Remember Me, Irene

“Andre Selman?”

“Yes. Anyway, knowing how he felt about being out on the water, you can understand why I didn’t question him when he burned the photocopy. It didn’t seem important at the time.” She closed her eyes, then added in a shaky voice, “Famous last words, right?”

I decided to keep the discussion on neutral ground. “Nothing else in the envelope?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think so. But maybe there was-maybe something was in it before he showed it to me, before he came home with it. All I know is, when Ben received these letters, something started eating at him. He started talking about retiring, about getting away from Las Piernas all together.”

“Ben talked about leaving Las Piernas?”

“Yes. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Things only got worse from there. I should have tried to get him to talk to me more. I should have seen this coming. Looking back-”

“Looking back is useless. I remember what you said to me on the ride home, Claire. You had been trying to get him to talk to you. He wouldn’t.”

She bit her lower lip, hard. “I think Ben was being blackmailed,” she said. “I think he was being blackmailed by your friend Lucas Monroe.”

“Hold on, Claire. I admit there are some suspicious circumstances here-”

“Suspicious! I would say so!”

“Please hear me out.”

“Ben…” She was shaking now. The tears started flowing. I stood up and reached out to her. She could have turned from me, but perhaps because I had been in this house with her the last time this happened, she let me hold her while she cried.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.

“It’s okay.”

She pulled some tissues out of a pocket and tried to dry her face, the tears continuing to thwart the effort. “I’m sorry,” she said again, “it wasn’t fair to call him your friend. You told me you haven’t seen him in years.”

“Uh…that’s not exactly true.”

That stopped the tears. She looked at me over the tissue.

“I saw Lucas. I just didn’t know it was Lucas when I saw him. And I want to believe that I am still his friend.”

“You aren’t making any sense.”

“No,” I agreed. I briefly told her the story of my encounter with Lucas, and of Roberta’s conversations with me at the Cliffside and in the church. “I want to hear Lucas’s side of all of this before I jump to any conclusions. There’s a logical explanation for his contact with Ben.” And Andre, I added silently. “Lucas is trying to straighten out his life. He’s probably looking for a job. Ben is obviously someone who knew him in better days.”

“I understand you want to feel compassion for him,” Claire said slowly. “You’re a compassionate person. But-”

“Claire, please don’t go into a lecture about alcoholics and what a hopeless sap I’m being. I got that one from Roberta. But think about it as calmly as you can. Please just try to do that. There are so many unanswered questions about Ben-and about Lucas Monroe. You said you wanted to try to understand what happened to Ben. Did you mean it?”

She nodded, fighting tears again.

Her struggle got to me. “As I said earlier, Claire-perhaps I’m not the person you need to talk to about this. You may not want to trust my judgment on something like this.”

“No, you’re wrong. I trust you,” she said. “That’s why I came to you for help. But I’m trusting you to be fair, Irene. If you discover that Lucas Monroe is guilty of blackmailing my husband…”

“I can’t be his judge and jury. But if I find proof that he was blackmailing Ben, then I’ll admit I was wrong about him. It will be a matter for the police at that point. Are we agreed?”

“Yes.” She looked away for a moment, then said, “I have to do something anyway, don’t you see? Ben’s reputation meant everything to him. The things that are being said about him now…” Her voice trailed off.

“Look, nothing can stop that entirely. I’ll be blunt. Here in Las Piernas, Ben was too rich and too powerful to be ignored when he was alive-and he won’t be ignored in death.”

“Of course not,” she said, the numbness coming back. “So what should we do next?”

“Let’s go over what we have so far. Let’s start with the photocopy. You said there was a group of people on the boat. Did you recognize any of them?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t get to look at it, really. I might have recognized them if I had been able to catch more than a glimpse of it. I have an impression of a group of men, but that’s all. There could have been a woman in the picture. I’m not sure.”

“Did Ben take other people out in the boat very often?”

“It was a long time ago…”

“Try to remember.”

“Well, yes, lots of people.”

“Anyone who went out on it often?”

“Andre Selman, of course. Andre loved fishing, so Ben took him along. Sometimes it was just the two of us. Sometimes he took business associates.”

“Roland Hill?”

“Yes.”

“Booter Hodges?”

She smiled a little. “Yes. I remember that, because the first time Booter went out with them, the sea was a little rough. Booter became violently ill and they had to turn back. They made fun of him, because he ruined Corbin Tyler’s brand-new deck shoes. The others all said that Booter couldn’t come along after that, but Ben wouldn’t let them pick on him. He just made sure Booter took a pill for motion sickness before he came aboard.”

“Somehow the story about Booter’s seasickness doesn’t surprise me.”

“Actually, Booter was braver than Ben about that. At least Booter took the medication and had the courage to try it again. The last time Ben went out on the boat,he got a bad case of seasickness. Came back from a fishing trip with Andre, looking awful. Ben said he didn’t want to set foot on it again, that he was going to sell the boat to Andre. He sold it, but he was in a blue mood about it for weeks. I remember that much.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Hmm. Ten, fifteen years ago? I don’t know.”

“Let’s work on that for a moment. We’ll assume that Ben told you the truth, that the color photocopy really was a picture of people on your boat, and not some other boating party. Did Ben already own the boat when you married him?”

She shook her head. “We bought the boat after we were married.” Her brows drew together. “Not long after we were married, so about seventeen years ago? And we didn’t own it for very long.”

“Would you still have records on it?”

“Yes, somewhere around here. Why?”

“If we figure out which years you owned the boat, that may help us learn when the photograph was taken. So that’s your first assignment.”

“Okay. But about this Lucas Monroe-” she began.

“I know he’s in the other one, but that doesn’t mean he sent the photograph. Lucas is homeless. He’s unlikely to be walking around with photo albums.”

“But who else would send them?”

I started studying the envelopes. The postmarks caught my eye. “Riverside! Why didn’t I think of that before? There is no easy way to get to Riverside from Las Piernas on public transportation,” I said. “Grey-hound might take you there. Not much else without lots and lots of transfers.”

“You’ve lost me,” Claire replied.

“These are postmarked Riverside. Lucas wouldn’t go all the way to Riverside just to mail a couple of letters, would he? Why? To hide an address? He doesn’thave an address.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed, then said, “Well, he might go to Riverside-or anywhere else, for that matter-