Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) (23 page)

“What?”  Still not quite ready to think of her aunt and some
man, Sophie nonetheless raised her head.

“Unless I’m forgetting, Joyce was the one who suggested to
me that Doreen had had a lover.  A married one, she made a point of telling
me.  I didn’t have to read between the lines to know what she thought of that.”

“She might have hoped you’d know it wasn’t true,” Sophie
suggested.  “Or that, if it was, the man was anyone else but her own husband.”

“That’s true.”  His eyes met Sophie’s.  “If she had
confirmation, though, she must have felt something a lot stronger than dislike
for Doreen.”

Her throat closed.  “You’re not saying—”

“We always knew her murder might be personal.”

She gaped at him.  “But…what about the break-in at Doreen’s
house?  And my cottage?”

“I don’t think Joyce killed your aunt.  It’s a thought,
that’s all.  The searches could have been separate.”

“Except whoever killed her also searched the storage unit.”

“That’s true.  Not very efficiently, though.  It could have
been a diversionary tactic.”

He’d suggested something like that early on.  “Oh, lord,”
she murmured.

His scrutiny made her skin prickle.  “Why does the idea
bother you so much?” he asked.  “Either way, someone Doreen knew killed her.  I
don’t see how it could have been a stranger.”

“No.”  She folded and refolded her napkin as if she was
creating an origami bird that could take flight.  “I guess I just don’t want to
think about her murder at all.  I mean, not the moment when she knew—”  Bile
rose in her throat and she dropped the napkin and grabbed for the beer bottle.

Daniel was watching her with compassion that was as tangible
as a soothing touch.  “Having the two people you’ve loved most in your life
both murdered…”  He shook his head.  “I’ve been telling myself it might be a
relief for you to find out your mother didn’t commit suicide, but maybe I’m
wrong.”

Even before he finished, Sophie shook her head.  “No, you
weren’t wrong.  As awful as murder is, her death would have been quick. 
Suicide suggests she was hiding horrible depression for months or even years. 
I can’t tell you how I hated thinking that.  That’s part of why I blocked her
out.  If I believed she’d committed suicide, I had to doubt all my memories of
her.  Do you see?”

“Yeah.”  His voice was a soft rumble that went with the
tenderness on his face.  “I see.”

“Plus, to be completely selfish, there’s my abandonment
issues.  If the choice was never hers, I can go back to believing my mother
loved me as fiercely as I thought she did.”

“Yeah.  Damn.”  He pushed back his chair but stayed
sitting.  He held out an arm.  “Come here.”

Call her pathetic, but she wanted a cuddle.

She circled the table and plopped onto his thighs, letting
him tug her close.  She sank into his embrace, burying her face into the crook
of his neck.

“I vote,” he said after a minute, “that we ditch all talk
about parents, aunts or any other relatives, and death.”

She was restored enough to give a small laugh.  “I vote
aye.”  She lifted her head.  “You have an idea for a new topic?”

“New activity,” he said, a different kind of warmth in his
eyes now.  He nibbled at her lower lip.  “Nonverbal,” he added huskily.

There wasn’t a lot of conversation after that.

Daniel was studying the real estate listings online when the
knock came on his door.  When he called, “Come in,” Abbot Grissom poked his
head around the door.

“I had a thought,” he said, sounding diffident.  “Probably
doesn’t mean anything, but…”

“Yeah?  Pull up a chair.”  Daniel got up and went to the
door, calling, “Ellie, can I get a cup of coffee?”  Most of the time he fetched
his own, but she didn’t seem to mind when he did ask.  “Abbot?  What about
you?”

“Huh?  Oh.  No, I just went through that new espresso stand
on Cedar.  The drive-through is so dang handy.”

“I’ve been there myself,” Daniel admitted.  “Decent
coffee.”  Not as good as you could get at Mist River Coffee, but close to
Ellie’s brew when you didn’t have time to detour by the station.  As he went
back around his desk, he thought,
seize the moment
.  “Get your dad moved
okay?” he asked as if making casual conversation.

