Find someone who hated him enough. It seemed simple when they had talked about it that way. Find the person who hated him. Collect the facts—the means and opportunity. Case solved. A clear-cut path, and yet not simple at all.
Rose could have hated Spencer enough to kill him. But that was the cruel irony of bullying. What Spencer did to Rose didn’t produce hatred for him. Instead—and far worse—it made Rose hate herself.
Nell tuned back into the conversation just as Danny was talking. “My dad said the men’s group had a record turnout last week. All because of a murder.”
“Curiosity, I guess,” Sam said. “Did they think Father Larry would have a scoop?”
“He usually does,” Ben said. “But he’s also very discreet. I wonder what they thought they’d learn.”
“Dad didn’t say. But he said they did what they do—especially with Father Larry there. They bowed their heads and sent him off with a prayer.”
“But no new rumors ran through the group?” Cass asked. “Those guys say women gossip, but I hear them out on the pier talking about everything from politics to divorces to lobster poaching. Not much gets by them.”
“Except the men’s club isn’t all old guys anymore,” Birdie said. “Harry Garozzo tells me they’re bringing in new blood. He’s got his nephew coming now, and some others, too.”
“They come for my ma’s casserole,” Cass said. “They sit in the back, eat a lot, and get out early, she says.”
“Probably true,” Danny said. “My dad said there wasn’t much discussion about the murder, not as much as he thought there’d be. In fact, the mood wasn’t respectful like it usually is when someone dies. When old Anthony Bianchi passed, they spent hours singing his praises, telling crazy stories, then turning the guy into Saint Anthony before the ground was settled on his grave. Not so with Paxton. They got out their RIPs, but it was clear at the end how they felt. Someone even muttered a ‘good riddance’ from the back of the room, and no one objected.”
A touch to Nell’s shoulder pulled her attention from the table discussion. She looked up into Patricia Stuber’s thoughtful eyes.
“Nell, may I speak with you for a minute?” Patricia said hello to the others and apologized for interrupting. Then she stepped over to the deck’s back steps.
Nell followed. “What is it, Patricia?”
“I haven’t slept well since you visited the other day,” she began. “Thinking about Rose Woodley, and things that might have gone on right before my unseeing eyes.”
“You know that isn’t how it happened, Patricia,” Nell said. “You weren’t a part of this. The bullying that Rose suffered often wasn’t even at the school. It happened at the yacht club, in a sailing class, and who knows where else?”
“I know that, Nell.” She smiled sadly. “But believe me, being principal means you don’t forget those students when they leave the school. You go with them, in a way. At least that’s how I interpret my job.
“But back to Rose Woodley. I couldn’t get her off my mind. I found her photo in the yearbook. I looked and looked, and I saw such sadness in her young eyes. It haunted me. I called together some of the staff who were there when Rose and Spencer were students. We sat around for a long time, talking and pushing ourselves back to those years, that class. That time.”
“It must be difficult. So many students go through those halls—”
“Yes, and it was especially difficult those two or three years. There were days when I wondered if I was carrying some kind of curse, something that had tentacles that reached out and affected others in a bad way. Sad things seemed to be happening to our school families at a rate that was difficult to handle.” She took a deep breath and exhaled.
“Things in the school?” Nell was puzzled.
“No. But connected to the school because they were our school families. But no matter, the staff and I were responsible for those walking our halls, Nell. They were our responsibility; we were their caretakers during school hours. As we dug back through those years we remembered small things, incidents here and there. Innuendoes. Things that, when added together, equaled bigger things. But they were always covered up somehow. Girls frightened to talk, popular groups with innocent faces.”
Nell listened, watching the shadows of memory pass across the principal’s face.
“You were right in your suspicions, Nell. Rose Woodley wasn’t alone. There were other students.
“And we did nothing to help them.”
Chapter 29
“They couldn’t have done anything, not if they didn’t know about it,” Cass said. “Patricia is being hard on herself.”
They sat and stood and walked around in the quiet haven of Izzy’s knitting room, the casement windows open, filling the room with sea air. The shop was empty of customers, thanks to Izzy and Mae’s decision to close the shop on Sundays once the tourists had gone. A decision they all welcomed. It gave the knitters a place to escape to, sometimes to talk or knit and listen to music.
And sometimes, like today, to gather pieces of a puzzle, strewn across their days like uneven rocks on a hiking path.
“Patricia is smart and realistic. She won’t beat herself to death over it. But she’s allowed that if only feeling—for a few minutes anyway.” Nell looped a long piece of pink yarn over a pole that she and Izzy had hung in the doorway. Her fiber art in progress.
“And what about what if?” Birdie mused. She finished weaving in a yarn end and set her sweater sleeve back in her bag. She moved over to the table where Izzy was scribbling on a yellow pad.
Birdie continued, looking down at Izzy’s pad. “What if Rose hadn’t been able to leave Sea Harbor? What if she’d had to endure four years of Spencer Paxton?”
What if. A thought none of them wanted to pursue.
Nell took her pole down and laid it across a chair. “Even if we don’t find anything directly related to Spencer, it was his world, too. We might understand it better by looking back at that time and seeing if we can find any connections.”
