The Traveling Prayer by YentaPatrol Chapter Four

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Chapter 4

John Eastman moved slowly about the kitchen as he prepared breakfast for his family. His shoulders were hunched and his head tilted slightly to the side as if weighted down by the tension in the house. He concentrated on sliding eggs and bacon onto the brightly colored breakfast dishes, while his daughter set the table.

“You want to let Mom know that breakfast is ready?” John asked, trying to suppress his irritation at his wife’s absence.

Lori’s face was still pale and her eyes still watery from the shock of hearing about her grandfather’s death. She gave her father a wan smile. “Sure Dad, I think she’s changing her clothes. I’ll go get her.”

John repressed a sigh. Her father was dead and all Chelsea could do was think about what outfit to wear. He brought the plates to the table and poured out glasses of orange juice. It was mainly his daughter that he was worried about. There was no doubt that Lori was taking Henri’s death hard. When John had broke the news to her, he had thought for a moment that she was going to faint. He had managed to sit her down on one of the wooden kitchen chairs and gently push her head down between her knees until the worst of the shaking had stopped. Since then, he had been keeping a careful watch over her, hovering several times on the brink of call Doc Owen to the house.

Of course, Chelsea refused to understand why he was so concerned about Lori. “After all, I was Henri’s daughter,” she had told John in a hurt voice. “Lori was only his granddaughter.”

Thankfully, Chelsea had left the kitchen shortly after her outburst. John shook his head, revolted by the memory of her reaction. Standing in the middle of their cheerfully decorated kitchen, John took a deep breath, preparing for his daughter’s sake to spend the day in their house enduring his wife.

It was mid-morning when Zane pulled in to the Eastman’s driveway. Their property was located on the west side of town, at the edge of a neighborhood that boasted large imposing houses and generous well-kept yards.

Zane had been in the same high school class as John Eastman and they had been friendly back then. At graduation, John had won a scholarship to Boston University and had gone off for two years, until his father’s illness and death had brought him home. Zane had gone eighty miles west to attend community college by day and wait on tables by night. He had graduated from the police academy at almost the same time as John had taken over his father’s carpentry business. Zane had been content to return to Monaco Lake, but he had always suspected that John had planned on returning to Boston to finish the school he’d started. Of course, that had been before John married Chelsea.

It was John who met Zane at the door of the house and ushered him inside. He was normally considered a handsome man, standing almost a head taller than Zane and sparely built, with thick wavy brown hair and dark brown eyes. But, looking at him now, Zane could see deep lines of stress etched into his face and his eyes were bloodshot as though he hadn’t been sleeping much.

“Thanks for coming,” he told Zane quietly. “The situation is a little stressful for my family.”

As Zane nodded, Chelsea’s querulous, high-pitched voice floated out to them. “Is that Zane Ackerton? It’s about time that he got here. I’ve been calling the station all morning.”

John shook his head apologetically, while he called back, “Yes it’s Zane.”

Zane made a motion of dismissal and followed him back to the kitchen area. Chelsea was seated at the table dressed in a flowing black top and loose black pants. Zane couldn’t help noticing that despite the shock of her father’s death, she had taken the time to carefully arrange her hair and makeup.

By Monaco Lake standards, Chelsea Eastman was stunningly beautiful. Zane could remember being one of a pack of mesmerized young men who had clustered around her, as fixated as their hunting dogs in duck season. In retrospect, Zane could see that what had passed for beauty in the minds of twenty-year-old boys, had mostly to do with her slender build, large breasts and abundance of glossy chestnut hair, all of which had been meticulously packaged into designer jeans and careful makeup.

Lori Eastman was quietly moving around the kitchen, straightening up what Zane suspected was a late breakfast. She was a tall girl who took after her father in both looks and demeanor. She greeted Zane politely and he thought she looked tired with signs of recent tears. Lori Eastman was going to miss her grandfather.

Irritated that his attention had wandered, Chelsea cleared her throat and asked pointedly, “Well Zane?”

Sitting down at the table next to her, Zane patted Chelsea on her shoulder and said sympathetically, “This must be really tough for you.”

