Chapter Twelve
Arturo has his arms crossed when he opens his door, which is really tricky to do, so I give him credit for that. Or I would, if it hadn’t looked ridiculously awkward—he basically tugged the door open, caught it with his foot and then used his foot to pull it open wide while he crossed his arms.
“You’re wasting your time,” he says. “My blind is shut. I am complying with the requirements, and you’re only harassing me because I dared to speak up against injustice.”
“No, the requirements are that, in the event of a lockdown, you need to close your blind and your shutters and use only your small lantern.”
“The battery is dead.”
“And, as I told you, closing the shutters will be sufficient. If you’d like to step outside and see how much light is getting past your blind—”
Dalton steps from beside me. “Lights out. Shutters closed. You forgot to recharge your solar lantern. Not our fault.”
“So you brought in the big guns,” Arturo says. Then Rory squawks and his gaze drops to her. His brows knit. Then his eyes narrow, as if this is some kind of trick. Maybe holding a baby means Dalton can hit him and Arturo can’t hit back.
“Yeah.” Dalton lifts Rory and holds her out. “This is the big gun. Close the fucking shutters or I unleash the teething infant.”
“You shouldn’t swear in front of her,” Arturo says. “And you’re telling me to turn off my light when you have a baby? If she starts bawling, all the closed shutters and dimmed lights won’t help. They’ll hear the town from ten miles away.”
“Let us handle Rory,” I say. “Now, light off or shutters closed. We will speak to Muriel in the morning about adjusting your shifts to even them out.”
His blink tells me I hit the bull’s-eye. He’s not protesting the general unfairness of the lockdown changes—he’s thinking of himself. Something tells me that if he was the one with the short shift, he wouldn’t say a peep about it.
“You will each work three and a half hours tomorrow,” I say. “If you close those shutters.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yes.”
That sets him back. Apparently, I was supposed to say no, not at all, think of it as an incentive.
I continue, “You don’t need to start until one thirty. Then you’ll be done at five. Acceptable?”
“No.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Dalton says. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“I want the early shift. In fact, I want the early shift permanently.”
I frown. “You had the early shift, and you hated it. Muriel swapped with you.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I’ve had enough of her slacking. If I’m on the early shift, then she has to show up on time, and she has to do her damn job because I won’t be coming in afterward to do it for her.”
I motion him back inside. Then Dalton and I follow, and Dalton shuts the door behind us.
I lower my voice. “This really isn’t the time for a labor dispute, Arturo. Can you agree, for tomorrow, that you will work the later shift, and we’ll sort this with Phil?”
He crosses his arms again. “No. I want it resolved now, and since you want my shutters closed, I have your attention. I’m not giving it up.”
Dalton makes a rumble that’s two seconds from becoming a snarl. My look tells him to let me try resolving this.
“You’re having a problem with Muriel not doing her job,” I say. “You seemed fine with her last month when you switched shifts. In fact, you made a point of telling Phil what a good coworker she was.”
“Because she’d agreed to take the shitty shift,” he says.
Then he shifts his weight. “Fine. Also because she was a good coworker. When I came in for my shift, everything was always done, and sometimes she’d do extra.
But that changed a couple of months ago, and every time I think she’s cleaned up her act, it starts again.
She does a half-assed job. She says all the plants are watered, but a bunch of them are dry.
If I’m lucky, she does the bare minimum.
And she’s not showing up at six, like she’s supposed to.
One of the kitchen guys came by for herbs last week and when he stopped by at nearly seven, the greenhouse was still locked tight. ”
I exhale. “Okay, we’ll deal with this.”
I’ll need to inform Phil, but more importantly, I’ll be telling Kendra that Muriel might be in need of counseling.
This sort of thing can happen—someone comes into Haven’s Rock, giddy with the relief of escaping their situation, determined to go above and beyond, but then the isolation and the cooling weather sets in, along with bouts of depression.
That would explain shifting moods—from working hard to barely doing her minimum.
If that’s the case, she needs counseling, not disciplinary action.
“You think she’s showing up late regularly?” I say.
He shrugs. “It’s not like I’m checking on her.
But since I got that report about the herbs, I started walking past on my way to get coffee in the morning.
