A Dawn of Death (8 page)

Helen couldn't quite imagine that conversation. The one way Tate resembled her ex-husband was in his belief that talking about emotions was silly. Feelings were just an inconvenient fact of life, something to ignore in his personal life and to manipulate in his professional life, using them to sway a juror to his side. They definitely weren't something to dissect.

It wasn't that Tate had no emotions. She'd come to realize it was just that he buried them, hidden behind his poker face. She didn't particularly crave any grand romantic declarations from him—she'd had her fill of them with Frank, who would briefly sweep her off her feet and then take her for granted until the next big demonstration of his appreciation—but she did want to be sure she wasn't reading more into Tate's actions than he intended.

Of course, she was reasonably sure Tate liked her at least as much as she liked him. Their first date had ended with a kiss that had convinced her of that much, and there had been quite a few more since then.

"You should do what I do," Helen said, ignoring the ping from her phone. "Threaten your family members with being disinherited if they meddle."

Tate glanced at the screen of Helen's phone where there was a text from Laura to make sure that tomorrow's visiting nurse appointment hadn't been cancelled. Helen had been lobbying to reduce the visits to once a week, now that she was feeling better, but the nieces weren't convinced yet. A moment later, another almost identical message appeared from Lily.

"Yeah," he said. "I can see how well that's working for you."

*   *   *

After they'd eaten, Tate returned to his woodworking, and Helen went outside to find Jack waiting for her with the car's engine running. She climbed into the front passenger seat and turned to Jack. "Do you know where Sheryl Toth's current construction project is?"

"Sure," Jack said. "I've got a cousin who works for her company."

"Then take me there, please. I'd like to talk to him, find out if there was any friction between the boss and the employees."

"You think one of them might have killed her?"

"Not really, but I'd like to rule out the possibility," Helen said. "I'm hoping it was just a tragic accident, but I have a few questions that are bothering me."

"Sheryl wasn't a bad sort, according to my cousin," Jack said. "Sure, she was blunt, and she didn't tolerate incompetence, but she was fair. Most people around here would even say her developments were good for Wharton. At least as good as any cluster of town houses can be. She's built a lot of affordable housing, starting before state law gave builders special consideration if they included deed-restricted affordable units. It makes buying a house possible for the year-round residents who can't afford the prices that are inflated by the demand from the summer-only residents."

Jack turned onto a dead-end street, and Helen was immediately bombarded by the roaring engines and piercing back-up beeps of heavy construction equipment. Jack continued past five or six houses nestled among wooded lots and stopped in front of a five-acre parcel of land.

Until recently, it had apparently been a half-wild meadow dotted with the occasional weedy tree, but now, the front half of it had been completely leveled, with a backhoe knocking down the trees and a bulldozer following in its wake to take care of the smaller vegetation by pushing it to the edges of the parcel like a winter plow would do with snow. In the wake of the two vehicles, the ground was as flat, lifeless, and ugly as an empty parking lot. Helen hoped it would look better once the buildings were done, but she thought they would still clash with the cozy little houses on either side of them.

"What do the neighbors think of this development?"

"They're resigned to it, I suppose," Jack said. "A few of them tried to stop the building permit process, but Sheryl was a human bulldozer and ran right over them."

"What do her competitors think of her?" Helen said. "There must be other developers here in Wharton. Did she bulldoze her way over any of them?"

"Probably," Jack said. "I've heard complaints about her getting too much preferential treatment because of her affordable-income units. It's all legal
,
though, not like she's bribing anyone, so there isn't much the competitors can do about it. They could get the same treatment if they offered similarly priced housing."

Helen watched another tree fall and felt the urge to go home and hug the trees that gave her cottage its privacy. "What about environmentalists? They can't be happy about losing the natural habitat that was here."

