I couldn’t have said it better. “It seems I’m always needing to thank you, Henry.”
“That’s not a bad thing.” He offered a disarming smile. “Have you had a chance to look up what this Sunaqua Estates is all about?”
“Not a minute.”
“Then let’s do it.”
I gave him what I hoped he interpreted as my most appreciative look.
“Maddie has the best computer in the house,” I said, at the same time thinking how Henry wasn’t much better than I was as far as facility with the Internet. “And she’s not one to do things blindly. She has to have her curiosity completely satisfied if she’s going to help.”
“I have one of those myself,” Henry said. “Let’s start the old-fashioned way.” He pulled out his cell phone and asked for directory assistance for Sunaqua Falls, New York.
I took a deep breath, feeling as though I were about to enroll in a class I didn’t want to take but needed in order to graduate.
I grabbed a notepad and pen when I heard Henry take the next step and ask for Sunaqua Estates. A shiver ran through my body as Henry recited the phone number. There really was a Sunaqua Estates in Sunaqua Falls, and it had a working telephone.
I looked at my watch. A little before five p.m. on the West Coast, eight o’clock in New York. I could only hope that all estates were closed for the day.
“It’s too late to call,” I said.
“Not if it’s a hospital or some other kind of medical facility,” Henry said. I frowned at the reasonableness of his argument. “Unless you don’t want to know?” he added.
Buzzz. Buzzz.
Ah, another reprieve. A nonthreatening one, I hoped.
Henry rose quickly and put his hand on my arm. “I’ll get it,” he said.
He looked through the peephole and opened the door to Susan, who probably wondered at the enthusiastic welcome we both gave her.
“I hope I’m not interrupting something?” she said. Along with other giveaway forms of dialect, her habit of ending sentences with a question mark had returned, after she’d spent years trying to get rid of it.
Yes, you are interrupting,
I thought,
and I thank you for that.
My breathing was erratic as I carried the (almost)
restored room box from the crafts room to the atrium for Susan’s examination. Would she notice a little disturbance on the floor against the far wall? Maddie and I had used fake sawdust and wood shavings in an attempt to cover up the residual glue where the bottom of the wine cork had rested.
I had my answer as soon as I saw Susan’s troubled expression. Seated next to Henry, she held the box at eye level.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. “I was worried about the match to the original shade of brown on the outside. I didn’t have natural light when I was mixing the acrylics, so the color might be a little off.”
Covering for Maddie came naturally to me, but I regretted having had my granddaughter work on the box with me. I’d thought she was ready to glue splinters together and mix paint, but she should have had more experience before tackling the tasks. There was a lot of skill required in choosing the right glue for each job, and color matching required a trained eye.
I’d failed my friend in a simple task of patching a miniature scene, something I did on at least a weekly basis for one project or another.
“The color is fine,” Susan said. On closer inspection I interpreted her frown lines as concern rather than disappointment. “Is this how you found the box in Oliver’s apartment?”
I hesitated. I looked at Henry, who knew the whole story. “Is something wrong?” I repeated my question to Susan.
Her lips were almost completely folded back into her mouth; her face had gone white. She looked at the spot where Maddie and I had removed the flash drive-cumworktable. “Wasn’t there a”—Susan squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them—“something else here? Where’s the brown worktable?”
Now it seemed it was Susan herself who’d painted and hidden the flash drive.
My head was dizzy with my back-and-forth theories of the camouflaged drive.
First, I was sure Susan had done a poor, hurried job of painting what I thought was an unimportant piece of plastic, to add an extra element to her little scene. Then I assumed it was Oliver who’d used his leftover house paint to disguise what was actually a flash drive. Now I was back to the notion of Susan’s rushed, uneven painting, but this time to hide the fact of the drive.
I tried to think of a reason she’d have for wanting to keep the existence of the drive from the police. And from me. The drive’s most obvious import was that its contents could show just how many people had a good motive to kill her brother. Something Susan should have welcomed.
