Lethal Little Lies (Jubilant Falls Series Book 3) Read online

  “So what happens now?”

  I put the car in gear and slipped back into traffic.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But I think the situation has changed—and not to our advantage.”

  Chapter 28 Addison

  The door was open to Watterson’s dark office when I got downstairs, but I knocked anyway.

  “You wanted to see me?” I asked.

  He waved me in. He was alone. I sighed in relief, knowing I wouldn’t be forced into some kind of goddamn happy-face verbal tap dance for people I didn’t know and had no idea of their intentions.

  “Sit down, Penny, sit down.” Watt indicated one of the leather chairs in front of his desk. “We need to talk.”

  “What’s up?” I asked as I settled into the chair.

  How often had I asked that question? Certainly it was hundreds of times over the last twenty-some years. The first time was during my first week at the Journal-Gazette, sitting with the editor who’d just hired me but thought my request to cover the occasional crime story wasn’t exactly something for “girls.” He’d wanted to get Watt’s blessing on letting me do it, “just to see if I could handle it,” in addition to my beat covering whatever fluff he could throw my way.

  He was probably hoping I’d come back crying or vomiting or both, with a story that couldn’t be deciphered. He’d backed off after I covered my first homicide and the staff photographer got a snarky shot of me calmly interviewing a witness standing next to a wall of bloody handprints. The men in the newsroom shut up after that and the black and white photo sat on my desk for years.

  The next time was five years later when the next editor, Jess Hoffman, was assaulted in the newsroom—come to think of it, over a story Marcus was doing—and Watt promoted me to editor.

  Was this going to be the last time I’d come into this office? I wondered. I needed to check in with Fisher Webb over that hospital PR job. Maybe it was still available.

  “Penny, I’m not going to bring up everything that happened here this afternoon, but suffice it to say that first thing on Monday we need to make certain that we have some sort of security plan in place for our staff,” he began. “The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is the people you saw here today.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush with you, of all the folks in this building. I think we’ve worked together long enough to know that I’ve been thinking about retiring for a while.”

  I nodded.

  “My daughter, Earlene, has wanted me to retire for some time now, as you know,” he said. “She’s not interested in taking over the paper and I don’t think her matrimonial track record indicates I should ever consider approaching her husband. He might not be around in six or eight months and things could get ugly.”

  Thank God, I thought to myself. Watterson’s only daughter Earlene was slightly younger than my own fifty-some years and she was on either her fourth or fifth marriage. Tall, buxom, platinum blonde and spoiled since birth, she’d perfected the art of picking rich husbands, then picking them clean. She was currently in Dallas, married to her plastic surgeon, but everyone expected that to change, hopefully before Botox permanently froze her face or her implants began to leak.

  The thought of her running the Journal-Gazette caused my stomach to churn.

  “I do have to tell you I am considering selling the paper,” he said. “I’m just getting too old for this, Penny. I’m close to eighty. It’s time for me to retire to my condo in Fort Myers and spend my days golfing.”

  “I hate to hear that, Watt, but it doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  “I was going to bring it up in one of my next department head meetings, but since you saw these visitors here, I wanted to let you in on what was going on.”

  “What newspaper chain were they from?”

  “No chain. They’re brokers.”

  “Brokers?”

  He nodded. “There’s quite an active business in picking up distressed newspapers these days, as I’m sure you know. There’s no need to lie: the Journal-Gazette is hurting financially and has been for some time. Maybe some new blood in here can bring in some new revenues. I’m getting too old and too tired to keep trying.”

  “What about the newsroom? What will happen to them?”

  “That’s up to whoever buys the place, but in my mind, your department can’t be cut any more and still do its job. But you know I can’t make those promises.”

  I nodded.

  “All I ask is that you keep this information under your hat for now. You might see some folks you don’t know coming in and out. I wanted to minimize that, bringing them in on weekends or after hours to keep office gossip to a minimum, but obviously that didn’t happen today. Once I decide what to do, though, we’ll do a story and slap it on the front page.” He lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, making his expensive suit look ill fitting and baggy. Suddenly, he looked very much like the elderly publisher he was. He waved his fat old hands in my direction.

  “Now go home, Penny. Spend some time with your family. Leave an old man to his thoughts.”

  *****

  “So how was your trip to Columbus?” Duncan looked up from the kitchen table. He had covered the kitchen table with old newspapers and was disassembling a motor from one of the portable milking machines. “Find out what you needed?”

  “And then some,” I said, hanging my jacket on the hook beside the kitchen door, next to my barn jacket. I stopped at the kitchen counter long enough to pour myself a cup of coffee, and glanced into the living room where Isabella was lying on the couch studying.

  She’d come so far since her bipolar diagnosis, although the Lithium had caused her to put on a few pounds. She turned a page in the textbook and I caught a brief glance of the stars tattooed across her inner wrist. They covered the scars from her high school suicide attempt.

  “Hey, baby,” I called out. “I’m home.”

  Isabella looked up, smiled and waved, then went back to studying.

  “She’s got a big test Monday,” Duncan said, moving motor parts so I could join him at the table. “She hasn’t moved off that couch all day. So, how did it go?”