Two days this week, she wasn’t there. Yesterday it was past eight when she arrived.
I saw her coming out of the forest, like she’d been out walking when she should have been working. ”
Yesterday.
I don’t look over at Dalton, and I try to keep my expression neutral. “Okay, she was late a few times this past week.”
“She tries to cover it up—saying all the plants were watered—but I can tell. She’s slacking, and I need to cover for her, which I was doing, because I didn’t want to snitch. But if she’s now getting half shifts? That’s too much.”
I could point out the illogic of this reasoning, which makes it sound as if Muriel earned those shorter shifts, but I understand what happened here.
Arturo was cutting her slack, possibly presuming she was having personal difficulties.
But now that she’s getting a perk, it just added to his frustration and tipped the balance.
What matters is that there’s a dead body in the clinic, a man who seems to have died sometime between midnight and five A.M. two nights ago. And that’s the same day Muriel was particularly late getting to her shift, after being MIA a couple of mornings earlier this week.
I get dates for every time Arturo knows she was late. There are three instances. The first was when the kitchen worker came looking for herbs earlier this week. I take the kitchen worker’s name to verify. Then she was late twice more—yesterday and the day before that.
I make notes. Arturo doesn’t seem to see anything odd in that. He’s just relieved that I’m paying so much attention to his complaint.
When we leave, I tell him that he can take the first greenhouse shift tomorrow, and he closes his shutters while we’re there and says he’s going to sleep early, so his light will be off.
See how amenable he can be? He just needed us to hear his complaint and take him seriously. I cut Dalton off before he says anything about that.
We head outside and say nothing until we’re inside the forest on the town’s edge.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Dalton says. “Muriel goes from being a model employee to slacking off and coming in late … including the morning we found Blake.”
I nod and say nothing. I’m deep in thought, working it out.
Dalton recognizes my look and waits patiently until I say, “Help me think it through. If Blake and Gretchen came for a resident—like Muriel—that wouldn’t explain her being gone multiple times over the past week.”
“Unless she was negotiating. They made contact. She tried to talk them out of…” He shrugs. “Whatever.”
I nod. “If they were hired to come after her, they might be open to a counterpayment. But that’s a week in the forest. Very slow negotiating in a hostile environment.”
“So they didn’t come to kill her. They came to communicate with her. Our first fear was that Blake and Gretchen were spies. Having someone in the town spying is better.”
“That would explain the earlier sporadic absences. Muriel seems to have been ‘slacking off’ in cycles, likely because she’s coming in late.
Those could indicate regular meetings with her handler.
Muriel is snuck into Haven’s Rock, presumably by the old Rockton interests, who would know exactly what émilie needed to grant entry, though we could be looking at an unknown party.
Either way, they give Muriel time to settle in, and then they start sending her handler for regular check-ins. But a ‘check-in’ doesn’t take a week.”
“Maybe she’s not holding up her end of the deal. It’s happened before.”
He’s right. We had multiple “spies” in Rockton.
Residents who were admitted on the understanding they’d report back to the council.
One actually was Anders, who’d been told Dalton was a corrupt sheriff.
Once he saw the truth, he flipped allegiances and gave the council meaningless intel.
Mathias was also supposed to spy … and just never bothered.
Then there was émilie’s own spy, her granddaughter Petra.
In that case, the “spying” had been mostly an excuse to convince Petra to take refuge because, in another life, Petra had actually been a field agent for some branch of the American government.
“Muriel would make a good spy,” Dalton muses. “At first, you’d think she’s too quiet, the sort of person you barely notice in the room. I’m not sure I could pick her out.”
“Which is perfect spy material. Petra had a similar vibe. Hardworking. Easy to get along with. Personable. Didn’t stand out in any way.”
“Fuck.”
I lift my hands. “I’m not saying that’s what we’re dealing with. Play it through. If Muriel decided she didn’t want to keep spying—and they sent Gretchen and Blake to get her back on track—why would Muriel kill Blake and then come back here?”
He shrugs. “What if Blake and Gretchen were the only link between Muriel and the council? The old Rockton council hires an outside firm to run the operation, in a double-blind.”
“Muriel goes rogue and kills both of them, and the council has no idea who their spy was.”