Wes sat and leaned against Oliver’s leg.
He had underestimated Sarah, Oliver thought ruefully. She hadn’t come to Maine just to get away from a failed marriage, the way he had come here to run away from Arlene’s death. Sarah had come, apparently subconsciously, to confront a trauma that must have scarred much of her life. He stood, feeling both humbled and worried, and stared down the driveway where dust from the Ford’s passage hung in the air.
Chapter 24
Saturday morning was sunny and unseasonably warm when Oliver arrived at Pearly’s boatyard, where he found Owl sitting on her trailer at the top of the launching ramp. Pearly had set up the boat’s mast and spars, and Sarah was standing in the cockpit attaching the sail. Pearly looked up from sorting out a tangle of lines.
“Don’t just stand there,” he said to Oliver, “make yourself useful. Take this.” He handed Oliver what looked like the jib sheet.
“Where’s Eldon?”
“He’ll be in this afternoon. I told him to take the morning off, because the cops were on his case again yesterday. They haven’t got him in jail, but that’s about the best you can say.” He handed Oliver another coil of line.
A light breeze from the northwest was blowing puffy clouds across the sky and bringing warm, blossom-scented air from inland. A mixture of sailboats, outboards and lobsterboats were taking advantage of the weather.
At last they had the boat rigged and her sails bent on.
“You got a good pump?” Pearly asked Sarah. “A bucket?”
Sarah held up both from the equipment still littering the cockpit. They had been on Oliver’s list.
“She’ll probably leak like a sieve for a couple of days where she’s been stored so long,” Pearly warned. “Back her into the water. We’ll tie up to the float and see how bad it is.”
Sarah climbed over the rail onto the fender, and dropped to the ground.
“You can use one of the moorings out front until I get one set up in Burnt Cove.” Pearly looked around. “Where’s your dinghy?”
Sarah looked flustered, and Oliver noticed a red welt on her neck, a black fly bite, probably from yesterday.
We don’t have launch service,” Pearly added patiently.
So much for lists, Oliver thought to himself. “I’ve got an old Puffin she can use,” he said hastily.
“I’ll pick it up this afternoon,” she said, shooting him a grateful look.
Sarah fumbled for the Explorer’s keys in her jeans pocket and started towards the Explorer, then stopped.
“What ever happened to Evan Huggard’s boat?” she asked.
Pearly, startled by the question, stared for a second. “Evan Huggard’s lobsterboat?”
“Myra left me her boats.”
Pearly shook his head as though conceding there was no limit to the astonishments of life. “My old man managed to raise her after the accident, but she was too stove up do anything with. Evan must have been going a ton when he hit the ledge. Stem was gone, back broken. It sat in the back of the yard for years. I finally salvaged what I could and burned the rest.”
He glanced at Sarah, looking a bit defensive. “It wasn’t as though Myra was paying storage or anything, and it used to be legal to burn stuff like that back then.”
“What about the dory?” Sarah asked.
“Nobody ever found it. We figured Evan must have been towing it when he went onto the ledge, and it sank or drifted off.”
Sarah and Oliver traded glances. If Myra had been alone, then she would have needed to row the dory back after sinking Evan and his lobsterboat. In that case, where was it? How else could she have gotten home?
“How did they find Evan?” Sarah asked.
“Winn Tupper was out pulling pots, saw his body and some wreckage floating out by Brill ledge.”
* * *
Pearly and Oliver stood on the float and watched Owl glide out of Pearly’s little cove and into the sound, where a gust of wind caught the Herreshoff and heeled it as the boat built up speed. Another cat’s paw sent a flurry of ripples racing off across the water, searching for another sail to fill.
“I don’t like her being out there all alone,” Oliver said.
“Looks like she can sail pretty well,” Pearly replied. He looked at Oliver’s face. “Hell, the worst that could happen would be to spring a leak, or have a plank-end pop loose, and you checked the fastenings. Beside, there’s plenty of boats out there to pick her up.”
