Intimate Strangers Read online

  The notion made him go cold. He didn’t want to believe it was true, yet it looked as if Molly had been targeted twice for accidents—both times at Tilden projects.

  He was in the car and driving to Tilden’s office before he’d formulated a plan. Then in the reception room, he heard himself telling the secretary that he was doing research for a book on the area and wanted the perspective of one of the leading builders.

  The story had the desired effect on the little redhead manning the desk in the front office.

  After asking Mark to take a seat, she hurried down the hall. Five minutes later the man himself strode into the reception area.

  He was about as Mark remembered him. Tall and broad-shouldered, going to fat in the middle, and with his brown hair pulled back in a ponytail to compensate for the thinness on top, a look Mark had always despised.

  He held out his hand, and they shook.

  “So you’re writing a book about the area,” he said without questioning the cover story or even asking Mark’s name as he led the way to his private office.

  Amazing, Mark thought as he smoothly elaborated on his nonexistent thesis. “Yes. I want to do a study of a small southern town where tourism is one of the main industries.”

  “Well, Perry’s Cove fills that bill,” the developer replied as they both took seats, Mark in a guest chair and the builder behind a large teak desk.

  “Can you give me an idea of how development has speeded up in the past few years? If it’s speeded up.”

  “It sure has.” Tilden rattled off some figures, which Mark wrote down. The numbers were frightening. If development kept up at this pace, there would be no open land left between the sound and the ocean.

  “So is getting good help a problem?”

  Tilden’s gaze sharpened. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was in the downtown area yesterday, and I saw someone knock a bucket of shingles off a roof of a store being remodeled. It turned out to be one of your projects.”

  A worried look flickered across Tilden’s face, but it was quickly masked. “Are you the guy who pushed Molly Dumont out of the way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Funny you didn’t mention that when you came in. If you’re writing a book, I think you’re trying to make me look bad. You and—” He stopped abruptly.

  “Me and who?”

  “Forget it. What are you going to do, write about that roofing incident?”

  “If it’s relevant.”

  Tilden stood up. Mark did the same.

  “You can say that I’m known for my excellent construction. And if I see anything libelous in your book, I’ll sue your ass off. If you want to highlight a guy who cuts corners, write about Randall, the owner of the murder house.”

  “I did some research on him,” Mark said mildly. “That’s why I wanted to see the house.”

  “Well, did you run across the fact that he did a crappy job of renovating an old fish-processing plant into an antique mall?”

  “No.”

  “Research that.”

  “I will,” Mark answered tightly. He knew his workmanship on the damn project had been excellent. So why was Tilden doing a number on a guy who wasn’t here to defend himself? Had something happened out at the antique mall or was Tilden trying to deflect Mark’s interest in himself? He sure as hell was going to find out.

  “Thanks for your time,” he said as he started for the door.

  “You’d be well advised to pick some other town for your little research project.”

  Mark stopped and turned. “Is that a threat?” he asked, seeing Tilden’s hands balled into fists at his sides.

  “Of course not. Just some well-meaning advice.”

  Mark’s features were set as he marched through the front room. He could hear Tilden’s footsteps behind him, and forced himself to keep walking, all the way to the car.

  He was sitting behind the wheel, wondering what to do next, when a black-and-white cruiser pulled up next to him. He went rigid.

  Cory Daniels, the deputy who had been with the sheriff the day before, climbed out and approached him.

  He rolled down his window. “Can I help you?”

  “Step out of the vehicle, please.”

  Mark complied, his heart rate suddenly skyrocketing. Images from last night’s dream flashed into his mind, only now it was a waking nightmare.

  “Spread your legs and place your hands on the top of the car,” Daniels directed.

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “You have two seconds to comply,” the deputy said.

  Mark complied, feeling a crawling sensation like insect feet on his neck as he felt the man pat him down.

  A century passed before Daniels murmured, “This is your lucky day. You’re clean.”

  Mark forced himself to stand there without comment because he knew anything he said now could and would be used against him.

  “You’re best advised not to harass Mr. Tilden,” Daniels said. “And best advised to get out of town.”

  That pronouncement did provoke a response. “I thought Sheriff Hammer wanted me to stick around.”

  “Oh, the house thing? We found a dead deer in the bedroom. It crashed in through a picture window, cut itself up and bled to death.”

  Mark breathed out a small sigh. So he was off the hook on that. He was even more relieved when Daniels got back into his cruiser and drove away. Mark climbed back into his car, resisting the impulse to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

  Looking up, he saw that one of the slats on the building’s front window was lifted. Someone in there was watching. Probably Tilden. He must have a pipeline to Deputy Daniels.

  With a quick, jerky movement, he pulled out of the parking lot and drove away, his breath still uneven. Daniels had made him feel like a convicted felon again, and he didn’t like the sensation.

  He wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going until he realized he was heading toward the real estate office. His automatic reaction to stress had been to seek out Molly. What if he went in and told her everything? He slowed down, then blinked as she stepped outside wearing a nicely fitted pantsuit. He’d wanted to see her. Only it wasn’t quite how he would have wished, since she was with a good-looking guy dressed in a sports jacket and slacks.

