Christmas Carol Murder (A Lucy Stone Mystery) (19 page)

Tragic situations had effects that were hard to predict. She thought of Al Roberts’s surprising, angry reaction when the cast members had offered to help him. If he’d been in his right mind, he would have taken her up on her offer and borrowed her car. But his emotions got in the way. Lucy suspected his anger about Angie’s situation had grown until it colored everything, including the foreclosure. Did he believe that Scribner was the author of all the family’s problems, and had he attempted to get back at Scribner by rigging the scenery to fall on his niece, Florence? Al had walked over to the caroling with her and Bob and Rachel, but he could have left them and gone back to the church hall. She didn’t remember seeing him among the crowd gathered around the bonfire, singing carols.

She was pulled back to the present when Rachel announced it was time to run through the curtain call, which she predicted would be a standing ovation, and all thoughts of Ben Scribner and Al Roberts and Angie disappeared in the euphoria of the moment. Rachel was over the top, once everyone was on stage, holding hands and bowing together. She clapped and bravoed and congratulated them all, assuring them that the show would be a terrific success.

Lucy was practically floating as she made her way to the Sunday School classroom that was serving as the women’s dressing room, when she passed Bob in the hallway. He was talking on his cell phone, apparently making an appointment with a client who wanted his will written.

“Okay, Al,” he was saying. “I can do it tomorrow, but I don’t see what the rush is.” Then there was silence, while Bob was listening and nodding. “Okay, we’ll make it bright and early—nine o’clock suit you?” Then he ended the call, but remained in the hallway, obviously troubled.

“Is something the matter?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, Lucy,” he said, looking up and smiling at her. “Great job tonight.”

Lucy shook her head. “You’re the star of the show; you were fabulous. I had no idea you had such a mean streak. Who knew that there’s a nasty old miser hiding somewhere inside nice generous Bob Goodman?”

Bob chuckled. “It’s just acting, I’m happy to say.”

“Oh, right,” Lucy said, teasing him.

“How’s Bill doing?” he asked. “I heard there was quite a kerfuffle at the FinCom meeting last night.”

“Not too good,” Lucy said. “Somebody slashed the tires on his truck.”

Bob’s eyebrows rose in shock. “I know the town employees are angry about the cuts, but I didn’t think they’d do anything like that.”

“Funny,” Lucy said. “My first thought was that it was the students, that group led by Seth Lesinski. Kids can be really irresponsible and do crazy stuff.”

“Maybe,” Bob admitted. “But the town employees have really been hurt by the cuts. Here’s just one example. This guy, I’m not gonna mention any names, worked for years and rose through the ranks until he was head of his department. Then he had some health problems and had to take early retirement. He got what probably seemed like a big payout at the time but now isn’t so much. He’s in real financial trouble. . . .”

Hearing Rachel’s voice, calling him for a photo, Bob paused.

“Listen, forget I said that. I shouldn’t talk about my clients—” He stopped abruptly. “I’m making it worse, aren’t I?”

“Forget it,” Lucy said, waving her hand. “I didn’t hear a word of it.”

O
n Friday morning Lucy woke with an odd mixture of dread and excitement—butterflies were definitely fluttering in her tummy. The show was hours away but she knew she was going to be nervously anticipating the opening curtain all day. What if she forgot her lines? What if she suddenly went blank? What then? A million things could go wrong in a stage show, which depended on the perfectly timed efforts of everyone involved, not only the actors but all the behind-the-scenes workers, too. All she could do was keep repeating her lines and hope that everybody else was focused on the show, too.

But first she had a long day to get through. Friday was generally a slow day at the
Pennysaver,
in which she developed a news budget, a list of stories for the next week’s edition. She usually started by going through the press releases that had been sent to the paper, looking for possible story ideas. She also checked the town hall calendar of meetings, as well as the docket at the county courthouse. Then, when she’d put together a list of ideas, she checked with Ted, who nixed or approved her ideas and sometimes had a suggestion or two.

There was no rush to get to the office, but Lucy was full of nervous energy and found herself unlocking the door at just a few minutes past eight. Phyllis didn’t come in until nine and Ted, being the boss, arrived whenever he felt like it, which was usually around ten-thirty on Fridays, sometimes later. Lucy considered making a pot of coffee and decided against it. Caffeine was the last thing she needed. Her nerves were all ajangle already. Skipping ahead to the next step in her Friday routine, she got the big accordion file of press releases and carried it to her desk, where she began to go through it. It was quite thin this close to Christmas, and nothing caught her interest. Her mind turned to what Bob had told her about one of his clients.