“Mmm,” Oliver said distractedly. Something about Pearly’s conversation with Sarah teased the back of his mind, just out of reach. But what? He continued to watch Owl gradually shrink into the distance, and his uneasiness grew. Was Myra’s gift to Sarah really driven by guilt or a dying old woman’s thank-you for Sarah’s years of silence?
Or was Myra manipulating people from beyond the grave? The more Oliver thought the more he worried.
* * *
Sarah set out across the sound towards Myra’s place. The stretch of water was only a couple of miles wide here, not far, even in her little sailboat.
The wind blowing off the land was erratic and required constant adjustments as Owl heeled to a gust one minute and sat almost becalmed the next. Sarah hadn’t sailed in many years, so she was rusty, but the old skills quickly returned, and the wind steadied as she got further from shore.
She had almost invited Oliver to come—he looked so hopeful, but the picnic lunch she packed was barely enough for herself. Besides, she wanted to savor her first sail alone.
This was what she had come to Maine for—the feeling of freedom and peace. That, and the chance to rethink her life. Unfortunately, much of her thinking centered around Myra Huggard. And now Evan.
She still didn’t know whether it had been the place or the person that had caused her to confide in Oliver about Evan Huggard. Kate, or almost anyone else, would have been a more logical choice. Except that Oliver hadn’t been around when Evan died and couldn’t have been involved. He was someone she could trust.
Sarah realized now that it had been some kind of psychological block that her youthful mind had erected against the emotional trauma of Evan’s murder that made her believe he was only unconscious, and had died later in a drunken accident. Oliver had demolished her comfortable illusion as easily as shattering a mirror. Now, the only question was whether Myra had an accomplice, as Oliver suggested, to help dispose of the body on Brill Ledge.
Reality was so awfully slippery. Just when you thought you had a firm hold on it, something happened to knock everything askew. Seeing the reality of Evan’s death after all that time had shaken Sarah’s self confidence to the core. If she had misread something as obvious as that, what other illusions was she harboring? What about her assumptions around Myra? What about her own marriage? Did she share more of the blame for its failure than she had thought? Was she dismissing Claude’s talk about reconciliation unfairly? There were no answers, only a churning fog of uncertainty.
Her mind returned to Evan’s death. Oliver could be underestimating Myra’s strength. Sarah had been no lightweight, even in her youth, but Myra had picked her up and carried her back to the house effortlessly. Couldn’t she have done the rest of it too?
On the other hand, the missing dory and her near death experience with the truck in the fog, suggested a second person; Someone who had been wondering for years how much Sarah knew, or had actually seen, that afternoon. But who? Sam was a possibility. The phone call Myra made that afternoon might have been to ask Sam’s help with the body, as well as ask Kate to pick up Sarah. But why would the Merlews invite her to Maine if they thought she could implicate Sam in Evan’s death?
What about Brian? He might have been there at the time of the attack, helping Sam get an early start on the fall cleanup. Was Brian’s attentiveness just an attempt to find out what she knew, and see if she was planning to stir up trouble over Evan’s death?
Sarah had always suspected that Evan beat his wife. Myra’s unexplained aches and pa
ins, and her occasional bruises, suggested as much. She wasn’t an expert on abusive relationships, but Sarah thought if she were in Myra’s shoes she would have been glad to see the last of Evan, no matter who did the killing.
A seal popped its head up among the lobster buoys and watched Owl glide by. The big, soulful eyes and bristling whiskers reminded her of Wes, and she felt a surge of anger. Sarah had never cared for dogs before, but somehow Wes had won her over. What kind of person would shoot a dog like that?
Sarah resolutely tacked Owl away from Squirrel Point. She would go down the other side of the sound and pass through the gut between the mainland and Long Island.
* * *
Since Oliver didn’t carry a cell phone and didn’t approve of them or the ugly towers they spawned, he was forced to stop at the big Irving gas station on Route 1, where he tried Brian from one of the few remaining pay phones. There was no answer, and Oliver guessed that the Realtor was probably out with a client.
