Death in the Off-Season

by Francine Mathews

  books by the author

  Death in the Off-Season

  Death in Rough Water

  Death in a Mood Indigo

  Death in a Cold Hard Light

  written under the name

  stephanie barron

  Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

  Jane and the Man of the Cloth

  Jane and the Wandering Eye

  Jane and the Genius of the Place

  Jane and the Stillroom Maid

  Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House

  Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

  Jane and His Lordship’s Legacy

  Jane and the Barque of Frailty

  Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

  Jane and the Canterbury Tale

  Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas

  Jane and the Waterloo Map

  Copyright © 1994, 2016 by Francine Mathews

  All rights reserved.

  Published in 2016 by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mathews, Francine.

  Death in the off-season / Francine Mathews.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-726-1

  eISBN 978-1-61695-727-8

  1. Folger, Merry (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women

  detectives—Massachusetts—Nantucket Island—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3563.A8357 D43 2016 813.54—dc23 2015042662

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated with love to my mother,

  Elizabeth MacEntee Barron,

  who always believed

  Y

  Introduction

  Death in the Off-Season is the first mystery novel I wrote, many years ago in 1992. I was working as an intelligence analyst at the CIA at the time, had no children, and was not yet thirty. The book began as an experiment of sorts—my husband challenged me to write a novel—and I chose to set it on Nantucket, a place I had long loved. It seemed to me that the island’s rich history and relative insularity—in the off-season, at least—were similar to those of small English villages immortalized in classic British detective fiction. Or, as Jane Austen once advised, “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.”

  I did not really expect the book to be published. It began as an exercise in form, and that is where I thought it would end.

  Death in the Off-Season found an audience, however, and precipitated a change in my career. I left the CIA, and three more books featuring Detective Meredith Folger and her circle of friends followed in swift succession. Other work claimed my attention over the ensuing decades—the raising of two sons and the writing of other books. It was only recently, when Soho Press asked me to write a new novel in the series and planned to reissue the previous Nantucket mysteries, that I looked with new eyes at the stories I had told.

  I decided that a twenty-year gap in the lives of Meredith Folger, Peter Mason, and their families was too great for most readers to support, and that the fifth book ought to pick up where the fourth left off. That meant, however, that I would have to revise the existing novels in the series to make them compatible with a new story in the present time frame. Much has changed on Nantucket Island since the mid-nineties, and much has changed about American life in general. My personal style of writing has also evolved. This new edition of Death in the Off-Season is therefore something of a departure from the original.

  I hope that those readers who first met Meredith at publication in 1994 will find her only more interesting in this version, and enjoy the streamlined series—several of the books under new titles—as each is reintroduced.

  Francine Mathews

  Denver, CO

  October 2015

  Prologue

  A perfect night for feijoada. The thought came to him unbidden as he stared through the windshield at the fog, a fluid blackness wrapping the car like a mourning sheet. Feijoada. Pungent rice and black beans with bits of pork and sausage, it was food intended to comfort—like most of his life in Brazil’s decaying paradise.

  His life. The car creaked into a pothole, lurching on its ravaged shock absorbers, and the motion sent blood pound­ing into his temples. He was exhausted, and his thoughts darted like fish in a disturbed pool; the nine-hour flight and the night ferry were catching up with him. He shivered in the creeping dampness. His life. He had to hold on to it, despite the insidious enemy, the threat cours­ing through his veins. He had to do more than escape. He had to win.

  He’d always hated this island. Hated the fog, the way it masked his sight, made him stumble, and turned the familiar into something threatening. He felt vulnerable on Nantucket, something no Mason could ever endure. Masons destroyed the vulnerable, for God’s sake.

  The car came to a stop, engine idling, its headlights picking up the glint of the livestock gate’s gray metal bars. He stared at it an instant, taking in the words mason farms, painted in a red semicircle on a square white signboard; and then he bared his teeth at the family do­main.

  “Open the gate for me,” his driver said.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s how you were raised.”

  He hesitated an instant, then shoved the door wide. The car was filled with the smell of salt and pine. He stepped tentatively into the opaque night, breathing his discomfort in quick bursts, the fog smoothing his brow with a wet hand. Only a few steps to the gatepost and the wire loop holding the bars closed against the sheep.

  He crossed in front of the headlights, feeling exposed and backlit, and glanced over his shoulder. The glare blinded him momentarily, as he had known it would, and he blinked, thinking for an instant that the car’s sudden movement was a trick of the light, something to do with the fog, and not the hurling of wheels and metal toward his body. The first stab of fear and understanding came just as the hood of the car crashed into his spine, throwing him up and backward, snapping his skull against the windshield.

  He skittered off the roof into a darkness that was filled with searing pain, unbounded by the edges of his body. The fog, he thought, fighting for sense even as it left him; and knew with anguish that he was lost.

  Chapter 1

  Will awoke, as he did every day, a few seconds before his mother turned from the muffins she was mixing in the kitchen two floors below and walked to the stairs. He lay still, his eyes closed in the semi-dark, listening for her voice.

