Premeditated Mortar Read online

  I learned that the company also planned a second Gables phase during which they would begin to renovate the three buildings at the opposite end from Jane’s hotel—Buildings Two, Three, and Four. They intended to build twenty luxury condominiums for those who could afford it.

  I had to shake my head at the idea of luxury condos. But why not? After all, we were going to transform this end of the Gables into a five-star hotel. Life was funny, for sure.

  Rachel’s biography on the website was extensive and impressive; she had attended several private schools in the San Francisco area and one private day school outside Mendocino. She went to Stanford University and Yale Law School, where she graduated summa cum laude and magna cum laude, respectively. She belonged to several professional societies and was a member of numerous business organizations. Her family still lived in Mendocino.

  It listed her skills, qualities, and interests: Self-starter; highly motivated; skilled negotiator. Rachel enjoys tennis, golf, and surfing. She performs in her local theater, plays piano and guitar, and sings in her church choir.

  The woman was a serious overachiever and clearly brilliant. And beautiful, with great taste in clothes. With all of us working at the Gables for the next year, I didn’t see why we couldn’t be friendly. I just hoped she wasn’t quite as big a drama queen as Mac seemed to think she was.

  Mac showed up Saturday afternoon and we took a walk over to the Lighthouse Pier, where we nibbled on fried clams at one of our favorite food stands. We left the pier and strolled along the boardwalk, holding hands and window shopping. Then we trudged through the wide stretch of clean white sand to the water’s edge, where we sat and skimmed small stones along the calm surface of the water. It was silly and fun and we deliberately avoided talking about anything serious like murder and torture and all that awful stuff.

  It would all be there waiting for me when I went back to work on Monday. And with that in mind, I asked Mac to check in on Ricky. He made the call and reported that Ricky was fine, to my relief. Maybe I was being super paranoid, but who could blame me after discovering the body of his best friend?

  Back at the house, Mac helped me gather veggies from my garden for a dinner salad and then I started a big batch of tomato sauce for pasta.

  Mac sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and read through my notes and the copies I had made of Rachel’s résumé, along with some of the obscure historical facts about the Gables that despite my meticulous research on the place, I had never heard of before that morning.

  With Mac working nearby and me prepping dinner, it felt so ridiculously comfortable and homey that I wanted to keep the picture of it in my mind forever. I thought it might be the perfect time to bring up my vague question about our future, but would I be rocking the boat? Spoiling the comfy vibe? And just as I was about to bite the bullet and bring up the subject, Mac came over, put his arm around my waist, and leaned over to test the pasta sauce. I was pitifully grateful for the distraction.

  “That’s fantastic,” he said, then gave me a kiss on the cheek and went back to his computer. “So I tracked down Regina Pomeroy’s obituary.”

  “Did you? That’s great. Where did you find it?” I waved the question away. “Never mind, Google mastermind. So what does it say?”

  “Among other things, it says that Regina graduated from the Wildwood Day School.”

  “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

  He grinned. “That’s because it’s the same private day school outside Mendocino that Rachel Powers graduated from.”

  “What are the chances?” I turned the burner down and put a lid over the sauce. I walked over and sat down next to Mac. “What else did you find?”

  “I was able to find Regina’s obituary right away. Her family’s local mortuary in Mendocino published it, even though she didn’t die in the city.”

  “No, she died at the Gables,” I said.

  “That’s right. Also, apparently the news of her death wasn’t disclosed to the family for nearly two weeks.”

  My jaw dropped, but as I thought about it, I said, “I’m shocked, but not surprised. Fairchild tried to cover it up.”

  “Probably to give herself time to come up with a plausible alternate reason for her death.”

  “And more important, to keep the funds coming in for as long as possible. Because you know that as soon as Fairchild told the family about Reggie’s death, her father’s checks would stop coming in.” I let that sink in. “Did they publish her photograph with the obituary?”

  “They might’ve published it in a newsletter or something,” he said, flipping through pages. “But it hasn’t shown up online. Not even on Google Images.”

  “I would really love to see a picture of her. We might be able to tell if she’s related to Rachel.”

  Mac looked me in the eye. “Or Ricky.”

  “Oh my God.” I cringed at the thought. “If she was related to Ricky, it would mean she’s Dr. Fairchild’s daughter.”

  We paused a minute to digest that creepy possibility. Because it would also mean that the doctor had killed her own daughter. But we were getting ahead of ourselves.

  “Let’s take it one step at a time,” Mac said. “I’ve got one more website to try.” He tapped at the keyboard with lightning-fast fingers, then murmured, “Here we go.”

  “Where are we?”

  He grinned at me, but didn’t answer. Just went back to staring at the screen. There was more tapping, and then he groaned.

  “What?”

  “They want my e-mail address.” He shrugged. “Oh well, I’ll never be lonely. This website will hound me till I’m dead. Fine, I’ll just enter a brand-new e-mail address so I’ll know it’s from them whenever they send me something.” He continued tapping keys and a minute later, he stopped. But the muttering continued as he scrolled. “Okay. Okay. Whatever.”

