Plaster and Poison (8 page)

“I feel better. Although I don’t think I want to talk about it. That would probably make me feel worse.”
Wayne nodded. “I don’t think you can tell me anything Derek hasn’t already said, Avery. Just keep doing what you were doing. I’ll go upstairs and take a look.”
He stepped toward the staircase. It looked like he had dressed hurriedly; his shirt was untucked and hanging over his uniform pants, and his boots were unlaced. His face looked tired, with heavy eyelids. He didn’t look like he had slept well, either, and I don’t suppose facing another dead body ever gets easier.
“Did you tell Kate?” I asked Derek, sotto voce, when Wayne was out of sight at the top of the stairs.
He shook his head. “She was in the shower. I figure it’s Wayne’s responsibility to tell her, anyway. As chief of police,
and
as her fiancé.”
I nodded. “I can’t imagine she’ll be happy that there’s a dead guy on her premises, and especially the guy who was going around with her daughter, but at least he died a natural death. That’s something to be grateful for.”
Derek squinted at me. “What makes you say that?”
I squinted back. “You mean he didn’t?” Damn.
“I wouldn’t want to go on record,” Derek said, “and I didn’t examine him closely, but there was some evidence that he may have had a little help.”
“What kind of evidence?”
He shrugged. “For one, it looks like he may have eaten something that didn’t agree with him.”
“Food poisoning?” That didn’t sound too bad.
“Or some other type of poisoning. Before someone asphyxiated him. But it’s just a guess. The ME will have to say for sure.”
“So you’re saying someone killed the guy on purpose?” That could complicate things. And implicate a whole lot of people. People who had access to the carriage house and who had had dealings with the guy. Like Kate. And Shannon. And even Josh, who might not have liked the fact that Shannon was going around with a man old enough to be her father.
A stray thought buzzed through my head and out the other side, but before I could try to catch and inspect it, Derek had answered my question.
“No idea,” he said cheerfully, “and not my problem, thankfully. We’ll just wait until Dudley Do-right gets here, and then we’ll tell the police the little bit we know and knock off work for now. They’re gonna be busy processing the carriage house as a murder scene for the rest of the day. We’d be in the way, even if they’d let us go to work, and they probably won’t. But at least we won’t be suspects. We didn’t know the guy.”
“Thank God. Horrible how he ended up in our work space, though.”
He looked down at me. “Seems to follow you around, doesn’t it, Tink?”
“Me!” I sputtered, moving away. “Nothing ever happened to me until I moved to Waterfield.”
“Nothing ever happened in Waterfield until you came. The last time we had a murder here was in 1999. And then you showed up, and now we’ve had five in less than a year.”
“Four,” I said, since one of the bodies had died years before I got here. “No, three.” Since Aunt Inga had died while I was still in New York, too.
Derek opened his mouth, probably to argue, but before he could get a word out, Wayne came back down the stairs, his steps heavy. Derek closed his mouth again and watched him. Wayne stopped at the bottom of the staircase and looked at us. We looked back.
“Well?” Derek said eventually.
“He’s dead, all right.”
Derek snorted. “No kidding.”
“Do either of you know who he is?”
Derek and I exchanged a look.
“We’ve seen him a couple of times,” Derek admitted. “With Shannon.”
“But other than that, we don’t know anything about him,” I added. “I don’t even know his name.”
Wayne looked at me. After a second, he seemed to conclude that I’d find out soon enough anyway, and he may as well tell me. “The name is easy. What he was doing here and who decided to kill him, if he was killed, may be a little trickier.”
“So who is he?” Derek wanted to know. “He looks familiar, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”
“I don’t imagine you have, since he’s never been to Waterfield before, to my knowledge. But I’m not surprised he looks familiar to you. He looks like his daughter. Or she looks like him.”
He looked from one to the other of us, waiting to see if we’d catch on. After a few seconds, he said, “His name is Gerard Labadie. He’s Shannon’s father.”

