Three Can Keep a Secret, page 22
I thanked him and took the book. He told me he was going to lunch, but that if I finished before he got back, I could leave everything on the table, and he’d put it back where it belonged. Then he went on his way, and I took a look at the book of old surveys. The title page explained that it was the collection compiled by a resident of Raven Hill who had worked as a surveyor. Small libraries and historical societies often ended up with this kind of thing, and some of those bequests proved useful.
I found the surveys that matched the area I was looking at. There wasn’t a survey for every property, but there was one for the Hunzeker land and adjacent acres, and several more around Winding Ridge Road. The barn Brian and Cynthia had mentioned was marked on one of the surveys. It wasn’t far from the Hunzeker house, but was accessed from another road. It had originally been part of a different property. I went back to the map I’d been looking at when Cynthia interrupted me. There was a line that ran along the edge of the Hunzeker lot—was that a stream or a road? It wasn’t named, so hard to tell. I compared it to the survey—same line, but it swung out to meet Winding Ridge. The survey indicated it was an access road. The lot it was on had no buildings other than the barn and a shed, and was wedge shaped, like a piece of pie. There were clusters of trees sketched in as well. Winding Ridge ran along one side, and Hilltop Road along the other. The two didn’t intersect.
I followed Hilltop. In one direction, it went southeast and met the main road toward Albany. In the other it went up into the Helderbergs, where it met some smaller roads. One of those was where the Walters cabin was located. If you cut across that pie-shaped lot, you could get from Anita’s accident scene to J. P. Walters’s cabin without using a main road and passing a traffic camera. At least, you could if the terrain allowed. I thought of Agnes and her friend, and the vehicle that had raced toward them and then disappeared into nothing. There must be a way.
“By the pricking of my thumbs,” I whispered, “someone murderous this way comes.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Before I left the historical society, I took pictures of the map and the survey. I wanted to be able to send them to Jennie once I’d worked out more details of my theory. I zipped home and printed them out, then added them to the collection I had. I took all the various pieces and put them together as well as I could. I sketched in the old access road and the barn, and marked where all the traffic lights and cameras were. I was no artist, but it was good enough. I traced the route from where Anita went off the road, across the Hunzeker lot, and onto the road leading to J. P. Walters’s place. Once you were within that triangle of cameras, you could move between locations without going through one and, at that time of night, in the dark, without much risk of being seen. As long as you could get across that lot, anyway. The terrain map suggested you could.
I went online and into the mapping program I’d used before. Pulling up the satellite images, I panned around until I found the area I wanted, and then zoomed in.
“It could work,” I said.
I grabbed my phone and texted Jennie.
Can you talk? Found something.
A minute later the phone pinged.
Couple minutes.
I popped up and paced. If that shortcut worked, the most obvious suspect was Cynthia. Her comment this morning added weight to that. But it also put Sloane and Sean Harris back in the picture. They’d come in from different directions, but once in the area could move between locations and then leave the way they’d come. They could have worked together, though this way they didn’t have to. But why?
My phone rang. Jennie.
“What’ve you got?” she said.
“A back way between crime scenes,” I said. “Listen to this.” I ran through what I’d found, told her I could send pictures of the various maps, and then repeated Cynthia’s comment and my theory about passion and fanaticism.
“And from what you said this morning, either of the Harrises could be back in the picture,” I added.
“They’re definitely back in the picture,” she said, her tone grim. “I just left Sean. When I confronted him with the traffic camera shot, he panicked. Told me he’d driven up to talk to Walters about his job. He’d heard that he might be shown the door—said it was departmental politics, though he stumbled over that—and wanted to plead his case. He told Sloane he was going back to the office and that he might be late. He did stop at the office but then went to Walters’s place. He said when he got there, the back door was open, and Walters was dead on the floor.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know. He said he checked for a pulse, and there was none, but the body was still warm. He bolted—said the scene was horrific and he got scared. He thought somebody must have killed Walters and could still be in the house, so he ran back to his car and took off. The timing of him coming and going supports a short visit.”
“And you didn’t find his prints, right?”
“He said he wore gloves except for when he checked for a pulse. It was a cold night, so that tracks.”
“And Sloane lied to cover for him,” I said. “That must be what Sam picked up on.”
“Not exactly, and here’s where it gets interesting. He said when he got home, Sloane wasn’t there. She came in ten minutes later and said she’d gone to try to talk to her mother. They’d had an argument earlier and she wanted to clear the air. She had Caleb with her. He believed her because the kid was half asleep and said, “Went to Grandpa’s” or something like that.”
“But Anita wasn’t there, and Richard didn’t mention seeing her.”
“Sloane said she saw her father in his workshop, but Caleb was asleep, and since her mother’s car wasn’t there, she turned around and came home. I’m going to see what she says, but right now she’s not answering her phone, and her husband doesn’t know where she is. She’s been gone a couple of hours. At least she doesn’t have the kid with her.”
“Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good.”
