The Hen of the Baskervilles (31 page)

I sat down in the swivel chair and leaned back. Maybe if I stayed here for a little while and did my yoga deep breathing, I would start to feel sleepy.

I gave up after a few breaths. I was too wired. I kept wondering if the chief was interrogating Genette. More likely he was standing by until Genette's attorney arrived. No doubt some highly paid defense attorney was even now being roused from slumber, or perhaps already speeding toward Caerphilly. I couldn't see the chief waking one of the local judges at this hour to preside over a bail hearing, so Genette was probably spending the night in a cell. She was lucky Caerphilly had finally regained possession of its police station and jail. Last year this time, the police had been temporarily quartered in Dad's barn, and Genette would have spent her night in a padlocked box stall. We'd actually had one upscale prisoner who found the experience quaint and charming, but I didn't think Genette would feel that way.

To my surprise, I found I felt just a little bit sorry for Genette. Not because she'd probably have to spend a few hours in jail. She deserved that. But she'd probably be spending most of the day being interrogated by the chief, and odds were he'd spend a whole lot more time trying to find information to prove that she'd murdered Brett than talking about chickens.

And I had the sinking feeling he was wasting his time. I didn't really think Genette had murdered Brett.

Which made no sense. I didn't like the woman. I didn't trust her an inch. She was a home wrecker, a bully, and a chicken thief. She had reason to know what Molly's van looked like, and access to it to plant the gun. And I didn't have any trouble imagining her as a killer.

I just had a hard time imagining her killing Brett. He was too useful to her. And from what I could see, her surprise and dismay at learning he'd fathered a child with another woman seemed too genuine. Maybe I was deluding myself, but I had a hard time believing Genette was that good an actor.

“She didn't kill him,” I muttered.

Of course, my believing in her innocence wouldn't count for much if I couldn't prove it. And I couldn't do that any more than I could prove Molly's innocence. As things stood, both women were still under suspicion, and even if the chief could gather enough untainted evidence to take one of them to trial, either woman could probably get off on reasonable doubt as long as the other hadn't been definitively proven innocent. Of course, getting off didn't mean that either of them would have her reputation restored. They'd both live under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives.

Unless someone found out who had really killed Brett.

I tried to tell myself that that was the chief's job. That mine was to help run the fair, and that I'd probably handle that job a heck of a lot better if I got at least a little sleep. That maybe if I dozed off while thinking about the murder my brain would keep working while I slept and I'd wake up with important new insights about the case.

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate.

It wasn't working.

I gave up and turned on my laptop. For want of anything else useful to do, I opened up my database of exhibitors and reread everything I had on file about Genette. And then my record on Molly. Nothing jumped out at me as useful. I didn't have a record on Paul Morot, but I did an Internet search for the Fickle Wind Winery and found where it had been located.

I called up my map of where the exhibitors had come from. Molly's dot was off by itself but the now-defunct Fickle Wind Winery was in the midst of a fairly dense cluster of other exhibitors. Other winemakers. Including Genette, of course.

I wasn't sure why I was focused on Morot so much. He certainly wasn't the only winemaker who had a reason to hate Genette. Just the one I knew about.

If I were the chief, I'd look very closely at all the winemakers. They all knew each other. And all hated Genette. And probably, by extension, Brett. Would they cover for each other if they thought one of their own had killed him?

And it wasn't just the winemakers here at the fair. There could be others who weren't exhibiting. Or others like Morot who weren't technically winemakers anymore but were still part of the close-knit community.

And what should I make of the fact that even one of the winemakers was suspicious of Morot?

Mother would know. She'd become a part of that close-knit community. She might know who else had been hurt by Genette, or even driven out of business. I should talk to her. Correction: Suggest that the chief talk to her.

Tomorrow. In the meantime, I opened my browser and did an Internet search on Genette. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. Maybe that was a good thing. If I'd had a definite goal in mind, I'd have gotten frustrated pretty quickly. Most of the articles I found were puff pieces published in her local weekly paper. Either she and the publisher were buddies or she was a major advertiser.

