“So you have no alibi,” Darrell concluded.
“I guess not.”
“As I recall, your alibi was soft for Brink’s murder, too.”
Norm stood up and put himself between Darrell and Sandra. “I think we’re done for now, Darrell. Sandra has to get back to work, and wild speculation isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
Sandra walked away to the trailer door, but I called after her. “Hey, Sandra? One more thing.”
Norm tried to shut me down, but Sandra waved at him to say it was okay. “What is it?”
“You turned down the bribe and told Brink to shove it. Then what?”
“I left.”
“No, I mean what did Brink say when you turned him down?”
Sandra scratched her cheek with black fingernails as she tried to remember. “He was pissed. Brink was a bully, you know that. He was the kind of guy who was used to getting what he wanted, and he thought he could intimidate me. He told me if I was holding out for more money, there wasn’t going to be any. And he said if I didn’t take the offer and quit the mine, I’d regret it.”
Chapter Thirty
The labor pains came back while we were driving to the Fair Day resort. This time, Darrell heard me inhale with a sharp breath and noticed my fists clenching and my whole body squirming in the passenger seat. He was immediately concerned.
“Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“Last time the pains went away after a few minutes. Let’s wait and see.”
“I’d rather not have to deliver your baby, Rebecca.”
“That makes two of us,” I replied.
He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and studied my face, which was taut with discomfort.
“Is this too much for you?” Darrell asked. “If being part of this investigation is putting you at any risk, I’ll drive you back home right now.”
“No, I want to be part of it. Really.”
I breathed steadily and tried to clear my head, which wasn’t easy. Fortunately, the pain settled down in a few minutes, as it had before, and my body relaxed. Even so, I knew you were coming, Shelby. You were getting ready to be part of this world. The clock was ticking, and I didn’t have much time to get answers to all my questions.
“I’m okay now,” I said, and I motioned to Darrell to keep driving. He looked relieved.
We arrived at the Fair Day resort half an hour later. It was situated on the far western edge of the county, built on the shore of one of our largest, prettiest lakes. Color had begun to dot the trees, and the sun was shining, making it a gorgeous October day. A few fishing boats trolled the water. The resort had been around since the 1930s, and a lot of us joked that the towels in the rooms dated back to that era, too. For its time, the place had been elegant, but decades later, it was just a collection of lakeside cabins with outhouses and a communal shower. It was seasonal, and the resort would be closing up for the winter in a few more weeks. I had a hard time imagining Gordon Brink staying here, but seven years earlier, he wouldn’t have had many options.
The owner of the resort was a man in his early fifties named Marvin Faraday, who was the son of the original owners. The Faraday clan went so far back in this area that some of us wondered if there was a Random Faraday centuries ago who gave the town its name. He was a rounded Paul Bunyan of a man, the sixth of six children, and he had seven kids of his own. Marvin was also the town mayor, which wasn’t a job that took a lot of time around here. He knew everyone, so when Darrell and I came inside the lobby cabin that doubled as his home, he was right there to put both hands on my belly to feel you kick. You must have liked him, sweetheart, because you kicked up a storm to say hello.
He poured coffee for himself from an aging Mr. Coffee machine in the corner of the office, and he held up the pot to the two of us, but we declined.
“Awful news about Ajax,” Marvin told us when we were all sitting down. “Awful, awful, awful. You know what happened?”
“We’re working on it,” Darrell replied.
“Ajax came here a lot, you know.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, sure. He had a cabin he liked, probably rented it out once or twice a month. Never came alone. For me, it was hear no evil, see no evil, know what I’m saying? He brought girls here, but I made a point of not noticing who. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and it wasn’t any of my business. As long as there weren’t any awkward scenes, jealous husbands showing up, that kind of thing, I didn’t care. I wish I could be more help.”
“Actually, we’re not here about Ajax,” Darrell told him.
“No?”
“We’d like to ask you about Gordon Brink.”
“You mean the lawyer who got killed last winter? What about him?”
“Did you know him?”
Marvin rubbed his beard and thought about it. “I’m trying to think if I ever met him. I don’t recall that I did. None of them stayed out here. There was a city council meeting about some of the vandalism the lawyers were complaining about, but as I recall, the mine sent some young associate. The only time I heard Brink’s name was after he got killed. Wasn’t it his son that did it?”
“We’re not so sure about that anymore,” Darrell replied. “The thing is, we think Brink may have stayed at the resort several years ago.”
“Oh, yeah? I guess it’s possible, but I don’t remember.”
“We’d like to look through your guest records from back then. Specifically from July seven years ago.”
Marvin shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
He retreated into a back room and returned a couple of minutes later with a shoebox in his hand. The box was labeled with a black marker for the months of June and July seven years earlier. Inside, hundreds of white index cards were squeezed together in no particular order that we could see. Each card listed little more than the basic information, including a name, cabin number, check-in date, check-out date, total bill, and method of payment. Back then, most of the guests had paid in cash.
Darrell took half the cards, and I took the other. The slowest part of the process was interpreting the handwriting, but when we were both done, we hadn’t found a card labeled with a name that even resembled Gordon Brink.
“Penny and Sandra weren’t one hundred percent sure it was seven years ago,” I pointed out. “Maybe we’re wrong about the timing.”
“I don’t think we’re wrong.” Darrell glanced at Marvin, who was reading a paperback Louis L’Amour novel. “Marvin? Do you typically ask for ID when people check in?”
The resort owner didn’t look up from the book. “Now I do. Seven years ago? I was pretty loose about things back then. As long as people had cash, I didn’t really care who they were.”
Darrell looked at me. “So Brink could have used a false name.”
“If he did, then we’ll never find him.”
But we went through the index cards again anyway. It took longer this time, hunting for the kind of fake name a Milwaukee corporate lawyer might use. The clue I spotted in the stack of cards turned out not to be a name, but a correction in the check-out date and the total bill. The guest had paid in advance for a two-week stay, but then the date had been crossed out and replaced with a new date that was only five days after arrival.
The name on the card was Jay Smith.
Jay. That felt like more than a coincidence.
I showed the card to Darrell, who spotted the significance of the new check-out date immediately.
“Norm found Kip and Racer’s bodies a few days later,” he said. “The bodies had been in the trailer a while. I think this is Brink, don’t you?”
We showed the card to Marvin, but not surprisingly, he didn’t recall one summer guest leaving the resort early seven years ago. If it was Brink, he’d come and gone without leaving footprints, which was no doubt exactly what he wanted. Darrell wandered out of the office with the card in hand, and I followed. A grassy slope surrounded the resort and led down to the lake and the guest cabins. Sunlight reflected on the water like orange stars, and dense forestland ringed the shore. The October air was cool.