The Fast Аnd Тhe Furriest

Chapter 18

Mr. P., his messenger bag slung across his body, was waiting in the hallway when Elvis and I came out of the apartment in the morning. “Could I trouble you for a drive to the shop, Sarah?” he asked.

“It’s no trouble and you’re welcome to come with us anytime,” I said. Elvis meowed loudly, seconding my words.

“I talked to Nick last night,” I said as we waited for Rose.

“Did you learn anything?” he asked.

“Possibly.” I told him what Nick had said about Natalie. “Do you think the police could somehow know something we don’t?”

“Detective Andrews has likely spoken to the Boston police. I don’t have any contacts there at the moment, but I’ll see what I can find out from this end. All aboveboard, of course.”

“Could you call Nick, please?” I said. I explained Nick’s surprise when I’d told him Davis Abbott hadn’t been in Nova Scotia. “Maybe he’ll tell you something he wouldn’t share with me,” I added.

Mr. P. smiled. “I suspect if Nicolas were going to be susceptible to anyone’s wiles it would be yours and not mine.”

I felt my cheeks get warm.

Rose came out then, carrying a small, red and white cooler. “Just a few snacks for the road,” she said.

• • •

We left for the salt works about eight thirty. The drive along the coast was beautiful. The sky was an endless arc of blue overhead and the sun sparkled on the ocean water.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Liz had asked as I backed out of her driveway.

“I figured you’d tell me where to go,” I said innocently.

“Sometimes you’re really funny,” she said. “This isn’t one of those times.” One of her perfectly manicured nails flicked the back of my head.

I laughed. “Yes, I know where I’m going. I checked the map before we left, Charlotte gave me directions and I have GPS on my phone.” I knew the last comment would get a rise out of her.

“We are not using that disembodied robot voice. Do I need to remind you about the time we almost ended up in the ditch thanks to that thing?”

“You most decidedly do not!” Rose said emphatically. “We’ve all heard that story plenty of times, thank you very much.”

I raised a hand as though I were back in grade school.

“What is it, dear?” Rose asked. “Do you need a washroom break?”

“No, I don’t need a washroom break,” I said. “I need a change of conversation. Tell me a little more about this salt works.”

“It’s quite simple, really,” Rose said, shifting into teacher mode. “You know that they collect water from the ocean.”

“Even in the wintertime?” I asked.

“No,” Liz commented from the backseat.

“The sun isn’t strong enough for the evaporation process during the winter. The salt houses are in operation from about the middle of March through October. They don’t use any anticaking chemicals and they don’t remove any of the trace minerals.”

“In other words, the salt is just the way Mother Nature made it.”

Rose turned to look at Liz and nodded. “That’s right.”

“Okay, I get that part,” I said. “I’m guessing the sea salt is more expensive because of the quality and because the entire process is pretty labor intensive.”

“That’s likely why Natalie was looking for a less expensive alternative,” Rose said.

“So what did she find? Table salt?”

A cynical snort came from the seat behind me. “More like road salt,” Liz said.

My gaze darted to Rose again. “Seriously? The same stuff they put on the roads when it’s icy?”

“Essentially.”

“No wonder she was being investigated.”

“In her defense, Alfred thinks that Natalie didn’t realize she was buying road salt. She may have believed she’d just been getting a slightly lesser quality salt without the trace minerals.”

“So what prompted the investigation?” I asked. I had my window cracked just a little and I could smell the ocean air.

“Customer complaints,” Liz said. “People were developing rashes and hives. Whatever the products had been doing for people’s skin in the past they weren’t having the same effect.”

“And you’re certain Natalie is going to show up today?” I asked.

“One hundred percent,” Liz replied. “You might say Charlie Carroll made her an offer she can’t refuse.”

“Charlie Carroll is the supplier Natalie has been using.” The road curved inland and we started up a long hill.

“That’s right,” Rose said.

“So what’s the payoff? Why help us?”

“Maybe Carroll got an offer too good to refuse,” Liz said.

I looked at her in the rearview mirror again. “What did you do this time?”

Her chin came up and she squared her shoulders. “I didn’t do anything. I simply pointed out that it made a lot more sense to help us than it would to get the police tangled up in that business.”

