“What about Lionel? Did they ever date?” Hard to imagine that the beautiful and popular Holly would have gone out with the awkward Lionel Kenefick, but I felt I had to ask.
Denise shook her head. “Holly would never date Lionel. He wasn’t popular enough. He liked her, just like all the other guys, but they were just friends. Like her and me.” She sniffed.
“So who do you think killed her?” Kate asked. “And buried her in the crawlspace?”
But Denise had no idea, or so she said. We took our leave and went back to the car, none the wiser.
I was just getting into the Volvo when Lionel Kenefick’s dirty paneled van came cruising up the street. He must have recognized me, because he pulled to a stop and rolled the window down. “Ms. Baker.”
“Hi, Lionel,” I said politely, moving a few feet closer.
“You OK? That was quite a knock you took earlier.” His examination of my figure was a little too thorough.
“I’m fine, thanks for asking.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“Anything going on with Denise?”
I shook my head. “Nothing at all. We just had to deliver some bad news.”
“What’s that?”
I hesitated, but ultimately there seemed to be no reason not to tell him. We’d told Denise, and by all accounts, Lionel had grown up with Holly, too, and been friendly with her. Maybe he’d even have something useful to add to what we already knew. “Those bones in the crawlspace up the street? They’ve been identified.”
Lionel blinked but didn’t say anything.
“It was Holly. Holly White.”
“Damn,” Lionel said. I nodded.
“I’m sorry. You two grew up together, right? Denise said you were friends.”
Lionel nodded. “Neighbors. Took the school bus together in the mornings, that sort of thing.”
“It’s strange that no one realized she was missing for four years.”
“We weren’t that close,” Lionel said with a shrug of his scrawny shoulders. “Especially after she started dating Brandon Thomas. Thought she was too good for the rest of us once she had a rich boyfriend.”
“Rich?” Brandon was a cop, one who had joined the police force pretty much straight out of high school; how could he be rich?
“He was going to go to college and become a lawyer or something,” Lionel said, “but then he changed his mind and joined the police instead.”
“Really? That’s interesting.”
Lionel shrugged. Apparently it wasn’t that interesting to him. I let it go for now and returned to the question of Holly White and her disappearance.
“You never suspected that Holly hadn’t left of her own free will? That something was wrong?”
“Didn’t see her much,” Lionel said with another shrug. “She was always with Brandon. And then she just disappeared one day. I thought she’d gone to LA. She always said she was going to. Get out, be somebody. Leave us all in the dust.”
“Denise said Holly left a note for her mom,” I said.
“Don’t know nothing about that,” Lionel answered and put the van in gear. “I gotta go.”
“Sure.” I stepped back, and he drove away up the street.
“What was that all about?” Kate asked when I climbed into the Volvo next to her.
“I’m not really sure,” I answered. “I guess he just wanted to know what we’d been talking to Denise about, and then things kind of developed from there.”
I repeated what Lionel had said, and when I got to the part about Brandon and law school, Kate nodded. “He’s from the Village. His family owns a Victorian a block or two away from your house. To a kid from the suburbs, that might sound like Brandon ’s rich, although I don’t think they’ve got much money. They’ve owned the house for several generations, and it hasn’t been updated in donkey’s years. Still, he might have made it to law school if he’d wanted to. I guess he must have decided he’d rather be a detective.”
“Guess so,” I said.
17
Dinner at Kate’s that night turned out to be a lively affair, in spite of the circumstances. Since it was late afternoon by the time we finished talking to Denise, I went along with Kate to Shaw’s Supermarket to pick up the ingredients for Irish stew, mashed potatoes, and soda bread, and then helped her mix and chop and prepare. Between Kate and Cora, I might learn to cook yet, I reflected as I creamed potatoes and butter and a dollop of sour cream in a lovely, turquoise Fiesta dinnerware bowl that would work wonderfully as a vessel sink for the main bathroom in the house on Becklea.
We had called Derek to let him know what was going on. He was still at Cortino’s, hanging out with Jill while Peter was finishing the work on the truck, and he promised to come to Kate’s when he was done there. Kate tried to call Wayne, too, to tell him about our conversation with Denise, but his phone was busy all afternoon. Poor guy, he was probably scrambling to get everything done without Brandon ’s help. At five o’clock, after Josh had dropped Shannon off, he drove out to Becklea to kidnap his father. Ricky seemed to feel that going back to Becklea was preferable to being stuck in Kate’s house with us three women, so they took off together.
“Where’s Paige tonight?” I asked Shannon as the two of us got busy setting the table in the dining room. She shrugged.
“She has a project due tomorrow that she has to work on. Ricky offered to help her, but she told him to go with us instead.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Just a couple of weeks. He transferred in from Carnegie Mellon the beginning of the semester. Why?”
It was my turn to shrug. “No reason. I just wondered how long he’s been in town. That kind of thing.”
“Not long enough to have killed Holly White,” Shannon said.
“I wasn’t really thinking that.” Or maybe I was. He was the right age to have known her. Same age as Brandon Thomas, more or less: a couple of years older than the others. Same age as Lionel Kenefick and Denise. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure,” Shannon said. “This is my second year at Barnham. It’s a small school. He didn’t attend last year, or I’d have seen him.”
“Why did he choose to come here? From Carnegie Mellon? Had he been to Waterfield before? Does he have family here?”
“Not as far as I know,” Shannon said, folding cloth napkins into precise triangles and setting them upright on every plate. “If he does, he hasn’t mentioned it. I don’t know why he chose to come here. Maybe someone told him about Barnham.”
“Have you asked?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, I haven’t. Why would I? I don’t care why he chose to come here. We have students from all over the country, and some from abroad, too. I just assumed he had heard about it at some point and decided he’d like to go to school in a small town in Maine. Pittsburgh ’s a big city, right?”
“I guess.”
“If you’re so interested,” Shannon said, folding another napkin, “why don’t you ask him?”
I shrugged. Maybe I would.
Josh and Ricky came back a little before six, trailed by Wayne in the police car. A couple of minutes later, Derek pulled to the curb outside. I excused myself from the hubbub and went out to greet him. I hadn’t seen him since that morning, and then only for a few minutes; so much had happened today that it felt like an eternity ago.
Derek looked as tired as I felt, with lines bracketing his mouth. “Hi, Tink.” His voice was hoarse, and there were shadows in his eyes. He held out his arms, and I stepped in. For a minute, we just stood intertwined without talking, his nose buried in my hair and my cheek against his chest. I hadn’t realized how tense I was until I felt the tightness seep out of my muscles. Then Derek stepped back and dropped his hands to my arms, blue eyes searching my face. “How are you feeling?”