“Uh, sure.”
Her gaze went past him, and her eyes widened when she spotted Craig behind him. Her accusing stare swung back to Joe. “What have you done?”
“He’s a good guy, Torie, and he brought all the police know about Lisbeth’s death. I thought you’d like to see. He’s not actively on the case so he has nothing to hide from you. I haven’t told him anything other than I was looking into Lisbeth’s death. You can explain your interest in it.”
Carrying a Dr Pepper, Craig walked toward them from the kitchen. “Well, hello. I didn’t know we had another guest.” His quizzical gaze slid from Torie to Joe.
“Torie, this is Craig Hall. He’s been a good friend of mine for a while now. Craig, this is Torie Berg. She works in the IT department at the resort.”
She heaved a sigh and held out her hand. “Hi, Craig, thanks for coming. Lisbeth Nelson was my best friend, and I’ve known Anton since I was born. He arranged for the job here so I could look into her death.”
Craig glanced at Joe, then back to Torie. “You’re the newcomer questioning whether it was suicide?”
“I don’t believe her death was suicide or an accident.”
Joe heard the note of desperation in her voice and prayed for Craig to really listen. If he discounted her right away, this would be a fiasco.
“I’m listening,” Craig said.
“I need to tend to dinner,” Joe said. “Let’s continue this in the kitchen while I take care of the final prep.”
“Where’s Hailey?” Torie asked.
Joe spoke over his shoulder as he hurried to stir the stroganoff before it burned. “My parents took her to dinner. I have to pick her up at eight thirty at their house in Brunswick so we have a couple of hours.”
Torie settled at the breakfast bar and laced her fingers together. “Nice kitchen. The resort remodeled it?”
“Just before I moved in.” Joe gave the meal a brisk stir. “Tell Craig what you told me.”
Torie launched into how she was sure Lisbeth’s death was not an accident and how the state police had brushed off any concerns. Then she opened the shoebox and withdrew a journal. “I found her journal too. She knew she was in danger.” She leafed through the book and found a page before she slid it across the white quartz countertop to Craig. “Look at the June 6 entry.”
Joe came around to read it too. He hadn’t heard anything about the journal.
June 6
Someone broke into my cottage last night. I didn’t know it until I got up this morning and found the back door standing open. There was a note on the dining table that read, “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. GO AWAY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.”
Craig stared at the journal. “Wow, this isn’t what I was expecting tonight. I’ll help in any way I can. I’m not technically on the case, but I’ll poke around and see what I can find out.”
Seeing Torie’s brown eyes fill with tears geezed up Joe’s insides. He clenched his fists together. He didn’t have the right to comfort her but sure wanted to.
“Sounds like the guy has had the key to the cottage awhile,” Craig said. “Long enough that he terrorized Lisbeth too.”
Joe ladled up the food and handed out plates oozing with the aromas of garlic and sour cream. “Eat up. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”
Julie used to say he had a hero complex and wanted to save everyone, but he’d never admitted to it. Maybe she was right after all.
* * *
Torie had found it hard to look at Joe while eating dinner. Couldn’t he have warned her that he was bringing Craig here? While it appeared the state cop was agreeing to help her, she still felt on edge as she put her plate in the dishwasher.
Craig rinsed his plate and stacked it behind hers. “Let me show you what I’ve got.”
She settled on a seat and watched as he pulled out a file and laid it on the island’s countertop. “That’s not much evidence. Is that all of it?”
He nodded. “I’d thought only Joe would be looking at it, so I brought everything, even the coroner’s report. You might not want to read that or see the pictures. It’s graphic.”
She suppressed a shudder. “So what do you have then? Why did the detective in charge of the case brush me off when I told him I didn’t believe her death was accidental?”
He pulled out a picture of the sand to show her. “There were footsteps along the edge of the water to where she entered the foam at the shoreline. See here—just one set of prints, so she wasn’t dragged in by someone else. There was water in her lungs, so she wasn’t killed, then dumped in the water.”
“Seawater?” Torie asked.
“The results aren’t back yet. They should be any time though. There were no bruises on her arms to indicate she’d been roughly handled. And her roommate reported she’d been despondent and had been taking pills for depression. So while we haven’t ruled on it yet, the department is leaning toward suicide. It’s a dangerous area where she was. There’s a sharp drop-off not far offshore and a dangerous riptide.”
Torie had to force herself not to leap from her chair. “I don’t believe that for a second! Lisbeth was the most optimistic and eternally happy person I’ve ever met. You say Bella Hansen told you this? I’ll talk to her myself. She’s wrong.”
Craig’s eyes shuttered, and she knew her adamant refusal to listen had hurt her case. She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I have to remember this is evidence that’s been collected. It’s not a judgment on Lisbeth.”
“When did you last talk to her?” Joe asked.
She forced herself to glance his way, and the plea in his green eyes dissolved her sense of betrayal. He was only trying to help. “About a month before she came here we talked for about an hour by phone. And texted nearly every day even after she came.”
“So sometime in early May? How much had you been around her in the last few years?”
“Well, she lived in Chicago, and I was in Scottsdale.” When she wasn’t traveling. “But we got together four times a year or so. And we spoke on the phone every week, sometimes more than once. We emailed and texted nearly every day. Believe me, if she’d been depressed or seeing a doctor for depression, I would have known.”
The pity on Craig’s face told her he’d heard that kind of excuse before. People weren’t always honest, even with those closest to them.
“Except you hadn’t spoken to her in a month by phone, only text,” Craig pointed out.
“I tried to call her several times and didn’t reach her.”
“And she never called back? That was unusual, wasn’t it?”
Torie nodded. “I am so mad at myself for not hopping a plane and coming to see her. I thought maybe she was caught up in her new job with odd hours, and I was busy myself.” Her dad had sent her to a struggling hotel in The Bahamas, but she couldn’t tell them that.
“You didn’t find any pills in her belongings, did you? That’s because she hated taking pills of any kind. She wouldn’t even take aspirin for a headache.”
Craig consulted the notes. “There was an unmarked bottle of pills that we tested and found to be Prozac.”