The Big Kitty

15

The screaming woman finally quieted down just as screaming sirens announced the arrival of the Kittery Harbor Police. The first responding officer was Constable Ben Semple. He looked a lot more authoritative today as he ordered the crowd back, called for backup and an ambulance, and then asked if anyone had witnessed what happened.

Sunny raised her hand, and he turned to her, his eyes going wide in recognition. “Ms. Coolidge!”

She mustn’t have looked her best, because the next thing Semple said was, “Are you all right?”

“You’ve got to call Will Price,” Sunny said, trying to keep her voice low and steady. She’d tried to get him herself, but her fingers were shaking so much, she kept hitting the wrong buttons on her cell phone. “I don’t know if you recognized him, but that’s Gordie Spruance under there.”

More officers arrived, helping to herd the onlookers out of the way while Semple made a phone call and then knelt for a real examination of the bloody form on the sidewalk. The constable glanced at Sunny, giving her a brief, negative headshake. Rising back to his feet, he craned his neck to look at the roof.

“Was Spruance trying to avoid the SUV when it crashed?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Gordie was trying to avoid me. I was trying to avoid the SUV.”

As she told her story, the constable began to get that glazed look she’d seen on his face before. “I don’t know what the sheriff’s going to make of this.”

“That makes two of us,” Sunny muttered.

Will arrived, using his badge to get past the police line. He looked bleary-eyed, as if Semple’s call had hauled him from a deep sleep.

He’s on the swing shift, Sunny thought. That’s exactly what that call did.

He also appeared to be a bit grouchy at being woken up. “Weren’t you supposed to call about wherever you were going?” Will demanded.

“I had to deliver—” Sunny broke off, looking at the envelope she’d been carrying. “Oh, God. I’ve got to get this to the Captain’s Table. Ollie Barnstable’s been chewing me out ever since I agreed to do that story for Ken Howell. This will give him an excuse to fire me.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t go,” Semple said. “You’re a witness to”—he gestured at the scene all around them—“whatever this is.”

“Looks to me like someone leaving the scene of a fatal accident—at the very least.” Will took the envelope from Sunny. “I’ll head over to the Captain’s Table and get this into Barnstable’s hands.”

“Also, tell him to call someone in to cover the office,” Sunny called after him. She turned to Semple. “Something tells me I’m not leaving here anytime soon, am I?”

*

Sunny’s suspicion turned out to be all too correct.

After canvassing the crowd, Constable Semple wound up taking her and a couple other witnesses to the police station, where they were divided up into separate rooms and asked to give statements.

By the time she finished with that, Will had reappeared. “Barnstable was wining and dining some foreign guy,” he reported. “And you were right, he was not happy when I told him what had happened. He seemed to think you tried to get yourself killed just to inconvenience him.”

“I’d say it was a bigger inconvenience for poor Gordie.” Sunny shook her head. “How could this stuff be going on? This is Kittery Harbor, where nothing happens.”

Will’s initial grin faded into a serious frown. “So would you mind going over the sequence of events again for my benefit?”

She explained about getting the call from Ollie, bringing the package, seeing Gordie … and what had happened as a result.

As she did, Will kept looking at some papers in his hand. “The getaway car—you said it was a Toyota?”

She slowly nodded. “I saw the logo on the trunk. But I was still getting up. I never got a decent look at the license plate. I can’t even say if it was from Maine or New Hampshire.”

“And the car’s color?”

“It was one of those new bland metallic colors.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what you’d call it. Cream? Sand?”

“Well, that falls in between the person who called it silver and the one that called it tan.” Will sighed.

“And the one that almost hit me was blue,” Sunny suddenly said.

“Yeah.” Will drew out the word a little. “Easy to check on, since it’s still stuck against the wall at the Redbrick. If you want to be precise, I believe it’s sport blue clearcoat metallic.”

“A Ford Explorer.”

Will gave her a bemused look. “That’s right. You must really fixate on logos if you noticed that bearing down on you while busily jumping out of the way.”

Sunny shook her head. “I saw it before. That day you gave me a lift, that—that monster truck was following me on my bike.” She began to shake again. “It would have been really easy to wait till we got out on an empty road and—”

Will grabbed her hands. “They didn’t then, and they didn’t now,” he broke in forcefully.

