Lost Lake Page 4

  Startled, the man stood and smiled nervously at Starbuck. “Betty.”

  “Larry.”

  I waited a moment to see if Starbuck would introduce us. When she didn’t, I extended a hand to the man. He recoiled from my outstretched palm, gave me a jumpy smile in return, and held up his own hands.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m mysophobic. Germaphobic, if you will. I’m Dr. Lawrence Bornstein. Please, call me Larry. I’m the donor relations director for the museum. Rather, I was. What’s my title now, Betty?”

  Starbuck sighed and leaned back against the wall, her hands tucked behind her back. She looked at Larry, but her words were directed at me. “It’s no secret we have experienced significant budget cuts over the last few years. Larry’s position was deemed redundant as we had a lower-salaried donor relations development associate. When she resigned, Larry accepted her role.”

  “Ah, yes. Development associate. Well, if nothing else, it certainly makes me sound like a young person! I perform the same functions as I did before. I’m a bit of a whore, you see, going from donor to donor, begging for a pittance,” Bornstein said.

  He adjusted his red bow tie and smoothed down his hair, then dispensed a squirt of sanitizer into his hands and began to vigorously rub them together. The air took on a faint chemical smell. “I presume you’re here about the theft? Naturally I’ll be one of your top suspects.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Well, because the safe is here, in my office. And I’m one of the three people who know the code. Ergo, suspect numero uno,” Bornstein said smugly, and sat back down. He pointed to the far wall, where a framed oil painting of a field of sunflowers hung. “It’s behind that painting.”

  I went to the wall and pulled on a pair of gloves. Carefully, I swung the painting away from the wall and peered at the safe. There were a number of visible fingerprints along the surface and on the combination dial. There were likely latent prints there, too, which I wouldn’t be able to see without an alternate light source.

  “I’ll call one of our crime scene techs to come and dust this. He can do that much without intruding on the party. In the meantime, don’t let anyone else touch it. Is there anything in the safe that you’ll need in the next few hours?”

  Both Starbuck and Bornstein shook their heads.

  “Well, other than fingerprinting the safe, there’s not much more I can do without an exhaustive investigation. And as you’ve already made clear, that would be unacceptable during the gala. What kind of security do you have in place, for the building and the collections?”

  Starbuck said, “We have a robust alarm system. It’s set each evening, when we close at five, and the first staff member in to work the next morning disables it. But, obviously … well, we’re a public facility, Detective. We have people coming and going throughout the day. We don’t charge admission, so unfortunately, lately, we’ve seen an increase in some … unsavory types. Drunks, the homeless. I feel sorry for them, but we’re not equipped to be a social services center. I assume you met our security guard downstairs? He’s contracted—part-time, and special events. I wouldn’t count on him to chase down anyone, not at his age, but the uniform does seem to deter some inappropriate behaviors.”

  “White mustache? Yes, I met him. How about this office? Who has access?”

  “All of the staff and of course the janitorial service,” Starbuck said. “We each have a master key, so that we’re able to get into the storage rooms and various other spaces.”

  Bornstein added, “But there’s only four of us. Excuse me, three of us. Three employees. Our fearless leader, Betty; the ingénue, Sari Chesney; and myself, the history nerd. Betty, doesn’t Lois have a master key, too?”

  “That’s right,” Starbuck said and nodded thoughtfully. “Thank you, Larry. I’d forgotten about that. Lois Freeman is the president of our board of directors and she, too, has a key.”

  I turned to Bornstein. “You said four employees, then corrected yourself. Is the fourth person the one who recently resigned?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Ruby Cellars. She left to spend more time with her kids. Her husband died a year ago, and she’s all they’ve got.”

  “You don’t change the combination to the safe when an employee leaves?”

  Starbuck tilted her head and gave me a small shrug. “We’ve had the same combination for the last ten years. To be honest, we’ve never kept many things in the safe. For the longest time, it was used to store duplicate copies of our insurance policies, deeds to the land, that sort of thing.”

