That stopped him for the count of two. “Did she imply that she was in danger?”
“No. I think she was just taking precautions. Taking care of details. Meredith was very good at details.” Silence hummed gently on the line for a few seconds. “But she may have had some qualms.”
“What makes you say that?”
“In her message, she said that if things turned nasty I’m supposed to call you.”
“Huh. Wonder why she did that?”
“Meredith was very intuitive.”
“Yeah?” He stroked the muscles behind Wrench’s bent ear. “I’ll take your word for it. I didn’t know her very well.”
“You slept with her.”
“Like I said, I didn’t know her very well.”
“Do you sleep with a lot of women you don’t know well?”
“No.” He let it go at that. Unlike Meredith, apparently, he was not real intuitive. But it was obvious, even to him, that this particular conversational direction would lead to a dead end.
There was a short, tense silence.
“I think I know where your one-point-five million is,” Leonora said after a while.
He was on his feet without being aware of having come up out of the chair. Wrench sat back on his haunches, head cocked attentively.
“Where is it?” Thomas asked.
“In an offshore account in the Caribbean.”
“That figures. She was a very sophisticated scam artist, wasn’t she?”
“I’m afraid so, yes.” Leonora hesitated briefly. “I’m sorry. Meredith had a long history of, uh, pilfering funds from other people.”
“When the amount involved is one and a half million, the term pilfering doesn’t seem adequate.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Can you access that offshore account?”
“Yes, I think so. She gave me the number of the account.”
He went to stand at the window that overlooked the cove. “If you’ve got the number, I should be able to transfer the funds back into the endowment account without anyone being the wiser.”
“Yes, well, that’s something I feel we should discuss in more detail.”
Damn. He had known it wouldn’t be that easy. Meredith had been a thief. He had to remember that. Thieves hung out with other thieves, or, at the very least, they probably favored friends whose own moral and ethical standards tended toward the low end of the spectrum.
“If you’re worried about your finder’s fee,” he said, “relax. I’ll make sure that you get the money.”
Leonora cleared her throat. He got the feeling she was working up her nerve for whatever it was she intended to say next.
“That’s not quite what I had in mind,” she said.
He braced one hand around the wooden window frame and prepared to negotiate.
“How does fifty thousand sound?” he said evenly. “Together with a guarantee that your name will not be brought up in any conversation related to the scam in the event that someone, say a cop or a lawyer, for instance, gets wind of it in the future?”
“No.”
Her refusal came swiftly. Too swiftly. There was no hesitation whatsoever in her voice. That worried him. She made her living as an academic librarian and he knew for a fact that there was no serious money in the family. He’d checked her out online. All she had was a grandmother who survived on social security, a tiny pension and the income of some small investments. Fifty grand had to sound like a very nice chunk of change to anyone in Leonora’s position. Of course, it wasn’t exactly one and a half million.
She was playing hardball.
“It’s a good offer,” he said. “The best you’re going to get. Meredith told you to trust me, remember? Take my advice, Miss Hutton. You do not want to try to hang on to the money in that numbered account.”
“I don’t?” She sounded almost amused.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I will hound you to the ends of the earth. I promise I will make life very difficult for you.”
“I believe you,” she said dryly.
“Good.”
“Look, this isn’t about the money, Mr. Walker.”
“Sure it is. It’s always about the money.”
“If you actually believe that, you’ve led a very limited and extremely barren life.”
The lecturing tone annoyed him.
“Okay,” he said. “If it’s not about the money, what is it about?”
“You said that your brother believes that his wife, Bethany, was murdered and that he sees some possible links to Meredith’s death.”
“Let’s leave Deke out of this. His theories about Bethany’s death have nothing to do with our negotiations.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“In addition to the number and location of the offshore account, I found two other items in Meredith’s safe-deposit box,” Leonora said quietly.
“Where the hell are you going with this?”
“One of the items was a book titled Catalog of Antique Looking Glasses in the Mirror House Collection. It’s over forty years old. There are a lot of black-and-white photos of old mirrors inside.”
He thought about that. “Meredith must have taken it from the library at Mirror House. Wonder why she ripped it off?”
“I have no idea. She had no interest in antique looking glasses as far as I know. There was something else in the box, too. An envelope. It contains photocopies of some clippings of newspaper accounts of an old murder case.”
A twinge of icy premonition drifted through him. “How old?”
“The murder occurred thirty years ago there in Wing Cove.”
“Thirty years ago? Wait a second—are you talking about the Sebastian Eubanks murder?”
“Yes. Know anything about it?”
“Hell, yes. Not exactly a secret here in town. A local legend, as a matter of fact. Sebastian Eubanks was the son of Nathanial Eubanks, the man who established the original endowment for Eubanks College. The story goes that Nathanial was brilliant but very weird. Committed suicide. His son, Sebastian, was also very, very smart. A mathematician and major-league eccentric. He was shot dead one night at Mirror House some thirty years ago. The murder was never solved.”
“That’s it? That’s all you know?”
“What else is there to know? It happened three decades ago and, as I said, they never caught the killer. It’s not like there’s anyone around who still cares about what happened. The Eubanks family line ended with Sebastian. You say Meredith had some clippings of the story?”