GRAVELY
DEAD
A Midcoast Maine Mystery
Second Edition
Lawrence Rotch
Also by Lawrence Rotch
Midcoast Maine Mysteries
Gravely Dead
Bulletproof
Standing Dead
Mistletoe and Murder
Beware of the Elephant
Buzzard’s Bay Mysteries
Abracadabra
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Gravely Dead. Copyright © 2008 Lawrence Rotch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright © 2008, 2021 by Lawrence Rotch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Second edition published in June, 2021
First edition published in August, 2008
Published by
Shoal Waters Press
Liberty, Maine
Shoalwaterspress.com
Table of Contents
Prolog
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
PROLOG
Myra Huggard’s weather beaten Colonial had sat by the water’s edge for nearly two centuries, and the passing years swayed its roof as though time itself was trying to press the structure back into the ground. The clear, still January night spirited away what little heat remained in the building, causing a roof beam to shift in the cold with a heavy thud.
Myra’s eyes fluttered open and her arthritic, clawlike fingers picked at the blankets, trying to bring them closer against the icy air. The old woman listened for another sound, but all she could hear was the beating of her heart.
The Russians were back. Myra knew they were Russians because she had seen them one evening as they prowled around her back yard in their furry Russian hats and black coats. They had looked like bears in the uncertain light. Or maybe like a pair of deer, her eyes not being so good anymore.
Myra had taken Evan's ancient, double-barreled shotgun to the heathens one night when she caught them poking at her abandoned chicken coop. She stood in the doorway and yelled at them to go away, but they just stared back, eyes glittering in the moonlight, until their silence made her so mad that she took a shot at one. She would have fired the other barrel too if the recoil hadn't knocked her off balance and stove in her shoulder so bad it took weeks to straighten out. Later, Myra wondered if they had known what she was saying, being Russians and all. In the end, she figured the shotgun spoke their language well enough.
Tonight was different, though. Tonight, they were inside. She took grim satisfaction in knowing the damn foreigners wouldn’t find what they were looking for.
Unless they were looking for her.
An occasional creak marked their progress as they crept around downstairs. Or maybe it was just the house shifting in the night. Cathy said she imagined things.
Myra fumbled in the darkness for the bedside lamp, but the fool thing wasn’t where it belonged, and she knocked it onto the floor with a crash. They would know she was awake now, and that made her afraid, because the shotgun was downstairs, propped in a corner beside the front door. She would have to remember to put it under her bed at night from now on.
If there was a now on. Myra’s ninety-four years and failing health didn’t promise much of a future in any event, but she had survived this long by confronting adversity head on, not by giving in to negative thoughts, like some she knew.
It occurred to her that she could even keep the shotgun under the covers. She smiled at the idea of blasting the Russians to bits from the warmth of her bed, with scraps of comforter flying in all directions. That would give them a surprise.
The noises seemed to be coming from the kitchen, and Myra decided she might be able to sneak downstairs in the dark and grab the shotgun from the front hall. Bruised shoulder or not, she’d to put a stop to their prowling once and for all.
The old woman swung her legs slowly, painfully, out from under the covers and into the frigid air of the room. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she eased her feet into the fleece-lined L. L. Bean slippers that Cathy had given her for Christmas. Myra thought fondly about Cathy for a moment as her feet enjoyed the cozy warmth of the slippers.
The fondness faded when she remembered what Cathy had said about the Russians.
“You know perfectly well there aren’t any Russians sneaking around here,” Cathy had told her. “It was just an old movie. Why would they come prowling around anyhow? Besides, they’re our friends now.”
“Not any more. I took a shot at one last week.”
Cathy gave her a worried look. “God, not the shotgun again. You’ll hurt someone if you aren’t careful.”
“Damn right, and they’ll holler in Russian when I put the lead to them. Just wait and see.”
“Don’t ask me to buy you any ammunition,” Cathy replied tartly.
Myra frowned at this, trying to remember how many shells were left in the box.
* * *
Myra hunched on the edge of the bed a while longer, until the dizziness of sitting up had passed. Cathy’s slippers were warming her feet, but the rest of her was beginning to freeze.
Cathy would believe in the Russians now. In fact, if worse came to worse, she’d have to deal with them. Myra had given her careful instructions about what to do if things went wrong, and she hoped the girl was up to the job, what with being so infuriatingly honest.
It was reassuring that Sarah Cassidy would be here in a few months. The fact that she hadn’t clapped eyes on Sarah in almost forty years didn’t enter into Myra’s thinking. The girl had shown she knew how to keep a secret, and she was sensible enough to stop Cathy from being too much of a wuss. Besides, Sarah was from Boston, where there must be lots of Russians, and she would know how to deal with them.
