Lisa forced a smile. “Can I get you a cup?”
“Sure.” He sauntered in and took up a post leaning against the refrigerator. “Nice place you have.”
She poured MacAuley a cup and handed it to him. “Thanks,” he said. He slopped in enough milk to turn it tan and took a deep, appreciative drink. Then he looked at her over the rim of the cup. “I hate to cause you distress, ma’am, but we do have reason to believe your husband may have been seeing Becky Castle.”
Lisa had split firewood before, and she knew what he was about. He was poking at the surface of the log, looking for a crack he could wedge his splitter into. It could take hours to chop apart a log with an ax. You needed an opening. It didn’t matter how smalclass="underline" Once you worked a splitter into it, down came the maul, and that log was gone, split in two, ready for the woodstove.
She took out her own splitter. “No, he wasn’t. And I know that to be true, because I know who she was seeing.”
MacAuley’s bushy eyebrows flicked upward. She had caught him off guard. “Who?”
“Shaun Reid.”
“The guy who owns the mill?” Kevin made a face. “Get out! He’s older than my father!”
MacAuley looked at him wearily. “It doesn’t shrivel up and drop off when you turn fifty, Kevin.” He turned to Lisa. “How do you know this?”
The first rule of lying: Keep as close to the truth as possible. “I clean for the Reids. Thursdays. And I was at Millers Kill High when she was. I know some of the same people she knows. There’s always talk. It’s a small town.”
“She lives in Albany now.”
“He never travels ‘on business’? She never comes up to ‘visit her folks’?” She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve got it wrong. But I’ve never heard any whispers about her and my husband.”
MacAuley set down his mug. “Mrs. Schoof, what would you say if you I told you that Becky Castle has named your husband as the man who assaulted her?”
“I’d ask why on earth Randy would want to hurt a woman he can barely remember from school.”
“She says he was planning on stealing her father’s logging equipment. She took pictures of him, and when she wouldn’t surrender the camera to him, he beat her up.”
“Oh, please. Randy was going to steal a skidder? And what, escape with it down the highway at twenty-five miles an hour?” Ladling scorn kept her from wincing. She knew Randy tended to act without considering the consequences, but she hoped even he wasn’t stupid enough to try to guarantee job security by ripping off heavy equipment. “Who’s more likely to have a reason to try to shut her up for good? A man who wants to get a good recommendation from her father? Or a man who’s already been through one expensive divorce and can’t face another one?”
MacAuley and Kevin glanced at each other. She clicked her teeth together. The second rule of lying: Don’t say too much.
“Miss Castle told us she ran into your husband’s motorcycle at her father’s house this afternoon. She called the tow truck and had it taken to Jimino’s garage on her dime. We’ve got a confirmation on that from the tow truck dispatcher and the mechanic.”
Lisa noticed MacAuley had dropped the “what would you say if I said” fig leaf. She looked him straight in the eye. “So she did meet up with him today. That explains why she used his name when she had to find someone to pin her injuries on.”
“Oh, come off it,” Kevin said.
Lisa put her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never known a battered woman to lie about what happened to her because she was afraid of the guy who hit her? Or in love with him?” She let her anger and her irritation show fully in her face, so they wouldn’t see past those emotions to where she was desperate and afraid.
Lyle looked at her as if he were measuring her. Finally he swung his gaze toward Kevin. “Time to go,” he said. Kevin promptly put his cup down, coffee untouched.
“When your husband comes home,” MacAuley said, “have him contact us immediately. Whether he’s responsible or not, things will go a lot easier for him if he does.”
Thunk. Thunk. The sound she heard as she ushered them out of her house was the echo of two pieces of wood falling, neatly and sweetly cloven in two.
Clare barely made it into the dry cleaners before they closed. She wasn’t the only person to wait until the last possible moment. Ahead of her, a harried-looking woman balanced a cranky toddler on her hip while accepting a stack of shirts. Behind her, the door chimed in a good-looking young man whose suit and camel coat looked decidedly out of place on a Saturday in Millers Kill.
“Clare Fergusson,” she told the attendant, after the woman had struggled away with kid and clothing. “One dress and two blouses.”
The woman took her slip and nodded past her at the young man. “You?”
He reached past Clare to hand in his pink receipts. “Je-remy Reid and Shaun Reid.”
Clare twisted around, interested. “Excuse me,” she said as the woman bustled toward the back. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but are you related to Courtney Reid?”
He raised his dark brows. “She’s my stepmother.” He looked at Clare. “And you’ll have to excuse me, but you don’t look at all like one of Courtney’s usual friends.”
“I’m the priest at St. Alban’s. Clare Fergusson.” She held out her hand.
He shook it. “I remember. One dress, two blouses. I’m Jeremy Reid.” He grinned, exposing teeth so dazzlingly white they had to have been bleached.
“Are you home for a visit?” Behind the counter, she heard hangers rattling. Millers Kill boasted the last dry cleaner in America to resist automation.
“Nope. I work here. Well, not here, exactly. At the new resort.”
“Oh! I’m going to be there tonight. At the grand-opening dinner dance. At least,” she considered, “I think I’m going. If it’s still on.”
“It’s still on. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because of the van der Hoevens.” A plastic thwap-thwap drew her around. The woman laid Clare’s clothes on the counter.
“Twenty dollars,” the attendant said, her impatient expression signaling that she was mentally already locked up and gone.
“What about them?”
Clare dug her wallet out of her jacket pocket. “Millie van der Hoeven is missing.” She dropped her voice. “And I don’t think it’s made the news yet, but Eugene van der Hoeven died today.”
“Holy shit!” His eyes went to her collar, which she had put on for her hospital visit, and he blushed slightly, burnishing his high cheekbones. She smiled to herself. Her sister Grace would have gone after this one with both hands. “Sorry. But no, we haven’t heard anything about canceling the dinner dance. When I left, preparations were in full swing.”
She handed over her twenty. “Who’s sponsoring the event?”
“GWP, the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation, and the resort. It’s not just for the land transaction, you know? It’s also a thank-you for Mr. Opperman’s investors and big donors to the ACC.” He frowned. “Even without the van der Hoevens, I don’t think Mr. Opperman would pull the plug. He wants to open the resort with a bang.”
“Mmmm.” She had met John Opperman two summers ago, when the resort was just breaking ground. He had engaged in the most cold-blooded business dealings she had ever witnessed. She had destroyed his corporate helicopter. It was safe to say neither had been left with a good feeling about the other.
The clerk hoisted a stack of suits and shirts onto the counter. “Forty-three bucks,” she said. Jeremy handed her a card.
“Do you think your father will be worried? If the land deal is off?”
He looked at her sharply.
“I heard the company buying the property was on the verge of making a bid for your family’s mill.”
“That’s not widely known.”
She smiled in what she hoped was a disarming fashion. “Priests hear all sorts of stuff that’s not widely known.”