“No. But send me those pictures. I’ll send them on to Sam. Someone needs to check your theory. Not you,” she added quickly.
“I know. My car couldn’t handle it or I already would have. I thought a nice, sturdy police SUV would be a better choice.”
“True. You can stay put and try to figure out a motive for one of the Harrises to kill two people. I can’t see a job teaching history being the reason.”
I thought of the academics I knew and the heated departmental politics they described. Jennie might be underestimating the situation, but time would tell.
“Maybe.” I couldn’t resist a dig. “And I thought motive was overrated.”
I heard a snorting noise and could picture her eye roll.
“It is, as a starting point. But if you’ve figured out the how, we’re going to need a why. Juries like that.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”
We hung up and I sent pictures of everything I thought would be useful. She’d be able to follow, and so would Sam. Then I paced some more.
Motive. If one or both of the Harrises had done it, it wasn’t about the manor and Anita’s obsession with the new building, or the Ravenscroft family. If Cynthia was our murderer, the new building angle came back in. With both Walters and Anita gone, so was the pressure to merge collections and absorb the historical society into the library. At least for now. Cynthia seemed to think the removal of Walters from the equation would make for smooth sailing on the grant front, if there really was a grant. Getting rid of Anita as well would make her life easier on many counts. She had a bottle of the wine. And she knew the area.
Still, it didn’t feel right. It was possible she’d just snapped, but I didn’t think she had the nerve to pull off a double murder. With Millicent and Jilly out of it, and Richard with an alibi, that left Sean and Sloane Harris. Or both of them together. Probably not. It sounded like Sean had freaked out at the sight of his boss’s body. We had only his word for that, though. And hadn’t his work bio said he enjoyed gardening? Perhaps he was growing and distilling poisonous plants in his backyard and had actually gone to drop off a poisoned bottle of wine that night. With his mother-in-law’s fingerprints on it? No, too much of a stretch.
Sloane. She was the more likely of the two, in my opinion. Nervy she might be, but that made her tightly wound enough to snap. She’d already threatened her mother—it would help to know what that was about. But then again, it sounded like the two had always been at odds. And as for her husband’s boss—well, maybe she was fed up with him too. His death certainly made it unlikely that Sean would have to start looking for another job anytime soon. But that was more like two motives unless Sloane had gone right round the bend and started a killing spree. That didn’t work even for me, never mind trying to sell it to a jury. I couldn’t see her doing that and then pulling herself together enough afterward to keep everyone guessing for a week.
I plopped down onto the couch and rifled through my notes again. What angle hadn’t I covered? Who could have done it? I’d done pretty well with that, though we still had three viable suspects. What was the motive? There were a few, but none of them worked for me for both murders. What was the common thread?
I looked at the words of wisdom from my old friend Poirot. “The victim. One must always return to the victim.” In the absence of a better idea, I flipped to a fresh page. I wrote “Anita” on one side, and “Walters” on the other, and drew a line between them. I knew Anita better, so I’d start with her.
I started with the obvious: driven, efficient, energetic, abrupt, inconsiderate, ambitious, bull-in-china-shop approach. Also underhanded, manipulative, obsessive, and a possible blackmailer, though all that appeared to be more recent. Then I added the comments people had made since she died: good researcher, a stickler, a snob about her principles, a snob in general, not afraid to make an unpopular decision. Delightful. I reviewed my list and marveled that no one had killed her sooner.
Now Walters. He was trickier—I had only other people’s impressions to go by. From what I’d inferred, he was ambitious, political, lazy, arrogant, and of reasonable intelligence, but not scholarly. A bit backhanded in the way he dealt with things, per his assistant, and someone who liked to hobnob with big donors and dump grunt work on people with less clout. So also a snob. Described as very fond of himself and very fond of his comfortable existence.
I reviewed my list to see what I had. Answer—two unlikeable people that someone had disliked enough to murder.
“Well, that’s certainly helpful,” I muttered.
There must be something else. I read through the list again. What connections were there other than Cynthia Baker and Sean and Sloane Harris?
Both Walters and Anita were historians. Walters had the PhD, but by all reports, Anita was as good or better with research. Walters was lazy on that count. He liked the trappings of the position, but not the work. Anita, on the other hand, was all about the work. And she had recently shown an unusual interest in his work. So I would as well.
I got my laptop and while that booted up, found all the printouts from Walters’s thesis. I sighed. It looked just as riveting as the first time I’d seen it. Which is to say—not at all. I might still need the whole thing, but for the moment I was grateful I’d handed that off to Helene. I read through the table of contents and turned to the bibliography. It looked like Walters was illuminating the role of a minor player in the run-up to the Revolutionary War, a presumed loyalist who’d secretly provided aid to the patriots. It built on earlier research done by another scholar who’d used letters and diaries kept by the loyalist’s spinster sister, who was herself sympathetic to the cause of freedom for the colonies.
Nothing wrong there. Walters had used the previous work as a jumping-off point to pursue his interest in the clandestine activities of the brother. He had also gone to original source material, in this case a cache of documents held by a local family. The name was familiar—I thought there was a small park in their honor somewhere in the capital district.