“Which is true,” Rose added helpfully. Sitting there with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap she looked just like someone’s doting grandmother, which meant people who didn’t know her tended to underestimate Rose. Most didn’t do it twice.

“So you blackmailed the owner?” I was directing my comment to Liz.

“I did not blackmail anyone. All I did was point out that it was in Carroll’s best interests—as well as ours—not to involve the police at this point in time.” She stressed the last part of the sentence.

I took one hand off the steering wheel for a moment and rubbed the space between my eyebrows.

“Do you have a headache, dear?” Rose asked.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “But I do have a bit of a pain in the neck.”

“I’ll bring you my magic bag after supper. You can heat it in the microwave. It’s very good for things like that.”

Behind me I heard Liz laugh.

Carroll Salt Works was just off the road in Marshfield. I could see the salt houses in the field beyond the parking lot, their rounded tops stretching long and low in the cleared space surrounded by trees. There was a bit of a breeze and I could smell the bite of salt in the warm summer air. “But this looks like the same kind of organic salt works that you described,” I said to Rose as we got out of the SUV in the gravel parking lot.

“Oh, it is,” she said. “The product Natalie has been buying is trucked down from a salt mine in Quebec.”

Liz climbed out of the backseat and smoothed the front of her blue and white tunic. Instead of her usual high heels she’d made a concession to the uneven terrain and was wearing a pair of canvas platform shoes with a peep toe and a rope wedge heel—the equivalent, for her, of flats.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” I asked.

She tipped her head to one side and squinted at me, wrinkling her nose. “Such a cynic,” she said. She turned and looked toward a gray-shingled building at the far end of the gravel lot. The story-and-a-half structure had a roll-up garage door just right of center and a window to the right of that. Left of the garage door was what I was guessing was the entrance to the business office. The inner door was open and I could see what looked like a desk through the wooden screen door. Someone was walking across the parking lot toward us.

“There’s Charlie,” Liz said, starting toward the salt works owner.

Charlie Carroll wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I’d been expecting someone older and harder both in physicality and in bearing.

I’d been expecting a man.

“Charlie Carroll is a woman,” I said softly to Rose.

“Oh, didn’t you realize that?” she said.

“Neither you nor Liz said she was a woman.”

Rose stopped and frowned. “Didn’t we? Oh my goodness.” She put one hand to her chest. “Did you ask?”

“No,” I said slowly. “I just assumed.”

She patted my arm, a gesture all three of them used when they were trying to humor me as though I were a child. “You shouldn’t make assumptions, dear,” she said. “It’s a much better idea to get the facts.”

“Yes, I can see that,” I said. I could see what they’d done, too. When I’d insisted on joining them for this . . . caper . . . they’d both taken a bit of offense at the implication that I didn’t think they could handle things themselves. This bit of subterfuge was a way of pointing out that I didn’t know everything. I turned to look at Rose. I could feel a smile pulling at my mouth. I’d been bested. I wasn’t quite sure what to say.

As if she could read my mind—and I’d had the uncomfortable feeling more than once that she could—Rose leaned toward me. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘touché,’” she said with a smile.

Charlie Carroll was maybe five foot five, an inch or so shorter than me. I was guessing she was somewhere in her late thirties to early forties. Her strawberry blond hair was cut short and her smooth skin suggested she was pretty diligent about wearing sunscreen. She wore knee-length khaki shorts, green rubber boots that rose almost to her knees and a gray T-shirt. She looked strong and solid with the kind of muscled arms that suggested many hard days of work as opposed to hard workouts.

“Sarah Grayson, meet Charlie Carroll,” Liz said.

Charlie offered her hand and we shook. The calluses I felt told me that she was hands-on in the business.

“Natalie is pretty good about time,” she said. “That means we have about half an hour until she gets here.” She looked at me. “Would you like a bit of a tour?”

I nodded. “Thank you. I would.”

She started across the parking lot to the domed buildings Rose had said were the salt houses, and the three of us followed. “These buildings are essentially greenhouses,” Charlie explained. “We use the sun and the wind to evaporate the water.”

Closer to the buildings what I thought of as the smell of the ocean was even stronger.

“Like any farmer, we’re dependent on the weather.”

