by Leslie Meier
I laughed and relaxed. Jamie wouldn’t be joking if Page was hurt.
Jamie flashed his familiar, comforting grin. He was a cop in this situation, but he was also an old friend. His mom and dad’s yard backed onto my parents’ property. Now he lived in the house alone. His parents had moved to Florida to be near his older sister. For three years, he’d been the newest member of Busman’s Harbor’s six-person police force, until a retirement had led to the hiring of a new “new guy” the previous spring.
“There wasn’t a soul to be seen as I drove over,” I told him. Through the back window I spotted flashlight beams bobbing in the backyard.
“Pete and the other guys are looking for stragglers,” Jamie reassured me. “The girls are in the living room.”
Chapter Two
Page, her best friend, Vanessa, and their hostess, Talia, were huddled on the formal, burgundy-colored couch, sobbing quietly. The tears unnerved me all over again. Page wasn’t a crier. I ran to them and hugged each one, even Talia, whom I’d never met. “What on earth happened?”
Page was the brave one who spoke up. “We were having a sleepover,” she said, and then stopped. I let the silence fall heavy between us and waited for the rest of the story. “We texted some girls in our class and invited them over,” she finally admitted.
“Did you have permission to invite anyone else?” I could guess the answer.
“No.” Page hung her head, her bright red curls falling across her freckled cheeks. A single tear fell from the end of her nose.
“It was just three girls,” Vanessa added loyally. She would defend Page in any situation. They’d been best friends since Vanessa had moved to town three years earlier. Physically, they couldn’t have been more different. Page was tall, taller than me already. She’d probably already attained her full height and had a swimmer’s powerful body. Vanessa had long, tawny brown hair and improbable green eyes. She’d always been the shortest kid in their class and was still awaiting her growth spurt. But woe to anyone who was tempted to intimidate her based on her size. She was also, probably, my ex-boyfriend Chris’s niece, but that mess was no longer my problem.
“Girls we know, our own age,” Vanessa added.
I nodded. I was more than two decades older than these girls, but I remembered how these things went.
“They must have told other kids, even though they swear they didn’t.” Page was a little feistier than she’d been at first. Looking for scapegoats. “And then kids started coming.”
“Boys,” Vanessa said. “Big boys, with beers. And girls, like from the high school.”
“Before we knew it, the house was full,” Page continued. “Kids were everywhere, even in Talia’s parents’ bedroom.” She made a gagging face. “The music was really, really loud, and they wouldn’t turn it down, even when we asked them. And there was a fight.”
“Not really a bad fight,” Vanessa clarified. “Two boys were shoving and shouting in the backyard.”
“Where are your parents?” I asked Talia. Livvie never would have agreed to a sleepover if she’d known no adults would be at home.
“At a party,” Talia said. It was the first time she’d spoken. She was brown-eyed and brown-haired. Her height split the difference between Page and Vanessa. She looked like she’d been a good-looking child who was now passing through a mild, adolescent rough patch on her way to being a good-looking adult.
“Then who’s in charge?” I asked.
“Mrs. Zelisko,” Talia volunteered. “She lives upstairs.”
“Oh.” I had a passing knowledge of Mrs. Zelisko, a short, round, older woman I’d seen around town.
“We tried to find her,” Page said, “when things got out of control, but we couldn’t. We went to her apartment on the third floor, and she wasn’t there. Like anywhere.”
I looked at Jamie, who stood in the archway between the living and dining rooms. He held his arms out, palms upward. The cops hadn’t found her either.
“And then the ghost came!” Talia said the words with maximum thirteen-year-old drama, and the other two squealed.
“The ghost?” I looked at Jamie. The slightest hint of a smile played on his lips.
“The ghost of Mrs. Zelisko!” Vanessa yelled.
“She was all dressed in white! Like a bride with a veil!” Talia screeched.
“Her face was white, like a clown, and she was flying,” Page insisted.
The girls’ eyes were bright, their voices high. “And all the kids who saw her screamed and ran.” Vanessa was breathless.
