by Barbara Ross
I genuinely liked Michaela, but something about Tony caused me to keep my guard up. I was relieved he was willing to pay the employees. It would be much harder to manage the clambake if word got around we’d stiffed people. But he was being too agreeable. Too generous. Why? Did he want to get this sad business over and done? Or did he have some other reason to care whether the citizens of Busman’s Harbor thought well of him?
“What are you planning for the rest of your day?” I asked.
“The police said we could leave, so we’re headed to Bath to spend time with Tony’s parents.” Michaela’s dabbed at her eyes with her napkin.
I looked at Tony. “You’re from Bath?” That was a surprise. Bath was just a twenty-five minute drive south along Maine’s jagged coast.
“Both Ray and I are. Were,” Tony replied. “We grew up together.”
How could I not have known? I could’ve sworn when Tony introduced me to his parents on board the Jacquie II, he said they’d just flown up from Florida. Then again, that wasn’t an unusual migration for an older Maine couple.
“That’s why we chose your place for the wedding,” Michaela said.
“I thought it was because you knew me in New York.”
Michaela shook her head. “No, no, no. Tony picked your place.”
Tony signaled for the waitress and signed the bill for our coffee. “We’ve got to get going and pack the cars,” he said to Michaela.
“Cars?” I said. “You didn’t ride up together?”
“Michaela came up early to meet her family,” Tony answered. “I was supposed to drive up with Ray, but when he came to pick me up, he had a big camp trunk taking up the whole backseat of his Porsche. There was no way his little car was going to fit me, Ray, his luggage, and all my luggage for the wedding and the honeymoon. So I drove myself up.” Tony shook his head and smiled. “Freakin’ Ray.”
Big camp trunk? Wasn’t that a little odd? “What did he say was in the trunk?”
“He didn’t. Some stupid thing would be my guess.” Tony smiled again indulgently. “Some prop for the best man speech or some other prank.”
“Did you tell the police about the trunk?”
“They didn’t ask. But they took all the stuff from his hotel room into evidence and towed his car from the lot at the Lighthouse Inn, so I guess they’ve found the trunk by now.”
Chapter 11
On my way back across the footbridge, I stopped halfway, took off my sweatshirt, and tied it around my waist. The day was still cool, but the sun was beginning to work its magic. A perfect day for a clambake. It was supposed to be our first day open to the general public for the season. I didn’t want to think about it.
I put my elbows on the rough wooden handrail and stared across the harbor, past its little islands to its mouth. Ray was from Bath, Maine. That increased the odds tremendously that he had the skills to get himself out to Morrow Island in the dark. It also meant he knew people who lived not too far away from Busman’s Harbor. For the first time, I began to believe Ray’s murder was the result of some trouble that had followed him to Morrow Island.
Even if some out-of-towner, whether from New York or Bath, had killed Ray, I still couldn’t imagine why the murder was committed on our island. And why had Ray’s body been left hanging in Windsholme?
I looked out at the harbor. Over the last few months, it had come alive. When I arrived in March, there’d been no boats in the frozen water. By the end of April, most of the working lobster and fishing boats were out or at least being readied for the season. In May, the tour boats came—day boats and whale watchers, the ferries to Chipmunk Island, and our own Jacquie II. Now the pleasure boats were beginning to arrive—cabin cruisers, beautiful sailboats, catamarans, and the yachts. Some came from Florida or the Caribbean, others from just down the coast. It felt great to see the harbor bustling, and I stood for a moment and enjoyed it all—the sun, the salt air, the clang-clang of the warning buoys out on the water.
On a map, Busman’s Harbor looked like the silhouette of the head and claws of a lobster dangling from the Maine coast into the sea. The residential part of town was built on the lobster’s head, my parents’ house sitting at its highest point. Off the lobster’s right shoulder was the inner harbor, lined with hotels and restaurants. On the other side, off the lobster’s left shoulder, was the back harbor where the working boats were anchored. The boatyard was there, with Gus’s restaurant nestled just beyond it. The points of land that made up the lobster’s claws surrounded the big outer harbor as if holding it in an embrace, and left an opening to the ocean just wide and deep enough for commercial traffic. These points, where the millionaires lived, were called Eastclaw and Westclaw.
