Death in the Off-Season

by Francine Mathews

  “That kid in your class wasn’t afraid of you,” Alison said, “and he’s in a coma.”

  Lucy flinched and dropped the pair of jeans she had been distract­edly folding. “That was a mistake.”

  “Are you saying you didn’t mean to stretch a wire across his path? Or that you meant for Peter to hit it?”

  “I mean that he wasn’t supposed to be hurt. Nothing’s gone right since Rusty came back. Since the night I got his letter.”

  “Rusty blackmailed you.”

  “Yes.” Lucy glanced from the skylight to the window. Fearful of discovery, she had drawn the shades. “Or at least, he tried.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Alison suggested.

  “I recognized him on the Fast Ferry. I don’t think he recognized me. I hid in the women’s room, and when the boat docked, I thought I’d lost him. But he came right here after he picked up that rental car—he had my address.”

  “How did he find you?”

  “Sky Tate-Jackson, maybe. He used to email Rusty. Probably kept him updated on Peter, and Peter’s friends. Rusty would recognize the name Lucy Jacoby. My full name is Lucy Jacoby Scott. It wouldn’t have taken him long to hunt me down.”

  “Why did you come to Nantucket in the first place, Lucy?”

  “Max loved this island,” she said. “And I thought I could hide on the edges of things. Invent a new life. My father had left me some money—even Grandpa couldn’t take that away—and I could live well here. With my books, my garden, and my classroom. Five years—I had almost begun to heal.

  “And then Rusty came back.”

  “Did you mean to kill him?” Alison asked.

  Lucy stared at her an instant, as if seeing again Rusty’s silhouette in the fog. “When he showed up here, I offered to drive him to Peter’s for the night. I couldn’t stand to have him in my home. My car was in the shop—I’d ridden my bike to and from the ferry. But Rusty had rented the Jeep.” Her voice quavered momentarily, then recovered. “I drove, since the fog was bad and he didn’t know where Mason Farms was. He laughed at me all the way over to Peter’s, saying he had half a mind to tell him who I was that very night—that I’d been in love with Max, and now I was in love with Peter.”

  As if remember­ing time was short, she scooped a heap of T-shirts and shorts into her arms. She threw the clothes, willy-nilly, into the suitcase. “He called me Max’s mistress. It wasn’t like that—some crass ex­change of sex for money. But Rusty could make anything dirty, even memories.”

  “I know.”

  “When we got to the farm, I made him open the gate. I looked at him in the head­lights, and thought of all I’d lost—Max, my old life with my grandparents, and now the new life I’d been building. My quiet friendship with Peter. I’d never wanted anything more than that. I was Lucy to him, not Sundance, not someone who’d caused his family pain. I couldn’t let Rusty tell him anything about me.

  “He was standing in front of the car, in the head­lights, unlatching the gate. And I . . .” Her voice trailed away, then became stronger with memory. “I hit the gas. As hard as I could, as if that would end it faster. He flew into the air and landed on the hood of the car. The impact cracked the windshield.”

  “Is that what knocked him out?”

  “Probably. I screamed—there was his body sprawled in front of the windshield—and threw the car into reverse. Rusty slid off the Jeep and didn’t move, like he was dead. I got out and checked him—and then I realized. He was only unconscious—but when he came to . . . he’d have one more reason to blackmail me forever.”

  “So you killed him,” Alison said.

  “I helped him die. I dragged him by his ankles up the driveway and put him facedown in the ditch. I made sure the water came up over his hair. And then I got out of there as fast as I could.”

  There was a silence.

  “I understand how you must have hated him,” Alison said.

  At that moment, they both heard the quiet scrape of metal on metal. Someone was working at the back door’s lock.

  Lucy whimpered once. Then she pulled a cotton running sock and a scarf out of her drawer, and gagged Alison.

  Merry had her service revolver cocked as she inched her way through Lucy’s back door. She threw a glance around the kitchen al­cove, felt rather than saw the stillness of the empty main room, and flattened herself against the wall of the loft stairs. She began to creep toward the lowest step, holding her breath.

