Old Chaos (9781564747136) (25 page)

“John! I thought you weren’t coming until the weekend.” Beth hitched herself higher in the shabby recliner that had belonged to Rob’s grandfather. The day before, when she attended the Chamber of Commerce meeting, she had abandoned the wheelchair and used a walker. The doctors promised a walking cast in two weeks. She could hardly wait.

Her eldest son plunked down on an armchair. “I have some news I needed to discuss with you in person. I talked to the insurance people.”

“About the house at Prune Hill?” Beth’s stomach churned. Even with the deal Drinkwater had given Mack, that horrible place had cost half a million dollars. If the insurance companies weaseled out of a settlement, she’d be paying on the debt when she turned ninety.

“Dad had a policy that pays off the mortgage when one of the partners in the marriage dies. He took it out a long time ago on the old house, and he transferred it to the new house when you moved.”

“Oh thank God.” She covered her face with hands that trembled.

“Yes.” John beamed at her. “And the other company, your ordinary house insurance, is supposed to pay replacement value. That will take a while, but my attorney thinks they’ll settle.”

She wiped her eyes with a Kleenex and said, almost at random, “I suppose that’s good, too.”

“Very good.” He hesitated. “I didn’t want to say it to Dad, but I didn’t like the mortgage arrangement that developer made.”

“Me either,” Beth muttered.

“The house price wasn’t out of line, and the guy—”

“Drinkwater.”

“Yeah. Odd name. He was generous on the down, but it was a variable rate deal. He could have upped the interest, and it was high to begin with. So you’re well out of it.”

“That’s a relief.” I’m into
meiosis,
Beth thought, a little dazed.

“So what do you want to do, Mom? I can put the old house on the market for you. With that and the insurance settlement, you can buy one of those condos that look upriver, no problem.”

“Ugh. Condo.”

He smiled. “I thought that’s what you’d say.”

Her head whirled. “Can I go back to the old place?”

“Sure!” He turned his head. “Hey, Dany!”

Her daughter came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. The baby was asleep. “Did I win the bet?”

John’s smile widened to a grin. “
I
did. She wants the old house.”

Dany threw down the towel. “Oh, Mom, you know it’s too big for you.”

Beth said, “It’s not too big for me and the family. I like company. If I bought a condo, even one with three bedrooms, you’d visit me in relays. I want you—any of you, all of you—to be able to drop in with your kids when you feel like it. And I like having us all to-gether. I want to have a room where everybody can sit down at the dinner table on holidays.” Except that the table was gone, smashed to kindling. “It’s a big house to furnish, but I don’t need to do it all at once.”

“Of course not.” Dany sounded reasonable.

“I can close off the rooms I won’t be using to save on gas.” The old house had a gas furnace.

“Well, if you’re sure it’s what you want.” Dany sat up straight. “I’ll go have a look at the furniture that’s still there. Who has the key?”

Beth racked her brain trying to remember who might have an extra key. Since she and Mack hadn’t yet handed the old house over to a real estate agent, that meant friends and neighbors, but all she could recall was that the wife of the principal of the high school, a fellow teacher and a good friend of hers, had a useless key to the Prune Hill house. John and Dany tossed other names back and forth.

Beth’s cell phone rang. Rob, reporting in. His description of Inger’s lofty departure from his office amused Beth, but she didn’t like the sound of Karl’s anxiety. If Karl even suspected his daughter of malfeasance, the odds were good she had done something. Not, surely, murder. As for Matt Akers, Beth was willing to believe almost anything of him, but he had always struck her as a blusterer, too open and direct to sneak around suborning commissioners, if that was the right term. He might have killed Fred Drinkwater in a fit of rage, but he wouldn’t have done it neatly.

When Rob wound down, she told him her decision about the old house.

“That’s a good idea.” His voice warmed. “It’s a great house, but you’ll need to furnish it. There’s some good stuff in my attic. Help yourself, and take your time moving home, Beth. I’m happy where I am.”