  “Will! Will, it’s past six!”

  Labor Day. He hugged the stillness of the early morning to himself for a few seconds longer; tomorrow he’d be torn from sleep and thrust into the long tedium of the school year. With it would come winter—shorter days, fewer ferries to the mainland, and the disappearance of the summer people, whose energy and strident voices broke the island’s isolation for a few months.

  “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” he murmured sleepily, and then stopped, self-conscious. His voice had changed a year ago and its new depth still had the power to startle him. He thrust his head deeper into his pillow and groped for the strands of a dream that had drifted across his brain an instant before his mother’s voice turned night to day. No good; it was gone. His eyes flicked open.

  The attic room high above the restaurant faced east, into the morn­ing sun, but today a livid white light filtered through the shade, and the groan of horns, human and suffering, rose off the water. That meant fog, his favorite weather. He
felt a rush of satisfaction as he threw back the bedclothes and swung adolescent legs, lanky and beautiful, onto the rag rug. It was boom day at the bog, and Peter would need him early to work the flooded cranberry beds.

  He pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and ran down the two flights, three steps at a time, passing his mother’s second-floor living area and the freshly painted dining rooms at the stairs’ foot. The kitchen sat at the back of the house, down a length of narrow, aged corridor that smelled of dry rot; the off-islanders considered it quaint. He pushed open the swinging door and a rush of air blew his dark bangs back from his forehead.

  His mother turned from the sink and gave him a brief smile as he slid a stool over to her butcher block. She’d already set out his blueber­ries and cream. He threw himself down before them and yawned hugely. The kitchen windows were shut against the damp, and the heavy smell of sausage fat hanging in the warm drafts from the stove reminded him of winter. His face creased uncontrollably in another yawn. He could feel his mother’s eyes on the back of his head, and dug into the berries.

  Tess Starbuck studied her boy an instant, and then pulled up an­other stool.

  “Get enough sleep?”

  “Yep.”

  “You were up until all hours. It was twelve-thirty when I fell off.”

  “I was reading,” he said. “That book on the Egyptian campaign is really good.”

  “Peter lend it to you?” she asked, reaching for a towel. Her fine hands were reddened like a waterman’s, or a chef’s. She had been both, among many things. Will loved his mother’s hands. He dropped his eyes to his breakfast.

  “Yeah. He’s got awesome books out at the farm. I could spend a week there.”

  “You could spend one in bed, too, by the look of those circles under your eyes. Read all winter, Will, when there’s nothing else to do on this godforsaken island.”

  Will gave her a doleful look from his dark blue eyes, and then grinned. Despite herself she grinned back. He knew that however she cursed Nantucket, Tess loved the island as he did and his father had, a native love deep into the bone.

  At the glancing thought of his father, Will felt the familiar burst of pain shoot through his gut, and breathed deeply to push it away. When would it stop?

  He wiped his mouth on his napkin and shoved back his chair. “It’s boom day, Tess,” he said. “Gotta get out there.”

  She kissed him swiftly on the cheek and brushed a hand across his forehead, needing to feel the silkiness of the hair spilling into his eyes. Fifteen. Growing up and away from her, and she’d never have another. “Take a change of clothes. You don’t want to ride back in wet jeans.”

  He was already out the door.

  Her brow furrowed, Tess followed him through the kitchen window as he swung a leg over his bike and sped off down Quince Street. One of these nights, maybe he’d be able to sleep without dreaming, she thought. Until then, she’d have to live with the dark circles, the pallor underneath his late-summer tan, and have faith that the passage of time would ease his nightmares.

  She watched as the fog rolled up from the harbor, silent and un­stoppable, blotting out the gray shingle of the neighboring house, and crossed herself, once, for luck. Then she shook her head angrily and turned back to her pans.

  She rarely indulged the pain of Daniel’s death, one way she and Will were very much alike. She had mourned the man she loved from the night his body was found on the beach at Siasconset until she bur­ied him three days later; then she had turned her energies to survival. She could brood, cultivating the terrors of the unstable future, and go slowly mad in the emptiness of her queen-sized bed; or she could cook until she was mindless and weary. Tess had undertaken to feed the is­land.

  Daniel’s partner had bought out her share of the scalloper. God knows it was worth less these days than when Dan had mortgaged his soul three years ago to buy it. But his partner had pitied her, something she hated and bore because she had no choice; he had given her enough to clear the debt and get out from under the bank. She had thrown Dan’s insurance money—how little she’d thought of actually having to use it, the day he’d signed the policy—into a professional kitchen, moved her life upstairs, and opened for business three months after the storm that killed her husband. The Greengage was a home away from home for the men who fished Nantucket’s wa­ters, and it was a tourist find as a result. Tess had been so busy from the day she opened that the nights she had feared—the stillness in her room, the dread reckoning of all she had lost—had been consumed by exhausted, dreamless sleep. Now she steeled herself against the arrival of winter, when the crowds fled, the island battened down against end­less wind and damp, and she would have only Will, fighting his own demons, between herself and the memories.

