Clammed Up

by Barbara Ross

  Michaela ran down the gangway and fell weeping into Tony’s arms. He held her close, whispering into her hair. Around them, the crowd quieted, all eyes on the couple. At some point during the afternoon, Michaela had changed out of her wedding gown into a pair of tailored white trousers and a fitted navy blouse that must have been her “going away” outfit. She’d thought she’d be wearing those clothes as she and Tony sailed off as man and wife after their wedding reception. I wondered if she’d ever be able to wear them again.

  Damn. That reminded me I had to cancel the little boat I’d hired to take them away.

  The crowd shook itself alive and the low throb of chatter resumed. As Tony walked Michaela off the dock, my sister Livvie came out of our ticket booth, searching the crowd for Sonny and me. When she spotted us, she trotted over and hugged us each in turn.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” She let me go and stared at the two of us. “Oh, my God!”

  “What’s it been like here?” I asked.

  “Insane.” Livvie cocked her head toward the ticket booth, which I took to mean we should speak more privately. The three of us crowded into the little space, which was claustrophobic for one person . . . and Sonny was a big guy.

  “It was awful,” Livvie said. “There were police cars at the entrance to the dock, so people knew right away something was up. They’d walk up looking kind of uncertain and scared by all the uniforms and the people milling around. The state police took names from everyone and asked their relationship to Michaela and Tony. They said someone had died on the island and there wouldn’t be a wedding. The police never exactly said it was a murder, but people aren’t stupid. If it was an accident or a heart attack, why would cops be taking names and asking for their contact info?”

  “Did the police question you?” Sonny asked.

  Livvie nodded. “They asked a lot about Michaela and Tony. What did we know about them? Why did they hire us to do the reception? Did I know this Ray guy? I told them they had to talk to you, Julia. You were friends with them in New York.”

  Friends was a strong word for my relationship with Michaela, let alone Tony. Michaela and I had run on the periphery of the same crowd when I first got to New York. I assumed that’s how she’d heard I’d moved to Maine to run a place that could host wedding receptions. But she and I had never been close—never been alone just the two of us, that I could remember. Tony was even more distant. Over the last couple of years, I’d seen him with Michaela at big parties, places far too noisy for conversation. I’d gotten to know them only slightly better while we were planning the wedding, but we definitely weren’t friends.

  I’d never met Ray at all. For all I knew, he was mixed up in something criminal in New York. I didn’t wish anything worse for Tony and Michaela than they’d already been through, but I fervently hoped if Ray’s death was a homicide, that it was trouble that had followed him to town. As much as I wanted to believe that, I couldn’t reconcile the idea of a criminal from New York taking a man out to our island in the dead of night, landing a boat on our little beach, and then murdering him. Why go to so much trouble? I couldn’t make sense of it.

  Out on the dock, the crowd slowly dispersed.

  “We should go back to Mom’s. She and Page will be worried,” Livvie said.

  “You two go ahead. I’ll be right along.” I had a few things to take care of.

  After Livvie and Sonny left, I called the lobster pound and canceled my order for the next day. I hoped they’d be able to sell some of what I’d contracted to other customers. We still had two hundred lobsters stored in the cold water under the dock on Morrow Island, and I didn’t know when we’d be able to use them. I also canceled the clams, the eggs, and the produce.

  I was pretty sure, small-town grapevines being what they were, all our employees, let alone everyone in Busman’s Harbor, knew we wouldn’t be opening tomorrow. I sent a group e-mail just in case, grateful this form of communication demanded brevity. No explanations or predictions about the future required.

  As I locked up the ticket booth, Sarah Halsey approached. She was one of Livvie’s closest friends and a teacher at Busman’s Elementary. Both she and her mother worked summers at the clambake. Neither of them had been booked to work at the wedding—the smaller crowd meant a lighter staff—but they were both scheduled to work the next day, which should have been the first day the Snowden Family Clambake was open to the general public.

