Paws Аnd Effect

11

It was unseasonably warm the next morning. I took my coffee outside. Owen came to sit on the wide arm of the Adirondack chair. He was washing his face when suddenly his head came up. His ears twitched and he turned his head to look at the side of the house. “Mrrr,” he said.

I waited and after a moment Elliot Gordon came around the side of the house.

I got to my feet. “How do you do that?” I said to Owen. He’d already resumed washing his face and ignored me.

“Good morning,” Elliot said. He was wearing jeans and a close-fitting black sweater with black leather shoulder and elbow patches. And he was carrying a large manila envelope.

“Good morning,” I said. I held up my mug. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“I would, if it’s no trouble.”

“It’s already made.” I gestured to the door. “Come into the kitchen.”

I got Elliot a cup of coffee, refilled my own and we sat at the table. He slid the envelope across the table to me.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Everything I’ve been able to find on the McAllister family.”

I pulled out a sheaf of papers. There were notes in fine, neat handwriting made in the margins of some of the pages. I suspected this was research done by a legal assistant.

“Can you give me the short version?”

“American Land Trust, the organization Danielle McAllister worked for, is funded by her grandmother.”

I frowned, flipping through the pages. “Are you sure?”

He didn’t say anything and when I looked up the expression on his face told me he was just going to ignore my question.

“The money is filtered through a number of different corporate entities,” he said.

“Which means it’s not common knowledge—or something the family wanted to be common knowledge.”

“I think that’s a safe assumption,” Elliot said, adding cream to his coffee.

“Do you think Dani knew?” I asked.

He nodded over the top of his coffee cup. “Based on when the organization was formed and when she went to work for them I don’t see how she couldn’t.”

“The McAllisters have a lot of money.”

“Old money,” Elliot said. “There’s a difference, you know, between old money and nouveau riche.”

“Old money brings tradition, prestige, influence, connections,” I said.

He nodded, taking another sip of his coffee. “Exactly.”

I remembered the story Maggie had told me about Dani’s brother. “Dominic McAllister is a developer. I’m not trying to imply developers don’t care about the environment.”

“McAllister doesn’t,” Elliot said flatly.

“I’ll take your word on that,” I said. I took a sip of my own coffee. “So if environmental concerns aren’t at the top of Dominic McAllister’s priorities, why did the family secretly fund an organization that seems to be at cross-purposes to their day-to-day business?”

“Not the family. Matilda McAllister.”

Hercules wandered in from the living room, glanced at us as he passed the table and went to sit in front of the door to the porch. I got up and opened it for him, grateful that he hadn’t just walked through the way he often did.

“Dani’s grandmother,” I said as I retook my seat.

“She controls the family trust and has money of her own,” Elliot said. “Dani has always had her grandmother’s favor and ear.”

I sighed. “Which also means access to her money.”

“Something some other family members haven’t been happy about.”

I stretched one arm up over my head. “So are you suggesting someone in her family killed her over that?” I sounded skeptical because I was.

“Rumor has it that Matilda has the ear of the governor, not to mention several other powerful people in the State House.”

I tried to follow the logic through. “So if Dani could find any reason to stop the project at Long Lake, no matter how flimsy, between pressure exerted by the coalition and her grandmother’s influence the project would have been scuttled.”

It gave Ernie Kingsley even more of a motive. I thought about my deal with Simon. I was going to hold him to his promise to set up a meeting with the developer. As far as I was concerned I definitely still wanted it.

“Kingsley-Pearson is leveraged to the hilt. If this project folds the company will go under.” Elliot’s face hardened.

“You think someone from the company could be involved,” I said.

“I think neither one of us wants my son to be accused of something he didn’t do.” He had a great poker face. I wouldn’t want to play cards with the man.

“That’s true,” I said.

“You doubt my intentions.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I believe that you care about Marcus and you want to help him. But as my friend Burtis says, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. You didn’t just come out here to share information. You could have done that over the phone. So tell me what else you want.”

He leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. “I want you to give this information to my son’s lawyer. If I give it to Marcus I’m not sure he’ll even look at it. “

“I can do that,” I said. I picked up the papers and put them back in the envelope.

“You and Burtis are friends,” Elliot said. “How did that happen?”