  The oven’s timer shook her out of sadness. She opened the door and inhaled the scent of bursting cranberries, then glanced at her watch. Four hours until the lunch crowd.

  Will covered the mile and a quarter from his house to the rotary at the end of Orange Street in about five minutes. The bike was a three-year-old Trek, one of his prized possessions and a gift from Peter, who had bought a new Yeti early in the spring. Tess had almost made him give it back, too proud to take charity from one of the Ma­sons, but Peter had told her it was a fair exchange for Will’s help at lambing. Peter had hired him outright after that, paying fifteen dollars an hour. Will was saving his money for college.

  The tall captains’ houses that lined Orange Street were silent this morning, their backyards blotted out, the colors of the late dahlias bleached and flattened by fog. Already most of the summer people who owned or rented them had left the island, beating the rush for spots on the car ferries at the end of the season. A few hardy souls waited until late September, but the ones with kids his age, bound for school tomorrow, were long gone. At the rotary at the end of Or­ange Street, he took the Milestone Road bike path toward Siasconset, not trusting the road in the fog.

  He had close to four miles to pedal before the turnoff to Altar Rock, through the gently rolling moors whose wind-gnarled scrub, on clearer days, had begun to show the first of fall’s intense color. Here in the middle of the island, beyond the town’s closely huddled houses, the heath stretched almost unimpeded to the sea. The occasional gray-shingled saltbox, rising amid the moor like a ship cresting a wave, was invisible now in the fog.

  The bike path was empty. Up ahead, a single gull huddled in the middle of the road, its feathers fluffed into a ball against the damp, ex­amining an indeterminate roadkill flattened on the macadam. Will felt moisture on the back of his neck, already warm with exertion, and shivered. Even in the height of July the island had weather like this, but today the air bore the scent of dying grass and beach plum past its prime, a sure sign summer was at its end.

  He slowed the bike, anxious lest he miss the turnoff in the fog, but his sense of timing hadn’t failed him. Ten yards ahead a swirl of sand showed where the road to Altar Rock cut through the heath into the center of the island. Will stopped the bike and glanced to either side, wary of cars looming suddenly out of the mist, then shot across. It took him ten minutes to travel the mile and a quarter before Altar Rock appeared on his right. He stopped the bike an instant to look at it, but today the granite slab was lost in fog. The radar sta­tion, his earliest memory of alien technology, hovered nearby. Most days, at ninety feet above sea level, this was one of the best spots for viewing the whole island. Today, the rise and fall of foghorns, a lament steady as his own breathing, carried across the moors from the invisible harbor a mile to the east.

  He pushed the sleeves of his sweatshirt above his elbows and labored on, past Altar Rock to the intersection of three sandy trails. He took the right-hand fork—less than a mile now to the farm. He felt a sudden burst of happiness at the thought of the day ahead. Wet harvesting was much more fun than dry. This year, Peter would give him a beater and let him wade through the
flooded bog, the whirl­ing machine sending a carpet of blood-red berries bobbing to the sur­face in his wake. Will was just young enough to relish having water up to his knees. To be paid for it was too much to be believed. Lunch would be something hot, given the coolness of the day and the drench­ing nature of the work: quahog chowder, maybe, with corn bread and fried scallops, followed by blueberry pie. Rebecca, the housekeeper who was old enough to be Peter’s mother, would serve him second helpings. Then they’d haul in the booms, skimming acre after acre of red berries from the water.

  Will felt a shifting current of air graze his cheek, and the fog cleared slightly: he’d passed the entrance to the farm. He thrust out a leg to stop the bike, his heel kicking up a whorl of damp sand, and studied the tangle of scrub pine to his right. No wonder he’d almost missed it. The aluminum gate that stood closed most of the day—to keep the sheep from roaming too far—was wide open this morning. Rafe must have been out early. Will’s forehead wrinkled slightly in puzzlement. Then he put his head down and pedaled up the unpaved drive toward the old saltbox.

  A mouse darted from the undergrowth to his right and shot in front of his wheel. He clutched at the hand brakes so suddenly that the bike skidded to a stop, throwing him off balance. In a desperate bid for sta­bility, he dropped his left leg; but the bike went down. He slid on his side in the sand perhaps five feet before his momentum ceased, and then he lay, slightly dazed by the early hour and the sudden panic, star­ing at the gray sky. He hoped devoutly that the mouse wasn’t ground to a pulp beneath his left hip. When he thrust the bike upright and eased himself to a standing position, slapping his jeans, his hands came away bright with smears of blood from one torn knee. Great. Now he’d have to tell Tess, and she’d never believe he hadn’t been reckless.

  A bobwhite called its name from the undergrowth opposite, and Will glanced up. Water lapped at the edge of the cranberry beds run­ning along either side of the drive. The vines were completely sub­merged. A fragment of bright fabric, caught on a large piece of driftwood half sunk in the shallow pool, drew his eye. He walked closer and strained to make out its shape.