As I stood on the footbridge, drinking in the sights and sounds of the awakening harbor, I was surprised to see the Boston Whaler we kept at Morrow Island speeding toward the town dock. I squinted to see who was in it. The royal blue baseball cap and matching windbreaker told me it was Etienne steering the small boat. I hurried the rest of the way across the footbridge to meet him.
Etienne tied up the Whaler and was just coming up the dock when I got there.
“Hey there,” I called. “What are you doing here?” I tried to sound chipper, as though my question was motivated by simple curiosity, but that’s not the way I felt. I wanted to say I was counting on you to stay on the island and make sure those people from the crime scene investigation team don’t destroy it. Or, I’m surprised the police let you off the island. Or, You hardly ever leave the island during the summer. But I didn’t say any of those things.
“The lieutenant wants to talk to me again.”
So Lieutenant Binder isn’t out supervising the crime scene team on the island. He must be the one Chris, Tony and Michaela had their interviews with this morning. I said to Etienne, “I’m sorry this has been such an ordeal for you.”
“The police are convinced I must have heard something that night. To tell you the truth, I am happy to be off the island. They have asked us to stay in the house. Out the windows, we see them searching every blade of grass, stomping in and out of Windsholme with their dirty boots. It is like a violation. I could not stand to watch. That sergeant said to come to town. So I have.”
I believed what Etienne said, he couldn’t stand to see the state police having their way with the island. He probably also couldn’t stand sitting in his house. Being still wasn’t one of his talents. He was built for constant work.
Etienne and Gabrielle had a nice house on the mainland where they spent the off-season. It was an old farmhouse with a pond, just a couple miles out of town. During the winter, he toiled in his woodshop making large wooden animal sculptures that were sold in shops up and down the coast. She hand sewed quilts that fetched breathtaking prices in the same stores. They always rented their farmhouse out for the entire summer season. The same family had taken it for years.
“How’s Gabrielle doing with all this?”
“Not well. I tried to get her to come to town with me, but she doesn’t like to leave the island in the summer. She’s lying down.”
Gabrielle lying down in the middle of the day? I could barely imagine it.
She had always been shy and far more self-conscious about her English than was warranted. It was actually quite fluent when you got her talking, but that was rare. An angular woman with graying hair cut in a neat pageboy, she wore dresses, never pants, and sensible shoes. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her, morning, noon, or night without an apron on. When we were little, Livvie and I had giggled about Gabrielle wearing her apron to bed. She had a vast collection, mostly floral prints, bib-front style, she’d made herself.
Livvie had told me Gabrielle’s shyness had become even more severe in recent years. She was too wedded to her routines and her places, Livvie thought. Changes in plans and unexpected events made her anxious and there had been so many unexpected events on Morrow Island in the last two days.
“She waits for him,” Etienne s
aid.
His expression was so sad I reached out and touched his shoulder. It was solid muscle. “I know.”
Etienne and Gabrielle’s son, Jean-Jacques, had been a year ahead of me in school. He was quiet like his mother and a hard worker like both his parents. We’d grown up together on the island and worked at the clambake every summer. Jean-Jacques and I had had an easy day-to-day relationship, like siblings. But he was hard to know.
At school, his parents’ foreignness made him something of a curiosity. We had that “outsiderness” in common. He with his Québécois parents, and me with the mother who’d been a summer person. Following high school, he’d gone to the University of Maine, but it didn’t take. He drifted back, worked different jobs in the harbor, and joined the army after 9/11. He stayed in for two tours, first to Afghanistan, and then Iraq.
Six years ago, his parents held a party for him when he was home on leave. I wasn’t there, but my parents were, along with Livvie and Sonny. Jean-Jacques had accepted everyone’s well wishes in his quiet way, then walked out of the house, down the road, and was never seen again. At least, as far as I or anyone in my family knew. Perhaps Etienne and Gabrielle knew more, but they didn’t say.
It might have seemed strange to many people that Gabrielle waited for Jean-Jacques in a place with no phones or cell coverage, a place that could only be reached by boat. But I understood her vigil. Morrow Island was where Jean-Jacques had spent every summer of his childhood. It was as much in his blood as it was in mine. That’s where he would return.
