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Also Thursday, September 19th
Charlotte rubbed the back of her neck as she surveyed the contents of her basement yet again, and tried to decide what had to be tackled next. Fatigue was setting in. When she was tired, it was hard to stop her mind from replaying the various scenes that led up to this sudden change in life, from the day Ellis learned that she was accepted to the Conservatoire, to the announcement that the magazines were closing. She knew that anger, at this point, was useless. The circumstances weren’t personal. Ellis did not go to Paris to abandon her. The magazines did not fold to reject her. Jack did not stop the child support to spite her (as much as it would have suited her to think this). The economy did not tank to nearly bankrupt her. It just was, like the weather. Nothing personal. So many others, like Donovan, were in worse shape.
But was he in worse shape entirely due to circumstances? Or was he a victim of some very poor choices? Charlotte knew that, at one time, the local steel mill workers earned good money with good benefits. They could buy nice homes, decent cars, take vacations, get nearly any kind of medical treatment they needed, and send their kids to college. If they started right out of high school, like Donovan, they could look forward to retirement and retirement benefits at an age young enough to start new careers if they wanted. She knew of a chiropractor who’d started training on his forty-seventh birthday, a week after he’d retired from the mill. Several of the real-estate agents and business owners in the area were once mill workers that had retired in middle age. Then things bottomed out, devastating scores of middle-aged workers and their families, and their loss of buying power impacted the entire region, long before the current recession.
Different people take different steps, though. Maybe Donovan, who was never married or had a family (as far as anyone knew), had less to worry about, or was willing to take more chances. Or perhaps he was more inclined to find an “easy” way to make money, even illegal ones? Charlotte thought of the world around the Warren Brothers pawn shop; even in a small town like Elm Grove there was usually an undercurrent of criminal activity, of drug dealing, prostitution, black markets, larceny, illegal gambling, and money-lending. Just because she hadn’t seen much of it before pawning her jewelry didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Even out in the countryside there were plenty of meth labs amid the cornfields. There had been more than one story in the local paper about former mill workers getting nabbed for anything from shoplifting to gun running or worse.
Once again she told herself, Snap out of it! She didn’t have the luxury of time at the moment. The best thing to do was to think about Olivia’s mystery while in Elm Grove, and her own situation while in Lake Parkerton, or something like that. The stacks and collections of things that were self-evident, like toys and Christmas decorations, she could leave for Stanton to sort out. The things inside storage boxes were another matter, particularly the ones full of old papers, schoolwork, and files. It took her an hour to find them all and move them up to her office to sort and shred.
Mental fatigue, however, was making concentration on the task difficult, as she found herself explaining over the phone to Diane, who called for a friendly update.
But Diane disagreed. “Nope. I mean, sure you’re really tired, and you ought to be, given all the stuff you have going on right now, and I’m sure it would drive anyone to drink, or at least wanting to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head.” She paused to get a breath, and Charlotte jumped back in.
“Well, then what is it? And what are you drinking? Buzz juice? I could really use some of your energy right now.”
“Just espresso. There’s a gorgeous new barista at The Coffee Grove. Too young, yeah, but I don’t care. Makes the best shots, so gifted, I swear.”
“Oh stop robbing the cradle already! We’re talking about me. Why am I spacing out like this when there’s so much I need to do here?”
“Because you’re in the middle of a murder mystery, you idiot! I mean, face it, it’s a lot more interesting than packing up your crap for a move, but you also care about Helene, and by extension you care about Olivia, or at least you have concern for your fellow human beings, and in the case of Olivia, there’s the whole mystery of the notebooks and the way she lived and why. You have a huge void in your life right now, no kid in the house and no regular job to answer to, just this downsizing stuff and you know how nature abhors a vacuum.”
“You have a point, there, about the vacuum. But we don’t know that it’s a murder, necessarily. It might just have been an argument gone wrong and an accident.”
“Somebody left an old lady there to die. Smells like murder to me.”
“Maybe. I guess I can’t help trying to figure out what happened, what it all means and why. It is intriguing, hard to stop thinking about.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, Charlotte. I can see the way your brain works, what makes you really good at observing and analyzing trends, would make it natural for you to try to sort out what happened to Olivia. Hold on,” she paused, and Charlotte could hear background voices. “Sorry about that. Client’s here, I gotta go. Hang in there.”
The pep talk made Charlotte feel better, and she tackled the papers with renewed vigor, scanning things which could be saved in digital form, shredding anything too personal or which could lead to identity theft, and throwing the remainder into paper bags for recycling. She found it helped to imagine she was in an embassy about to be stormed by a military coup and she had to evacuate with only a briefcase of the most important things. In a sense, she really did have to leave, and in a hurry, and it sped up the decision-making process. Box by box, she whittled everything down with the goal of ending up with just one expandable file and a thumb drive. Whatever she couldn’t do today, she could finish while the crew from Stanton Estate was setting up in the week ahead.
After an hour, her phone rang again, showing Helene on the caller I.D. She welcomed the break and went out to the kitchen as she took the call, taking the opportunity to make a fresh half pot of coffee. It wasn’t good news.
