I headed for the bedroom myself, turned on the television and made sure it was set to turn off once Jeopardy! was over. My cat watching one game show was okay, but anything more than that would just be weird.
Liz had the kettle on when I got to her house. I’d stopped at McNamara’s and managed to snag a couple of lemon tarts for us.
“I saved them for you,” Glenn McNamara said as he rang them up along with a blueberry muffin for my breakfast in the morning.
I frowned at him across the counter. “How did you know—” I stopped. “Never mind,” I said. “Liz called, didn’t she?”
He grinned. “This morning.”
• • •
“My favorite. How thoughtful,” Liz said when I handed her the small cardboard box containing the tarts.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
Liz made the tea and we sat at her kitchen table. “Where’s Avery?” I asked.
“Working on a class project with a couple of friends.” She put one of the tarts on her plate. “That reminds me. Do you still have that box of flowerpots? You didn’t give it away, did you?”
I shook my head. “No. Did you want them for something?”
“Avery has an idea. She says she can make them a lot more interesting.” She cut the lemon tart in half. “All I can tell you is that it seems to involve black paint and cheesecloth.”
I took a sip of my tea. “She might as well have at them,” I said. “I’d be lucky to get a couple of dollars for the whole box.”
“Thank you,” Liz said. She took a bite of her pastry and gave me a blissful smile.
I put the other tart on my plate. “So tell me what you found out. You said you were going to talk to Wilson and a couple of people who were on the board back when Michelle’s dad was running the Sunshine Camp.” Liz was digging into the history of the summer camp and the Emmerson Foundation itself under the guise of putting together a book about the foundation. What she was really doing was looking for evidence that Rob Andrews hadn’t embezzled money from the summer camp.
“I didn’t find out a damn thing.” She shook her head in annoyance. “I didn’t get anywhere with Wilson. He dismissed the entire thing as self-indulgent.”
Liz and her brother often clashed over the foundation. She claimed he still held a bit of a grudge because their grandfather had put Liz in charge of the charity when he stepped down instead of Wilson. Abernathy Emmerson had apparently been a very progressive man for his time.
“What about the board members you talked to?”
“Neither one of them had anything useful to offer.” She picked up the knife and cut the remaining half a tart into two pieces and immediately ate one. Then she held up a finger as something occurred to her.
I waited.
“There was one thing,” she said finally. “David Jacobs, who’d been a board member the longest, said he still found it hard to believe that Rob Andrews had embezzled the money.”
“Did he say why?”
“Just that Rob seemed to genuinely care about the kids that came to the camp.” She made a face. “For a minute I had the urge to smack him with my purse. Why in heaven’s name didn’t he say something at the time?”
I got up for the teapot and refilled both of our cups. “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “The case against Michelle’s father was pretty much airtight.”
Liz shook a finger at me. “That in itself should have been a red flag,” she said. “There was too much evidence. It was too damn easy. Rob Andrews was a smart man. He wouldn’t have been that careless.”
I sighed. “I know. The same thought’s occurred to me.”
Just recently Liz had unearthed some of the minutes of the board meetings from the time period when Rob Andrews ran the Sunshine Camp. The only incongruity we’d found was passing mention of several projects that then seemed to disappear without any explanation. There hadn’t been any money attached to those projects but the lack of information on them anywhere in the foundation records rankled Liz.
“Did you ask Wilson about those proposed projects we can’t seem to track down?” I asked, taking a bite of my own tart. I could see why they were Liz’s favorites. The pastry was crisp and flaky and the filling was lemony with just a hint of sweetness.
Liz looked so elegant sitting there with her tea, legs crossed, not a hair out of place, but there was nothing elegant about the snort she made in response to my question.
“He claims he doesn’t remember them,” she said. “And he probably doesn’t. Wilson has never been a details person. No one else seemed to know what I was talking about, either.”
“Do you really think these projects are connected in some way to Rob Andrews?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. What I do know is that back then there were things going on that I didn’t know about. So maybe I didn’t know everything about Rob Andrews, either.”
Chapter 6
“What about Mike Pearson?” I asked.
“What about him?” Liz said.
“Is it possible he might know anything?”
Liz shrugged. “I doubt it. He was just a summer student for one year.”
I shifted in my chair, pulling one leg up underneath me. “What was he like back then?”
She eyed me across the table. “Are you asking what he was like as an employee or are you asking if I saw any indication that someday he’d walk away from a burning house with his wife’s body inside?” One eyebrow went up. “I know you’re not one hundred percent convinced that Michael had nothing to do with his wife’s death, Sarah.”
“I know that you and Rose and Charlotte believe in him,” I said, “and I trust your judgment.” She opened her mouth to say something and I held up my hand. “I’d still feel better with some kind of evidence. There are three kids who’ve already lost the only mother they knew. I don’t want to see them lose their dad, too.”
“It won’t happen,” Liz said. Her expression turned thoughtful. “To answer your question, I remember Michael as being young, keen and interested in everything. It didn’t matter what job he was given, he never gave anything less than his best. He always did a bit more than he was asked but it wasn’t in a just-trying-to-get-ahead kind of way. If you want to know more about Michael you should talk to Elspeth. They spent a fair amount of time together that summer.”
“I might do that,” I said. There was one tiny bit of tart left on my plate. I ate it. “So are we going to talk about the elephant in the room?” I asked.
Liz made a show of looking around the kitchen. “And which elephant would that be?”
“John,” I said.
The lines around her mouth tightened. John Scott had been the youngest member of the board of the Emmerson Foundation during Rob Andrew’s tenure at the Sunshine Camp. Back then he’d also been Bill Kiley’s grad student. The late William Kiley had been a very well-respected history professor and Liz’s first husband.
“C’mon, Liz. John and Gram are settled and we need to tell John what’s going on. You know he’s trustworthy and he’s way more likely to remember things from those board meetings than anyone else is.”
“I have talked to him a couple of times under the pretext of working on the so-called history of the foundation, but all I’ve really gotten is just general reminiscences. And I hate to put him in the middle of something.”