"You've met Dale Meeke-Mason," Jack said. "She's the town's most vocal environmentalist. She and Sheryl were frequently at loggerheads, but they always found a way to work things out in the end. Dale is passionate about her causes, but she learned about compromise early on. Did you know that the Meeke family and the Mason family were among the earliest settlers of Wharton?"

Helen shook her head.

"They were. And they rivaled the Hatfields and McCoys for nursing a grudge from generation to generation. Everyone thought it would go on forever until Dale's parents came along and ended the hostilities with their marriage."

"I don't suppose Dale proposed to Sheryl in order to resolve their differences."

Jack laughed and shook his head. "Dale's pretty committed to her causes, but I doubt even she would go quite that far. She just knew how to pick her battles with Sheryl. Dale managed to shut down one development, but that was about five years ago, and there were some serious wetlands issues, so Sheryl had to have known it was a long shot. Most of the time, though, Dale just extracted some concessions to make the project more palatable. Like setting aside some land for the residents' recreational activities and putting a
right to hang
clause in all of her homeowners association documents."

The fact that Dale and Sheryl had a long history of working out their differences without resorting to violence was encouraging, Helen thought. It suggested that Dale wouldn't have killed Sheryl even if their negotiations broke down. For once, the evidence was leaning in the direction Helen wanted it to. Sheryl's death was just an accident, and Dale had nothing to do with it.

Now if Helen could just get a few more questions answered about what the bulldozer had been doing at the garden, she could let go of her suspicions and concentrate on her new hobby.

*   *   *

 Jack parked as close to the construction office trailer as he could get. Instead of staying behind to play games on his phone, he insisted on getting out to escort Helen. Normally, she would have been annoyed by the unnecessary solicitousness, but she hadn't taken two steps before realizing that the ground wasn't quite as even as it had appeared from inside the car. It was littered with rocks and rutted with the tracks of the earthmoving equipment. The last thing she needed was to trip and injure herself before she'd even had a chance to get stronger by working in the garden.

They were halfway to the construction office when Marty Drumm burst out of it carrying two hard hats. He leaped across the three steps to the ground and raced to intercept Helen and Jack.

"What are you two doing?" he shouted. As he ran, he pointed in the direction of the road. "Can't you see this is a hard hat area?"

Helen turned to see what he was pointing at. There was a large sign installed parallel to the road, a few feet in front of where Jack had parked. She hadn't paid any attention to it, assuming it was the standard advertising sign that could be seen at any construction site with the name of the builder and the bank that was providing the financing. The blank back didn't tell her any different, but from Marty's actions she assumed the sign warned against the dangers of an active construction site.

Marty skidded to a stop in front of her and didn't wait for her permission before plopping a much-too-large hard hat on her head. A moment later, Jack was wearing one too.

Helen reached up to keep her hat from sliding off. "Anyone who knows me will tell you I've got an exceptionally hard head."

Marty was bent over, trying to catch his breath after the race from the construction trailer. He pulled a phone out of his jacket pocket and glanced at it briefly before putting it away and straightening. "Everyone's got to wear a hard hat on the site. Sheryl was rigid about it. No exceptions, no excuses. She fired a few hard workers over it, but she also saved lives."

Helen was having trouble hearing him clearly between the echoes of her oversized hard hat and the noise of the distant construction equipment. She tilted her head back so she could see Marty's face while they spoke, only to have the hard hat slip forward to cover her eyes. She quashed the urge to push it up again, afraid it would slide too far in the other direction, exposing her bare head to danger and getting her kicked off the site.

Besides, another tree had just fallen, and it had sounded a bit too close for comfort. She peered beneath the rim of her hat, but all she could see was the office trailer where a muscular man in jeans and a tank top printed with
Toth Construction
was coming down the steps. She couldn't see all of him until he reached the ground, and then her gaze was drawn to his bright red hair, gelled to stand up like porcupine quills. He had a jagged scar that was almost the same red running diagonally down his cheek from beneath the inner corner of his eye all the way to his jaw line. Apparently, some injuries could still happen, even when the crew was diligent about the use of hard hats.

