Murder Under the Covered Bridge (12 page)

“Chicken.”

But there were the shovels and the dirt in the truck. “Do these make William look like a treasure hunter?”

Charlotte waggled her eyebrows. “Finally, you come around. I love the way you're thinking now,” she said. “However, let's play devil's advocate. At this point the evidence is circumstantial. Tasty, but circumstantial. Shovels and dirt just mean he was digging. He could have been planting trees at one of his nursing homes.”

Francine shook her head. “Not William. Dolly maybe.”

Francine rooted around the trunk some more. She pulled on a flap on the
left-hand
side that looked like it might be used to trap reusable grocery bags. At least, that's what she would have used it for. But something black was in it. She pulled out small tablet computer with a keyboard cover attached.

“What have we here?” Charlotte asked. “A hidden laptop?”

Francine contemplated whether she should boot it up. “It's a tablet, not a laptop. But it was definitely hidden.” She rotated it around in her hands, thinking about it some more, then blew out a breath. She put it back.

“We have to take that!” Charlotte hissed. “He must have had it hidden back here for a reason.”

“He could have had it back here to keep it hidden for perfectly innocent reasons. For example, so it wouldn't get stolen out of the car.”

“But think what could be in it!”

“I have, and I don't think we have the right to invade that kind of privacy.”

“Coward. We can't leave both the mystery water and the secret laptop back here. What kind of investigators would we be?”

“Petty larcenists is what we'd be. We are not licensed investigators. And even then, I bet it would be illegal.”

“Go ahead,” Charlotte said, “stand on principle. You'll find yourself wishing you'd have taken it.”

Francine put a fist on her hip. “I doubt it.”

Charlotte suddenly pointed toward the back of the heavily wooded property. “Did you see something?”

“Where?”

“Back there in the woods. I'm sure it was something or someone moving among the trees.”

They both stared in that direction. Francine definitely didn't want to be caught snooping in William's trunk. She searched the yard for a few moments. “I don't see anything. It was probably some form of wildlife.”

“Then it was some kind of wildlife that resembled a human.”

“I don't see anything there now. And you couldn't have gotten that good of a look at it.”

“He could still be back there, hiding behind a tree. Some of those trunks are big enough to hide a grizzly bear.”

“There are no grizzly bears in this area.”

“Bigfoot, then.”

Francine gave her a look. “Let's get out of here.”

They returned to the Prius. Charlotte opened the door and worked herself into the passenger seat. “I still wonder how the car got here.”

“Me too,” Francine said after Charlotte was buckled in. “Me too.”

thirteen

Francine, Charlotte, and Joy
made sandwiches and joined Mary Ruth and Alice in the large family room at the back of the mansion to eat a late supper. Marcy had come and retrieved Merlina, so they were back to their own group again. The room had a big-screen television on one side that Francine estimated to be at least a sixty-inch model. On the other side of the room was a Ping-Pong table, a Ms. Pac-Man video arcade game, and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase full of board games. The women sat in front of the TV on a sofa and two easy chairs that had white L.L.Bean slipcovers on them. They put their food on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

Joy said she had arrived at the mansion immediately ahead of them. “Once the news team back at the station agreed they had enough recorded material and they didn't need me live for the eleven o'clock news, I was able to leave. I told them I could either be live tonight for
News at Eleven
and dead tomorrow for
Good Morning America
, but not alive for both. Guess which one they chose?”

“How did the six o'clock news go?” Francine asked.

“We were just about to watch it,” Mary Ruth said. She doled out crudités with a dilled yogurt dip leftover from when she and Alice had eaten. “I set up the DVR to record it when Merlina, Alice, and I got back.”

Joy, who was slouched on an easy chair, sat up and stretched. “Needless to say, the tone for tomorrow's report at the Roseville Bridge will be much different than it was for this morning's, given that the bridge is a
burned-out
mess. The photo shoot may not come up at all, but I still need you all there just in case.”

Alice yawned. “Well, I for one am not going to be sorry if you can't find a good segue from the tragedy of the bridge going up in flames to the sexy photos Francine and Jonathan were doing at the bridge.”

“You can't throw Jonathan and me under the bus! You all took photos like that too.”

“Says who?” asked Mary Ruth. She fiddled with the remote control, but nothing seemed to be happening on the television. “We didn't do ours at the Roseville Bridge.”

“Just a minute,” Charlotte said. “We have to think of how this will reflect on Joy. They count on her to get happy news stories about us senior citizens, and I think the sexy calendar idea with all of us involved has the potential to rival the
skinny-dipping
situation.”

“The very fact that anyone thinks the public will find it fascinating probably means they won't. Who can predict what's going to become newsworthy next? Pinup calendars by older women have been done before.”

