Daughter of Ashes

TWENTY-FIVE

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

When I arrived at the hospital, the volunteer at the visitors’ desk informed me that Rusty Heberling had been moved to a rehab facility. A quick call to his father, Dwight, told me where.

Bayview Health and Rehabilitation Center sat on several rolling green acres on the outskirts of town, although there was no ‘bay view’ that I could see.

I found Rusty in his room, a comfortable single furnished more like a hotel room than a hospital, with a bay window overlooking an ornamental lake.

He was seated in a wheelchair by the window reading a Kindle in a large-size font, but looked up at my ‘Hello,’ and seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

‘Mrs Ives!’

‘How are you doing?’ I asked.

Rusty closed the Kindle and slipped it between his thigh and the arm of the chair. ‘As you see, having a bit of trouble getting the stupid legs to cooperate.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

He shrugged. ‘The Nazis in the PT department work me over pretty good. I need to get well just to get away from them, you know?’

‘How’s your mom?’ I asked.

‘Grace?’ Rusty smiled. ‘It’s spay and neuter day, so she’s out at the animal shelter. Sometimes I think she cares more about the animals than people.’

‘Actually, I’m glad she’s not here because there’s something I need to talk to you about.’ I reached into my handbag for his iPhone and held it out to him.

‘Damn! You found it!’ A frown clouded his face as what I had just said sank in. ‘What?’ he asked, withdrawing his hand without touching the phone. He eyed me suspiciously.

‘Your phone had been badly water damaged, but I was able to dry it out,’ I began. A spare chair sat at the foot of his bed. I dragged it over so I could sit down next to the wheelchair and talk to him face-to-face.

Without confessing to snooping in his phone, I said, ‘I’m worried about you, Rusty. Did it occur to you that whoever was driving that black Mustang intended to kill you?’

Rusty seemed to be studying the silver medallions on the wallpaper and refused to meet my eyes.

‘You know who it was, don’t you?’

He turned his head, sucked in his lower lip and nodded silently.

‘For God’s sake, who?’

‘The only dude I know who drives a badass car like that is Tad Chew.’

I couldn’t place the name. ‘Who is Tad Chew?’ I prompted.

‘Clifton Ames’s grandson. The youngest kid of his daughter, Annette Chew.’

Ah! I remembered the showoff in the yellow Speedo at Kendall’s picnic, the kid who’d told the sheriff he’d seen Caitlyn… the Mustang in Kendall’s parking lot. I caught my breath. Whoa! So, Clifton Ames was sending his grandchildren out to do his dirty work for him. What rock had he crawled out from under?

‘Just because he wears J Crew and Banana Republic and starts at Princeton in the fall, Tad thinks he’s hot shit.’ Rusty was on a roll. ‘Works for his uncle Jack part-time, too. Dude doesn’t need the money, so what’s that all about, I wonder?’

I flashed back to the day of Jack Ames’s visit to Our Song, pictured the preppy, college-aged kid who’d slid out of the driver’s seat of Ames’s Acura. Hadn’t Jack called his young chauffeur ‘Tad?’ So, maybe it wasn’t Clifton Ames who wanted to silence Rusty. Maybe it was his son, Jack, the owner of the face smiling out at the world from political billboards all over Tilghman County. If Jack Ames had aspirations to occupy the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a family scandal might very well derail his plans.

‘Look, Rusty,’ I said, moving on. ‘What puzzles me is that you were sharing this information with Kendall. It seems to me that your relationship with your biological mom was a lot closer than you wanted anyone to know.’

‘The last couple of years…’ Randy began, then he shrugged. ‘I guess Kendall was on a guilt trip or something. Calling me up, giving me presents. I didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings. Grace, I mean.’

I set the iPhone on Rusty’s knee and held it there. ‘You need to show these photos to the police. If what you say about Tad Chew is correct, whatever Kendall did with the information most likely got her killed.’

‘I know.’ His head lolled against the back of his chair. ‘I am such a shit!’

‘What did she do with it?’

Rusty took a deep breath and blew it out slowly through his lips. ‘You were at her picnic?’

I nodded.

‘Then you saw that boat, that swimming pool?’

‘I did. Pretty hard to miss.’

‘Kendall didn’t pay for all that like everybody thinks. Cliff Ames did.’

I sat back, stunned. ‘But why?’

‘About ten years ago, Cliff and Kendall had an affair. She was way younger than him, of course, so I was kinda surprised when she bragged about it one night at the Crusty Crab after she’d had a bit too much to drink. Somehow, while they were still sleeping together, she found out that Clifton’s old man had rigged it so that he could buy up a bunch of small farms that were being auctioned off for delinquent taxes.’

‘Kendall was already working in real estate by then, wasn’t she, so she might have stumbled across records of the transactions,’ I suggested. Just as I had.

‘Anyway,’ Rusty continued, ‘Clifton junior told Kendall that his dad got him a summer job at the county tax office so that the kid was in on the ground floor, so to speak. Not sure how they managed it, but Kendall told me that the farms went to auction before the owners knew what hit them.’

‘The son of a bitch.’ The words just fell out of my mouth. I couldn’t help it. That certainly explained why Clifton junior was so interested in what records were stored in the courthouse basement.

‘Clifton senior allowed most of the former owners to stay on as tenants, like at your place, but there were a bunch of farms up north of town…’ Rusty paused. ‘That’s where Clifton Farms built their processing plant.’

‘I see.’

‘After they broke it off, Kendall used that information to get “loans” from Cliff, but I don’t think any of them were ever repaid.’

That figured, I thought. ‘And Cliff’s marriage to Nancy Hazlett?’

Rusty’s eyebrows shot up under his bandage. ‘That was a shocker, wasn’t it?’

‘Why on earth did you share that information with Kendall?’

‘Insurance?’ He closed his eyes, massaged his eyelids with his fingers then said, without actually looking at me, ‘I didn’t think she’d actually use it. I’m really sorry about that.’

‘Look, Rusty. I think there’s a very good chance that either Clifton Ames or his son, Jack, murdered your mother. There’s also the possibility that Clifton murdered Nancy Hazlett back in 1952 to stop her from telling anyone about their marriage or the baby.’

‘Shit,’ Rusty said, stretching the word out into two syllables. ‘Are you telling me that Clifton Ames was the father of the baby up your chimney?’

‘I believe so, and I think you can help me prove it.’

‘How?’

‘I want you to promise me that you’ll call Andy Hubbard and tell him what you just told me. Got that?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, sounding like he meant it. ‘But how does that prove that Ames fathered that baby?’

‘I have a plan, and it involves making Clifton Ames believe that the cops are going to exhume Nancy’s body to test it for a DNA match to the baby.’

‘Are they actually going to do that?’

‘No, they don’t have to. Nancy’s brother, Thomas Hazlett, submitted a sample of his DNA for analysis. They already have a positive I.D.’

Rusty looked relieved. ‘So what’s the point?’

‘If Nancy didn’t die a suicide, then there may be evidence that her neck had been broken, just like Kendall’s.’

Rusty lowered his head, wrapped his arms around himself in a bear hug and was silent for a long time. When he looked up again, he said, ‘I feel sick.’

I patted his knee. ‘I think we all do.’