Murder's No Votive Confidence

by Christin Brecher

  Jessica reached behind her and grabbed an unused china cup and saucer from an empty table.

  “Sit,” she said, and patted an empty chair at their square table.

  I sat.

  Jessica poured a steaming cup of coffee that looked delicious and pushed it toward me.

  “I love that candle, Stella. I expect that it will remind me forever of this special weekend.” Jessica suddenly got a little misty. “In fact, I’m planning to order more so I can light them every year on Joe and my anniversary and we can tell the kids all about our wedding.”

  “I already made you extras,” I said, waving off my own set of waterworks. “You’re sure you still like it?”

  “She’s sure,” said her mother, pouring a pack of sugar into her cup in a way that told us to cut out the sentiment before she lost it, too.

  “Come on,” Jessica said to her mother. “Let’s take a last look at the unity candle. Tomorrow it will be up on the altar.”

  “No. You’ve made it clear. You’ve got everything covered,” said Mrs. Sterling definitively. If Emily were here, she would understand the subtleties of this dynamic from years of experience, but I was winging it.

  “It’s no problem,” I said, rising.

  “Please?” Jessica said to her mother.

  A deep love flickered across Mrs. Sterling’s otherwise controlled face as she looked at her daughter. I concluded in that moment that whatever issues Mrs. Sterling was having about her daughter’s wedding, she adored Jessica more than anything else in the world. She rose and adjusted her sweater.

  “It is a beautiful scent, Stella,” said Mrs. Sterling. “I like the seagrass note.”

  I beamed at the compliment, feeling that Mrs. Sterling did not hand them out lightly, and I led our small group to a room off the kitchen that had become the wedding’s staging and storage area. Given its size, it was more like a glorified closet, but it had a window and a good-sized worktable in the middle, plus lots of shelves along the walls to keep track of things in an organized way. I opened the door to find all of my boxes of candles and ten times more of Emily’s supplies. Yesterday, I’d placed the unity candle on a shelf in a shaded area of the room, but now, to my horror, I noticed that the shelf was empty.

  “Jessica, did someone move the unity candle?” I asked. I wondered if perhaps it had been moved to the Siasconset Chapel about twenty minutes down the road, in anticipation of the evening’s rehearsal.

  “I took it to the Game Room to show Joe and the others last night. The bartender said he would return it safe and sound,” said Jessica. “Why?”

  “Is there a problem?” said Mrs. Sterling in full-on Mom mode that scared the socks off of me.

  “No,” I said lightly. I picked up the phone to call the inn’s manager to find out if he had seen the candle, but Jessica motioned to me to hang up.

  “I bet Joe has it,” she said. “That’s so damn sweet. All I’ve done is tell him how much I love it. He probably didn’t trust the bartender to bring it back in here last night.”

  Jessica called Joe, and gushed a little. They were so cute. She hung up a moment later, however, looking confused.

  “Joe says he doesn’t have it.”

  “Call Tony,” said her mother, folding her arms. She looked at me. “Have you met Tony Carlson?”

  I shook my head, although I knew she was referring to the best man. I also knew there were a total of five members of the Sterling-Handler wedding who had arrived last night. They were Jessica, Mrs. Sterling, Joe Handler, Tony Carlson, and Jessica’s uncle, Simon Sterling. As I understood it from Emily, Jessica’s father had died just over a year ago.

  “Tony probably had too much to drink last night and thought it would be funny to take it,” said Mrs. Sterling.

  Jessica dutifully called Tony. She apologized for waking him, then hung up looking more concerned.

  “No, again,” she said.

  “Well, I can’t imagine what Simon would want with it, so someone at the hotel must have it,” said Mrs. Sterling. “Call the manager.”

  “Let me call Simon,” said Jessica. She flipped through her contacts, called, and waited. Then, she frowned, looked at her watch, and dialed again. “No answer. Maybe he has his phone on mute. I’ll knock. Mom, you look for the manager. Stella, can you come with me? I don’t know Simon Sterling very well. He’s my dad’s brother, but they were estranged so I’d never met him before last night. That probably sounds weird, but I need someone to walk me down the aisle. If for some reason he took the candle, though, I wouldn’t mind if you, um—”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’ll tell him we need it back so there’s no tension between you two.”

