Olive and Let Die (26 page)

“You're here early, Dolly,” I said.

“Sophie wants to go to Olive Garden for lunch, so we're going to go pick up Marina and head for Watertown. We might see that new George Clooney movie while we're there.” She wiped her fingers on a napkin. “What about you?”

It wouldn't hurt to have two more people know where I was supposed to be, even though Hank would be meeting us there. “Melanie's assistant and I will be out at the farm today.” I took a bite of the donut. Delicious.

Sophie frowned. “You want Marina's gun?”

“What? No, no, I'll be fine. It's safe, and I won't be alone.” Marina had given me her miniature antique gun once before. Not that I'd had the chance to use it, which was probably for the best.

The frown deepened. “You be careful.”

I patted the sleeve of her cardigan. “I will.”

An hour later they had left and I'd cleaned up the breakfast dishes. I retrieved Doreen's Bingo box and its contents from my desk, then went outside to wait for Caitlyn. It was a beautiful morning, the sky a clear, pale blue and the leaves on the oak tree at the edge of the parking lot a bright golden yellow. I thought about sitting at the picnic table, but the benches were still wet with dew so I stood.

Anticipation bubbled through me. If Caitlyn followed Melanie's instructions, today everything would be laid out on the table. And I'd get to test my theory about the Bingo card and the key.

Something brushed against my legs, then did it again in
the opposite direction. I jumped involuntarily and looked down. An orange-and-cream-colored cat sat at my feet, its long tail swinging sinuously.

“Well, hello there.” I reached down slowly so as not to scare the creature away. When it didn't run, I gave the cat a scratch on the top of its head. “Where'd you come from?” But I thought I knew. This was the same cat that I'd seen near the Suds-a-Rama and Jack's apartment a few days ago.

“You're a wanderer, aren't you?” The animal meowed and twined itself around my legs. “Are you hungry, boy? Girl?” My experience with pets was extremely limited. I unlocked the kitchen door and retrieved a can of tuna.

I had to shove the cat aside gently with my foot when I stepped outside again. “Sorry, fella, but you can't come inside a restaurant kitchen. You'll have to dine al fresco.”

The cat purred and began eating the tuna from the paper plate I'd put it on. The animal looked well fed, but I suppose it was a lot more efficient being fed by a human than having to catch a rodent dinner.

A familiar sleek black BMW pulled into the parking lot. I left the cat to its meal and approached the car. The passenger window rolled down. “Get in,” Caitlyn said.

“Hi, Caitlyn. Nice to see you too.”

She looked sheepish. “Sorry. Melanie's got me running ragged what with the show coming to film here and then all this extra work with Doreen's estate and leasing the farm to those old hippies.”

“Did she give you some terms we can present to Hank before we take it to the lawyer?” I could only imagine what she'd want.

“Only a couple of things, really. She wants Hank to renovate the barn, at his own cost, and use the hayloft for the yoga studio. She's got an idea she wants to add a floor, seats, and a stage to the ground level.”

“A stage?”

“She's talking about putting together some summer stock shows.”

Hmmm. A professional theater in the North Country? It might just work. Boutique wineries were popping up all over Jefferson County. If somebody could organize bus tours from New York City or even Montreal or Toronto, that could be good news for all of us business owners.

Caitlyn drove out of the parking lot, and we made the main road out of town in record time. “So,” I said.

She held up a hand, fingers splayed into a half star. “Georgie, I promise I'll explain everything when we get there, okay?”

Oh, fine. What was a few more minutes when I'd been dying of curiosity all night? So I leaned back on the seat and watched the countryside go by. Out here in the sticks the sugar maples were ablaze with scarlet leaves. In five months those trees would produce a fine-quality syrup with a little help from some wood-fired evaporators.

I wondered what my life would look like in a few months. My divorce would be final. Sophie would be in Greece for the winter. Cal would be there with her. Melanie would be back in California. Inky and Spiro? They hadn't shared their plans with me, but it seemed likely they'd be around if they were going to get Spinky's up and running for the spring. I'd have Liza, of course, and things seemed to be progressing
with Jack. At least they were on my end. What he thought remained to be seen.

Almost before I knew it, we were pulling into the driveway of the farmhouse. “What time are we meeting Hank?”

Caitlyn shut off the ignition and whipped out her phone. “I told him to meet us here at ten. That'll give us time to go over everything.”

