“Is there anything else I can do?”
“Yes.” Caroline looked quite serious now. “That’s really why I called.”
She pulled a light blue bubble pack mailer out of the stack of mail on her credenza, hidden in plain sight. It had been stapled closed but was now just folded over. There was no postage and no address; it had been hand-delivered that morning.
“Grant doesn’t know about this.”
Caroline had turned into a light sleeper; perhaps a week in prison did that to a person. She’d heard a sound in her driveway around 6:30 A.M.when Grant was in the shower. She didn’t dare open the door but peered out through her bedroom window and noticed the envelope on her doorstep leaning against a cedar planter. In her peripheral vision she saw a car that had been parked across the road take off, but she couldn’t be sure the two actions were connected. And it was still too dark to identify the car or the driver.
“You shouldn’t have opened it,” I said, staring at the envelope but not touching it. “It could have been dangerous.”
“Like what, a dead rat from one of my neighbors? Anthrax?”
“Who knows?” I started to say you never really knew people, but thought better of it.
Caroline slid something out of the envelope and onto the table. It was a glossy blue jewelry box. Inside was an item wrapped in tissue paper. And a note typed on ivory card stock.
It’s not over till it’s over.
“Well, looks like someone has a problem with your release.”
“There’s more to it than that. It’s not over till it’s over? That was a cheer we did when our team was down toward the end of a game. Whoever sent this knew me when I was Monica.”
And despite what a judge in Michigan might decide, that person didn’t think anything was over. Caroline unwrapped the tissue paper. It was a silver megaphone charm with the letters NHS on it. Newtonville High School. On the other side were the initials MJW, Monica Jane Weithorn.
Caroline’s cell phone rang, announcing she had a text message: Want it to be over? If you can pay one million dollars in bail you can damn well pay back the money you stole from me.
Thirty-one
I put the water on for tea and made Caroline go over the story she’d kept to herself for years and had undoubtedly repeated out loud and to herself a dozen times in the last month.
“I guess I was pretty, but who thinks she’s pretty at that age-only the most confident girls, and I wasn’t one of them. I was the poor girl, pretty enough to make out with but not presentable enough to bring home to your parents. Until I met Eddie and Kate. They made me feel special. Kate even gave me some of her clothes and convinced me to try out for cheerleading. She knew the coach. Cheerleading made me popular, at least I thought that’s what it was. Once I started dating Eddie, I had lots of friends. Coach Hopper even encouraged Eddie and Kate to come along to games. He gave them credit for bringing me out of my shell.
“I never knew what they were doing, and I didn’t steal anything,” Caroline said. “Honestly.”
“Caroline, I’m not going to judge you and I’m not sure that’s the hot issue right now. Someone I would characterize as one of the bad guys thinks you did. And knows your phone number and knows where you live. He may even know that you’re holding this thing right now.” As I said it, the two of us looked out the sliding glass doors into Caroline’s backyard and the reservoir behind it. A beautiful spot. Peaceful. Wooded. Remote. She pushed a button under the island and sun shades rolled down, allowing us to see out but obscuring the view from outside. Then she went into her living room to retrieve a bottle of vodka.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Let’s have some more tea, okay?”
“Tea is not going to do the trick. I’m screwed. My life has been unalterably changed, my kids must think I’m a hypocrite, my mother-in-law wants custody of my children. Lord knows how Grant’s clients will react. What else can they do to me?”
What they could do, and she’d realize it once she calmed down, was to make her look as bad as possible so that a judge in Michigan would have to send her back to prison to complete her sentence, otherwise risk being thought of as too liberal.
“You have to call the police,” I said.
She shook her head vigorously and I couldn’t blame her. The last time she trusted them, she was sentenced to twenty years in jail for a crime I still wanted to believe she hadn’t committed.
“No,” she said. “We just have to find this man and see what he wants.”
“Caroline, we know what he wants-money. Some measure of revenge. And from the tone of that note, scaring the pants off you would be a nice little bonus for him.”
“You have to help me. You found Jeff Warren, you can find this guy.”
I had to admit I was getting good at locating things and people. I found myself wondering what Nina Mazzo charged for this line of work. It had to be more than gardeners earned, and the work was a lot less strenuous, if occasionally risky.
“Okay, let’s narrow down the possibilities. We keep saying ‘he.’ Are we even sure it’s a man?” I asked.
There was only one other woman who’d been involved with the case, and she wasn’t talking. Unless it was from the grave.
“I can’t tell you anything about Kate,” Caroline said. “The subject is off-limits.”
Thirty-two
Apparently, only a few people had shown up for Kate Gustafson’s funeral. Even her mother hadn’t gone, although maybe she was too heartbroken to watch her only child being put in the ground. Kate and Caroline were seven years apart in age, but had had a lot in common. They were pretty, smart, and from single-parent homes where there was never enough supervision.
Kate had always wanted to be on the stage, ever since her first beauty pageant at age six. She hadn’t won, but she’d stayed on the local pageant circuit until her late teens, when being named Miss Atwell Air Filter was about as much fun as being named Miss Jiffy Lube. Some people just didn’t respect the beauty pageant community. To hell with them. The Atwell prize paid for six months of tuition and they couldn’t laugh at that. In contrast to what her lawyer tried to claim at the trial, she did well in school and finished college in three and a half years because she had calculated exactly when her financial aid would run out.
Originally, she had hoped to be a teacher, but there were no jobs available since residents were leaving Newtonville and insisted on taking their kids with them. One of the public schools had even shut down and the overflow of teachers were subbing and waiting for their colleagues to either retire or die.
Kate had had a succession of part-time jobs including tending bar. She was reading the obituaries, looking for job openings one night when Eddie Donnelly came in.
She went back to bartending after her release and was found dead in the bar’s basement after a fire caused by faulty, nonlicensed wiring on a neon sign. Arson investigators were suspicious but found nothing.
“Kate was a good person,” Caroline said. “People thought it was odd that we became friends, but she was like an older sister to me. There was no jealousy over Eddie. We were all friends.”
Friends who were all criminals, or two friends who set up the third one? Caroline knew what I was thinking.
“You don’t understand. Kate tried to protect me.” Caroline fiddled with her tissues and looked longingly at the bottle on the table. Clearly she was deciding how much to tell me and I wondered how much more there was to tell.
“Three months into my freshman year, I sensed something was going on. I didn’t know what it was. I thought Kate had started seeing Eddie again. There had been a lot of big parties after the games. Sometimes they’d get lost in the crowd and leave me to fend for myself. We weren’t the Three Musketeers anymore, the way it had been the previous year. I confronted her and she denied it, but I knew they were hiding something.”