Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa - Jersey Girl 01 - New Math Is Murder (17 page)

“A sport? How did that manage to sneak its way in?” Ken asked.

“Whitley and Da Silva both played basketball. How about Kevin Sheffield?”

Rhodes flipped through the yearbook while I polished off my calzone. “Here he is. Kevin Sheffield. Varsity Basketball. National Honor Society. That’s all.”

I glanced at Sheffield’s picture—thin face, glasses, no smile for the camera. He was unimpressive back then, every bit as bland as he was currently. “They were all on the same team and most likely all good friends,” I told Rhodes. “Let’s move on and see what else we can find.”

I flipped through the middle of the yearbook. Here were mostly candid shots of sports, classes, and school plays. I stopped at class dance photos and slid the book over to Rhodes. “Take a look. Jennifer Talmidge is the Homecoming Queen. Is that Jason Whitley with her?”

“It sure is. And here’s the Holiday Ball. Winter Queen—Elizabeth Cunniff. Escorted by Jason Whitley,” he said.

“There’s Stanley Da Silva with Grace Morrow,” I said, pointing to another picture. “That’s a new name. She must have been one of that group.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s Da Silva’s wife,” Ken said. “I thought I read somewhere he married his high school sweetheart. And look here. Senior Prom pictures. That’s Jason Whitley with Stanley Da Silva’s Holiday Ball date. He’s all over Grace Morrow. By the way, how did the interview with Da Silva go?”

“He’s a complete bore with a super-inflated ego. He seemed obsessed with himself—nothing new there, but he also got it into his head that someone is knocking off nominees for that dumb Teacher of the Year award.”

“We should be so lucky,” Rhodes said.

“I did discover a couple of interesting things
after
the bookcase fell on me. Kate and I wandered into this recycling room. Turns out they save important papers and documents for shredding there. The janitor told us Jason Whitley was rummaging through the bins for test papers the night before he disappeared.”

“So? Maybe he accidentally tossed out something. I do it all the time. Don’t you?”

“I guess I have,” I admitted.

“Which proves my point. He probably threw them out by mistake,” Rhodes said. “What was the other thing you discovered after the library?”

“Outside in the parking lot, there’s a strip of land with overgrown shrubs that hides the soccer field. It’s so dense, you could lose a school bus in there. It makes that section of the parking lot very secluded. I think that could be where Jason Whitley got himself killed.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“You’re not impressed with my deductive reasoning?”

“Whitley’s body was dumped, and he was last seen at the high school,” Rhodes told me. “It’s not too much of a stretch to assume the murder took place around that area.”

“Yeah, but I think we parked in the spot where Jason Whitley bit the big one!”

The comment caught Rhodes by surprise, and he couldn’t hold back the laugh. A mouthful of tea-colored liquid sprayed from his mouth. I grabbed a handful of napkins and wiped the table. Rhodes used half a roll of paper towels to wipe down the wall.

“The light’s blinking on your answering machine,” he said as he cleaned around it.

“I guess Sara got tired of picking up the phone.”

I pressed the button to play the messages. There were only two:

“
Hi. It’s Grandma. Pick up the phone, Sara. I hate talking to machines! Come over for supper. I’ll make you a nice salad. You should eat some red meat. You’re nothing but skin and bones.
”

The machine beeped and went to the next message—a hang up, most likely one of Sara’s hated telemarketers. I erased both messages and turned off the auto answer. As if on cue, the phone rang. I picked up and said “hello,” but didn’t get an answer.

“Hello?” I repeated, annoyed. “Talk or I’m hanging up!”

“Colleen Caruso?” the caller whispered, barely audible.

“Hello? Yes? I can’t hear you!”

A distant click broke the connection. I slammed the phone down on the table and turned to Ken Rhodes. “I hate these telemarketers! I’m on the Do Not Call Registry and they still keep calling. What else do I have to do? I wish there was a way to trace these people and report them!” 

Rhodes picked up the phone and pressed the menu button. “There is.”

“What are you doing?”

“Checking Caller ID for the last incoming number.”

I slapped my sore head. How simple!

Ken pressed the talk button and put the phone on speaker as it automatically dialed.

“Nothing,” I said as it rang on the other end.

“Let it ring a little longer,” Rhodes told me.