He continued south on Route 1, turning onto Merrifield road towards Burnt Cove.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into the Merlew’s driveway. Their van was gone, but Kate was cleaning up the flower bed beside the house. A forest of daffodils filled part of the garden with yellows and whites, while green sprouts dotted the rest. Freshly planted violets ran along the front. Kate rose stiffly to her feet as he stopped.
“Oliver, what a pleasant surprise,” she said. “Sam is away running some errands, if you’re looking for him, and I’m just about to go inside and make some tea if you’d like to join me. Half an hour of kneeling is my limit nowadays.”
He sat at the kitchen table while the old woman fussed with tea. She finally joined him at the table.
“What have you been up to this morning?” she asked.
“I was down at Pearly’s watching Owl go into the water.”
“Sarah told us this was the big day. She’s been very excited. It was awfully nice of you to help her fix up the boat.”
“It was nice of Myra to buy a boat for the camp,” Oliver said.
“She got a kick out of the kids, I suppose.”
“It was generous of Myra to give the boat to Sarah,” he added. “I wonder why Myra asked you to send it down to her last fall.”
Kate busily stirred her tea. “Myra knew she didn’t have much time.”
“Of all the campers who visited Myra over the years, Sarah must have been quite a favorite,” Oliver said.
Kate took a careful sip from the steaming cup.
“We knew a few of the girls went over there occasionally,” she said. “Looking back, we shouldn’t have let them wander around so much, but the world was a safer place in those days, and Myra enjoyed having them—the ones she liked, anyway. She ran the others off.”
“And she obviously liked Sarah.”
“Sarah was a nice, level-headed little girl as a camper, and a good counselor later on. And she was one of the few girls who visited Myra with any regularity. The rest were put off by her ways.”
“It must seem funny to have Owl fixed up after all those years. I suppose it brings back a lot of memories.”
Kate looked at him warily. “It had been sitting in our barn for years, just taking up space. And Sarah loved Owl.”
One of those long, rectangular pill boxes with a hinged cover for each day of the week sat on the table. He could see through the translucent plastic that most of the compartments were empty. Kate fiddled with the box, her thumb twitching at Saturday’s lid.
“You must have wondered why Myra hung onto the boat, when she could have sold it and gotten some money.”
“We put it away in the barn when the camp closed, and forgot about it. She never mentioned Owl, so we assumed she’d forgotten about it too, or decided to let us have it.”
“She never came over to look at it?”
“Look at Owl? God, no. Why would she?” Kate replied.
“When did you learn something was hidden in the boat?”
Kate put the cup down carefully, holding it in both hands, as though afraid it might escape. “How did you find out?” she said.
“It’s the only answer that makes any sense.”
Chapter 25
“We thought it was all over when Myra died,” Kate said. “We figured it was finished and we could forget about her blackmail schemes. And we could forget about what happened to Evan.”
She paused. Oliver waited.
“It all happened so quickly,” she went on. “Sam was walking along the edge of the archery field, picking things up. You know, the stuff that kids always leave lying around at the end of the season, and Myra came over to check on him, see what he was up to. Myra was like that, especially when she thought somebody might be walking on her property. She was very possessive that way.”
Kate’s gaze moved from the teacup to the sunlit window.
“They were talking and thought they heard noises, like a struggle, down on the rocks. So they went over to see—”
She looked into Oliver’s eyes, searching for understanding.
“Those girls were like our own children, it was like Sam’s own daughter was being attacked. If he’d had a chance to think, but it happened so fast. . .” Tears ran down Kate’s wrinkled cheek. “Anyway, Myra carried Sarah up to the house . . .”
Kate stopped, like a wind-up toy running down.
“And then?” Oliver prompted after a while, afraid of breaking the spell that was leading Kate on.
