Клэр Донелли - Hiss And Tell

“You remember the state I was in—hell, the state we all were in?” Sunny said. “Seeing the sheriff dead shocked me sober, but Lieutenant Wainwright could still smell the beer on me. He even asked what drinking game we’d been playing. So don’t try lying when he asks what we were doing earlier. It won’t look good.”

“But why would he ask—” Cillie broke off, if possible, looking even more shocked. “He can’t think that anyone here—”

“To quote the man, ‘The proximity is suggestive.’ He can’t ignore looking for a connection when two people get killed barely a couple of blocks apart.”

But Cillie’s concerns were closer to home. “If Grandfather finds out about the beer pong, he won’t be happy.”

That should be the least of our troubles, Sunny thought. But all she said was, “You’d better tell the others, too. I suspect tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

*

Her prediction provedonly too tiresomely true. Sunny got only a few hours’ sleep after a marathon phone call with her father discussing what had happened to the sheriff. Mike’s enthusiasm for politics diminished considerably now that it had turned from bare-knuckles to bloody. He wanted her off Neal’s Neck, but she argued to stay. What kind of reporter would she be, turning her back on a mystery—and a story like this?

She won that difference of opinion, but it didn’t feel much like victory, dragging herself out of bed to head down to the state police barracks. The good news: the clothes she’d unpacked yesterday didn’t smell as stuffy, and Priscilla had been able to get hold of a lint roller and an iron for Sunny to use. The bad news: Sunny had to wear one of her limited supply of suits for her trip. And Lee Trehearne was on hand to see her off in one of the compound’s town cars, his expression mixing a self-satisfied “I told you so” with violent dislike.

Just the memory of Trehearne’s evil eye kept Sunny sitting in a stiffly uncomfortable pose until she was about half a mile away from the compound. Don’t relax too much, she warned herself as she finally sank back into the upholstered seat. You don’t want to doze off.

To keep herself awake, she mentally edited the statement she was going to write down for the troopers. Sunny decided to tactfully evade the subject of beer pong, and merely say that the younger members of the gathering had been entertaining themselves by the pool.

They arrived and Sunny asked her security guard/driver to wait while she took care of her business inside. If they decided to hold onto her for questioning, she could send the car back then.

Sunny had half expected to find herself in an interrogation room with a pad and pen. Instead, a young trooper led her to an empty office with a desk. She sat down to work on her story. Will had said that the blood at the murder scene was still fresh, so Sunny contained herself to the events of that evening. She mentioned that Beau Bellingham had left the group fairly early, and that Peter Van Twissel had departed some time afterward, accompanied by Carson. She couldn’t put a time to the bridegroom’s return, having been too busy launching her big beer pong assault to check her watch.

I hate to flag them as possible suspects, Sunny thought, but this is too important to start fooling around.

She wondered what kind of alibis Cale could offer for the rest of the family.

After a final read Sunny decided she’d done the best she could. She signed the statement, turned it in at the front desk, and found herself dismissed with the warning that Lieutenant Wainwright might want to talk with her again.

Sunny’s eyes did sink closed on the sixteen-mile return ride, but she made a determined effort to rouse herself before she arrived back at the compound. She needn’t have bothered. The guesthouse was empty except for a note from Priscilla inviting her to breakfast in the boys’ accommodations. Sunny went over there to find most of the guests around a large and somewhat scuffed dining room table. Apparently the furniture gets harder use here in boy-land, she thought.

Peter certainly looked the worse for wear. He was horribly hungover, extremely apologetic for his embarrassing behavior the night before, and barely able to stomach any breakfast. He had to excuse himself hurriedly when Tommy Neal suggested he try hitting one of the leftover bottles of beer as hair of the dog.

Sunny looked after Peter with a certain amount of sympathy. But that soon faded as she found herself considering Peter Van Twissel in quite another light. He’d shown himself to have quite an ugly streak when he drank beyond his limits. How much had he imbibed on the day that Eliza Stoughton was killed? He was the only male in the party that Eliza hadn’t wound up fighting with—at least, not in public. So motive was open. As for means, Sunny remembered how strong his bony fingers had looked—and how easily they’d curled into fists. As for opportunity, well, she’d thought of that before. Assuming he was aware of the surveillance cameras, he certainly had the computer savvy to wipe any evidence from the hard drives.

But seeing him pale and hunched over this morning, he seemed as though he couldn’t harm a fly. Most likely, the fly would win. Could Peter really look so natural after killing two people? For that matter, could he have dragged himself out of bed to meet with Frank Nesbit? Or could the sick bit have been an act? Peter had seemed pretty drunk; even his nasty side had seemed real enough.

Carson came in to apologize for Priscilla—she’d been hijacked by Fiona Ormond for wedding business. “I think they’re talking about cakes, and Fiona wanted Cillie’s opinion of the local bakeries.” He paused for a second before asking, “How did it go with the state police?”

Sunny kept her answer brief, just mentioning the pen and pad. She wasn’t about to give another impromptu course on dealing with police interrogations.

Speaking of which . . . Sunny shifted her gaze to the front-runner in the suspects sweepstakes. Beau Bellingham was awake but still wearing the same rumpled surgical scrubs he’d probably slept in. Did he not own any other clothes? Sunny wondered. It’s not like he’s on call out here. When anyone spoke to him, he replied in monosyllables. His expression was stiff, almost sullen, but the way his eyes darted around the room showed that he was on edge.

He knew already that the cops had their eyes on him, Sunny thought. Having another flimsy alibi isn’t going to help, even if he doesn’t have much in the way of obvious motive.

During the course of the day, each member of the group was brought in for a talk with Lieutenant Wainwright. Otherwise, they worked quietly to clean up the area of last night’s party, collecting the empty bottles, rinsing them out, and adding them to the recycling boxes outside the kitchen of the big house. The Styrofoam ice chests could be broken up and put in the trash, after the water remaining from the ice had been poured off. A generous collection of full bottles also remained, which wound up in the refrigerators of the guesthouses. Carson reported that the Ping-Pong table was already gone when he went to scout the area after rising. Cale Kingsbury must have been up and on the move even earlier.

Of course, Sunny had another job as well—getting out another blog post. The hard-news reporter she’d been wanted to focus on the murder near the premises. Kind of hard to shoehorn a subject like that into coverage of a festive event, she thought.

While she sat in her room, wrestling with trying to tie the two diametrically opposed concepts together, Priscilla popped her head in. “Just wanted to check how you were doing.” She made a game attempt at smiling. “After last night, I figured you might want to rest a little more.”