by Barbara Ross
Michaela greeted me as if we were long lost friends. I wondered if she’d left her mother-in-law’s house the minute she got my text. We hadn’t been close in New York, but I was probably the closest thing she had to a friend in Maine. As she hugged me, I wondered why anyone would want to ruin this woman’s wedding day, and in such a horrible way. There was only one person I could think of. Tony. I took a seat in the comfy chair across from her.
“I’m so glad you’re still here,” I said.
Michaela rolled her eyes. “I’m not. Living with Tony’s parents is a nightmare. His dad is great, but as far as his mom is concerned, no one will ever be good enough for her Tony. I knew that when I married—agreed to marry—him, of course. But I hadn’t realized I’d be staying at her house for days when I was supposed to be on my honeymoon.”
“Michaela, I’m so sorry. For everything.”
“It’s okay.” She sighed. “It’s not your fault. It is what it is. Tony and I will stay until after Ray’s service at least. His body’s been released. Tony is with Ray’s parents making the arrangements. So much time has gone by, they want to have the service as soon as possible. Tomorrow even.” Michaela’s voice got a little husky as she spoke about Ray. “But enough about my troubles. How are you?”
I filled her in on my news since the weekend. She’d heard about the fire. “I never thought my wedding would bring so much unhappiness to both of us.”
The pretty, young barista called out that my cappuccino was ready, along with a refill for Michaela. We sat for a moment enjoying the warm drinks while I gathered my courage to ask the next question. Despite my sympathy for Michaela, saving the clambake had to be my highest priority.
“The clambake is pretty much shut down until this murder gets solved. I know this has been worse for you than for us, but if we’re closed for even a few more days, we’ll lose the business altogether. So I have to ask, is there anything at all you haven’t told Binder that might help him? Is there anything you have told him that he’s not following up on?”
Michaela drew her pretty dark brows together. It wasn’t where she’d expected the conversation to go.
She didn’t say anything, so I prompted her. “I know you and Ray had an argument in Crowley’s the night before he was murdered. And I know you called him from the Snuggles and were gone for several hours that night.”
Michaela looked into her coffee cup and said nothing.
“Were you and Ray having an affair?” I asked it boldly and baldly. I had to get the question out.
“No! Whatever gave you that idea? It was nothing like that.” I saw a flash of the bride aboard the Jacquie II who’d grasped my arm so tightly it went numb and demanded we turn the boat around. Michaela was so even-keeled most of the time, but there was a temper burning down deep.
I didn’t want to admit her maid of honor had hinted about a relationship with Ray. Or that Binder had said Ray’s body was left the way it was to upset her. So I didn’t answer her directly, just pushed on. “What did you fight with Ray about, then?”
The anger drained away just as quickly as it erupted, replaced, it seemed, by sadness. “I can’t tell you.”
“Why can’t you tell me? Ray’s dead.”
“I know, but I made a promise. And nowadays, I keep my promises.”
Nowadays? What did that mean? I felt like I was walking a tightrope between her emotional extremes. I tried again. “Where did you go that night? Were you with Tony?”
“Tony!” Her eyes widened in surprise and she sat back in the deep couch.
“Because I don’t think he slept—”
It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t listening to me. She was staring through the plate glass window at something behind me. By the time I turned around, Tony pushed his way through the front door of the coffee shop.
“Hi, babe. Hi, Julia. This looks like fun. Mind if I join?”
If Michaela said more than two words after that point in the conversation, I don’t remember what they were. Tony confirmed that Ray’s funeral would be the next afternoon; the gathering afterward would be at Tony’s parents’ house. Ray’s parents just weren’t up to hosting. Michaela chewed on her lower lip while Tony talked about his boyhood in Bath and growing up with Ray, how they’d swum in the tidal waters at Popham Beach and played basketball together in high school. Like Michaela, Tony was casually, but expensively dressed. The cashmere sweater tied around his shoulders demonstrated how far he’d come from being a townie in Bath.