7

“Oh, my God!” I said, and I must have reeled, because I felt Derek’s hand reach out and steady me. Again.
“Shannon’s dad?” he repeated, gripping my elbow. “That prince of a guy who had his fun and then left Kate to raise Shannon on her own, with no help from him?”
“The same.” Wayne looked about as disgusted as Derek sounded. “He had his wallet in his pocket, with his driver’s license in it, and that’s what it said. Gerard Labadie, with an address in Boston, Massachusetts.”
“That’s where the car’s from, too,” I nodded.
Wayne turned to me. “Car?”
“The silver gray Lexus I’ve seen him drive. It has Massachusetts plates.”
“Wonder where that is now,” Derek muttered.
“If we knew that,” Wayne answered, “it might answer a lot of questions.” He sighed, and added, scrubbing his hands over his face, “I guess I need to give Kate the news.”
He headed for the outside, looking glum.
I lowered my voice. “He’ll have to give Shannon the news, too. And I don’t envy him. She’ll be devastated, won’t she?”
Derek nodded. “Especially if her father’s been up here for long enough that she’s gotten to know him. You know, I didn’t see this coming.”
He held the door open for me to pass out into the frigid morning air again.
I shook my head. “I didn’t, either. But now that I know, I can kind of see the resemblance.”
Shannon had her mother’s statuesque height and centerfold figure, but her father’s dark eyes and strong nose and chin. And her mahogany or black cherry hair was the sort of thing that might happen if a redheaded Irish girl got together with a swarthy Frenchman to make a baby.
Derek called Wayne to a stop on the snow-covered lawn between the carriage house and the B&B. “Do you want us to come in with you, Wayne? Kate might like to have Avery there when you give her the news. Another woman. But we’ll do whatever you want.”
“Sure,” Wayne said. “When Brandon gets here, I’m gonna have to come back out here anyway, and it’s just as well to have someone who can stay with her. In case she takes it hard.”
“I’ll be happy to stay with Kate until Shannon can get here,” I said. “After that, I’m sure they’ll prefer to be alone.”
“Come along, then.” Wayne headed for the back door. Derek and I followed.
Kate was still in the kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast, and she took the news rather well, everything considered. She didn’t faint, cry, or have hysterics, although she did turn pale and have to sit down.
“Dead?” she repeated, in a voice that was barely there.
Wayne nodded, eyes narrowed. His own face may as well have been chiseled out of granite for all the emotion it expressed. He might be a cop assessing a potential suspect, but I wondered if he wasn’t more of a fiancé assessing his girlfriend’s reaction to the news that her ex—and the father of her child—had died, and on her property. Was he searching her face for something more than just normal shock and grief? Some indication that Kate still had feelings for Gerard? Or that she had had a hand in his demise? Did Wayne know that Gerard had been going about with Shannon? Or that Kate had spoken to Gerard the day before?
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Kate blinked. “I haven’t seen him for at least six years. Not since Shannon and I moved to Waterfield.”
I glanced at her across the table. Her face gave nothing away.
“What about Shannon?” Wayne wanted to know.
“She saw him once in a while growing up. Nothing structured. We didn’t have a custody arrangement, since we were never married, and although he’s listed as her father on her birth certificate, Gerard never asked for visitation rights. Every once in a while he’d call and want to see her, and I’d let him, but it was never more than once a year or so. He just didn’t care enough for any more.”
“So you didn’t know that he’d had contact with Shannon over the past few weeks?”
It was Kate’s turn to glance at me. “I suspected it,” she admitted. “Yesterday, when Avery told me she’d seen Shannon with someone. He sounded like Gerard.”
“But you hadn’t seen him yourself? Or spoken to him?”
Kate flushed. “I called him yesterday, to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, sneaking around behind my back.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t,” Kate said. “I had to leave a message.”
“And you didn’t hear back from him?”
She shook her head.
“Huh,” Wayne said. He had pulled out his tiny notebook and pencil and was taking notes.
“Do you think maybe that’s what he was doing here?” I suggested. “He got your message and came to talk to you?”
Kate shrugged.
“Well, were you home last night?” Derek asked.
Kate nodded. “All night. Making place cards for the wedding supper. If he knocked on the door at any time, I would have heard him.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“Any idea what he was doing in Waterfield?” Wayne asked. “Why he’d suddenly want to get to know Shannon after all this time?”
Kate flushed angrily. I guess she must have forgotten, in the heat of the moment, that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. “Oh, yeah. He probably found out that my grandmother died and left Shannon enough money to keep her comfortably for the next twenty years, at least.”
“Wow,” I said. “Really?”
Kate nodded. “I bet you that’s why he’s here. He was trying to get in good so she’d share it with him.”
“Did you speak to her yesterday?”
Kate shook her head. “After I tried to get hold of him, I tried to get hold of her. I had to leave a message there, too. She isn’t answering her phone. Not for me, at least.”
“I’ll call her,” Wayne said. “If she won’t answer for me, I’ll call Josh and make him put her on. She’s next of kin; I have to talk to her.” He dialed the number and turned away.
“How would Gerard know about your grandmother’s death and Shannon’s money?” I wanted to know. “If you didn’t have any contact with him?”
Kate shrugged. “He may have seen the obituary in the
Globe
. My grandmother was pretty well known in Boston. Or maybe he ran across someone who told him. I do have a few friends left in Boston. And here.”
“How many people did you tell?” I wanted to know, a little hurt. She hadn’t told us, and I thought we were close. Or at least that she and Derek were close.
“In Waterfield? Just Jill Cortino, in addition to Wayne and Josh. She does some financial planning on the side, when she’s not helping Peter run the shop. I thought she might have some ideas for how we could make the most of the money. One can’t be too careful about investing these days.”
“I doubt Jill has been chummy with your ex-boyfriend,” Derek said lightly, resting his hand on my back for a moment. “She has a low tolerance for liars and cheats.”
Kate nodded. “I’m well aware of it. I still don’t think she’s forgiven Melissa for carrying on with Ray while you two were married. She’s thrilled you’re not together anymore, but she has never stopped despising Melissa for the way it ended.”
Derek shrugged. “Water under the bridge,” he said.
Before any of us had time to say anything else—and I was biting down on a snide remark about my predecessor, the former love of Derek’s life—Wayne turned back to us. “She’s on her way. Josh is bringing her.”
“How did she take it?” Kate wanted to know, her voice concerned.
“I didn’t tell her. Just that she needed to come home because something had happened. Once I told her you were fine, she didn’t ask any more questions. We’ll tell her about her father when she gets here. I figured you’d want it that way.”
“Thank you.” Kate leaned into his side, where he was standing next to the chair she was sitting on, and closed her eyes. He ran a hand over her bright curls.
Derek moved his hand from my back to my waist and pulled me closer.
After just a few seconds, Kate lifted her head, some of the strain now gone from her face. “So what happens now? ”
“Now we wait for Brandon and the forensic kit,” Wayne replied. “After that, we figure out what Gerard was doing in the carriage house, and who’d want to kill him. If someone killed him and he didn’t just die of natural causes. And then we get married and go to Paris.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Wayne said. “He’s only been in Waterfield a short time, so he couldn’t have known more than a few people. All we have to do is figure out which one of them wanted him dead.”
It did sound extremely simple. I couldn’t help but wonder if he realized as he said it that the two of them, plus Shannon, were likely the only people in Waterfield who knew Gerard well enough to want to get rid of him.