Halloween Party Murder

by Leslie Meier

  Howard wasn’t wrong. At this time of year, there would be plenty of places for Mrs. Zelisko to move, even at the rent I suspected she paid for a third-floor apartment without exterior access. But come June, she might well be out of luck. Every space would be rented to tourists for top dollar or used to house summer help.

  “I’m glad Howard disagreed with me and we never asked her to move. I’m ashamed of myself for being so selfish.” Blair put her head in her hands. “I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to Mrs. Zelisko. Maybe we could have been friends.”

  Mrs. Zelisko apparently hadn’t had friends. Not in the way Blair meant. But it didn’t seem like the right time to point that out.

  I sat with Blair Davies for a long time, comfy under the Snuggles Inn blanket. I steered the conversation away from everything Mrs. Zelisko. I prattled on about all the fun things the town had planned for the rest of the season. The festival of Christmas trees. The lights at the botanical garden. The day we all got up at dawn to Christmas-shop in our pajamas.

  Blair allowed herself to be jollied along. I could tell it was an effort to climb out of her gloom, but she made it, and we ended up laughing a lot. The sun grew dimmer. We wouldn’t revert to standard time until that night, but on the eastern edge of the time zone, dark came early even before daylight saving time ended.

  Eventually, it was too cold to sit even with the blankets. We stood and folded them, working together. Then we hugged. She went inside, and I trudged home to my apartment.

  Chapter Eleven

  It had been six months, but I still wasn’t used to returning to an empty house. It wasn’t so much that it was empty. Chris worked long hours during the season, like I did, and I often got home first. It was more that I hadn’t gotten used to coming home to a house where nothing had been moved unless I moved it. Nothing had been eaten unless I ate it. The bed hadn’t been made unless I made it. No wet towels in the bathroom. No size-eleven work boots piled by the stairs. When Mrs. Zelisko had been alive, Blair Davies had longed for an empty house. Increasingly, I longed for a full one.

  My mother had offered Le Roi, our Maine Coon cat, to keep me company. He had belonged to the old caretakers on Morrow Island. When they left, I took him, but he’d regarded Chris as an interloper, and a battle of wills ensued. Which is to say Le Roi had done everything he was capable of to get rid of Chris, including, memorably, spilling my shampoo, spreading it all over the bathroom floor and then jumping repeatedly from the headboard onto Chris’s head until he got out of bed, wandered into the bathroom, and nearly killed himself on the slippery floor. Attempted murder.

  Finally, when Chris was unable to put his boots on in the morning without checking inside them, Le Roi had been removed to my mother’s. It was an arrangement that suited all of us. I still got to see him every day when I went to work in the Snowden Family Clambake office on the second floor of my mother’s house. In the summer, Le Roi lived with my sister on Morrow Island, where he wandered freely and begged for clams and pieces of lobster from any clambake customer with a soft heart.

  I’d refused Mom’s offer to return him. I could tell Le Roi loved it at her house and she loved having him. I didn’t have the heart.

  I grabbed my laptop, sat down on my beat-up old couch, with its view out the window to dusk settling over the back harbor, and searched for any sign of Mrs. Zelisko on the web. There was no website for her business and nothing about her online. She wasn’t even in the photo of the Star of the Sea auction committee that appeared after their successful fundraiser year after year.

  I snapped the laptop shut. What did I think I was doing? The police would have done this and more. But I felt so deeply curious about, and sorry for, Helene Zelisko. How did someone end up so isolated that even her “friends” at church didn’t know her first name?

  It wasn’t like I was a social butterfly or given to deeply intimate relationships beyond my family and, formerly, my boyfriend. But this woman who lived alone, worked alone . . . It seemed to be a choice, but I couldn’t help but wonder, was she hiding from someone? Someone who had found her and killed her?

  My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten lunch. In the tiny kitchen alcove of the studio, I opened the refrigerator door. Light spilled onto the dark linoleum floor. A can of bacon fat, a limp bunch of celery, and a piece of cheddar cheese with mold on all sides stared back at me.

