Oliver abruptly turned to her. “Would you like some lunch? I’ve got sandwich stuff, coldcuts, BLT makings, that kind of thing.”
They assembled their meal in silence while Wes supervised the proceedings with a hungry eye. Oliver certainly lacked Brian’s easy charm, light patter, and brilliant smile.
Sarah noticed the dishwasher was full of dirty dishes. It smelled as though they had been there a while.
“You want me to run this?” she asked.
Oliver looked dubious. “Is it full already?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Where’s the soap?”
They left the dishwasher to splash and gurgle, took the sandwiches outside, and placed two lawn chairs in a sunny corner where there was enough of a breeze to keep the black flies at bay.
“I think you need to be careful about getting involved in all this,” Oliver said.
Sarah put down her sandwich. “You mean as in Brian?”
“I don’t have anything against Brian. He probably has nothing to do with it, but think a minute. Myra is dead, and Brian is the broker for her land. That means a big commission for him.”
Sarah felt her face turning hot. “Are you suggesting Brian killed Myra so he could sell her land?”
“I’m just saying there’s a lot of money involved, between Myra’s place and everything else. Even if you put the money aside, there are people with strong feelings about all the development going on. Look what’s already happened to your car. Someone has it in for you for some reason.”
Sarah was still focused on Brian. “It’s crazy. How could Brian be sure Myra’s sister would want to sell and make him the broker?”
“I just think you should be careful.”
Fuss, fuss, fuss. But her irritation faded as she looked at the worry on Oliver’s face. “I’ll be careful,” she said, “but you should be careful too. Look what happened to Wes.”
* * *
Wes followed them into the house, looking hopeful, as they returned their plates to the kitchen. Oliver explained that he usually walked the dog after lunch, and Sarah surprised herself by asking to go along.
Sarah admired Owl once again as they passed by on their way around the barn. The ugly bulge was gone now, the bottom was freshly painted, and the boat glistened in the sun. Sarah realized with a thrill that if the weather was good, as the forecast promised, she could be out sailing by this time tomorrow.
They rambled through the woods on an old tote road, slathering on Uncle Ben’s to discourage the black flies. Wes, impervious to such pests, bounded ahead.
“The camp was still going when I moved here,” Oliver said as they skirted a trickle of water that crossed the trail. “It was on its last legs by then, though. The Merlews were getting kind of old to run it, and Kate began having health problems. That’s when they started selling off the camp’s land.”
Wes nosed a red squirrel from the underbrush and it raced up the path ahead of them with Wes, panting and snorting like a furry locomotive, in hot pursuit. Being shot didn’t seem to have slowed him down much. The squirrel darted up a beech tree, chattering insults from a safe height. “You’re a disgrace to your bird-dog ancestry,” Oliver scolded mildly.
“Do you think having the Merlews sell off the camp is what started Myra on her anti-development campaign?” Sarah said.
“Maybe, though they started selling lots, one at a time, years ago when the camp closed. It wasn’t until the last couple of years, when the Vincents, Oak Hill, and the Borofskys all came one right after another that Myra really got going.”
“Having the Borofskys build right next door must have been the last straw,” Sarah said.
Oliver called Wes away from his squirrel and said, “Wouldn’t you kids have noticed a grave if there was one in that strip of woods between the Borofskys and Myra? A grave in there would have complicated things for the Borofskys, especially if it was on the water.”
Sarah thought about the first time she and Marlee Sue had explored those woods, gotten lost in the jumble of brush, and ended up in Myra’s back yard. “Not necessarily. It was so thick in there you could hardly see a thing.”
They had been working their way steadily up hill, and now they passed through a tumbledown stone wall at the edge of an abandoned blueberry field.
Sarah stood transfixed by the view that stretched out below, a sweep of green that rolled down across the miles to the water. A handful of tiny white specks dotted the bay, and Sarah wondered if there were any Herreshoff 12's out there.