Helen turned her head in Marty's general direction, although all she could see of him were his construction boots. "I'm sorry if we worried you."

"You didn't know about the danger, I suppose," he said grudgingly. "What can I do for you?"

Helen hadn't expected Marty to be the first person she saw at the site. In fact, she'd hoped to avoid him so she could question someone who might know if he had truly been at risk of being fired. She wasn't likely to get the opportunity now. Marty showed every sign of being as much of a mother hen for his crew as everyone in Helen's life was for her.

"I just wanted to pay my condolences," Helen said. "I didn't expect to see much work going on."

"It's what Sheryl would have wanted," Marty said, absently pulling his phone out of his pocket again and tapping the screen to send the call to voicemail. "Toth Construction was her life."

And her death, Helen thought. "Now it's your life?"

"I'm just keeping the work going until someone tells me otherwise."

Helen wondered if he truly felt that loyal to his boss's memory or if it was an act to keep anyone from believing the rumors about his previously imminent firing. "How'd you end up with the responsibility?"

"The usual," Marty said. "No one else wanted it. I probably wouldn't have volunteered if I'd realized how much paperwork there was. I'd much rather be operating a backhoe or hammering nails."

"Presumably, Sheryl felt differently."

"Not really." Marty's phone buzzed again. "She got the paperwork done, but whenever she could, she was out doing the real work."

"Operating a backhoe and hammering nails?"

He nodded. "She loved the heavy equipment. Said it was relaxing after a long day of dealing with paperwork, inspectors, and suppliers. At least once every two or three days, I'd find her out there doing some of the fussy precision work after the rest of the crew had left. During really stressful times, she'd be out there every single day."

 That wasn't what Helen had hoped to hear. "If Sheryl was so safety conscious and so good with a bulldozer, then how…?"

"How did she die in an accident?" Marty finished. "She didn't, that's how. Someone killed her."

"The police think it was an accident."

"No way," Marty said. "Sheryl didn't take risks with her safety. No, someone killed her. I'm sure of it."

"Who would have done that?"

Marty didn't even stop to think. "Dale Meeke-Mason. She's so obsessed with protecting the environment that she doesn't care what happens to people. She's trying to shut down all construction here in Wharton, and she doesn't care about the local residents who would lose their jobs. I wouldn't put anything past her if she thought it would protect her stupid trees."

The ground shook as another massive tree fell toward the back of the lot.

Marty didn't notice. "I'm telling you, everything about Sheryl's death stinks. There's absolutely no reason for her to have been at the garden unless Dale lured her there to kill her."

So much for simply reassuring herself that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for how Sheryl had died. Helen wasn't sure what to believe, but she couldn't simply discount the possibility that Marty was right. Not about the identity of the culprit but about the suspicious nature of Sheryl's death.

Despite what she'd told Tate about only talking to Sheryl's employees, Helen couldn't stop asking questions yet. If the police ever came around to believing the circumstances were suspicious, she was afraid that Marty wouldn't be alone in thinking that Dale or one of the other gardeners was to blame for Sheryl's death.

Marty might have continued ranting about Dale's villainy except that his phone pinged yet again, and apparently, this caller couldn't be ignored. He gestured for Helen and Jack to go back to the car.

"Leave the hard hats next to the sign," he said and headed back to the construction trailer. As he walked, he shouted over the background noise of the heavy equipment, complaining to his caller about some supplies that were late.

There really wasn't anything more Helen could do here, she decided. Her nieces might not believe it, but she wasn't foolish enough to try to sneak past Marty and flag down a backhoe to ask its operator questions about which of her employees or competitors might have wanted Sheryl dead. There were other people she could talk to who would have answers to that question. People who worked in safe settings. Like town hall. Even Lily and Laura wouldn't consider a little visit to town hall to be dangerous. In fact, Lily thrived on confronting government bureaucrats, so she was in no position to deny her aunt the same thrill.