  “Well, nobody could identify Rowan from the old mug shot we had of him—not surprising, since, as I found out later, a couple years in the slammer and a serious addiction have pretty much ruined his looks.” I stopped to take a sip of coffee. “Then Dad and I talked to Rick Starrett’s secretary, Rosalee Levenger, who told me that Rick regularly sent money personally to what she thought was his ex-wife as some sort of extra child support payment. When I told her that the courts handled all that, she seemed a little confused.”

  “So what happened next?”

  I sighed. “Well, about that time I got a call from Watterson Whitelaw. Apparently Graham was interviewing the woman who was stalking Marcus. Remember the suspect who we all thought shot his wife? Marcus happened to drop in at the newsroom after visiting Kay and saw this woman there. Watt was there on some other business and there was a huge confrontation in the newsroom. Police were called, the whole nine yards.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Well, the best parts are yet to come. Turns out this woman who is after Marcus, this Charlotte De Laguerre, which is a pen name I guess, is married to the man we all knew as Rowan Starrett. Only she knows him as Deke Howe. This all came out after the police hauled Charlotte away and we compared pictures. And then the real fun started.”

  “Hmm.” Duncan didn’t look up as he picked up a screwdriver and began to tighten a tiny screw. “What else happened?”

  “Watt had these two corporate types with him throughout all this mess—”

  “Great first impression.”

  “Exactly. Turns out they’re brokers. Watt’s finally going to retire, but he’s going to sell the paper. His daughter doesn’t want it.”

  Duncan looked up sharply from his work. “What does that mean for you?”

/>   There’s a saying, “Behind every successful farmer is a wife who works in town.” That was the situation with Duncan and me. My job, while it didn’t pay a whole lot, did provide health insurance and a steady check when harvest was poor or milk prices tanked. The hours were crazy, the demands on my time were insane, and I definitely gave the Journal-Gazette more time than it deserved, but, outside of the money Duncan’s Henhouse Graphics sometimes generated, my paycheck was the safety net that sometimes kept this farm going.

  “I don’t know, honestly,” I said, reaching for his grease-stained hand.

  “Have you talked to Fisher Webb any more about that PR job at the hospital?”

  “I haven’t had time. I’d like to get this mess with the Starrett boys straightened around before I decide.”

  “You make them sound like some sort of Wild West gang.”

  “It may not be too far from the truth.”

  “The job may be gone by then. You know the money he offered you would solve an awful lot.”

  “I know.” Duncan was silent for a moment. “You’re not much of a hockey fan, are you?”

  “Huh?” His change of direction surprised me.

  “If Rowan Starrett wanted to truly disappear, he should have chosen a better fake name.”

  “Why?”

  “In hockey, a deke is a move to fake out another player—it’s short for decoy. And Gordy Howe was one of hockey’s greats.”

  I raised my eyebrows, surprised. “Really? That almost makes sense then as a fake name.”

  Duncan nodded. I could see fear in his eyes—either that I’d lose my job at the Journal-Gazette when it was sold or that I’d waited too long to tell Fisher Webb my decision on the hospital PR job.

  I could also see that he knew I wasn’t going to let go of a story until it was finished. My mind was already churning about what direction to take next.

  I didn’t know. I was stuck. I needed to talk to Rick Starrett to learn the background of the relationship with his brother, what happened to make them continue a ruse supposedly begun by their mother. Why didn’t they reveal it when Rowan was drafted into the NHL or Rick started his bid for the Statehouse? Had it just gone on so long they didn’t know how to break the bonds of their own lies? Or did keeping it going serve some other purpose?

  How was I going to find out?

  Steve Adolphus certainly would pounce on me if he knew I’d gone back to the jail. And even if the newspaper was going to be sold, I needed this job, at least for a little bit longer.

  I couldn’t call or visit without it being recorded—I knew that now—and once again feeling the wrath of the prosecutor.

  And what about Charlie? Her story could be the basis for getting Rick’s charges dismissed, if there was any truth to them. What kind of a drunken mess of a marriage did she have with the man she believed to be Deke Howe? And why keep it going if he abused her so badly?

  I needed to talk to Anna Henrickssen, Rick’s lawyer, and tell her what transpired today in the newsroom. She would have to take it from there.

  Or did I? All I should do was write the story.

  Graham’s story certainly shook the nuts from the tree—Charlie was proof of that. Maybe a second story would do the same. But how could I write one if I didn’t know all the facts?

  I looked over at Duncan. He’d gone back to tearing down the milking machine motor. He looked up at me, grimaced and shrugged.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  “What do you think I’m going to do?” I answered, taking a sip of the strong black coffee.

  He sighed and gave me a lopsided smile.

  “Go get your story. Before anyone else does.”

  I kissed his cheek and ran upstairs to call Anna Henrickssen.

  *****

  Sitting on the bed Duncan and I shared, I dialed Anna Henrickssen’s home number.

  “Miss Henrickssen? It’s me, Addison McIntyre. Have you got a minute? I know it’s Saturday and you’re probably—” What would a young, single lawyer be doing in Jubilant Falls on a Saturday night?