“What are you going to do with this house?”

A pause. “Damned if I know. I can’t bring myself to sell it. Willow loves it, for one thing.”

“Do you?”

Another pause. “I guess I have mixed feelings.”

“Talk to Meg.”

He chuckled. “That’s part of the problem. She mixes my feelings.” He said good-bye and hung up.

She clicked her phone off. Memory stirred. Clara Jenkins next door had a key to the old house. Clara always spent the winter with her daughter in Florida. Her house sitter wouldn’t know where the key was. Beth’s mind cringed away from calling. Clara would not have heard of Mack’s death.

As she was explaining the situation to Dany and John, the land-line phone rang in the hall. John jumped up and went for it.

“What’s Clara’s number?” Dany asked. “I could call her for you and explain.”

“Oh, darling, would you? It’s Coral Gables. Her daughter is listed.”

Dany wrote down the daughter’s married name.

Beth hated to be so feeble and dependent, but she didn’t like Clara. The woman was a talker. She’d gush sympathy, and Beth had had enough sympathy to last a lifetime. What she wanted was Mack.

John returned almost at once. “That was Skip. He couldn’t get through on your cell phone, so he looked up Rob’s home phone. Peggy’s awake. She recognized him. She wants to see Sophy.”

Too much joy. Too much confusion. Beth burst into tears.

Warren Bjork turned up on the dot of three. Rob went out to meet him. Since it wasn’t a formal interview, Rob didn’t call on Linda to take notes nor did he use the recorder.

Bjork was a short, petulant man with a recent hair transplant. Since bald was fashionable Rob wondered why the transplant but admitted to himself that, so far at least, baldness was a problem he hadn’t had to deal with. He’d been short, though, all the way through school, and defensive about it. Now he was sort of medium. He’d started to shoot up taller his senior year at Klalo High, but he remembered agonizing over his stature, especially when he was in love with the captain of the girls’ basketball team. She had topped six feet at the age of thirteen. She’d agonized, too, or so he discovered many years later.

Bjork was looking the office over, lip curled. “I can’t imagine what you want with me, Deputy. I know nothing about Latouche County, and I’m a busy man.”

Rob waved him to the chair with armrests. “Sorry to inconvenience you, sir. What do you do?”

Bjork stared. “Do?” He slammed down into the seat.

“You said you were busy.” Rob sat.

He gave a bark of laughter. “Busy trying to settle my father’s estate. As for what I
do,
I’m CEO of a charitable trust in California.”

Settle the estate? Rob frowned. “I met your father in January. He seemed well enough then.”

“My father’s not dead. He has Alzheimer’s Disease.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” But not surprised, thanks to Meg.

The man’s mouth set in a thin line. “He was diagnosed more than a year ago, but I wasn’t informed until last week. I dropped everything and came north at once.”

“You’re a devoted son.”

“If you’re being sarcastic I don’t appreciate it. The old bastard turned his back on his family fifteen years ago when he traded my mother in for the current model. I’m here to protect my own interests. And my sister’s.”

“Hmm.” Rob steepled his fingers. “And you were what, twenty, at the time? An undergraduate?”

“I was thirty-two!” Bjork half shouted.

That made him some years older than Rob, probably about the same age as Catherine Parrish Bjork. “I guess I don’t understand,” Rob murmured. “Divorce is always unpleasant, but it’s a fact of life for a lot of people. At thirty-two you may have been unhappy about your parents’ split, but it shouldn’t have been a major trauma.”

“My father is a wealthy man,” Bjork said, as if that explained anything.

“And?”

“She…Cate signed a pre-nup. The divorce settlement granted my sister and me…Fuck it, my family history is none of your damned business. Suffice it to say, I have a legitimate interest in what that woman does with Dad’s money.”

“Washington is a community property state,” Rob mused, “like California. Your stepmother is a competent and mature woman. No doubt she has power of attorney and can arrange for care-givers.”

