Presumed Guilty

“Well,” said Chase, “I guess we should call Lorne. Though I’m not sure he’d be much help at this point.” He turned to the phone.

He’d already picked up the receiver when Miss St. John suddenly said, “Wait. Perhaps you should hold off on that call.” She was staring at a loose page near her feet. Thoughtfully she picked up the paper and smoothed it across her knee.

Frowning, Chase hung up the receiver. “Why?”

“This is a profile of Valerie Everhard. You remember her, Chase. Our local librarian. And a married lady. According to this, Valerie has taken on a lover.”

“So?”

“The man she’s seeing is our chief of police.” Miss St. John looked up and her eyes had lost all trace of humor. “Lorne Tibbetts.”

“Why did he have these awful reports?” asked Miranda. “What was he planning to do with them?”

They were driving through darkness back to town. The fog had rolled in from the sea and curtained off all view beyond the dim haze of their headlights. Nothing seemed real in this mist, nothing seemed familiar. They were driving through a strange land, through a swirling cloud that seemed as if it would never lift.

“It doesn’t sound like Richard,” said Chase. “Snooping around in his neighbors’ private lives. He committed enough sins of his own. If anyone was vulnerable to blackmail, it was Richard. Besides, who cares if Lorne is having a little fling with the librarian?”

“The librarian’s husband?”

“Okay, but why would Richard care?”

She shook her head, unable to come up with an answer.

“I wonder if any of these people knew about these files. Miss St. John didn’t.” She looked down at the papers on her lap and thought of the terrible secrets they contained. She had the sudden urge to shove the pile away, to throw off that unclean burden. “Chase?” she asked. “How do we know any of this is true?”

“We don’t.” He gave a short laugh. “And we can’t exactly knock on George LaPierre’s door and ask if he’s had syphilis.”

Miranda frowned at the note clipped to the folder. “I wonder who this is. This W.B.R. who got the information.”

“The initials don’t ring any bells?”

“None at all.”

As the darkness flew past their windshield, Miranda thought of all the secrets revealed in these files. The banker’s weakness for whiskey. The doctor’s white-collar fraud. The husband and wife who conversed with their fists. All of it concealed beneath the glaze of respectability. What private pains we nurse in silence.

“Why these particular people?” she asked suddenly.

“Because they have the most to lose?” Chase suggested. “We’re talking old island families here. LaPierre, Everhard, St. John. All of them respected names.”

“Except for Tony Graffam.”

“That’s true. I guess he has a file in there, too…” He paused. “Wait. There’s our link.”

“What?”

“The north shore. You haven’t lived here long enough to know all these families. But I grew up with them. I remember the summers I used to play with Toby LaPierre. And Daniel Steiner. And Valerie Everhard. Their families all have summer cottages out there.”

“It could be coincidental.”

“Or it could mean everything.”

Chase frowned at the highway. The fog was thinning. “When we get back to your house,” he said, “let’s take a good look at those names. See if my hunch holds up.”

An hour and a half later they sat at Miranda’s dining table, the pages spread out before them. The remains of a hastily prepared supper — mushroom omelets and toast — had been pushed aside and they were now on their second cup of coffee. It was such a domestic scene, she thought with a twinge of longing, almost like newlyweds lingering at the dinner table. Except that the man sitting across from her could never, would never, fit into the picture. He was a temporary apparition, a visitor passing through her dining room.

She forced herself to focus on the sheet of paper, where he’d just checked off the final name.

“Okay, here’s the list,” said Chase. “Everyone in Richard’s file. I’m almost certain they all own property on the north shore.”

“Are any names missing?”

Chase sat back and mentally ticked off the camps along the access road. “There’s Richard, of course. Then there’s old man Sulaway’s property, down the road. He’s a retired lobsterman, sort of a recluse. And then there’s Frenchman’s Cottage. I think it was sold some years back. To hippies, I heard. They come up for the summers.”

“So they’d be living there now.”

“If they still own the place. But they’re not from this area. I can’t see Richard bothering to dig up information on them. And as for old Sully, well, an eighty-five-year-old sounds like a pretty unlikely victim for blackmail.”

Blackmail. Miranda gazed at the papers on the table. “What was Richard thinking of?” she wondered. “What did he have against these people?”

“Something to do with the rezoning? Were any of these names on the land commission?”

“They couldn’t have voted, anyway. They would’ve been disqualified. You know, conflict of interest.” She sat back. “Maybe our burglar was looking for something entirely different.”

“Then the question is, did he — or she — find it?”

From somewhere in the house came a sound that made them both glance up. It was the soft tinkle of breaking glass.

Miranda jerked to her feet in alarm. At once Chase grabbed her hand, signaled her to be silent. Together they moved from the dining room into the living room. A quick glance around told them the windows were all intact. They paused for a moment, listening, but heard no other sounds. Chase started toward the bedrooms.

They were moving up the hall when they heard, louder this time, the distinct crash of shattering glass.

“That came from the cellar!” said Miranda.

Chase wheeled and headed back into the kitchen. He flicked on a wall switch and yanked open the cellar door. A single bare bulb shone over the narrow stairway. A strange mist seemed to swirl in the shadows, obscuring the bottom of the stairs. They had taken only two steps down when they both smelled smoke.

“You’ve got a fire in here!” said Chase, moving down the steps. “Where’s your extinguisher?”

“I’ll get it!” Miranda scrambled into the kitchen, pulled the extinguisher from the pantry shelf and dashed back down the cellar steps.

By now the smoke was thick enough to make her eyes burn. Through the whirling haze she saw the source: a bundle of flaming rags. Nearby, just beneath a shattered basement window, lay a red brick. At once she understood what had happened, and her panic gave way to fury. How dare they smash my window? How dare they attack me in my own home?

“Stay back!” Chase yelled, plunging forward through the smoke. His shoes crunched over broken glass as he crossed the concrete floor. He aimed the extinguisher; a stream of white shot out and hissed over the flames. A few sweeps of the nozzle and the fire faltered and died under a smothering blanket of powder. Only the smoke remained, a stinking pall that hung like a cloud around the bare light bulb.

“It’s out!” said Chase. He was prowling the basement now, searching for new flames. He didn’t notice that Miranda had gone rigid with fury, didn’t see that she was staring, white-faced, at the broken glass on the floor.

“Why can’t they leave me alone?” she cried.

Chase turned and looked at her with sudden intensity. He said, dead quiet, “You mean this has happened before?”

“Not — not this. But phone calls, really cruel ones. Again and again. And messages, written on my window.”