by Barbara Ross
Livvie begged me to give up my venture capital job and my life in Manhattan to come home and run the business with Sonny. “You’re trained for this. You went to business school. Helping entrepreneurs is what you do. Julia, please. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
I promised Livvie I would give it one summer, which was all the bank had agreed to anyway. In March, I’d moved back to Busman’s Harbor.
Happy. What a concept. I didn’t respond to Sonny. I’d had enough experience this spring to know it wouldn’t be productive. I tried to keep the guests and employees calm . . . and I waited. Finally the detectives emerged from Windsholme and made their way down to the dock.
“Who’s in charge here?” the older of the two yelled up at the boat.
I glanced at Sonny. The question went straight to heart of the issues between us. When he didn’t say anything, I stepped forward. “I am.”
Chapter 3
“Where can we go to talk?”
I led the state cops through Gabrielle’s pin-neat kitchen to the front room of the little house by the dock. It had always been a comfortable place for me, cozy inside with views to Spain out every window. I sat on the window seat with my back to the view. The detectives pulled straight-backed chairs from the dining room and sat opposite.
“I’m Lieutenant Jerry Binder, Commander, Major Crimes Unit.” He had a bald spot stretching in a narrow strip from his forehead to his crown. Right away, I liked that he didn’t attempt to disguise it with some elaborate comb-over or shaved head. I sensed in him the same straightforwardness of character he displayed with his hairstyle. The fringe of hair he did have was medium brown with flecks of gray. The round brown eyes staring out over the ski-slope nose showed just a few wrinkles. I put him in his mid-forties.
“This is Detective Tom Flynn,” Lieutenant Binder said. Flynn was younger, early thirties I thought. He had the kind of body that only comes from hard work at the gym. Unlike his partner, Flynn had plenty of hair follicles, but the hair itself was cut so short I only had an impression of its sandy color. He had a New England accent, though it wasn’t quite Maine. Boston, or maybe even Providence. He sat with his back ramrod straight. The whole package—the hair, the posture, the toned body—said ex-military to me.
Binder was polite, even empathetic. He asked me about the island and the business. “Tell me about finding the body.”
I described step by step what had happened. Was I apprehensive when I threw open Windsholme’s heavy front doors? I couldn’t have been. But in the movie in my head, I hesitated, hand on the doorknob, knowing what awaited me.
“What happens next?” I asked when we’d finished.
“We’ll question everyone here and then let you take them back to the harbor,” Detective Flynn said. “From what you say, we should talk to this Etienne person next. Two of our colleagues are with your sister on the mainland. They’re getting information from the wedding guests. We’ll take their contact information and let them go back to their hotels. Same with these people here. Another officer in the harbor is talking to the groom right now.”
The groom. Poor Tony. Not only had he lost his wedding day, he’d also lost his friend.
“Is there any chance Ray Wilson could have done this to himself?” I asked, because more than anything, that was what I wanted to believe.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Lieutenant Binder answered. “Preliminarily, the medical examiner thinks he was hung up there after he was dead.”
I’d only looked at the body for a few seconds, but I closed my eyes and let myself see what my mind had been denying. The dried blood covering the front of Ray Wilson’s pink polo shirt. “Is that where the blood came from? From when he died?”
Neither of them answered. Flynn brushed imaginary lint from his trousers.
I cleared my throat and asked the question I’d been dreading. “How long will we be closed?” I felt selfish asking. A man was dead. But the future of our business depended on the answer.
“No way to know,” Flynn said.
Binder followed, a little more sympathetically. “Certainly you’ll be closed tomorrow. After that, it’ll be day-to-day.”
The Snowden Family Clambake was teetering on the brink as it was. Every day we were shut down would bring us closer to financial ruin. And to losing the island—which I was convinced would break my mother, still recovering from my father’s death. That’s why I’d come home. To save the business that provided for my family. And to save Morrow Island for my mother.
“Lieutenant, we have a short season here on the coast. Everyday we’re shut—”
“I understand, Ms. Snowden. I do. But we need to process the scene. We also need to make sure the island is a safe place for you and your guests.”
A safe place? “You think this could have something to do with the island?” It was another question I hadn’t wanted to ask, though it was all I had thought about for a couple hours. Why here? Why on the island?
Chapter 4
I climbed back aboard the Jacquie II. The name of the boat was a bit of a joke. My mother’s name was Jacqueline, but I couldn’t imagine anyone, even my father, calling her Jacquie. My father had purchased the boat seven years ago, when the economy was flying high, to replace the refitted minesweeper that had been the Jacquie I. It was a logical thing to do at the time, even a necessity, but when Sonny took out the new loan, he’d rolled the boat loan into it to get a more favorable rate. So the boat was part of the giant debt endangering my mother’s property.
People seemed to have accepted we’d be stuck aboard the boat for a while. Sonny had opened up the bar and was serving water and soft drinks, no alcohol since everyone still had to be questioned—though I’m sure some people could’ve used it. He put all the snack food we normally sold on the boat—chips, candy bars, small bags of cookies—out on the bar for people to help themselves. It was a small financial hit for us to take, compared to the enormity of what might come.