I nodded. Finally I would get some answers. The front door swung open when the key was applied, and I stepped in cautiously. There was an umbrella in a stand by the coatrack and I grabbed it. It wouldn't be any good against a gun or a knife, but if I had the element of surprise, I might be able to buy us enough time to get away.

But somehow I didn't think we were in danger. If there was someone else out there pulling the strings, he didn't seem to want to get his own hands dirty.

Caitlyn sat down at the kitchen table. She opened the flap of her enormous messenger bag, but didn't take anything out of it, and set the bag on a chair. I parked myself opposite her and gave her an intent stare.

She took a deep breath and began. “You already know about the Bloodworth Trust. Elihu Bloodworth, your great-great-great-grandfather, was an extremely wealthy man. After he cut down most of the trees in Jefferson County and had made his fortune processing and selling them, he turned his attention to making the lives of his grown children and their spouses miserable. His wife had already gone to an early grave. Out of spite, he willed all his assets into a trust, giving his children a set amount of money with instructions to make their own way in the world, as he himself had done.”

“Okay, I knew all this. But go on.” I tapped my fingers impatiently on the Formica table.

“But the law does not allow a trust to exist permanently. There is something called the Rule Against Perpetuities. Elihu set up the trust to vest, or become the property of his heirs, twenty-one years after the death of his last grandchild born before the trust was established. Any grandchildren born after the trust was established—and we haven't been able to find any—would not be entitled to inherit, nor would their heirs.”

Whew. That was a lot of legalese, but it corroborated what I'd figured out from the newspaper clipping I'd seen upstairs, the one with my grandmother's handwriting on it and the date of next February.

“So who are the heirs? We know about Doreen and Melanie. But before he died, Channing said, ‘There's only one true heir to the Bloodworth Trust.' So who did he mean? Are Doreen and Melanie somehow disqualified?”

Caitlyn pushed her glasses up on her nose and looked at me. “We don't know.”

“I don't understand. The lawyers must know who the grandchildren were, and it's only been a hundred years. The descendants should be easy to trace.”

“Oh, they are. But they're not the problem.”

I blew out a breath. “Okay, I'll bite. Who is the problem?”

Caitlyn turned toward the window, then back to me. “Again, we just don't know.”

She was talking in circles, and it made me a little bit crazy. “Caitlyn, spit it out. We don't have all morning before our company arrives.”

“There are still gray areas. And I'm just the messenger,
by the way. Elihu's granddaughter, your great-grandmother, was, by all accounts, pretty angry about being effectively cut out of the will. She started digging into Elihu's background, probably in an effort to come up with something she could blackmail him with. And what she found shocked her.”

I leaned forward in the chair, wishing she'd get on with it. Hopefully, this story was about to get a lot more interesting because it had been pretty uninformative up to this point.

“It seems that Elihu came to Bonaparte Bay from downstate. He married your great-great-great-grandmother. But he neglected to tell her that he already had a wife.”

TWENTY-FIVE

My jaw dropped. “You mean he was a bigamist?”

Caitlyn nodded. “Elihu apparently traveled quite a bit, on business. But in fact he was splitting his time between the wives.”

“And only the first marriage was valid.” I was beginning to understand. “The second marriage, to my however-many-great-grandmother, was illegal. Which means her four children were illegitimate, even if she didn't know it. So does that mean their descendants are not eligible to receive the proceeds of the trust?”

“The lawyers interpret the trust documents, at least as far as they've told Melanie, to include
all
his children. There doesn't appear to be any language restricting the inheritance to legitimate heirs.”

I asked the obvious question. “Did Wife Number One have any children?” Because that would explain a lot.

Caitlyn frowned. “That's what I've been working on for months now, and what we hired the genealogical investigator for. So far, we've come up empty.”

“Then how do we know there even was a Wife Number One? Surely there must be some kind of documentation—church records, birth certificates, mentions in the newspapers?” The same things Sheldon Todd had told me he was looking for.

“Rumors,” Caitlyn said, echoing Melanie's words to me after she'd been shot. “Melanie's mother told her about it when Melanie was a kid. And Doreen knew about it too. The story goes that Elihu's granddaughter was so angry that she broke into her grandfather's office one day while he was away and stole the marriage certificate from a locked desk drawer.”

“And did what with it?”

“Hid it. We think she didn't want to embarrass her mother by making it public, but planned to blackmail Elihu privately. Maybe she did.”