Bjork had the grace to look embarrassed. “I talked to his doctors. Dad’s still at home. He has full-time attendants, and he’s getting decent care.” He ran a hand through his hair. “He didn’t recognize me, hasn’t seen me in a couple of years.”

“It’s a terrible disease.” Rob felt a moment of compassion for this short, unappealing man. Whatever Bjork’s feelings about his father, he must know that Alzheimer’s could run in families. He had to be worried about that as well as about money.

“So what do you want with me?” Bjork asked.

“I’m investigating the death of Fred Drinkwater.”

Bjork frowned. “Oh, the developer. Cate mentioned that some of his houses were destroyed by a mudslide.”

“Yes. It seems your father invested in Drinkwater’s projects.”

“What of it?”

“There are only a handful of motives for murder.”

“It was murder?”

“Probably. As I was saying, people are killed for a limited number of reasons—anger, sexual jealousy, revenge, and greed top the list. Drinkwater was a womanizer, so we’re looking into his relationships.”

Bjork’s lip curled. “Then look into Cate.”

An interesting thought. “Does she sleep around?”

Bjork’s scowl deepened. “I’ve never been able to prove it.”

Rob decided not to press the matter. The idea of the classy commissioner with a two-bit Lothario like Drinkwater had to be absurd. “We’re also following the money trail. The mudslide represented a major setback to Drinkwater’s enterprises. His financial partners were bound to be upset. There you have it. Two sets of motives.” Rob was editing freely.

“Believe it, my father is uninterested in Drinkwater’s problems.”

“What do you know of the other investors?”

“Nothing at all. Look, whatever Dad put into Drinkwater’s schemes, the money was chump change to him.”

“When did your stepmother take over his affairs? Could she have talked him into the investment?”

Bjork’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward. “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” The flash of interest faded. “I doubt it. When Dad was functioning, he made his own decisions. They moved up here almost six years ago, and he was still in charge then. At the bank, before he retired, he was notorious for playing his cards close to his chest. He spoiled Cate, gave her whatever she wanted, but he wouldn’t have
consulted
her in a business matter. When she worked for him, she was just his social secretary, not a colleague.”

“What’s her background?”

Bjork snorted. “She doesn’t have any. Nobody from nowhere, that’s our Cate. Parrish was her first husband’s name. He was an actor or musician, died of an overdose.”

In fact, Cate had gotten mileage out of her first husband’s death when she ran for office. She had strong ideas about expanding the county’s drug abuse programs.

“She has a P.E. degree from some state college,” Bjork drawled. He had a Wharton MBA. Rob had checked. Cate’s degree was from UC Santa Barbara, hardly a backwater institution but certainly state-funded. Of the two, Cate struck Rob as being the more intelligent. Her stepson’s stupidity was beginning to annoy him.

“She worked as an aerobics instructor. When Dad met her she was a personal trainer.” Warren Bjork’s voice put the term in quotation marks. “His assistant was having health problems, so Cate started keeping track of Dad’s social engagements, and the next thing we knew she’d replaced Mrs. Schulz. I don’t think my mother even noticed Cate. I sure didn’t. I still don’t understand the attraction. Cate was no great beauty, just another skinny blonde. She must have made Dad feel young or something.”

Rob wondered if the first Mrs. Bjork had been a great beauty. He thought he might look into that if he had time. Right now he didn’t. “So there was a divorce and a property settlement.”

“Had to be,” Bjork said with some complacence. “My mother’s family owns a chunk of Orange County. She has good lawyers.”

Rob said mildly, “Then your grievance against the present Mrs. Bjork seems a little overblown.”

Caution shuttered Warren Bjork’s eyes. “I don’t know that I have a grievance. I don’t like her, and I don’t trust her an inch, but I can’t prove anything against her. So far.” He rose. “I also don’t see how I can help your investigation. If that’s all?”

Rob considered. “If you uncover financial improprieties that touch on the investment your father made with Drinkwater, I want to know about them.”

Bjork looked mulish.

“I mean it,” Rob said. “This is a murder investigation.”