Enright Family Collection (29 page)

“What!”

“That land belongs to the Devlin trust. The trust was
controlled by my brother and me. If both our signatures are not on that document—or at the very least my brother’s and my aunt’s, since she has power of attorney in my absence—it’s totally worthless.”

“You mean I’ve been …”

“Duped. Yes. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, this is terrible. Absolutely terrible.” He rose and began to pace. “Miss Devlin, I purchased that land in good faith on behalf of my shareholders. We have spent considerable money on surveys and development plans. We have entered into an agreement with a builder to construct little cottages on those lots. The whole purpose of my visit today was to see if I could persuade Mr. and Mrs. Devlin to sell me just a small additional piece, which would give the future owners of these cabins access to the beach.”

“Lucien, I’m afraid I do not know what to tell you.” India suddenly felt very sick to her stomach.

“Miss Devlin …”

“‘India.’” She gestured for him to sit back down.

“India, I paid Mrs. Devlin a great deal of money for that land.”

“How much, might I ask?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, as you can see.” He pointed to the line where the cash part of the transaction was indicated.

“Oh,” India exclaimed. “Oh,” was all she could say.

“Oh, indeed.” Lucien sank back onto the sofa, looking every bit as miserable as he must have felt.

“I think perhaps you’d better start from the beginning.”

“A little more than two years ago, I started to look for some undeveloped land around the Delaware Bay. A place where I could build a new community of small, relatively inexpensive beach homes. I found Devlin’s Light, and of course, when I saw that entire stretch of undeveloped land running along an unspoiled beach, well of course, I had to find out who owned it. It wasn’t difficult to get in touch with your brother. I made him an offer—a very generous offer, I should tell you—right there on the spot. And on that very same spot, your brother flat out turned down my very generous offer and told me in no uncertain terms that the
beach was not for sale. There seemed to be no reason to even attempt to negotiate. I thanked him for his time and that was that.”

“Lucien, if you approached Ry to buy land and he refused to sell it to you, why would you have called his wife to sell it to you?”

“Oh, I didn’t,” he told her. “Mrs. Devlin called me.”

“Maris called you?”

“Yes. She said that her husband didn’t want to sell the beach property but that he had some property along the river that I might be interested in.”

“You obviously did not speak with my brother about this.”

“Well, I believe that all of our dealings may have been strictly with her from that point on.”

“‘We’?”

“I personally was not involved other than to speak with your brother that first time, and to speak with Mrs. Devlin when she called back. Will Shuman, our then-vice president of development and special projects, handled this transaction for Byers World.” Lucien’s eyes knit together pensively.

“Then perhaps you should discuss this with your employee.”

“My ex-employee.” Byers sighed heavily.

“Where is he now?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” He shook his head. “I should have known there was something …”

Byers rose and began to pace again.

“How long ago did he leave your employ?”

“He resigned about two years ago. Said he was moving to Atlanta to be closer to his family.”

“Lucien, Maris has been dead for two years.”

“May I ask how she died?”

“She drowned in the bay.” India told him the story, then added, “Her body was never recovered, though we did find a few things that had been hers. One of her sandals. Her sunglasses. A hat she always wore while she was crabbing.”

“Hmmm. An accidental death.” He gazed out the window. “Now that I think back on it, I think this may have been the last piece of business Shuman worked on for us.”
Lucien sat back down on the chair and exhaled loudly. “You know, I had heard rumors, but I never for a minute suspected that he could have been so desperate.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There had been some rumblings that Shuman had a gambling problem. That he had run up a sizable tab at one of the casinos in Atlantic City.” Lucien tapped his pen in the palm of his left hand. “Since his departure, some small irregularities have appeared in several of his expense accountings, a few minor shortages involving several of the deals he was working on, but nothing of this magnitude.”

“You think he worked with Maris to defraud you?”

“Actually, I’m thinking perhaps he defrauded both Byers World and Mrs. Devlin.” Byers looked at her, his eyes heavy with speculation.

“You mean he worked with Maris to take your money, then disappeared with it all himself?”

He nodded.