She pulled a folder out of her oversized messenger bag, followed by a zip-top plastic bag filled with what appeared to be fluffy white cotton, and set both items on the kitchen table.

I glanced at the tab on the slightly yellowed manila folder. My heart stuttered. Monty's missing file. And the plastic bag must contain the arrowhead. I stared at Caitlyn.

“Why do you have this?” I demanded. “How did you get it?”

She was nonplussed. “When I couldn't get it that day at Gladys Montgomery's house, I, uh, broke into Jack's apartment and took it.”

Wow. This girl had some skills. “How did you know you needed it?”

“After they got the letters from MacNamara and
MacNamara, Melanie got in touch with Doreen. Doreen scoured the house and grounds—and found the marriage certificate. She hid it again, and when we got here, we decided to leave it where it was for now since she assured us it was in a safe place. But before we could see it or figure out what to do, Doreen was dead.”

“And you still don't know the hiding place.” She nodded. My mind raced. I pulled Doreen's Bingo box out of my oversized shoulder bag, then opened the lid and looked at the Bingo card. N-G-O and the number 68. North, Go 68. “Come on, Caitlyn. Let's go see if we can find that piece of paper that's worth millions to somebody.”

I headed out the back door and for the mound crowned with junk, not bothering to count my steps or estimate the yards. If I needed the shovel, I'd go back for it.

Caitlyn and I searched through the rusty ghosts of farm tools past, looking for anything that Doreen's tiny key might fit. If there had ever been a depression or any other sign that an arrowhead had been dug up here, it had long ago blended into the ground and been covered over with grass. There were no signs of recent digging either. We examined each of the farm implements, looking for places that a small box might be concealed. Skunked.

I brushed up against an old-fashioned milk can and looked down at the smear of oxidation that appeared on my jeans. Nuts. I stared down at the offending can, its top lying off to one side. The screw threads at the top were shiny, in contrast to the dull surface of the rest of the can, as though they'd been recently scraped. I turned the top over with my
toe. Yup. Similar scrape marks. This can had been opened recently. “Caitlyn! Over here.”

We bent over the can together.

Still empty.

My heart dropped like an amusement park ride. If this had been where the document or documents had been stored, someone had beaten us to it.

Caitlyn looked up at me.

“This doesn't mean anything, you know. Doreen could have found it and hidden it somewhere else.” She looked doubtful.

“I suppose. But have you seen that house? It's full of clutter. What are we going to do? Lift every floorboard? Break up every plaster wall looking for something hidden inside? Not to mention the barn. Damn it!”

The truth was, why did we care? Even if there was another heir out there, it seemed there was plenty of money in that trust to go around. Hundreds of millions split two ways was still a boatload of bucks.

Except that the Mystery Man might not feel like sharing. And he might have paid Channing to murder Doreen and Spencer. Would I ever know what Spencer had wanted to tell me? It must have been about the Bloodworth Trust. Had he found one or more additional heirs? Or evidence that Channing had killed Doreen? Speculation was useless. If Spencer had notes or other documentation, the police would find it. He'd been a real pain in the behind at times, but he'd tried to warn me. For that I was grateful. And sorry that innocent people had lost their lives, all because of greed.

“Let's go back to the house.” Defeat. “Hank will be here soon.”

Buzz. Buzz. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the display. My spirits lifted. It was Jack.

“I'll take this outside and watch for Hank,” I said to Caitlyn. She nodded.

“Hi,” I said into the phone. “Did you have a nice time with your sister?” I plunked myself onto one of the old metal chairs on the front porch.

“Hi, yourself,” he said. “And yes, it was great catching up with Trish. She sends her love.”

“She doesn't even know me.”

“She will soon.” A warm fuzzy spread throughout my body. I filled him in on everything that had happed in Bonaparte Bay since he'd been away.

“Good God, Georgie. Are you all right? Melanie? Sophie? I knew I shouldn't have left.”

“We're all fine. Please don't worry. When are you coming back?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Georgie, something's come up and they need me at the Oswego Station. I'm not sure how long it will take. A few days anyway. I don't think I can get out of it.”

The warm fuzzy grew wings and flapped away in a cloud of disappointment. “Oh, okay.” Wow. That was pathetic. My eyes focused on the flowerbed near the front steps. The mums and asters still looked good, but there were some brown stems from some summer flowers that needed to be cut down. The gnome wearing the Giants football jersey stared back
at me.
Get it together, Georgie
, he seemed to say.
Maybe it will work out with Jack. Maybe it won't. But you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

“I'll call you as soon as I can.” It was clear from his voice that he was conflicted. “I'll be back soon and then we can spend some time together. I've got Gladys's big house to take care of, remember?”