  “I’m armed,” a quavering voice called out.

  Merry halted, her black brows crinkling.

  “I have a hostage. I’ll shoot her if you come any closer.”

  “Don’t make this worse than it is, Lucy,” Merry said.

  Overhead, a bedspring creaked. Merry listened for the direction of the footsteps, one set pulling, the other dragging, and knew they were nearing the edge of the loft.

  At that moment, the front doorbell rang.

  All three of them froze.

  Merry recovered first and swung around to the foot of the steps, her gun trained on Lucy Jacoby’s head.

  “Lucy! Are you there?”

  Peter Mason’s voice on the doorstep.

  “She’s armed and dangerous,” Merry called. “We have a hostage situation.”

  She kept her eyes on Lucy and the woman who must be Alison. Lucy had locked Alison’s neck in the crook of her left elbow. Alison’s face was grotesquely distorted by a gag, and her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Let her go, Lucy,” Merry said. “This won’t get you anywhere.”

  The front door was dead-bolted. She could hear Peter running to the rear of the house, where she’d forced the kitchen lock. “Stay out, Peter. I’ve got back-up on the way.”

  But he had already slid into the kitchen and was walking up quietly behind her.

  “Why don’t you let her go, Lucy,” he suggested, “and we’ll sit down and talk about all of this.”

  “Oh, Peter!” Lucy’s voice rose hysteri­cally. “Why weren’t you there when I needed you?”

  “Get out before you fuck this up,” Merry muttered.

  “I know her better than you do.” Peter came calmly to Merry’s side and stared up at the two women. “What do you want us to do, Lucy?”

  “I need safe passage to the airport and a plane out of here.”

  “Let Alison go first,” Merry said encouragingly, “and we’ll talk about it.”

  Lucy shook her head and released the revolver’s safety catch with an audi­ble click. She placed the muzzle against Alison’s skull.

  “You’re better than this.” Peter moved slowly toward the stairs. “You can’t change the past, but you can stop being Rusty’s tool. He screwed up your life once. Don’t let him do it again, Lucy. Say no. Say enough.”

  “I want a plane out, Peter.”

  Merry watched Lucy’s gun begin to shake. She felt sweat break out on her own chest, aware of how volatile the Browning could be. If Lucy’s finger moved the trigger—

  “You could stop running.” Peter mounted the first step. “You could be rid of fear. You haven’t felt that kind of peace since the day he first blackmailed you, years ago, or the night you killed him.”

  “Stop right there!” she cried. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “Let Alison go, Lucy.” Peter took another step. “Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore.”

  Without warning, Lucy shoved Alison to the edge of the staircase. Feet and hands still bound, Alison fell at her feet.

  A perfect shield, Merry thought.

  She grabbed Peter by his wounded arm and forced him behind her.

  She was halfway up the stairs when Lucy fired.

  Chapter 34

  Later, when the English teacher’s body had been taken away and Alison had been driven to the station to deliver her state
ment, Merry found Peter in the yard behind the house. He was standing near Lucy Jacoby’s roses, and she didn’t like the look on his face.

  “Hey, Peter,” she said.

  He glanced around. “Hey. Thanks for being here when it mattered.”

  Polite, even when he thought she’d driven Lucy to her death. Merry considered the woman lying inert in the body bag. She wished she’d been able to talk Lucy down. But for what? Life in prison?

  “When did you realize she’d killed Rusty?” he asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  “A couple of things came together. I located a Lucy Jacoby by searching com­puter records under partial names. That told me her last name was Scott, and her original license was from New York. I remembered how Malcolm Scott looked when we showed him that photograph last week.”

  Peter nodded. “Rusty must have taken the picture the summer Lucy was involved with Max. He probably told her he’d show it to my mother. She was pretty young—really loved my dad—and didn’t want to lose him. So to keep Rusty quiet, she gave him what he wanted—Max’s takeover plans.”

  “Until your brother-in-law, Hale, told your father what Rusty was doing to him,” Merry mused. “That must have been a lousy day for Lucy.”