Finally, someone answered. A huge, bellowing voice shouted, “The building’s empty! Call back tomorrow morning!”

I knew the voice but couldn’t place it.

“Who
is
this?” Rhodes demanded.

“Johnny Lynch. The building’s empty. There’s nobody here.”

“What building?” Rhodes asked. “Where am I calling?”

“Tranquil Harbor Regional High School. You called the main office,” he said, and I knew exactly who the voice belonged to. It was the potbellied janitor, the man who helped me and Kate up off the floor in the library and caught us trespassing in the recycling room.

I touched Rhodes’s arm to get his attention and shook my head
no
. The custodian had no reason to call me. He was a loud, helpful man who didn’t know my name or anything about me.

“Mr. Lynch, did someone use this phone in the past five minutes?” Rhodes asked him.

“I don’t know. I was just passing by the office when I heard a phone ringing,” Johnny Lynch explained.

Rhodes thanked the janitor and hung up.

I was terrified that someone phoned my home after my visit to the high school, though I knew I was in no immediate danger. Ken Rhodes stood right beside me. A killer would have to be both crazy and stupid to try anything with Rhodes around. I took a deep breath. It didn’t help. I had an irresistible urge to shove food in my mouth, but I was too full from the calzone. I could have used a cigarette, but I was completely out.

Rhodes filled one of the plastic cups with Johnnie Walker Red and gave it to me. I took a sip and felt the burning liquid go down my throat and settle somewhere in my chest.

“Ugh! This is awful! How can you drink this stuff?” I put the cup on the table and pushed it far away from me. “I’ll never touch bourbon again.”

“It’s scotch, and you’re taking another mouthful,” he said, reaching over and giving the cup back to me. “You’re making someone very nervous, Colleen. You were nearly run down in a parking lot, drowned in the bay, and crushed to death by a bookcase. Now you’re getting phone calls! I want you to stop with the interviews, the column—and everything else that even remotely has anything to do with Jason Whitley. And I’d feel a whole lot better if you and your kids stayed with your parents tonight. They still live in Tranquil Harbor, don’t they?”

“One street over, in the house right behind mine,” I said. “The kids are already there.”

“Good,” he said. “Now drink.”

The next sip of scotch didn’t seem nearly as repulsive as the first. It relaxed me enough to let me think. Rhodes was right. I
was
making someone very nervous.

That someone was me.

17

Kevin Sheffield, Betty Vernon, and Stanley Da Silva were all up at the high school on the night of the bookcase incident. I thought I could concentrate on just those three—unless the custodians had a grudge against me and my sister. Not that any of it mattered. I had been officially barred from snooping into Jason Whitley’s murder.

Ron Haver and Ken Rhodes insisted I leave both the unlawful and the law-abiding residents of Tranquil Harbor alone for safety’s sake. Truth be told, Haver had shown far more concern about Kate’s welfare than mine. My sister played up her library injury and hobbled bravely for days on end like a martyr. Ron Haver fell for it. He doted on Kate and managed to be at her side every moment he wasn’t on duty. Although Ken Rhodes did seem uneasy about my well-being, he wasn’t a bit interested in my writing career. Left up to him, I would continue to be plain old Colleen Caruso—the fluff writer.

I wasn’t a feminine, delicate woman like Kate. My mother often told me I was made of tougher stuff and built to run on a muddy track. I decided to keep a low profile and immerse myself in my remaining writing assignments, but I fully intended to go forward with subtle probes into Jason Whitley’s murder. I knew Ron Haver still held Bevin Thompson high on his list of most likely suspects. My best friend would be in the clear and I’d finally have a name for myself if I could learn the identity of Whitley’s killer.

I covered the community fundraiser for Jeffrey Fitzpatrick, the ten-year-old who had been hit by a car on Bay Boulevard back in April. The boy was making progress, thanks to grueling rehab sessions at the Kessler Institute in West Orange. It was fitting that the fundraiser should be held in the closed-off parking lot of St. Michael’s By the Sea, close to the scene of the accident.

With the Escort still dead by drowning, Bevin offered to drive me to the fundraiser. She hunched over the steering wheel and watched the auxiliary policeman direct traffic. Conversation was strained between us and had been ever since she admitted to the affair with Jason Whitley. We’d had only two brief phone conversations since the day she confessed to me, with uneasy silences once the usual
how are you
and
how are things going
were asked.