When he spoke about Ray, Tony appeared wistful, not angry. Not betrayed. Not guilty, at least as far as I could tell. His hand sought out Michaela’s, just as he had when I’d talked to them in the dining room at the Bellevue Inn.
The more Tony talked, the more ridiculous I felt that I’d suspected Tony of murdering Ray out of jealousy. For one thing, Tony seemed absolutely secure in Michaela’s love. And for another, though he wasn’t broken up and sobbing, his reminiscences about Ray were warm, not tinged by anger in any way.
So Tony wasn’t jealous of Ray. But there was something about Tony—the way he took control of the conversation, the way Michaela was so quiet in his presence—that left me uncomfortable. And I still didn’t understand Michaela’s relationship with Ray. If it wasn’t an affair, why did she go out to meet him on her wedding’s eve?
I promised them I’d go to Ray’s funeral the next day and said my good-byes. I got into my mother’s car and headed home, feeling frustrated. What had I been thinking? That I’d out-investigate the state police major crimes unit? All I’d succeeded in doing was wasting the day. I was farther than ever from discovering who’d killed Ray Wilson.
Chapter 28
I shouted to my mom that I was home and ran upstairs to my office. I checked my cell phone to make sure that Binder hadn’t called to say we could open. No such luck, not that I expected it after our “chat.” I set about confirming with everyone we’d be closed tomorrow, yet again. No one was surprised. Livvie hadn’t accepted any reservations. If I’d been able to be more honest with myself, I’d have been more honest with the employees and sent out a “stand down until further notice” type of e-mail. Instead, I was upbeat as possible and stated we were “day-to-day.”
That chore behind me, I read a few blogs and generally procrastinated. I was discouraged about everything. The clambake business. The murder investigation. I could hear Mom in the kitchen, cooking us dinner. God help me.
My eyes fell on the Sunday New York Times I’d been reading earlier, the real estate section still open on the top. I’d never finished going through the paper. I decided to dream about Manhattan apartments a little more.
As I pulled the Times to my lap, I noticed a page in the real estate section was dog-eared, just like the one containing Tony and Michaela’s wedding announcement had been. I turned to the page. About halfway down in the left-hand column was a story about Tony and Ray.
OFF THE GRID BUT LUXE
Resort developers Tony Poitras and Ray Wilson have found a winning formula for today’s overwhelmed consumers. Can’t take a break from your smartphone, e-mail, or social media, even on vacation? Poitras and Wilson’s resorts force you to slow down and smell the roses. Built on islands, the resorts purposely offer no Internet, cell coverage, or television. You can’t feed your addiction because these services just are not available. But unlike most other “off the grid” vacations, these resorts are luxurious. You can’t get online, but you can get a massage, a sumptuous meal, and a bottle of Dom Pérignon.
Built from the enormous “summer cottages,” hunting lodges, and private hotels of the super rich of another age, Poitras and Wilson’s properties allow guests to live it up old-school, as in old school tie. Customers pay four figures a day at the low end to be whisked in and out via helicopter for an experience one described as a cross between a “luxury spa and an English country house party.” Poitras and Wilson have properties in the Finger Lakes of New York, near Mackinaw Island, Michigan, off Van
couver, British Columbia, and in the Caribbean. They are currently on the hunt for more properties.
A chill ran through me. Who the heck was I dealing with? At first, I’d assumed Michaela had approached me about her wedding reception because we’d been acquaintances in New York. Later, I’d learned that wasn’t true. Tony had grown up just down the coast and had chosen Morrow Island for their wedding. Now it turned out, Tony and Ray were also in the business of turning islands into resorts. Were they after Morrow Island?
After a truly terrible dinner, I rushed back to my office. I stayed up late into the night, searching the Web for everything I could find out about Ray and Tony. For the most part, the articles confirmed what I’d read in the Times. They had started as contractors, then became residential developers, then hit on the idea for luxury resorts in remote places without cell service or Internet. Part of their “winning formula” was to get the properties cheap from cash-strapped owners.