“It’s been very difficult, the fire and now my father.” She sighed forlornly and cupped her coffee mug with two hands, as if it was an effort to raise it to her lips. “Zane,” she looked pleadingly at him, “when will I be able to bury my father?”

“Well, we’re working on that.” Zane paused, he never felt comfortable lying to people. “The thing is, the medical examiner has got a bee in his bonnet about some of the details. So, I’m running around trying to get some loose ends tied up. That way he’ll release Henri’s body and everybody will be happy, or happier,” he corrected himself apologetically. “If you’ll pardon my saying so.”

“Details,” Chelsea said sitting up indignantly. “What details?”

John had sat down at the table and was watching Zane quietly. “What do you need to know Zane?”

“Oh just run of the mill things.” He pulled his notebook out of his pants pocket and flipped it open. “When was the last time you all saw Henri?”

Lori came over to the table and said softly, “I saw him yesterday afternoon when he stopped by the diner during my shift.”

Zane looked up at her in surprise. “How’d he seem?”

“He only came in for a moment to talk to Annie and Brett.” She frowned trying to remember the conversation. “I think they were supposed to go up there last night.”

Chelsea gasped in surprise. “You must be joking. Whatever would Annie be doing going up to my father’s house?”

“I don’t know.” Lori frowned again, this time with a slight disdain for her mother. “She and Brett went up there sometimes. I think to talk about Annie’s stories.”

Chelsea rolled her eyes in dismissal, saying as Lori drifted away, “My father did some strange things sometimes.”

“I’m sure we all do,” Zane told her reassuringly. “When was the last time you saw Henri?”

Chelsea pursed her lips and took a moment before saying, “I went up to his house for a cup of coffee yesterday afternoon to discuss some personal family matters.”

Zane made a note to himself and looked at John.

“Henri came out to see me at the house I’m working on the day before yesterday,” John told him easily. “He seemed fine and I’m afraid that the subject of that meeting would have to fall under what Chelsea is calling personal family matters.” His brown eyes held a slightly sardonic expression as he levelly regarded Zane.

Zane carefully entered the information in his notebook. Then at the bottom of the page in large letters he wrote the words ‘personal family matters’ followed by a question mark. Flipping to a blank page, he turned back to Chelsea and asked. “So how did Henri seem to you?”

“Fine, just like he always does.” Chelsea sniffed sadly and brushed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I mean like he always did.”

Zane nodded. “And just for formalities’ sake, where were you guys last night?”

John smiled as Chelsea let out an indignant gasp. Ignoring her objections, he told Zane, “I was in my workshop until about four thirty this morning when you came by and told me the news. But, other than that, I don’t think anybody could vouch for me formally.”

“I’m not too worried about it,” Zane told him, turning back to Chelsea.

“Really, if you must know, I was here asleep all night from nine o’clock on.” She gave him a martyred look and added, “I’m sure John can vouch for me if it’s necessary.”

“Actually,” John said slowly. “I don’t think I can.”

Zane paused in the act of recording Chelsea’s answer. “Excuse me?”

John met his gaze squarely and Zane thought he seemed almost gratified by the situation. “I can’t vouch for my wife’s whereabouts last night. Like I said I was in my workshop. The last time I saw Chelsea was about seven thirty last night.”

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(con't)


Chelsea’s stared at her husband in disbelief as her face froze in an expression of icy contempt. Sensing that her rising anger was about to spill into the room, Zane decided that it was time to make a strategic exit.

It was a cloudy day out and the lake looked flat and gray, mirroring Zane’s feeling of depression brought about by his visit to the Eastman’s house. Driving slowly along the east side of the lake toward Jacqueline Davenport’s house, Zane thought over what he knew of John’s and Chelsea’s marriage.

When she had first come back from New York, nobody, least of all Zane, could have predicted that Chelsea would marry John Eastman. She had graduated from New York University with a degree in theatre and returned with a sophistication that was foreign to Monaco Lake. At night, Chelsea could be found sitting on her bar stool and dropping names of the famous people she had met, with the same casualness that she dropped her cigarette ashes. Her stories left her admirers convinced that when she returned to New York she would become an overnight success.