  Chris was a wonderful cook, and when we’d run the dinner restaurant together, I’d never had to worry about my next meal. Or what to do with my time. I was busy every moment of every day, and I loved it.

  The long winter loomed. The clambake business would be wound up when I closed the books on the season and divided the profits among Mom, Sonny and Livvie, Quentin Tupper, our silent investor, and me.

  Hannaford closed at six o’clock in the off-season. If I was going to eat, I had to shop. I grabbed my keys and quilted vest and headed down the stairs. I walked through the dark restaurant to the back door and was surprised to see Page in the glow from the outside light, huddled in a sweatshirt that couldn’t be keeping her warm enough.

  “Page! You scared me. You shouldn’t be out alone at night.” I didn’t elaborate. Murderer on the loose, Page a potential witness. But she understood what I meant. “Where are Vanessa and Talia?”

  “I left them at Grammy’s.” She didn’t wait for me but led me back to my own apartment.

  “What’s the matter?” She was pale and shaking. My stomach clenched as I wondered, after almost twenty-four hours of awful revelations, what could be upsetting her so much.

  “I remembered something. Something I didn’t tell the police.”

  I moved toward her. “That’s okay, honey. Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn won’t be mad. We’ll go in the morning, and you can explain that you forgot.”

  “It’s important.” She paused. “And it’s bad.”

  I waited for her to work up her nerve.

  “Mr. Davies came home during the party. I saw him.”

  Now I was alarmed. “Howard Davies was at the house while the party was going on?”

  “Yes.” She squeaked out her answer. Then she found her voice. “I saw him going up the stairs from the first to the second floor. The hallway and staircase were filled with kids, and I thought it was so weird he didn’t say anything. I called out to him, but it was so noisy. And then after it all happened, with the ghost of Mrs. Zelisko flying down from the ceiling and the police coming, it went right out of my head, and I’ve only just thought of it.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I can’t remember. The party was full-on, though.”

  “Was it before or after you and Talia went to look for Mrs. Zelisko?”

  “Before.” Her voice was stronger. “I’m sure before. Like, fifteen minutes before.”

  “If he was climbing the stairs, was his back to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you think it was him?”

  “It looked like him from the back. And he had on the same clothes he was wearing when he left for his work party. Dad clothes, not kid clothes.”

  “Dad clothes?” I wasn’t sure what Page thought that meant.

  “A navy-blue sweater and those pants. Those tan pants.”

  “You mean khakis?”

  “Like Quentin wears.” She was losing patience with me.

  Quentin Tupper, the silent investor in the Snowden Family Clambake, was probably the only man Page knew who wore khakis. Kids didn’t wear them, unless it was part of a school uniform or under duress.

  “Are you sure it was Mr. Davies?” I asked.

  “No.” And then she burst into tears.

  * * *

  I called Flynn to find out if the detectives were still in town. He and Binder were finishing dinner at Crowley’s. They would meet us at the police station in fifteen minutes. I called Livvie to tell her what was going on. Then I called Mom to tell her Page was with m
e. We agreed she should keep Vanessa with her since Emmy was at work, but she should send Talia back to the Snuggles.

  I hoped the walk to the police station would calm Page down, but she fretted the whole way. “What if it wasn’t Mr. Davies? I could get him in so much trouble. I’m not sure.”

  “Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn are good at their jobs,” I told her. “They’ll talk to Mr. Davies. They’ll interview the other guests who were at the work party to find out if he left at any time. They won’t charge him with murder on your say so.”

  She stopped walking. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell them. Won’t Mr. Davies be so mad?”

  “No. Mr. Davies wants to get to the bottom of this as much as anyone. He’ll be happy to clear this up with the police.” Unless he was the murderer. My voice was firm, though I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of what I was saying. I didn’t know Howard Davies from a hole in the wall. “Maybe he’s already told the detectives he went home during the party. We don’t know everything people have told them.”