“More or less.”  Abbot sighed.  “Mostly less, to tell you
the truth.  I got him and his bed and dresser moved, and that’s about all.  My
mother-in-law had a stroke, and Jean has been up in Seattle taking care of
her.  No way I’d start clearing Dad’s place out without her.  I have no idea
what she’ll think we ought to keep and what she’ll want to garage sale.  I
imagine Dad will need more of his clothes and what-not, but I’ll let her decide
that, too.”

Daniel felt some tension leave him.  He mostly liked Grissom
and hadn’t enjoyed even having to give him passing thought as a suspect.

Ellie showed up with his coffee and gave signs of wanting to
linger in hopes of finding out what they were talking about, but her phone rang
and with a last, speculative look over her shoulder, she whisked herself back
out.

Daniel wrapped his hand around the mug and suggested, “If
there’s anything nice, you could donate it to save Misty Beach.”

The middle-aged lines in Grissom’s face multiplied with his
laugh.  “Sure, if they want ugly porcelain figurines.  Mom and Dad never had a
lot of really nice things.  He owned a gas station, you know, and Mom never
worked.  There’s a couple of decent pieces of furniture from my mother’s
parents, but that’s all.  Not that I’m complaining.  Wasn’t like there were
rich kids to compare to, when I was growing up.  We were all in about the same
boat.”

Daniel nodded, gratefully letting go of what had really only
been a passing awareness that Grissom fit some of the criteria.  “What was it
you wanted to talk to me about?”

Grissom shifted in his chair, as if he were suddenly
uncomfortable.  “I overheard a conversation,” he said, too fast.  His chair
squeaked a few times as he twitched.  “Normally I wouldn’t repeat anything like
this—”  His cheeks were a little flushed.

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Daniel assured him.  “Not unless
it has to do with a crime.”

“Well, that’s what I thought.”  Grissom’s expression remained
troubled.  “This bothered me, though.  It was at the hardware store.  I noticed
Arthur Escott and Ron Campbell with their heads together talking real intensely
and didn’t give it a thought.”

Arthur Escott and Ron Campbell were two city council members,
such close allies you always knew how the other would vote once the first
expressed his opinion.  Both were on the conservative side, Campbell a
businessmen and Escott a developer.  Neither would be fans of the Save Misty
Beach campaign.  As it happened, Campbell owned the hardware store, and a
couple of others in the county, too.

“The shower at home has been dripping and Jean’s been
nagging me, so I thought I’d surprise her—”  Grissom stopped, looking
embarrassed.  “You don’t care what I was there to buy.  Thing is, plumbing
supplies were only an aisle away from the two of them, and I couldn’t help
overhearing some of what they said.”

Daniel knew better than to interrupt when a witness
rambled.  People got to the point in their own way, in their own time.  He only
nodded encouragement.

“Escott especially was pretty mad that Ms. Thomsen has taken
over where Doreen left off.  He said, ‘With that woman gone, I figured people
around here would see sense, and now they’re letting an outsider steal our
chance to make Cape Trouble a real destination.’  It was the way he said it, as
if he’d thought a problem had been dealt with.”

“Doreen being the problem,” Daniel said thoughtfully.

“He’s an angry man.”

“I wonder if he had in mind developing some of that land
himself.”

“Well, that’s the rest of what I heard.”  Voice lowered,
Grissom bent forward.  “He said he’d been in talks with Somerset Resorts. 
Sounded like he’d been leading them to think this whole campaign to turn that
tract into a nature preserve was doomed to failure.  He had them so confident
it would bellyflop, they’ve been moving ahead with plans.”

“And now he’s hearing hints that Sophie may be a serious
threat to his prediction.”

Grissom sank back with a sigh.  “That’s it.”

“What are you worried about, Abbot?  That Sophie has reason
to be afraid?”  Which she did, he thought, although maybe not of Escott.  “Or
that some of his confidence might have come from him having taken care of
Doreen himself?”