When Etienne came aboard the Jacquie II after meeting with the state police, Sonny and I huddled up with him in the pilothouse to compare notes.
“I told them no one landed a boat at our dock last night. No way.” Etienne’s English still rolled with the soft syllables of his native Quebec. Even in his late fifties, he was a powerful man who did hard, physical work every day. The hair that was left on his head was mostly gray, and he had great, bushy eyebrows and a mustache. He’d come to work for my dad just a few years after the company started, so I’d known him for as long as I could remember. I trusted him with my business and property, and, if it ever came down to it, I would have trusted him with my life.
“You were asleep,” Sonny challenged, running one of his big hands over his forehead and through his buzz cut.
“Non, non,” Etienne insisted. “We leave the dock lights on all night. Look how close the house is.” Etienne pointed from the cottage to the dock as if Sonny and I didn’t have the whole island memorized. “Gabrielle right now is telling the police the same thing. No one landed on the dock.” His voice was insistent and I was afraid he and Sonny would be off on another one of their arguments.
There’d been tension between Sonny and Etienne all spring. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They’d worked together for a dozen years, the last five without my father, and somehow they’d gotten on. But not anymore. I thought maybe my presence in the business exacerbated the tensions between them, especially since Etienne almost always took my side.
When Paul Simon sang that orangutans were skeptical about changes in their environments, he’d described my brother-in-law perfectly. Sonny even had the flaming orange hair and barrel chest to go along with his deep suspicion of anything new or different. Etienne had proved much more flexible when it came to saving the clambake, ready to try anything. The only idea of mine he’d opposed was rewiring the two rooms in Windsholme, which he’d argued was a terrible use of our severely restricted cash. But I’d gone ahead and done it.
“It’s possible, I guess.” Our little beach was on the other side of the island, as far from the dock as it could be. It’s a long walk, but we kept a path cleared for clambake customers who wanted to explore. You could land a small boat there, if you were very skilled.
Sonny nodded. “A local then. Knows the harbor, knows the island.”
A chill ran through me and I huddled into my sweatshirt. I nodded toward a cluster of college students on our waitstaff. “What do they say?” Fed and talked out, they were sunning themselves on the top deck.
Sonny answered. “Some of them have friends who work at Crowley’s. What’s going around is Ray Wilson was at the bar last night at closing time, drunk off his ass and picking fights. Chris Durand threw him out of the bar, loaded him into his cab, and drove him away. Nobody saw Wilson after that.”
Sonny and Etienne looked at each other, and I could tell they were thinking the same thing I was. Chris Durand. Local. Knew the harbor well. And he knew the island. Thanks to me.
Chapter 5
Back in March, when I returned to town, I moved in with Mom because I only planned to stay for a few months. But sometimes living and working with family, all day, everyday, got to be too much, especially since Sonny and I had been at each other’s throats from the beginning. When I’d been home about two weeks, I’d slammed down the phone after an argument with Sonny and stomped out of my mother’s house.
Mom and Dad’s house in the harbor was a five-minute walk to the town dock, so I hadn’t bought a car yet. That meant I was stuck. Then I remembered Gus’s. I walked back over the top of the hill and down the other side and followed a long path past the boatyard to a low wooden building jutting over the water.
Gus’s restaurant had an old gas pump with a round top out front, like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Inside, you climbed down a long set of stairs into the main room where you found a candlepin-bowling lane on your left and a lunch counter on your right. In back was a dining room with the best view of Busman’s Harbor anywhere.
Gus looked up from the grill when I walked in and growled, “Get out. No strangers.” He was governed by the same public accommodation laws as any restaurant owner, but nevertheless had an ironclad rule. He didn’t serve diners unless he knew them personally or someone he did know vouched them for. I have no idea how he got away with it.
“Gus, I’m Julia. Julia Snowden. I’ve been coming here all my life. For goodness sake, I was born here in the harbor.”
Gus looked at me appraisingly. “Now Jul-ya, just because kittens are born in the oven don’t make them biscuits.” But then he said, “What’ll ya have?” and I knew I was in.
His fare was simple in the extreme—hamburgers, cheeseburgers, BLTs, hot dogs, lobster rolls, and fried clam rolls—all served with the best French fries on the face of the earth. He bought his beef from Maine farmers and ground it fresh daily. He only served Maine clams and potatoes.
You would never see the word artisanal on Gus’s menu. In fact, aside from the scrawl on the blackboard behind the counter, you’d never see a menu. Gus didn’t prepare food that way because he was some kind of a locavore. He did it because that’s the way he’d always done it. He’d missed the era of frozen food entirely, and now he was right back on trend. You had to reserve a slice of Gus’s wife’s scrumptious pie when you placed your meal order, because Gus didn’t like to be surprised later. I ordered a cheeseburger, cherry cola, and a slice of three-berry pie.
