“Well, I’m glad you were able to cross me off that list.” Maybe she thought that sounded harsh, so she laughed after she said it. “How did you find me?”
“Well, I have the guest register from the time when the event happened, and I’m contacting people from it.”
“Are you contacting everyone who was staying at Windward Resort at the time?”
“Well, not everyone, of course, but anyone we think might have had some contact with Duane Wozniak.”
There was a pause, then Elizabeth said, “This is a strange question, but have you contacted someone named Denise Smith?”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t think she’s on my list.”
“Never mind. I was just wondering.”
“Should she be on my list?”
“Oh, no. I was just curious, honestly. There’s zero chance she had anything to do with Duane Wozniak.”
After ending the phone call, I spun on my office chair and looked out at Oxford Street, bathed in sunlight even though I could see a bank of clouds moving in from the west. I wondered if I’d made a bad mistake in calling Elizabeth, if she was on the phone right now to her sister to warn her that a private investigator might call to ask about Duane Wozniak and the Windward Resort. Somehow, I didn’t think so, though. As she said, they weren’t that close. And even if she did contact Joan, making the phone call might have been the right move. I’d gotten crucial information. Not only had Joan Grieve been at the Windward Resort when Richard Seddon had been there, but she’d been with Richard’s cousin Duane when he’d drowned.
The way I now saw it was that Joan Grieve had been personally involved in three separate instances where someone or several someones had died. The first was that she was with Duane Wozniak in the year 2000 when he drowned at night in the ocean. The second was the death of Madison Brown and James Pursall in her honors English class three years later, and now she had lost her husband in a murder-suicide. Out of those three events, Richard Seddon was tangentially involved in the first two. He was staying in the same room as Duane Wozniak, his cousin, at the Windward Resort. And he was best friends with James Pursall. It made me think he might have had something to do with the death of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil, as well.
What if Richard Seddon and Joan Grieve had met at Windward Resort all those years ago and plotted to murder Duane Wozniak? What if they’d been so thrilled to get away with it that they’d decided to keep planning murders? It sounded ludicrous, I realized. For one, James Pursall had pulled the trigger in my classroom, not Richard Seddon. Did I really think that somehow Richard or Joan had made it happen? Had they talked him into it?
And what about the deaths of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil? If Richard Seddon had been involved then how would that have worked? Would he have been waiting for them in the house? If so, where was his car?
My afternoon, like most of my afternoons, was free. I drove back out to the northwest suburbs, a drive I was getting very used to. By the time I reached the deck house in Bingham that was still for sale, the dark clouds I’d first noticed in Cambridge were smothering the sky, and light rain had begun to fall. I pulled directly into the driveway, not worrying about anyone seeing me, then got out of the car and looked at the house. It was exactly as I remembered it, a brown deck house that blended into the woods around it. The last time I was here I’d heard the three gunshots coming from inside and forced myself to go in and look. I could remember every detail of what I’d found.
Instead of trying the front door I went around the side of the house, walking across the narrow strip of lawn that led to the back of the property, with a screened-in back porch and another narrow strip of lawn bordering the thick woods. The rain was picking up, coming in gusts, and I turned up the collar of my Harris Tweed jacket. I walked over and looked at the door that led to the porch, tried it but it was locked. The lock was a spring latch, and I considered digging out a credit card to find out how easy it was to open but decided against it. Instead, I skirted the edge of the property, spotting what looked like a seldom-used path heading into the woods. About fifty yards along the path it met up with a definite trail, the ground hard-packed soil, and the trees cut back. I turned right and walked slowly. It was dark in the woods, but the rain had either temporarily stopped or was not penetrating the thickly clustered pine trees. I passed a tree that had a blaze of yellow paint on it, so I knew I was on some sort of official trail. I walked through a clearing, disturbing a trio of crows that scattered from the ground to lower branches, cawing at one another, and probably me. Then I reached a road. A small sign nailed into a tree told me I’d been walking in the Bingham Town Forest. There was no parking lot at the trailhead but the road widened a little and there were tire ruts along the side of the road. I crouched and looked at one of them, pretending for a moment that I was the type of detective that could look at treads and know what kind of tire had made them.
I reversed course back through the woods, managing to find the path that led to the deck house. Sitting in my car, the heater running, I now knew that it was entirely possible that someone else had been in the house on the day that Richard and Pam had been shot. The killer could have parked along a parallel road and gone through the woods. I would never have seen them from the front of the house. There was no definitive proof that this had happened, but I’d learned it was a possibility.
I sat there for a while, making assumptions as I’d been doing all day.
Joan’s husband was having an affair and she decided she wanted to kill him, plus the woman he was cheating with. She knew she couldn’t do it herself, but she had an accomplice. He was an outcast named Richard Seddon and they’d killed together before, or at least instigated murders. So she contacted him, told him the place that her husband conducted his afternoon trysts, and Richard lay in wait, having parked on a nearby street. But even that plan wasn’t good enough, so she decided to add a witness, a detective who would find the bodies, and confirm that it looked like murder followed by a suicide.
I decided that the time had come to talk with Richard Seddon. If all of what I was thinking was true—if he was the third person—then questioning him might provoke him into contacting Joan. What I really wanted to do was to talk with Lily again, or maybe it was time to talk with Roberta James. Tell her what I knew, and leave it to her. Instead, I formed a plan. Tomorrow morning I would park my car down the street from where Richard Seddon lived in Fairview, and sit and wait for him to go by. I needed to find out where he worked, and if I should approach him there or at his house. I already knew the questions I would ask him, that I would try the same ruse I’d used when talking with Elizabeth Grieve, telling him I was hired to investigate the drowning accident of Duane Wozniak. It would be just plausible enough, and also just suspicious enough that he would contact Joan. And if that happened, then I’d know for sure, and then I could hand the whole thing over to Roberta James and the Bingham Police Department. Easy peasy.
Chapter 27
Richard
Richard looked up, and there was the man with the jeans and the tweedy jacket that he’d seen outside his house the day before. “Are you Richard Seddon?” the man asked. Richard stood up too fast and immediately felt the blood rushing from his face, and for a brief moment thought he might pass out.