“Maris was not one to go quietly, Lucien. If Shuman had defrauded you and cut her out, you can bet your bottom dollar that she’d have come straight to you about it.”

“Not if Shuman killed her first.” He spoke the words softly, his voice fraught with a quiet horror.”

“Killed?”
Her eyebrows raised at the thought of it. “You think Shuman may have killed Maris?”

“I think we have to consider that possibility, don’t you? How difficult would it be to overturn a boat? To take the body out to sea?”

Maris murdered? A chill ran though her. Ry had definitely been murdered, but the thought that Maris had met with foul play had never occurred to her.

“Lucien, it’s no secret that the circumstances surrounding my brother’s death are still being investigated. Now you’re suggesting that his wife had been murdered? If Maris had been killed by this Shuman, why would Ry have been killed? Shuman would have already had the money. And it was more than two years between the time that Maris died and the time that Ry died. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Byers pondered this. “Maybe Shuman hid the money somewhere around Devlin’s Light, then came back looking for it. Maybe your brother caught him.”

“I guess that’s possible.” India frowned, her arms crossed against her chest.

“The other possibility is that the two deaths, while unfortunate, were unrelated.”

“Let’s think this through. Who else was there when your company went to settlement on this property?”

Byers sorted through the papers in his briefcase. “There was Mrs. Devlin and a lawyer named Patricia Sweeney. A representative of the title company named Peter Hales. Shuman …”

“Lucien, we need to talk to these other people.” India looked over the papers.

“My thoughts exactly.” Byers nodded. “And first thing Monday morning, I will personally do that very thing. May I call you next week?”

“Let me get one of my cards for you,” she said as she left the room. “I’ll be right back.”

Once in the dining room, where she’d left her pocketbook earlier that morning, she searched through her wallet with shaking hands until she found a card. Returning to the sitting room, she found Lucien Byers looking out the front window to where Corri and Ollie were trying to maneuver over the cracked pieces of sidewalk on roller skates without falling. Corri made it through the worst of it, but Ollie did not. India grimaced as the child fell half onto the sidewalk, half onto the grass.

“Ollie, are you all right?” India called from the front door.

The child picked herself up and brushed the leaves and pine needles from her denimed bottom, nodding that nothing much was damaged but her pride.

“Is she hurt?” Byers asked with apparent concern as India handed over her business card.

“No, just embarrassed. I’ll have to have that sidewalk repaired, though, before someone does get hurt. It’s the sort of thing that my brother used to take care of.” She smiled wanly.

“It’s obvious that you miss him terribly. I’m so very sorry.”

“We all are.” She shrugged, then turned her attention back to the card. “I’ll be at this number on Monday.”

“Assistant district attorney, city of Paloma, Pennsylvania,” he read. “Quite impressive. I suppose you could look into the whereabouts of some of the players.” He raised the sheaf of papers and shook them slightly.

“Absolutely. As a matter of fact, if you fax copies of those documents over to my office, I’ll get someone working on it first thing this week.”

“Excellent. And I will start to gather what information I can on Shuman. I know a very fine private investigator.”

“Maybe I can help locate Shuman. I’ll see what’s in the computer banks on him.”

“Wonderful. Maybe if we work together we can get to the bottom of this. And perhaps, eventually, reach some sort of agreement on that tract of land.”

“An agreement?”

“India, regardless of what our combined efforts find, I— my company, that is—is still out a quarter of a million dollars. Money that was paid to your sister-in-law.”

India stiffened. “Lucien, I am not responsible for Maris’s actions, nor do I have any responsibility to you or your company. Certainly I feel terrible that this has happened, but I don’t believe I have any obligations here, even if I had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to pay you back.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. It isn’t the money I want. We have invested a good deal of money into the development of that land—land that our records show we purchased. I would like to think we could work out something that would permit me to proceed with those plans.”

“I think we both need to speak with our lawyers and see where this all stands.” She frowned.

“India, I hope you don’t take this personally, but I have an obligation to my company. If there is any recourse, I will have to pursue it.”

“I understand. I’m sure I’d do the same thing. I just feel so terrible about this.”