  “Max would have figured it out: If Rusty could blackmail Hale, he could blackmail anybody. Max probably confronted Lucy and she probably broke down. Told him about the pictures, the threats, how Rusty had used her. That would only have made my father even more insanely angry at my brother.” Peter’s expression was harsh. “And then there’s Malcolm Scott. Obviously Max told him what had happened—both about the affair and the blackmail. And when my father dropped dead a few weeks later . . .”

  “Scott blamed Lucy. For thirty-five years, Max Mason trusted Malcolm Scott, and it turns out Scott’s granddaughter was the one who nearly destroyed the company. I guess that’s why he cut her off. A mixture of pride and shame. But her grandmother . . .”

  “—Must have quietly stayed in touch. Hence these roses.” Peter paused. “There’s no doubt, I suppose? Lucy really did kill Rusty?”

  “Her fingerprints matched the ones on the button we found near his body.”

  “Ah.”

  “That alone wouldn’t be enough,” Merry said, “We knew she’d owned the sweater, and she could have lost the button at your bog any time. But then there was Sandy Stewart.”

  “Who?”

  “Friend of Will’s. Lucy gave Will a book on Friday, but she’d left something in it by mistake—Rusty’s blackmail letter, addressed to Sundance.”

  “So it was Lucy who hurt Will?”

  “She wanted to get the book back, Peter.” Merry stepped closer to him, dis­turbed by the remoteness of his expression. “That’s why she knocked him off the bike. Only she got it wrong—Will had loaned the book to Sandy without even reading it, poor kid. And Sandy found the letter. He came to the police station this afternoon.”

  Something in Peter’s face stirred. “Is there any news about Will?”

  “Rafe called. In all this mess, I completely forgot to tell you. Will has come around. But there’s one thing.” She hesitated. “He’ll need some rehab. Motor skills, stuff like that. The kind of thing you’d be great at helping him with, once he gets back from Mass Gen.”

  She was pleased to see some life stir in Peter’s eyes.

  “Look,” she attempted, “I’m sorry it worked out this way.”

  “I am too,” he said. “Lucy deserved to be left alone.”

  His voice cracked. Merry reached tentatively for his sleeve.

  “She’s at peace, Peter,” she said. “It’s you who has to find some.”

  He laid his palm fiercely on hers, holding it fast to his sleeve. She felt a thrill course through her body and fought the impulse to jerk her hand away.

  “I thought, for one instant, that she had shot Alison. Then I thought she had shot you. And I was as destroyed by one possibility as the other.”

  She stepped back in confusion.

  “Congrats on getting through your first homicide case, Detective.”

  “I’d be happy never to have another one,” Merry said. “It tears me apart.”

  “That’s why you’re good at it.” Peter looked at her intently. “You allow yourself to feel. Nobody ever said it’d be easy. But the hard things in life are the only ones worth doing.”

  He broke off a rose and handed it to Merry. “Lucy believed these were good luck.”

  The image of the English teacher’s shattered skull and sightless eyes swam in Merry’s mind.

  “Her grandmother created that flower, and named it Sundance.”

  “The woman painting in the garden,” she remembered. “Are you going to break the news to the Scotts?”

  “I owe Lucy that,” he replied. “I want to tell Betty how much she loved her roses. I don’t suppose you’d come with me?”

  “To Chappaqua?” Merry said, startled.

  “It’s a quick trip if you fly Cape Air straight into Westchester County. And you interviewed Malcolm about this case. It might help him to hear the end from you.”

  Peter was watching her carefully. Merry understood suddenly that he was asking for her support. Not Alison—not Rafe da Silva—not his sister, George. He wanted her.

  She lifted the rose to her face and breathed deep of its scent.

  The hard things in life are the only ones worth doing.

  “Of course I’ll come with you,” she said.