He hadn’t given a name, but Lucy remembered writing a story a few years ago when Al Roberts retired, and she was pretty sure that he was the employee whom Bob was talking about. It had been the usual congratulatory fluff piece about an employee who had served the town for many years. In Al’s case, he’d been with the highway department for some thirty years, ending his career as superintendent. Even so, thought Lucy, he was a young retiree, not yet sixty. Why, she wondered, had he stopped working at such a relatively young age? As superintendent, he didn’t have to perform difficult physical labor. It was an office job, involving meetings and negotiations and scheduling, with occasional site visits to check on work in progress. He had been making good money, too, by local standards. Why did he give it all up? And why had he hired a lawyer?

Lucy suspected two possibilities: Al Roberts had been forced to take early retirement because of either a job performance matter or a health issue. Job performance was an area that nobody in town government liked to talk about, because it made employees and officials vulnerable to criticism from taxpayers. Lucy understood that it was simply unfair for a teacher, for example, to be subject to public scrutiny and criticism for a personal matter, perhaps needing extra sick days to care for an ailing relative. Lucy knew only too well how critical some taxpayers could be of town employees, always eager to claim the privilege because they were ultimately paying the employees’ salaries. When it came to health issues and disability claims, especially disability claims, those were even more likely to unleash a torrent of angry outrage.

But as much as Lucy understood the need for town employees’ job evaluations to remain confidential, she was often frustrated when she encountered this protective wall of silence. Not everything had to make it into print, but background knowledge was valuable to a reporter in that it gave greater understanding of issues and tensions affecting public policy. It helped to know that the superintendent of schools and the town treasurer absolutely loathed each other. If Lucy needed a comment from the town treasurer on a school budget matter, or vice versa, she knew she was likely to get an unprintable reply.

On the other hand, she admitted ruefully, sometimes she wanted to spice things up a bit. Then a call did the trick, with the addition of a few asterisks and exclamation points because the
Pennysaver
was decidedly a “family-friendly” publication.

This Al Roberts thing was none of her business, she reminded herself, but somehow she couldn’t put it out of her mind. It sat there, nibbling away at her thoughts, popping up when she tried to concentrate on the Girl Scout carol sing at the old folks’ home or the New Year’s Eve party at the VFW. Lucy knew perfectly well that Roger Wilcox, the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, would insist on maintaining the confidentiality of Roberts’s records, and Bob Goodman would claim client privilege, but she was also aware of the boxes of town documents that Bill had stashed away in his office. Those boxes were a treasure trove of information, but she was forbidden from looking at them.

They were extremely tempting, but it would be a violation of journalistic ethics to even peek at them. Even worse, a violation of marital ethics, because Bill was entitled to privacy. She wouldn’t think of opening a letter addressed to him, except for the bills, which were her responsibility to pay. She would never open a personal letter, like a birthday card or something like that. Never.

She could picture the boxes, however, the image quite clear in her mind. They were beige with a brown stripe, and the words
Documents
was printed on them. They squatted there, in her imagination, and wouldn’t leave. It was like that second chocolate bar, a buy-one-get-one-free offer, perhaps. You ate the first and saved the second for later, but you couldn’t quite put it out of your mind and you ended up eating it, too.

Lucy checked the clock on the office wall. It was barely nine. Bill would be at his current job, a summer cottage colony renovation, and Ted wasn’t due anytime soon. She was only after background information, she told herself, pushing back her chair and reaching for her coat. Deep background, that was all.

Even so, despite her efforts to rationalize away her guilt, she had the uneasy sense that she was doing something wrong when she climbed the narrow stairs to Bill’s attic office. Up there, under the sharply angled ceiling, he’d carved out a space for his desk and files. It was his haven, away from the family, and he’d decorated the walls with framed baseball cards from his boyhood collection and New England Patriots posters. Lucy ignored quarterback Tom Brady’s rather disapproving gaze as she opened the first box, which contained computer printouts of the town budget from recent years. There was no way she could make head nor tail of that, she decided, replacing the lid.

The second box, however, was more interesting as it contained minutes of the FinCom’s meetings, including those of executive sessions. Executive sessions were closed to the public and the press and usually concerned confidential personnel matters such as contract negotiations and disability payments. They had been filed neatly according to date and she soon found records of a discussion concerning Al Roberts’s retirement.

According to the minutes, Roberts had requested early retirement on medical grounds, claiming injuries sustained some seventeen years earlier in a roads project. Roberts, who was then foreman of the town’s road crew, had set a dynamite charge that exploded too soon and he was injured by flying debris. That injury, he claimed with the support of medical documentation, was now causing moderate to severe back pain that made it impossible for him to continue working as superintendent.

Jake Marlowe had questioned Roberts’s claim, pointing out that the town had paid his medical expenses at the time of the accident. He also noted that when Roberts subsequently filed a lawsuit claiming disability, the committee offered him a lump-sum payment that he accepted, rather than taking the case to court. The amount, twenty-five thousand dollars, had probably seemed generous at the time but, Lucy thought, now seemed rather paltry. Marlowe didn’t mince words, however, accusing Roberts of attempting to blackmail the committee with this new demand for early retirement. Instead, he suggested, the committee should simply refuse to renew his contract and look for a replacement. In other words, Marlowe had threatened to fire Roberts.