“And then all the other kids, who didn’t even see her, were screaming and running out the doors, too,” Page added.
The girls went silent, staring at me through three sets of big, teary eyes.
“I think that brings us up-to-date,” Jamie said. “I’ve called Talia’s parents. They’re on their way.”
* * *
“Where’s your overnight stuff?” I asked Page and Vanessa.
“Upstairs in Talia’s room,” Vanessa answered.
I glanced at Jamie, who nodded it was okay. “Why don’t the two of you go and pack up? Talia, you go with them. I want to talk to Officer Dawes for a moment.”
“There’s no one up there,” Jamie reassured them. “We’ve checked.”
The girls rose from the couch. Faces strained, clinging together, they headed for the stairs. I followed Jamie back into the kitchen.
“How much trouble are they in?” I asked as soon as they were out of earshot. “Do I need to call Livvie and Sonny? I hate to interrupt their weekend if I don’t have to.”
Jamie surveyed the disaster of a kitchen. “This is clearly something that got out of hand. From what they told me, they didn’t even know most of the kids who showed up.” He put his palms down flat on the granite countertop and then jerked them away, rubbing the sticky stuff from his fingers. “They may be in huge trouble with their parents, but I don’t think we’ll be involved after tonight.”
My shoulders relaxed, and I exhaled noisily. “Thanks,” I said, meaning it. One of the great benefits of small-town life is knowing the local police.
“What’s up with the flying?” I was tempted to change my assessment of my niece as a mature, level-headed kid.
“Darned if I know.” Jamie drew his dark eyebrows together. He was one of those blue-eyed blonds with black brows and lashes and tannable skin. It was, as my sister said, not fair. “I don’t know what they saw, but something frightened those kids into running out of here.”
Jamie’s partner, Pete Howland, entered through the kitchen door, his flashlight still on. His normally jovial face was twisted in a grimace. “You need to come see this,” he said to Jamie.
“Excuse me.” Jamie disappeared with Howland into the dark backyard.
Chapter Three
I looked around the big front hall while I waited for the girls. The three broad streets that climbed the hill in Busman’s Harbor were lined with houses similar to this one. My mother lived in one. They were sea captains’ houses, built in the days when ships and shipping dominated coastal life. The houses were designed to impress, even to intimidate. I’d never been in this one. The layout was different from the others I knew, but the feeling was the same.
Typical of these old houses, the ceilings on the first and second floor were high, maybe fourteen feet on the first floor and twelve on the second. The third-floor ceiling was lower, the space originally intended for servants. Added together, the ceiling of the open entrance hall towered almost forty feet above me. A staircase wound around the space. From a two-step landing to the left of the front door, the stairs turned and climbed up the wall. When they reached the second floor, there was another turn, and a balcony ran across the wall. I could see a doorway and a long hall off it. The girls’ voices floated down from somewhere up there.
At the end of the balcony, there was another turn, and the stairs continued along a third wall to a small landing and a door on the top floor. The door was
narrow and flat, obviously added long after the house was built to provide the tenant of the auxiliary apartment with privacy.
Where was the tenant? The girls’ wild story aside, Mrs. Zelisko must have gone out, even though she’d been put in charge by Talia’s irresponsible parents. My irritation rose.
The girls trooped down the stairs, Page and Vanessa each carrying a backpack and a bed pillow. Page’s was in a pink pillowcase I recognized. Vanessa’s was a teddy-bear print. They were still little girls in a lot of ways.
I was about to tell them to put their stuff in my car, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to leave Talia alone with the police until her parents got home. Jamie was an old family friend to us but a stranger to her. She was clearly a nervous wreck, like the other two girls. I felt we should stay for moral support.
As I stood in the hallway, debating what to do, the back door opened, and Jamie reappeared, a flashlight in his hand, his mouth set. He beckoned me over. “Take Page and Vanessa home. This property is a crime scene. We’re calling in the state police Major Crimes Unit.”
From unfortunate experience, I knew what that meant. I looked into his eyes. “Please tell me it’s not a kid.”