“Oh, Charlotte, it’s terrible,” said Helene. “The police have been questioning me all over again about Olivia.”
“Why? Do they know anything more than they did?”
Helene sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. They just left a few minutes ago. They asked me another million questions about Olivia, her son, her husband’s work and his side of the family. They wanted to know everything about her lifestyle, her money, her will, just everything, and I had so little information for them. I might live nearby now, but we hadn’t been close in years and they look at me like I’m lying to them. Does everyone really think family members ought to know every last thing about one another, particularly if they are two old widowed sisters?”
“Are they aware of how, well, eccentric she was, that it wasn’t easy to have that sort of relationship with her?”
“They seem to understand it when I tell them, but they keep coming back with questions that suggest they haven’t taken it on board. I’m not used to having my statements of fact challenged like that. Very disconcerting.”
“Do you think you’re going to need a lawyer?”
“Oh heavens I hope not! I mean, what could I possibly be guilty of? I’m another old woman. What would I gain from such a thing? I’m comfortable.”
Charlotte thought the whole thing odd, and the idea of the police making Helene feel nervous and under scrutiny was unsettling.
Just then, from the window in the breakfast nook, Charlotte could see a black sedan quietly pull into the driveway. The spotlights attached to the side mirrors meant it was an unmarked police car.
“Helene, someone is here, and I will have to call you back, okay?”
“Please do. Thank you, Charlotte.” She disconnected.
Charlotte opened the front door immediately, forcing assertiveness for Helene’s sake. A heavy-set man in a dark suit and tie got out of the car and hoisted up his trousers as he walked toward her, revealing his gun and holster. He nodded and smiled as he held up his identification.
“Ms. Anthony? I’m Detective Gordon Barnes with the State Police Criminal Investigations Division, about the incident at Mrs. Targman’s in Elm Grove.”
Charlotte nodded in understanding and held the door open. If he could be gracious, so could she. “Please come in. I’ve got coffee on.” She spotted a movement on the other side of the privet hedge. Ernie was snooping again. She lowered her voice. “My neighbor isn’t shy about eavesdropping.”
They entered the kitchen, and Charlotte silently thanked her lucky stars that it wasn’t a mess. There were the things she had boxed up, of course, but the rest of it looked clean and welcoming, or at least calm and orderly, unlike her nerves at the moment. What was going on? “Pardon the boxes and such. I’m putting the house on the market and getting ready to have an estate sale.”
“I saw the sign. Where are you moving to?” Barnes nodded thanks as she handed him a cup of coffee.
“Cream? Sugar?”
“Both, thanks.”
“I’ve taken a studio apartment in Elm Grove, right above The Good Stuff.”
“Downsizing.” He stirred and sipped his coffee.
“That’s what they call it,” she laughed, somewhat nervously. She had a feeling he’d been looking into her.
“My wife’s sister did that last year when she got laid off and stayed laid off. It’s not easy.”
“It’s been eye-opening, but in some ways almost exciting. It’s really making me think about why I have the things I do, why I thought I wanted them, and just how little of it is really worth it.”
He smiled and nodded. “You seem to be handling it well.”
“I’m tired, I’m probably trying to do too much too quickly, but, yeah,” she smiled and nodded back, and realized her hand was trembling ever so slightly as she held her cup. “I’m all right with it. Drinking far too much coffee, but I’m alright with it.”
Barnes nodded briefly and cleared his throat. The niceties were done. “Well, to get down to business, the incident at Mrs. Targman’s is now officially a murder investigation.”
Charlotte was struck cold on hearing the word “murder” from a policeman, in a way that was much more visceral than hearing it from Diane.
Barnes continued. “Do you know Wesley Warren?”
She paused. Where was this going? “I know who he is, one of the Warren Brothers, but I never knew him, no. He drove his car into a pond, right?”
Barnes nodded. “We’ve matched the blood on the rug and bat at Mrs. Targman’s house with Mr. Warren’s.”
“Oh my god!” Charlotte’s jaw dropped, and her mind raced with trying to make sense of this new fact. “Do you think Olivia, Mrs. Targman, killed him? How did he get in the car, then? Or was it the accident that killed him?”
“The cause of death was drowning. Toxicology came back clean. But the autopsy showed there was a severe injury in the back of his head, enough to render him unconscious. There was nothing at the scene to indicate it occurred during the accident, and in fact the injury seems to have occurred a fair bit of time before he drowned.”
“So the head injury probably happened at Olivia’s, and he drove away, lost consciousness, drove into the pond, and then drowned?”
Barnes nodded briefly. “Something along those lines is possible. It is presumed that Mr. Warren was visiting Mrs. Targman, perhaps in regards to appraising some items she may have wanted to sell, and there was an argument that led to an altercation. This presumably led someone, perhaps Mrs. Targman, to injure Mr. Warren with a baseball bat. In turn, he presumably pushed her down, causing her fall and head injury. Then, as you suggest, he left, and as his injury bled, or perhaps bled internally, he lost consciousness and drove into the pond. But this is all speculation at the moment.”