Another noise from downstairs made Myra wonder if the events that she had set in motion would cause trouble for Cathy or Sarah. Normally, the old woman wasn’t burdened with feelings of guilt, preferring to put the blame for her actions where it belonged—on the other person. Even so, the Russians, with their strange ways, made her nervous.
Myra’s dressing gown lay on the covers. She worked her arms into the sleeves and shuffled along the edge of the bed, using the mattress for support. Launching herself from the corner of the bedstead, she staggered across the narrow room, guided by the faint, cold glow of moonlight f
iltering through the window curtains. Myra opened the door cautiously and crossed the hall. Breathing heavily, she paused at the top of the stairs, her hand on the newel post.
The staircase dropped precipitously to face the front door across a small, cramped hallway. To the left lay the parlor, where Myra had wintered over her hens and started her pullets in the spring, years ago when she still had a flock. A door at the right led to the dining room and beyond it, the kitchen.
A faint, quivering red glow outlined the dining room door. What could that be? Then it hit her. Of course, the Russians would have candles so they could see.
Or perhaps she had forgotten to close the firebox door to the kitchen stove when she filled it with wood last evening. It was getting harder and harder to remember these things, though she didn’t admit it to anyone for fear they’d shut her up somewhere, like they did to poor Hazel Gartley last year. It only took that devilish nursing home four months to steal every penny Hazel had and kill her off.
Myra stood and breathed a while longer. The last two months had made her keenly aware of the grey area that lay between being alive and being dead. She had seen Hazel pass through that strange land; a place where people like Gerry Gartley, her sniveling, good-for-nothing son, made decisions “for her own good,” without listening to what Hazel wanted. Myra wasn’t going to let that happen to her.
The edges of the stair treads looked like a row of writhing orange snakes in the flickering candlelight. She blinked a few times to clear her eyes, but the snakes were still there.
Myra hated snakes. Trying not to step on them, she started down slowly, her hand clutching the banister. Suddenly, she was pushed from behind. Or perhaps she just lost her balance.
She felt herself pinwheeling down the stairs, bones snapping like dry twigs. The momentum threw her across the narrow hall, fetching her up against the front door.
There was no pain yet, but her legs wouldn’t move, and her left arm was crumpled under her. Myra’s head was jammed up against the door, where an icy draft swept through the door sill’s crack and sliced into her face.
The butt of the shotgun was inches from her nose, but her right arm wouldn’t work properly. With her last strength, Myra made her fingers climb up the stock and lock around the trigger. The gun went off with a roar, dropping a blizzard of plaster onto her motionless body. Overhead, flames roared through the house.
Chapter 1
The early March sunshine streamed through the windows, warming the back of Sarah Cassidy’s neck as she stood and admired her handiwork. She had just finished sawing five inches off the legs of her reproduction Chippendale dining room chairs, and she realized the truth of what she’d heard, that it really was hard to get the lengths just right so the chairs would be steady. She’d need pieces of cardboard to even the legs up. A power saw might have worked better.
The sun that baked Sarah’s neck brought a ruddy glow to the slender board that balanced on her highly polished dining room table. Even placed catty-corner, the board was almost too long to fit in the room and it lay there, ends drooping precariously over the table’s edges. Sarah admired the flawless mahogany, thinking that it had better be flawless, considering what the lumber supplier in nearby Boston had charged for it.
Her prize couldn’t negotiate the hallway, so she had been obliged to carry it around to the back yard through two inches of slushy snow and slide it in the dining room window. Something else for the neighbors to gossip about.
She looked at the chairs again. They were a bit dwarfish now, but no matter, their backs were the perfect height to prop up the overhanging ends of her board. She carefully positioned the chairs under the board, slipping bits of cardboard under some of the legs.
Next came the old, disused encyclopedia from Claude’s study. She carried several volumes at a time, stacking as many as she could on each chair to weigh it down.
Panting a little, since lugging thirty musty volumes around the house was a chore, Sarah paused in front of the hall mirror. Dark, shoulder length hair framed an unmistakably Irish face that evoked, as her mother used to say, peat smoke and leprechauns. She tucked a stray wisp into place and gave her reflection a critical look. Not bad, despite a few strands of gray. Her figure had held up pretty well too, all things considered, and one could take her to be well under her true age of fiftyfive. If the lighting was right.
“You’ll do, Sarah Cassidy,” she murmured, pleased that she could say that now and believe it. Most of the time. It was even becoming second nature to think of herself as Cassidy again, after all those years of being Johnson.
She returned to her work.
