He lifted one hand when I passed him to pull into my garage.
The contents of James Everett’s attic.And sooner than I’d hoped, and a great deal more of it than I’d bargained for.
I parked and got out, and I looked at the boxes and then at Walt and felt the day tilt toward something longer than I’d planned.
“This is James’s grandson and one of his friends,” Walt said, by way of hello.“They were nice enough to bring everything over for us.”
“We appreciate it,” I said.“Lordy, where are we going to put these.My living room is already full of the boxes we brought from Josephine’s.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said.“But you might put on a fresh pot of tea and put out some cookies.I called the others.This is probably going to take a while.”
CHAPTERTEN
“I am telling you,Walter, Horace Goodacre is a menace, and the HOA ought to have his head on a pike.”
Bea delivered this from her post at my sideboard, where she’d built a bar operation that would have shamed The Ritz.She had a lemon in one hand and a paring knife in the other, and the knife did a good deal of the talking.
“It’s a flag, Beatrice.”Walt didn’t look up.He was squaring a legal pad to the edge of my table for the third time, getting it true to the grain.“A man can fly a flag in this country.People died for that flag.”
“It is a forty-foot flagpole, Walt.Lit up like the Second Coming.On a street of houses that cost seven figures.”She pointed the knife at him.“I can read Tolkien by it from my claw-foot tub.”
“Pipe down, Bea,” Dottie said.“We all know you’ve never read Tolkien a day in your life.”
“All I’m saying is it’s a safety hazard.Vernon Tucker drove clean into it on the Fourth of July.That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
“Vernon Tucker was drunk as a skunk,” James said.“That flagpole was built to last.Didn’t even get a dent.”
James Everett had been a surprise addition to our afternoon Silver Sleuths gathering.He wasn’t an official member, but Walt had invited him, deciding since he knew the most about Henry that he’d be a valuable asset to the case.He fit right in with our circus.
Bea sliced her lemon clean through.“I just don’t understand what’s happening on this island.This place used to have class before all the mainlanders started moving here.Now we have flagpoles and god-awful metal sculptures in people’s yards.”
“Those don’t have anything to do with mainlanders,” Dottie said.“It’s the old-timers who are putting up all the tacky stuff.Not that I’m saying the flag is tacky, Walt.”She quickly clarified before Walt could get in a huff.“It’s a very nice flagpole, and I like that you can see the flag coming over the bridge.But Horace has mentioned more than once that people stop by his house thinking it’s the visitors’ center.I bet it won’t be too much longer before he takes it down.He never was the brightest bulb in the shed.You can tell a lot about people by the type of books they check out at the library.”
“What kind of books did he check out?”I asked.
Dottie raised a pointed brow.“He didn’t.”
These conversations were par for the course with the Silver Sleuths.It was rare they gathered without relitigating every grievance Grimm Island had to offer, and I’d learned to let it run.You couldn’t rush it.You’d only scald yourself trying.
So I let them bicker, and I mostly kept my head down and focused on Henry Wainwright’s appointment book in front of me.His Rolodex sat at my elbow, and I was doing the kind of slow, thankless digging nobody ever wrote a song about.Believe me, I’d been trying to think of one.
His handwriting didn’t help.Left-handed and racing, slanted so hard the letters seemed to lie down and rest, and half of what he’d jotted was initials anyway.A private shorthand he’d never meant for another living eye.So I’d drawn a line down a legal pad.On the left I copied out every appointment and every set of letters I could pry loose from his last months.On the right went the names of whoever in the Rolodex had those initials.It didn’t necessarily mean that was the person he was talking about in his appointment book, but it was a lead to run down.And we’d had precious few in the case so far.
It was as tedious as picking weevils out of flour.And I loved it.There’s a peace in turning a puzzle with your hands while the people you love bicker about flagpoles two feet away.
The bickering wound down first, as it happened.It usually did when Dottie went quiet, and Dottie had gone quiet a while back, which with her was never idleness.
“James.”She had a ledger open and her readers down on her nose, and she spoke without lifting her eyes, which meant she’d caught a thread and meant to pull it.“Come sit by me and tell me what I’m looking at.I read a balance sheet fine on my own.I’d rather have it from a man who lived inside these books.”
James drew his chair around, and turned an untouched bourbon in his hand and looked at the ledger she slid him.
“What do you want to know?”
“Start at the beginning.I know you and Henry always did charitable work.Kind of like a Doctors Without Borders, right?”
He smiled grimly.“On a much smaller scale, but yes, along those lines.Henry and I became doctors because we wanted to help people.Any people.However we could.We both grew up on this island and knew what it meant to come from a privileged class.Most people don’t get that opportunity.So Henry suggested we find a way to help people across the world.
“It wasn’t anything, at the start.It was just Henry being Henry.”A faint, sad smile.“We had the practice on Broad Street, the two of us, and Henry would see anybody who walked through the door.Money or no money.Wrote off half his own income doing it and never blinked.I used to fuss at him like a fishwife.Henry, I’d say, a man can’t run a hospital and a poorhouse out of the same checkbook.You’ll bury us both.”