Besides, Susan used computers every day in her job as a market analyst. And she was about ten years younger than me. (I had a slightly jaundiced view of the computer literacy curve, matching the age curve exactly.) Susan would know how to retrieve information from the drive and offer it as proof of murder, or destroy it if it made her brother appear less than pure as he’d carried out his inspection responsibilities.
Unless she also had trouble getting through the password protection.
Susan placed the scene on the table and lowered her head until it touched the top frame of the room box. At the first sound of sobs, Henry put his hand out and rubbed her shoulder.
“You built the extra workbench? Using the flash drive?” I asked.
Susan nodded without lifting her head. She whispered a weak “Yes.”
I had a hopeful thought. Maybe Susan thought the drive was old, with nothing on it, or that it was an extra one, like the dozens of discs and other pieces of plastic that were scattered around computer areas these days, ready to be scooped up by a miniaturist needing a structural element in a dollhouse or room box. The title of the drive had come up
Potentials Data
, but perhaps Susan didn’t know that and saw what she considered a useful found object for a last-minute addition to her present for her brother.
Her continued distress—she’d sat up straighter now and tried to control her breathing—said she’d known exactly what she was doing. Hiding information. Hiding evidence.
“Do you know what’s on the drive?” I asked.
“No, I couldn’t find the password in Oliver’s files and I couldn’t hack it in the short time I had. I just wanted the drive to be out of harm’s way until I had access to better software. It was stupid, but I was trying to protect my brother, in case . . . just in case.”
I thought back to Susan’s withholding the small facts of her brother’s DUI and the bribery charges lodged, if not filed, against him during his tenure in Tennessee. She might even know of the bribe it took to get him his Lincoln Point job. Susan had handicapped me from the beginning, and as much as I felt sorry for her loss, a wave of annoyance came over me. She’d used me, sending me to Oliver’s apartment, hoping I’d find the room box before the police or Lynch and company did. She counted on my not noticing the flash drive.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “The flash drive probably has the proof you need that Oliver was about to bring down a lot of people. Isn’t that why you wanted the police to comb through his list of potentials? Isn’t that why you pressed me into service—to spur them on.”
“I knew what was on the hard copy list the police picked up right after he . . . died. I hoped that would be enough to find his killer. I didn’t know for sure what was on the flash drive. I found it in my desk drawer after Oliver had just left my house a couple of weeks ago. There was no way to tell if he’d done it intentionally or not. Maybe he was trying to hide it, or maybe he wanted me to have it in case something happened to him.” The tears began again, streaming down her face. “I just couldn’t take a chance until I saw what was on it.”
“You thought the drive might have something on it that incriminated your brother.” I saw only the slightest of nods. “And if there was, you’d have destroyed it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and I believed her.
As short a time as a week ago, I might have judged Susan harshly for considering doing something illegal, like hiding evidence of a crime. Tonight I understood.
Henry, who’d left the atrium, now returned with a cup of tea and handed it to my guest. “Take this, Susan, and try to relax. You know if you don’t tell Gerry everything, there’s no way for her to help you, and she’s already wasted a lot of time.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you go to Oliver’s apartment and retrieve the room box yourself, Susan?” I asked as more confusion washed over me. “In fact, why did you give the drive back to him after you found it in your desk?”
“I know it sounds crazy, Gerry. I made the workbench with the flash drive and the cork and took the assembly over there shortly after I found it. Things were starting to really heat up with Lynch and Crowley. I slipped it onto the floor of the workroom scene, thinking that disguising it was the best thing. And then if Oliver asked for it, I’d be able to tell him where it was. But then he . . .” She choked up and stopped. “I never even got to ask him about it.”
Though I felt I had a handle on who did what to the flash drive when, I knew it would take a notepad and pen and a lot of doodling for me to track its journey. I saw an image of a small piece of plastic, first red, then brown, traveling from Oliver to Susan, back to Oliver, and now back to Susan.
