Marian yawned. “I checked that one out myself, not being a downy duck. Ben Parotti said she was on the seven-thirty ferry Tuesday morning. The ferry docked at eight-fifteen and her car rolled off going south. According to a secretary at the firm of Lampkin and Swift, she arrived at their offices at eight-fifty and was in a conference room with an L and S lawyer and his client and a court reporter when Edna Graham called.”
“It would be nice if we knew exactly when Glen was killed.” Max looked thoughtful. “Kit spoke to him at eight forty-five, Richard found his body at ten-fifteen. That’s an hour and a half unaccounted for.”
“Two shots.” Annie looked puzzled. “Why didn’t anyone hear them?”
“We don’t know for sure that no one did.” Max held out his hand and Marian reluctantly poured out a half-dozen peanuts. She jerked her head toward the vending machine. “More where these came from.”
Max flipped the peanuts in his mouth, stepped to the machine, dropped in two quarters, and punched. He retrieved a bag of peanuts from the trough and tossed it to Marian.
She accepted the bounty as her due. “Unless somebody pops up and proves the shots occurred at the precise moment Elaine was entertaining the president of the League of Women Voters or, better yet, two fresh-faced Mormon missionaries, I’d say she’s history.”
Annie pushed up from the chair. “On that cheery note . . .”
They were in the break-room doorway when Max looked back at Marian. “You remember when I asked you about Elaine and you said you had an interesting tidbit about her?”
Marian’s head jerked up. Her bright dark eyes gleamed. Without looking down, she ripped open the cellophane of the peanut bag with the skill of long practice. “Hey, hey, hey. You wanted to know about Elaine before we had a kill. What kind of inside dope do you have?” She pulled a soft-leaded pencil from the pocket of her jeans, along with a couple sheets of folded computer paper.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Annie responded. “Maybe we can make a deal.”
Max held up a warning hand. “Nothing’s been released about—” He broke off, not mentioning Pat Merridew’s name.
Annie had no such qualms. Billy Cameron either dismissed the possibility of murder in Pat’s death or felt there would never be a way to prove murder. But she had every right to voice her own opinion.
Marian made notes as Annie recounted the background: Pat Merridew’s late-night forays, her death from an overdose of an opiate, the fingerprint-free crystal mug, and the photograph in her BlackBerry of a towel wrapped around something. “ . . . and the photo definitely was taken in the Jamison gazebo shortly after midnight on June thirteenth.”
Face folded in disparagement, Marian ran a hand through her spiky, silver-frosted dark hair. “So what does any of that have to do with the price of rice in China?”
Max’s gaze told Annie he felt she’d landed in a sticky patch all by her own effort. He shrugged. “ ‘Trust me not at all or all in all.’ ”
Annie didn’t know whether to admire Max’s erudition or whether he recalled her quoting from some of her cherished Miss Silver novels by Patricia Wentworth. Miss Silver often repeated the maxim from Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Whichever, it was good advice.
Marian’s eyes rounded as Annie described the bundle Elaine held Tuesday morning that probably contained the murder weapon and how Annie had told Billy and that led to the search of the marsh.
Marian stared at Annie. “So rewind to the gazebo and another bundle. Is it your idea that Glen’s gun was in the towel and Pat Merridew saw who put it there, then tried a little genteel blackmail over coffee in crystal mugs, but wound up dead instead of counting ill-gotten gains? Have I got it right?”
Annie nodded.
Marian muttered aloud, “Okay, I think it all follows. The gun-safe key was missing. Probably we should pin down when that was known, see if it correlates with the towel in the gazebo. But it’s kind of an ergo equation working backward. Tuesday morning Elaine had a bundle, which likely held the murder weapon, so the odds are that she’s the one who put a bundle that might have contained a gun in the gazebo.” She blinked at Annie. “At least you’ve got a date. When was the pix taken?”
“At twelve-oh-nine A.M., June thirteenth, that’s just after midnight on Saturday, June twelfth.”
Marian fingered more peanuts. “Sounds like a one-way ticket to jail for Elaine. No wonder she’s a person of interest. I wonder what she was doing the night Pat died?”
“She was home. Alone.” Annie felt discouraged.
Marian looked rueful. “Where’s an alibi when a woman needs one? I guess she didn’t spend that weekend in Savannah with her gentleman friend.”
Annie asked, “Savannah?”
Marian’s face had a waiflike quality. “Yeah. Savannah. That was my tidbit. Elaine Jamison and Burl Field are an item. I’ve seen her and Burl coming back on the early-morning ferry a couple of times. I have a niece who reads poetry at a coffeehouse and sometimes I stay over at her apartment on Saturday nights after her gig. In fact . . .” Her face squeezed in concentration. “Oh, wait a minute.” Marian pulled an iPhone from her pocket. “I stayed with Cindy on, oh yes, I thought so, Saturday night June twelfth. I saw Elaine and Burl, yeah, it was the first ferry Sunday morning, June thirteenth. There’s no ferry to the mainland after ten P.M. Saturday night, so Elaine didn’t tuck a gun wrapped in a towel in the Jamison gazebo. Somebody else did the honors.”
The morning clouds had fled and the day had heated up. In bright sunlight, Burl Field used a bandanna to wipe sweat from his red face. He braked the forklift and dropped to the ground. The forklift held a pallet of two-by-fours. “Yeah, Max, how can I help you?” A buzz saw whined in the cavernous interior of the lumber-yard warehouse.
Asking a man whether he spent the night with his lover could evoke a pugnacious response, but the conclusion seemed obvious. The last ferry to Broward’s Rock left the mainland at ten P.M. The first ferry departed from the mainland at seven A.M. If Elaine Jamison and Burl Field had been on the early ferry from the mainland island on
