Red Herring (5 page)

But that’s what she opted for now.

“Mr. McNaughton,” she confessed, leaning forward to complement his body language. “Let me start over.”

“Good idea,” he commented, instantly challenging her resolve.

“As hard-bitten as some of us probably seem to folks like you, starting the day seeing a woman’s murdered body is no picnic. It hangs in your head and makes you madder and madder as the day goes on, and it’s been a really long day.”

He didn’t respond, but she could see he was at least listening.

She held up her hand. “I’m not saying that’s right, and I do apologize for hitting you so hard, but I’d sure appreciate another chance. I need all the help I can get to find out who did this.”

She let him chew on just that, as tempted as she was to add to it. Joe had also taught her the value of silence, and of the influence of any suspect’s inner debate.

And despite his having an alibi in Oklahoma City, along with no obvious motivation to have killed his erstwhile secretary, Chuck McNaughton was very much a suspect.

The man seemed to consider her request, pursing his lips, and then crossed his legs and placed both hands on the arms of his chair. “All right, fine. What do you want to know?”

Sam nodded and conjured up what she hoped was a conciliatory
half smile. “Were you aware of anything happening in Doreen’s life recently?”

“You mean her mother?” he asked in surprise. “It was sad she had to go into that nursing home, but Dory had it under control. That’s why she retired early, as far as I know, to do unto her mom what the old girl had done for her as a kid.”

“Tough upbringing?”

He lifted a shoulder. “I only know the Cliff Notes version, but tough enough, from what she told us. Single parent, no money, hand-to-mouth. Probably pretty typical nowadays—hell, my own father had worse in his day—but Dory appreciated her mom’s sacrifices and effort, and wanted to make sure Maggie wasn’t left wanting.”

“She have much of a personal life as a result?”

“When?” McNaughton asked. “When she was younger, or after Maggie went into the home?”

“Both.”

He stared at the ceiling a moment. “I guess she did all right in the old days,” he said. “Good-looking girl, smart and outgoing. It wasn’t my business, and she kept her private life private, but I always thought she knew how to have a good time.”

“But no husband or regular boyfriends?”

“Nope. Unusual for a woman, especially in these sticks, but obviously possible. For all I know, she might’ve been a lesbian.”

Sam widened her eyes. “Really? You basing that on anything you saw or know?”

He tossed the notion off. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“You must’ve made a play for her,” Sam pursued him, “back when you were in the game.”

He smiled and tilted his head. “Well, she was older than me—not my style.”

“How ’bout your dad?” Sam asked casually.

“Dad and Dory?” he exclaimed, laughing. “Wow. There’s a picture.”

Sam thought his eyes weren’t reflecting the humor. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

But he was waving both hands in the air. “No, no. Dad was all business. You wouldn’t be thinking that way if you’d known him.”

Sam made a mental note that Chuck had never actually denied that either he or his father had had a romance with the woman.

“Did the two of you keep in touch after she left?” she asked. “She must’ve been a huge resource during the transition.”

“Yeah,” he said, almost too easily. “We got on the phone now and then.”

Sam had already studied Doreen’s home and cell-phone records. She’d been in communication with Chuck a lot, right up to the end.

“Now and then?”

“Often enough,” he conceded. “She knew the company inside and out.”

Remembering their rough start, Sam let it be. “Did she ever express any worries about anything or anyone, let’s say in the past month? An argument she might’ve had, or maybe something related to the nursing home?”

He shook his head. “I can’t think of anything.”

“How ’bout company business?” Sam persisted. “She must’ve known a few skeletons. Was there anything that came up recently that caused any ripples?”

He hadn’t stopped shaking his head. “No, no. I don’t think you’ll find anything there. We just send trucks around; it’s not that complicated.”

Right, she thought, but resisted mentioning how the tangled history of the trucking business had proven to be anything but
uncomplicated. “What about her replacement? Sue? That’s her name, right?”

His voice gained a formality. “Yes. Susan Allgood. No Dory Ferenc, but highly qualified.”

“Did they talk a lot? Passing the torch, so to speak? Maybe they exchanged a few private details, too.”

McNaughton smiled indulgently. “Different kind of arrangement. Dory ended up being more like a company executive. Sue’s just my secretary. They wouldn’t have talked.”

