Page 54 of The Summer Guests

“Trout.”

“Maiden Pond doesn’t have any trout.”

“I mean bass. I fish for bass.”

She held up the phone, encased in a plastic evidence bag. “And you caught this instead?”

“I told you, I found it in my truck. It was underneath a pile of trash I was planning to haul to the dump. Why do you keep asking about the phone?”

Jo pulled up an image of Zoe Conover on her own phone and slid it across to Farley. It was a photo taken on a happy day, the girl posed in a Speedo bathing suit with a blue ribbon around her neck. The champion swimmer, celebrating her triumph. “Do you know this girl?”

“No. Why?”

“That cell phone, the one you ‘found’ in your truck, belongs to her. Her name’s Zoe Conover, and she was staying with her family at Maiden Pond. Maybe you’ve read the news online, or you’ve seen the posters all over town. She’s been missing since Monday.”

He went very still. At last, he understood how much trouble he was in, and it had nothing to do with the cottages he’d broken into, or the stolen items in his closet.

“You know we’re going to search your trailer from top to bottom, as well as every inch of your woods. The crime lab’s going to go over this place and your pickup truck with a microscope. If they find one hair from that girl, oneeyelash, it’s all over for you. So you might as well tell us where she is.”

All the air seemed to go out of him. He sank back in his chair, a sad and deflated version of Farley Wade. “I don’t know,” he said, and took in a shaky breath. “I don’t know anything about her. The evening I was there at the pond, I didn’t see any girl. And I’d never kidnap one. I swear it, Jo!” He looked her in the eye. “I swear it.”

She watched him shaking in his chair, and a memory came back to her, of Farley in the schoolyard, sprawled at her feet after she’d shoved him. He’d had no fight in him then, and he had none now. He was that boy again, caught out for his misbehavior, ready to admit defeat.

“Okay.” She rose from the chair. “We’ll continue this down at the station.”

“I didn’t hurt any girl!”

Mike tugged Farley to his feet. “Let’s go.”

“I didn’t, Jo!” Farley yelled as he was dragged out to Mike’s cruiser. “You know I didn’t!”

Jo picked up the cell phone and turned to look at the five members of the Martini Club, who had witnessed the whole thing. “Well?”

“Anyone could have planted that phone in his truck,” said Maggie, and her four friends all nodded in agreement. “I don’t think he’s your man.”

“I don’t think he is either.” Jo sighed. “It looks like I’m back to zero suspects.”

“Not entirely,” said Maggie.

Chapter 26

In her eleven years as a Purity police officer, Jo had been called to the Tarkin residence three times, twice because Reuben had gotten into scrapes with the Conovers. Jo was aware that Reuben and the Conovers had some sort of long-term feud going on, the genesis of which she did not know, but so far it had not advanced to the violence of the Hatfields and McCoys. It had just been Reuben throwing trash on their deck, or punching a hole in their canoe, a feud that sometimes extended to Arthur Fox’s property as well. Whatever the cause of the rift, the solution, as Jo once said to Reuben, was simple:Just stay the hell away from those people.

Which wasn’t so easy when their homes faced each other directly across the pond.

Her most recent visit to the Tarkin residence was a year ago, when Reuben’s mother passed away in her sleep. According to their family doctor, old Mrs. Tarkin’s death had not come as a surprise because the woman was eighty-nine, and for years she had suffered from what he calledthe dwindles, a slow and inexorable retreat into the grave. He’d been impressed that she had hung on as long as she did, which he’d credited to Reuben’s devoted care. On the day Jo had last visited the Tarkins, she’d seen the evidence of Reuben’s devotion in the multiple vases of wildflowers that he had set on his mother’s windowsill, and the tray of food—spaghetti and steamed carrots—that was still on her nightstand. His sister, Abigail, also lived in the house, but Abigail wasconfined to a wheelchair. Only Reuben could have picked those flowers. Only Reuben could have prepared his mother’s meals.

Jo parked on the dirt road fronting the Tarkin residence, and from her cruiser, she eyed the sagging roof, furry with green moss. It was little more than a shack, the clapboards silvered with lichen and age. Only the wheelchair ramp to the front door looked relatively new, a replacement since the last one rotted away. Just the two siblings lived there now, Reuben and Abigail, both in their sixties. Jo didn’t know why Abigail was in a wheelchair, only that she’d been unable to walk since childhood, and Reuben was her sole caregiver. No wonder he’d never had regular employment. No wonder he often seemed in a foul mood, and who wouldn’t be? Trapped all these years in that wreck of a house with an elderly mother and a disabled sister.

But was he angry enough to take it out on a fifteen-year-old girl?

Jo stepped out of her vehicle and climbed the steps to the porch. Outside the front door, she paused and patted the weapon at her hip. Just a reflex, to assure herself it was there. While Reuben himself had no record of violence, Jo was well aware of what his father had done. And because this was Maine, she had to proceed as if there were firearms in this house. Through the kitchen window she saw movement inside. They’d probably heard her tires on the road, the creak of her weight on the porch steps; they had to know someone was at their door.

She didn’t have a chance to knock. The door opened and Reuben stood scowling at her, blocking her entry into his house. Inside, a commercial was playing on the television, and Abigail called out: “Reuben, who is it?”

“The police,” he said.

“What’d you do now?”

---