Home > Last Day(46)

Last Day(46)
Author: Luanne Rice

“Hey! Kate!”

She turned to see Scotty emerging from the kitchen, carrying a tray of sliced tomatoes and basil.

“I forgot you worked here,” Kate said.

“Beth got me started.”

“Did you grow those?” Kate asked, looking at the ripe, red slices.

“Yes, but the basil is Beth’s. I stopped at her garden to pick some on my way over. She always did things to make the meals special. People here loved her. They miss her.” She gestured at a bulletin board across the room on the wall. A photo of Beth in her gray shirt and white cap, her arms around two beaming women, had been tacked to the board. Beneath it was a banner that said FOREVER LOVED. It was covered with signatures.

“Everyone who comes in is invited to sign it,” Scotty said. “They all do.”

Kate drifted over to look at the names. Scotty put the tray down on the serving station and followed her. Kate read every name, but she didn’t find what she was looking for.

“What brings you here?” Scotty asked.

“I was hoping to see a friend of Beth’s. In fact, I sent you a text about him—didn’t you get it?”

Kate turned to see Scotty hovering nervously behind her. A few tendrils of blonde hair fell from her cap. She had a very slight tan and faint lines around her brown eyes. They had been friends for a lifetime, and Kate knew those eyes so well. They were full of remorse.

“Sorry, I thought I replied,” Scotty said.

“Who’s Jed Hilliard?” Kate asked.

Scotty blushed and looked away.

“Both you and Lulu knew, didn’t you?”

“Beth would have told you eventually,” Scotty said. “She was afraid you wouldn’t approve.”

“Of course I would have,” Kate said. “Anything that made her happy.” But their last conversation at Witchfire, the defensive tone in Beth’s voice, echoed in her mind: You think I want to have an affair.

“Is he here now?”

“No,” Scotty said. “He hasn’t been back once since she died.”

It felt like a blow. Kate had thought if she could meet him today, ask him about Beth and the drawing, she might find some peace. She’d wanted to hear that he’d loved Beth and she’d loved him, that life had become happier for her. “Were they together?”

“Not like that! They were just good friends,” Scotty said, but Kate wasn’t sure she could believe her.

“Was he Matthew’s father?”

“Oh, come on, Kate! Why would you even ask that?”

“Do you know where he lives?” Kate asked.

“For a long time, he was a handyman at the Academy, and they gave him a room in the attic. Then he was living here in New London—on State Street, in that building they’re converting into artists’ studios.”

“Is he there now?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know,” Scotty said. “If he was, I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t be showing up for food.”

“She met him at the Academy? When he was working there?” Kate asked.

Scotty bit her lip. Her eyelids fluttered in a way that brought a sinking to Kate’s heart. She could read sorrow in her old friend’s eyes.

“No,” Scotty said. “He never even knew Black Hall until Beth brought him there.”

“Then how?”

“She met him at the prison, when she was visiting your father. He was there at the same time.”

“Working there?” Kate asked, her stomach churning to think of her father being connected in any way. “Volunteering?”

“An inmate,” Scotty said.

Kate let that sink in. “What did he do?”

“He got caught selling marijuana. She said your father would talk to him. They had art in common.”

Kate couldn’t speak. Beth had stayed in touch with their father all along, and even though Kate half knew she had visited him, Beth had understood that Kate hadn’t wanted to hear anything about him. She had cut him out of her life the day she’d learned the part he’d played in those twenty-two hours. Beth had regularly gone to the prison, and she’d met a man there, and now she was dead. Kate felt sick. Her sister had had a secret life, and it had involved her father and another convict.

Maybe Pete wasn’t the killer after all.

“Thanks, Scotty,” she said.

“Kate . . .”

Kate gave her old friend a quick hug, then walked out of the room. The spicy, pungent scent of basil from Beth’s garden hung in the air. She smelled it when she walked out onto the street, into the bright sun, and all the way home to her loft, and her eyes burned with tears as she thought of all the things her sister had never told her.

 

 

28

Reid’s search of Martin Harris’s room at Osprey House four days earlier hadn’t turned up anything of interest, but that of the shared bathroom at the end of the hall had. The walls were lined with blue tiles probably as old as the two-hundred-year-old hotel itself—some of them cracked, pieces missing, caulk chipped away. The housekeeper obviously tried to keep it clean, but the mildew created by years of seaside fog and the steam of thousands of showers made it a losing battle.

The floor was covered with yellowed linoleum. Reid noticed how the corner under the sink was curled up, so he pulled on the edge and found a cache of porn. Whole magazines wouldn’t fit, so pages had been torn out and slid under the loose floor. Reid called for a team to process the scene.

The pages came from different kinds of publications, from soft- to hard-core porn, suggestive photos of celebrities and models ripped from mainstream magazines, and even photos of models in pajamas and bathing suits ripped from the J. Jill and Sundance catalogs. Among the stash were images of naked women tied up, bound with their own underwear, gagged and blindfolded.

Because the bathroom was shared by all eight rooms on the fourth floor, and residents from the other three floors could use it as well, Reid couldn’t immediately link the pages to Harris. The state police lab found twenty-two different sets of fingerprints—the Osprey House version of a dirty magazine being passed around a camp cabin—and one was Harris’s.

Harris had not been sent back to Ainsworth, the state’s highest-security prison, but he was being held at Avery, the local jail on the road between Silver Bay and Black Hall, used to hold prisoners waiting for trial, usually on lesser offenses. Reid had checked his alibi for Beth’s last day; Harris claimed to have been drinking with some Osprey House buddies in the first-floor TV room. Three of them confirmed it, but all three admitted to having passed out drunk, so how good were their stories?

“This isn’t looking good for you,” Reid said, sitting opposite Harris and Lisa Lewiston, his attorney.

“I didn’t do anything,” Harris said.

“Mr. Harris,” Lewiston said, her hand on his arm.

“I need to tell him,” Harris said. “So he understands. And I’m going to.” He gave his lawyer a stern look. He hadn’t had a drink in the four days since he’d left Osprey House and been held at Avery, and his eyes looked clearer. His voice had an echo of the authority it might have had when he was still a professor.

“I’m listening,” Reid said.

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