  Page looked doubtful but started walking again.

  Binder and Flynn did their best to make Page comfortable, even though the high ceiling and meeting-room-sized space of the multi-purpose room was intimidating. Responding to Binder’s patient questions, she told the story to them exactly as she had told it to me. She was clear that she couldn’t identify Howard Davies, though, “It really looked like him from the back. I was sure it was him at the time. He was wearing the same clothes.”

  When they were done, Binder took Page to the adjacent firehouse to find a treat in the firefighters’ always well-stocked kitchen.

  “What do you think?” I asked Flynn, as we stood in the dark hall waiting for them to return.

  “She saw someone she thought was him, for sure. Davies is a young-looking guy, but he’s in his early fifties. Would he look like a teenager from behind?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Which means . . . ?”

  “Which means if it wasn’t Davies, there was a grown man mixed in among the teenagers at that party,” Flynn concluded.

  “Exactly what I was thinking. Have any of the other kids mentioned an adult male in the house?”

  Flynn shook his head. “No. But they’ve been terrible witnesses. No one saw anything until Mrs. Zelisko flew through the air. Which every one of them claims they saw, by the way, even though not all of them were in the front hall when it happened.”

  “So she flew a few laps around the house and yard?”

  He laughed. “So we’ve been told.”

  Binder and Page returned, then she and I walked back to Mom’s. By the time we got there, the detectives’ unmarked car was parked across the street, and Binder and Flynn were on the Snuggles Inn porch, asking to speak to Howard Davies.

  Chapter Twelve

  I woke up early, woolly-headed and confused. Then I realized the time had “fallen back” and my phone and laptop clocks had reset themselves overnight. The weather was still gray. I was tempted to stay in bed.

  From downstairs at Gus’s came the sounds of conversations, the scrape of the spatula across the grill, and the rattle of dishes being dumped into Gus’s ancient dishwasher. Gus usually had three distinct crowds on Sunday. The before-church crowd, the no-church crowd, and the after-church crowd. I could tell by the amount of car-door slamming and yelling going on in the parking lot that other people were as messed up by the time change as I was.

  I decided to see what I could discover about Howard Davies on the web. I found exactly what I would have expected before Page had revealed what she had seen. There was an announcement in our local paper about Howard’s new job at the oceanographic lab. Before that, in Medview, Massachusetts, Howard had played in a lot of tennis tournaments at a local club. Blair taught school, as she’d said. Talia was frequently on the honor roll at her old middle school and had had a lead in the school play.

  A perfectly normal family. But how many normal families end up with a body in their shed?

  I was about to give up when my cell phone buzzed. I didn’t immediately recognize the number.

  “Julia? Barry Walker.” He was gasping, like it was hard to breathe.

  “Barry, what is it?”

  The sound of a deep inhalation followed by the slow release of breath traveled through my phone. “When we were talking yesterday, I got to worrying about my taxes. I left a message for the police that I needed my documents, but no one called me back. So this morning, I called the IRS. They have an emergency number, and I thought this was an emergency. I was on hold forever, but then an agent came on the line. He told me my federal taxes haven’t been filed for years! Since the Zelisko woman took over my account. He couldn’t tell me what I owed, of course, since he didn’t have any of the paperwork, but he said the interest and penalties could really be piling up. I could owe more than the business is worth, even if I sold my building!”

  The hysterical edge had crept back into his voice. I could understand why.

  “You need to tell the state police about this,” I said.

  “Why?” Barry yelled through the phone. “If I tell them, they’ll think I murdered her! If she wasn’t dead, I’d be contemplating it right now.”

  “If Mrs. Zelisko was mismanaging your account, that’s important information.”

  “Mismanaging? She wasn’t failing to pay the taxes, like some kind of mistake or neglect. She was taking money from me, telling me she paid the taxes and then not paying them. She was stealing!”

