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“Oh, Nicole. You’re married. Want to become a mother and . . . well, there’s no talking to you about this. I know. I’ve tried.”
Nikki didn’t argue. Her mother was right. It wouldn’t do either of them any favors. “You told me once that you thought Baxter Beaumont was involved with Margaret Duval.”
“They were.” She said it as if it were fact.
Okay, time to plunge on. “So was it possible that Margaret’s youngest daughter, Rose, was Baxter’s kid?”
A pause.
Nikki’s pulse ticked up.
“There was talk,” Charlene said evenly, “but it was primarily conjecture.”
“Because of Rose’s age?”
“Yes, and because she didn’t look like her sisters. The first two were dead ringers, two years apart, but nearly identical except for size, and Rose wasn’t. Now that could be just a case of genetics. Siblings sometimes don’t look a thing like each other. Look at you and Lily, for example, but the fact that she was a little different, facial shape, hair not quite as fair as the others, gave the gossipmongers more grist for their mill.”
Okay, so that told her a little more.
“What do you know about the Channings?” Nikki asked. “The neighbors of the Beaumonts who have the vineyards.”
“Not much.”
“I never saw them at any of the parties we went to at the Beaumonts’,” Nikki said.
“Well . . . that was because of Nell, I suppose. Eleanor, her name was.”
“Baxter and Connie-Sue’s daughter?” The dead girl who had drowned in the river, the one whose spirit still walked through the woods according to local legend.
Charlene was thoughtful. “It was a long time ago and I wasn’t there, mind you, but the way I heard it, the little girl was playing unattended, well, except that her brother was there. He was with the Channing boy, what’s his name?”
“Jacob.”
“Yes, that’s it. They were roughhousing or playing some game in the river, which is dangerous enough, and little Nell tried to join them and somehow unfortunately drowned. Connie-Sue blamed the Channing boy, though according to the police reports, it was just a horrible, horrible accident. A tragedy. Connie-Sue never got over it. Eventually she made Baxter move, and the boys weren’t allowed to see each other, at least not that their parents knew.”
“You think that Jacob was involved in Nell’s death?”
“No, no, I think it was a tragedy. Horrible. And sometimes when a child dies, it’s natural for the parents to want to blame someone.”
“In this case Jacob Channing.”
“Yes.”
“What about Tyson? He was there, too.”
“But he was their son. Their only son.”
They talked a little longer and as she ended the call, Nikki vowed she would visit Charlene this coming weekend. Come hell or high water.
She eyed the clock, read over Sylvie Morrisette’s last wishes for the second time and then searched through accounts of Nell Beaumont’s death. All the articles came to the same sad conclusion: accidental drowning.
Reed wouldn’t be home for hours, probably.
She bit her lip and considered her options.
There was no way she could sit here idle. She remembered the gleam in Kimberly Mason’s eye as she, while on her cell phone, climbed into the news van and the big white van took off out of the church parking lot, hot on Reed and Delacroix’s tail. That burned her. Then Nikki thought of Norm Metzger at the crime scene trying to interview Reed.
That did it!
