Olive and Let Die (24 page)

“Call 911, then. The numbers are big enough for you to see, right?” Maybe we'd get lucky and Cindy was off today.

I didn't dare take my eyes off the road to see if she was managing. Channing made a left turn, back toward the Bay, wobbling all over the road, probably because he couldn't see through his physical reaction to the spray. I followed as fast as I dared drive.

“Hello? This is Caitlyn Black. I'm Melanie Ashley's assistant. Yes, that Melanie Ashley. I know who killed Doreen Webber and Spencer Kane. It's Channing Young and he's headed—”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see her turn toward me. “Route 12 south toward Bonaparte Bay.”

She repeated my directions. “Red pickup truck. I don't know the license plate but he's got one of those big silver toolboxes in the truck bed. And he's driving erratically.”

Caitlyn turned her head in my direction. “They're sending out cars now.”

“I hope they hurry. There's no telling where he's headed. If he makes it back to the Bay, he could find a place to hide the truck.” I oversteered again and the car fishtailed slightly.
When we were back on course, I said, “You want to tell me what happened back there?”

Channing surprised me by not turning right into the village of Bonaparte Bay under the neon “Welcome” arch. He bypassed the village and continued south on Route 12. Where was he headed? If he made it as far as Watertown, his chances of hiding out for a while were even better.

“Uh, not really,” Caitlyn said.

“Yes, really. This has to end. So let's start with what you were doing at the farm. Why did you hide the car?”

“There's some . . . documentation I've been looking for. The same documentation Channing was looking for, but for different reasons. When I overheard Liza telling Channing that you wanted to meet him at the farm today, I was sure he'd take the opportunity to look for it. So I got there early, hid the Beemer in the barn, and went into the house with the extra key I had made.”

My lips pursed. Channing was still headed south. We were lucky he couldn't go at maximum speed. It seemed to be all he could do to stay on the road.

“And this documentation is what? From where I sit, neither Channing nor you for that matter stands to benefit from the trust. So why are you two involved up to your necks?”

At that moment Channing slammed on his brakes and took a sharp right onto the exit for the Can-Am Bridge. He left skid marks and the smell of burnt rubber in his wake. I braked more gently and pulled off. Sirens wailed in the distance.

He couldn't possibly be trying to cross into Canada, could he? Would he have had the foresight to bring his passport?
But there was no way he was getting past the border patrol in his current condition anyway.

The sirens drew nearer. Channing passed the duty-free shop and entered the base of the bridge. I pulled up behind him, honking my horn to try to attract the attention of the guards. It apparently worked, because all of a sudden there were border patrol agents everywhere, some with guns drawn.

I found myself on the bridge behind Channing. There was nowhere to pull over, so I kept going. As we approached the highest point of the bridge, Channing pulled off sharply with his truck at an angle. I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the truck. A line of cars with top lights whirling had formed from both the Canadian and the American sides. Channing was trapped.

He got out of the truck. Caitlyn and I followed. We shouldn't have, what with all those firearms aimed in our direction. But I had to see this through.

Channing climbed up onto the framework of the bridge. What was he doing? It was a hundred or more foot drop into the St. Lawrence. I looked through the lattice of steel girders. A laker honked its horn as its bow passed under the bridge.

He stood up straight on the outside of the bridge, holding on with both hands as though he'd just conquered the world's largest set of monkey bars.

“Don't move,” came a voice magnified through a bullhorn. “Or we'll shoot.”

Channing spun his head in one direction, then the other, until his dripping eyes landed on me.

“Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her I tried.”

And with that he let go, threw his arms out perpendicular to his body, and sailed through the September air.

I squeezed my eyes closed. But of course that couldn't mask the sickening thud as Channing's body hit the deck of the giant oceangoing freighter. I reached for Caitlyn and wrapped her in a hug.

TWENTY-THREE

“What?” Liza's voice was weak and thready, as though she'd lost her composure—for the first time ever.

“I'm so sorry. I wanted you to hear it from me rather than the police.” Or wherever it was she got her information about happenings around the Bay, which she always seemed to know about before anyone else.

“I—I don't understand.”

“He tried to make a run for the border, then committed suicide when the authorities had him surrounded. He”—I cleared my throat—“he killed Doreen and Spencer.”

“This can't be real,” she said after a pause. “I thought I knew him. It wasn't as though I loved him, of course. But he was . . . special to me.”

A shadow passed over the sun. Eclipse? No. It was the burly form of Lieutenant Hawthorne of the New York State Police. He towered over me, not quite touching but close
enough to be intimidating. Well, I'd been through enough today. He wasn't going to scare me.

I held up my index finger in a
wait a minute
gesture.