  She squeezed my arm in thanks as we headed up the stairs to the second floor. Ten paces down the hall, however, we heard a strange scratching noise against Uncle Simon’s door.

  “What’s that?” said Jessica. She lagged behind me, but I forged ahead in search of my candle.

  I knocked on the door.

  “Uncle Simon?” Jessica said from behind me.

  The scratching stopped for a moment. We both put our ears against the door. I don’t know why I did. I surely did not want to hear that noise again.

  “Uncle Simon?” said Jessica, more loudly.

  “Eeeeow,” came an unmistakable sound from the other side of the door.

  It was a cat. Not a quiet cat, but one with a screeching, horrible mew.

  “Excuse me,” said Jessica to a passing housekeeper. The woman was Maude Duffy, a dear family friend whose son I used to babysit when I was in high school. “Can you let me into this room? My uncle is staying in here, but we can’t seem to rouse him.”

  Maude looked at me and I gave her an all-go nod, so she fished out her passkey. No sooner had she opened the door than a flash of black fur, darker than my own wild mane, dashed out of the room and down the stairs. We peeked inside, but the bed was still made. No sign of Uncle Simon.

  “Did you already clean the room?” I asked Maude.

  “It’s seven in the morning,” she said without a trace of defensiveness. “I just got here.”

  In the distance, the sound of scratching and mewing resumed.

  For a moment there was silence.

  Then, came a scream I’ll never forget.

  They say that when people go into shock, they sometimes do the opposite of what they should. Like someone pulls out a gun, and the person just stands there. Or an earthquake hits and instead of staying inside, everyone runs outside. Stuff like that. A scream would suggest danger ahead. The scream I heard would suggest that as creepy as Uncle Simon’s empty room was, the best idea would be to run into it, lock the door, and dodge under his bed. Instead, we all did the opposite. We ran down the stairs, past the reception desk, and toward two open doors to the Game Room, in front of which that cursed cat sat, still and erect, eyes on us like a sentry.

  Inside, Mrs. Sterling stood shaking and looking as if she were ready for another scream. The inn’s manager, Frank, a tall, slim man, about my age, who was impeccably dressed for work at this early hour, was beside her looking as if he were summoning every fiber of strength not to join her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, but didn’t get a chance to hear the answer because Jessica, a step or two ahead of me, let out her own scream.

  Doors above us started opening.

  Footsteps from other areas of the hotel began to stampede toward us.

  Maude, who I once saw kill a snake with her own hands, fainted.

  And then I saw the most horrible image I’d ever seen.

  Lying on the floor, was my once mighty unity candle, broken in two.

  The candle itself would be easy enough to fix, but the fact that Jessica’s estranged uncle, Simon Sterling, was lying next to it with his head bashed in suggested a cause of death no one could dispute.

  Chapter 3

  “Shut the door,” said Frank, his phone out and already dialing 9-1-1.

  “Don’t touch t
he doorknobs!” said Maude, regaining consciousness. “Fingerprints.”

  Maude’s a woman of few words, but when she speaks, people listen. No one closed the door. Frank was too busy relaying the situation to the police to notice that no one followed his orders.

  I tried desperately not to look at the dead body of Simon Sterling. Instead, I looked at the wood-paneled bookshelves, a billiards table, the fireplace, the portrait of a whaling captain over the mantel. I stared through the doors and into the lobby. There, the concierge was holding back an elderly couple and a busboy from Ahab’s by making himself into a human yellow-tape barrier with his outstretched arms. Good man. The Melville is a seasonal resort that does not officially open until Memorial Day weekend. Even so, I suspected the concierge would have his work cut out for him. I knew from Emily that other than the Sterling party, there were three other rooms occupied last night, a sort of soft launch, and that those guests were leaving today.

