CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Marjorie Fenn agreed to a second conversation with considerably less frost than the first, arriving at the Inkwell & Anchor's café in a cardigan the color of dried lavender and settling into the chair across from Marin with the wary posture of a woman bracing for an accusation she half-expected to deserve.
"I've been thinking about our last conversation," she said, before Marin could speak. "I've decided I owe you a fuller account of it, and I'd rather give it to you directly than have you piece it together from town gossip and conclude something worse than the truth."
"I'm listening."
"Walter and I argued more than I let on.
Not just about the deed records." Marjorie's hands were folded tightly in her lap.
"He wanted the Historical Society to formally endorse his manuscript before publication — to lend it our name, our credibility, as validation that his claims about the Vance family were substantiated and not simply an old man's grudge.
I refused. Not because I doubted him, Ms. Ashworth.
Because I was afraid of him being right.
" She met Marin's eyes, and for the first time since they'd met, something like genuine shame moved across her face.
"The Society receives an annual grant from the Vance Family Foundation.
Has for eleven years. It funds nearly a third of our operating budget — the roof repair, the archive digitization, all of it.
If I'd lent the Society's name to an accusation of decades-old fraud against the very family funding our survival, I'd have been signing our death warrant, whether or not Walter was right. "
"So you refused him to protect the Society's funding."
"I refused him, and then I lay awake for a week feeling like a coward about it, and then he died, and I have lain awake every night since wondering whether my caution about a grant cost a good man his life, because if I'd simply said yes, if the Society had stood behind him publicly before he could be silenced —" Her voice cracked, just slightly, the first real crack Marin had seen in her carefully maintained composure.
"I am many unpleasant things, Ms. Ashworth.
Officious. Difficult. Overly attached to proper procedure.
But I am not a murderer, and I would like very much for someone in this town to eventually believe that, once the truth comes out. "
"I believe you," Marin said, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she meant it entirely.
Whatever Marjorie Fenn's failings, they were the failings of caution and self-preservation, not violence — and the guilt sitting visibly on her now was not the guilt of a killer covering tracks, but of an ordinary, frightened person confronting the cost of an ordinary, frightened choice.
"There is one thing," Marjorie added, as she gathered herself to leave.
"Walter asked me, that last week, whether the Society had any records of who currently sat on the Vance Family Foundation's board.
I told him it was Prescott, of course, and his sister in Portland, who takes no active interest, and —" she hesitated.
"And Denise Hartwell. She's held a board seat for over a decade.
Longer than I'd have expected for an assistant, even a loyal one.
I always assumed it was simply Prescott rewarding long service.
Walter seemed to think it meant something more. "