  “How do you possibly run an entire museum with such a small staff?”

  Starbuck smiled, toying with her necklace. “We’re fortunate to have a wonderful corps of volunteers.”

  “I see.” I turned to Bornstein. “What do you think happened to the diary?”

  Bornstein seemed surprised to be asked, taking a moment to smooth down the front of his sweater vest before answering. As he spoke, he took another hit from the hand sanitizer bottle.

  “Well, quite obviously it’s been stolen. It would be easy work for a safecracker. Either that, or Sari’s finally gone and done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “Taken us for all we’re worth. You’ve heard the expression ‘champagne tastes on a beer budget’? That’s Sari in a nutshell. I wouldn’t be surprised if she robbed a bank someday.” Bornstein smiled faintly at the thought. “Though she is a very foolish girl if she has stolen it. She won’t be able to sell it, not to anyone in legitimate business. She, or whoever stole it, will have to sell it on the black market.”

  “Is there a black market for such a thing?”

  Bornstein tipped his head. “Come now, you’re not that naïve. These days, there’s a black market for everything.” He grew glum. “If we don’t get that diary back soon, I guarantee you two things will happen.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “First, the board of directors will shut us down. They’ve been threatening it for years, and this will be the final straw. In fact, Lois Freeman informed us at the last meeting that there is a buyer who is very interested in the property,” Bornstein said.

  “And the second?”

  He stared at me, then smiled grimly. “Someone will die.”

  Chapter Five

  Starbuck practically sneered. “He’s talking about the curse, of course.”

  This just got better and better. “Curse?”

  Larry Bornstein nodded. “The curse of the Rayburn Diary. Every person who has ever had it in their possession has died a terrible death. That’s partly why it’s been locked away in the museum’s archives for the last hundred years, save for the past few months when James Curry—our preservationist and book restorer—had it in his shop.”

  I decided to play along. “Did Curry die?”

  Starbuck winked at me. “Excellent question, Detective. Well, Larry? Did James choke on a chicken wing? Or drown in his bathtub?”

  Bornstein glowered. “Betty, you know perfectly well that James Curry is alive. That’s because he was merely borrowing the diary, to ensure it was ready for permanent exhibition here at the museum. The museum retained ownership.”

  “That’s right. You have to own the diary for it to kill you,” Betty said. She checked her watch, then gestured for me to follow her. Once we were outside Bornstein’s office, she said, “My father told me about the curse, and his father told him before that, and all the way back to Owen Rayburn’s hag of a second wife, who told anyone in town that would listen to her that it was his diary that was somehow responsible for him catching his leg in an animal trap up in the mountains. He bled to death before he was found. That’s bad luck, not a curse. Of course, it didn’t help that one of their daughters drowned a few years later.”

  “How awful,” I murmured.

  “Yes. Look, my guests will begin arriving shortly. You can direct your fingerprint person to this office. If I know Larry, he’ll be hiding in the
re for a few hours. He’s convinced every other person has the bubonic plague. In the meantime, please, enjoy the exhibits and the appetizers. I need to check in with my volunteers and see if they’ve found anything suitable to fill the display case where the diary should have been.”

  I made a few phone calls and, fifteen minutes later, a crime scene tech arrived. He gathered a number of fingerprints from the safe, then left. I kept myself busy in the general vicinity of the food tables, stalking a server arranging breaded mushrooms on a silver platter and chatting up a couple of shopkeepers who were moonlighting as bartenders. They were good for local news and gossip, and by the time the party started, I’d had a glass of wine, seven stuffed mushrooms, three shrimp croquettes, and a chocolate-covered strawberry.

  Then I saw the Italian buffet laid out for the main course and immediately tried to figure out where the hell I was going to put Caesar salad, lasagna, garlic bread, and tiramisu.