  While I did my best to avoid looking at the crime scene, others in the room had their own reactions. Mrs. Sterling sank to her knees over the dead body while Jessica retched over an empty vase I knew Emily was planning to fill with freesia at about eleven this morning when she and I were scheduled to arrive for setup. We’d planned to have the hotel transformed by two o’clock in the afternoon, before the wedding guests arrived for the long weekend. Looking at that vase, I suddenly registered the fact that the weekend’s plans had profoundly changed.

  “He looks so much like your father. How did I never notice?” said Mrs. Sterling. She sat over her brother-in-law’s body and touched his arm.

  Still lying on the floor, Maude turned her head toward the dead man and raised an eyebrow. I followed her gaze across the navy Persian carpet upon which Simon Sterling lay splayed on his back, and I knew what Maude was getting at. Although his tweed jacket was beautifully cut, and his thick hair combed in perfect lines, I could only assume that Jessica’s father was an unusual-looking man if he looked anything like his brother did right now. Simon’s eyes, for one, stared fiercely at us. I should say eye. One, which was punctuated by a solid black bruise, looked boldly ahead while the other was closed in a mocking wink that gave him an ironically taunting expression for someone in his position. I only gave myself five seconds to view the body, but I’ll never be able to erase the image. Trust me, I’ve tried. I reached down and helped Maude to her feet. She brushed me off with a look that warned me never to tell a soul she’d fainted.

  “God, I miss Henry,” Mrs. Sterling said, choking a tear. “If it wasn’t for this good-for-nothing brother of his, he might still be alive.”

  So much for keeping unkind words about the dead to oneself.

  Jessica sank beside her mother and put her arms around her. The two women held each other, crying for Henry Sterling while his dead brother kind of smirked at them. I started to have a feeling that Simon Sterling was not the greatest guy, in spite of the fact that he had offered to walk his niece down the aisle.

  “Oh my God, Jessica,” said a new arrival to the scene who dashed past the beleaguered concierge and into the room, tripping over his own two feet. “Get back. Everyone, get back.”

  The man had a thick mop of hair that stuck up in ways it should not. He was about my age, but his face was a deep, flushed red. It was a shade that suggested high blood pressure, and it got brighter around the rims of his ears. I found it fascinating that he wore socks with his pajamas, and, given the wedding’s price tag, that the socks had holes in them. He ran toward Jessica, peeled her away from her mother, and pulled the ladies to the far end of the room.

  “Oh, Joe,” said Jessica, clinging to his neck, which was an inch or two below her shoulders.

  I’m not proud of it, but all I was thinking at that moment was: Get. Out. Of. Town. Joe Handler must be insanely rich or funny or I don’t know what, because he was the opposite of my James Bond–Disney Prince image. I know, I know. This was a ridiculous and trivial detail to notice in the middle of a violent tragedy, but I was freaked out about the dead body that I was still standing near. I think it was a coping mechanism.

  “What’s happened?” said a man, trailing behind Joe, who needed a good shave. He looked at the room, and then let out an expletive that fit the moment.

  “Language, Tony,” Mrs. Sterling said to the wedding’s best man through her tears.

  Another man entered a pace or two behind Tony. He let out the same expletive, then closed the doors. Fortunately for him, he did not touch the knobs or I suspect his wife, Maude, would have had a strong word or two of her own. Bill Duffy, the hotel’s bartender and off-season caretaker, immediately crossed over to his wife and put his arm around her. Bill wouldn’t be on duty until the lunch seating at Ahab’s, but he walked Maude to work every day from an old cottage the inn provided for them down the road. I’ve known the Duffys since I was in high school. Bill ran a handyman business and was a regular visitor to my mother’s store, which in those days had a leak that was always giving her problems. He even taught me how to dunk a basketball in high school when I was trying out for the team. In exchange for a hefty discount for his handy services, I babysat for their son. I wasn’t really supposed to get paid, but Bill and Maude are a generous couple. They always slipped me what they could when I’d leave their house.