As we walked from one building to the next Charlie explained the process in a little more detail. “The water goes into the first set of houses where anything that might have been in it can settle out. At fifty percent salinity it’s pumped into a second set of houses where the water is reduced to even greater salinity. Finally it ends up in the finishing house where the rest of the water is evaporated and what’s left is just pure sea salt.” She smiled. “Some processors use heat to extract the salt. We let Mother Nature do the work for us.”

She went on to explain how the salt was ground, with about half of it ending up flavored for the restaurants that made up a large portion of the company’s business.

“You started doing business with Natalie Welland what, close to two years ago?” I asked.

Charlie nodded. “That’s right.” She suddenly stopped walking. Hands in her pockets, feet apart she faced me, squinting in the sun. “Look, you know this is only part of my business. I also bring product in from Canada for nonfood, commercial applications.”

There were a lot of euphemisms in that last sentence.

“You bring salt in from a mine in Quebec, which you sell to several snow-removal companies here and in New Hampshire for use on parking lots and driveways,” Liz said. There was a challenge in her gaze. “For the most part,” she added.

Charlie nodded. “Since we’re being so plainspoken, yes. I sell to a number of small companies both here and in New Hampshire and I don’t check up on any of them. I had no idea what Natalie Welland was doing. And if I had, I would have been the first person to turn her in.”

I believed her. There was nothing evasive in her voice or her body language. She looked us right in the eye. She didn’t mumble or shuffle and she wasn’t making excuses.

“All we want to do is talk to Natalie,” Rose said. “We don’t want to jam you up.”

I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh at her use of an expression I was certain had come from some crime drama on TV.

“Why don’t we wait inside?” Charlie said. She checked her watch. “She should be here soon.”

“Jam you up?” I said to Rose as we followed Charlie to the gray-shingled office building.

“You’re not the only one who watches Law & Order,” she said with a sly grin.

Natalie Welland arrived about ten minutes later. Charlie went out to the parking lot to meet her.

My first thought was that I would have known that Leila and Natalie were sisters. They had the same gorgeous cheekbones, the same smooth brown skin and long neck. Based on the photo I’d seen, Natalie was taller. Like her sister, she wore her black hair in corkscrew curls, in Natalie’s case just past her shoulders. She wore a casual white and silver short-sleeved cotton dress and flat sandals.

She looked confused when she stepped inside the office. “Am I interrupting something?” she asked.

I was leaning against Charlie’s desk. Rose and Liz had the two chairs in front of it.

Rose smiled and got to her feet. “You’re not interrupting anything,” she said, her tone warm and reassuring. The fact that she looked like—and was—the sweet, grandmotherly type didn’t just cause people to underestimate her, it also tended to put people at ease at least a little. She handed Natalie a business card.

The younger woman studied it for a moment and then looked up at Rose. “You’re private investigators?” She pulled at the corner of her bottom lip with her teeth.

Technically only Mr. P. was licensed at the moment, but Rose was about to be. I wasn’t really sure what Liz and I were, but it didn’t seem like a good time to quibble about semantics.

“Yes,” Rose said. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Natalie immediately held up her hands. “I’m not talking to you. I’m taking the deal and there isn’t anything left to say. I can’t give people money I don’t have.”

Liz and I exchanged a look. I had a feeling the wheels were turning in her head the same way they were in mine. Natalie and the Federal Trade Commission had come to some kind of settlement agreement. She thought we were working on behalf of some of du Mer’s customers.

“This has nothing to do with your company,” Liz said. “We’re investigating the murder of Erin Fellowes.”

“Wait a minute, you’re investigating a murder?” Charlie said from the doorway. “You didn’t say anything about that.”

“No, we didn’t,” Liz said. “We didn’t say anything about a lot of things.”

Charlie didn’t speak again. She’d clearly gotten the message.

“We just want to ask you a few questions,” Rose said. “Please. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

Natalie shook her head. “No. I can’t help you.” Her body had tensed when Erin’s name had been mentioned.

She was about to leave, I realized. “We’re investigating Erin’s death because Mac is our friend,” I said. I pulled out my phone, swiped a finger across the screen and found a photo. I turned the phone sideways and held it out to her. It was all of us, jammed around the table in Rose’s apartment eating pulled pork sandwiches.

