A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

There was hopeful news on two fronts the next morning at the Nelson police station. The first was word that Ada Finch had been located. Ada’s cousin in Lardeau had hidden her in a barn overnight and then got too frightened to keep up the secret and confessed to her mother, Ada’s aunt. She would be back in Nelson by the afternoon. They could interview her and her father, now that it had become a murder investigation, as soon as he had got her home.

“The girl showed some enterprise. She apparently sneaked onto the steamboat and got a lift to Lardeau by water. Her father is driving over to pick her up. He’s pretty mad,” Terrell said, after taking the call.

In addition, Terrell’s advertisements had prompted three calls to the police station. One was from a farmer down the south arm of the lake; he’d picked up a boy who had missed the school bus and brought him into town. Another call was from a man travelling between Kaslo and Nelson who’d seen a man on the road—he couldn’t quite remember where—but hadn’t stopped to pick him up. A description of the man was requested and given. A third call was from another driver who had seen the same man and had picked him up, about five miles out of town, and deposited him at the local Rexall drug store.

Armed with the description, and restive over the personal turmoil the case was causing him, Ames took up his coat and announced that he was going to track down the second hitchhiker.

“I’ll come with you, sir,” said Terrell.

The sky had become heavy, and there was a smell of snow in the air as they crossed Baker Street toward the drugstore. The bell on the door rang as they went into the narrow, crowded space. A plump middle-aged woman turned to stare, mainly at Terrell, and then inched away toward the newspaper stand. The pharmacist was on a stepladder fetching something from a high shelf; he came down, putting a small box on the counter.

“Gentlemen. I’ll just finish up here and be right with you.”

Hoping that no one else would come in, Ames and Terrell waited while the transaction was finished.

“Now then, what can I do for you, Sergeant? Don’t usually see you fellows in my pharmacy.”

“We’re looking for a man who was dropped off here three days ago. He’d caught a ride into town.” Ames gave the description and the pharmacist nodded.

“I saw the ad in the newspaper looking for information. That was Wilf Gunderson. I happen to know because he told me he’d missed Stewy’s bus and had to walk quite a ways before anyone stopped. He’s not in any trouble, is he?”

“Is he a regular customer?”

“Yes, he gets his heart pills here. He’s not that old, but he’s had a dicky heart since he was a boy.”

Terrell looked up from his notes. “Can you tell us where he lives, sir?”

“He lives in a little homestead just this side of Balfour, before you get to that gas station. Lives there on his own since his wife died. Nicest guy you’d care to meet.”

“Thanks very much.” Ames and Terrell both tipped their hats and went out to stand on the street.

“I’m not too hopeful he’s our man,” Ames said, “but we’d better head out there. The nicest people you care to meet don’t usually go around murdering and robbing people. But he was on the road at the crucial time, so he might have seen something useful. I know we should really be stopping first to tell Mrs. Watts that this has become a murder investigation. I dread it, if I’m honest. And who knows? We might get something from Gunderson that will allow us to tell her we have someone in our sights. We’ll stop there on the way back. If we’re lucky, we can get back before it snows.”

They’d crossed to the north side and had been driving for twenty minutes when they felt a dip in the temperature, Terrell turned up the heat. “Do we have enough information to even find the place?” he asked.

“We’ll ask at the store. Mr. Bales is bound to know.”

“Are you worried about Miss Van Eyck, sir?”

Ames felt completely transparent. “All those women, Terrell. If the hitchhiker angle doesn’t pay off . . . now that it’s become a murder, I find it hard to imagine that Watts’s penchant for young girls wasn’t part of this. It seems there are some who have plenty to be angry about. There might be more out there who suffered the . . . treatment Miss Van Eyck did.” He could not bring himself to say so violent a word.

“The question is, why now? If he’s been happily married for a decade, why would he be suddenly worried that Miss Van Eyck talked, and why would he end up murdered?”

Ames thought about Tina, suddenly confronted after more than a decade by the man who had raped her, and then he shook off the thought. “We know Finch was not at work that afternoon. And we don’t really know if Watts has been happily married for a decade. We’ve only got his wife’s word for that. She might be trying to preserve his reputation. Or her own. She knew about the other girls at the beginning, but when she got pregnant, she told us he stayed with her. But who knows? He certainly disappeared from time to time,” he said.

“According to Gilly, someone must have been with him in the car, hiding in the back seat. Or did someone follow him and get into the back seat to, I don’t know, talk about something? Maybe someone who was blackmailing him about the rape?”

“And that’s the other thing. Where was he going? You’re suggesting he might have been going to meet a blackmailer, pay him—or her for that matter—off? According to his wife, he drops their little girl off at the school down the hill