“Preface to my question,” I said. “Your wife’s father, Prentiss Wescott, reorganized his personal financial affairs a few months before he died, when his daughter was separated from her previous husband, but not divorced. He put everything in trust for her, all the securities, this house, the business, everything. Income during her lifetime, with the income divided between her and any children she might have as they readied twenty-one. Is that your understanding?”
“Yes, of course. The bank manages the estate.”
“If she dies without issue, everything goes to Emory University Hospital. Immediately after her death the trust officer must start the liquidation of everything not in cash or securities, close the estate as soon as possible, and turn over the bequest to the hospital trustees. And your wife, I understand, is not expected to last out this year.”
He laughed as he held his hand up. It was a very good laugh. “Wait! You are really straining at a gnat, Mr. Rhoades. Are you serious? Is that your script? Store manager conspires with clerk to steal diamonds? Fears unemployment? I think I’d be angry if it weren’t so amusing. Whoever buys the business would be a fool not to hire me to operate it my own way. If that didn’t work out, I’d start my own shop. My customers would be loyal. I have savings, you know? Quite a lot. The trust department has always paid our living expenses, and I get a salary in line with my position. I suggest you stop inventing fantasies and get on with finding Anne Farley.”
On Monday I was very busy. On Tuesday the signs on the doors of Wescott and Sons said “Closed for Inventory.” It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t want to be out in Libby’s enclosed yard with her and Fido anyway, for fear I wouldn’t hear the phone.
“He made the duplicates, then?” she asked.
I told her he had made them and made the switch himself, and they did not know where he’d done the work yet, but they would probably find out. She told me to stop pacing around and I told her I was too tense to sit down.
“What are you saying is that he talked Anne Farley into laying her own false trail. Why would she do such a dumb thing?”
“She believed whatever he told her. Some plot against him or the business. Some kind of ripoff he was trying to avoid. He told her to paint herself blue and live in a tree, and she did.”
“What?”
“Never mind, honey. He thought she’d lay a clumsy trail and it would have been followed to a dead end in Yucatán a long time ago. But nobody found the loose ends except me, the old hound with the sore feet and the great nose.”
“That nose has been broken.”
“I didn’t mean great looking. I mean function.”
“Oh.”
“The way I read it, he had her all set to leave for someplace else on the Saturday he got back from Chicago. Per instructions, she had checked out of that airport Holiday Inn with her suitcase and her tropical clothes and waited for his plane. His car was at the airport. He took her home and...”
The phone rang. I didn’t knock anything over getting to it. A wonder. I didn’t have to say much. Grunt and listen. Sigh and listen. Hang up. Plod back to the couch and sit down heavily. Sigh.
I finally responded to her anxious questions. “After locating the right stone yard and talking them into letting me see the records on delivery dates to Laneer, and after talking all those official types into picking him up and getting the warrant, wouldn’t I have looked like all kinds of damn fool if I’d been wrong.”
“But... they found her?”
“Under the boulder they delivered the day before he found, to his horror, all those diamonds were missing. Since then he’s been selling them back to the business a few at a time under a dummy name and pocketing the funds. He paid himself almost seven hundred thousand to buy them back, they think.”
“Poor Anne,” she whispered.
“The weather bureau says it was a nice November afternoon. Warm and sunny. They say it looks as though he clubbed her in the back of the head with the flat of his spade, using a full swing. Then he dug the hole, buried her and her suitcase, and prepared the site for the two-tone boulder he’d preselected. Journey to nowhere.”
She shuddered and looked gray. I put my arm around her. “And it’s a good guess that woman in the house watched it all through the window. I wonder how much she saw, how much she comprehended. J. Trevor couldn’t care less, because she could not tell anyone anyway.”
It got to me too, just then. A little more than usual, and I put both arms around the lady, looking for, as much as trying to give, comfort.
Laneer had told me to get on with finding Anne Farley. And, God help me, I had. Cold winds blow through the loveless heart.