“Do you care about Jack Bullard?” Gregor asked.
This time, her eyes got a little more active. If Gregor believed eyes could narrow, he would have imagined hers had.
“I’ve known him half my life,” Linda said. “I’ve known him all his life. I remember him as a baby in a carriage in town. His father used to walk him in on the weekends and buy bait and go out fishing with Jack in the carriage beside him. He was the cutest thing on wheels.”
“Which doesn’t answer my question.”
“Your question is impossible to answer. I suppose I care about him. I’m fond of him. He’s—there’s something very innocent about Jack. Not just naive, but innocent.”
“Was it innocent, going out to Las Vegas with Kendra Rhode and Arrow Normand?”
Linda flicked this away. “Jack wanted to be a photographer, a celebrity photographer. It was his chance. The whole filming thing was. His chance to take a shot at getting out of here and doing something with his life.”
“Do most people want to get out of Margaret’s Harbor? I thought this was where rich people went to retire.”
“Which is fine if you’re a rich person,” Linda said. “Jack wasn’t, any more than I am. If you’re a year-rounder, the Harbor is deadly dull and deadly ended, if that makes any sense. Jack went away to college, and we thought that would be the last we’d see of him, but he came back. His father was ailing. Not that that lasted long. The man keeled over and died within a month, but Jack never seemed to be able to get the momentum going to get all the way out, if you see what I mean. Then they came and there it was, his shot. So he took it.”
“You didn’t mind?”
“Why would I mind?”
“He is your employee,” Gregor said. “Going off to Vegas for a weekend had to cut into the time he had to work for you.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Linda said. “Really, Jack’s taken weekends before. And it’s not as if it was in the season, when we’ve got a lot to do. Margaret’s Harbor in the late fall is not a hotbed of news that has to be rushed to the printers.”
“Not even with the film people here?”
“I didn’t run stories about the film people,” Linda said. “And I’m not going to run them now, except to report on the criminal investigations, and the trials, if we ever get to those. I am running a story about what happened to Jack. I wrote it myself. It will be out at the end of the week.”
“What will it say?”
“It will say Jack was attacked,” Linda said, “which is more than any other paper will say, anywhere. Nobody is much interested in Jack Bullard’s hand when they’ve got Kendra Rhode to talk about, or that other one. I didn’t mind Kendra Rhode so much. She was at least local.”
“I thought she came from New York.”
“Local as in from a Margaret’s Harbor family. A summer family, but a family.” Linda shrugged. “I’m sorry. I’m a snob. It matters to me.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened to Jack Bullard?”
“I don’t know what happened to Jack,” Linda said. “How could I know? I only know about finding him.”
“Where did you find him?”
“In back of the Home News Building. There’s a place back there, a little open space between our building and the Coach store on the other side, the Coach store on Melville Street. We put the garbage out back there and then on garbage day we wheel it out to the front. Well, we do at the Home News, and the people at the Coach store do, but Bill Grady that has the pharmacy takes his stuff to the dump in his truck. It makes me crazy. It’s a pharmacy, for God’s sake. It’s not like he’s some widower fisherman living on his own in a cabin. But you can’t talk to Bill Grady. You never could.”
“Do you know what Jack was doing out in back of the building? Was he taking out garbage? Had he gone to meet someone?”
“He’d gone out for air,” Linda said. “He was up in my office, and he started to feel sick to his stomach. Or he said he did. And he got up and went out back to get some air. He was away for nearly half an hour and I got worried. So I went back there to see if I could find him.”
“And? ”
“And,” Linda said, “I did find him. He stumbled into the building, and there was blood everywhere. It looked to me like somebody had tried to take his hand off. Then I went to look at the other one, to see if somebody had tried to take that one off, too, but of course it had the glove on it.”
“Why of course?” Gregor asked.