Grave Consequences (14 page)

If I hadn’t slipped, I would never have seen the photos tacked to the far side of the cabinet. Pictures of women. Not
just the usual Dean Avery–the-site-pervert bum pictures, but quite beautiful shots, taken candidly on the site. Then I realized that the photos were of just one woman. There were nearly two dozen of them.

And they were all of Jane.

I was so shocked by this realization that it took me a minute to realize that they weren’t of Jane at all. Picking a close-up shot, I pulled it and the adhesive gum that held it to the cabinet away to stare at it under the center light. This was a much younger woman, but the superficial resemblance was quite striking in the dim light of the shadowed side of the cabinet. She was dark haired, with a pointed nose and unsmiling demeanor that defied you to call her pretty. I had never seen this young woman before. It was her intensity, the set of her face, that reminded me of my friend.

I hurriedly replaced it and was glad I did; I could hear steps outside the darkroom, followed by a pause and then a brief curse. I came around from the cabinet to the out-box just as Dean Avery pushed past the curtain, carrying a box full of papers and chemicals. For a fat man, he moved very smoothly indeed.

“Are you looking for me?” he said suggestively. His voice was higher pitched than I expected, and the squeaky cartoon animal sound made his attitude all the more loathsome. Avery put the box down on the table and stepped toward me. His unwashed hair reflected the low light readily.

“No, Jane couldn’t find you. She needed some photos,” I said.

“Look at us here, all on our lonesome. We could get acquainted, you and me. I don’t like people messing about in here, this is my place. But so long as you’re here…” He took another step forward.

I backed up again, swearing to myself. This was exactly what this jerk wanted. “Maybe another time. I’ve got to get back.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“Jane wanted these right away and you weren’t there, and she’s got a lot on her plate—”

By now I’d backed up all the way around the table until I felt the coarse fabric of the curtain over the door. Avery had followed, slowly, inevitably.

“Jane doesn’t get away with bossing everyone around, you know,” he said.

I stopped abruptly, which disconcerted the photographer. “She’s not bossing me, and no one else is, either. I do exactly what I like, so maybe we can chat later, okay? I’m going to get back now.”

“Whatever you like.”

I turned, swept my way past the curtain, hoping that my heart couldn’t be heard to beat as loudly as I thought it did. The air in the hallway outside the darkroom was wonderfully cool, and I sucked in a lungful gratefully. I kept moving through to the kitchen and out the door. Half my instinct told me to make sure that the creep didn’t loiter around Jane and Greg’s house—my house, too, for the time being—the other half didn’t want me to wait around for him to finish. A walk back to the site with him? No, thank you.

As I walked slowly back to the site, I pondered the pictures I’d seen. Even in the dim light they’d made an impression, and I didn’t believe that was entirely due to Avery’s acknowledged talents as a photographer. The young woman in the shots was striking, and obviously she had captured his attention as well. I would have to scrutinize the dozen or so students once I returned to the dig; I have to admit, I had rather relegated them to the background, so preoccupied had I been with the senior staff.

But as it happened, her identity was discovered long before my walk was over. I looked up from my reflections to see the same young woman from the photographs staring down at me—from another photograph. I was in front of the newstand down the street from Jane and Greg’s, and the morning edition of the paper was out. The headline read: “P
OLICE
C
ONTINUE
S
EARCH FOR
S
TUDENT’S
K
ILLER
.” Just be
neath it was a picture of the young woman, who was, according to the caption, Julia Whiting.

Holy crow
.

I pulled some change from my pocket, carefully sorted out the unfamiliar coins, and handed the news dealer the proper amount. He said something in an accent so quick and blurred that I couldn’t catch a word of it.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, you’re American. Thought you might be, but your clothes…”

He shrugged as if to say, “What can one say about them?” At home, whenever I ventured off the site on an errand, it always took me a moment to remember that I wasn’t dressed like other women. The boots and work pants would have been enough, but the dirt and clank of small tools stuffed into my pockets was quite another thing.

“I said,” he continued, enunciating carefully and loudly so I would understand, “shame about that poor girl, isn’t it? Ending up in a…like that? Terrible thing.”

“Yes, it is. I’m working on the site where she had been working.”

He clucked. “Now, I say that’s too bad for her family as well. Local people, been here for years.”

I remembered my conversation with Palmer during the drive into town, about how Julia’s parents hadn’t raised the alarm when she’d first gone missing, and mentioned it to the news dealer.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Whiting took out an ad, as I recall. Must have cost him a penny or two.”

That didn’t seem like enough to me. “But her mother—Ellen, is it? Nothing from her?”

The news dealer seemed to consider. “Not that I recall, but I’m sure the poor lady was distraught, wasn’t she? Terrible thing, when a young person goes and gets killed like that, with no reason.”

“I suppose.” Her daughter was only missing at that point, I thought, the wife of a man prominent in town, you’d think
she’d be using all her resources, all her connections, to find Julia.

“—No reason at all for it, know what I mean?”

The news dealer was unaware that I’d been focusing on my own thoughts for a moment. “Oh?”

“Well, she was a bit of a swot, wasn’t she? Head down in the books, she was at school with my girl. So it wasn’t the drugs, was it? Smart as a whip, Julia was—and her brother too, gone off to university last year. Awful, a nice, quiet girl like that.” He reached up and scratched under his cap.

“I hope they catch whoever it was soon,” I said.

“Amen to that.”

“You take care now,” I said.

“Righto.”

I walked around the corner, but stopped a bit shy of crossing the street. If the woman in the pictures was indeed Julia Whiting, then what did that say about Avery? What was the relationship there? There had to be some way of finding out, besides simply asking outright.