  “No, it’s OK. I’m not doing anything. What have you found out?”

  I stopped before answering. How much should I reveal? This is why journalists stay neutral and just report the facts. I wasn’t her investigator paid for getting the evidence to clear her client.

  So where did my loyalties lie? With a man I’d known all my life? A man I’d gone to high school with and watched as his star climbed personally and professionally? Or with my reporter whose wife lay in a hospital bed with a bullet wound, thanks to that same man’s brother or sister-in-law?

  And what would telling Henrickssen do? Would it get Rick released? What if he was lying? Could I live with the possible consequences of setting a guilty man free? What if it got Charlie released? What if she really had been the one who’d shot Kay Henning? I shouldn’t have agreed to do any of this.

  Odds were that nobody was getting out of jail until Monday. That didn’t mean that Birger wasn’t going to talk to both Rick and Charlie this weekend, if he hadn’t already.

  Would telling Anna Henrickssen screw up the case? Would not telling her anything do the same thing?

  I took a deep breath. “I have a couple more questions I need to ask you,” I asked.

  “OK. How has your search gone?”

  “ Eh.” I shrugged as if she could see me.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Why did this whole thing begin, this hiding the fact that Rick and Rowan were twins?”

  “You heard my client. His mother was responsible for that farce and they had to let it continue.”

  “But after college? After Rowan was drafted by the NFL? Why not say something then? It wouldn’t have been a big deal to let his true age slip then. I know ninety percent of my readers wouldn’t even notice if we slipped his correct age in.”

  “That I can’t answer.”

  “And why make Rick complicit in faking Rowan’s death? Did he not think this would affect his political career if it came out?”

  “You’d have to ask him these questions, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your advice that attorney-client conversations are not recorded was wrong. Anyone else who is there — other than you and your client—breaks attorney client privilege. As soon as I left the jail the other day with that envelope, Steve Adolphus came charging down to the paper with the digital recording of our conversation, claiming if I did a story on Rowan, I’d poison the jury pool. If I come back with you, I’m toast professionally.”

  She was silent.

  “And furthermore, my boss said he’d fire me if I was in anyway interfering with a police investigation.”

  She sighed at the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry.”

  “And that’s another question I have. Your client has enough money to retain an attorney with experience enough to keep him out of prison for the rest of his life, even if he was standing over Virginia Ferguson’s dead body with a smoking gun. Why is he sticking with you?”

  “ I know Mr. Starrett was insistent that you be the one he told Rowan’s story to. He has been asking me every day why your story hasn’t appeared in the paper. The Journal-Gazette is the only newspaper allowed in the jail.”

  “I can’t write a story unless I know all the facts and frankly no one’s telling me a lot of them.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Now it was my turn to be silent.

  “You should have hired an investigator and kept me out of it,” I said finally. “But as long as I’m knee-deep in this mess, I need more facts. Can you meet me tomorrow afternoon? I’ll have a list of questions for Rick to answer. If you can get those answers to me by Sunday night or first thing Monday morning, I might have enough to do a story for Monday’s noon edition.”

  “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Where would be the most inconspicuous?”

/>   “Come out to my place. I’m right at the Plummer County line in Longfellow.”

  Longfellow was a wide spot in the road at the east end of the county whose founders had larger, grander, more poetic aspirations. Today, a run-down bar, a post office and an abandoned one-room schoolhouse sat amongst a gaggle of ramshackle trailers and tract houses. It was an odd place for a young attorney to live.

  “Sure,” I said. “Give me your address. I’ll see you Sunday.”

  “No, come now. I’ll talk to my client and see if I can get this back to you Sunday.”

  *****

  The roof of Longfellow’s long-abandoned one room schoolhouse sagged under the weight of the mid-November snow as I pulled up to the village’s single intersection an hour later. Dead weeds poked their dry, brown heads through the snow at the base of the stop sign and, to my right, abandoned farm equipment—an old reaper and a tractor— sat in the middle of a field, covered with snow. No one was outside these sad, battered homes in the cold weather.

  The GPS told me to turn left, down an unmarked country road, over-arched by naked trees. I drove half a mile before the GPS ordered me to turn left again, this time down a small, unpaved lane. A cluster of battered trailers sat at odd angles off the lane, paired with rusty pick-up trucks and junk cars by their front doors.

  The door to the trailer just ahead of me opened; Anna Henrickssen, wearing a Cleveland-Marshall College of Law sweatshirt and jeans, stepped out and waved.

  “Welcome to my home,” she said.

  “Not exactly where I thought an up and coming attorney would live, I have to tell you,” I said as she shut the door behind me.

  “Just because I grew up here doesn’t mean I’m going to stay here. Right now, I’m too far in student loan debt from law school to live anywhere else. My granddaddy owns the land and all these trailers. My parents lived in the one to your right as you pulled in. Granddaddy lives in the one with the truck in front. He said I could stay here as long as I wanted. I don’t want to stay here at all, but right now, I don’t have a choice.” The trailer, while dated and faded, was clean. She indicated a small mismatched table and chairs near the kitchen. “Have a seat.”