The Hen of the Baskervilles(92)

“It’s a setup,” I muttered. I’d bet anything the woman hadn’t had an affair with Brett. I suddenly realized something that should have occurred to me when I’d witnessed her scene with Genette. The supposed unwed mother mentioned “the baby”—but she hadn’t given the offstage child a name. A mother would name her child. And she hadn’t even brought the baby along. Why not? A cooing or howling infant would be much more effective in shaming Genette and enlisting the sympathy of the onlookers. But I was willing to bet there was no baby. She’d simply gone to the Caerphilly Inn to stage a scene—a totally fake scene that would shift suspicion in the murder case onto Genette. But why?

Possibly to make sure the rival fair Genette was organizing would fail. I suspected from my snooping over in the Midway that the Clay County powers-that-be were only pretending to be content with the tax revenue from the Midway. If they were planning to revive their plans for a Clay County fair, Brett’s murder gave them a golden opportunity to throw a wrench in the plans of one of their main rivals. Or maybe two of their rivals—having a murder happen on our grounds wasn’t going to do the Un-fair any good.

Was it an opportunity they’d seized or one they’d created?

“Ridiculous,” I said aloud. Surely no one would really commit murder over the fair.

But it wasn’t the fair. It was all about the money. Caerphilly was moving past its financial crisis, but Clay County was still mired deep. They’d never been prosperous, thanks in no small part to nepotism and incompetence, so the downturn had been that much harder for them. And everyone in Caerphilly knew it. It was why we included them in the Un-fair—so they’d have a chance to share in whatever prosperity the event might bring. And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that a lot of people in Clay County seemed to feel resentment rather than gratitude.

What if that hadn’t been enough for them? Plunkett had told at least one Midway barker that the fair would be in Clay County next year. What if they thought the way to make that happen was to get rid of some of the competition? And had knocked off Brett because they thought he really was the organizer of the Virginia Agricultural Exposition? Or maybe they meant to kill Genette and got Brett by mistake. Either way, they could have sent the supposed unwed mother to make a scene that would draw suspicion back onto Genette—not because they had something against Genette, but because framing her would be a lot more useful to their cause than framing Molly. And Genette’s attempt at chicken theft had tightened the noose around her own neck, playing right into their hands.

They. I was starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. And even if there was a conspiracy, somebody’s hand had to have been holding the gun. To convict anybody, the chief would have to put a name to that hand.

The chief would also have to find a way around all the problems with the evidence. And if someone from Clay County was involved, maybe Deputy Plunkett wasn’t quite the idiot we all thought he was. What if he was deliberately tainting as much of the evidence as he could—literally—get his hands on? It made sense if he knew that someone from Clay County was involved.

And even more sense if it had been his own hand holding the gun.

He’d appeared at the crime scene awfully quickly. He could have gone away long enough to conceal the murder weapon, and then come back to make his attempt to control the crime scene. Had he been alarmed when Caerphilly had succeeded in asserting jurisdiction? Or had he been secretly gloating, because he thought with us in charge his cover-up would be all the more believable?

Maybe he hadn’t even hidden the gun. Maybe he’d had it with him all the time, ready to dispose of when he got a chance. And by allowing him to help with the search of Molly’s van, Vern had unwittingly handed him a perfect opportunity not just to dispose of it but to plant it where it would divert suspicion from him. He hadn’t failed to lift the floor mats—he’d lifted them all right—to put the gun there. And then he’d wandered off, pretending to need a smoke, leaving it for Vern to find.

And the bantam feathers in Brett’s car. Plunkett actually found those. He could have collected them by skulking around the chicken tent, but I would have bet anything that he’d taken the Russian Orloffs and hidden them somewhere. Although it might take some doing to search all the Dingle, Plunkett, Peebles, and Whicker farms in Clay County to find them.

Suddenly I felt curiously anxious and exposed in the brightly lit trailer, so close to the scene of the murder. I whirled to look out the window behind my desk, but all I saw was my own reflection. I turned off the desk lamp and felt a little better with just the glow of the monitor lighting the room. And better still when I checked both that window and the other and saw nothing but the empty field around me and the barns in the distance.