There was a group of them that had frequented the bar at Moose Junction, back then. Sometimes, John would come in and sit at the end of the bar, quietly drinking coffee or sipping a dark beer. As likely as not, reading a book and paying no attention to Chelsea Walden. Zane wondered if John’s two years in Boston had made him wiser than the rest of them; if, perhaps, he had already divined that Chelsea Walden would not tolerate being ignored.

Nobody knew exactly when Chelsea had finally managed to capture John’s attention. But the town never wasted time wondering about how she caught him. Chelsea’s rapidly increasing waistline, shortly after they were married, had made the ‘how’ obvious.

From having convinced the local community that she was going to be a star, it was a short step for Chelsea to convince people that she could have been a star. But as Zane grew older and saw more, he found that his sympathy lay chiefly with John Eastman. Zane believed that John had been truly deprived of becoming everything he could have been, if only he had been able to return to Boston to finish his degree.

Jacqueline Davenport’s house was coming into sight, when Cari Plodgett’s flat voice on the car radio interrupted his thoughts. “I don’t know what the code for this is,” she told him in a hushed tone. “But Brett Carson is here. He says he’s going to wait until he’s sees you.”

Zane frowned. “Did he say why?”

Cari’s voice dropped to an even softer tone that Zane had to strain to hear over the static. “I don’t know, he just says he needs to talk to you. He looks pretty upset. I think it must be important.” Then resuming her normal tone added, “Oh and Mrs. Davenport called again, I told her you were planning on swinging by.”

“Yup, I’m here right now,” Zane told her maneuvering the police cruiser down the driveway of Jacqueline’s elegant stone house. “Tell Brett to hold on, I’ll head back after I’m done here.”

The houses on Jacqueline Davenport’s side of the road sat level with the water and featured backyards that opened up directly on to the lake. Many of the houses along the road were owned by ‘summer people,’ who used them for long weekends and family vacations away from their busy lives in Southern Maine or Boston. For the most part, they were large houses that the owners maintained with an almost overt rustic simplicity and expensive boats tethered to unsteady, decrepit old docks, were a common sight.

Jacqueline’s house made no pretense to rustic simplicity. Instead, the property aspired to the grandeur of an Italian villa looking out over the Mediterranean Sea. A low brick wall ran alongside the road, with two stone recumbent lions marking the entrance to Jacqueline’s paved circular driveway.

He rang the doorbell and waited. After several minutes had passed, Zane found himself wondering if he was being left to wait on the step as some sort of punishment for not contacting Jacqueline sooner about Henri Walden’s death. He rang the doorbell again and listened to her little dog barking in a frantic effort to alert Jacqueline to his presence.

Jacqueline was a tall woman with high cheekbones and finely plucked brows. Considering her age, Zane assumed that her auburn hair owed its thick luster more to her hairdresser than to nature. When she finally opened the door, she did so in the manner of someone performing an unpleasant yet necessary duty and her expression was stern as she stepped back and allowed him to enter.

In contrast to the open space in Henri Walden’s house, Jacqueline Davenport’s front door opened into a confined hallway with a staircase and a row of doors on either side. Zane followed her down the hall and through one of the doors into a small sitting room on the right-hand side of the house. It was a pleasant enough room, decorated in shades of pale blue and white, with windows overlooking a small garden, but Zane was fairly sure that this was not the room Jacqueline entertained guests in. This was the room that was appropriate for discussions with workers and hired help. For a brief moment, Zane found himself wondering which category she placed him in.

Jacqueline sat down on a small sofa and motioned for him to take a chair facing her. “I must tell you, officer, that I am extremely disappointed that you didn’t see fit to notify me of Henri’s death.”

“It must be very difficult for you,” he nodded. “Unfortunately, department regulations make it necessary to notify next of kin, before we notify anyone else.”