Sam took a stab. “Is Sue back from Oklahoma yet? I’ll have to talk with her, too.”

His expression froze, his eyes locked to hers, before he finally said slowly, “Right. I’ll make sure she makes herself available to you.”

At that, he stood up abruptly, crossed to a small closet, and extracted an overcoat. “Well, I hate to cut this short, but I have to get home and grab some shut-eye. Long day ahead.”

He paused and gestured toward the exit. “Ladies first.”

Sam rose slowly, refastening her coat. “You never asked me how Dory died.”

He put on a surprised expression, painfully amateurish. “I assumed it was confidential. What happened?”

Sam gave him a thin smile before passing before him and leaving him ignorant, if only from spite. “You’re right. We haven’t released that yet.”

She paused at the top of the stairs and looked back at him. “I’m surprised you didn’t know Doreen had been killed, in this day of constant communication.”

“I leave my cell phone off when I’m at these things,” he answered blandly.

Right, she thought, and took her leave.

“Mary Fish, I would normally call security and force you to take a vacation, or at least go home on time, but then the whole place would collapse and the trustees would kill me.”

The school’s headmaster was named Nicholas Raddlecup, as if he’d wound up here after being cut from a Dickens novel. He was cherubic, always wore a three-piece suit and a bad rug, believed himself to be a ladies’ man, and had a brain as pristine as on the day he was born.

And Mary, as his assistant for the past ten years, was the one to know. She also knew he’d just now spoken the complete truth.

“Not to worry, Nicholas,” she told him, seeing him in her office doorway. “I’ll be wrapping up soon. Elise is at the fire department Bingo game anyway, so there’s no rush for me to get home.”

“You have an excuse like that every night, Mary,” he chastised her, but then immediately waggled his pudgy fingers at her in farewell and concluded, “But, to each his own. You are a saint. Have a good evening.”

She waited until he’d retreated down the hallway before murmuring, “I will now.”

Nevertheless, she did check the clock on the opposite wall—one of those dark, wooden framed monstrosities that looked like an antique but ran on batteries and was available at Wal-Mart. It was getting late and she wanted to be home when Elise returned. In fact, she did feel guilty about how little time she gave their relationship. They’d been together so long—over twenty-five years by now—that each of them had finally taken the other for granted. Or Mary had, according to Elise.

Mary paused in her paperwork, sighed, and sat back in her chair. In Vermont, a gay lifestyle, especially involving two white-haired “old ladies,” was hardly worth a headline, much less any gossip at the country store. People respected your privacy, and your independence.

The irony was, of course, at least from her earlier experience of a twenty-year marriage to a man, that Mary was hard put to tell much difference between gay and straight housekeeping. She was happier with Elise—no doubt about that—and more peaceful at heart. But the ups and downs remained largely the same. At least from her perspective.

She glanced at the paperwork before her, and the contents of the shimmering computer screen, before standing up and crossing to the window overlooking the snow-covered campus quadrangle. Ethan Allen Academy was a lower tier prep school, dangling between the lofty, well-heeled New England ocean liners like St. Paul’s, Deer-field, and Exeter, and the best Vermont public high schools. It had nothing to be ashamed of, and yet spent much of its time scuffing its feet in embarrassment.

Mary touched the cold glass of the windowpane with her fingertips, wondering what had gotten into her. All this pondering of the psychological balance beam. She was happiest as a doer—a hands-on shaper of events. That’s what made Raddlecup both so grateful and
so useless: He didn’t have to worry about Mary performing both of their jobs, leaving him to posture before the parents and the board.

Maybe it was this year’s sneak attack snowstorm. She’d been brought up in this county. Her father had owned a farm in Putney. As a child, she’d helped do the milking before sunrise, her frigid fingers warming against the heat of the cows’ teats. Snow and ice were as natural to her as sand was to a Bedouin. But she was tired of it now. It got into her bones, and the gray sky clouded her spirit.

It was time to pull the rug out from under that fat toad Raddlecup, make a gift to Elise, and go on vacation somewhere sunny. With the time she’d accrued over the years, she could probably get a month off or more.