  Walker’s always seemed to be barely hanging on. How much could Barry owe? It seemed more likely Mrs. Zelisko had been lying to him about the amounts and then pocketing the money. Even then, it couldn’t be a lot of money, hardly worth risking your reputation for. Unless she was doing it to a lot of clients.

  “I’m coming over,” I said. “Give me half an hour.”

  But the time I opened the door of Walker’s Art Supplies and Frame Shop, Al Gleason was already there, leaning against the high counter Barry used to cut the mats for his picture frames. Al’s arms were crossed over his chest, and he was listening to an agitated Barry Walker.

  Mr. Gordon scurried in behind me.

  Al Gleason unfolded his arms and turned to me. “You were right on in what you guessed, Julia. My employees’ withholding hasn’t been paid in four months. Neither have their insurance premiums. I’d been getting notices, lots of them from the insurance company, but Mrs. Zelisko had changed the contact info, even the phone number. She was getting the calls about our non-payment.”

  “You were right about our store, too,” Mr. Gordon said. “Sales tax hasn’t been paid in months, even through the busy season.” Christmas and Valentine’s kept Gordon’s Jewelry afloat in the winter, but the busy season was tourist season.”

  “Ugh,” Mr. Gleason said sympathetically. “I’m guessing all that money isn’t sitting in your bank account.”

  Mr. Gordon shook his head. “Not one penny of it. The money has disappeared.”

  “Maybe not.” They all looked at me. “She’s been stealing from Barry for five years.” I didn’t add that he was the most disorganized, the most trusting, and the most susceptible of the three of them. “I’m guessing she’s been stealing long-term from others. I’d love to get a look at the books for the Star of the Sea auction. But if she started stealing from the hardware store and the jewelry store in the last four months, that means something has changed. Maybe she thought she was on the verge of being caught and she was planning to run somewhere. Or looking for a big hit so she could retire someplace warm. Maybe the police will find some of the money. It’s not like she spent it on an extravagant lifestyle.”

  “Unless she had a gambling problem.” Mr. Gordon looked miserable.

  “If the money doesn’t turn up during the police investigation, because they find out she was murdered for another reason, we can hire a forensic accountant to track it down,” Al Gleason said.

  I turned to Barry. “You see now that you have
to talk to the police, right? There’s safety in numbers. Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn won’t suspect you specifically, because Mrs. Zelisko robbed a lot of people. More than the three of you in this room, I’m certain.”

  “Okay, okay,” Barry said. “I agree. We talk to the police.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I called Binder and Flynn, who came right over. As the shop owners told the cops what they knew, I could see Flynn’s eyes grow bigger. There must be dozens of people in town who had a motive to kill Mrs. Zelisko.

  Binder asked the three men to come to the station to give formal statements after they closed up their shops for the day. Gleason had employees at the hardware store, who could cover him, so he said he’d be over in the afternoon. Mr. Gordon and Barry Walker would come by later.

  Out on the sidewalk, Binder, Flynn and I stood in a tight circle against the wind, processing what we’d heard.

  “This case gets weirder and weirder,” Flynn said.

  “And more and more complicated,” Binder agreed. “By the way,” he looked at me, “Howard Davies didn’t leave his work party. It’s not just his wife who vouches for him; we easily located plenty of witnesses. There were two cars in the host’s driveway parked behind the Davies’ car. The house where the party was is way out in East Busman’s Village, too far to walk and make it back without his absence being noticed. No one can see how he could possibly have gotten home, even if he’d left.”

  Flynn stepped away from us to make a phone call. Binder looked at me. “The crime-scene techs are finished with the Davies’ house. We’re about to let the family move back in. Tom and I are going over for a last look while it’s empty. Want to come?”

  Flynn ended his call, and both men started down the sidewalk toward the Davies’ house without waiting for my answer. They knew what it would be.

  We stood on the big front porch while Flynn turned the key in the lock. Inside, the house was the same temperature as outside. If the Davies did that thing of not turning on the heat until November 1, it hadn’t been on when they left Halloween night, and it still wasn’t.