I lifted my hand in the air. “Dunno. I haven’t kept up with anyone from high school. Vera and I left the summer we graduated. We both went to school in Boston. She returned home after college and I stayed up there until about six weeks ago. Can you believe she’s been hiding her relationship with Tyler for six whole weeks?” More than anything, this made my chest squeeze with sadness.
“I think it’s time we do a little internet sleuthing on Mr.Carr, for starters,” he said.
He grabbed a laptop and came to sit next to me on the sofa. I scooted over to make room and noticed a scar on his forearm. I reached to touch it. “What skirmish is this from?”
“Motorcycle accident when I was in college.”
The man sure was prone to trouble. Part of me liked that, a lot. Okay, all of me liked it.
He opened his laptop and his fingers flew across the keyboard.
“Here’s his campaign website. Let’s see.” Jack read aloud. “Tyler loves hunting, fishing, and boating. He’s a lawyer and, ah, check this out. He works for his family’s construction company.”
I snapped my fingers. “That’s right, his dad is a condo developer.”
“Condos. Just what Florida needs more of.”
I snorted. “Look how slimy he is. Even his smile gives me the creeps. God, my sister has the worst taste in men. One time she dated a guy with a face tattoo. You know what he’d tattooed on his forehead?”
Jack started to laugh. “What?”
I ran my index finger over my forehead. “‘It’ll all end in tears.’ It’s a Jack Kerouac quote. And not even the complete one.”
“Wow. That’s... something.”
We stared at the screen for a moment. I was acutely aware of the proximity between us as we sat there. The air crackled with a magnetic energy, making my heart flutter like a startled canary.
“Nothing really stands out in his bio,” Jack said, shifting a millimeter in my direction. “Do you know anything about his recent campaign for city council? Who were his campaign donors, his backers?”
I shook my head. “I guess I should get more acquainted with local politics now that I’m living here again. All I know is that it’s a nonpartisan race, so the political parties usually aren’t involved.”
He navigated to the website of the local weekly paper, theWahoo Sentinel. We skimmed a couple of boring articles about the election. It seemed that Tyler Carr was far more pro-development than his opponent, and much more so than my sister had let on.
“That’s troubling, considering she’s always fought against new construction on open land in town.”
Jack clicked to a different page and leaned an inch closer to the screen. “Well, this is fascinating.”
“What?”
He pointed at the screen. “Here are the election night returns. Tyler ran against an incumbent, a guy named Dave Smith. Tyler won by a hundred and twelve votes.”
“OK. So? I think it’s pretty typical for local races to be that close.”
“Right. But get this. There was a third candidate in the race. A person named David H. Smith.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That’s unusual. Two candidates with essentially the same name? Dave Smith was a council member, and David H. Smith was a challenger? I mean, there are about fifteen thousand people in Wahoo, so I guess it’s a possibility. It’s a common name.”
Jack stroked his chin. “This reminds me of an election fraud scheme some years ago in Miami. It made the news but no one was ever arrested. Basically, the winner paid a fake candidate with a similar name to run a sham campaign, to siphon votes away from the opposition.”
“Is that legal?”
He typed into the newspaper’s search bar. “Probably not, but if that’s what happened here, it looks like Tyler Carr might have gotten away with it. Or he’s under investigation and no one knows yet. Somebody’s behind this, that’s for sure. I don’t see any stories about any scandal. Look here, the newspaper tried to reach David H. Smith and it said he didn’t respond to their candidate questionnaire.”
I sipped my coffee. “I wonder what this has to do with Gene.”
“Maybe nothing. But it sure is oddly coincidental, you finding the photo of him and Tyler, the overheard conversation, and now this. Who was the young guy at Barbie and Gene’s house this morning?”
I shrugged. “Never saw him before.”
