The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(59)

There once was a poet named Grieve,

Whose poems would have you believe

That at a summer resort

She met a girl in a skort

And lost the one thing she couldn’t retrieve.





Ten minutes after her office hours started, I dialed her number.

“Professor Grieve here,” she said, her voice throaty and deep, not at all like Joan’s.

“Oh, hi Professor. You don’t know me but I’m a private investigator, and I was wondering if you had five minutes to answer a couple of questions for me.”

“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word.

“Oh, great, great. Sorry to bother you during your office hours, but I thought I’d take a chance. As I said, I’m a private investigator and we’ve been hired to look into an event that occurred back in 2000 at the . . .” I paused a little as though I was looking it up. “. . . at the Windward Resort in Kennewick, Maine.”

“Oh, that,” she said.

“So you were there?”

“Is this about the kid who drowned?”

“Actually, it is. Duane Wozniak. According to the resort’s records you were a guest at the time of the accident.”

“Yeah, I was there with my family. But I think maybe you want to talk with my sister, Joan.”

“Because she knew Duane,” I said, hoping I sounded like I knew what I was talking about.

“Yeah, right. What is this about, anyway? I’m confused. Is someone suggesting that it wasn’t an accident?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’m not authorized, of course, to divulge my client’s name, but we were tasked to just look into the events that led to his death. I don’t think there’s any suggestion that there was any wrongdoing on anyone’s part.”

“Well, like I said. I didn’t know him, and I don’t know anything about what happened except for what my sister told me, so I suggest you talk with her.”

“I will, Elizabeth. So you never met him while you were at the resort?”

“I remember seeing him, I guess, but my sister and I, both then and now, are not particularly close. I was doing my own thing there, and she was doing hers. He talked her into going out on that jetty on the beach at night, and he was showing off and slipped into the water.”

I knew I was beginning to push it, but I asked her, “So you had no interactions with Duane Wozniak or Richard Seddon?”

“Who’s Richard Seddon?”

“Oh, he was Duane’s cousin. They were sharing a room together.”

“No, I didn’t. Like I said, you’re talking with the wrong sister.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been helpful. It’s really just a matter of crossing you off a list of people I’m supposed to talk with.”

“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?