  “No work tomorrow, huh?” Sarah said it pleasantly, but I could hear the tiny bit of worry in her voice. Teachers in Maine don’t get paid much, and she was the single parent to a nine-year-old son.

  “Not tomorrow, Sarah.”

  “What do you think about Monday?”

  What indeed? “I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

  “Thanks, Julia. Take care.”

  “’Bye, Sarah. See you . . . soon.”

  Chapter 7

  I walked the block from the town dock to my mother’s house. Perched at the peak of the hill that formed the residential part of Busman’s Harbor, the house was a solid foursquare with a cupola on top of its flat, mansard roof. The house was painted a deep yellow with dark green trim and you could see it from anywhere around, land or sea. I always felt it was like a bright beacon leading me home.

  My father bought the house for my mother before I was born. A town person marrying a summer person was unusual, but even rarer when my parents wed thirty-two years ago—especially a union between a high school educated boy and a girl from a family who owned an island. My father built the Snowden Family Clambake Company because he loved my mother. He understood that even though she loved him, she wasn’t prepared to be poor. Her hopes and dreams weren’t outlandish, but she expected a roof over her head, heat in the winter, and to give her daughters the same kind of education she had received. So my father built the clambake company to provide all that, and to keep Morrow Island in the family. For my mother, who loved it.

  When I came along, I dutifully followed the path my parents set for me. Prep school in New Hampshire, college in Massachusetts, business school in New York City followed by a job at a top venture capital firm, each step taking me farther in every way from Maine.

  My sister Livvie, two years younger, rebelled at every chance. She’d finally flunked out of so many prep schools my parents relented and let her finish high school in the harbor. At eighteen, she got engaged to Sonny Ramsey whose father was a local lobsterman. She got married and got pregnant, though not, as she’ll cheerfully tell you, “necessarily in that order.” She gave birth to my niece Page.

  Our life trajectories seemed set. Livvie stayed in Maine with her little family and she and Sonny joined the clambake business. My life was in Manhattan. But then came Dad’s awful diagnosis and his death, followed by the recession, and finally, the frantic phone call from Livvie. So, I was back in the last place I expected to be.

  I found Mom in the kitchen with Page, my nine-year-old niece. Mom stood at the counter chopping vegetables for salad. She was small like me. Or rather, I was small like her. Livvie got my father’s height and athletic build and auburn hair. I got Mom’s petite blondness. But that was where our resemblance ended. My mother was all romance. I was all practicality.

  Page folded dinner napkins at the kitchen table, her head bobbing up and down to a tune playing in her head. She had Sonny’s fiery red hair and Livvie’s tall, swimmer’s build. She’d be a gorgeous adult, but I feared in the next few years she’d grow to hate her bright hair, lightly freckled skin, and height. I hoped with all my heart she’d mature through that phase and remain the special person she was. Page’s warmth, innocence, and humor had held our family together during my Dad’s illness and gave us all, especially my mother, a reason to go on afterward.

  “Julia, how are you?” Mom’s eyes slid meaningfully toward Page. I understood we weren’t to discuss murder in front of my niece. Ray Wilson’s death would be the talk of our little town for weeks to come, so Livvie a
nd Sonny would have to find a way to explain it, but later, in their own home.

  I responded, “Fine,” in the same chipper tone my mother had used. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Lobster mac and cheese.” Mom indicated the contents of the heavy glass pan bubbling away in the oven.

  “Oh—”

  “Livvie made it this morning before she went to work.”

  Thank goodness. My mother was a terrible cook. Livvie, on the other hand, was world-class, and lobster mac and cheese was one of her specialties.

  “Why don’t you let Page and I finish up?” Mom said.

  The rich aroma of sweet lobster meat and sharp cheese filled the room. My tummy rumbled in response, reminding me I’d eaten next to nothing all day.

  I grabbed a Sea Dog ale from the fridge and joined Livvie and Sonny on our wide front porch. The heavy, wood-framed windows were still up and I looked through the wavy glass out toward the harbor and its six tiny islands. Morrow Island was farther out, beyond the harbor’s mouth. My mother claimed she could see it from the cupola at the top of our house. Sonny, Livvie, and I knew that was impossible, but in the years since my father’s death, we’d given up arguing with her.