“But you can’t put this down to a Wile E. Coyote foul-up.” Sunny paused for a second, struck by a thought. “Or can you? Was Gordie there to lure me into position for that truck? Or was he just really unlucky—in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

She gave an impatient headshake. “That doesn’t work out. Even if it was a two- or three-man operation, Gordie, the guy in the explorer, and the guy in the getaway car, how would they know I was going in that direction? So they had to be following me.”

“I’d like to worry a little less about the theoretical implications of the attack and concentrate more on cold, hard facts—especially while they’re still fresh in your mind,” Will said. “What can you tell me about the driver from the Ford?”

Sunny shrugged. “I only saw him for a few seconds, and not from a good angle. I was on my hands and knees at the time, climbing up from the sidewalk.”

She frowned, shutting her eyes, trying to call up a picture of the guy she’d seen stumbling from the wrecked SUV. “He had a bloody nose, that’s what really leaps out. The blood was trickling down between his fingers.” She opened her eyes and shook her head. “That bloody hand was covering everything from his nose to his chin. I just saw bright red—didn’t even notice the color of his eyes.”

After a second she said, “He had a lot of hair. Long. Maybe it had been pulled back in a ponytail and got loose, because it was all over the place.”

“Long hair,” Will repeated. “His hand couldn’t have blocked all of his face. Try to remember. Was he clean shaven, or did he—” He broke off with a frown. “That could be leading.”

“What could be leading?” Sunny asked. Then the light went on over her head. “You think it might be that Ron Shays guy?”

Again, Sunny tried to visualize the man making his way out of the blue Explorer, struggling to bring the edge of his masking hand into focus. Could there have been a beard under there? Or was this what Will was afraid of? Had he planted the idea in her head?

“Sorry,” she said unhappily. “I just can’t say.”

“It would have been nice.” Will straightened up the papers in his hands. “Because if you hadn’t realized it yet, I just lost my prime suspect in Ada’s murder.”

“There’s still Veronica Yarborough and the Towles,” Sunny suggested. “Neither of them have alibis for all of Saturday morning. And do we know where anyone was on Friday night?”

Will nodded, but it was clear he wasn’t rating the neighbors as hot suspects. Sunny wasn’t so sure. For all her airs and graces, Veronica Yarborough didn’t strike her as a good person to cross. As for Chuck and Leah … Sunny remembered how she’d felt when she found Shadow crying in the back of the pickup. If I found the person who hurt him—

Protecting a pet suddenly seemed like a much stronger motive now.

*

When Sheriff Nesbit arrived, he wasn’t happy to find Will with Sunny.

This time, though, he can’t shove what happened under the rug—there are too many witnesses, she thought. And he’s got to see there’s no way I could have singlehandedly arranged an attempted hit-and-run against myself.

But the sheriff’s mood certainly didn’t improve when Will started telling him some of the things they’d discovered about Gordie Spruance.

Nesbit smoothed down his silver mustache while his face turned dull red. Before Will got a full sentence out, the sheriff barked, “The two of you have been conducting your own little investigation, and now you’ve decided to let me in on what you’ve found out? How considerate of you!”

“It didn’t start as an investigation,” Sunny responded. “I just talked to the guy as part of the article about his mom’s death—”

“A death that you insinuated might be murder,” the sheriff interrupted. “And you weren’t happy until you spread your theory all over town, were you? Look where it’s gotten you.”

“A death where the dead woman’s son and heir was a tweaker,” Will stepped in. “You don’t have to take my word on that. I’m sure an autopsy will prove it.”

“Maybe you’re right, Will,” Nesbit said grudgingly. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but you know there are weak-willed people out there who’ll use drugs no matter how clean we keep things around here.”

“Except Gordie was hanging around with a dealer who specialized in making places dirty,” Sunny burst out. “Tell him, Will.”

Will started explaining about Ron Shays and his business model of opening meth labs in virgin areas, but Nesbit cut him short. “You went to Portsmouth PD and didn’t share this information with me?”

“What would you have done if I had?” Will challenged.

“It’s irrelevant,” the sheriff blustered. “Doesn’t apply here.”

“What doesn’t apply?” Will wanted to know. “We have a guy who likes to open meth labs in quiet places, and we have the tweaker son of a lottery winner who could put up the money.”

“Except nobody seems to know where this famous missing ticket ended up,” Nesbit objected, “or even if it exists. To tell you the truth, I wish to God I’d never heard about it!”

You and me both, Sunny thought. It may have gotten Ada Spruance and her son both killed. And I might be next.