A huge boulder, its profile shaped like a dog’s head, jutted from the hilltop. So this was the hound of Hound Hill.
“Let’s climb onto the rock,” she said. Wes, apparently understanding her suggestion, bounded off to the boulder. Without thinking, she took Oliver’s hand.
She felt him tense, and let go.
Why had she done that? The excitement of finally getting Owl into the water? These impulsive lapses always got her in trouble. “Reckless Irish blood” her mother had called it. She supposed that marrying Claude had been one of those lapses.
They clambered up the back of the rock where it sloped into the ground. The front end loomed some fifteen feet over the field and offered a truly spectacular view. Sarah sat on the weathered surface of the hound’s left eyebrow, and Oliver found a spot at a companionable distance beside her.
Wes sniffed around the base of the rock and she noticed his bandage was wet and muddy. “Would you like me to change that? I was a nurse once.”
“You were?”
“For a year, before I got married.” She first met Claude when he had surgery for a ruptured appendix. He was smart, handsome, witty, and full of fun. He had graduated from Harvard law school, passed the bar exam that month, and made a joke of his new job as a tax lawyer for the IRS. She fell for him like a ton of bricks.
Oliver looked down to where Wes was nosing the brush at the base of the rock. “Sure. I’ve got all the stuff in the house.”
“Do you come up here often?” she asked. “Wes seemed to know where we were going when I suggested it.”
“He’s got a pretty good vocabulary,” Oliver said, gazing into the distance. “It’s a good thinking spot.”
For the most part, any signs of human habitation were lost in the trees from this distance, and Sarah could imagine that she was looking down on Burnt Cove and Squirrel Point as they had been forty years ago, or a hundred and forty.
Perhaps it was just another of her impulsive lapses, but whatever the reason, Sarah told him about the day that Evan Huggard died. She had half-planned to tell Kate about it, now that Myra was gone, but something had held her back. For some reason, Oliver’s “thinking spot” seemed to be the right place and he seemed to be the right person, perhaps just because he was here. In some strange, almost magical way, the quiet timelessness of the place managed to bring past and present together.
* * *
Sarah was eighteen that last summer, and the camp was due to close the next day. She and Marlee Sue had both been camp counselors for two summers by then, and since one of Sarah’s duties was to teach sailing, she crossed the archery field to take a last look at Owl.
The afternoon was fading into twilight, and she found the boat sitting peacefully at her mooring in the stillness.
Several Buffleheads were paddling just offshore, and Sarah sat on the ledge above them, watching as they gradually worked their way into the shallows nearby, occasionally quacking softly to each other. Then, apparently sensing her presence, they swerved and swam quickly away.
It had been a bittersweet week as Sarah prepared to leave Migawoc for the last time. With college starting, she would need a better paying job next summer, and Sarah had been saying farewell to her favorite haunts.
The air turned cooler, causing Sarah to welcome her sweatshirt and regret her shorts. She got up and wandered along the shoreline in front of Myra’s house.
The ledges were wet below the high-tide line, and that was where Sarah wa
lked, looking for little creatures among the seaweed and small tidal pools that filled hollows in the rock.
* * *
It was so sudden there was no time to react.
Sarah was pushed from behind and fell headlong onto the seaweed. She scrambled to get up, but Evan Huggard flipped her over like an oversized fish.
“So, it’s Myra’s little friend,” he said, leering into her face. His breath reeked of alcohol.
She started to scream, but he was kneeling over her and holding her upper arms. He slammed her down against the ledge. The wet fronds of seaweed covering the rock were probably all that prevented him from shattering her skull. Dazed, she struggled and was slammed down again.
“Shut up, or I’ll smash your head in,” Evan said. He jerked her sweatshirt up and held it over her face like a sack.
Her head spun, and the world seemed to recede. With a strange detachment, she felt her shorts being yanked down, and heard Evan grunting as he struggled one-handed with his own clothing.
Chapter 23
It wasn’t happening to her. The wet, cold weed-covered rock was soaking someone else’s clothes.
