. At least that was what he called them. In my opinion, his headaches were brought on because his sphincter muscle was too tight. He sighed and then spoke finally. “We didn't find much. His room hadn't been wiped clean exactly, but the only thing we found was a neatly packed suitcase. Contents of which were clothing, toothpaste, toothbrush, a box of condoms—”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Young, single, male. You never leave home without them,” he explained. “His cell phone was in the front pocket. That was it.”

“Nothing related to the wreck? I mean, he brought no papers, no nothing?”

“No.”

“Professor Lahrs wouldn't come down here to work on a project that could make or break his career and not bring one thing pertaining to it! Look, I know what I saw. I saw a letter written in 1921 by a man who claimed to have been the captain of
The Phantom.
”

“Whose name was not Eli Thibeau.”

“Right. The name on the letter was William Wade. The captain of
The Phantom
was Eli Thibeau.”

“Maybe you misread it.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't. The letter was written to his wife or his lover or something, and it was telling her that he had taken care of ‘it.' Whatever ‘it' was. And that they would never have to worry about their future. He mentioned very specifically getting a job for the time being as another riverboat captain. And since nobody would know he was the captain of a boat that sank, he shouldn't have any trouble getting a new job. He signed it ‘William Wade.'”

He shook his head.

“What?”

“It just sounds like a bad episode of
The X-Files.
If an asteroid hit the earth, you could find a conspiracy in it.”

“That is not true,” I said. “And there are no bad episodes of
The X-Files.
”

“Right, did you see the episode where the killer mushroom ate Mulder and Scully?”

“I think those documents belonged to Jacob Lahrs and somehow Mr. Ketchum ended up with them.”

“All right,” he said. “So what? They were associates.”

I took a deep breath. “Do you mind if I do some searching on my own?”

He opened his top drawer. “Where's my Tylenol?” Not finding his bottle of Tylenol, he slammed the drawer and opened the other one. No Tylenol there, either. I opened my purse and tossed him a bottle of Advil, which he caught. He swallowed two of them without any water. How do people do that?

“Okay,” he said. “I'll ask Jeremiah about the documents.”

“Colin,” I said.

“What?”

“Do you care if I do some research?”

“What kind?”

“Nothing hands-on, for pete's sake. I'm going to do some digging, look up Professor Lahrs's family tree.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Don't look at me like that. I'm going to take Collette with me, and we'll report back to you as soon as we find something.”

“I wasn't looking at you weirdly,” he said, reaching for his throat. “The pill is stuck.”

Just then, I heard Collette's voice out in the front office. “Oh, gotta go, Colin. Drink some water!”

I was halfway to his door when I realized I'd forgotten to tell him about the speeding ticket. “Oh, and on the dashboard of Jeremiah Ketchum's car was a speeding ticket dated the day Jacob Lahrs was killed.”

Colin swallowed some water and gave me an exasperated look over the top of the cup. “How do you know that?”

“I saw it on the dashboard yesterday.”

“And you could tell what day it was issued?”

“Well, yes. I looked very closely,” I said.

“Maybe it was for jaywalking,” he said with a sneer.

“It was issued in Jefferson County,” I said. “You might want to check on—”

“Get out of my office!” he roared.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and hobbled to the door.

Collette and I drove up to the main library in St. Louis County on Lindbergh. We stopped for lunch in Kirkwood at Einstein's Bagel, then headed on up to the library. We passed the Huntleigh estates, and that made me think of Jessica Huntleigh and why she had switched boats. Granted, there was no connection between the two Huntleigh families, but it niggled something in my brain. She'd gotten onto
The Phantom
for no apparent reason at all. And that just made no sense. Because the
Louisiana Purchase
was a luxury steamer.
The Phantom
was not.