“Liza, Channing's last words were,
Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her I tried.
”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

Lieutenant Hawthorne must have popped one of his ever-present sticks of gum into his mouth because I could hear it snapping as he chewed and the crinkly sound of a piece of paper being rolled up. I was pretty sure if I looked up, I'd find a not-amused expression on his nicely chiseled face.

“Sorry?” she said. “He tried? Tried what?”

“I was hoping you might know what he meant.”

“I wish I did. Now I suppose I'll never know. Look, Georgie, it means so much to me that you called to tell me, that it didn't come from a stranger. But I . . . need to be alone for a while. To try to make sense of this.”

“Of course. I'll check in on you later. And I'm always here for you. You know that, right?”

“I do. Bye.”

“Bye.” And she was gone.

Caitlyn was leaning up against a cop car. She appeared to be giving a statement to a good-looking young officer. He handed her a box of tissues, and she wiped her nose and dabbed at the tears that still dripped from her eyes. I wondered if it would do any good for her to go to the ER and get her mucus membranes flushed or treated somehow to get rid of the burning pepper oil. Or maybe it just had to wear off. At least she'd gotten a very low dose. Despite her
ordeal, she seemed talkative, almost flirty. Well, as I said, the officer was cute.

“Georgie.”

“Yes? Let me guess. You want to take my statement.”

His expression was stony. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

Truer words were never spoken.

*   *   *

Caitlyn and I
sat in Melanie's hospital room, one on either side of the bed. She was finally awake, and had agreed to try some orange gelatin, which she was now slurping daintily from a plastic spoon.

“How do you feel, Melanie?” It wasn't just a polite question. I'd done some soul-searching in the last few hours and come to the realization that holding on to resentment and anger did no one any good, least of all me who had so much to be thankful for. Not that Melanie was going to win any mother-of-the-year awards. But a truce was the beginning of, perhaps, an understanding. And if she truly did want to be part of Cal's life, I would not be the one to stand in the way of that relationship.

“Plenty of drugs. Plenty of bland, soft foods. A moderately cute doctor. What more could anyone ask for?”

“How about some information?”

She sighed. “I suppose you want to know about the trust. I wish my great-great-grandfather had just given the money away to charity. So many lives would have been saved.”

Caitlyn nodded. “Elihu Bloodworth made a fortune in the
lumber business, basically cutting down, processing, and selling every tree he could get his hands on. Of course, sustainable growth and the biological necessity of having trees weren't known then. In those days it was just take, take, take.”

“Not so different now, though I think things are changing,” I said.

Melanie continued. “Elihu had three sons and two daughters. By all accounts he was a crotchety old coot and by the time his children were married, he decided he didn't care for them or any of the spouses. And he seems to have felt that since he himself had made his own fortune, his children should not have their fortunes handed to them.”

Caitlyn said, “So he sat down with his lawyers and created a generation-skipping trust. Upon his death, his entire estate was to be liquidated and the assets placed into an interest-bearing account, to be managed by his loyal friend and attorney, Jonas MacNamara.”

“As in MacNamara and MacNamara?” I said.

“Yes,” Caitlyn said. “The law firm has been run by MacNamaras for more than a hundred years. Back to the trust, legally the money could not be tied up forever. There had to be an end date.”

“Let me guess.” I thought back to the newspaper clipping I'd seen in the scrapbook at the farmhouse. “February twenty-third of next year—twenty-one years after Monty died.”

“Twenty-one years after Elihu's last grandchild died,” Melanie corrected.

“I know Gladys and Monty never had children of their own. So the MacNamaras identified you and Doreen as the only heirs?”

“That's right. Our grandmother was the daughter of one of Elihu's daughters. Monty was descended from Elihu's other daughter.”

“And now, with Doreen's death, everything comes down to you, Melanie. How much money are we talking about?” I sat forward on the edge of my seat.

She paused. “It might be as much as a few hundred . . . million.”

Wow. No wonder Melanie was selling her Bel Air home. She was probably planning to buy something bigger. Like property on the moon.

“When the time comes,” Melanie continued, “you and Callista and I will sit down and figure out what to do with the money. For sure we'll plant some trees, to make up for the forests Elihu destroyed.”

I rose. It was time for me to head back to the restaurant.

“You don't have to include us, you know. The money's yours, fair and square.”

She looked at me. “It's ours. Fair and square.”

Back at the Bonaparte House, Dolly had already arrived. “I heard what happened,” she said sympathetically. “I can handle the kitchen tonight if you want.”

I was grateful, but the busier I stayed, the less likely I was to hear, over and over in a loop in my head, the thud of Channing's body as he hit the deck of the ship.

I tied on an apron and washed up.

