“I’m so glad you called!” Roxanne’s energy level hadn’t dimmed since their last conversation. “Look, Sonny Barnes told me you had been asking about the Hudson River Regulating Board and the Sacandaga land buyouts.”
“Sonny Barnes?”
“Our librarian. I bet he didn’t introduce himself, did he? Sonny’s a little challenged on the social-adeptness front.” That was an understatement. “Anyway, about your research?”
“I was interested in what had happened to a local family. The Ketchems. But as it is, I’ve just recently found out-”
Roxanne steamed forward. “I have, right here in my hands, the financial records of the long-defunct Adirondack Land Development Partnership.”
“Say what?”
“They were one of the groups that popped up like mushrooms when the HRRB was formed. They were land speculators who had friends on the board. They bought up properties that were going to go underwater and resold them to the board for a nice profit, and they also snatched up land near areas that were undergoing development.”
“Sounds like a recipe for success, if not for sleeping soundly at night. How come they went under?”
“It was a huge, racy scandal. In 1932, the three partners and a bunch of friends were whooping it up at one of their twenty-five-room cottages. There were lots of scantily clad girls at the party, none of whom were their wives, and at the end of the night, two women were dead. There were rumors of orgies, the whole nine yards. Nowadays, they would have just gone on Live with Regis and Kelly and tearfully apologized, but in those days it wasn’t so easy. One of the partners killed himself, and the Adirondack Land Development Partnership went bankrupt.”
“How did the historical society wind up with their financial records? Wouldn’t they have been confidential?”
“We don’t actually have the original documents. That’s probably why Sonny didn’t think of it. He loathes copies. In the early eighties, a true-crime writer who summers around here researched the case for a book. She got copies of the partnership’s records, and when she was done, she donated them to us. Wasn’t that thoughtful?”
“Yeah.” The question of what had happened to Jonathon Ketchem was over. She wasn’t going to find anything in a bunch of financial documents about why his wife killed him, then spent the rest of her life insisting he was dead and building up a living memorial to his name. Unless it was the question of where the money for the clinic came from. Had the Ketchems made a bundle when their farm was sold? Or had there been some sort of insurance on Jonathon Ketchem that no one except his wife knew about? “I’d like to take a look,” Clare said. “Can I come by tomorrow?”
“Nobody’s going to be around tomorrow. I’m here this afternoon.”
“I’m tied up for the rest of the afternoon and then five o’clock evening prayer.”
There was a pause. Clare thought she heard the tap-tap-tap of Roxanne’s manicured nail against the phone. “How long does that last?”
“I’ll be free by six.”
“Okay, you nip over here right afterward and I’ll let you in. I won’t be staying, but I’ll set the alarm for you so that all you have to do is trigger it when you leave. How does that sound?”
“Terrific. Thank you.”
She hung up feeling as if she’d accomplished something, recognizing, even as she let herself warm to the feeling, that it was really just busywork, no different from when she had been a teen and had prided herself on working on one of her dad’s engines while she should have been writing a paper or cleaning her room. It was always easy to escape into work that didn’t matter. The hard part was settling down to the unpleasant tasks of life. She picked up her sheaf of pink papers, shuffled them, and then picked up the phone again. It was time to explain to the bishop’s office how the rector of St. Alban’s had gotten herself into the newspapers. Again.
Chapter 36
She was sitting at the worktable, gazing out the window in the historical society’s old nursery, when she realized she hadn’t ever called Russ. She had wanted to talk with him out of earshot of Mrs. Marshall, but in the rush of the day, the intention had slipped away from her. She reached into the pocket of her oversized trench coat and pulled out her phone. At least she could count on it to work in town. Usually.
She hesitated, considered where he might be at 6:30 on a Monday night, and dialed his cell phone. She was avoiding calling him at home because of who might answer. Could there possibly be a clearer indication that her relationship was inappropriate? If you want to be good, don’t put yourself in places where you’re tempted to be bad, her grandmother Fergusson would say. When your gut says to retreat, listen to it! Hardball Wright would say.
And yet, she wasn’t hanging up, was she?
“Van Alstyne here.”
“Hey. It’s Clare. Is this a bad time?”
“Hey.” She could hear some sort of machine noise in the background, a rhythmic chittering. “I’m still at work. Getting in some faxes. Trying to cross off some possibilities for either of our missing men. Where are you?”
Pellets of rain, reconnaissance for the coming storm, strafed the window. “I’m sequestered in the top floor of the historical society.”
“Look, when I suggested you try a volunteer stint there, I didn’t mean you had to move in.”
She laughed. “I’m not cataloging. I’d been asking questions about when the dam went in on the Sacandaga and what happened to the people who were displaced. Roxanne called me with this cache of documents that have lots of the records of the financial transactions. You know, who bought the land, how much they paid for it.”
“Sounds deadly. The only time I go through financial records is when I’m forced into it.”
“Like in Dr. Rouse’s case?”
“Yep. Although Lyle pitched in and did a fair share of the scut work, especially with the Rouses’ personal finances.”
“Anything that gives you a lead?”
“Nothing that looks any different from every other professional who has to buy a new SUV every third year to impress the neighbors. Three cards carrying big balances, but no signs that they ever went over the limit or couldn’t pay on time. Line of equity, car loans-again, nothing that stands out.”
“So your theory that Allan Rouse might have been dealing prescription drugs…?”
“Doesn’t look like it holds water. Or my idea that maybe he was abusing. Kevin Flynn hit every pharmacy between here and Gloversville, and no one could remember ever seeing him. We’ve run down his phone log in case we could spot an accomplice, but no luck.”
Clare removed a stack of pages from the box in front of her and flopped them on the table. The copied documents were just that, loose-leaf copies stored three inches deep in a manuscript box. “What about the clinic’s records?”
“They’re more complicated, so we’re not through with them yet. So far, it looks like all the funding from the town is accounted for.”
“What about the money from the trust?”
“I’m still trying to track everything down that doesn’t come from the town. He only had to account to the board for their money, so everything else-donations, sliding-scale fees, the trust-is all stuck in around the edges, as it were.”
“What?” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘what’?”
“You had a funny note in your voice.”
He laughed quietly. “Busted. Until I pin down every penny, I’m still not giving up on the idea that there might have been some financial shell game going on.”
“What about Mrs. Rouse? That was what I wanted to talk to you about earlier today.” She flipped through a few pages. It looked as if the entries were in chronological order. She tipped the whole box over until the papers flopped into an upside-down pile and picked up the last several documents. No index. Shoot.