I went back to the top photo. Business club? Was this some kind of organization for high schoolers who had already figured out where they were getting their MBAs and which corporation would be the target of their first hostile takeover? Not my idea of a fun way to spend your after-school hours, and from the looks on the faces of the four girls and eight boys, probably not theirs either. The business club members had “pad your extracurricular activity list for that college application” written all over their faces.
Most were staring awkwardly at the camera, wearing the sort of fixed smiles that always result when the photographer says, “Hold that smile. . . . Just one more shot.” And to make it worse, they were all sporting fashions from the late ’70s and early ’80s, including some truly memorable examples of why big hair had been such a hideous trend. Was it quite fair to shudder at fashion crimes you’d once committed yourself? Surely most of these earnest-looking young future businesspeople had sworn off mullets and Farrah ’dos and grown up to regret what they were wearing here?
At the far right side of the back row I spotted Enrique Blanco. Apart from the slight suggestion of a mullet, his hair wasn’t too bad, and his clothes were pretty bland compared to the rest of the crew. Only his air of superiority remained unchanged. He stared out with a faint frown on his face, as if preparing to chide the photographer for taking too much of his valuable time.
I turned my head aside to sneeze. The old papers must be dustier than they looked.
I turned back to the photocopy and read the caption. Just a list of the names, but I studied them anyway.
Odd. Enrique Blanco wasn’t listed. Yet there was his face, radiating juvenile pruniness.
I counted the names till I got to the seventh one, corresponding to his place in the group shot. The face I knew as Enrique Blanco was listed as belonging to a Henry White.
Henry White?
Blanco was Spanish for white, and if I wasn’t mistaken, Enrique was the Spanish equivalent of Henry. Had Blanco gone through a period of juvenile rejection of his ethnic heritage? Bronwyn wouldn’t be surprised.
I flipped the paper over and looked at the next sheet. It was a bad photocopy of what appeared to be a court document of some sort.
After peering at it for a few moments, I suddenly realized what I was seeing. A copy of a twenty-year-old court document granting Henry S. White a change of name to Enrique Blanco.
No wonder Blanco had been so unsympathetic to Ramon’s cause and so reluctant to address Señor Mendoza in Spanish. He probably wasn’t Latino at all.
The other papers in the envelope were a medley of little Henry’s greatest hits since changing his name. Enrique Blanco accepting a scholarship from the Spanish Culture Association. Enrique Blanco awarded a certificate for outstanding Hispanic student at his business school. Enrique Blanco being honored as the Latino administrator of the year by some other organization.
Why had someone hidden an envelope in our closet containing evidence that would do serious damage to Dr. Blanco’s career if it were made public?
My nose was tickling again. I turned my head again and sneezed several times.
It wasn’t dust. I lifted the envelope to my nose, took a hesitant sniff, and then had to turn aside to sneeze six times in a row. The envelope was permeated with the faintly acrid and completely annoying smell of Dr. Wright’s perfume.
Had this envelope come out of Dr. Wright’s purse?
Most probably. When she’d looked in her purse for her PDA—was it only this morning?—she’d taken out her wallet and a folded envelope. I was willing to bet this was the same envelope—and also the reason for Blanco’s curious willingness to connive in Dr. Wright’s persecution of the drama students. If she had proof of his underhanded behavior and threatened him with exposure, he’d probably have done anything she asked. Until he got a chance to eliminate her.
And he had probably taken these papers from her and then hidden them in our closet in case the chief searched him, either individually or as part of a general search of all the suspects. Rotten luck for him that I’d decided to lock the closet after he’d stowed the papers there.
I needed to tell the chief about this. It gave Blanco the strongest possible motive for murdering Dr. Wright. And if he was, by his own admission, her closest friend at the college, who more likely to know about her diabetes?
And from his retreat in my office, out in the barn, he could easily sneak across the yard and in through the sunporch to the library. What if he’d been in the library when Randall Shiffley entered the library? He could have shouted and waved outside the window not because he was trying to get in, but because he was trying to disguise the fact that he’d already entered, killed her, and fled when he heard Randall’s approach.