I sat down on a bench and read the article, which was a continuation of the one that had been out yesterday that we’d missed. None of the furor had diminished, however, and it must have been doubly exciting for a town as small as Marchester, never mind that she was local and the daughter of a prominent citizen.

Whoa! I thought. It was her
father’s
Dumpster? My skin crawled and I looked around me apprehensively. At just that moment, Dean Avery came around the corner, heading back to the site. I froze, hoping that the breeze wouldn’t rattle the newspaper, even though I wasn’t entirely certain why I didn’t want him to see me. He didn’t look down the street to where my bench was, and I watched him walk directly to the site.

I turned back to the article, but things were still very sketchy. No details were being released from the autopsy pending conclusive results, etc., but the cause of Julia’s death had been suffocation. The only thing that had been positively ruled out was suicide; her wallet was missing, suggesting the possibility of a mugging.

The lack of details was infuriating. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have paid so much attention to the death of a stranger, but I wanted to help Jane. It was only the last paragraph, a plea for information on behalf of the police, that gave me anything substantial to think about:

I folded up the newspaper quickly and stuffed it into my back pocket. I’d been away from the site too long already,
but I dawdled heading back. It seemed impossible that this was just an accident, a chance mugging; there were just too many connections close to home. And suffocation? That was by no means an impersonal mugger. Julia had died, practically on her own doorstep, metaphysically speaking, and that must be where the police were going to focus their efforts. I thought briefly about contacting Dave Stannard, but dismissed that idea quickly: he hated when I got involved in these sorts of investigations. Besides, the sheriff of a small Maine county would have no influence with the police here.

The other thing that kept me from walking quickly back to the site was the thought of all the sudden connections there to Julia. But wait—what if the intended victim had been Jane, and not Julia? Given their similarities of appearance and manner, mightn’t it be possible that the murderer had mistaken student for professor?

I shivered, slowed even more, then finally stopped. Given the disappearance of Trevor and the photographs of Julia in the darkroom—and, I had to admit, the impenetrable wall between Greg and Jane—it was just possible that there were some undercurrents that wouldn’t bear too much scrutiny. But that was exactly what I had to do: explore those possibilities. And the best way to do that, I decided, was to start with the crew. At the pub. That evening.

I glanced at my watch: I had been gone for almost an hour. Jane would be in a state, I decided; she wasn’t looking very well when I left. I had at first thought I would sidle over to my work area and stash the newspaper in my backpack. No sense dragging unpleasant reminders into the maelstrom of the working day, I reasoned.

But then I saw something peculiar happen. A Jaguar roared past the site, then suddenly stopped and reversed, back up the street to the site, almost as quickly as it had passed. A short, slight man got out and homed in on Jane like a heat-seeking missile. He began shouting almost as
soon as he reached the gate, and soon she was shouting too.

I didn’t recognize him, and since the rest of the crew was sitting aside having their morning tea-break, they were not aware of what was going on. Greg was working on his notes by the wall. Jane looked uncharacteristically scared. I pulled my coat over the top of the newspaper to conceal it, and hurried over.

The man was short, compact, and trembling with energy, every angry bit of which was directed at Jane. His gray hair was in a crew cut and had a bristly look that suggested a cock’s comb. His voice was harsh, his accent unschooled, and I caught only the end of the sentence:

“—All your fault, and I hold you personally responsible for what’s happened!”

“As if anything I said or did would ever make that kind of impression on her!” Jane was nearly pleading. “She had a mind of her own!” She seemed to be trying to convince herself as well.

“Don’t underestimate yourself, you bloody woman!” He mimicked a girl’s voice cruelly. “Jane said
this,
Jane said
that!
That’s all we ever heard, when she bothered to come home. If she bothered to come home. No, no, Dr. Compton, taking out your hostility against me on her, that’s despicable! Why couldn’t you have left her alone, you bloody…
murderer!”

The stranger—who I now suspected was Julia’s father, George Whiting—was in a state of angry shock. Grief had left his face a blank canvas for the rage that was there now, but apparently he wasn’t the sort to keep his thoughts to himself, and he wasn’t the sort to grieve quietly. His short, jerky movements suggested physical power that was barely—and perhaps unwillingly—restrained: he looked as though he had started at the bottom of his trade and pushed himself through to the top, purely through iron will and wiry muscle.

Jane too was pale as chalk, and remembering what she’d
said about Julia in the gym, and worse, what Greg had said about her relationship with “the Julias in the world,” it was no wonder she was shaken by what Mr. Whiting had just told her. I’d only heard the end of the conversation and wondered what might have prefaced that.

Stammering and trembling violently, Jane seemed unable to master herself and that’s when I decided she needed some help. I decided to make being an American work for me for a change. I barged right in.

“Hi, uh, Jane? I got those pictures you wanted? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, or anything, but I figured you’d want them right away.”

I don’t think either of them heard me approach and I startled both of them past recognizing any of the inane words I said. They both stared at me uncomprehendingly. Suddenly aware that they were not alone, that the shell that their emotion had created around them had shattered and the rest of the world was seeping back into that space, each reacted differently.

George Whiting seemed to shut down, get smaller, recede into his own body. The emotion that had made him seem larger than he was interrupted. The emotion I saw in his eyes was gone, or at least shuttered up, no longer visible to the outside observer; all that was left now was the anger of feeling one has been made foolish, having deep emotions suddenly exposed. This wasn’t much more attractive than what I’d seen before, but at least it was aimed at me and not Jane. Part of me felt guilty about intruding like this—the man must be in unspeakable pain at the sudden loss of his daughter—but Jane looked as though she was ready to collapse, and she was my main concern.