  In the midst of an animated discussion, the couple took no notice of him as he drove by.

  The man was probably just another client, he told himself. Not a lover or a killer hired to do the job that yesterday’s accidents hadn’t been able to accomplish. The latter idea was doubtless outrageous. Yet once it popped into his head, he couldn’t dislodge it.

  The air-conditioning hadn’t been working long enough to kick in, and it was still stuffy inside the car. But a sudden icy chill swept over his skin. Slowing, he watched in the rearview mirror as Molly pulled onto the highway, heading in the same direction he was going.

  He took the next side road, where he made a quick U-turn. When Molly’s car passed, he waited several beats before pulling out and following her and the man, dropping back when she slowed. His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to make sure Deputy Daniels wasn’t following him.

  Several minutes later, Molly pulled into the parking lot of a popular restaurant, Madeleine’s. Well-dressed men and women were getting out of cars and heading for the front door, and he realized that they were gathering for a meeting of one of the local professional societies. That meant the guy with Molly was probably not planning to drive her to a secluded stretch of beach where he could make love to her or kill her.

  He started to drive by, then he decided he’d like to know what the group was saying about Mark Ramsey. Were they talking about his run-in with the sheriff? His trip to the Treasure Hunt Pavilion?

  He didn’t consider that he was looking for excuses to stay in Molly’s vicinity as he pulled into the parking lot and found a space. Most of the guys getting out of cars were wearing sports coats or short-sleeved dress shirts with nice slacks and no tie
. He looked down at his own knit shirt and chinos, thinking that he didn’t exactly fit in. But that might not matter. Picturing the interior of the restaurant, he remembered there was a big meeting room in the back, near the rest rooms.

  From the rear seat, he picked up a baseball cap and jammed it onto his head. The hostess was busy, so he was able to bypass the front of the dining room and follow a group of people down the hall in the back, then walk past the meeting room, which was filling up with local businesspeople, some of whom he recognized. There were tables set for lunch, but nobody had sat down yet.

  Molly was chatting with several people, her back toward the door. He heard Ted Collins, the owner of a crafts store, asking her about the roof incident. Her answer minimized the accident, and he wanted to tell her she was taking the right approach.

  “So later you got into some trouble at the old Randall place,” Collins pressed.

  Mark stopped just past the door, straining his ears to hear her answer to that one.

  “No big deal,” she replied, then switched the topic by asking if Ted was looking forward to the luncheon speaker.

  The phones weren’t far away, and he picked up the receiver, keeping his hand on the hook while he pretended to dial a number.

  Face hidden by his hat, he hunched his shoulders, making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

  From where he stood, he heard Mike Randall’s name mentioned a couple of times. But he really wasn’t close enough to find out anything useful. When he saw Bill Bauder come in, he decided that he could make better use of his time. If Bauder was here, then he wasn’t going to be at his office, which meant that a researcher wasn’t going to encounter him if he went over there and asked to see back issues of the paper.

  He turned and started for the exit, then felt a tingling sensation as he crossed the wide doorway of the meeting room. Turning his head, he saw that Molly had chosen that moment to look up. Her eyes were locked on him, and he stopped in his tracks. The room was full of men and women, but it felt as if the two of them were the only two human beings in the universe. She was the one who broke eye contact first, deliberately turning toward the tables where others were already choosing seats.

  He watched her walk toward a place setting, watched the man who had come with her take the seat next to her and put his hand familiarly on her shoulder.

  That hand made Mark’s stomach clench. Then he firmly reminded himself that he had no claim on Molly Dumont.

  The guy was speaking to her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, fine.”

  Mark stood with his hands stiffly at his sides, wanting to cross the room and ask her to leave with him. But he knew the impulse was totally irrational. It would be the worst possible thing he could do because it would draw attention to both of them.

  So he forced himself to walk toward the front of the restaurant and leave. He’d come here on impulse, and probably that hadn’t been a very good idea. But at least he’d pinned down Bill Bauder’s location.

  So his next stop was the office of the Voice of Perry’s Cove, the rag that dominated the local media. Well, it was actually the only local media. There was no radio or TV station here, so Bill Bauder had made the Voice the place to look for detailed coverage of local events. That was how he had set himself up as a power in the community. People’s views of you were influenced by Bauder’s view. And if you got on the wrong side of him, you were likely to suffer publicly.

  Mark wasn’t sure what he had done six years ago to earn such virulent coverage in the Voice. It might make sense if Bauder was working with whoever had set him up. But what would the editor’s motive have been?

  The newspaper office was not in the central business district but in another converted factory about a quarter mile from downtown. The wood-frame building looked out of place in the residential neighborhood that had grown up around, but it was convenient for Bauder. There was plenty of employee parking and plenty of room to unload papers that came from the printing company on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

  As Mark recalled, for a small-town paper the Voice had a fairly large staff. Ad salesmen were in greatest supply. But there were also a couple of part-time reporters and feature writers, even a food editor. But Bauder kept a firm hand on all aspects of the operation and he personally wrote what he considered the important stories.

