Revenge and the Wild(60)

The curtains were drawn, and there was just enough candlelight to see the mayor leaning back in his chair, arms folded over the tub of his belly.

“Nigel, good to see you again.” The mayor’s arms unwound to fiddle with the broken telegraph bird on his desk, with the sheriff’s official star on the stationery tucked in its beak. He snuck a glance at Westie before turning his attention back to the men of the group. “Please, have a seat.”

Westie looked in the corner of the room for an extra chair and felt a jolt when she saw Hubbard and Lavina in the shadows. Lavina was putting something into a safe. She closed the door before Westie could see inside.

Though startled by their presence, she wrestled those fears to the ground and forced her expression into a mask she hoped was as unmovable as Alistair’s.

“What are they doing here?” Westie demanded.

The mayor’s smile was an ugly slash of pink across his face.

“You’re branding my guests as heathens. They have the right to face their accusers.”

Westie looked at the sheriff, who only nodded, then at Nigel, who seemed confused.

“I have to admit I was quite surprised when the mayor said you believe us to be cannibals,” Lavina said, taking a seat beside her husband. Her eyes burrowed into Westie. A drop of sweat crept down the front of Westie’s chest into her bodice. “And there we were, about to hand over our fortune after Nigel’s explanation of Emma’s capabilities this morning. What a shame.”

Westie glanced at Nigel. He was a heap against the mayor’s desk. The crestfallen look in his eyes crushed her heart, but it wasn’t the time or the place to be worrying about Nigel’s mood. She had to focus on taking down the Fairfields.

She wondered if they had discovered their gold was missing yet. She doubted it. No one could hold a smirk such as the one on Lavina’s lips if that were the case.

“All right, then,” the mayor said. “Let’s hear these ridiculous claims you’ve made.”

Nigel cleared his throat, looking as if he were about to be sick. “Yes, well, about the Fairfields . . .”

It took some muscling through, but Nigel, with the sheriff’s help, delicately explained the story they’d concocted. Nigel elaborated a bit, told the mayor that he’d examined the bones of Isabelle Johansson for a second time after Alistair expressed doubts about his conclusion, and upon doing so, discovered that not only had Isabelle not been attacked by a bear, but she wasn’t attacked by an animal at all. The teeth marks he’d found upon reexamination were human. He even had a signed affidavit by Doc Flannigan, who agreed with the findings—which was a forgery, but Nigel had insisted the doctor owed him a favor and wouldn’t mind.

Once Nigel was done speaking, he presented the mayor with the owl earrings as evidence and the story of Alistair finding Olive wearing them while she played in the woods.

Westie wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a panicked twitch in Lavina’s eyes before she blinked it away.

From his stack of papers, Nigel pulled statements from witnesses testifying they had seen Isabelle wearing those exact earrings at the ball.

Near the end of Nigel’s report, the sheriff pulled the cuffs from his belt. All the while the mayor sat at his desk listening, his blank expression never changing.

When Nigel was done speaking, the room was quiet except for Alistair’s breathing. He fussed with his machine as if he might find a kill switch.

The mayor finally spoke, voice booming, shaking Westie in her chair. “Earrings, you say.” He studied the earrings up close, picked at the dried blood with the tip of his long fingernail. “And you say young Olive was wearing them?” He looked at Alistair, whose dark hair clung to the sweat dotting his forehead.

Alistair nodded.

“Did you ask where she got the earrings?” the mayor asked.

Westie looked at Nigel. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

“That’s unimportant. The fact is she had them,” Alistair said.

The question of where Olive had gotten the earrings hadn’t come up in their planning. Most little girls got their jewelry from their mother, so Westie thought people would assume Lavina had killed Isabelle and had given the earrings to Olive. Westie wanted to mention it, but then thought better of it in case the mayor turned that logic back on her, since it was Westie who’d given Isabelle the earrings in the first place.

Westie cursed inwardly.

“Just answer the question, please,” the mayor said.

Alistair’s mask hummed. “No, sir.”

“So it’s possible the girl found the earrings in the forest where she’d been playing, the same forest where Isabelle Johansson met her unfortunate demise.”

“Yes,” Nigel interjected, “but—”

The mayor slammed his hands against his desk so hard Westie could feel it in her feet, cutting off whatever details Nigel might’ve added to the wispy remains of their story.

Westie fought the emotion that had started to make her chin quiver. She looked away from the mayor so he wouldn’t see, and focused on the safe in the corner instead. It had three locks. Now that the Fairfields didn’t have their gold, she wondered what Lavina possessed that was so important she needed to hide it in a safe.

“Unless the Fairfields have blood on their hands and skin in their teeth,” the mayor went on, “I will have no more of these accusations. If there are cannibals running amok, it has nothing to do with my guests.” The mayor pointed a bloated finger at the sheriff. “What you have is circumstantial evidence,” he said, peppering his speech with words from back in his lawyer days, “nothing more. If you want to keep your job, you’ll have to do better detective work than that.”