“Do you really think she could have hit him that hard, or even had a chance to? She was in her nineties!”
“It does seem unlikely, yes, but we can’t rule it out—it might even have simply been an unlucky blow. We also can’t rule out the presence of a third party.”
He paused, watching Charlotte take in the significance.
Before she could answer, Barnes began asking a “routine” series of standard information-gathering questions, along with questions about how she was connected to Olivia and Helene. Charlotte knew, from the experience of answering questions on the day she found Olivia, to keep her answers on point and brief, and she resisted the temptation to elaborate or go off on tangents. She was dying to ask questions, but bit her tongue every time one nearly blurted out. She wanted the detective to take her seriously, but she didn’t know if it was because she was trying to figure out what happened herself, or if her ego was fragile because of her circumstances. She also couldn’t help thinking that Donovan was now much more likely to be a suspect, or somehow involved.
Then he said the magic words: “Do you have any questions, Mrs. Anthony?”
“Oh, I have a thousand questions!” she laughed.
He smiled. “Naturally. Anyone would under the circumstances.”
“Is there any firm knowledge about what actually happened at Olivia’s?”
“It’s all speculation at this point. It is assumed that Mrs. Targman knew Mr. Warren, or that there is a connection between them, because there was no sign of a break-in.” He paused and fiddled with the coffee spoon.
“But what about Mrs. Targman? Do they know if she was also hit or if she fell?”
“That is still under examination; the position of her body was different than it would have been if she’d just fainted or passed out. Not impossible, mind you, just not likely.”
“Is Helene considered a suspect?”
Barnes looked at her with the most neutral expression she had ever seen on anyone. “At this time we have not ruled out anyone.”
Charlotte felt her jaw start to drop again, but she managed to talk instead. “So I’m a suspect, too? What about Donovan? I mean, he would have been expected to benefit from his mother’s death, and he was very upset to find out that the property is tied up.”
Barnes nodded as he looked at her for a few long seconds, as if sizing her up. “I know about his blowing up at his aunt. He’s got an alibi, but you’re right that he bears a closer look. We do know that he has a minor record, and some dodgy associates, but nothing serious, no violent crime history. But we’re seeing a sharp increase in crimes of desperation, as would be expected in this kind of economy, and Donovan Targman appears pretty desperate.”
“So I’m considered a suspect because I’m forced to downsize?”
Barnes remained neutral. “We are looking into the possible motivations of everyone involved.”
Charlotte barely repressed a short laugh of disbelief at this turn of things. Snap out of it, you’re not the only one hurting here! She looked up at Barnes. “The one I’m worried about is Helene. She’s just lost her sister, she’s being forced to deal with Olivia’s overwhelming estate and requests, and her nephew has a temper.”
“Have there been any further outbursts?”
Charlotte shook her head. The idea that she and Helene were among the suspects triggered something in her brain, though, gave it a shot of adrenaline that refused to let her become a victim of circumstance. “No, but something odd did happen this morning.” She recounted Mitchell’s appearance on the scene, and Donovan’s unease, which drew a look of intense interest from the detective, and he made some notes as she talked. “So now someone from Warren Brothers is once again in that house. Do you think they know that Wesley Warren was there, or could this be a coincidence?”
“You raise a very good question. I don’t like coincidences, especially in a small town. Mitchell Bennett is known to us, but not as an employee of the Warren Brothers. In fact, he’s bad news, and I urge you to exercise caution in his presence or while working in Mrs. Targman’s house.”
“Oh good grief. What on earth do they want with Olivia, or anything in that house?”
“Another good question. Mitchell Bennett is connected to one Toley Banks, who has his fingers in a number of underground pots. Banks is the half-brother of Bosley and Wesley Warren. We know Banks bailed them out of their failing hobby shop several years ago and set them up as a pawn shop, which could be pretty convenient for his activities, but we just haven’t caught him yet.”
He got up from the table, took out a business card, and handed it to her. “Thank you for the coffee. Here’s my info, and don’t hesitate to contact me if Mr. Targman continues with aggressive behavior, or if Mitchell Bennett or anyone else is hovering on the scene or giving you the sense that people are acting under pressure or threats. Of course, call me if you think of anything more, or if anything new comes to light.”
“Of course.”
As he left, he turned and asked, “By the way, what is your impression of Simon Norwich?”
Simon, too? Charlotte recalled his taking pictures of the crime scene, his need to be able to counter what he called “bad cops.” Was that based on experience, and actually having committed a crime at some time in the past? She had no way of knowing. She chose to be honest. “Abrupt. Talented. Honest. Helene thinks the world of him, and he of her.”
Barnes just nodded and smiled, then went on his way.
Charlotte took a deep breath. Such unsettling times, and had been for a while. She grabbed her phone and began to call back Helene, as she’d promised to do. A hammering noise from the street caught her attention and she walked out on the driveway to see what it was. Another pickup truck full of signs sat in front of the Vanetti’s house two doors down, and a man was driving a stake into the front lawn. Then he attached a realtor’s sign to it, along with an additional “FORECLOSURE” sign at the top. Another one bites the dust.