“I don’t like to think that,” Grissom said unhappily.  “I
went to school with Arthur and even dated his sister, once upon a time.  But he
sounded downright…well, vicious.”

“Did the two of them ever spot you?” Daniel asked.

“Spot me?  Oh, at the hardware store.  No, I gave up on
looking for the washer I needed and sort of sidled away.”

“Then I might just have a talk with both of them.  No need
for me to name who passed on a tip to me.”

“That would be good,” Grissom said, his relief obvious. 
“Ms. Thomsen is a nice lady.  And Doreen, I didn’t always agree with her, but
she was a fighter, and you have to admire that.  She sure as hell didn’t
deserve what happened to her.”

His fervency removed Daniel’s last doubt.  “No, she didn’t.”

*****

Turned out Arthur Escott had an ironclad alibi for the time
of Doreen’s death.  He and his wife had been in Juneau, Alaska, visiting a
daughter who lived there.  They hadn’t gotten back until that same evening. 
Daniel did a little checking with the airline, and sure enough.  Both the
Escotts had been on the direct flight into Portland.

One thing Daniel knew – he now had an enemy on the city
council.

Daniel had a brief conversation with Ron Campbell, too, but
from a purely financial standpoint, he had a lot less motive to want the Misty
Beach campaign to flop.  Tourists didn’t tend to flock to the hardware store
when they were on vacation, and as marginal as pay was for industry jobs like
maids and groundskeepers, the boost in population to the town wouldn’t
translate to a burst in economic prosperity for his kind of business.  Campbell
at least had the grace to express his shock at Doreen’s murder and his hope
that Daniel would soon make an arrest.  He did grumble briefly about
‘outsiders’ who were trying to influence what should be a purely local
decision.  Daniel pointed out that the land was now owned by another outsider,
one who had no stake in the future of Cape Trouble.

Back in front of his computer, he discovered that Elias
Burton’s mother had sold her house in the old part of town – presumably Elias’s
childhood home – just two months ago and moved into a condo in a seniors-only
building closer to the beach.   The last couple hours of the afternoon, he
tracked down several of the donors who had given items that were in the larger
box with the jewelry to ask if they might have given anything else.  Gail
Burton wasn’t home the first time he went by the new condo, but when he tried
again close to five, she came to the door.

She was a strikingly beautiful woman for her age.  The
artist’s bone structure, height and coloring had come from this woman.  “Why,
you’re the police chief, aren’t you?”  She sounded intrigued rather than
dismayed.  “Please, come in.”

No, surprise, a magnificent oil painting of the rocky part
of the beach and the sea stacks offshore dominated her living room, hanging
above a sofa that was upholstered in a fabric he guessed had been chosen to
complement the artwork.

“Your son’s,” he said, nodding at it.

“Yes.”  She smiled with obvious pleasure.  “I have several
in other parts of the house, but that’s my favorite.  Landscapes can be bland,
don’t you think?  But never Elias’s.  He surely didn’t get his talent from
me.”  She chuckled, asked if he’d like coffee and then, when he declined, gazed
inquiringly at him.

He explained that he was investigating Doreen Stedmann’s death
and that questions had been raised about some unidentified auction items.  He
claimed that an unspecified ‘someone’ had suggested she might have donated some
items as she cleared out her house.

“Actually, I did make a donation,” she said without hesitation. 
“Didn’t Elias tell you?”

“Tell me?”

“He’s given me so many paintings over the years.  I couldn’t
possibly hang them all here, and I thought it was appropriate to give a
different one he did some years back of the driftwood looking as ancient as dinosaur
bones along the river.  It’s really lovely, and a little melancholy, and given
that he did the auction artwork, I suspect will sell for a really good price. 
He hates the idea of that land getting bulldozed so huge hotels can go up, you
know.  He’s painted scenes over there any number of times.”

“I have seen a couple of those,” he agreed.