Wow, Lucy thought, sitting back on her heels. She had no idea this was going on. And to think she’d always found FinCom meetings to be boring. Actually, they were. All the exciting stuff took place in executive session.

Reading on, Lucy discovered that cooler heads had prevailed. Jerry Taubert had pointed out that granting early retirement would be far less costly than deciding the matter in court, and he for one thought Roberts had done a very good job as superintendent. Frankie and Pam had also voiced support for Roberts, leaving only Gene Hawthorne to side with Marlowe.

When it came to awarding Roberts’s pension, however, Taubert switched sides. Roberts had wanted his pension to be calculated based on the years he would have worked to age sixty-five, but the committee voted to include only the years actually worked, although they did allow him to start collecting immediately.

The actual figures weren’t mentioned in the minutes, however, and Lucy had to check those town budgets for the actual payroll figures. She flipped through quite a lot of pages of numbers and finally discovered that Al Roberts was getting $1,257 a month, but Frank Sullivan, the former building inspector who had retired at age sixty-five, was getting $1,979 a month. Lucy did a quick calculation and discovered that was a difference of more than $700 a month.

What did seven hundred dollars a month mean to a man like Al Roberts, Lucy wondered. The answer was clear: it was the difference between keeping up on his mortgage payments or losing his house to foreclosure. She knew he was an angry man and, she realized with a start, he did have some experience with explosives. The question was, she thought, whether he was content to vent his anger through the legal system, or whether he’d taken things further by sending a package bomb to Jake Marlowe. She knew he’d hired Bob, and she hoped that indicated he was content to work within the legal system, but thinking back to Bob’s conversation with Roberts, she sensed that Roberts had been growing impatient.

Lucy realized her legs were cramping and she got to her feet, then bent over to stretch out her hamstrings. It wouldn’t hurt, she thought, to go and talk to Al. Maybe she could do a feature story about how the recession was forcing many elders to take early retirement, and use Al’s case as an example. Perhaps the FinCom would even revisit the issue and take another vote. Perhaps that would be enough to save his house from foreclosure—at the very least it would give him a bit more income with which to find another place to live.

Lucy drove slowly, not sure she was doing the right thing. Al Roberts had a bit of a temper. What if he turned on her? What if he didn’t like her nosing around in his affairs? What if he thought she should mind her own business?

Turning down Bumps River Road, Lucy was struck once again by the obvious signs of poverty. Quite a few of the little houses were in disrepair; many sat in yards filled with discarded appliances and wrecked cars. When you were poor, she knew, you hated to let go of anything that might come in useful later. That wrecked car contained parts that could be used to repair another car. And that dryer that no longer ran? It cost money to leave it at the dump and maybe it could be used as a rabbit hutch? Or a food safe, especially in winter, when it could serve as a makeshift freezer. One man’s trash was another’s treasure, and that was nowhere truer than on Bumps River Road.

Al Roberts’s little house, at the corner of Murtry Road, was neater than most and in fine repair. The roof was neatly shingled, and the porch contained only a couple of dark green Adirondack chairs. Lucy knocked on the door, and when there was no answer she cupped her hands around her eyes and peeked through the living room window. There was a plaid couch, a large picture of a stag hung above it, and a coffee table sat in the middle of the room on the braided rug. Squinting to see more clearly, she tried to make out the objects scattered on the coffee table, which appeared to be tools and wire and a broken cell phone.

What was he up to? she wondered, trying the door and finding it unlocked. Pushing it open, she called out a hello, and then his name. Her voice echoed through the empty rooms and, after hesitating a few moments, she stepped inside. Getting a closer look at the coffee table, she felt a rising sense of anxiety. This looked an awful lot like the makings of a bomb. She wasn’t sure—maybe he’d just been trying to repair his cell phone, but who did that? You just took it back to the service provider and got a new one, didn’t you? Noticing a neatly folded square of paper, she picked it up, discovering that her hands were shaking. Opening it, she gasped in shock as she read the neat, block-style print.

Suddenly dizzy, Lucy sat down hard in an armchair and immediately began searching for her cell phone, frantically scrabbling through the contents of her handbag. When she finally retrieved it she hit 9-1-1 for the police department.

“What is your emergency?” the dispatcher asked—Dot Kirwan’s daughter Krissy.

“A suicide bomber.” Lucy’s throat was tight; she could barely get the words out.

“Location?”

Lucy went blank. “Oh, golly, I don’t know. I found a note.” She considered the possibilities. “I bet he’s going to Downeast Mortgage. He’s going to blow the place up, and himself, too.”

“Do you have a victim?”

“Not yet. You’ve got to hurry. Get there before he does it.”

“Who? Who’s the bomber?”