Charlotte's voice got a little louder. “It has been a good five years or more since those ladies in England did it. That was the last time. This bridge burning down could be just the ticket. Francine and Jonathan's photo session yesterday contained perhaps the very last photos to be taken in the bridge.”

Francine wondered why Charlotte kept supporting the idea of the calendar being in the press. “The burning of the bridge needs to be the focus of Joy's report, Charlotte. If the Bridgeton Bridge incident from 2005 is any indication, they'll need to raise a lot of funds to rebuild it. That's the better story.”

“You're right, Francine,” Charlotte said, seemingly struck by the idea. “A national focus on raising money may be exactly what's needed here.”

Francine got suspicious whenever Charlotte switched sides on an argument too swiftly.

Mary Ruth handed the remote disgustedly to Joy. “I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.”

“Why do you think I can fix it?”

“Because you're the media person. And because you've got Toby in the basement copying all the video footage you shot this morning so I don't have him to fix it.”

Charlotte mulled that. “He's copying it so you can give it to Roy in the morning, isn't he?”

Joy huffed. “Roy asked for it. Don't make a big deal out of this.”

Charlotte put her hands up. “I'm just sayin'.”

Joy studied the remote. She pressed two buttons and the news anchor who had been frozen on the screen came to life. “There you go. Let's see how it came off and then I think I may be off to bed.” She began to
fast-forward
through the newscast for her segment.

Mary Ruth returned to her spot on the sofa. “You might as well know I'm not going to the Roseville Bridge. Alice can go if she wants, but I have to stay back and get the cinnamon rolls baked and cooled and iced. They need to be fresh and ready to sell first thing. And we all remember the disaster the
last
time I appeared on
Good Morning America
.”

“I hardly think it was a disaster,” Charlotte said. “So you fell into the pool and had to be rescued by Francine. Look at all the good that came out of it.”

“Nonetheless, I'm glad it's behind me and don't see the need to relive it. Besides, this is business. I trust I can have everyone's help again tomorrow after you come back from doing Joy's
GMA
report?”

They nodded. Joy stopped
fast-forwarding
and hit the play button. “This is before Zedediah Matthew's house went up in flames. Watch how I changed their focus when they asked about why we were there.”

They sat through the segment. Joy's report was a capsule summary about the two incidents at the bridge. On a tight
close-up
of her, she described William's being chased out of the cornfield by gunshots they believed to be from a rifle, his fall into the creek, Jonathan's stopping him from drowning, and that he remained in a coma. Her report was accompanied by video she'd shot herself and supplemented by footage the station had obtained of the Clinton hospital William was in. Then the cameraman pulled back and the remains of the Roseville Bridge came into view. In the background, the firemen battled the blaze, but there was no question the bridge was a total loss.

As the segment concluded, the female anchor asked, “You were a live witness to the incident. Tell us how you came to be at the Roseville Bridge so early this morning.”

“The Covered Bridge Festival, of course. But we've just received a report that a house not far from here is also on fire and may be a total loss as well. The police haven't yet said whether arson was involved or not. We're heading there next. We're in contact with the Parke County Sheriff's Department about all these incidents and will keep you informed as the investigations unfold.”

Apparently there'd been no good way to turn the conversation back to Joy's reason for being at Roseville Bridge because the anchors thanked her for the report and moved on to the weatherman, who was sitting in a chair beside them. He was the new, handsome face of the weather team and he smiled brightly with teeth that surely had been artificially whitened. Joy turned off the television.

After Francine, Charlotte, and Joy finished their meal, Mary Ruth pulled out some cookies. “We can all have one cookie for dessert, but no more than that. I'm saving everything else for tomorrow morning.”

Before long the women trudged off to bed. Though it was only nine o'clock, everyone needed to be up early. Mary Ruth would be up at four o'clock to pull stock out of the freezer and organize tasks for the morning. Alice was getting up at four thirty, and the rest of the women planned to stagger their showers starting at five o'clock. Joy said they needed to be out at the Roseville Bridge by seven o'clock.

The other women made their way up the staircase, but Charlotte seemed to be having trouble getting up the first step. Francine slowed her climb to wait for Charlotte. “What's going on? Is your knee bothering you again?”

Charlotte put a finger to her lips and indicated she should keep quiet. Francine wondered what was going through her mind.

When they could hear doors closing, Charlotte motioned Francine to come back down the stairs with her, which she did. “Toby,” she whispered.

“What about him?”

“The photos you took of the bridge this morning, of the image carved in the beam. This would be a good time to have Toby analyze them.”