A knock on the interrogation room door interrupted them. The door opened, and one of Nesbit’s deputies came in with Ken Howell.

“Sheriff—,” the nervous deputy began.

“I don’t have a comment to make right now,” Nesbit barked. He turned furious eyes on Howell. “Especially not for your miserable rag.”

“My ‘miserable rag,’ as you put it, is the least of your worries,” the Crier editor told him. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook in my office. Reporters from the Portsmouth paper, all the TV news types, even stations from Boston, they all want to pick up on the double tragedy connected to this lottery ticket.”

He scowled. “Hell, I would, too. Just my luck this happens the day after the latest issue came out.” Then he grinned at the sheriff, having kept the best for last. “It’s a slow news day, Frank. You’re gonna have yourself a media circus coming to town—and all the clowns will want to talk with the reporter who actually interviewed Gordie Spruance and witnessed his death.”

“Oh, God,” Sunny blurted out.

“Oh, damn,” Frank Nesbit muttered.

*

Sunny quickly called her dad and filled him in. This was something she did not want him discovering on the TV news. Then, all too soon, Sunny found herself standing beside the sheriff in the local press room, a utilitarian space with cream-colored walls and a low dais where Nesbit positioned himself behind a simple lectern, facing an array of microphones and cameras. It wasn’t just the regular media contingent that she saw on TV. She also spotted a lot of people she’d encountered while beating the bushes for a journalism job in the area—would-be newspaper stringers and unemployed reporters who called themselves freelancers.

I think anybody with a press card within a hundred miles has turned up, she thought. Oh, Lord, I hope I don’t look like a deer in the headlights.

Nesbit stepped up and gave a carefully edited summary of the facts in the case. “A sport utility vehicle climbed the sidewalk in downtown Kittery Harbor, narrowly missing one pedestrian and causing the death of another. We cannot speculate at this time as to how or why this happened. The driver of the SUV fled the scene. Our mechanics are examining the vehicle to determine whether there was any sort of mechanical malfunction.”

Period.

He handled the storm of questions that followed like the political professional he was. Yes, it appeared the car had been stolen several days ago in Portsmouth. No, his department had no idea as to the identity of the driver yet. Yes, the deceased was the son of the supposed lottery winner, who herself had died less than a week ago. No, the lottery ticket had not yet been found.

Nesbit wrapped it up pretty quickly, then turned to Sunny. “Ms. Sonata Coolidge is the person who survived this traffic incident. She also works as a reporter for our local newspaper, the Harbor Crier.”

Out in the wolf pack, Ken Howell grinned broadly.

“Ms. Coolidge recently wrote a story on the death of Ada Spruance, in the course of which she interviewed Gordon Spruance, the young man who died in this occurrence. She is assisting us in our inquiries.”

Thanks to her experience from the other side of interviews, Sunny handled herself pretty well. There were a couple of ticklish moments, like the question from one reporter who’d done her homework.

“You suggested that there were mysterious circumstances in the death of Ada Spruance.” The skinny young TV journalist curved her bloodred lips in a predatory smile aimed at Sunny. “Do you think these circumstances might also apply to this woman’s son?”

“I outlined apparent discrepancies regarding Mrs. Spruance’s death that I was able to substantiate,” Sunny carefully replied. “There were other rumors that could not be substantiated.”

Translation: If I couldn’t use the information I’d dug up for my own story, why would I air it for yours, honey?

“But are the two deaths connected?” the female reporter persisted.

“That’s for the police to determine,” Sunny honestly answered. “All I can say is that buying that lottery ticket seemed to use up all the luck the Spruance family had. If the ticket actually exists, it hasn’t done them much good.”

After a few more questions, Sheriff Nesbit stepped in to wrap things up. But just as he was doing that, a deputy came hotfooting it into the room. “Sir, urgent call from the fire chief over in Sturgeon Springs. We transferred it in here.” He pointed to a phone off to the side of the podium.

Nesbit impatiently snatched up the telephone handset. “What is it, Joe?” he barked. But as he listened, his face went white.

“Huh,” Ken Howell said from the middle of the crowding journalists. “Good thing I left my cell on vibrate. It’s a source on the Sturgeon Springs Fire Department.”

He listened for a moment, and his smile only got broader. “Well, what do you know? Gordie Spruance’s place has exploded in flames, and they’re having a hell of a time putting it out. My guy says it looks exactly like a training film they just watched—about dealing with fires in meth labs.”