It was late for lunch by harbor standards and I had the dining room to myself. Since my last visit, someone in town had placed signs around that said things like GUS DOESN’T SERVE HORS D’OEUVRES. HE DOESN’T BELIEVE YOU NEED FOOD WHILE WAITING FOR FOOD, and YOU CAN ASK GUS FOR SALAD. YOU’LL NEVER GET IT, BUT YOU CAN ASK FOR IT. I’d just settled back to sip my soda and stare dreamily at the view, when I heard the slam of a car door. I looked out the street-side window just in time to see a pair of work boots and jeans clattering down the stairs. I’m embarrassed to admit I recognized those legs before the head they were eventually attached to ever came into view. Chris Durand. I’d had a crush on him in junior high so strong I still felt its echoes.
Busman’s Harbor’s small junior high and high schools were in the same building. In seventh grade, I was assigned the locker next to Chris’s. He was a junior and so handsome I’d go weak in my thirteen-year-old knees whenever he came near. If we happened to be at our lockers at the same time, I could barely breathe.
Chris, football player, reputed wild man, was kind to the shy girl with the crush. “Hey, beautiful,” he’d say, while I fumbled with my lock or dropped my books. “How’s it going?”
We went along like that for two years, until he graduated and I went away to boarding school. For a while, whenever I went home, I’d pump Livvie for the details of Chris’s life. Who was he seeing? How was that going? She was sympathetic, but discouraging. I could tell she felt I wasn’t in his league, so I eventually stopped with the questions.
I sat in my booth blushing furiously at the memory.
Chris placed his order—fried clam roll and coffee to go—and asked Gus, “Anybody here?”
“Julia Snowden. In the back. Take her these.” Making patrons deliver food was just one of Gus’s many charms.
I wasn’t sure Chris would remember who I was. He’d never worked at the clambake, though he’d done just about every other job in town. But I was the only person in the dining room.
“Julia,” Chris said, handing over the red gingham paper boats almost all Gus’s food was served in. “You home now?”
“Just for the summer to help out with the business.”
“Yeah, lots of people have moved home.” For some reason, Chris having the idea I’d crawled back to live in my Mom’s basement mortified me, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that wasn’t the case without sounding defensive. It was such a longer story.
“What are you doing now?” I asked, the best defense being a good offense.
“Oh, you know.” He rolled his impressive shoulders. “This and that. I own Harbor Cab. I landscape in season. And I’m still the bouncer at Crowley’s.”
I could believe it. The impressive shoulders were paired with an impressive set of biceps and a broad chest that tapered to a narrow waist and those long legs— Geez, Julia. Get ahold of yourself. “That sounds great,” I stammered.
I was saved by Gus calling to Chris that his order was ready.
“See ya around.” Chris turned and walked away, proving the part about the landscaping. You don’t get a backside like that from driving a cab. I hunkered down in the booth and ate every morsel of Gus’s delicious meal, including the pie.
Since then, whenever we’d end up at Gus’s at the same time, which seemed to be every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, Chris and I ate lunch together. It wasn’t a thing, exactly. I’m not sure what it was. Chris became my sounding board, the person I poured my heart out to, cataloging my troubles, confessing my fear I wouldn’t be able to save the clambake. He was the only person I ever talked to who wasn’t a family member, an employee, or a vendor—in other words, who wasn’t depending on the Snowden Family Clambake financially.
At least, he’d never been a vendor until I’d hired him to help Etienne and Sonny clear the winter’s damage off Morrow Island and get it ready to open for the summer. So Chris knew Morrow Island. Really well. And he’d apparently been the last person in the harbor to see Ray Wilson alive.
Chapter 6
It was late afternoon by the time Lieutenant Binder told us we could return to town. Jamie came along on the Jacquie II and I was grateful for his presence. He’d worked at the clambake for so many summers it was like having another member of the crew. Somehow I’d missed him on my last couple holiday visits to
the harbor, but we’d been so close as children, we fell right back into being comfortable with one another. He was a grown man, very much the cop, but I still saw the boy—long blond hair, nose perpetually peeling, baggy surfer shorts—when I looked at him. Jamie was like a cousin to Livvie and me.
On the ride back, I tried to get him to tell me something, anything, about the investigation. “Do they know yet if Ray Wilson was killed on the island or brought there dead?” I hoped my tone conveyed appropriate concern, not panic or morbid curiosity.
Jamie shut right down. When he was in his new police role, he wasn’t the kid who waited for the school bus with me. He was all business. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“It’s just . . . I keep wondering why the island? Whoever took him there, killed him, and hung him up went to a lot of trouble. Why go through all that? What was the point?”
Jamie’s blond brows rose, providing an even better view of his sky-blue eyes. His look communicated clearly he was getting a lot more out of me asking questions than I was going to get from him by way of answers.
“Just tell me this,” I persisted. “How long do you think we’ll be shut down?”
That did get me a look of sympathy, which scared me more than his just-the-facts-ma’am persona. “Julia, I’m sorry. I’m sure Lieutenant Binder told you it will take as long as it takes.”
When we pulled into the harbor, the dock was in chaos. The wedding guests surged toward the boat, shouting questions, while the passengers rushed to get off. Sonny and Jamie immediately took charge, helping people disembark one at a time.