1 Aunt Bessie Assumes (11 page)

“The trip to the wheel hasn’t gone the way you
expected?” Bessie suggested.

“No, I guess you could say that.”

Bessie stayed silent, waiting to see what he
might add.
 
After a long minute
while they both took in the view, Donny sighed deeply.

“Coming to the Laxey Wheel was Samantha’s idea,”
he told Bessie.
 
“Apparently some
distant ancestor of hers once worked in the mine here.
 
I can’t imagine what it must have been
like in those days.”

“Me either,” Bessie told him.
 
“I was just thinking about that as I was
climbing up here.”

“You never saw the mine when it was working?”
Donny asked.

“The mine stopped operating in 1929, when I was
still living in America,” Bessie told him.
 

Donny looked like he had a dozen more questions
for Bessie, but then he sighed again and fell silent.
 
After a few minutes, Bessie restarted
the conversation.

“So Samantha wanted to have a look at the wheel?”
she asked, trying to pick up where he had left off.

“What?
 
Oh yes.
 
Samantha wanted to
see the wheel and the mines and whatever else we could find.
 
We made all of the arrangements last
night, before bed.
 
Then, this
morning, Vikky overheard our plans and asked if she could come as well.
 
Samantha wanted to say ‘no,’ but I
couldn’t see any harm in including her.
 
She needed the change of scenery as much as anyone.”

Bessie nodded slowly.
 
“So you brought them both here.”

“Yeah, and they started fighting in the car
before we even left the cottage and argued all the way to the car park,” Donny
looked bewilderedly at Bessie.
 
“They really seem to hate each other, and I’ve no idea why.”

Bessie studied the man, wondering if he was
really that stupid about women.
 
“Perhaps Samantha thinks you are falling for Vikky,” she suggested.

“Vikky is my brother’s widow.
 
She’s my sister now,” Donny sighed
again.
 
“I won’t deny that she’s a
very attractive woman, but she just lost her husband.
 
Even if I weren’t involved with
Samantha, I wouldn’t be trying to move in on Vikky, at least not yet.”

Bessie stared out towards Laxey and tried to
figure out how to reply to the man’s words.
 
The “at least not yet” seemed telling to
her.
 
Donny was interested in the
attractive widow; he was just waiting for the right time to make his move.
 
She sighed.
 
People so often made their own problems.

“So where are Samantha and Vikky now?” she
asked.
 
She and Donny were still
alone on the platform.

“They both went stomping off in different
directions,” he shrugged.
 
“I guess
I’ll call them both when I’m ready to go.
 
I’m dreading the drive home, though.”

Bessie gave his arm a sympathetic pat and began
to turn away.
 
She stopped when
Donny grabbed the hand that she had used to pat him.

“Bessie, please, I hate to keep you standing out
in the rain, but, well, can you spare me just a minute more of your time?”

She turned back towards him curiously.
 
“Of course,” she said gently.

“I just wondered,” he began hesitantly.
  
“Oh, never mind.”

“What is it you wondered?” Bessie coaxed.

“You know the island and what goes on here,”
Donny said.
 
“What do you think
happened to my brother?”

Bessie shook her head slowly to give herself
time to think.
 
“That’s a question for
the police,” she said finally.
 
“I
know the island, but I don’t know anything about murder.
 
From what I’ve seen, I can’t begin to
guess who might have wanted to harm your brother.”
 
She was surprised when Donny choked back
a laugh.
 

“He really had everyone fooled,” he said
harshly.
 
“My mother won’t believe a
bad word about him.
 
The police seem
to think someone in the family is responsible and I don’t want to speak ill of
the dead, so I haven’t told the police absolutely everything.
 
Maybe I should fix that?
 
What do you think?”

“I think you should tell the police anything and
everything that you know,” Bessie said, a touch primly.

Donny shook his head.
 
“He was my big brother,” he answered
with a catch in his voice.
 
“I
always looked up to him, you know?”

Bessie nodded.
 
“I had an older sister.
 
I know exactly what you mean.
 
But the best thing you can do for him
now is help the police find out what happened.”

The man nodded slowly.
 
“He was taking drugs,” he blurted
out.
 

Bessie struggled to keep her face from
registering shock.
 
“Drugs?” she
repeated.

“Yeah,” Donny sighed.
 
“I just found out a few weeks ago.
 
He started missing work or turning up
late.
 
My father is getting ready to
retire early, or he was anyway, and more and more of the responsibility for
running the company
has
been falling on me and
Danny.
 
Except in
the last month or so, it’s been all me.
 
Danny hadn’t been coming in, or he’d
come in late and then leave early.
 
And he’d been, uh, all over the place with his decision-making.
 
I finally confronted him a few days ago,
before the trip, and he told me everything.”

“Everything?”

Donny shrugged.
 
“Probably not everything, but he told me
plenty.
 
He was hooked on some
prescription painkillers that he got to help with headaches.
 
He said it started out with just one a
day, but he found out that he liked the way they made him feel.
 
They just wiped out all his
worries.
 
Fast forward a few weeks
and he was hooked big time.
 
He was
using multiple doctors to get more and more prescriptions and then he found
another source, a black market one.”
 
Donny turned away from Bessie and leaned against the platform railing,
his eyes filling with tears.
 

