I turned on the police scanner I kept in the Jeep and listened to the chatter, but it sounded like a slow morning in cop land. Driving around like this, I could almost fool myself that I was on patrol, headed to Indian Pond to see whether the last smelt shacks had been hauled off the ice, as required by law. In reality, my destination was a house I had been warned to avoid in the strongest-possible language.
What I discovered at Schooner Lane took me by surprise. A big moving van had backed down the Westergaards’ steep driveway-I’m not sure how the driver had managed it-forcing me to park along the private road. I had located the professor’s dead body only the day before. How had his wife managed to hire movers to begin emptying her house the very next morning?
As I stepped into the mud, I notice a flag of yellow police tape flapping in a tree and a latex glove wrapper dropped by some careless deputy.
The movers were all dressed in coveralls. There seemed to be enough men working around the house to field a baseball team. I watched several of them carry some blanket-wrapped pieces of furniture down the walkway and up the ramp of the van before one of them made eye contact.
“Is Mrs. Westergaard here?” I asked.
The accent was straight out of South Boston. “Yeah, she’s here somewheres inside.”
By the light of day, the building seemed like an unfamiliar place-neither the shadowy horror show that Charley and I first witnessed nor the ghostly lit structure I’d toured via video at the sheriff’s office. It was just a mansion with tall windows and high ceilings, a place you wondered how any maid could ever clean. A draft blew through the open doors, causing the small hairs to lift along the back of my neck.
I found Jill Westergaard in the living room, overseeing the removal of the couch with a steaming cup of tea in her hand. She wore the same trench coat I’d last seen her in, but the rest of her outfit was new: brown turtleneck, blue jeans, and some sort of moccasin-type shoes that probably retailed for more than my week’s salary.
“Please be careful with that,” she was telling two men who were attempting to wrap a blanket around the sofa. “That davenport belonged to my mother.”
I coughed to make my presence known. “Mrs. Westergaard?”
When she turned to me, I noticed that her face was done up with eyeliner and lipstick. The makeup was very subtle; it had been carefully applied. Her bleached-blond hair appeared freshly washed. The whites of her eyes were clear. Not for an instant would I have guessed that this was a woman in mourning.
“Thank you for coming,” she said without smiling.
“It was no trouble.”
“I doubt that’s true. What did you do to your hand?”
“I broke it chasing some vandals in the woods.”
My answer didn’t seem to interest her. She shook her golden head in the direction of the back porch. “Do you mind talking outside, to get out of the way of the movers?”
“Not at all.”
I followed her through the living room. The shattered lamp had been removed and the glass vacuumed up. A towel, I noticed, had been placed carefully over the bloodstain on the carpet.
She stood against the porch rail, with her back to the ocean. A brisk sea breeze was blowing off the water, but the view was spectacular. I spotted a raft of eiders bobbing along in the current. In the distance, a tanker was crawling up Penobscot Bay, making for the oil piping station at Searsport.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “You were right about Hans.”
“That’s not necessary, Mrs. Westergaard. In fact, I wanted to apologize to you for dismissing your concerns.”
“No, you tried to warn me. I can’t believe I was such a fool.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
She found her sunglasses inside her coat pocket and put them on. I saw myself reflected in the lenses. “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t hear me insisting to the detectives that Hans couldn’t possibly have been fucking Ashley Kim.”
“You were in denial.”
She took a sip of tea to recover her composure. “I remember telling you how well I understood Hans, how there was no way he would have chosen a twerp like Ashley over me. I still have no idea what he saw in that kid. But you never really know someone until your relationship with them is over.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the end is when all the secrets come out. I never would have imagined Hans could have committed suicide, let alone murdered someone. He had too much self-regard to take his own life.”
The last time we’d spoken, she’d been certain that her husband was also a victim. “You don’t believe he killed himself?”
“I never would have believed it was possible. But I never believed he was having an affair with Ashley, either.”
I chose my next words with care. “You might not know this, but I was the one who found his body yesterday.”
“Of course I know it,” she said brusquely. “That’s why I asked you to come here.”
“What did the investigators tell you?”
“They told me that his throat was slashed. Then they asked me if Hans had any enemies.”
So Menario was continuing to look at alternate suspects. I was relieved to hear he hadn’t believed Danica Marshall’s assertion that this case was a murder-suicide.
“ Did your husband have any enemies?”
“No one except the rest of the Harvard Business School faculty, the executives he excoriated in his book, and many of his former students. Hans was an arrogant man who never minded being disliked. But I doubt he ever did anything in his life to make someone decide to murder his girlfriend before slashing his throat. Then again, what do I know? I thought he was a faithful husband.”
The sea breeze was beginning to flay my exposed skin. There were so many questions I wanted to ask. “What about Ashley? Did she have enemies?”
“I have no idea. We weren’t girlfriends, for Christ’s sake. Hans and I had her up here last summer, visited some lighthouses, bought lobsters off the dock in Seal Cove, had a few too many drinks.” The bottom half of her face, beneath the sunglasses, was contorted, but her forehead remained smooth. “These are the same questions Detective Menario asked.”
“Did he mention the name Erland Jefferts?”
“You mean the man in prison everyone says is innocent?”
I was somewhat surprised that she recognized Erland’s name, until I realized how much publicity Ozzie Bell had stirred up for him in the Maine media.
My hand was burning like a three-alarm fire. “It might sound ridiculous, but I wondered if there was some sort of connection between your husband and Jefferts.”
“What sort of connection?”
“Had he been following the controversy over Jefferts’s conviction in the papers?”
“I’m not sure what you’re suggesting,” she said warily.
“I’m just trying to make a connection.”
She put two and two together very fast. “You don’t think Hans’s death was a suicide. You think whoever killed the Donnatellis’ daughter also murdered him?”
It irked me that she gave no consideration to Ashley Kim. And I was about to protest that I actually believed Erland Jefferts had killed Nikki Donnatelli, when the weight of what she’d said smacked me in the temple. “You know the Donnatelli family?”
“Of course I know them. I remember Nikki from when she was a toddler.”
Now I was completely confused. It was my understanding that the Donnatelli family hadn’t owned property in Maine for seven years. “Didn’t you just move here, Mrs. Westergaard?”
“My family has had a summer cottage on Parker Point for three generations. I learned to swim off the dock in town. I practically grew up in Seal Cove.”
It took me a while to absorb the importance of what she was telling me. “I thought this was a new home.”
“It is a new home,” she said, “built to replace the falling-down cottage my family has always owned here. This was supposed to be my dream house. I spent years designing it and supervising the construction. And now I can’t even stand being inside it for more than five minutes without wanting to vomit.”