  I smiled. “Where are you?”

  He looked up at me. “I think I’ve found the answer to one of our questions.”

  “Which answer? Which question? How’d you find it?”

  “Hang on.” He tapped the keyboard a few more times. “Okay, I finally found this high school yearbook website. You can look up any school, any year, and see every page of the yearbook for that year along with photos of all the students.”

  I squeezed his arm. “That was brilliant, Mac.”

  He tapped his head. “Mastermind.”

  I had to smile. He looked so boyish and eager and excited.

  “But like I said, the trade-off is that they’ll be sending me junk e-mail until I’m dead. But okay,” he continued, “you wondered if Rachel had a deeper connection to the Gables.”

  “Right.” I watched his expression. “So? Did you find a connection?”

  “That would be yes.”

  “Really?”

  He turned the computer around to show me the photo of a pretty, teenaged girl with a bright smile and a blond Farrah Fawcett hairstyle.

  “Oh, it’s Rachel.” I smiled. “Gosh, she’s so young.”

  “Yes, she is,” he said. “Except this isn’t Rachel. It’s Regina Pomeroy.”

  My eyes boggled and I had to take a closer look at the photograph. Then I stared back at Mac. “Rachel and Regina look like exactly the same person.”

  “But they’re not the same person,” Mac said. “They’re twin sisters.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  We tossed around a dozen different scenarios having to do with the Gables and murder and connections and twins. We sat down to enjoy an incredible dinner of spaghetti and meatballs and a fabulous Chianti and tried to talk about happy things, but that didn’t work. We were still tossing around possibilities and ideas and theories until midnight when we were finally able to fall asleep.

  Mac and I woke up Sunday morning knowing there was nothing we could do about that thunderbolt of inf
ormation we’d collected but simply wait until Monday. It wasn’t easy. I could hardly wait until we could get back into the Gables.

  Mac tried calling Rachel to set up a meeting, but the call went straight to her voice mail. He frowned when he ended the call. “I have no other way to get in touch with her.”

  “Do you think she’s safe?”

  “I hope so.”

  I let out a pensive breath. “I’m going to go with the theory that she’s fine and dandy but simply isn’t answering her telephone on a Sunday morning.”

  “Okay, we’ll go with that,” Mac decided. “And Ricky’s doing fine, too. I talked to him a little while ago when you were on the phone with Chloe.”

  “I’m glad you called him.” I folded up the last of the kitchen towels from the load of laundry I’d done. “So we’re free to let it all go for now. You ready?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I can’t wait.”

  Ten minutes later we were in Mac’s car and he was starting the engine. “I’m looking forward to the barrel tasting.”

  I grinned at him. “It’s almost as fun as solving a murder.”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  We drove south and then east for almost an hour until we reached the Bella Rossa Winery. In Italian, the words meant beautiful redhead. Uncle Pete had named the winery for me and Chloe when we were two little red-haired girls. But now that Chloe was a blonde, I teased her that the name was all about me.

  It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Anderson Valley was hard to find. You definitely had to want to go there because they didn’t make it easy. It was miles away from both the coast highway and the more heavily traveled Highway 101. And while the other more popular wine country regions like Napa and Sonoma were mere minutes from anywhere in the Bay Area, the Anderson Valley was downright obscure. It could be reached by way of a narrow, often treacherous, winding two-lane highway that meandered through forests and hills. Once you arrived, though, it was a little piece of heaven. Rustic and rural, it still had that small-town charm that the other more populated regions had lost.

  Uncle Pete’s winery had expanded from the one-room shack of a tasting room to a gorgeous modern glass-walled building that offered stunning views of the vineyards and hills beyond.

  The afternoon air was cold and clear, with an unobstructed view of the big blue sky above and the surrounding evergreen-clad mountains in the distance.

  For the barrel tasting, we were a small party of seven. Mac and I, Chloe and Eric, my father, Uncle Pete, and Belinda McCoy, his winemaker and Dad’s girlfriend.

  Regular visitors were being taken care of by two of Uncle Pete’s best wine tasting helpers. That way, he and Belinda could join us in the barrel room.

  The wines were wonderful and Belinda gave us all the most elaborate details of each wine and how it came to taste the way it did. She definitely proved that she knew what she was talking about when it came to wines. And since I had learned that she had worked for several years at Château Margaux in the Bordeaux region of France, I never doubted her.

  Dad and Uncle Pete had taken Eric and Mac out to the vineyard to show off their newest plantings, so that left Belinda to entertain Chloe and me.

  Belinda inserted the tube-shaped glass tool—otherwise known as a “wine thief”—into the barrel and siphoned out a generous serving of the delightful Bordeaux-inspired Cabernet Sauvignon she had been experimenting with since first coming to work at Uncle Pete’s winery. She poured the dark liquid into Chloe’s glass. Then she did the same for me.

  “Let me know what you think.”

  We both tasted and let out little moans of joy. “It’s wonderful,” I said.

  “You’re a genius,” Chloe effused, and took another sip.

  “Thank you. So Chloe, are you planning to move back here and live with Eric?”