“I begged him to get help,” he told Bessie.
 
“I offered to pay for it, offered to
cover it all up from our parents, offered to do whatever it took.
 
He said he wasn’t ready yet.
 
I think he married Vikky because he was out
of it on drugs.
 
I can’t believe he
would have ever done that any other way.
 
He loved being single.
 
And I
suppose he was out of it when he redid his will.
 
That’s one of the reasons why I’m
supporting my father’s efforts to get Vikky disinherited.”

“Really?” Bessie tried to keep the shock from
her voice.

“Hey,” Donny answered, “I like Vikky a lot, but
she had to know that my brother was doing drugs.
 
I think she knew and she took advantage
of it.
 
My father and I will make
sure she gets some sort of payout, but she certainly doesn’t deserve Danny’s
share of the company.”

Bessie bit back a dozen replies.
 
“So he wasn’t interested in giving up
the drugs?” she asked, changing the subject away from the widow.

“No, at least not yet.
 
He said something about being
straight-laced and responsible his whole life and needing a few months to just
have some fun.” Donny shrugged.
 
“I
suppose some people would call it a midlife crisis.”

Bessie nodded.
 
So many more men than women seemed to
suffer from such things.
 
She had
always been aware of the passage of time and the fragile nature of existence,
but it appeared that some people, on realising that they had hit middle age,
felt the need to do something radically unlike
themselves
in order to prove something to someone.

Doona, for example, got a tattoo on her fortieth
birthday.
 
Unfortunately, she had
chosen to have it done at a location that was more about affordability than
artistic ability.
 
Luckily, the
tattoo was small and, as it was on the back of her shoulder, she didn’t have to
look at it herself.
 
Bessie often
wondered if she was tired of saying “No, it’s a butterfly, yes, really,” all
summer long when she wore sleeveless dresses, but it wasn’t something that
Bessie felt she should ask her friend.

“And Vikky knew about the drugs?” Bessie asked.

“She must have,” Donny insisted.
 
“If Danny wasn’t hiding it from me, he
wouldn’t have been hiding it from his girlfriend, either.
 
I don’t think he cared who knew, aside
from our parents.”

“I take it they wouldn’t have approved,” Bessie
remarked.

Donny laughed.
 
“They would have fired him, cut him off
without a cent and written him out of their wills.
 
My mother and father have very strong
opinions about drug taking, in spite of their own behavior at the moment.
 
The family firm is tied up in all sorts
of complicated legal entities, and every single one of them has clauses about
substance abuse.”

“So what do you think happened to your brother?”
Bessie asked.

Donny looked around the empty platform and then
lowered his voice for no reason whatsoever.
 
“I think he arranged a middle of the
night meeting with a drug dealer and the dealer killed him,” he whispered.

“Where did the dealer get the knife from?” she
asked, annoyed with herself when she realised she was whispering as well.

“Danny must have taken it with him for
protection,” Donny said, a touch smugly.
 
“He couldn’t possibly have been comfortable dealing with drug dealers
and the like.
 
He was probably
terrified.
 
And he was probably
carrying a great deal of cash as well.
 
Taking the knife with him for protection makes perfect sense.”

“You really need to tell the police everything
you’ve told me,” Bessie said, her mind spinning from all the information that
had just fallen into her lap.
 
“They
need to know about your suspicions.”

“I suppose so,” the man said in a reluctant
tone.
 
“It’s all really just my own
personal theory, though.
 
I can’t
prove any of it.
 
I suppose there
must be drug dealers on the island who would supply prescription medication?”

Bessie frowned at him.
 
“I have absolutely no knowledge of such
things,” she told him tartly.
 
“I’m
sure the police will be able to figure out if your theory is plausible or
not.
 
But they can’t investigate it
at all if you don’t tell them.”

“I know you’re right,” Donny sighed.
 
“I guess my big fear is that my parents
will find out about Danny’s drug problem.
 
My mother is so distraught already, I hate to add to her unhappiness.”

“I understand that,” Bessie said, now patting
his arm again.
 
“But surely she
would prefer to see his murder solved, whatever unpleasantness that might
reveal.”

“I guess so,” he agreed after a moment.
 
“And I suppose she would rather it was a
drug dealer than the alternative.”

“What alternative is that?” Bessie asked.

The man shook his head.
 
“The only alternative I can think of is
that Vikky killed him,” he said softly.
 
“And that would be much worse.”

“You really think she’s capable of murder?”

“No,” Donny said too loudly.
 
He took a deep breath.
 
“I don’t know what to think,” he said
eventually.
 
“I mean I introduced
them, you know?
 
I met Vikky through
mutual friends and I thought she would be perfect for my brother.
 
I was even happy when they got married,
even though I thought Danny only agreed because of the drugs.
  
I thought she would be good for
him, once he got his habit sorted out.”

“Why would she kill him?
 
They had only just married,” Bessie
played devil’s advocate.

Donny laughed unpleasantly.
 
“They were fighting almost all the
time,” he told Bessie.
 
“The night
of the, um, er, the night Danny died they started fighting at dinner and kept
at it until Vikky finally stormed away to go to bed.
 
Danny said he was going to just sleep in
one of the spare bedrooms rather than try sleeping with Vikky.”