I wasn't finding anything, but I kept going, because the search was so dull it was bringing me closer to sleep than I'd been for hours. I stared at picture after picture of Genette. Genette hosting wine tastings. Genette hosting concerts. Genette winning ribbons at her county fair, although a visit to the fair's Web site proved they were fourth place and honorable mention ribbons. Pictures of Genette with various dignitaries. She had a habit of striking the same pose and smiling the same overwide toothy smile, so consistent that you could have cut her out of any picture and pasted her into any other and barely notice the difference.

It was almost interesting when I came across a June article in a Richmond paper about the upcoming fair being held on Genette's land. The fair Brett was supposed to be organizing, although there was no mention of him in the article. Maybe my suspicions were right, and Genette had involved him in a futile attempt to avoid tainting the event with her unpopularity. If I'd been trying to do that, I'd have found a front man who was well known and above reproach, or at least someone not known to be committing adultery with me. Genette had to use what she had, and what she had was Brett.

I narrowed my search by adding the words “agricultural exposition” to Genette's name, just to see if I could figure out when she'd started using Brett as a figurehead.

The second article I came across had only a minor mention of Genette—it was mostly about Clay County's attempt to put on its own fair, with a roundup at the end about other contending fairs, like ours and Genette's. I had to laugh because the article featured a picture of a group of Clay County notables at what the article claimed was the breaking ground ceremony for the construction of the Clay County Fairgrounds. I remembered hearing about it at the time—they'd staged the whole thing in what was still a swampy field on Sheriff Dingle's hog farm.

I studied the photo. Sheriff Dingle was there standing behind his brother-in-law, the county board chairman, who was pretending to dig up the first shovelful of earth. I didn't recognize most of the others, but their faces looked familiar. Probably other Dingles along with a few Plunketts, Peebleses, and Whickers. Those four names accounted for at least two-thirds of the Clay County phone book. Deputy Plunkett was there, smiling broadly.

And right beside him was a familiar sharp-nosed face.

I zoomed in on that part of the picture. It was her—the self-proclaimed mother of Brett Riordan's out-of-wedlock child. She had blond hair pulled back into a ponytail—evidently the unruly mop of brown hair had been a wig. But I recognized her. And Horace and I had gotten the ski-jump nose right. So there, Deputy Plunkett.

Of course, he probably knew that. He had to have met her before. In the picture, she was smiling, and had one arm around him and the other around a man whose shape and features suggested he was either a Dingle or a Plunkett.

And so was she. I checked the caption and counted over the list of names until I figured out which one she was. Aurelia Plunkett Dingle. A Dingle
and
a Plunkett.

I searched for her name and came up with a two-year-old account of her wedding, from the
Clay County Advertiser,
their local weekly. She and her husband—also her third cousin, and one of the sheriff's nephews—had moved after the wedding to West Virginia, where the groom was studying agriculture at Pineville College. That probably accounted for the fact that I hadn't seen her around before. But not the fact that Plunkett hadn't recognized my description of her, or the sketches Horace and I had come up with. The ski-jump nose wasn't unattractive—in fact, in the posed wedding photo, it looked curiously elegant. But it was absolutely distinctive. And the sketches we'd made with Horace's software program were dead on. Plunkett had lied.

“It's a setup,” I muttered. I'd bet anything the woman hadn't had an affair with Brett. I suddenly realized something that should have occurred to me when I'd witnessed her scene with Genette. The supposed unwed mother mentioned “the baby”—but she hadn't given the offstage child a name. A mother would name her child. And she hadn't even brought the baby along. Why not? A cooing or howling infant would be much more effective in shaming Genette and enlisting the sympathy of the onlookers. But I was willing to bet there was no baby. She'd simply gone to the Caerphilly Inn to stage a scene—a totally fake scene that would shift suspicion in the murder case onto Genette. But why?

