Sleeping With The Fishes

Chapter 15

Sophie and I went our separate ways down the street as I made my way toward Betty’s. I didn’t even care about getting anything to eat right now; all I wanted was some more caffeine. If Betty could just hook an IV directly between me and her coffee machine, right now I would be all for that.

I walked down Main Street like a zombie. Luckily, I was a zombie that still made my way along the sidewalk instead of wandering into the street, and by the time I reached Betty’s, the fresh air–and the promise of imminent caffeine consumption–made me feel a little bit better.

I passed the A-frame sign out the front which today was advertising chocolate pecan cheesecake slices for only $3 each, when suddenly I stopped.

The sign. That was where I’d seen the writing before. I pulled out my phone, just to be sure I wasn’t being completely paranoid, and opened it up to the photo I’d taken a couple of days earlier from inside Matt Smith’s home. Sure enough, the writing on the threatening letter was identical to the writing on the A-frame board. Whoever wrote this had to be the person who wrote the threat.

I knew it wasn’t Betty; I could bet my own life she would never write a threatening letter to anyone. Entering the café, I was relieved to see that the lunch rush was ending–it was rarely ever that big on a random Tuesday after tourist season anyway–and that there were only a couple of tables that were filled with patrons.

“Hi, Angela,” Betty said to me with a smile from behind the coffee machine. “I heard you had a pretty rough night last night.”

I grinned. “Is it a sign you’re getting old when a rough night means you had a few bad dreams and your cats kept you up?”

Betty laughed. “I don’t think the cause really matters when you feel the same way as if you’d drank a twelve-pack of beer.”

“You got that right,” I told her. “Can I have another double shot latte? Maybe make it vanilla this time? And a BLT, please.”

“Coming right up,” Betty said, and I settled myself in on one of the stools at the counter, eyeing the chocolate pecan cheesecake gluttonously. It was only three dollars today, after all. That reminded me of what I had to do while I was here; now that I knew I couldn’t ignore it. When Betty brought over my latter, I motioned for her to wait.

“Can you have a look at this?” I asked, and then lowered my voice. “It’s a threat that Matt Smith had sent to his home just a few days before he died.”

I showed her the picture, and Betty’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “Oh no,” she said softly.

“I didn’t realize where it had come from until I walked past the sign today,” I said.

“We need to go speak with him,” Betty said, motioning to the kitchen. “But be gentle. I think there’s probably an explanation here that doesn’t end with Carson being the murderer.”

I nodded and followed Betty into the back area of the café. Funnily enough, I’d never actually been in the back part of the café, but right now I didn’t focus on the mounds of baking equipment everywhere; I was focused on the shy, skinny teenager carefully pouring icing sugar into a huge bowl that was already filled with cream cheese.

“Excuse me, Carson?” Betty asked, and the teenager looked up expectantly.

“Yes, Mrs. MacMahon?”

“Could you come over here for a minute please? We have something we need to show you.”

“Ok, give me one second, I just need to finish this measurement so I don’t mess it up,” he said, carefully pouring out the right amount of icing sugar before getting up and coming over to where we were, wiping his hands on the apron he was wearing. “What can I do for you?” he asked, his eyes passing from Betty to mine, confusion written all over them. I opened the picture showing the threatening letter, and showed it to him.

As soon as Carson saw the letter, his face went white. I honestly thought he might pass out. To his credit, he didn’t deny anything. “You wrote this,” I said matter-of-factly, and he nodded.

“Please don’t tell my parents,” he begged, his eyes pleading, and I realized in that moment that Betty had been right to tell me to go easy on him. There was no way this boy had actually killed someone.

“Why don’t we sit down over here and talk about this?” Betty asked, motioning to an empty space toward the far end of the room. She grabbed some empty milk crates from under a table and we sat down on them, Betty and I both facing Carson, who looked like he was going to cry.

“Do you want to tell us what happened?” Betty asked him softly, and he nodded.

“My parents got divorced five years ago,” he said. “My dad had been cheating on my mom with a lady from his work in Portland, and then one day he just left. Never came back. My mom worked really hard to keep everything the same for my sister and me, but last year she said that she couldn’t keep up with the payments on our house by herself and that we had to move.”