“He saved my life. He and Marcus. And my cats like his turkey jerky.”

“Next time you see him tell him I said hello.”

I nodded. “I will. And just so you know, he still lives in the same place.”

He smiled but didn’t say anything.

After Elliot left I went out to the porch and sat down next to Hercules, who was looking out the window. “Interesting man,” I said.

He wrinkled his nose at me almost as though he was agreeing.

I looked at my watch. I’d been mulling over Roma’s advice to learn more about Dani. I’d told Marcus I wanted to talk to both John and Travis. “Maybe now is a good time,” I said to Hercules.

He jumped down and headed for the kitchen door, meowing at me without even looking back.

I’d made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies after I’d gotten home from Maggie’s. Now I put a dozen in a bag to take to Travis. Hercules was sitting by my shoes.

“Want to come with me?” I asked.

“Meow,” he said, eyeing the bag with the cookies, whiskers twitching.

“No, these are for Travis,” I said. “Do you still want to come?”

I couldn’t help grinning as he cocked his head to one side, seemingly considering the question. “Mrrr,” he said after a moment of thought.

I gestured at the door. “Let’s go.”

We drove out to the Bluebird Motel first, Hercules on the passenger seat beside me, looking through the windshield and making little noises from time to time as though he were giving directions.

Even though Ruby wanted to sell the piece of land her grandfather, Idris, had left to her, she’d given John and Travis permission to access it, so if Travis wasn’t at the Bluebird I’d head for Wisteria Hill.

“I don’t want that development to be built if it’s not the right thing for the town and the land,” Ruby had told me when I’d said I thought it was good of her to let John and Travis on the property. “I’d rather hang on to the land.” She’d grinned at me. “Maybe I’ll build a tree fort and go live out there.”

I was hoping it was early enough that Travis would still be at the motel, and when I pulled off the highway I saw his rental car still in the lot.

“I won’t be very long,” I said to Hercules.

He looked pointedly from me to my cross-body bag. How did he know I had a tiny container of fish-shaped crackers in there? A friend of Roma’s owned a small cat food company and Owen and Hercules had been taste testers—happily—several times for his new products.

“Stay in the truck and I’ll give them to you when I come back.” I patted the bag.

He sighed and laid down on the seat, putting his head on a small paperback book on the history of Minnesota that Abigail had gotten for me for a quarter at a flea market.

I picked up the bag of cookies and got out of the truck. I knocked on the door of Travis’s motel room, expecting him to ask who it was. Instead, after a moment, he opened the door. His hair was disheveled. There were dark circles under his eyes and a couple of days of stubble on his cheeks. Everything about him, even the way he was standing, was so profoundly sad I knew I couldn’t ask him any questions about Dani. I knew it would be wrong to take advantage of his grief like that.

“Hi, Travis,” I said. “I just came to see how you were, if you need anything.” I suddenly felt a little silly standing there with the bag of cookies. I held them out to him. “I, uh, made these for you.”

He didn’t take the bag. “Did you come to plead Marcus’s case?” he asked in a voice edged with snark. “Are you going to tell me we should grieve together?”

I shook my head slowly. My heart ached for him, my chest actually hurting. “No,” I said. “I just came to see if I could do anything for you. Not make you feel worse. I’m sorry.” I turned to go.

“Have the police figured out who killed her?” Travis said.

I turned back around to face him. “Not yet.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “She came here because he was here. She wanted to talk to him.”

Dani knew Marcus was in Mayville Heights? “How do you know?”

He swallowed and his face tightened. “I went looking for her, after the restaurant that morning. She was on her phone talking to someone. I heard her tell whomever she was talking to that now she’d have the chance to talk to him. Then she said, ‘No more secrets.’” He pulled a hand across the stubble on his chin. “She wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t tell me what the hell she was talking about. She wouldn’t let me apologize.”

The bit of conversation Travis had overheard didn’t prove anything. I sighed. “I’m sorry.” The words seemed inadequate but I didn’t know what else to say.

“Secrets, Kathleen,” Travis said bitterly. “All these years later and the two of them are still keeping secrets.”

I noticed he was still referring to Dani in the present tense. Marcus had done that a few times as well.

