Free Nantucket Grand by Steven Axelrod Page A

are mostly bigshots who’d laugh at you if you accused them of anything.”
    â€œNot all of them.”
    â€œNo, but—come on. Someone like Doug Blount? He’s ten times more scared of McAllister than he is of the police. All he has to do is stonewall. He could accuse you of slander and he’d probably win.”
    â€œUnless the victims come forward.”
    â€œBut they won’t. Jill’s in a coma and Emily’s parents are shipping her off to some boarding school in Maine. I don’t know who the other girls are. But I know one thing for sure—they’re too embarrassed to go to the police. No one wants to admit this stuff—being addicted to drugs and—all the rest of it. So it’s hushed up and the house where they did it is gone, and who knows where the films are. On some flash drive somewhere, which you’d need a warrant to even look at and you could never get a warrant on hearsay from some girl.”
    The diatribe wound down. I blew out a breath while she took one. “You’ve obviously thought about this a lot.”
    â€œIt’s all I’ve been thinking about. For weeks.”
    â€œCould you get Mason to come forward? If he corroborated your story…”
    â€œNo way.”
    â€œMaybe I could talk to him.”
    â€œHe’s too scared. He’ll just deny everything. He told me so.”
    â€œHow about Jared?”
    She shook her head. “Those people could ruin his father. He does most of his work for Brad Thurman. And it’s the same for my dad. One word and his whole ’Sconset route goes to Myles Reis. McAllister is Dad’s customer and they’re all pals on Baxter Road, and my dad doesn’t have a ten-customers-more-or-less, easy-come, easy-go lifestyle. Sorry. I’m not going to wreck his business to make some useless point and turn myself into a bigger loser than I already am, for nothing. I’m just not.”
    â€œI could talk to Jared anonymously.”
    She stared at me. “They saw him that night. Not just me. Maybe I didn’t make that clear. They know who he is. ‘Anonymous’ doesn’t work around here, anyway, Chief Kennis. Everyone knows everything about everybody. That’s why I didn’t say anything before. That’s why I was trying to…to do things on my own.”
    â€œBut you’re going to stop that now. Because you understand how dangerous it is.”
    â€œI guess.”
    â€œI need you to be certain about this, Alana.”
    â€œOkay, okay. I’ll leave it alone. I will.”
    â€œThank you.” Time to move on. I had an arson fire to investigate. “Tell me about the house. Was it deserted when you got there?”
    â€œIt was burning when I got there. I looked inside and I could see the curtains flaming in the living room. And the couch. It was really smoky. I tried to get in but the doors were locked.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œI know. Nobody locks their doors around here. I don’t even have a key to my own house. My dad must have one somewhere but he never uses it.”
    â€œYou said doors…so you tried the back door, too?”
    â€œYeah and the bulkhead. The whole place was locked up tight.”
    â€œSo when you ran around to the back…did you see anything—or anyone suspicious?”
    â€œJust Mr. Toland—and Mike Henderson. They were shouting at each other. When we were leaving I saw the newspaper guy, Mr. Trezize? And some crazy old man—could he have set the fire?”
    I thought about David Lattimer. The only way he could set a fire would be smoking his pipe in bed. It was a class issue for him. Felonies were for the hoi polloi. I remembered him quoting with evident relish Winston Churchill’s response to his first view of real poverty, after touring the East End of London during an early campaign: “How strange it must be! Never to see anything beautiful, never to eat