“And you sent me to get it because . . . ?”
“I was afraid to be caught there with it. What if the police came back while I was there and confiscated what I had—it would look awful if I had evidence on me.”
“But it would be okay if they found me there with evidence?”
“Uh-huh.” I gave her a strange, frowning look. “You know, with your nephew and all, I didn’t see it as a problem. Or what if Patrick Lynch or Max Crowley came?”
I started to tell her who exactly did show up, with at least one gun, but decided she wouldn’t be able to handle that right now. “What if?” I said.
“I figured you could act perfectly innocent because you wouldn’t know what a flash drive was, Gerry.” She paused. “No offense.”
“None taken. You didn’t count on Maddie.” I felt a certain pride, as if my granddaughter were making up for my shortcomings. Wasn’t that the principal mission of the next generations?
Susan gulped down the tea, prompting Henry to remove the empty cup and take it to the kitchen for a refill. We were silent until he returned, both using the time to draw deep breaths.
“Susan, is there anything else you’re holding back?” I asked.
Henry said, “If you’d like me to leave, so you can be more open—”
“Henry knows everything,” I said, wondering what I meant, other than the fact that I didn’t want Henry to leave.
“It doesn’t matter now, anyway.” Susan looked at me. “You already gave the drive to the police, didn’t you?” I could see that she hoped she was wrong.
“It’s really the best thing,” Henry said. “We’ll just have to wait and see what’s on the drive. I’m sure the police have more resources for getting into these things.”
If they don’t, they should, I thought.
I had a silly question. “Susan, was it really you who painted that drive and glued it to the wine cork?”
“Awful, wasn’t it?” she said. I saw the first sign of a smile. “I was in a big hurry.”
“I won’t tell Linda,” I promised.
I was happy to see my friend’s smile widen.
Susan began to relax. I hated to take advantage of her
vulnerable state, but I hoped she’d be able to offer pieces to a puzzle in my mind: what was the relationship among all the players in the city inspector’s office?
“Once Oliver was accused of bribery years ago, it made him very sensitive to the crime and he went looking for trouble, sometimes in dangerous places,” she said.
“Crowley being one of those places,” Henry said.
Susan had nodded. “Except Crowley didn’t even wait for trouble to come his way. He preempted it. Crowley paid off the powers that be to look the other way about Oliver’s DUI, without Oliver knowing about it. Oliver just figured his past troubles were overlooked because they were so long ago and so minor.”
“And Crowley then had something to hold over Oliver’s head,” Henry said.
“So if he turned out to be the kind of inspector who didn’t want to cooperate with Lynch and the others, they could always blackmail him,” I said, proud that I’d kept up with all the cross-references.
“Uh-huh. They could threaten to go public that Oliver got his job under false pretenses,” Susan said. “Unless Oliver could gather enough evidence against them.”
“Kind of like nuclear deterrence,” Henry said.
I trusted that the analogy was apt, though I knew little of the strategy for either blackmail or war.
One mystery solved, however. Oliver wasn’t as much of a cad as Skip and I had thought. The revelation brought me relief, as if somehow a course of good “brother” karma had begun and my own husband, Beverly’s brother, would be exonerated as well.
The labyrinthine reasoning didn’t bother me as much as it should have.
“So you think the flash drive has evidence against Lynch and Crowley?” Henry asked Susan.
“I surely do,” she said.
We all fell silent. I figured we shared the same thought in one form or another—the flash drive was a dangerous item to be caught with.
I was relieved that it was now out of my hands and my house.
I wondered what was keeping Maddie busy all the while
we were talking, especially since it was getting toward dinnertime. Susan had said, “No, thank you,” to my offer of food. She’d excused herself to fix her face, as she’d put it, and gone home with her room box, swearing there would be no more holding back information. I promised to tell her as soon as I heard anything from Skip.