Jacqueline maintained a stony silence for several moments, while her eyes bored into Zane with marked disapproval. “You do realize that for all practical purposes I was Henri’s next of kin. Despite not being married, we had been a couple for almost thirty years. I stand as a mother figure to his daughter and as a grandmother to his granddaughter. Furthermore, our present relationship notwithstanding, we had planned on marrying next month once I turned sixty-five.”

Zane blinked. “I didn’t know that, I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you.” Jacqueline’s manner was slightly more gracious as she nodded her head. “I’m sure that it is difficult for some people to comprehend the extent of my loss.” She stared out the window for a moment, an expression of profound sadness in her eyes. When she turned back to him, all signs of weakness had disappeared and she asked sharply, “So officer, what is the purpose of your visit? I can hardly assume that you are here just to extend your department’s condolences.”

“Unfortunately, there seems to be a few questions that need to be resolved before our medical examiner will sign off on the death. All formality of course, but I’m in charge of tracking down the details,” he ended on an apologetic note.

“Of course,” Jacqueline nodded regally.

Zane shifted in his chair and hunched over trying to balance his notebook on his knee. “When was the last time you had contact with Henri?”

“About nine o’clock last night. Henri was in the habit of phoning me in the evenings. I suppose it was a way of putting closure on his day.” Her voice trailed off and once again her gaze drifted out to the little garden.

“I assume he didn’t have anything out of the ordinary to say?” Zane asked.

“No, he was tired and I think a bit discouraged.” She paused and folded her hands in her lap studying them for a moment before adding in a frank manner, “He’s been trying to help my daughter by taking an interest in her attempts at writing fiction.” She smiled sadly. “Henri was a romantic. He always wanted to see the best of people and sometimes he had a hard time seeing the truth. Annie was up there last night and I think the visit must have worn on him. He didn’t want to talk much. He said he just wanted to take a sleeping pill and go to sleep.”

Zane made a note before sitting up and asking, “Did he discuss Annie’s visit?” Zane asked.

Jacqueline shook her head and looked down at her hands lying clasped in her lap. “He didn’t mention anything specific. My daughter has problems, emotional issues and she can be very difficult, unpredictable.” She looked back at Zane with a sigh and stood up, saying with a certain finality, “He really didn’t need to tell me the particulars.”

Zane nodded, accepting her comments at face value, as well as the tacit dismissal. “One last thing Mrs. Davenport,” he asked as they turned to leave. Did Henri have any health problems that you were aware of?”

Jacqueline led the way to the front door saying with some amusement, “Henri was as healthy as a horse and, like many healthy people, he always thought that he was coming down with some grave illness.” She paused at the door and frowned. “Actually, now that I think of it, he had been complaining of difficulty sleeping and feeling rundown, but I’m sure Doctor Owen can help you with that.”

Zane jotted down the information and thanked her before stepping out onto the stone steps. The large oak door closed firmly behind him as if to reaffirm that he didn’t belong there.

It was nearly noon when Zane reached the station and he was feeling hungry. As he parked the police cruiser, he wondered how long it would be before he could run out to McDonald’s, and reminded himself to pick up a sundae for Jimmy.

Zane’s interview with Jacqueline had stirred up a lot of vague memories about Annie Davenport and he wondered if she had anything to do with why Brett was waiting to speak with him. Personally, Zane had never had any trouble with Annie. But like everyone else in Monaco Lake, he knew that she’d had problems over the years. Still, as far as he remembered, she’d been fine for a long time now.

The station room felt tense when he entered. Jimmy was still seated at a desk coloring, but he had moved on to what looked like a carefully arranged still life of a stapler, pencil holder and a three hole punch, precariously stacked against each other. Cari was typing reports and staring straight ahead at her screen, while Brett waited restlessly in a chair beside her desk, his hands clenching a beat-up envelope.

Zane greeted them easily, noting Cari’s grateful look, before he turned his attention to Brett saying in a friendly fashion, “I hear you want to talk to me.”

Brett nodded silently at him. His face wore a strained expression and his complexion was almost gray.

Feeling a sudden surge of sympathy, Zane patted him on the shoulder and said gently, “Let’s go into Donald’s office.”

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