  “I’ll take these porch windows down tomorrow, put up the screens,” Sonny said. “Might as well. No work.”

  “So what do we think?” Livvie asked from her seat on the porch swing. “Who did it?” Like most Mainers, Livvie was nothing if not direct.

  “From the questions the cops asked you, sounds like they think it’s trouble Wilson brought with him from New York,” Sonny answered. He turned toward me. “Were these people into something shady there?”

  “I don’t know. I barely know Tony and I’d never met Ray.” I flashed on the body hanging from the grand staircase at Windsholme.

  “So that’s it then,” Livvie was as eager as I was to pin the murder on outsiders.

  “But why on the island?” I asked them the question that had bugged me from the beginning.

  When no one had an answer, Sonny offered an alternative. “Chris Durand was the last to person in the harbor to see the dead guy.”

  “I’m sure Chris had nothing to do with it,” I responded, a little too vehemently.

  “Julia, I know you and Chris have this thing,” Sonny said. “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have done it.”

  “What thing?” I glared at Livvie. Betrayer.

  “That thing where you eat lunch with him at Gus’s three times a week,” Sonny answered.

  Oh, that thing. I remembered what I hated about living in a small town.

  Sonny continued relentlessly. “I know you have a big blind spot where Chris Durand is concerned, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t involved.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do,” Sonny insisted. “He’s been in and out of trouble since high school.”

  I looked at Livvie to see if she was going to give me any help, but she sat on the swing, apparently in agreement with her husband.

  “Chris is a respected citizen of Busman’s Harbor.” My voice rose. “He owns three businesses in this town. God forbid if we were all judged by the things we did in high school. You especially, Sonny.”

  “You don’t live here, Julia,” Sonny raised his voice to meet my own. “I do. I hear stuff. Current stuff.”

  “What stuff?” I demanded. I’d been arguing with Sonny so long and hard all spring, it was reflexive. I yelled, he yelled. Such a well-worn road.

  “Dinner.”

  The three of us had been so caught up, we hadn’t heard Page open the front door. “What are you guys fighting about?”

  “Nothing important, honey,” Livvie jumped off the swing and moved toward her daughter. “You know how Daddy and Aunt Julia are.”

  “Always yelling,” Page grumbled.

  Livvie put an arm around Page and escorted her into the house, followed by Sonny. I brought up the rear. Passing him on the way into the dining room, driven, as always, to have the last word, I hissed, “Even if Chris had something to do with it, which I totally discount, it still doesn’t answer the question why on the island?”

  Chapter 8

  Livvie’s mac and cheese was the perfect comfort food at the end of a long, horrible day. I ate heartily, savoring the rich tanginess of the cheese combined with the sweetness of the lobster. The tastes and textures perfectly complimented one another—the springy noodles and toothsome lobster along with the crunchy panko breadcrumb topping. People asked if I ever got tired of lobster. I’d discussed this with the family who owned the ice cream parlor in town, who fielded similar questions. The simple answer was no. If you loved something, you loved it.

  After dinner was cleared up and Livvie, Sonny, and Page finally went home, I climbed the back stairs to my room and fell exhausted onto my bed. I wanted nothing more than to sleep. But once I was cleaned up and properly tucked in, sleep didn’t come. I couldn’t stop worrying about the clambake.

  In the clambake business, when a day was lost, it was lost forever. The income projected for this weekend was gone, our ability to make it up later severely hampered by the short Maine summer season. I knew if we were still closed on Monday I’d have to have a conversation with our banker. And I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  I lay awake, doing calculations in my head. What if we were still closed on Monday? On Tuesday? Wednesday? Being shut down through the next weekend would be catastrophic. I was certain if that happened, the bank would call our loan. I tossed and turned and started calculating again.