I visited all the Web pages for their resorts and they were, indeed, lovely places, former country homes that Ray and Tony gutted and rebuilt with attention to period detail and an overall sense of cosseting for their guests. Some articles in local papers near the resorts complained about the environmental impact of things like indoor swimming pools on small islands, not to mention the noise of the helicopters coming and going, but for the most part, Ray and Tony seemed to be welcomed as environmentally conscious custodians of places that would otherwise have been lost.
I found much less, nothing in fact, about Quentin Tupper III, the man who’d appeared, left me a newspaper, and then disappeared again. As I’d remembered, tons of Tuppers lived in Maine, particularly on that part of the coast, so there were genealogies galore online and newspaper stories about lots of Tuppers, but not Quentin. I wondered how a grown man who lived in New York City could leave no footprints on the World Wide Web. Had he never run in a road race, sung in a chorus, donated to a charity, or reviewed an online purchase? It seemed so unlikely.
I’d been irritated when I found the dog-eared wedding announcement. I’d thought Quentin Tupper was rubbing my nose in the tragic events that occurred at the Snowden Family Clambake’s very first wedding reception. Now, I didn’t know what to think. Was he sending me some kind of message?
I vaguely remembered that he lived somewhere in my New York City neighborhood. I wanted to contact him, to ask what he was up to, but there was nothing.
I searched until I fell into bed, exhausted, at two in the morning.
Chapter 29
I woke up the next morning to a gray glow outside my windows. My bedroom usually offered great views of the harbor, but I could barely make out the Snuggles Inn across the street. I climbed back into bed. There was no clambake to run, anyway.
I was awakened a few hours later by my cell phone. “Ms. Snowden, Lieutenant Binder. You’re cleared to go ahead and take down the rest of that porch.”
“Does that mean we’re open for business?” I could barely contain my excitement.
“No. Let’s take this one step at a time. I said you could demolish the porch.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” There followed a series of calls between Sonny and me and radio calls between Sonny and Etienne. We decided Sonny would borrow his dad’s lobster boat—his dad hadn’t gone out in the fog— because the big plywood sheets we needed to close off the dining room’s French doors wouldn’t fit in our Boston Whaler. Etienne would bring the Whaler in, then would return to the island with Sonny and the supplies in his dad’s boat. I was responsible for returning the Whaler to the island.
After I hung up, I became aware of the sounds of voices and banging as well as a smell I remembered well from my childhood. Still in a T-shirt and pj bottoms, I descended the back stairs into the kitchen.
Livvie was there with Page, along with Sarah Halsey and her son Tyler. Mom had her back to me, facing the stove. They were all busily engaged in the process of making strawberry rhubarb jam. Rhubarb jam day was a family tradition, and judging by their jumpy, chattering ways, Page and Tyler were pretty excited about it.
“No school?” I asked.
“We got out yes-ter-day.” Page sang it rather than said it. Like a lot of Maine kids, she loved foods that turned other children green. She was brought up eating all manner of crustaceans and bi-valves, after all. I’d seen Page and Tyler fight over the last fiddlehead fern in a bowl. But nothing, in my opinion, was stranger than her love of rhubarb, the plant that grew like a weed and tasted, unless mixed with something sweet, like bitter celery.
Rhubarb grew all around our house, and my mother, combining her skinflint upper-class Yankee upbringing with her thrifty Maine housewife ways, couldn’t stand not to use every bit of it. So on a day she designated in June every year, all rhubarb not previously used in pie, cake, or compote was cut down and turned into strawberry rhubarb jam.
I helped myself to coffee and sat on the back stairs out of the way. I smiled hello to Sarah, remembering how uncomfortable she’d been when I last spoke to her at the clambake. She smiled back as she chopped rhubarb stalks.
Livvie and Sarah were close friends. They were about the same age and had been pregnant at the same time—too young, in my parents’ opinion, and in mine, truth be told. But while Livvie and Sonny were obviously deeply in love, Sarah had arrived in Busman’s Harbor alone, taking what retail work she could get during her pregnancy. Her mother Marie showed up not long before Tyler was born and had never left.