“I know,” I said.

“You know?” He narrowed his eyes at me.

I let out a long slow breath. “I know there’s something they were keeping from everyone. I don’t know what it is.”

Travis’s mouth worked before he spoke. “You’re okay with that?”

I looked away for a minute and then met his gaze again. “Marcus told me it wasn’t his secret to tell. Which means he’s protecting Dani. I don’t expect you to ever be friends again with Marcus after what happened, but you know whatever else he is, he’s deeply loyal to the people he cares about. Whatever his reason is for keeping this secret, he thinks it’s important. I know he’d do the same thing for me if I needed it.”

He looked at me for what felt like a long time. Then he cleared his throat and inclined his head in the direction of the room behind him. “I have a coffeemaker. You want a cup?”

I nodded. “I’d like that.”

Travis and I sat at the small round table just inside his room. He told me more about Dani, his face lighting up as he related the story of how they met in high school when he skidded down an icy stretch of sidewalk outside the school and she caught him. As he had before, he talked about Dani in the present tense, as though she wasn’t gone.

Very quickly I realized I wasn’t going to learn anything from Travis that would tell me more about who Danielle McAllister had been as a person. His memories were colored by how he felt about her. There was nothing critical or negative in them and while I’d thought more than once since her death that I probably would have liked Dani if I’d had the chance to get to know her, I knew that no one was quite as perfect as Travis described. It struck me that he had been a little obsessed with her.

Still, it seemed to help him to talk. “If I hear anything about the investigation, I’ll let you know,” I said when I got up to leave.

“Thank you,” he said. It seemed like there was something else he wanted to say so I waited for a moment without speaking. Finally he spoke, looking past me as he did. “Tell, uh, tell Marcus that Dani’s family is having a service for her a week from Sunday. Maybe . . . maybe we could, uh, drive up together.”

I nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

Hercules was sitting on the driver’s side when I opened the truck door. He looked up expectantly at me. “Let me get in,” I said. He moved over about a foot. I took the little box of crackers out of my bag and shook three of them onto the seat.

“Ready?” I asked after he’d eaten them. He made a quick pass at his face with a paw then moved over a few inches and gazed out the windshield. He was ready.

I got home in lots of time to change for work, make a sandwich and start dinner in the slow cooker before I left for the library. It was a quiet morning and I was arranging a display of Halloween-themed books when Simon Janes walked into the building just before lunch. He nodded to Mary, who was at the desk proofreading the mock-up of the poster advertising Spookarama, and walked over to me.

“Good morning, Kathleen,” he said with a smile.

I smiled back at him. “Good morning.”

“Could we talk somewhere private?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I led him over to one of our meeting rooms. Once I’d closed the door he handed me the brown envelope he was holding.

“What is it?’ I asked.

“Ernie Kingsley is a lousy businessman and a first-class ass, but he didn’t kill anyone.”

“How do you know?” I said, my heart sinking.

Simon indicated the envelope. “Look inside.”

I lifted the flap. The only thing inside was a photograph. Looking at it, I realized it was a screen capture from a security video. The black-and-white image was of Kingsley and a young woman who barely looked eighteen wearing red stilettos, red fringed bikini bottoms and nothing else. She was giving him a lap dance.

I looked at Simon. “Where did you get this?”

“From a club just outside of Red Wing,” he said. “Look at the time stamp in the corner.”

I looked at the number on the bottom right-hand side of the picture.

“He was there for more than an hour,” Simon said. “I saw all the footage.” His hands were jammed in his pockets, feet apart. He looked uncomfortable.

I did the math in my head. “He didn’t kill Dani. There’s no way he had time.”

“No, he didn’t.”

I looked up from the picture. “You knew. That’s why you said you’d get me a meeting with him if I still wanted one.”

“I suspected,” he said. “I’d heard some talk—he wasn’t exactly discreet. It wasn’t that hard to find out for certain.”

I handed the photo and envelope back to him. “Thank you,” I said.

“I’m sorry it wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”

I sighed softly. “I just want the truth.”

Simon slipped the photo back into the envelope. “In my experience that’s not always so easy to find.”