  Continue reading for a sneak preview from the

  next Merry Folger mystery

  DEATH IN Rough water

  Prologue

  The night wind was blowing unusually cold for late May, and the stars were blotted out by a bank of cloud. Captain Joe Duarte took the measure of the waters, felt the plunge of his deck, and knew he should head for port. The mounting weather made black sea and sky one, a pitching cocoon through which his trawler labored and rolled. The Lisboa Girl had just crossed over what Duarte knew as the Leg—part of the intricate underwater landscape of the Georges Bank he’d been f ishing since the age of f ifteen. He had turned sixty-eight three months past, and though much had changed in the f ifty-three years he’d been on the water, he still called the Bank’s bottoms, its gullies and peaks, by the old names made familiar from decades of studying charts in storm and sun: Cultivator Shoals, Billy Doyle’s Hole, Little Georges, Outer Hole.

  The younger men, using location indicators fed down from the stars, thought in signals instead of words. They moved over the crags of the seabed as a blind man feels Braille, sensing the humps and dips that clutched at their nets. Had they been told to head to the Leg instead of following a GPS, they’d have been lost.

  The captain knew the Georges Bank like the prof ile of a beloved woman, something no locator on a screen could ever replace. It was an ancient shelf of the North American continent, inundated by glacial ice melt twelve thousand years before. The Georges Bank sat more than sixty nautical miles off the present coastline and was larger than the entire state of Massachusetts. To Joe Duarte, it was home. The charted names of the bottoms remained with him like the Portuguese words of his childhood, artifacts of a vanished age. Like his boat. And himself, for that matter. He was among the last of Nantucket’s commercial f ishermen, and the last of the Duartes to go down to the sea, something they had been doing in Portugal and the New World for over f ive hundred years.

  The Lisboa Girl, three decades old and Joe’s second trawler, was one of only two remaining draggers to call Nantucket home. She was an Eastern-rigged wooden vessel, meaning that her pilothouse was aft and she launched her nets over the side rather than to the stern. A more dangerous and old-fashioned boat to f ish from than the steel-hulled Western-riggers—in heavy seas like this, she’d have to come to a stop and turn broadside to the wind to prevent the net from drifting under the hull
and fouling the propeller.

  The captain pulled open the pilothouse porthole and stuck his head into the rising wind. It was time to quit f ishing and head for port. His rheumatic bones ached, and his eyelids stung with weariness. Maybe it was time to quit for good, like all the rest.

  Nobody his age worked a trawler anymore. The younger men skippered boats that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and carried insurance that drained them of thousands more. Fishing from an island port like Nan­tucket tacked a surcharge on everything they needed to survive. They weren’t fools. They had left long ago for the mainland ports of Hyannis and Provincetown, Gloucester and New Bedford, and the Nantucket fleet slowly died.

  Joe Duarte had watched the others go with a grim pride. His boat was paid off. He’d inherited his house on Milk Street. He could afford to stay in the town where he was born—where, at f ifteen, he learned his trade from his father and grandfather, and had the youth whipped out of him by the bitter cold of winter f ishing. He found the mainland ports too crowded and the towns too suburban. Returning to the harbor of a January night, past Great Point Light arcing its reassurance into the early dusk, he saw the glow from hundreds of Nantucket windows rising out of the midwinter Atlantic with a surging of the heart and a gladness born of deep love. He knew the value of what he had earned with his blood and his years.

  Only I’ve no one to give it to, he thought. So much for pride. All it buys is loneliness. I’ve got to call Del. Blood is blood, after all.

  “Holy Christ, would you look at that!”

  Jackie Alcantrara, his f irst mate, was bent over the gray face of the f ish-f inder, studying the shifting shapes of the schools twenty-f ive fath­oms below. The image rippled like a f ield of summer wheat. “It’s cod, Joe. A friggin’ f ish convention. Let’s go.” He moved to the door of the pilothouse impatiently, shouting orders to the two crewmen on the night watch.

  Joe Duarte squinted in the glare of the working lights. It was impossible to see much of the Atlantic beyond, but he could feel the pitch of the waves, grown sharper in the last few minutes, and the wind that was tugging at his sparse white hair. They were heading into f ifteen-foot seas, over sharp peaks on the sandy bottom, and the net would be torn to shreds. There were no other boats in sight. They were one hundred and f ifty miles from land.