Jamie shook his head. “Mrs. Zelisko.”
* * *
At my mother’s house, after consultation with Mom, I called my sister. No matter how discreet the cops were, word would certainly be flying around about the wild party. It wouldn’t take long for news of the body to get out. We wanted to reach her before someone else did.
Livvie said they’d each had a couple of drinks at the party they’d attended and would drive back first thing in the morning. Even though I hated cutting their weekend short, I didn’t protest.
The girls were either asleep or pretending to be in the “pink princess” bedroom Mom had decorated for Page when my dad was dying and Livvie and Page stayed over so often Mom thought Page needed her own room. Under intense questioning by Mom and me, Page and Vanessa had been polite, contrite, but not forthcoming. They knew they were in a whole lot of trouble.
Vanessa often stayed over when her mother, Emmy, worked the late shift at Crowley’s, Busman’s Harbor’s nosiest, most touristy bar. At this time of year, the leaves were gone, and so were the tourists, so Crowley’s was only open on Friday and Saturday nights. I’d texted Emmy to let her know Vanessa was at Mom’s. She’d immediately sent a hurried thumbs-up. But small-town life being what it was, by the time she’d arrived at Mom’s house two hours later, wild-eyed, she’d heard the whole story.
“What do we know about Mrs. Zelisko?” I asked Mom and Emmy. We were seated at Mom’s kitchen table, and even though there was silence from upstairs, I kept my voice low. I knew from my own childhood that sound traveled up the back stairs.
“Not much, I’m afraid.” My mother matched my hushed tone.
“I think,” Emmy ventured, “she goes to Star of the Sea?” Star of the Sea was the local Catholic church.
Emmy was still in her Halloween costume, so it was hard to take her seriously. She was dressed as a cat. Not a sexy, cat-woman type cat, which would certainly have enhanced her tips. Instead, she wore something that looked like furry footie pajamas in what might have been a leopard, or tiger, or even calico print. The outfit had a hood with cat’s ears on it, which Emmy wore up for warmth. My mother, true to the code of the thrifty Yankee housewife she’d become, never turned on the heat until November 1. The minutes were ticking rapidly toward that momentous date. Since I ran the family business, the Snowden Family Clambake, out of my dad’s old office on the second floor of Mom’s house, I could hardly wait for heat day to arrive.
“I think Mrs. Zelisko moved here five years or so ago,” Mom ventured. “She’s always rented the apartment on the third floor of that house.”
“What did she do?” I asked. “Is she retired?” My hazy picture of Mrs. Zelisko included steel gray hair, an oval face with a prominent nose, and an extra chin. She had a hairy wart on one cheek near her ear. The perfect face for scaring children. She was short and cylindrical and wore black dresses so tight they looked like sausage casings. Though I could picture her, I couldn’t guess her age.
“She’s a bookkeeper,” Mom said. “She takes care of the books for a lot of small businesses here in town. After your dad died and before you came home to run the clambake, I considered hiring her. Your dad always took care of the books, and I didn’t think it was a strength of Sonny’s.”
My parents had founded the Snowden Family Clambake to keep the private island my mother had inherited in the family. From mid-June to mid-October, we loaded three hundred visitors on our tour boat, showed them the islands, lighthouses, seals, and eagles of Busman’s Harbor, then took them briefly into the North Atlantic until we docked at Morrow Island. There we served an authentic Maine clambake meal; twin lobsters, the soft-shelled clams called steamers, corn on the cob, a potato, an onion, and a hard-boiled egg, all cooked under seaweed and saltwater-soaked tarps and over a roaring hardwood fire.
My brother-in-law had run the clambake for a few years after Dad died—and had nearly run it into the ground. It wasn’t entirely his fault. There had been a recession, bad weather, and an ill-advised bank loan. The less said about those unhappy days the better. I had been called home to run the business. Four years later, I was still here. I’d thought I would marry Chris and make a life. Now, I had no idea what I was doing.