Francine felt exhausted. She couldn't believe Charlotte wasn't as well. “Why is this the perfect time?”

“Because Toby's alone, he's already working on something, and we won't have to let anyone else know what we're doing.”

Francine would have like to have excluded
Charlotte
from anything Toby might discover, but she'd remembered the photos and wouldn't likely let go of the idea. Plus, there was also the matter of the second diary, hidden in her purse. Knowing what the carved image looked like might help her when she met Zedediah the next day at Bridgeton. Charlotte didn't need to know that was the deciding factor.

The basement stairs turned out to be quite narrow. Francine went first, clutching the handrail. She made sure Charlotte was steady behind her. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was glad to see the basement was more than a cellar. At some point it had been built out. It had an open recreation room to the right and a bedroom with an adjoining bathroom to the left. Francine could see a light coming from under the bedroom door. She knocked. “Toby, it's Francine and Charlotte.”

Toby opened the door. He had on an orange tank top that read,
Sun's out, guns out,
and blue cargo shorts that covered his knees. The tattoos on his arms were on display, but what struck Francine was how much progress he'd made on losing weight. He had lost his beer gut and was gaining definition in his muscles. “Shouldn't you be in bed?” he asked. “I thought we were all getting up early?”

“We needed your help on something,” Charlotte said from behind Francine, still negotiating the final stair. “We—that is, Francine—took photos on the bridge this morning that we need some kind of enhancement of in order to be able to see.”

“You mean you need them lightened?”

“And maybe blown up, although I wouldn't use that phrase around Sheriff Roy right now.” Charlotte chuckled at her own joke.

“Who? Never mind, c'mon in.”

He opened the door to let them in. The room was narrow and small—no more than a bed, desk, and two chairs crowded together across from the door and a closet on the wall adjacent to the door. Toby's laptop sat on the desk. There was barely any leg room between the desk and the bed. Toby squeezed into the desk chair.

His laptop was an Apple computer with a large screen, and it was open to some video game that involved a lot of gunplay. He shrunk the game into a corner of the laptop. “I'm sorry there's only one other chair in the room,” he said. “One of you can sit on the bed if you want.”

The bed's comforter lay on the floor, revealing a plain white blanket. “I'll take the bed,” Charlotte said.

Francine sat in the other chair and handed her phone to Toby. He opened the photo app. “I assume you're talking about the most recent photos taken today? These dark ones?”

She nodded. “Can you get to them?”

“I'll just email them to myself.”

“Will it take long?”

“Shouldn't.”

While he was waiting for the photos to go through the email, he said, “So these photos were taken at the Roseville Bridge?”

“Right where we were standing when we got shot at,” Charlotte said. “I made Francine look to see if there were anything significant about the spot.”

“And you found this carved into the beam?”

Francine nodded. “We did.”

The emails came in. Toby made the whole thing seem effortless. He pulled up the photos one at a time. “These all look the same.”

“They're at slightly different angles. I wanted to make sure I got it.”

He shrugged. He picked one and kept enlarging the photo, almost to the point of distortion. Francine had recognized the image well before then.

“It's the heart on the diaries,” Francine said. “Much cruder because it's hand carved into the wood, but I'm sure that's it.”

“Yes!” Charlotte said. “Wait. Did you say diar
ies
, as in plural?”

Francine tried to put a confused look on her face rather than the sheepish one she was sure had appeared at first. “Did I say diaries? I meant diary. I'm just tired.”

Charlotte's
narrow-eyed
frown suggested she was not convinced. Francine hoped she would not have to explain herself later.

Toby continued to play with the image. “You can see how dusty this is, and how it distorts if I blow it up larger. Now I want you to look at this.” He moved the photo up. There was something below the heart.

“Can you make it any sharper?” Charlotte asked.

“Only if I reduce the magnification.” He made two clicks with a button on the keyboard and the image was a little more focused. “I think it's because of where it was located on the beam. It was a little more protected and collected more dust. Plus, the image is just smaller altogether.”

Charlotte jabbed at the screen with her finger. “It's a key.”

Both Francine and Toby leaned toward the screen and knocked heads. Francine's glasses were jammed into her face. “Oww!” She pulled away, removing the glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose where the impact had been felt.

“I'm sorry,” Toby said. He rubbed his temple where the corner of her glasses had made contact.

Charlotte continued to point the screen. “It's an
old-fashioned
key, the kind you'd find that fits a door as old as this mansion is.”

Francine put her glasses back on and inched a little closer to the screen, wary of where Toby was. “I can believe that. But I haven't seen that image before.”

“Have you had a chance to look at the diary yet?” Charlotte asked.

“Well, no, not much.”

“Then how can you be sure?”