Smiling at last, she switched off her computer, tidied up her desk, locked her office door, and headed for home.

Home used to be an apartment attached to one of the dorms, where she and Elise had doubled as surrogate mothers for an ever-revolving gaggle of self-focused teenage girls. But age and seniority had its perks in this environment, and a couple of years ago they’d been allowed to move into a small, highly coveted, school-owned cottage on the edge of campus.

It wasn’t much larger than the old apartment, but hopelessly and endearingly cute. It was ancient and a school icon, featured in all the academy’s literature and publicity—trim, neat, rustic; an erstwhile barn—the epitome of Vermont to all those foundations and out-of-state full-tuition parents with visions of cows, maple syrup, and bucolic mountains in their heads. Mary knew it also for its cold air leaks, floor creaks, cracked walls, and cranky plumbing, just as she knew Vermont for its poverty, bureaucratic inefficiencies, drug problems, and alcoholism. But every home owner had such knowledge, just as every local knew of her neighborhood’s aches and pains. None of it negated
what met the eye, and Mary remained happy with the house, her relationship, her job, and the state in general.

She just needed a break.

She walked along the edge of the quad, its sidewalks meticulously cleared. Mary loved this time of night, halfway between the post-dinner bustling and the true darkness after lights out, when the kids were quiet and still. The moonlight and the old-style street lamps balanced each other appealingly, the snowbanks absorbed the sound of her footsteps, and even the cold gave her comfort, wrapped as she was in a heavy coat and scarf. She was beginning to anticipate breaking the news of her decision to Elise.

The cottage lay outside the quad, beside a field favored by the cross-country ski team. Elise had left the lights on for her, as usual, and with them a warming sense of home.

Mary opened the unlocked front door—nobody locked doors around here—stepped into the tiny mudroom, and settled onto the bench by the wall to remove her boots and coat before crossing the threshold into the house proper. She had to admit to enjoying the ritual of the mudroom protocol—the shucking of armor against the cold for the coming comforts of the hearth.

Her slippers on her feet and her scarf discarded with her coat, Mary opened the inner door to the house and walked into the toasty embrace supplied by the woodstove, anticipating the preparation of a little soup and a glass of wine for dinner.

But there she stopped in midstep, staring ahead and frowning. Before her, looped over the living room’s central, exposed wooden beam, was a heavy-duty electric cord. One end dangled just above the floor, the other ran off at an angle to her right and was attached to the cellar door.

She began to walk toward it, wondering what project Elise had
going, when a gloved hand suddenly came up from behind her and clapped onto her mouth.

“Don’t move, Mary, or Elise will die.”

The voice was muffled, as if by a mask, and very soft, whispering into her ear. “Go forward,” it ordered.

She did so, her mind fighting for a handhold—some starting point from which she could begin to comprehend, and perhaps to reason. What had happened to Elise? What did this person want?

She never found out. Before she could form a strategy, or choose where to start, she felt herself pushed forward slightly, so that she threw her hands out for balance, during which split second she saw a flash of red electrical cord pass before her eyes, and felt the slippery coldness of its coil around her neck. Then a violent jolt as she was simultaneously pulled back and up by the wire, her feet suddenly flailing in midair.

Mary felt her air cut off, saw the room turn red, and was only vaguely aware of her fingers faintly tapping at her throat before she lost consciousness, the last sound in her life being a terrifying rush, as from a train passing by two inches away.

“I heard you ate like a stray dog, but you come here for breakfast?”

A freshly wrapped bean burrito in hand, Joe turned around to face Paul Duffy, a Brattleboro fixture who owned several businesses, a former selectman with Gail Zigman for a couple of terms, and now a leader of the area’s perpetually floundering Republican Party—a lonely minority in the most left-leaning town in a liberal-minded state.

Joe smiled. “I hate to be obvious, Paul, but you’re standing in the same line.”

Paul waved his arms wide. “Taco Bell? Or as Martha calls it, Tacky Bell? It’s also Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I’m just here for the coffee. How’ve you been? Up to your neck in that murder, I bet. Terrible thing. I cannot believe how much we’re turning into a Massachusetts doormat. If people around here won’t face that reality and start giving guys like you more power and tougher laws, they better get used to it, right?”