So what was the issue? Anita had either found one or thought she had. Having gleaned as much as I could from what I had, I opened up the union catalog I used to search for items from outside the system. Walters did not have a large body of research—it shouldn’t take long to run it down. He might not have provided it for St. Catherine’s, but it would be somewhere, and if it were cataloged anywhere, I would find it here.
After an hour of searching, I’d concluded that Walters was indeed lazy. He’d taken his thesis topic and refashioned it into a dissertation, with some additional material, and every bit of scholarly writing he’d done related back to the same topic. Nothing ground-breaking, but enough to pass muster at the schools he’d attended and worked for, especially if he was willing to take on administrative tasks. Not one for a mental stretch, our J. P., but mediocrity was not a crime. Plagiarism was, but I hadn’t found or heard any evidence of that. Maybe Anita had.
I went into the resource sharing interface and took another look at every request Anita had placed. I recognized the ones I’d done for her, but there were several she’d placed herself, like the thesis. They all related somehow to the Walters thesis. She’d gotten a few articles and a book. What she’d requested and hadn’t gotten was more interesting. The dissertation that Walters had used when researching his own was held in only one library, and the request had come back unfilled. The reason—missing. The author, Rebecca Griswold, had gotten her degree at a university in Vermont, about an hour and a half away. They owned the only copy of the dissertation. As far as I could tell, it had never been digitized.
I did a quick internet search. Dr. Rebecca Griswold was now a professor at another small college in New England. According to her bio on the school’s website, she still taught one class a semester but was no longer serving as advisor to any students. Sounded like semiretirement, however that worked in academia. She’d have a copy of her own work. She also had office hours starting shortly. I decided to try calling her. If I could reach her, it would be faster than email. I got voicemail and left a message, saying I was a librarian helping a local historian with some research and wasn’t having any luck finding what I needed through the usual channels. Worth a try.
I tapped my pen against the notepad. What else? What had I missed? I ran through all the conversations I’d had about Anita and Walters. Sister Mary Josephine had dealt with them both. She’d called Anita a stickler and Walters lazy and pompous, and theorized that we had an academic mystery on our hands. It was looking that way. I went to my bookshelves and surveyed my collection. I’d read quite a few mysteries set in universities, but not many of those scholarly crimes had made it into my permanent collection. I pulled Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers off the shelf—that was one of my favorites. Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie wasn’t academic, but featured characters driven by their obsessions, and Flavia de Luce, the brilliant young detective and chemist, had a passion for poisons.
A passion for poisons. Anything could be poisonous in large quantities. A doctor had once told me that the most dangerous substance in most households was a large bottle of acetaminophen. But that wasn’t what had killed Walters. What had Jennie said? Something vegetal? Who could make or get their hands on something like that?
My phone rang. It was the number I’d just dialed—Dr. Griswold. I answered with my work greeting, “Hello, this is Greer.” Dr. Griswold introduced herself. Before I had the chance to ask her anything, she began to apologize.
“I’m so sorry about the delayed response. I only just got the message last week and haven’t had a chance to call back. I’ve been out—hip replacement—so inconvenient, and right at the beginning of the semester. Now, you’re with the Raven Hill Historical Society, is that right?”
“Actually, I’m with the library, but—”
“Really? I could have sworn the message said historical society, but I could be mistaken.”
“Oh no, I think you may have heard from them. The library and historical society work together on certain projects. That’s why I’m calling—it’s a joint project, and one of their people was in an accident, and another is tied up with a grant deadline, so—”
“Ah, here it is. Yes, she did say she needed information for a grant. On the Valkenburg family. Subject of my dissertation.”
“Yes, that sounds right. I’m trying to figure out—”
“Now, let me see. She also mentioned something about some letters, I think.”
Deciding that attempting another question was pointless, I waited. I heard the rustling of papers. Her desk must look like mine. Possibly worse, I thought as the noise continued.
“Ah! Here it is,” she said. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, I was wondering who—”
“Excellent! So many dropped calls these days. Makes you appreciate the landline. Your colleague was interested in my dissertation and the correspondence I used for my research. Of course, I also had personal journals and household ledgers. Scholars so often overlook the domestic sphere, and it can be so revealing, don’t you think?”
“Yes, certainly,” I said.
“Anyway, she wanted a copy of the dissertation, preferably in digital form. That’s not available, but I do have an extra bound copy somewhere that I could dig out if necessary. Now what really interested me about her message was that she mentioned a local professor who had published on a related subject. She wanted to know if he’d ever contacted me.”
“J. P. Walters?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Had he?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I contacted him. Must have been about thirty years ago. I’d read an article he published. It was going to be part of his dissertation. I got in touch because in the course of further research on the Valkenburg family, I’d come across something that contradicted one of his key points. He wouldn’t have seen it—I found it in a collection of letters that were still held by the family of the writer. I wanted to let him know before he went much further with his work.”