Suddenly, there was a thud, Evan’s body twitched and was still, his weight pinning her to the rock. She lay paralyzed with terror for what seemed an eternity, her head spinning.
“Damn you!” a voice spat. Then the weight was gone.
Myra picked Sarah up as though she was a rag doll. “Don’t look,” Myra said urgently as she held the sweatshirt over Sarah’s face.
Myra crooned comfortingly, almost desperately, as she carried Sarah up to the house, laid her on the sofa, and covered her with a musty blanket.
Sarah had never been in Myra’s house before. It smelled as though the windows were seldom opened to the fresh air. Myra dried Sarah’s face with a stale-smelling towel and patted the blood on the back her head, talking softly all the while. The words didn’t register in Sarah’s mind, only that Myra had never spoken like this before.
After Sarah had stopped shivering, Myra went into the kitchen to make tea. Sarah heard her on the phone with somebody, probably Kate Merlew. From the snatches of conversation she could hear, Myra was saying that Sarah had fallen on the rocks.
She returned with a chipped mug. “Drink some tea. It’ll make you feel better.”
Sarah had never tasted tea so strong or so heavily sugared, but the hot liquid had a bracing effect. Myra sat on the edge of the sofa and tucked the blanket around Sarah’s feet.
“Kate will be here in a few minutes,” Myra said, “but we’ve got to talk first. What Evan tried to do was bad, but it could have been worse.”
Myra paused, her words hanging in the air, filling the shadowy room with menace.
Sarah relived the attack. Her stomach heaved, and Myra took the mug, holding Sarah’s hand until the moment passed.
“He had to be stopped before he did worse,” Myra went on. “You know that, don’t you?”
Sarah nodded her head and winced at the pain.
“It was drink made him do it. We mustn’t judge him for that. It’s best we put it behind us. Keep it a secret between you and me, and god. Remember, ‘judgement is mine says the Lord,’ so we should let Him hand out judgement. Do you understand?”
Sarah had never thought of Myra as a religious person and her references to god had always been profane—until now. She nodded again, winced again.
Myra studied Sarah’s face. “We need to make things right, but no good will come if you tell what he tried to do, just trouble for you. People will start looking at you funny, like you was some kind of slut, from no fault of your own. You’re not like me. You’ve got a good life ahead of you. Don’t ruin it by dragging this out.”
Myra gently brushed a strand of hair from Sarah’s face.
“Put it behind you, like it never happened. You’re strong. You’re a survivor. I saw that the first day you came over.”
Headlights swept across the dimly lit room.
“There’s your car,” Myra said. “Remember, let God punish the evil doers.”
Kate came in, a pale, frightened look on her face. She checked the blood-stained back of Sarah’s head and held her face to the light, checking Sarah’s eyes.
Kate never questioned her about what had happened. Perhaps she didn’t dare, and perhaps she didn’t think it mattered, because Sarah left for home the next morning, started college a few weeks later, and never came back to Burnt Cove or Migawoc camp again. Until now.
* * *
The story took a while to tell, and they sat in silence when she finished, staring out over the trees to Squirrel Point, so far away and yet so near.
Wes had scrambled onto the rock, and he lay between them, his head on Sarah’s leg. The bandage was grimier now, covered with twigs and bits of dead leaf. A dime-sized bloodstain had seeped through the gauze.
“And you never told anybody?” Oliver said after a while. He looked at her. His eyes, deep blue now, were solemn.
“No. I probably should have. At first it was like keeping a promise to Myra. Later on, there just never seemed to be a good time, or a good reason. After all, Evan drowned that night.”
Sarah realized she had been absentmindedly scratching Wes’ ear while she talked. He gazed up at her, and his soulful brown eyes seemed to be filled with the love, wisdom, and sorrow of the ages.
“I know it’s silly, but I’ve always felt guilty, as though he wouldn’t have attacked me if I hadn’t been wandering around out there, and he might not have ended up so drunk that he drowned that night.” She glanced at him, but Oliver was staring off towards the ledges of Burnt Cove.