Her father’s big, handmade wooden tool box sat on the sideboard. The box, with its drawers, compartments and special holders for the various tools, had fascinated Sarah when she was a little girl. She rooted out two heavy iron clamps. Using two pieces of scrap wood to protect her precious board, she clamped it to the table top.
The lower jaws of the clamps were bare and they dug into the underside of the table with a satisfying, dent-making, crunch as she tightened them.
Until recently, Sarah hadn’t realized, perhaps hadn’t been willing to realize, how much she disliked the dining room set. Or, more accurately, how much she disliked the lavish dinners she placed on the table for Claude’s hard drinking business associates. At any rate, those days were over.
She gave the clamps an extra twist.
Next came her father’s heavy plane. The senior Cassidy had been a carpenter who specialized in cabinetry, and Sarah often watched him work when she was a child, helping with some of the simpler jobs when she was a little older.
Still, the plane was intimidating. She had practiced on a cheap piece of pine from the local Home Depot until she was able to make long curls of wood roll out of the plane, shaping the board the way she wanted. Even so, she paused over the mahogany.
“You’ve got to start sometime,” she said at last, descending on the board. A thin ribbon of wood fell to the floor. She figured there would be a lot more of them over the next few days.
* * *
Muffy Willet stared at Sarah with disbelief. “Why in the world do you want to go to Maine?”
They were sitting in what the real estate agent had called “The Breakfast Nook.” That was twenty-nine years ago, when the Reproduction Colonial, like Sarah’s marriage, had been new, exciting, and full of promise. Sarah still loved to gaze out the bay window to the deck, perennial bed, and lawn.
Stan’s Lawn and Landscape Service normally came out in the spring to spread their magic potions, thereby ensuring plenty of lush grass for them to mow all summer. She didn’t let Stan’s eager minions lay a glove on her flower bed, however.
“I went to summer camp in Maine when I was a kid,” she said.
“That was a lot of years ago, dear,” Muffy pronounced.
“Thanks for the reminder. Anyway, I’ve kept in touch with the Merlews, who ran the camp, and they offered me an apartment in their house for the summer.”
“They must be older than Methuselah by now. Are they still running it?”
“No,” Sarah replied, “they retired and sold the camp years ago. It’s long gone.”
“Are they the ones who gave you that old boat in the garage?”
The boat in question was named Owl, a Herreshoff 12 ½, seventy years old and in need of serious repair. Owl was about sixteen feet long, with comfortable seats and the reassuring feel of a much larger vessel.
“Actually, I inherited it. The boat had been sitting in their barn for years.” There was more to the story, but Sarah chose not to burden Muffy with a lot of details that would just confuse her.
When first introduced to Owl, Sarah was told the boat’s seaworthy behavior was largely due to the 750 pounds of lead in her keel that helped the vessel “stand up to the wind.” Needless to say, Sarah had known perfectly well that lead sank in water, and she had fretted over this scientific tidbit until learning about the flotation tank in Owl’s
bow that made the boat unsinkable.
Designed in 1914, more than four hundred of the vessels were built in cedar and oak over a period of thirty years, not counting numerous modern fiberglass versions. Many sailing afficionados consider the “12” to be one of the finest, most seaworthy sailboats of its size, and Sarah had been smitten from the moment, years ago, when she first laid eyes on Owl’s comfortable cockpit, graceful curves, and wineglass shaped stern.
“I learned to sail in that boat,” Sarah added.
Erica Strom, a tall Nordic type, and one of the camp counselors, had taught Sarah the secrets of capturing the wind in Owl’s sail, and introduced her to the joy of feeling the boat come alive under her hand. Sarah took to it like a duck to water and ended up teaching sailing herself when she became a counselor after Erica left.
Sarah’s friend gave her a worried look.
“God knows you’ve gone through a rough patch with Claude,” Muffy said, “but running off to Maine and living with a bunch of strangers isn’t the answer. Don’t you think you should be here with people who care about you at a time like this?”
“I just need to get away and think for a while. Someplace where I won’t keep seeing Claude running around in his Porsche with some underage bimbo.”
“Yes, but why go way up there?”
“It’s not as though Maine is a foreign country, for heaven’s sake.”
“Some little village in the middle of nowhere? It might as well be. What’s the place called? Bryant Cove?”
“Burnt Cove, and it’s not that small anymore.”
A week of work had produced an ankle deep pile of mahogany shavings in the dining room, and one of them had escaped, where it lay curled up in a delicate brown spiral on the kitchen floor. Muffy was staring at it, apparently trying to figure out what this alien thing was, but too polite to ask. For Muffy’s sake, Sarah was glad she’d kept the dining room door closed.
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