Carson bit his lip and stopped for a moment before continuing.

“So my mom sold the house that I’d grown up in. It was ok. I knew that we couldn’t stay there, and we moved to one of the small duplexes on Fir Street. But then a few months after my mom sold the place, to this Matt Smith guy, a big sign showed up in the middle of it, with some kind of development application.”

“Matt Smith wanted to change the house?” Betty asked, and Carson shook his head.

“No. I asked around to find out what it meant. He wanted to demolish the house completely and put some apartments on the land. I was so mad. I grew up in that house! He couldn’t just destroy it completely. I went and found him one day, when he was in Willow Bay. I asked him to keep the house, to rent it out to someone, or to flip it like they show on all those shows on HGTV. Those make money, right? Anyway, he laughed at me. He told me I was just a little boy who didn’t understand business, and what did I care what happened to a place I didn’t live in anymore anyway? He told me the apartments would be a lot nicer than the ugly house that was there now anyway.”

Carson stopped to wipe a tear from his eye. Matt Smith had obviously completely humiliated him. I found myself feeling really badly for the poor kid.

“So I found out where he lived and I wrote him the letters. I was never going to do anything about it, but I wanted him to feel as bad as I did about what he was doing. Plus, a little part of me thought that maybe if he got scared by my letters, he might change his mind about tearing down my old home.”

Carson looked up at us for the first time during this monologue. “But I swear, I had nothing to do with him dying! Ever since it turned out someone killed him I’ve been scared that someone would find the letter and figure out I sent it and think I did it!”

“Ok, thanks Carson,” Betty told him. “You can go back to work now. I don’t think either one of us believe you killed Matt Smith,” she said, looking at me and I shook my head to agree.

“I think you should bring the sign in, and maybe write the daily specials on it yourself, though,” I suggested. “That way Chief Gary or anyone else from around here who might have seen that letter as they investigated the death won’t recognize the writing.”

Betty nodded. “Good idea.”

Carson’s eyes widened. “You mean, you’re not going to turn me in to the police?”

Betty looked at him with the look she would have given her students during the forty or so years that she was a schoolteacher. “No, I’m not going to turn you in. However, I need you to understand that what you did was wrong, and that you cannot simply send people threats when they do something you disagree with.”

“Yes ma’am,” Carson replied, hanging his head. “Believe me, I’ve realized it. As soon as I found out about his death, I’ve been worried sick that people will think I did it. I understand, I won’t do it again.”

“Because I believe you, I won’t turn you in. Keep working, you’re not in trouble. But if I do catch you doing that sort of thing again, I will report you to Chief Gary.”

“Thank you, Mrs. MacMahon,” Carson replied, before scurrying back off to the bowl where he’d been making cream cheese icing. Betty and I looked at each other after he left.

“I really don’t think he would have hurt anyone,” Betty told me.

“Me neither. I don’t get that vibe from him at all. He seems like a good kid who made a bad decision. I think the call to change the sign is a good one, and we can simply hope that the threatening letter leads to a dead end.”

Unfortunately for me, the dead end meant that I was quickly running out of suspects in Matt Smith’s murder. After all, if Tony Fanchini hadn’t done it, and the letter writer hadn’t done it, that really only left someone linked to Matt Smith’s arrest in Washington.

I sighed. My plan had been to figure out who the murderer was so it could eliminate Jason and I as suspects. Instead, I was eliminating everyone else who could have done it.

I hoped that Jason was about to find out that the person Matt Smith was arrested for assaulting in Washington had a record that involved a penchant for shooting people and then dumping their bodies in the ocean, but I didn’t have high hopes.

Making my way back out to the main eating area, I drank my coffee and ate my BLT completely lost in thought, trying to figure out the case, before I grabbed a slice of chocolate pecan cheesecake to go. After all, it was a pretty good price.

As I got back to the vet clinic and settled in for an afternoon of chaos with the animals I cared for, I wondered if I was ever going to figure out who killed Matt Smith.