  * * *

  In spite of the missing diary, the gala seemed to be a success. Betty Starbuck found a flag in the basement that had been carried during the Civil War by a regiment of Colorado volunteers. She draped it in the display case intended for the Rayburn Diary, and while I didn’t know much about curating an exhibit, I thought it looked pretty damn good.

  After the guests had ample time to arm themselves with a drink or two, Starbuck took to the stage and gave a warm welcome. She explained that the night’s real surprise was still under restoration and would be displayed in a short time. There was grumbling in the crowd, and I overheard a few guests mention the words theft and diary. It was clear that news had spread, though most guests didn’t seem as bothered by it as Starbuck had anticipated.

  Chief of Police Angel Chavez was among the first of the guests to arrive. I joined him and Detective Lucas Armstrong at an otherwise empty cocktail table and took a few minutes to fill them in on the missing diary. Halfway through my story, Armstrong mumbled something about needing a few hours off from shop talk and drifted away in the direction of the band.

  Chavez was relieved that I had, in his words, “handled Betty Starbuck.”

  “That woman is a real piece of work,” the chief grumbled around a mouthful of bruschetta. “We served on the school board together a few years back, and man, if she didn’t drive me crazy. We called her Betty the Bulldozer. This is a woman who’ll run you over and then sue you for staining her driveway.” Chavez lifted his chin. “It looks like she’s keeping some interesting company tonight.”

  I turned around to see Starbuck and Larry Bornstein engaged in a heated conversation with a man I recognized, Alistair Campbell, and a second man I didn’t know. Campbell had been in Cedar Valley for nearly six months now. He was an extremely wealthy contractor with a company, Black Hound Construction, that employed mostly ex-convicts. Though I didn’t know Campbell well, I didn’t like or trust him. Call it a cop’s instinct or just plain sixth sense; though I’d never prove it, I was sure Campbell had blood on his hands somewhere in his past.

  The four of them—Starbuck, Bornstein, Campbell, and the fourth man—stood off to the side and spoke in hushed tones, but anyone watching them could see by the look on Campbell’s face that he was furious. The man next to him—short, about fifty years old, with a scraggly goatee and a pair of rimless tinted eyeglasses perched on a pug nose—raised a finger to Starbuck’s face and shook it vigorously, then stormed off and ducked into the men’s room. Campbell, too, moved away from Bornstein and Starbuck and joined the crowd mingling around the various display cases.

  “The guy with the adolescent beard, who was that?” I asked Chavez.

  “James Curry. He owns the used bookstore on Main Street, but most of his business comes from very wealthy, very private international clients. Curry is a world-renowned expert in book restoration and preservation. He moved to town nine, ten years ago.”

  “Got it. He restored the Rayburn Diary.”

  “Oh?” Chavez took a sip from his cocktail glass and shuddered. “That’s disgusting. What the hell is a paloma? I thought I was getting a gin drink.”

  “Grapefruit and tequila,” I answered.

  Chavez gagged. “I hate grapefruit. Be an orange or a lemon, not both. Anyway, you should check out Curry’s shop sometime. It’s … interesting.” Chavez wiped his mouth, then discreetly glanced at his cell phone. His dark eyes grew serious. “I checked the logs. What’s the story with your call out to Lost Lake this morning?”

  “A young woman by the name of Sari Chesney disappeared late last night or early this morning. She was there with a group of friends. She’s an adult and there’s no sign of foul play but she’s not answering her phone and her friends are worried. This is out of character for her. I opened a file and it’s a good thing I did, as Chesney works here. At the museum.”

  The chief raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps you should look at Ms. Chesney in light of the stolen Rayburn Diary.”

  I nodded. “Absolutely. She’s one of the three employees who hold the combination to the safe.”

  “Lost Lake, huh?” Chavez looked troubled. “There was a group of women who drowned up there, back in the late eighteen hundreds. I think there were five or six of them. Young women, eighteen, nineteen years old.”