  A desk in the lobby of the building controlled access to the interior.

  Manning the station was a petite woman who seemed barely out of high school, and he wondered if she was full-time or just a summer intern.

  “Is it possible to look at your archives?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course,” she answered, then stared at him. “You’re…the guy Mr. Bauder met at the old Randall place.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Mr. Bauder’s already developed the pictures. He’s doing a new story for the Wednesday edition.”

  “Oh, dandy,” he muttered.

  “Don’t you like being famous?”

  “I came here for peace and quiet.” He sighed. “Just let me duck into the back room and look at those old editions.”

  “Okay. But you have to sign in and wear a visitor badge.”

  Just great, Mark thought. So Bauder would know he’d been there. But he signed the sheet and took the pass because he didn’t see any alternative.

  “What years did you want to see?” she asked as she led him to the room at the back where bound volumes of old editions were kept.

  “I don’t know. I’m writing a book about Perry’s Cove, and I just want to get a feel for the town.”

  “Okay. We have a computerized index in case you want to look up a specific topic.”

  “All the modern conveniences.”

  When she’d finally left him alone, he got out some of the volumes with stories about the Randall murder, steeling himself to view the old articles. But it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be. He could look at them with detachment, as though he were reading about some other poor jerk who’d been chewed up and spit out by the system.

  Curious, he went back to the index and looked for the latest article on Mike Randall. To his surprise, Bauder had reported the fact that the conviction had been reversed—in a small article buried on page seventeen. At least he hadn’t omitted the information entirely.

  Next he put Phil Dumont’s name into the index. He was shocked to realize he was reacting more strongly to what he was seeing than to the previous subject.

  He saw that Molly and Phil Dumont had been given the same sensational treatment as Mike and Veronica Randall.

  There were pictures of the couple attending a dance sponsored by the merchants’ association. Then pictures of a dazed-looking Molly next to stories of her husband’s suicide.

  Apparently he’d taken his life at the antique gallery. Not good for business, Mark thought. He could see why Molly had been forced to find another source of income. Probably the other dealers had been furious about Phil’s parting shot, so to speak.

  Mark sat back and thought about that phrase. When he’d been in prison, the wife of one of his fellow inmates had committed suicide, and the man had been so distraught that he’d also tried to take his own life. In order to understand what had happened, Mark had read a lot about suicide. An individual who took his life often saw his situation as hopeless. Ending his own pain might be his primary motivation, but there was also an element of punishment for those left behind. “See what I was forced to do. Now you deal with it.”

  It sounded as if Phil Dumont had been sending that kind of message to his fellow antique dealers, otherwise he might have picked a more private place to end his life.

  Had Phil blamed the dealers for the failure of his business? Mark didn’t know, but the antique mall brought him back to one of his original purposes in coming here.

  He looked up more listings on the place and found that, indeed, there had been a couple of accidents. A stair tread had broken, injuring a tourist. A window had
blown in during a thunderstorm. And a plumbing pipe had burst, ruining merchandise in one area of the gallery.

  None of them were big problems, nor could Mark lay the blame on his construction. Poor maintenance was just as likely, he told himself, while still struggling with his feeling of discomfort.

  He spent another half hour randomly looking at recent editions of the paper to ascertain the present tone. Then he figured he should get out of there before he bumped into Bauder.

  After handing in his visitor pass and signing out, he headed back to his room at the East Point Lodge, to change from slacks into more casual shorts.

  The room had been cleaned in his absence. But as he reached to open the drawer where he’d put his shorts, his hand stilled.

  Someone had been poking through his stuff.

  Chapter Seven

  Mark stared at the drawer front with narrowed eyes. He’d listened to guys in prison talk about how to tell if their rooms had been tossed. So he’d mixed a little glue with some water and used it to paste strands of his hair against several of the dark-wood drawers, where they met the side of the dresser. On the drawer that held his sports clothes the hair was gone. So were all of the others, he discovered after a quick check.

  The maid might have brushed against the dresser and knocked off one or two of the hairs. But not all of them, surely. Whipping away from the drawers, he hurried to the closet to inspect the box in which he kept the Mike Randall mask.

  The combination lock was still in place, which proved nothing. If someone had figured out how to open it, they could have snapped it back into place when they finished.

  He set the carrying case in the middle of the bed, wishing he knew for sure whether anyone had seen his little reverse disguise. If they had, they were doubtless wondering why a guy named Mark Ramsey had shown up in Perry’s Cove with a Mike Randall mask.

  He thought about locking the box in a self-storage unit. There hadn’t been any of those in town when he’d lived here previously, but perhaps that had changed. On the other hand, he’d have to show identification when he rented the unit, which meant that anyone following his movements would know about it and could break in, just as they’d gotten into the room.