I smiled. Gladys's back parlor would be a nice place to spend a winter evening, curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and a movie. And a hot Coast Guard officer, who I wasn't about to ask to make a choice between me and his career. “I'm safe. And I'll miss you. See you when you get back.”

“I miss you already.” He rang off.

My eyes roamed back over the yard and landed again on that silly gnome. Now it seemed to be mocking me from atop its pedestal. A number was painted in flaking white paint on his round belly. Number 68.

N-G-O 68.

Not Go North 68.

Rearrange the letters and you got G-N-O. Gnome.

I raced over to the garden. The gnome was ceramic, about a foot and a half high. One hand on his pointed hat and one hand on his butt, I tipped him up. As I suspected, he was hollow inside. I peered into the inner cavity and was rewarded with . . . nothing.

Damn! I could not catch a break. I went to set him back on his pedestal. A door with a small ring handle lay flush on the surface. My finger inserted itself into the ring, seemingly without any conscious effort from me. I pulled up, just
as Caitlyn came out the front door. “What are you doing?” she called, walking over to me. I probably looked odd to her, bent over in a flower bed.

I restrained myself from peeking until she got there. Her face lit up. “Did you find it?”

“Let's find out.” I plunged my hand into the opening, thinking too late that there could have been bugs—or worse, small furry rodents—inside. My fingers grasped a plastic bag and I pulled it out. Inside the sealed bag was another sealed container, dull orange 1970s-vintage Tupperware like we'd had when I was growing up.

“We should open it inside,” Caitlyn said, ever efficient and practical. “Whatever's in there, we don't want to drop it or have it blow away.”

Impatient as I was, of course she was right. I closed the door and replaced the gnome on his throne. We trooped inside and I set my find on the kitchen table.

“Ready?” My hands shook slightly as I unzipped the bag.

“As we'll ever be,” she responded, leaning forward.

The lid of the Tupperware container proved difficult to remove. I wondered if some kind of glue had been used to stick it down. One broken fingernail and some inventive cursing later, the lid lay on the table.

I reached in and pulled out a small metal box, the inexpensive kind someone might use to keep cash in at a yard sale. The little key fit perfectly. I gave it a twist and we heard the metal-on-metal snick of the lock opening.

Inside lay a sheet of yellowed paper, folded into a neat square. Next to that lay another folded page, this one a lighter color.

“Which one shall we read first?”

Caitlyn blinked behind her big glasses. “It doesn't matter. Pick one.”

Arbitrarily, I went for the one on the left.

Unfolded, the page was about half the size of a sheet of letterhead. The creases were deep and the paper had worn through in a few spots. It was covered in faded old-fashioned flowery handwriting. My voice trembled.

My Dear Helene.

That was my grandmother's name. And this was as close as I'd ever get to her.

If you are reading this, it means I am gone. Enclosed with this letter you will find a certificate of marriage. The contents will no doubt shock you. Please do not feel shamed or embarrassed. We cannot choose the family into which we are born.

Wasn't that the truth. I continued.

You may wonder why I never destroyed this document, which brought my mother such pain. It is because, after she retrieved it from her father's study, she asked me not to. When the time came, many years into the future, she believed that God would make the situation right. If the fortune exists at the time the trust is disbursed, our heirs should be the ones to decide whether to reveal—or conceal—the secret.

I looked up. “So Doreen had read this letter and seen the first marriage certificate?”

“She was the one who told us about it, said, ‘an arrow marked the spot.' Not ‘an arrow
pointed
to the spot.' So I put two and two together and figured out that it must have been located on the site of the archaeological dig, which was reported in some of the newspapers at the time. But since I didn't know the exact location of the dig, I needed Monty's file.”

By all accounts, Doreen had had a prickly personality. She might have gotten a perverse pleasure out of making Melanie wait to find out about her potential long-lost cousin. Or cousins. Who was to say there weren't a whole passel of descendants out there from Elihu Bloodworth's first, legal marriage?

“It was only a couple of days before we arrived that she'd located it. She never did say where, but now I have to guess your grandmother hid it in the milk can on the site where the arrowhead was found.”