Channing. Why had he killed Doreen and Spencer? He'd admitted that he wasn't an heir, so he had no personal stake. I assembled the ingredients for the salads, methodically lining up the components.
There's only one true heir to the
Bloodworth fortune, and it wasn't Doreen and it's not your mother.

But the attorneys said otherwise. And since they'd been involved since the inception of the trust, they must have been keeping track of every birth and every death in the family.

Tell her I'm sorry.
Channing's last words bounced around my mind. Sorry about what? Murdering two innocent people, one a cousin I never knew I had, and one a newspaper reporter who had, perhaps, gotten too close to the truth? But what was that truth? Or was he sorry for something else?

Lettuce, shredded carrots, and chopped celery went into the big stainless steel bowl. The wetter ingredients, tomatoes and cucumbers, went into separate bowls to be added later.

“Dolly, you've lived in the Bay your whole life, right?”

She looked up from the lemons she'd been slicing to go into the water glasses.

“Yup, born and raised ten miles away, never lived anywhere else. Never wanted to.”

I knew what she meant. The North Country had its issues, for example, lack of good-paying jobs for young people just starting out. Oh, and the fact that there was sometimes snow on the ground and frigid temperatures from November to May. But I loved it here too.

“Did you know Doreen? Did she ever mention any relatives?”

Dolly smiled, her pearly dentures on full display. “I didn't know her too well, would see her over at the Legion playing Bingo once in a while. Just recently she mentioned being related to a television actress. Of course, nobody believed
her. But it turned out to be true, didn't it? Who'da thunk that you'd all turn out to be related?”

Yeah. Who'da thunk it?
“Did she ever mention anyone else?”

Dolly pursed up her fuchsia lips. “Her parents, that would be Lorne and Bea Webber, her mom was a Smythe, you know. They died years and years ago. Her father had a heart attack and I think she got pneumonia and didn't think she was sick enough to go to the hospital. Dead in a couple of days. Then there was Helene and Joe.” My grandparents. The bitter ones. “I don't remember what they died of, but it was within a year or two of each other. Can't think of anyone else.”

As I continued to work, my mind wandered. Melanie had said the Bloodworth Trust was worth millions. Possibly hundreds of millions. I thought about my grandparents. No wonder they were bitter. They must have resented having to eke out a living on a farm when the only way anyone was going to see any money was when they were dead. And maybe they resented Melanie, the daughter who would inherit twenty-one years after Elihu Bloodworth's last grandchild died. Her getting pregnant with me had been just the excuse they needed to send her on her way—maybe every look at her was a reminder of what they didn't have, and could never have, all because of the whims of one spiteful lumber baron a hundred years ago.

“Georgie?”

My head snapped up. “Huh?”

“That's more salad than we need,” Dolly said, waving her chef's knife at the enormous pile of lettuce I'd chopped as I'd been musing.

“Oh. I wasn't paying attention. Well, let's put the extra in the walk-in and whatever we don't use you can take home. I'm going to go check my e-mail.” I untied my apron and peeled off the gloves.

“Go on,” she said. “I've got it from here.”

And she did. Dolly could easily run the kitchen if I or Sophie weren't here.

A whiff of stale air hit me as I entered my office. It had been closed up for a few hours and it had been a warm day. I crossed the wide pine floors and opened the window overlooking the employee parking lot and frowned. My car wasn't there, of course. I'd completely forgotten that it was still out at Doreen's farm. I checked my watch. Not enough time to go out there this afternoon before we opened for dinner, unless I wanted to stick Dolly with the cooking and supervising the wait staff and running the credit cards. Impossible.
Oh well
, I thought. It's not like I'm going anywhere tonight. I'll have somebody drive me out there in the morning. And I knew just the woman for the job. Caitlyn.

Back at my desk, I booted up my laptop. It had been a couple of days since I'd heard from Cal. While I waited for the Internet to connect and the programs to load, I glanced around my desk. I'd been trying to keep my desk neater. Feng shui, or the Law of Attraction, whatever you wanted to call it, I figured it couldn't hurt. A piece of foil lay on top of the server schedule. I picked it up and rolled it into a ball. Chocolate wrapper, of course. I flicked it into the wastebasket. Two points, though it didn't feel like much of a victory.

The computer clicked and whirred. Whoa, Nellie. I sat up straighter. My eyes scanned the top of the desk. Where
was it? I opened drawers until I remembered it was still in the pocket of my jeans. The card from the genealogical investigator. I stared at it for a moment. Would I be able to pull it off? Only one way to find out.

I punched the numbers on the card into my phone, holding my breath when it rang. On the fourth ring a man's voice came on the line.

“Sheldon Todd.”

“Hello, Mr. Todd. My name is Georgie Nikolopatos. I'm Melanie Ashley's daughter.”