Natalie studied the screen for a moment. She didn’t say anything but I saw the muscles in her jaw tighten as she clenched her teeth.

“We’re here because we all care a lot about Mac and I think at one time you did, too.”

“I still do,” she said, in a voice so soft I almost missed the words.

“Erin came from Boston to see him,” I said. “Do you know why?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t even know she was coming to Maine. All I know is she changed her mind, about him, I mean. Everyone . . .” She cleared her throat. “Everyone in the family thought that my sister’s accident was Mac’s fault. I didn’t . . . I didn’t know what to believe. Erin was always so positive about it and then, all of a sudden she wasn’t. Something changed, I could tell, but I don’t know what.” Her expression hardened then. “There isn’t anything more I can tell you.”

Or maybe there wasn’t anything more she wanted to tell us.

“You mentioned you’d taken a deal,” I said. “Did you mean with respect to the investigation into du Mer?”

The nod was so slight I wasn’t actually sure she’d acknowledged my question. She turned to look at Charlie. “That’s why I’m here. I made a deal with the FTC. You’re not in any trouble. I told them you had no idea what I was doing.”

She turned to face us again. “Leila didn’t know that I was . . . changing some of our ingredients to get our costs down.” She tipped her head in Charlie’s direction. “She didn’t know, either. So the company is going out of business, but no one will go to jail, customers will get some money and staff will get severance.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’ll get probation and community service and Leila’s name will be cleared.”

“That must have been a very difficult decision,” Rose said kindly.

Natalie pressed a hand to her mouth for a moment. “I never meant for things to turn out the way they did,” she said. “Jackson said sometimes things just go in a direction you didn’t mean for them to go and you just do the best you can to fix things and go forward.”

“Jackson Montgomery?” I asked.

She nodded. “He’s helped a lot with du Mer. Erin, too.”

Interesting that Jackson hadn’t mentioned any of this when I’d asked about Natalie. I suspected he still felt a degree of loyalty to the family. Then I remembered the tiny carved wooden bird that had been in Erin Fellowes’s pocket. Mac had said he thought it was Leila’s.

“Natalie, did you give Erin anything from your sister’s office? Some kind of remembrance maybe?” I asked.

“I let her take a couple of things, a photograph of the two of them, a needlepoint pillow and a couple of weeks ago she asked if she could have a little bird that Leila had in her desk drawer.” She kept tapping her leg with two fingers.

I felt my heart begin to pound. That tiny bird did mean something. “Did anyone else take anything from Leila’s office?” I asked. “Anyone else in the family?”

“No,” she said. “Just Erin.” Her gaze went from me to Rose to Liz. “You haven’t asked where I was when Erin was killed.”

“No, we haven’t,” Liz said. “Where were you?”

“At a meeting with the FTC and my lawyer.”

I wasn’t surprised. Natalie wouldn’t have raised the question if she hadn’t had an answer. “Jackson was with you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. He was in court. Someone else from his office was with me.”

I remembered Jackson telling me the first time we’d met that he’d been in court. So I wouldn’t be able to ask him about the meeting. But it wouldn’t be that hard for Mr. P. to check.

That was pretty much the end of our conversation. Rose thanked Natalie for answering our questions. Liz took Charlie Carroll aside for a moment. I had no idea what they talked about but they both seemed satisfied with the conversation. Rose and I walked back to the SUV.

“Natalie Welland has mixed emotions about her sister,” I said.

I knew Leila only from what little Mac and Jackson had shared and from the photos Mac had showed me, but even on the small screen of his cell phone I’d been able to see that there was something special about the woman, some spark that had made people want to know her. It was the same quality that Liz had. More than charm or personality, it was some undefinable quality that pulled people in. My grandmother called it “presence.” It was as good a word as any. Whatever that elusive spark was, Natalie didn’t have it.

“I think it must have been difficult to be Leila’s little sister,” Rose said. “She was smart, beautiful and successful.”

I wondered what it had been like after so many years of being the family’s dirty little secret to finally join it and find oneself in the shadow of the perfect big sister. Natalie had said she was trying to keep costs down but had sibling rivalry caused her to sabotage Leila’s company? We kept coming back to du Mer. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Leila’s business was tied to what had happened. I just didn’t know how.