“Is your parking sticker valid, Bev?” I asked. As Harbor residents, we were entitled to free parking in the municipal beach lots, but an outdated sticker meant a five-buck parking fee.

“I renewed it in January.”

Traffic crawled. There were hundreds of people crammed into the lot St. Michael’s used for the rides and midway games. Bevin fiddled with the radio while we waited for the auxiliary cop to wave us on.

“It feels strange not talking,” I told her. “It’s like we’re not really friends anymore.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course we’re friends.”

“But our topics of conversation are pretty limited lately.”

“There’s parking in the lot up ahead,” Bevin said, changing the subject.

“Is Franklin still cheating on you?” I dared to ask.

“Dear Lord, aren’t you a persistent little thing!”

“Is he?”

Bevin sighed with resignation. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Are you?”

“Jason Whitley’s dead, Colleen. Do you think I ran right out and found a replacement?”

“It depends on how mad you are at Franklin.”

“I’m flying solo,” she told me. “And Franklin still doesn’t know anything about Jason Whitley. With a little luck, he won’t find out for a while. I’m trying to take this one day at a time. As soon as the police arrest someone for Jason’s murder, Lucinda Maynard will start the old divorce ball rolling again.”

I wondered how far Bevin could stretch that luck if the cops decided to arrest her for Whitley’s murder. “You don’t want to try to work things out with Franklin?”

She pulled her Mercedes into an empty space. “Did you want to work things out with Neil after you found out he cheated on you?”

“Neil isn’t interested in a reconciliation,” I told her.

“What if he was?”

“I fantasize about it, I guess. But as my mother says, once a cheat, always a cheat. No, I don’t think I would take him back.”

“Any sane woman wouldn’t. I’ve had it with husbands, Colleen. I’m getting a dog. At least they’re loyal.” It was only a small wisecrack, but at least things were lightening up.

We parked the car and walked two blocks back to the carnival. Traffic was a nightmare. Pedestrians had to dodge between the steady stream of cars just to cross the street.

“It’s a good thing the cops are directing traffic down here or we’d be joining the Fitzpatrick kid up in Kessler,” Bev said. “I wonder if the police have any leads about the car that hit him.”

I didn’t know. I planned to make a follow-up call to the police station and ask the detective on the case if there was anything new that I could include in the article. From what I read in the papers following the accident, a witness said she saw a light-colored sedan with what looked like a resident sticker in the rear window speed off after it clipped Jeffrey Fitzpatrick. There were over thirty thousand residents in our forty-two-square-mile town. Judging from the traffic on Bay Boulevard, it looked like half the cars were light-colored sedans, and they all had Tranquil Harbor stickers in their rear windows.

I wondered why were there so many neutral cars in the area? Maybe the light colors reminded their owners of snow, or the sandy beach on the bay, or even cocaine, for all I knew. The color preference could also be due to an utter lack of imagination on the part of Tranquil Harbor residents.

We reached the carnival and melted into the crowd. I had to track down Willy, the staff photographer, and talk to Jeffrey Fitzpatrick’s parents. I dug deep into my pocket and withdrew a five-dollar bill—all the money I had left for the weekend. I handed it over to Bevin.

“The Knights of Columbus are raffling off an SUV. Could you fill out a ticket for me?”

Bev sighed and grabbed the money. “You know nobody ever wins these things.”

“Somebody has to win. And I’m in desperate need of a car.”

“Yeah, and you’d probably be persuaded to donate it back to the church after Father Egan makes you feel guilty for winning,” she told me.

We agreed to meet in an hour. I strolled off toward the church, where I had arranged to meet the Fitzpatricks for an interview. Willy had found them first and was taking shots of the couple on the church steps when I got there. St. Michael’s loomed over Claire and Brian Fitzpatrick like a huge, gray, gothic monster ready to swallow them whole.

“My hair looks like steel wool,” Claire Fitzpatrick complained when I introduced myself.

“Everybody’s hair goes Brillo in this humidity,” I told her. Mine did, of course. But Brian Fitzpatrick had that dark, thick, straight, Irish hair that I’d sell my mother for.

“Do you guys mind moving halfway up the steps?” Willy asked the couple. “I’d like to get the church doors in the background. I swear, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, nobody cares about your hair. And I promise I won’t take close-ups.”