Mom, Emmy, and I talked about Mrs. Zelisko. What would bring a single woman in her . . . fifties? . . . to Busman’s Harbor? If she wasn’t in the tourist trade, if she didn’t have friends or family locally, perhaps she simply liked living by the sea.
Eventually, Emmy took off. She lived on Thistle Island in a trailer parked on her old gran’s property. Her four-year-old son, Luther, was a little too much for the elderly woman to handle when he was awake, so Emmy had to get some sleep and pick him up early in the morning.
Mom suggested I spend the night in my old room. I thought about my apartment, empty and dark, and agreed.
Chapter Four
In the morning, I was awakened by familiar sounds floating up the back stairs. Forks scraped across plates, water ran in the sink, and the murmur of adult voices, punctuated occasionally by the loud, querying voice of my nephew, Jack, came from the kitchen table. The sky visible through the windows was gray. Gusts of wind rattled the old, wooden frames. I snuggled under the covers for a few minutes before I got up.
Sort of dressed, in sweatpants and a T-shirt I found abandoned in my old bureau, I made my way down to the kitchen. Livvie and Sonny were already there. Someone, probably not my mom, had made a batch of scrambled eggs, and there was buttered toast on the counter. Everyone sat around the kitchen table except Jack, who had been excused and was careening around the circle formed by the dining room, living room, front hall, and kitchen. “Jack, don’t run,” Livvie cautioned in a voice that sounded robotic and distracted.
Mom, Sonny, and Livvie ate and talked in subdued tones about all the construction in Portland. “Cranes everywhere,” Sonny complained, but the traffic on the way home was, he said, “Light. Easy.” Page sat at the table, silent and bent over, the eggs on her plate untouched.
“Good morning.” Mom forced a tight smile. Nothing to see here. Perfectly normal breakfast, her expression said.
“I’m sorry you had to come home,” I said to Livvie and Sonny, not sure how close to the elephant in the room I was supposed to get.
Sonny shrugged his big shoulders. “No problem. We’ll do it a different time.”
They wouldn’t. “Did Emmy already pick up Vanessa?”
“First thing this morning,” Mom confirmed.
I took some eggs from the pan, picked up a couple of pieces of toast, and sat down, still unclear on what I should or shouldn’t say about the previous night.
“Mom, can I be excused?” Page asked.
“You didn’t eat a thing,” my mother said.
Livvie put a hand up, “It’s okay.”
“Can I go see Talia?”
“Talia’s across the street,” Mom explained to me. “The state police asked the Davies to stay somewhere else since their home is . . .”—she hesitated—“unavailable.”
“You can say it,” Page grumped. “I know there’s a dead body there. I’m not a baby.”
“So they’ve checked into the Snuggles,” Mom finished.
The Snuggles Inn was run by Fee and Vee Snugg, neighbors, family friends, and honorary great aunts. I could see how the Davies family’s situation would have appealed to Fee and Vee’s big hearts.
Livvie answered Page’s original question. “Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn have asked that you don’t talk to Talia or Vanessa, even by phone or text, until they’ve taken your statement. Besides, your father and I haven’t decided on your punishment yet.”
The girls had looked so bedraggled the night before that I was tempted to say they’d been punished enough, but I kept my mouth shut. This was none of my business.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” Livvie continued. “But you, Vanessa, and Talia invited those other girls over, something you were expressly forbidden to do.”
Page looked wildly from one parent to the other and then made puppy-dog eyes at my mother, willing her to intervene. When Mom didn’t take the bait, Page folded her arms across her chest but didn’t leave the room.
I finished my eggs and gulped down a second cup of coffee. “I’m going across the street to talk to the Davies,” I said.
“I’ll come with you.” Sonny pushed back his chair. “I have some questions. First up, how do they get off leaving the house when these girls are having a sleepover?”
“Dad!” Page shrunk into herself even further.
Livvie put a cautioning hand on her husband’s arm. “Let’s leave that discussion for later. We have more important things to deal with.”
Sonny hesitated, but pulled his chair forward again, back under the table. “Okay, but these people have some explaining to do.”