Patricia Stuber’s evasive comment about difficult years was exactly that—evasive, and they weren’t even sure where to look. But something had happened during that time that affected the principal so much that she still thought about it all these years later. When Nell had nudged her for more information, Patricia had said it wasn’t anything pertinent to the murder. And she wasn’t even sure why it had stayed with her so long. Then she had changed the subject.
“I don’t know why or how, but it seems significant,” Birdie said. “And if it’s not, we’ll find another way to connect our dots. I do feel a little bit like I’m flitting back and forth in time. I’m slightly dizzy.”
Izzy looked down at her scribbled words. Important words were encased in separate circles, beginning in the middle of the page with one containing Spencer’s name.
“I just wrote down random things and people, things that are connected. Or could be. Maybe.” She shrugged.
“Your own Venn diagram,” Nell mused. She leaned closer.
“Clever. You’re showing who is connected to whom, to what. Interesting.”
Many of the circles overlapped with one or two others: Elevator keys, Alibi, Beatrice, Rose, Sea Harbor High, Bree—but Izzy had wisely used pencil, easily erased.
Only one circle floated freely on the page, as if looking for somewhere to land: Palazola office break-in.
Birdie pointed to Bree’s name. “Why is Bree’s circle only intersecting with Spencer, and not with Alibi?”
“Because Bree is lying,” Izzy said matter-of-factly.
The others stared at her.
“She’s connected to Spencer, of course,” Izzy continued, pointing to the two overlapping circles. “Husband and wife. But she doesn’t have an alibi.”
“You sound certain of that,” Nell said. She hadn’t yet mentioned to any of them that she and Ben had seen Bree and Josh Babson together the night before. They had talked about it on the way home, trying to convin
ce themselves that Bree and Josh were both adults. Bree had been through a huge trauma. Perhaps Josh had been there when she was most in need.
But in truth, it didn’t matter. Things shifted and took on complicated meanings when a murder was being investigated.
Nell looked around the table at her friends, all of whom cared about Bree McIntosh. They all wanted desperately for her to be innocent of her husband’s murder. But before Nell could complicate their hopes further, Izzy went on to explain her earlier comment.
“Bree wasn’t in her house when the police came looking for her to tell her about Spencer,” Izzy was saying. “No one, no matter how heavy a sleeper they are, could sleep through that doorbell. We know that, and we’ve been ignoring it, especially me, maybe. But she is vague when she talks about it. Almost muddling her words. It’s clear to me she’s not telling the truth.”
Nell listened, and then it was her turn. She took a breath, and then said, “Bree and Josh were together last night, checking in to the Beauport Hotel in Gloucester.”
Izzy’s head shot up. “Josh?” And then, as if going back over the days and weeks in her head, she said, “Josh has been around a lot these last few weeks. No, longer, really. Ever since the idea of the fiber show came up.”
“We started thinking about the show months ago,” Nell said.
Izzy nodded. “Yes, it was . . .” She left her words hanging.
“Jane pushed that,” Nell said, wanting to be sure they didn’t jump to conclusions. “She encouraged him to help with planning and preparations. It took some of the load off her.”
Izzy nodded, still trying to put it together in her head.
“They’re grown-ups. Seeing them together at the hotel doesn’t mean anything, really,” Cass said. “At least as far as alibis and murders go.” And then she corrected herself. “But a murder changes everything, doesn’t it—everything means something. Or could.”
But what it could mean for Josh and Bree wasn’t clear. “I wonder how long this has been going on,” Izzy said.
They were all wondering the same thing. Had she and Josh been having an affair—if they were having an affair—for months? Bree had met the Canary Cove family of artists early on. And she herself said she and Spencer lived separate lives.
“I suppose it could even have been an agreement between Bree and Spencer. People do that. Separate lives.” Izzy picked up her pencil and stared at her diagram.
“But if not, Spencer’s death would certainly be freeing for them,” Cass said. “But we’re conjecturing all over the place here.”
“That’s what we do, Cass. We conjecture all over the place . . . until we know.” Birdie put on her glasses and looked at the diagram again, watching Izzy add information to the page.
The new circle had Josh printed in the middle. “I don’t know how I forgot him. He should have been on here all along.” Her voice was tight, as if she herself had somehow been betrayed by people she cared about.
Josh’s circle overlapped with Spencer.
And Bree.
But Josh floated free of Alibi.
“He doesn’t have an alibi?” Cass asked. “The police must have talked to him. Even Jane and Ham talked about him disliking Spence.”
No one knew for sure.
So his circle remained connected to Bree and Spencer. And not intersecting with Alibi.
Exactly the same as Bree’s.
“So,” Cass said, stretching out the word. “She and Josh were having an affair. Maybe. What do we do with that?”
Sometimes, they decided, a question worth its salt simply had to go unanswered. At least for a while. Until it ripened.
* * *
The drive from the yarn shop to the small building that housed the Sea Harbor Gazette was a short one. Knowing a columnist at the paper helped, and as they piled out of Nell’s car, the back door of the building opened and Mary Pisano, the energetic columnist and their friend, poked her head out.