There were even fewer people in the library in the afternoon than there had been in the morning so I was able to spend some time in the workroom doing some of the simpler repairs to our pile of damaged books. I left the more complicated work—including the sticky picture book from Tommy Justason—for Abigail, who had just taken a book-repair workshop in early September.

I was staring at a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, wondering how a piece of purple bubble gum had gotten wedged down between the spine of the book and the dust jacket, when there was a knock on the half-open door behind me. I turned around to find John standing there smiling at me.

“Hi,” he said. “Mary was downstairs. She told me to come up. I hope that was okay.”

I stood up and rolled my neck from one shoulder to the other. “Yes,” I said. “I could use a break. I’ve been hunched over so long I’m beginning to feel like Quasimodo.”

He was carrying a small white paper bag with handles. He offered it to me. “I just came to thank you for all your help, not just for letting me use the herbarium. You introduced me to Rebecca and Maggie. And I know you went out to check on Travis this morning.”

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said. “Thank you.” The bag held apples from Hollister’s.

“They’re Honeycrisp,” he said. “Good for eating and cooking, so I was told.”

“I’m sorry about everything, John,” I said, setting the apples on the table.

“Me too.” He swiped a hand over his neck. He seemed subdued, even given everything that happened.

“You didn’t find what you needed, did you?”

He shook his head. “The bats are on Wisteria Hill land. There’s no evidence of them in any caves on Ruby Blackthorne’s property or on the land around the lake. And it’s probably a good idea that you don’t ask me how I can be sure about that last bit.”

“So the development will go ahead?”

John shifted restlessly from one foot to the other. “Barring some kind of last-minute Hail Mary, yes.” He looked down at his feet for a moment. “I feel like I let her down.”

I knew he meant Dani. “I know how hard you looked for something, anything, to use to stop the project.”

He laughed but there really wasn’t any humor in the sound. “I thought about faking something, you know. Capturing a few bats somehow and relocating them. Looking for some plant and—” He shook his head. “I know how stupid that sounds. Dani would have said, ‘Have you lost your mind, John-Boy?’ I wanted to finish what she started, but not like that.”

“It was a good decision,” I said.

“I keep thinking that if she were alive she would have been able to find something.” He smiled. “We met in middle school, you know. In the rock club—Dani and thirteen geeky boys. We all spent more time looking at her than we did at rocks. Sometimes I wish we could just go back there and do things just a little bit different.” He shook his head. “I have to get going. I need to return the journals to Rebecca.”

“Take care of yourself, John,” I said.

He nodded. “You too, Kathleen.”

* * *

Marcus called while I was on my supper break. He’d stopped in at the house to check on Owen and Hercules and return my stepladder. I told him about my visit with Travis and relayed his message.

“I’ll call him,” Marcus said. “Or maybe it would be better to just go see him. Thanks.” We made plans to check out a flea market after the library closed the next afternoon and I hung up.

I was no closer to figuring out who Dani was as a person. I wanted to know the real woman, not the idealized version that Marcus and his friends had told me about.

* * *

The evening was just as quiet as the rest of the day had been—sometimes Fridays were that way—and I was home a few minutes earlier than usual. I pulled on my sweats, grabbed my laptop and sat at the kitchen table. I’d just turned on the computer when a furry paw poked its way around the basement door and the rest of Owen followed. He looked surprised to see me.

“I live here,” I said. He padded over to me. I picked him up and he planted his two front paws on my chest and peered at my face. “How was your day?” I asked, as I scratched behind his left ear. He made a rumbling sound of satisfaction low in his chest. After a moment he turned to look at the computer screen.

“I wanted to see what else I could find out about Dani,” I said. “Roma pointed out that if I knew more about her as a person maybe I’d be able to figure out why someone killed her.”

Owen wrinkled up his gray tabby face. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t think much of the idea or because I’d mentioned Roma. He’d had his shots just a couple of weeks earlier and he was still nursing a grudge at her over that.

It took an hour before I found what I was looking for. Owen sat on my lap and watched the screen intently, pawing at the air occasionally as though trying to tell me what to click on next. In the end it was luck as much as it was my good research skills and his suggestions.

American Land Trust had created a memorial page for Dani on their website. As I read the comments I began to get more of a sense of the woman. She had a great sense of humor and a penchant for playing pranks on her friends. She was a big Minnesota Wild fan and it struck me that she would have gotten a kick out of meeting Eddie.