“I appreciate that.” He snapped the briefcase closed briskly. “I’m only sorry that we had to meet under such unpleasant circumstances.”

India walked him to the door and shook his hand when it was offered. He gave her a card, which she placed upon the table just inside the doorway.

“I’ll talk to you on Monday,” he told her as he walked across the porch and down the steps, pausing to look up the street to where Corri and Ollie were skating toward the corner. He waved as August pulled the Buick into the driveway.

Business couldn’t be too bad, India noted as he drove off in his brand-spanking-new Mercedes.
But if he makes any
more deals like the one he made with Maris, his next trip will be on a Raleigh ten-speed.

“Who was that slick-looking fellow?” August came into the kitchen through the back door and set a bag on the counter. “Someone from Paloma?”

“No, why would you think he was from Paloma?” India frowned, in search of a fresh cup of coffee to replace the one she had left in the laundry room.

“He just had
city
all over him.” August slid out of her winter coat.
“Ad unguem factus homo.
A man polished to the nail.”

India paused, then poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to her aunt, gesturing her toward the window seat.

“Aunt August, I think you’d better sit down for this one.”

It took a while, but by two o’clock that afternoon, India’s temper, initially suppressd by shock, was about ready to blow. How dare Maris even attempt to sell off Devlin land! How dare she involve this family in a fraudulent scheme! Was she really so stupid she could have believed that the truth would never see the light of day? Madder than she’d been in longer than she could remember, India decided to do what she always did when her cork was about to pop. She went running.

Dressed in a long-forgotten pair of sweatpants and heavy socks she found in the bottom drawer of her dresser, a turtleneck from her suitcase and one of Ry’s old sweatshirts, India rummaged in her closet until she found the old sneakers she’d been certain she had left there. How did any of us ever manage to run wearing nothing but plain old
sneakers?
India smiled as she tied the laces of the old white tennis shoes, envisioning the array of athletic shoes she had recently seen in a specialty store in the mall. Walking shoes. Running shoes. Cross-trainers. Tennis shoes. Basketball
shoes. As she went through the motions of a too-brief warmup. she compared the old white canvas sneakers to the fancy, high-priced numbers sitting neatly on the floor of her closet back in Paloma. She could not in all honesty say that she missed them.

Corri and Ollie were in the attic playing dress-up with the old clothes set aside for just that purpose, and Aunt August was in the sitting room, cozy in her favorite chair nearest the fire when India set out. August had been totally unprepared for the news India had had to share that morning, but she was not shocked to learn that Maris had been involved with underhanded dealings.

“I cannot say that I’m surprised, India.” August’s chin set and her mouth was drawn into a tight, straight line. “There was something about Maris. … I do not mind telling you it near broke my heart when Ry brought her home. I never understood it even for a second. Except for Corri, there was nothing good to be said for that woman. And sometimes it was hard for me to believe that she was really that child’s mother, she was so indifferent to her. But that’s another matter. For her to involve the Devlin name in a dishonest scheme …”

August shook her head as she reached for the phone to call the family lawyer to alert him to this latest bit of news, pausing to add, “God forgive me for my lack of charity, India, but the woman only got what she deserved.”

A chill from the east blew through Devlin’s Light, and the sky, pale gray earlier that morning, had deepened to the color of gun metal, the clouds falling so low that they all but dropped into the bay. A snow sky, India thought as she headed out through the town in the hopes of running off her anger. The first mile was arduous; it had taken her that long to find her rhythm again. The second mile was better, and she slowed as she looked through the high black wrought-iron fencing that marked off the grounds of Captain Jonathan Devlin’s mansion. The property took up the whole block, but it was only a small portion of what had once been the holdings of the oldest of the three original Devlins. Long ago given to the town, and used by the local historical society for a variety of fundraisers, the house stood tall and white, black shuttered and handsome, built to prove to the
captain’s in-laws, prominent Quakers from Philadelphia, that their beloved daughter Salem—short for “Jerusalem”—had married well. Which was all the consolation Jonathan could offer them, since Salem, by marrying a non-Quaker, had not been welcomed into the homes of her family.