“Myra even sent me a note,” she said, “saying what happened to Evan wasn’t my fault. ‘It was drink that did him in,’ was the way she put it.”
He turned to her. “A note?”
“Myra asked Cathy to send it to me if she died.”
“It sounds as though Myra knew you’d feel guilty about what happened.”
“Well, she was right.”
“There might be another reason for that note,” Oliver said, looking at her pensively. “If Myra knocked Evan out with a rock, or whatever it was, he must have come to with a hell of a headache, on top of being drunk. Why would he take his boat out in that condition? Wouldn’t he just sleep it off?”
He went on so gently, so quietly, that she strained to hear, “I hate to suggest this, but maybe Evan was already dead when she took you up to the house. If your face was covered, did you actually see anything?”
She felt exhausted and her stomach churned as it had that afternoon on Myra’s couch. “No.”
Had Myra had killed her own husband for Sarah’s sake?
Oliver reached over and touched Sarah’s hand where it rested on Wes’ back. His fingers felt warm on her skin. “It would explain a lot if Myra had killed Evan and then sank his boat to get rid of the body.”
Suddenly, she knew with an awful certainty that he was right, that she had refused to admit the truth to herself all these years.
The hideous, crunching thud of the blow echoed through her brain in all its gruesome clarity. Evan was dead when he collapsed onto her. Why had she refused to see it? Her vision tunneled. Then Oliver was there, his arm around her. She leaned into his shoulder and cried, great heaving sobs.
After a while, she became aware that Wes was licking her hand and whining worriedly. Oliver handed her a handkerchief that smelled faintly of cedar.
She dried her eyes, blew her nose, and returned the soggy piece of cloth. “Myra must have been wondering all along if I knew she had killed him, wondering if I’d turn her in.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t, or couldn’t see what was right in front of my face.”
“Happens to all of us. It would help explain why she gave Owl to you,” Oliver said.
“Yes. Set her house in order.”
Oliver looked at her with worried eyes. “The trouble with this theory is that if she real
ly did kill him, then I don’t think Myra was alone,” he murmured.
She stared at him.
“Think about it. Myra would have needed to carry Evan’s body over those rocks, load it into the dory, row out to Evan’s boat, and hoist it in. That’s heavy work for one person.”
Oliver went on relentlessly. “It isn’t easy to run a boat onto the rocks at night all by yourself and get away in one piece, either. Did they have an outboard motor for the dory?”
Sarah shook her head.
“Then she would have had to row a good three miles in the dark to get back home. Unless someone else had a power boat.”
Sarah was shivering. There must have been someone else. The same person who decorated her car and ran her off the road. And nearly everyone in Burnt Cove had access to a motorboat.
“You understand this is all guesswork, and a little far-fetched at that,” Oliver said reassuringly. “It’s more likely that Myra only knocked him out, like you remembered.”
“Don’t try to coddle me,” Sarah retorted, suddenly angry. “She killed him. It made such a crunching noise.”
He looked at her for what seemed like a very long time. “You have got to take this to the police.”
“What will they think, having me come in and report a forty-year-old murder I can’t even remember for sure. What can they do? Wouldn’t it just stir up trouble without solving anything? God, I’m talking like Pearly with the headstone.”
“This is nothing like Pearly and the headstone! This is a threat against you, probably by a killer.”
* * *
Oliver and Wes stood in the driveway watching Sarah’s piebald and dented Explorer tow Owl away. Her story about Evan’s death answered some questions, but raised others. If Myra had an accomplice, who could it be? Was there a connection to the Merlew’s inviting Sarah to Maine? Had they known all along that Evan had been murdered? Had Myra’s accomplice panicked when Sarah turned up in town after all those years, and had run her off the road? Was Evan’s death tied in with the murders of Myra and Cathy?
Gravely Dead: A Midcoast Maine Mystery Page 16