  Chloe began to choke and I slapped her back, laughing the whole time. When she could catch her breath, she said, “How much did my father pay you to ask me that?”

  Belinda laughed. “Well, it was more like a bet. He bet me I wouldn’t be able to get an answer out of you and I told him I would.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “One hundred dollars.”

  Chloe gave a little snort. “Easiest hundred you’ll ever make. The answer is yes, I’ll still work on my show, but I’ll live here and commute. Our shooting schedule is conducive to that plan since our director lives in Taos and one of the producers commutes from Bend, Oregon.”

  “Well, that’s handy.”

  “It is.” Chloe took another sip of the Cabernet. “I’ll be shipping my things over the next few months, and then we’ll pick a weekend and Eric will fly down and drive with me back up the coast.”

  I grabbed my sister in a hug. “I’m so happy.” But seconds later, I glared at her. “Why are you just telling me this?”

  “Calm down,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t tell you before because you hit your head on a brick.”

  “That’s no excuse,” I grumbled. “And this is the second time I’ve been the last to know about someone’s big relationship news.”

  “And also,” Chloe continued undeterred. “Because Eric and I only worked out the details last night.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  She laughed again. “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Then I pulled her in for another hug. “I’m really happy for you.”

  “I’m happy, too,” Belinda said, and hugged us both. “And a hundred dollars richer.”

  We all laughed, and Belinda said, “I don’t know why your father didn’t just ask you himself.”

  Chloe grinned. “Because he’s shy, and because I probably wouldn’t have told him as much as I’m telling you.”

  “It’s a Dad thing,” I explained, grinning.

  “What’s a Dad thing?” my father asked as he strolled into the barrel room followed by Uncle Pete, Eric, and Mac.

  “Oh, it’s just girl talk,” Chloe said. “But you owe Belinda one hundred dollars.”

  He blinked, then looked at Belinda, who just beamed at him. Then he looked at Chloe and I watched his eyes fill with tears. “My girl’s coming home?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  They threw their arms around each other while I tried to wipe away my own tears. Mac moved over and slipped his arm around my waist. “You’ll tell me all about it on the way home?”

  “Yes,” I said, sniffling, but smiling.

  A few minutes later, after we had all laughed away our tears and had another taste of a new Pinot Noir, Dad cornered me. “Walk with me.”

  “Okay.”

  He walked toward the open doorway and we stood on the terrace looking over the vineyards. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you ever since your party the other night.”

  “What’s up?” I asked. His tone was more somber than it should’ve been. “Is something wrong?”

  “I realize I should’ve said something to you a long time ago, but it never seemed like the right time.” He gritted his teeth and blew out a breath.

  I was starting to worry. He had been so happy a minute ago and now . . . “Dad, what is it?”

  “It’s about that place. The Gables.”

  “Oh.” I smiled. “You should come up and visit the site, see what Jane’s planning to do. You’ll be impressed. It’s going to be awesome, Dad.”

  “I know it will be. And I’ll get up there one of these days.”

  “Good.”

  He stared out at the rows of grapevines. “Do you remember visiting the Gables with Jane when you were young?”

  “Sure. Jane used to go every week with Jesse, but I only went up there three times. And then I didn’t go anymore.” I frowned, then shrugged. “I don’t think I did anything wrong. I just figured it got too hard for Jesse to take both of us alo
ng for a visit. Things could get pretty emotional, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.” He took a slow sip of his wine. “And you didn’t do anything wrong. Once Grace got better and she was able to come back home, she drove over to visit me.”

  “That’s right. You and Mom were friends with her.”

  He smiled at the memory. “Grace and your mother were very good friends. But this visit was long after your mother passed away.”

  Just hearing him say those words made me reach out and grab his hand. I had to work out the timeline in my head. My mother, Ella, died when I was ten and by the time Grace Hennessey was being treated at the Gables, I was closer to fourteen.

  “I recall us sitting on the patio,” Dad continued. “Jesse was there, too. And Grace looked great. She said she felt healthy and ready to get back to living. But a few minutes later she confessed that she knew she would end up back at the Gables one of these days.” Dad gazed out at the hillside. “She was so much more fragile than we ever knew.”

  “When I was really young I thought she was a fairy princess. So ethereal and yeah, fragile.”

  “Yes.” He reached for my hand. “She told me and Jesse that day that she didn’t want you to visit her anymore.”

  In that moment, I knew what it meant to feel my heart drop. I gasped. I felt weak and had to press my hand to my chest. “Dad. Why?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me why exactly,” he said, “but it wasn’t about you, sweetheart. She was worried about something. She said that something was wrong at the Gables. One of the patients had died while she was there and nobody would talk about what happened. But she knew that the people in charge were bad. She used those words. ‘They’re bad.’”

  “What did Jesse say?”

  “He told her flat-out, he hoped she’d never have to go back, but if she did, he wouldn’t stay away and he wouldn’t keep Jane from visiting her.”

  “She went back, Dad,” I said, still rubbing my chest, still hurting for Grace. And Jane, too. “If she knew something was wrong, why did she keep going back?”