They rented an apartment over Gleason’s Hardware store on Main Street. Sarah got her GED and then her teaching degree, no easy feat with a baby and a job, especially when the nearest university was an hour commute each way. She taught kindergarten in town and worked for us summers and weekends. My father had hired her after Tyler was born, and I knew she depended on her clambake income. Her mother was a lunch lady, also at Busman’s Elementary, and she, too, worked for the clambake in the summers, cooking with Gabrielle. Tyler had grown into a polite, funny boy who was Page’s best friend.
Sarah had always been diffident around me, which was something I felt badly about. True, I was her summer boss and a couple years older, but neither should matter. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to be ashamed of and a lot to be proud of.
As I watched, Sarah continued slicing rhubarb while Livvie cut up strawberries. Page stood at the sink washing another batch of rhubarb while Tyler removed the jam jars and lids from their boxes. Livvie had quietly co-opted the jam making, as she had all the other food preparation chores. My mother was still as much a part of the day as ever, but Livvie was the one who actually determined the amount of each ingredient and cooked the jam.
I shuddered remembering my mother’s version—gray, slimy, awful. I died of embarrassment every December when Livvie and I delivered jars of it, festooned with bright red bows, to neighbors for the holidays. Now that Livvie cooked the jam, it was delicious, but I wondered how many of our neighbors still poured it straight down the sink without even tasting it.
As I sat watching, I tried to recall where Sarah had come from. I remembered when she turned up in town, a pretty girl, her pregnancy already showing. Somewhere along the line, had I heard that Sarah and her mother had moved to Busman’s Harbor from Bath?
Bath, where Tony and Ray were from? Maybe Sarah knew them. Maybe that explained her presence at Crowley’s the night of the murder. Remembering how she’d freaked out the last time, I wasn’t going to ask her anything in front of the kids.
I stood up. “Got to get dressed.”
“Where are you off to today?” Mom asked.
“Over to the island. The cops said we’re free to clean up.”
Sonny and I had minimized our descriptions of the damage from the fire when we’d told Mom about it. Of course, almost every guest had a camera and there were plenty of ugly pictures and even videos of the leaping flames available online, but that was nothing Mom needed to know about.
“That’s good, dear. It’s fog
gy.” My mother looked pointedly out the kitchen windows and it was true, the fog hadn’t burned off yet.
“Maybe you’ll see the ghost!” Page crowed. Then she and Tyler collapsed into giggles. “Woo-woo-woo! The ghost! The ghost!”
Like all good Maine mansions, Windsholme had a ghost. Actually, it had three. A stonemason killed during the mansion’s construction, a parlor maid who died of a burst appendix during a storm in the 1890s, and my mother’s great uncle Hal, who was killed in France during World War I. Why Hal had returned to the island to do his haunting, no one had explained.
“Have you seen the ghost?” I asked Page.
“Of course, silly.” Page hadn’t lived on Morrow during the summer the way Mom, Livvie, and I had, but she’d spent a lot of time there. Before money got so tight that Livvie had to work in the ticket booth, relegating Page to Mom’s care, Page had spent almost every day on the island during the season, running pretty free.
During her spring vacation this year, while Sonny, Chris, and Etienne were cleaning up the island, Page had gone out every day, with Tyler, if I remembered right. I was glad she’d had that time on Morrow, climbing the rocks, exploring the tide pools, building forts in the woods. The island was a special place for a kid. You felt like you knew every inch of it, like you ruled it. I thought of Page in that unbroken chain of children in my family playing on the island, starting with my great-grandfather and his siblings and continuing to my grandmother, my mother, and Livvie and me. I was sick and sad that part of Page’s childhood, of all our childhoods, might come to an end while it was my responsibility to save it.
“Page, did the men fix up the playhouse for you and Tyler to use when you were out on the island this spring?” I asked.
“No. It was a mess. But I think they should!”