“Evan kept his dory on a haul-line out front, and Sam loaded Evan into it while Myra was waiting for me to come and pick up Sarah—it was fairly dark by then. Later, Sam and Myra took the body and rowed out to Evan’s boat. Then Myra took the boat out to run it onto the ledge, and Sam followed in our Whaler.”
“And the dory?”
“There were some blood stains, and Myra was worried about them, so they weighed it down with an anchor and sank it out beyond the ledge.”
Rage colored Kate’s face. “Myra’s dammed camera. It was while they were rowing Evan’s body out to his boat. It was so dark Sam didn’t even realize she had it until the flash went off.”
“She took a picture?” Oliver’s jaw dropped.
“Four of them, before she was done.” The indignation was fresh in spite of the years. “There would have been more, but she only had one flashcube. Sam tried to take the camera away at first, but he was rowing, the dory was tippy, and Myra was pretty strong. Besides, he was in a state of shock. I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”
“Myra used the pictures to blackmail you? But she was as guilty as Sam.”
Kate looked exasperated. “Don’t you see what would have happened if it came out that one of our campers was attacked, and there had been a murder to cover it up? Parents would have pulled their kids out in droves. We’d have been ruined. We were on pins and needles for years, worrying that Sarah would say something.”
She took another sip of tea. “On the other hand, when we thought about it, we weren’t absolutely sure it was an attack. Sarah wasn’t screaming or struggling all that much.”
Oliver stared at Kate, appalled. The girl had been slammed onto the rocks, stunned, terrified, the breath knocked out of her, her sweatshirt pulled over her head. How much screaming and struggling did Kate expect? He bit back a retort.
Kate was too absorbed in her memories to notice Oliver’s expression. “Myra wasn’t all that greedy, really. She was just trying to survive. We all have to survive. For years she’d ask for money to help pay the property taxes and we gave it to her, at least until the camp closed. I think the tax assessors tried to go easy on her, but even so, waterfront land like hers isn’t cheap.”
She looked at Oliver defiantly. “It cost us a lot of money over the years, but we didn’t kill her. Why should we? We weren’t even giving her anything the last few years.”
Oliver nodded, hoping she was telling the truth, hoping she spoke for Sam as well. “When did Myra ask you to send Owl down to Sa
rah?”
“Cathy brought Myra over for a visit last fall, around the middle of October. That’s when we learned Sarah was going to get the boat. Myra said she wanted Sarah to have it right away, before she died. I suppose we should have been suspicious, but it never occurred to us that she might have hidden copies of the pictures in Owl, of all places.”
Kate sighed. “She must have snuck out some night while the boat was still in the water and hid them aboard it, probably not long after Evan died. I suppose it appealed to her twisted sense of humor to hide copies in Owl.”
“How did you find out they were there?”
“Cathy came over the morning after Myra died. She was in a state, crying and blubbering. She told us Myra had hidden what she called ‘blackmail stuff’ in the boat. I don’t think she knew what the blackmail stuff was. She just felt badly about Myra extorting money from us.”
“And that’s why you invited Sarah to spend the summer up here?”
“We thought it would be fun to have someone in the apartment, too,” she said defensively. “We figured it would be easy to find the pictures once we had the boat in the back yard. It’s not as though they’re really important any more, with the camp closed and Myra dead. We just wanted to get rid of them and be done with it once and for all.”
“Tying up loose ends.”
Kate nodded. “The trouble was that Cathy never told us where to look before she disappeared, and then Sarah took Owl right up to your place, so we never had time to go over it.”
“There are a lot of places to hide a few pictures, even in a small boat,” Oliver said, thinking he knew where to look.
“I don’t see what Myra expected Sarah to do with the pictures,” Oliver added. “Why not just let you have them?”
“She was getting kind of batty, so we assumed that she must have forgotten about them, and gave Owl to Sarah as payback for keeping her mouth shut about Evan. Then things started happening to Sarah.”
Gravely Dead: A Midcoast Maine Mystery Page 17