  Bill gave me a reassuring smile, which I returned. I didn’t see the Duffys as much as I used to, but I have a very soft spot for them. They’re a good family, and a great couple. Bill and Maude remind me of a poem my grandma taught me as a kid about Jack Sprat who would eat no fat and his wife who eats no lean. Except the minute you see them together, you know they were meant for each other. That’s what I’m going for.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Jessica said to Tony in an angry outburst that brought me back to the moment. “Uncle Simon was murdered. This can’t be happening. Oh my God, is that our unity candle?”

  I started to feel nauseous. It seemed out of the question to leave the scene, but the room was beginning to feel claustrophobic. I found a seat at a card table by the window where I was as far from the body as possible. As the chaotic and panicky conversation in the room continued to swirl around me, I focused on the unity candle.

  Yesterday morning, I had delivered the candle to the inn and had put it on a dark and cool shelf, away from everything else, to protect its delicate gold embellishments. The candle’s ornamentation was an exact copy of the beaded flowers on Jessica’s wedding dress. The design twisted around the entire circumference of the smooth wax. It looked deceivingly delicate, but I knew how heavy and strong the wax was. It would take a lot of force to break this candle in half as someone had done. Simon Sterling had not stood a chance.

  I instinctively found the need to reclaim my candle before it became an official part of a crime scene. I stood, surprised at how steady my legs were, crossed the room, and leaned over to pick up both ends of the candle, which were still strung together by the wick. When I stood, I noticed that Tony was taking pictures of the room. He seemed to be the only one who was thinking about the crime scene. I was impressed until he leaned over the body to take a picture and dropped his phone on the dead man. He picked it up off the body, which elicited a communal groan.

  “Don’t touch the body, Tony. Or take pictures. And you. Put the candle down,” said Mrs. Sterling. She grabbed the candle from me and put it back on the floor. “This is evidence.”

  Immediately, I saw the error of my ways. The Melville’s shaken manager did, too. I didn’t know Frank well, but he had been working at the Melville since it had opened two years ago. This was his worst nightmare come true. He covered the body with a cashmere throw that hung on the arm of a leather couch for the guests’ comfort, while I tried to rearrange the candle ends in their original position. I was hoping Tony had gotten a photo of the candle before I had tampered with the evidence when I heard my name.

  “Seriously, Stella?”

  “Cut it out, Andy,” I said without needing to look up.
“I panicked.”

  Andy Southerland stood tall and looked at the mess. When this guy’s off duty, he is all smiles. You’ll find him in a T-shirt, jeans, and hiking boots with a baseball cap topping off his thick, dark hair. He shares a hello and a joke with everyone in town, and they reciprocate happily. When Andy is on duty, however, he is all business. His smile transforms into a strong and serious jawline, and his body language shifts to controlled and skilled action. Right now, he looked something like an animal on the hunt. I watched his quiet, dark eyes scan the room and take in the situation.

  As I slunk back to my chair at the card table, the nausea returned and I realized it was from a smell in the room. Tobacco. I hate the smell of pipe tobacco. One summer, I tried to develop more musky scents, things that our social constructs would deem masculine. I spent one evening on a tobacco blend and got a migraine. Now, I remembered the same odor in Simon’s room. I had been too busy dodging his cat to focus at the time, but there was no doubt that the scent was one and the same. Confirming my suspicions, I noticed the offending pipe about two feet away from Simon, beneath the vase to which Jessica was once more clinging.

  With Andy’s entrance, the room calmed down. There were eight of us, and we all looked expectantly at Andy, but I knew he’d never had a murder case before. In Nantucket we have our fair share of stolen bikes, and definitely some drunk and disorderly conduct. Occasionally we have car accidents. But murder? No. We’re a town where people feel comfortable leaving doors unlocked for the most part. You might come home to find someone has entered your house, but in that case it would be to leave a freshly caught lobster, or homemade clam chowder. We don’t go around murdering each other.

  “I need everyone to remain calm,” said Andy.