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“I have one last question.” I hold up the necklace. “This is yours, right?”
Her hands go to her neck, patting as if expecting to find it there. “Yes, that’s mine.”
“When did you lose it?”
“I didn’t. At least, I didn’t know that I had.”
“When did you last notice it?”
She pauses. “I don’t think about it much. I put it on in the morning and take it off at night. I definitely had it on that day. Wait! At one point, when I was running from the moose, I ran into a branch. As I was clawing it away, my fingers snagged the necklace.”
“Did it break?”
She shakes her head. I thank her and leave her to her rest.
That means someoneputPenny’s necklace in that bush. It couldn’t have been Bruno. At the time Pierre found it, Bruno had been lying at the bottom of a gorge. The distance between Mark’s camp and here is too far for Bruno to run back, stage the necklace, and then return to talk to his partner and get pushed off that cliff.
That means Bruno’s partner staged it. Tossed it into the bush to be found in the search for Penny. Making it appear as if she’d been abducted.
That theory rests on one very dubious piece of evidence—Pierre’s story about when he found the necklace. If Pierre is lying, itcouldhave been Bruno who staged it, after he was brought back and snuck out that night. What if he staged italong with another clue that pointed at his partner, a clue his partner got rid of… because Pierre is his partner. Pierre finds the necklace after Bruno sets it out. He hides the clue, takes the necklace, and locks it into that drawer.
I track down Yolanda next. She’s sitting on the front porch of the town hall, where Anders has asked her to watch over Pierre. She’s drinking tea and staring into space.
“How is she?” Yolanda asks, without looking over.
I put one foot on the deck. “She seems fine, and Eric is guarding her.”
“Good.”
“I need to speak to you in private. Can we go inside?”
“Those walls aren’t soundproof.”
“That’s fine.”
She hesitates, and then she understands that I don’t care if Pierre overhears. In fact, I might even hope he does.
We go in, and she settles into a chair, cupping her mug and sipping from it. She’s quiet tonight. Muted. I don’t comment on that. The cause is obvious. Bruno is dead, Pierre is in the cell, and Penny is under guard after being left for dead by Bruno, after possibly being attacked by Pierre. Or, if not Pierre, then someone else on her crew.
I tell Yolanda what Penny said about the argument Yolanda had with Bruno the night he first disappeared.
“He made it seem as if he was fighting for his bonus,” I say. “But Penny says that was secured.”
“It was. He came up with a bunch of bullshit about being worried for the crew, that it wasn’t fair for them to risk their bonuses because of delays they couldn’t control. The obvious answer would be to extend the deadline, which I said we would if the delays were truly outside the crew’s control. Then he started going on about how people expected to be home at a certaintime. I figured he meant him. He wanted to fix things with his wife, and he was getting antsy. Now I see the truth—he just wanted to make that… claim thing.”
The mining claim, she means. She’s being careful with her language with Pierre in the next room. If he’s Bruno’s partner, then he knows what we’re talking about. If he isn’t, then we’re sure as hell not telling him there’s an unclaimed gold find out there.
“Bruno was in a hurry to get home,” I say. “Because he had no way of making the application while up here.” I pause. “Did he ever try to get access to your sat phone? Come up with an excuse for using it?”
“No.”
“Has anyone tried since his death? Suddenly needed to use the sat phone or suddenly needed to go home?”
She hesitates. Then her lips form a silent curse as she turns toward the door leading to where Pierre is being held.
She lowers her voice. “He’s been demanding to leave since that uproar with Nanette earlier today.”
I walk to the cell and unlock the door. A scuffle sounds within as Pierre dashes away from his eavesdropping spot. When I open the door, he’s on the single cot, his arms folded.
