Dutch Me Deadly

“Me, too! I watch it at my cousin’s. He has a satellite dish. I even follow it on Facebook.”

“Me, too!” I lied again.

Curving his mouth into a slow smile, he scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “The code to access the computer.”

“Really?”

He winked. “Let it be our secret.”

With the small front lobby all to myself, I typed in the access code and in a few keystrokes was staring at the Google homepage. Now, where to begin? I typed “Gary Bouchard,” hit the return key, and in less than a nanosecond pulled up more than four million bits of information on the Gary Bouchards of the world. Four million. You gotta be kidding me.

I decided to narrow my search. My fingers flew over the keyboard. “Gary Bouchard Bangor Maine.” I hit the return.

Twelve thousand hits.

Okay. Twelve thousand I could handle.

I spent the next fifteen minutes unearthing pieces of Gary Bouchard’s life on a website called, Who’s Who in Bangor. His car dealership was apparently the largest in southern Maine, with satellite dealerships as far north as Presque Isle, which practically sat on the Canadian border. He’d received several Businessman of the Year awards from local service organizations, was an officer in the Knights of Columbus, and sponsored a basketball camp every summer for underprivileged youth. Gee, that was nice of him. He was a longtime member of the Bangor city council, president of the fine arts commission, and served on the board of trustees for St. Francis Xavier High School. My eyes slowly glazed over. The guy sounded like a saint. An elitist saint, but a saint nonetheless. I obviously needed to dig deeper into his background to find the real dirt.

I accessed the local paper and plunged into the archives, hitting the mother lode under “weddings.” Gary’s name led me to a bridal photo of Sheila in her “peau de soie gown, sewn with seed pearls and aurora borealis crystals.” Wow. The article described every single detail of the wedding, from the bride’s and attendants’ gowns, to the altar flowers and mother-of-the-bride outfits. It listed out-of-town guests, the country club where the reception was held, and where the newlyweds would be traveling on their honeymoon.

I studied the photo of Sheila (Eaton) Bouchard, thinking how incredibly young she’d been when she married. Babies having babies. But she and Gary were still together, so they’d obviously found a way to make it work. The article mentioned that she’d graduated third in her class from St. Francis Xavier and would be “at home” after the honeymoon, setting up housekeeping in their new house, which had been a wedding gift from her parents.

I read that twice to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. A house as a wedding gift? Who could afford it? My parents had given us a blender, but it had twenty-four speeds and a self-cleaning button, so it was a really good one.

The article wrapped up with the scoop on the groom. He’d been the highest scoring basketball player in Xavier’s history, graduated fifth in his class, and planned to attend Husson College in the fall to pursue a degree in business, while at the same time joining his father at Bouchard Motors as part owner.

Gary’s life had apparently been all mapped out for him, but I wondered if Gary had done any of the planning. He might have pursued a basketball career if Ricky Hennessy hadn’t monkeyed with the toilet paper in the boys’ bathroom. He might have attended one of the big Ivy League schools if Sheila hadn’t been pushing marriage. He might have tested his wings in another part of the country if his in-laws hadn’t anchored him in place with a new house. At some point in his life had he rebelled against the status quo and exacted revenge on the people who’d stolen his options? But what could he have done that Pete Finnegan might have found out about? And how did Paula fit in?

I accessed birth announcements, obituaries, and entries in Bangor’s social calendar. I found a birth announcement for Gary Allen Bouchard III a few months after the wedding and an obituary for Gary Bouchard Senior two years later. Gee. He’d only been forty-five years old. Died in a hunting accident. I clicked on a link to find that Gary Senior had been fatally wounded when his gun accidentally discharged while he was deer hunting with Gary Junior.

I stared at the words until the letters ran into each other. Holy crap. Was this my smoking gun? Literally?

I scanned the rest of the article, learning that Gary Junior would be taking over the family car dealership, insuring that loyal customers would suffer no disruption in sales or service. Armed with his two-year business degree, twenty-one-year-old Gary professed readiness to step into his father’s shoes, although his mother would remain the titular head of the business. Accessing a second link, I found another obituary—that of Gary’s mother, who died in a car accident eight months later. “A defect in the braking system of her Chrysler Saratoga,” a subsequent article reported, explaining how Mrs. Bouchard had careened down Newbury Street hill and crashed headlong into a tree. I didn’t know if Gary’s dealership had been responsible for maintaining her brakes, but I did know that with both his parents dead, Gary was free to run the whole show without interference from anyone. Barely in his twenties, he becomes one of the wealthiest men in the city, which probably did a lot to make up for a few of his earlier disappointments.

Coincidence, or deliberate plan?

I expanded my search to include Sheila Bouchard and in a few clicks discovered entries in the social calendar announcing her induction onto the boards of the Maine State Historical Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Junior League of Bangor. She even established her own social club, the Minerva Society, where local women came together on a weekly basis to discuss literature and the arts. I found pictures of an ever-evolving Sheila with the conductor of the Bangor Symphony orchestra at a Christmas extravaganza, and with St. Xavier’s Sister Hippolytus at the parish’s annual Coffee Party. I studied the photo of the nun, remembering this was the teacher none of the girls had liked. Sister Hippo. I wondered if she was still alive. She’d be pretty old now, but when nuns retired to the Mother House, they oftentimes seemed to live forever. Kinda like Osmond.

Sheila graced the pages of the Bangor Daily News throughout the decades, and almost exclusively on the front page—at the opening of the State Fair, at the ribbon cutting for a new wing of the medical center, at the Bowdoin College graduation ceremony when Gary III received his degree, at the county courthouse where she gazed sourly at a jubilant Paula Peavey.

Courthouse?

I scanned the accompanying article. Oh, my God. Paula had won a discrimination suit against Sheila and the Minerva Society. Paula’s application for membership had been rejected on the basis that since she hadn’t graduated in the top tenth of her class, she wasn’t actually smart enough to discuss Lolita or Green Eggs and Ham. Paula had called foul, and the judgment had been decided in her favor, along with a significant cash payment for damages. A week later, another article announced the dissolution of the Minerva Society, which “in its two years of existence, had become the premier ladies group in Bangor, surpassing even the Junior League in popularity among the well-heeled.”

I leaned back in my chair, thinking. Had Sheila eventually forgiven Paula for the lawsuit, or had she bided her time until she could even the score? Paula had definitely knocked her down a few pegs. Sheila wouldn’t have liked that. But how far would Sheila have gone to get even? Could she have been bitter and angry enough to commit murder? The idea seemed pretty far-fetched, and yet one thing I’d learned in my travel experience was that, what seemed far-fetched to me might seem perfectly normal to a homicidal maniac.

I stared out the lobby window in a daze. Was this the kind of information that would be useful to the police? Or would they tell me to come back when I’d found a direct link between my suspects and their victims? I’d already found a link between Paula and Sheila, but I needed something concrete to connect Pete to Gary. Something that I could point to and say, “See this? I think Pete is dead because he threatened to reveal this about Gary.” But what could Pete possibly know?

I heard a loud rapping on the window. Jackie grimaced at me with every muscle in her face before mouthing something I couldn’t hear.

“What?” I mouthed back.

Rolling her eyes in disgust, she charged through the front door and into the lobby. “I said—What are you doing in here? Gheertrude isn’t waiting for you. But I know which way she’s headed, so if we leave now, we might be able to catch up.”

I typed a flurry of words, my eyes riveted on the monitor. “Gimme a minute. I need to find out what Pete