“Meg is coming back,” said Klauder.
Hank’s eyes showed interest. “Find something?”
“I hope so,” said Klauder.
Christine replaced Hank in the doorway, her faint perfume overriding the musty odor of wet foliage and the lake wafting inward.
Klauder looked around the spotless kitchen, where copper bottomed pots and pans were suspended over an island, the sink gleaming. The step-on trash container had a fresh liner.
“Checking on my neatness?” Christine’s voice was amused.
“Hoping to check on your uncle’s. You cleaned up after him?”
“Really nothing to clean. Neatness runs in the family.”
“Notice anything to indicate he might have had company for breakfast?”
“Nothing obvious, but the trash I put outside is still there.”
“It can wait. I’m going to take another look at the boathouse.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll tag along.”
“You’ll get wet.”
She snapped her fingers at him. “Be alert, Klauder. A good detective should be looking for a motive for my interest.”
“Obvious. You intend to seduce me in the wet grass.”
“Damn,” she said. “My mother warned me detectives weren’t easy.”
He had visualized the shooting as taking place on the landing, but that twenty degree angle made a difference. Ten feet or so from shore, the landing was approximately two feet high when it crossed the edge of the water. If only Fen had been on the landing, above the shooter — he scanned the soft earth, muddy the last foot or so where the lake waters lapped. Plenty of footprints that didn’t mean a thing.
They’d have looked for a cartridge case, spewed out if an automatic instead of a revolver had been used. Perhaps there had been one, picked up by an alert shooter. He squatted by the water’s edge. If the shooter had been standing here, an automatic would kick the casing into the water. Something else for forensic to check.
The boathouse could tell him nothing more. He rose and stepped outside. At both edges of the clearing, a path led off into the woods. Common all round the lake except where the banks were too steep, worn there by neighbors, strollers, and people who fished from shore.
The purr of engines drifted down from the road. Meg here already.
Yellow-slickered, she listened, nodded, and went off to talk to the two men she’d brought with her.
When she returned, Klauder asked, “You looked into Benson’s offer?”
“Face to face. I like to see a man’s eyes when he tells me what he’s been up to. Four properties he’d like to have. The others are willing to sell. Fen wasn’t. Without him there could be no deal. Not really that important, he said. If Christine here thinks like Fen, he’ll just find another strip.”
Christine waved a hand at the path on the left of the clearing.
“Now I know why Mr. Tustin was so interested.”
“Interested? What did he say?”
“He came over yesterday to express his condolences. He said he and my uncle had been friends for years. He seems to be a nice old man, but I felt he came over more to learn if I intended to sell than to extend sympathy. It wasn’t what he said so much as how he said it. He seemed anxious to know what I was going to do.”
“He did? Benson said the others didn’t care much one way or the other. If Fen sold, so would they. If he didn’t, it was fine with them. He didn’t mention that Tustin might have felt differently.”
Meg fingered her jaw.
“When I talked to them, he and his wife said they’d heard nothing, but there was something about his wife—” She pointed at Christine. “You stay here. If my people find anything, they’ll cut a piece out of the landing to take back to the lab. I don’t want them chasing you around for permission.”
Walking through the woods in the rain was not one of Klauder’s favorite activities. Soaked to the knees, water trickling down his neck; everything gloomy; tree trunks stained dark, even the sheen gone from the silvery birches; foliage shedding water that invaded every seam.
Glimpses of the rain-stained Tustin house appearing through the trees heightened his sense of dire anticipation. Nothing like Fen’s — more typical of the others spotted around the lake. Bare-bones design, but snug and serviceable, like his cabin.
Up close, dilapidation was clear; a loose shingle projecting over the eaves breaking the pattern of the water running from the roof, window frames once painted now peeling, a patch that had once been a vegetable garden overgrown with weeds — a drab picture that heightened the sense of foreboding that had been with him since he landed.
It’s the gloomy atmosphere, he told himself — his mind conditioned by what he saw. Wouldn’t feel this way if it had been sunny. He grinned. The only sunshine he’d seen today had been Christine.
Tustin was one of those men shrunken and dehydrated by the years: shoulders hunched, cheekbones and eyes prominent, gray hair sparse, plaid shortsleeved shirt and chinos baggy on his thin frame. He stood almost defiantly behind his seated wife. Klauder noticed the occasional tremor in the liver-spotted hands on his wife’s shoulders. Parkinson’s, no doubt.
They were hardly a Jack Sprat couple — wearing a light sweater and dark slacks, his wife was as lean, but women spent their lives more conscious of appearance so the ravages of time had been tastefully veneered with cosmetics, the full head of styled gray hair probably a wig.
Meg held her soaked Stetson at her side, her voice dangerously soft. “You didn’t tell me you and Dexter had a disagreement about selling.”
Tustin’s Adam’s apple jerked as he swallowed. “You didn’t ask.”
His wife covered her face with her hands.
In a silence broken only by the whisper of the rain on the roof, Klauder looked around at a kitchen that seemed as worn as its owners.
“I’m asking now, Mr. Tustin.”
His thin, old man’s voice was almost whining. “All right. I wanted to sell. We needed the money to move to town. Nothing better than living out here when you’re young enough to get around, take care of things, but when shopping and seeing the doctor are almost more than you can handle—”
“You’re not the first elderly couple in that situation, Mr. Tustin. The others simply sell and get out. The way this county is growing, buyers are no problem. Couldn’t you do the same?”
Tustin’s hand trembled as he waved. “Look around. How much would we get the way it stands? Benson was offering almost twice as much as a private buyer. That difference meant we could live like human beings instead of scraping by.”
“Ah. And only Fen kept the deal from going through. Sounds like a good reason to shoot him.”
“You can’t prove I did that!”
Meg looked down at the Stetson, rotating it in her hands thoughtfully. “Well, now that we know where to look, maybe we will, Mr. Tustin. It would be much better for you to tell us all about it before that time comes.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
His wife shrugged his hands from her and rose abruptly. “For God’s sake, tell her! It was an accident! That damned old gun! I told you from the beginning to tell the truth. What could they have done to you? All you did was make it worse.”
Anger stiffened him for a moment before his shoulders sagged. “Why couldn’t you keep quiet? Whatever they did to me, you’d be left here alone. You know you couldn’t handle that.”
Meg’s voice held a touch of sympathy. “Mr. Tustin, you’d better have an attorney sitting beside you when you explain what happened. What did you do with the gun?”
Head down, he stared at the floor like a child being scolded.
Mrs. Tustin stepped around him, disappeared through a door, and reappeared a moment later, the corners of her mouth turned down in loathing, a small black automatic cradled in both hands before her as though she was disposing of a slimy woodland creature driven indoors by the rain.