“The morgue is ready for you,” she said happily, then sobered. “That’s not a good word to throw around these days, is it?”
She ushered them past a couple of reporters who barely looked up, then down a hall to a room in the back with MORGUE printed on the door. Mary flicked on the light. “Help yourself, my friends. The machines are in here. I pulled out the microfiche you asked for, Nell. There are soft drinks and bad coffee out front. Have a good time. I’m off.”
She grinned and waved, and in an instant, all five feet of Mary Pisano had disappeared, leaving them in a dusty-smelling room that felt entirely like the word that was printed on the door.
“Spooky,” Cass said, pulling out a chair behind one of the machines. She turned the machine on. “Okay, ladies, step into my time machine.”
Izzy laughed and turned on the machine next to her.
Nell and Birdie pulled up chairs between them, adding their eyes to the scanning process.
In the space between the machines sat a pile of microfiche, something none of them had used in a while.
“It takes me back to graduate school,” Nell said.
Izzy and Cass agreed.
“Even the smell is the same,” Izzy said. “The law library. It’s all coming back, strangling me. File after file, case after case.” She clenched her throat with one hand, then settled back and inserted the first roll of film. “Okay, to work.”
Since they weren’t sure what they were looking for, or the exact year, Izzy and Cass took separate years of newspapers, starting with Rose’s freshman year and ending with Spencer’s graduation.
“We don’t care much about weather or sports or obits,” Cass said. “But let’s keep eagle eyes out for the name Patricia Stuber or Sea Harbor High.”
“Or the Paxton name,” Birdie added.
Soon the room echoed with the sound of film sheets sliding beneath glass, buttons pressing, and an occasional reminder to go faster.
“One year done,” Cass said, taking out the film and inserting another. “Apparently the Math Olympiad didn’t make the city paper. But my hairdresser’s wedding did. Pretty dress.”
The next year started quickly with several months going by in a flash. A nor’easter captured the news, including school closings for two days, then a schooner festival. But in May, Izzy paused, then rolled back a page. “Oh, geesh.”
They leaned toward the screen. The photo took up the front page. A car smashed against a guardrail on the highway. The headline looked huge on the screen. FOUR SENIORS AT SEA HARBOR HIGH KILLED. It was a month before graduation. “School and town reeling,” the caption read.
“I remember that. My ma tore it out and sent it to me. Four kids in a town this size is huge. Everyone knew at least one of the kids or a relative.”
Birdie remembered, too. “Esther Gibson’s granddaughter Sandy died in that car accident,” she said. “They were so young. It was terribly sad.”
Cass named two others who were in the accident—her dentist’s daughter, and a son of the accountant who handled the Halloran Lobster Company books.
Patricia Stuber was quoted in the article, and when Izzy enlarged a photo, she was visible at one of the memorial services, standing in the back, looking as if she had lost her own child.
“Do you think this is what was clouding Patricia’s mind during that time?” Nell wondered out loud. It was awful and tragic, and must have been challenging to deal with at the school. But it was one day, one year . . .
When Cass began moving through the next year, they could feel Patricia Stuber’s presence in the room, mourning her students. “They were her family,” Birdie said.
Cass paused during a week in July. Another accident, another death. A freshman at Sea Harbor High was in a fatal sailboat accident. And just a few months later, a young man who looked like everyone’s next-door neighbor, fell asleep while driving home from his homecoming dance.
“Jimmy Northcutt,” Cass said, her voice unusually husky. “He crashed into a tree over near Canary Cove. Jimmy was re
lated to Father Northcutt and hung around the church. My ma loved that kid. She made him cookies.”
Everyone was related to someone else, someone’s neighbor, and someone’s friend. And they realized with overwhelming certainty that this was, indeed, what could have clouded the principal’s life for months and months. In ordinary life, when one wasn’t scrolling through years on microfilm in minutes, the events, though tragic, would only have been tumultuous to those directly affected. Family, loved ones, people who cared. Like Patricia Stuber.
Things she could do nothing about.
Izzy inserted another year of newspapers and paused for a minute, her hand on the knob, not sure what a new year would bring or if she wanted to read about it.
She also wondered if they were on a wild-goose chase.
Then she started the last film, slowly moving through winter, then spring. She stopped in April, when a small article reported the death of a long-time and beloved math teacher, who had died peacefully in his home. It had occurred the same week as a young student at Sea Harbor High had died unexpectedly from an undetected heart abnormality.
They moved on, slowly, as spring morphed into summer, then fall, along with articles on football games, homecoming games and dances, and apple picking. Halloween costumes and Thanksgiving food drives. Happy events.
“It looks like the curse Patricia Stuber felt was finally lifted,” Nell said.
“And the dear woman was right,” said Birdie. “There was nothing she could do about it but ache for the sadness people suffered.”
It wasn’t about anything malicious. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was simply a tragic, sad time in the life of the principal of Sea Harbor High and all the families and townspeople who were touched.
Izzy continued to slowly roll through the newspaper images as they talked, the print beginning to blur into one long, hazy image.
“Wait,” said Birdie. “Would you please go back one? There, at the bottom of the page.”
How to Knit a Murder Page 22