  “How awful. I’ve never heard this before.”

  Chavez waved a hand. “It’s ancient history. The girls grew up together, here in town. They experienced some kind of mass hysterical illness—sort of like what they think happened in Salem—and the girls made a suicide pact. Over the course of an October, one by one, they hiked to the lake and threw themselves in. At first, everyone thought they’d left town on one of the cross-country trains that passed through in Avondale. The lake froze over, see. No one saw them … until the following summer, when the water thawed and some poor fishermen found them. The Lost Girls, they were called. You know, come to think of it, I’m sure one of them was Owen Rayburn’s daughter. Isn’t that a coincidence? Anyway, the Lost Girls were said to haunt the lake. I think those stories have all died out, though, as people have forgotten about them.”

  “How awful for the families.” I shivered. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I couldn’t help remembering the sad, haunted feeling I’d experienced at the lake that very morning; the sense that there was some presence, some being, inhabiting the woods and the water.

  “Tragic.” Chavez motioned for a server.

  “How do you know all this?”

  Chavez shrugged. “After I moved here—and especially after joining the force—I took an interest in local history. I thought I should be prepared. You know what they say, history repeats itself. Look, is there any chance Chesney may have gone in the water?”

  “If she did, it’s unlikely it was of her own volition. Her friends told me that she nearly drowned in an accident when she was a child. She’s apparently been terrified of water ever since. Chief, everything seems to indicate Sari Chesney left the campsite on her own accord. There was absolutely nothing at the lake to indicate anything untoward happened. But when you factor in the theft of the diary…”

  Chavez nodded. “The mayor would be furious if we sent a dive team up there without probable cause. Between the leak and the fact that we’re over budget for the sixth year in a row … well, let’s just say Mayor Cabot is keeping a close eye on our department.”

  The leak … Over the last few months, confidential information on cases, suspects, even victims had appeared in the local newspaper. Chavez suspected it was coming from inside the police force but had been unable to prove anything yet. Files had been locked down and internal security measures tightened, but the leaks continued. The longer they continued, the lower morale dropped. Mistrust and suspicion were slowly replacing the easy camaraderie and mutual support that had once been the strength of our work force, and it was only a matter of time before an investigation became seriously compromised.

  By eleven p.m., my feet were hurting and I needed an antacid. The food was long gone, and many of the guests
had moved the party to the bars on South Street. Even the event photographer, a man who had been bustling in and out of the crowd all night, looked weary. I needed a final word with Betty Starbuck or Larry Bornstein, to go over the next steps in the Rayburn Diary investigation, but neither of them was anywhere to be found. I assumed they were with guests and took my leave.

  An hour later, I sighed with relief as I finally crawled into bed. Sleep should have come easily, but Brody lay on his back, snoring and making noises that would wake the dead. Seamus had abandoned his own bed for the foot of ours, and his heavy, squat body took up more room than it should have.

  I tossed and turned in an attempt to claim a corner of my own.

  After what felt like mere seconds of sleep, the home phone was ringing and weak sunlight was seeping through the sheer bedroom curtains. Brody got to the phone first. After a moment he gently nudged my shoulder. “It’s for you.”

  It was Sunday morning, and the clock on my bedside table said 6:40. This couldn’t be good.

  It was Chloe Parker, our longtime dispatcher, and she sounded panicked. “Gemma? I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone. You’re up on the roster. There’s been a murder.”

  “Oh no.” I was already out of bed and moving toward the closet. “Where?”

  “The museum. Chief Chavez is already there. And the techs are on their way,” Chloe said.

  The museum?

  I heard another line ringing at the station, and I knew she’d be off the phone in a flash to answer it. Dispatch typically ran shifts in pairs and, in my experience, calls always seemed to come in when one dispatcher was on break, leaving the other alone to manage the lines. It wasn’t ideal, but small-town police departments rarely have the luxury of a large staff.