Page 87 of The Summer Guests

“How do you know that?”

Declan Rose raised his hand. “That bit of intelligence would be my modest contribution, courtesy of our local Realtor, Miss Betty Jones. She keeps excellent records of every property transaction that’s gone through her office, whether it’s a sale or a rental agreement. She said all three parties signed rental agreements in 1967.”

“And using the county tax maps, I confirmed the dates they later purchased their properties on Maiden Pond,” said Ingrid. “It was all within two years of each other.”

“Maybe that was a good time to buy real estate.”

“1967 was also the year Vivian Stillwater moved here,” said Declan. “She never purchased any property, but she did rent a cottage. On Maiden Pond.”

“How did you get Betty Jones to tell you all this?”

He leaned over Jo’s desk and whispered: “Baked goods.”

“The point is,” said Maggie, “in 1972, all these people were living year round on the pond. The Greenes, the Conovers, Arthur Fox, and Vivian Stillwater. They knew each other very well. Then Vivian suddenly packs up and leaves, and no one knows where she went. No one asks any questions. It seems like no onewantsto know what happened to her.”

“You told me she got hit by a car in New Hampshire. Died in a long-term care facility,” said Jo.

“Andthat’swhere this gets interesting,” said Ingrid. “Why was her fate so hard to track down? It’s because everything about Vivian Stillwater’s death has been scrubbed from official documents. The accident report. Her hospitalization. Her death certificate. It’s as if someonetried to erase the evidence of what happened to her. And believe me, Ilooked.”

Yes, Jo certainly did believe her. She believed that if Ingrid Slocum put her mind to it, she could locate a missing cat in Timbuktu.

“Okay.” Jo sighed. “You’ve just told me why Vivian Stillwater is not our skeleton in the pond. So how is she relevant to this case? Why are we talking about her at all? About any of them?”

“Because there’s a reason why all these people came to Maine in the first place. And it has nothing to do with our fine summer weather.”

“Have you tried just asking them?”

“You can’t believe anything Elizabeth or Arthur tells you. They know how to conceal the truth, even under duress. They’ve been trained to do just that.” Ingrid glanced around at her friends. “Trust me, we should know.”

We should know.Jo knew what that meant. They were adept at concealing their emotions, and the five faces gazed back at her with impenetrable expressions. “I take it you’re now going to tell me all the things I’ve missed.”

“To be fair,” said Maggie, “we haven’t been at the top of our game either. We should have been quicker to learn who Vivian Stillwater worked for, and why she was headed to Washington, DC. These are things you couldn’t have found out.”

“Because I’m just a small-town cop.”

“A very good cop, Jo. But this involves a matter outside any normal police investigation, and it happened before you were even born. It’s a part of history we’re not proud of, even though the five of us were not personally involved. People were hurt because of it. People like the Tarkins.”

Jo was confused. A moment ago, they’d been talking about Vivian Stillwater. Now suddenly they’d swerved to a completely different topic. She eyed the five people facing her, all of them with backgrounds they’d kept hidden from her. They knew how to guard their secrets. They alsoknew how to ferret out the secrets of others, and they were about to bring Jo into their circle of trust.

“Have you ever heard of MKUltra?” said Declan.

“Isn’t that, like, some superhero’s name?”

Declan smiled. “No. Project MKUltra was a human experimentation program that our government conducted from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was during the Cold War, and we were in a weapons race against the Russians. By ‘weapons,’ I’m talking about more than just guns and bombs. We were also trying to master mind control. Was there a way to manipulate the human brain through drugs or hypnosis to make enemy spies give up their secrets? Or to help our own agents sharpen their extrasensory abilities?”

“What do you mean by ‘extrasensory’?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. ESP. Telekinesis. Clairvoyance. We knew the Russians were deep in such research, and we didn’t want to be left behind. It all sounds absurd now, but at the time, our government actually thought those things might be possible. They began testing a variety of mind-altering drugs and chemicals and observing their effects on people. Some of these test subjects were volunteers, paid to take part. But some people never knew they were being used as guinea pigs by our own government.”

“What kind of drugs are we talking about?”

“It ranged from LSD to barbiturates, mescaline, and psilocybin. A whole gamut of psychoactive chemicals, some of them not legal. Anything that might prove useful against the enemy.”

“And some of these people didn’t even know they were getting the drugs? That sounds pretty damn unethical.”

“Itwasunethical. But consider the era. Project MKUltra was launched at a time when paranoia about the Soviets was running rampant. We needed to stay ahead of the enemy. We needed new weapons to help us uncover their secrets. That’s how the program was justified, at the time.”

Jo’s eyes narrowed. “I’m going to take a wild guess.YourAgency was running the show?”

---