“Maybe,” she said. “More likely it’s someone who took advantage of all the chaos of the setup to slip into camp. It’s not as if every one of the volunteers knows every other volunteer.”
“But does anyone know all of them?”
“Not sure if anyone knows all of them, but I probably come pretty close.” She pointed at a woman standing nearby. “Retired teacher. Here with her husband, a retired insurance executive. We get a lot of retirees, especially for the expeditions with short notice, like this one. Right beside her: college student, studying environmental science. We get a lot of students, too. The woman manning the information desk—now she might be a little suspicious. Made out so well in her latest divorce that she has no need to work, so she volunteers for every cause she sees. Then again, this might be her first and last expedition. I’m not sure how she likes roughing it in her half-million-dollar RV. The bright pink one that’s only slightly smaller than the Queen Mary,” she added, pointing to the vehicle in question. “I pretty much know them all. But I was tied up much of yesterday and didn’t get around camp as much as I usually do.”
Tied up amusing Josh and Jamie, I remembered. Should I feel guilty and apologize for distracting Caroline from her commitment to the brigade?
“Does anyone even have a list of everyone who’s here?” I asked aloud.
“Sherry would,” she said. “You’ve seen her—tall, blond, thirtyish, with the big faux tortoiseshell glasses.”
“Runs around with a clipboard collecting photo releases?” I asked.
“That’s her,” Caroline said, with a nod.
The Valkyrie.
“She’s been doing a lot of volunteer administrative work for some of our projects in the last year or so,” Caroline went on. “And one of the things Monty dumped on—er, delegated to her was making sure we had a photo release from everyone in camp. Last thing we want to do is have some great footage of volunteers herding an emu into the pen and realize we have no idea who the gawkers in the background are and whether we have releases from them. So—you show up in camp, and Sherry doesn’t know who you are, she finds out, and if you refuse to sign a photo release, she makes sure you hit the road. You’d like her. She’s very organized and efficient.”
“I’ve met her, remember,” I said. And the word I’d have used was officious, and I hadn’t liked her all that much. But then again, Grandfather had rounded up more than his usual number of cats and made her one of the chief cat herders. Having been in a similar position myself more than once, I resolved to give her a reasonable amount of slack.
“I’ll ask her to give you a list,” Caroline said. “Better yet—I’ll ask her to give me a copy. I need it anyway. And you never know—she might have overheard Monty going on about how organized you are. She’s a little touchy—heaven knows, we don’t want her thinking you’re invading her turf.”
“I have no desire to offend the Valkyrie with the clipboard,” I said. “Just give me a copy of the list when you get it. And while you’re at it, give Stanley a copy, too.”
“You’re not going to have him investigating our volunteers are you?” Caroline sounded shocked. Investigating them actually sounded like a pretty good idea to me if we had unlimited time and money and a dozen or so Stanleys to do it.
“Not practical even if we wanted to,” I said. “But Stanley’s investigating my grandmother’s murder. I just want him to know who’s here, in case he runs across any of the names in some other context.”
“You think Cordelia’s killer is here in our camp?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Grandfather only decided to come down here this week, right? Before that there was no connection between him and Riverton.”
“No publicly known connection,” Caroline corrected. “Stanley has been poking around for a few weeks.”
“Discreetly,” I said.
“He could have talked to the killer,” she said. “And if I’d killed someone, and a private investigator turned up looking for her, that would get my attention.”
“Yes, but I think the odds are pretty low that the killer was a member of your e-mail list,” I said.
“True. We only have a few thousand people. No one from Riverton. I won’t swear we don’t have a few bad eggs in the basket, but I doubt any of them killed your grandmother. So what good will it do to give you and Stanley the list?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I just need to be able to tell Annabel that we know who everyone in camp is. Someone did kill her cousin, you know, right there in her backyard. And now here she is with that same backyard filled with dozens of strangers. That has to be tough for anyone, and she’s a recluse who’s recently had a front row seat for a homicide.”