The remembrances were all heartfelt, but one comment made my throat tighten. It was one sentence: The light has gone out of my world. Tanith Jeffery. Dani’s best friend, maybe?

It was an uncommon name, Tanith—the Phoenician goddess of love, I remembered reading somewhere, because those kinds of facts stuck in my head. And maybe in the end it wasn’t luck. Maybe it was that tiny piece of information that twigged something in my brain.

Tanith Jeffery was a jewelry designer, I learned. I found several photos of her eating ice cream and standing, arms linked with three other women, smiling into the sun at Twin Cities Pride. After that it took some leaps, but everything began to make sense.

I went into the living room and called Marcus. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

“I’m just leaving Eddie’s. I can stop in on my way home.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

I went out to the porch to wait for him. Owen had disappeared again.

Marcus saw me as he came around the house. He waved and then stepped inside the porch, leaning down to kiss me. “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“Waiting for you,” I said, “looking at the stars, thinking.”

“So what did you need to talk to me about?”

“Sit, please.” I gestured to the bench by the window. I sat next to him, turning so I was facing him. “I know that there was nothing going on between you and Dani when you were in college,” I said. I couldn’t see his face very well in the moonlight that was coming through the window, but it seemed to me that he blanched a little. “Her grandmother was—is—extremely conservative. I think the day Travis caught you two kissing outside her dorm room you were covering for Dani so he wouldn’t find out there was a girl in her room—a girl she was involved with.”

For a moment he didn’t say anything, then he sighed softly. “I wanted to tell you, but like I said, it wasn’t my secret to tell.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“She wasn’t sleeping with Travis. That’s why he was so angry. He thought we’d done what they weren’t doing.” His arms were propped on his legs and his hands hung between his knees. “She really did try to end things with him. Like I said, he was pressuring her for one more chance and her grandmother, who was like mother and father to Dani after her parents died, was pushing her to try to work things out. Dani adored her grandmother but the woman has very rigid beliefs. If she’d known the truth . . .” Marcus shook his head. “I don’t think Dani wanted to take the chance of losing the only family she had left. You saw for yourself what Travis can be like when he’s angry. He would have gone right to her grandmother.”

“Does John know?” I asked.

Marcus shook his head. “How did you find out?” he asked.

I told him about the comment Tanith Jeffery had written online. “It seemed pretty clear she and Dani were close. When I did a little digging I discovered that Tanith was gay. After that it was good research skills and a bit of luck.”

Marcus still looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“I found a photo of a dinner at which Tanith Jeffery received a design award. She was at a table of what I take were her friends. Dani was one of them. The look on her face . . . It just didn’t feel like much of a leap to think they were involved.”

I reached over and linked my fingers through his. “I’d seen the same look on the face of one of my sister’s friends when Sara won an award for volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club. It was a mix of pride and love. When I told Sara she thought I was crazy, but I turned out to be right.”

Marcus leaned back until his head was against the wall. “Her grandmother was funding American Land Trust.”

“I know.”

He smiled at me in the near darkness. “I should have guessed you’d figure that out as well.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Your father did. I have everything he’s come up with so far. I think you should give it to Brady.”

The smile disappeared. “My father?”

I nodded. “He’s trying to help.”

“I went to see him. I told him to go home.”

I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to see that,” he said.

“Do you think Dani was afraid that if her grandmother knew who she really was she’d cut off the money?” I asked.

He nodded. “Her biggest worry was losing what she had left of her family, but yes, she was afraid that if her brother found out he’d use the information against her. He had no idea their grandmother was basically funding everything Dani did. Dani said he wasn’t exactly the tree-hugger type.”

“Did she know you were here—in Mayville Heights? Or was meeting you at Eric’s just something that happened by chance?” Travis, at least, seemed to believe Dani had come to town to see Marcus.

Marcus turned his head to look at me. “I wondered about that, you know. She said she needed to talk to me but she hadn’t known I was here. It was just a coincidence.”

“What did she want to talk about?” I asked.

He put his arm around my shoulder and I leaned against him with my head on his shoulder. “I wish I knew,” he said.