“Oh.”  Her eyes flashed.  “I suppose you saw the one over
his fireplace.”

He agreed that he had.

“It’s an extraordinary painting, isn’t it?”  She sat at one
end of that sofa, gracefully composed, a woman who was more comfortable with
the topic than he’d have expected.  She sounded artless, but he wasn’t deceived
into thinking that she was chatting mindlessly.  “That poor woman.  Elias was
quite madly in love with her that summer, before she killed herself.  What a
dreadful tragedy.  I felt so for her daughter, and now I understand she’s back
in town taking charge of the auction to save the old resort.  I have to admire
her courage.”

“I do, too,” he said, smiling at her.

“I wouldn’t have thought she’d ever want to see that
particular beach again.”

“She didn’t.”  He explained about her relationship with
Doreen.

“I see.”  A cloud seemed to momentarily shade her face.  “I
had fully intended to volunteer to help with the auction, but then I had a bit
of a health scare.  That’s what led to me downsizing.”  She gestured to take in
the condo.  “If she still needs help, I’m to the point where I’d be glad to do
something like make phone calls or write letters.  Will you let her know?”

“I will,” he said, rising to his feet.  “You may be sorry
you offered.  I know Sophie is trying to find people to hand-write thank you
notes to all the donors.”

“I can certainly do that,” she said firmly, standing as
well.  “My phone number is in the book.”

On the way out the door, he asked if she happened to know of
anyone else who might have given a beautiful antique quilt or some jewelry, but
she shook her head.  “I’m afraid not.  I have a couple of friends who have
given, but nothing like that.”

He thanked her and left, reaching for his phone even before
he got into his car.  Sophie would have called if she’d been ready to leave the
storage facility…but he wanted to be sure.

*****

Sophie hadn’t actually lived with a man since she left home
for college at eighteen, and this was different.  It felt so intimate,
exchanging news from their day as she stashed her purse and kicked off her
shoes while Daniel removed his holster and pistol, putting them on top of the
refrigerator.  She’d talked to Doreen’s pastor about the memorial service they
were planning, and Daniel made a few suggestions.  Somewhat to Sophie’s relief,
Doreen’s body had yet to be released, which meant delaying the service.

Then, as he emptied his pockets of change into a jar on the
counter, Daniel told her about his conversation with Elias Burton’s mother, and
her offer to help with the auction should Sophie want her.

“I’ll pass her name on to Hannah.  She’s taken over
organizing the volunteers writing the thank yous.  I know she could use more
help.  People offer, and then don’t follow through.”

“Even on a job, some people aren’t good with follow
through,” he said, opening the refrigerator.

“What’s she like?” Sophie asked, curious.

He turned, a package of chicken breasts in his hand.  “What
do you mean?”

There was an odd tone to his voice, but, pursuing her own
thoughts, she didn’t pay attention to it.  “He seems so reserved.  I mean, he’s
not the kind of guy you can picture as a little kid.  Running to Mom when he
falls off his bike and skins his knee.  Plus, you have to admit he’s
beautiful.”

“No, actually I don’t.”

She frowned at him.  “You sound annoyed.”

Having dropped the package of chicken on the stove, he
leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms.  “We’re sleeping together.”

Light bulb.  “You didn’t like me calling him beautiful.”

“Would you like it if I whistled at some bikini babe when we
were together?”

He was jealous.  Sophie grappled with the notion.  Daniel
Colburn was so supremely self-confident, she would never have expected him to
feel so much as a twinge merely because she’d remarked on another man’s
appearance.

“I didn’t flirt with him.”

His mouth had a rueful twist.  “I know you didn’t.  Hey, I’m
being stupid.  Pretend I didn’t say any of this.”

She crossed the couple of steps separating them and went on
tiptoe to kiss his jaw.  “You know you don’t have to feel threatened by Elias. 
He’s an interesting man.”  It was the banked fires she’d sensed in him, she
thought, but knew better than to say.  “I didn’t find him sexy.  Truthfully…” 
She hesitated.