  Eventually, counting our potential losses had the same effect as counting sheep, and I nodded off. But then, in that split second of twilight between conscious and unconscious, a vision of that awful, inert body hanging from the stairs leaped into my brain. My eyes flew open and I was wide-awake again. I couldn’t stop picturing how dead Ray Wilson was. Even in the few moments I’d stared at his body, I’d known there was no spark of life.

  I started the counting again, and the cycle repeated—the nodding off, the awful vision, the wide-awakeness, then back to the counting. I don’t know how many times it happened, but it felt like most of the night. I must have slept some, but even those periods were disturbed by a dream where I ran from place to disconnected place— Manhattan, Busman’s Harbor and towns I didn’t recognize—struggling to tell people a man was about to be killed, but unable to produce a sound.

  At dawn, I gave up and climbed out of my girlhood bed. Sunrise came early in coastal Maine. I looked longingly at the door connecting my room to Livvie’s old bedroom, wishing she were there so I’d have someone to talk to. I dressed quickly, though I had nowhere to go.

  I considering putting on coffee and making breakfast, but the house felt like a cage. I had too much energy to be indoors. I headed out, not thinking about where I was walking, but somehow making a beeline for Gus’s.

  The restaurant was packed with lobstermen, fishermen, the crew who ran the whale watch, and the ferrymen who took people to the summer colony on Chipmunk Island. Was it my imagination or did the noise level fall when I walked into the place? The murder on Morrow Island was the biggest news to hit Busman’s Harbor in years. It had to be the main topic of conversation, but no one came up to ask questions. No one spoke to me at all, a benefit of that famous Maine reticence.

  I looked around hopefully for Chris Durand, but he wasn’t there.

  Jamie Dawes was, however, sitting at a round table with the officer who’d taken him out to the island. They were in uniform, which I thought was a hopeful sign, ready to get to work nice and early. I briefly debated whether it would be weirder if I walked over to their table, or weirder if I didn’t. I decided on weirder if I didn’t and approached.

  “Hey, Jamie.”

  “Julia. This is Officer Howland. I’m not sure if you met yesterday.”

  “Not properly. Hello, Officer. I think you were in my brother-in-law Sonny’s class at Busman High.”

  Ho
wland grunted in my direction around a mouthful of eggs.

  “Are you going out to Morrow today?”

  Jamie gestured toward the empty chairs at their table. “Yep. Waiting for the state police detectives and the crime scene team to get here from Augusta.”

  “Thanks.”

  As I walked back toward the counter, I was grateful for Gus’s “no strangers” policy. At least I wouldn’t run into any of the wedding guests, though I had to admit that was unlikely so early in the morning. I grabbed a stool at one end of the C-shaped counter.

  Behind it, Gus unhurriedly fried bacon and made pancakes, despite the size of the crowd. He didn’t vary his pace for anyone. “You’re up early,” he said as he poured my coffee.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Ayup. Clam hash?”

  Among the cognoscenti, which is to say the locals, Gus’s clam hash was famous. Like any hash, it’s made with lots of onions and potatoes, but he uses clams instead of beef or corned beef. The fresh, diced clams give the hash a salty-sweet taste that cannot be beat. And if you ask for it, he will top the hash with one or two perfectly poached eggs.

  “Yes, please. With one egg.”

  “Because one egg is un oeuf.” Gus repeated the oldest joke in the world.

  Sitting diagonally across from me on the long side of the counter was a man dressed differently from everyone else in the place. He had on a tweed sports coat and a tailored blue shirt, and was reading, my heart went pit-a-pat the New York Times. He was one of my people.

  Suddenly, I was homesick for Manhattan. It was all I could do to keep from hiking out to the highway and sticking out my thumb. Back to the land of fresh bagels, high salaries and, best of all, no family responsibilities.

  I stared at the backside of the man’s newspaper. It had to be yesterday’s. It would be hours before the Sunday Times made it to our end of the peninsula. But no, he was reading the wedding notices from the Times “Sunday Styles” section. My favorite part of the weekend. Where had he gotten hold of it?