Possibly to make sure the rival fair Genette was organizing would fail. I suspected from my snooping over in the Midway that the Clay County powers-that-be were only pretending to be content with the tax revenue from the Midway. If they were planning to revive their plans for a Clay County fair, Brett's murder gave them a golden opportunity to throw a wrench in the plans of one of their main rivals. Or maybe two of their rivals—having a murder happen on our grounds wasn't going to do the Un-fair any good.

Was it an opportunity they'd seized or one they'd created?

“Ridiculous,” I said aloud. Surely no one would really commit murder over the fair.

But it wasn't the fair. It was all about the money. Caerphilly was moving past its financial crisis, but Clay County was still mired deep. They'd never been prosperous, thanks in no small part to nepotism and incompetence, so the downturn had been that much harder for them. And everyone in Caerphilly knew it. It was why we included them in the Un-fair—so they'd have a chance to share in whatever prosperity the event might bring. And maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that a lot of people in Clay County seemed to feel resentment rather than gratitude.

What if that hadn't been enough for them? Plunkett had told at least one Midway barker that the fair would be in Clay County next year. What if they thought the way to make that happen was to get rid of some of the competition? And had knocked off Brett because they thought he really was the organizer of the Virginia Agricultural Exposition? Or maybe they meant to kill Genette and got Brett by mistake. Either way, they could have sent the supposed unwed mother to make a scene that would draw suspicion back onto Genette—not because they had something against Genette, but because framing her would be a lot more useful to their cause than framing Molly. And Genette's attempt at chicken theft had tightened the noose around her own neck, playing right into their hands.

They. I was starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. And even if there was a conspiracy, somebody's hand had to have been holding the gun. To convict anybody, the chief would have to put a name to that hand.

The chief would also have to find a way around all the problems with the evidence. And if someone from Clay County was involved, maybe Deputy Plunkett wasn't quite the idiot we all thought he was. What if he was deliberately tainting as much of the evidence as he could—literally—get his hands on? It made sense if he knew that someone from Clay County was involved.

And even more sense if it had been his own hand holding the gun.

He'd appeared at the crime scene awfully quickly. He could have gone away long enough to conceal the murder weapon, and then come back to make his attempt to control the crime scene. Had he been alarmed when Caerphilly had succeeded in asserting jurisdiction? Or had he been secretly gloating, because he thought with us in charge his cover-up would be all the more believable?

Maybe he hadn't even hidden the gun. Maybe he'd had it with him all the time, ready to dispose of when he got a chance. And by allowing him to help with the search of Molly's van, Vern had unwittingly handed him a perfect opportunity not just to dispose of it but to plant it where it would divert suspicion from him. He hadn't failed to lift the floor mats—he'd lifted them all right—to put the gun there. And then he'd wandered off, pretending to need a smoke, leaving it for Vern to find.

And the bantam feathers in Brett's car. Plunkett actually found those. He could have collected them by skulking around the chicken tent, but I would have bet anything that he'd taken the Russian Orloffs and hidden them somewhere. Although it might take some doing to search all the Dingle, Plunkett, Peebles, and Whicker farms in Clay County to find them.

Suddenly I felt curiously anxious and exposed in the brightly lit trailer, so close to the scene of the murder. I whirled to look out the window behind my desk, but all I saw was my own reflection. I turned off the desk lamp and felt a little better with just the glow of the monitor lighting the room. And better still when I checked both that window and the other and saw nothing but the empty field around me and the barns in the distance.

But it was still a little creepy here, and past time for me to get back to the barns.

I hit my printer's on button and printed out the two articles—the one with the groundbreaking ceremony, and Aurelia's wedding piece. I waited impatiently while the pages chugged out of the printer. Then I folded them and stuffed them into the back pocket of my jeans. I turned off the printer and the computer and stepped out of the stuffy little trailer.