Etienne and I stood in silence for a moment, lost in our own thoughts.
“I’ll walk with you.”
“To the police station?”
“Now that I’m sure Lieutenant Binder’s there, I want to ask him again when we can open.”
Chapter 12
The police station was part of Busman’s Harbor’s relatively new fire department-town offices-police complex. The huge bays for the fire department rigs—one each for ladder truck, pumper, and ambulance—dominated the front of the building. Etienne and I cut around the side to the police department entrance. Normally, it was a sleepy little place. The two full-time officers on duty on each shift were always off on patrol, and if you were lucky you might catch the chief at his desk doing paperwork. Today, the place hummed with activity. State cops, local cops, and cops from the county sheriff’s office were all crammed into the small room, working two and even three to a desk.
I waited while Etienne gave his name and was led off into a small warren of cubicles by a policeman in plainclothes.
“Good luck!” I called after him, then wondered if that was the wrong thing to say. Did it imply he needed luck?
I gave my name to the harried-looking female civilian employee behind the desk and asked to see Lieutenant Binder.
“Sorry, he’s in a meeting. Can’t be disturbed.”
“Even if I know who killed Ray Wilson?”
The woman looked up sharply. “Do you?”
“No,” I admitted. “But I really need to talk to him.”
The woman got up and went through the door behind her into the giant multipurpose room where our town meetings were held. I caught a quick glimpse as the door opened and closed behind her. Chris was still there, sitting across the table from Binder. I had only a partial view of his back, but I recognized him instantly—the curve of the face in profile and the clothes. It was definitely him. How long had he been there? He’d left Gus’s more than two hours before.
The woman reappeared. “Sorry, Lieutenant Binder can’t be interrupted.”
I turned and left the police station discouraged, heading toward home.
As I passed the Snuggles Inn, a B&B across from my parents’ house, Michaela’s maid of honor Lynn stomped out onto the porch, struggling with a rolling suitcase, a garment bag, and a tote. She looked frazzled, to put it mildly. Her hair was in the same up-do she’d had yesterday for the wedding. She’d obviously slept in it. She was wearing yoga pants and a pink T-shirt and her pink-painted toes were shoved into flip-flops.
“Let me give you a hand.” I took the garment bag and tote so she could concentrate on pulling the suitcase along the inn’s uphill front walk. She needed the help, but I also thought it might be my only chance to talk to her. Gus’s challenge from this morning still rung in my ears. I had to solve my own problems.
“That’s my car.” Lynn nodded toward a mid-sized convertible with its top down parked in front. She put the suitcase on the backseat, turned toward the front door of the Snuggles, and screeched, “Beanie, get your butt out here! I am leaving in five minutes.”
Lynn grabbed the garment bag from me and tossed it in with the suitcase. “There’s five hundred bucks I’ll never see again. What do you think it would get on eBay? ‘Murder gown for sale?’ Too tacky? Beanie! I mean it!”
I didn’t know where to start or what to ask. It was easy for Gus to tell me to solve a murder, but it was much harder for me to do it. Lynn and I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk waiting for the unseen Beanie, who I knew was one of the bridesmaids. Michaela had thought it would be fun to put them all up together at the Snuggles, like a pajama party. She’d stayed there with her attendants the night before the wedding.
“Headed back to the city?” I assumed Lynn lived in New York, but it seemed best to be sure.
“Yes, thank God. The cops finally told us we could go. Beanie!”
“I just came from seeing Michaela and Tony. The cops told them the same thing.” Lynn had to be a close friend of Michaela’s. She was the maid of honor, after all. That probably meant she also knew Tony pretty well. But what about Ray? “Was Ray Wilson a friend of yours?” I asked.
Lynn stomped a flip-flopped foot in disgust. “Freakin’ Ray. Freakin’, freakin’ Ray,” she said, echoing Tony’s words, but in a very different tone. “Immature. Irresponsible. Still acting like a frat boy. Always ruins everything. Always. I certainly wasn’t his friend. I don’t see how Tony could stand him. And Michaela. I warned her a hundred times that man would bring her nothing but grief. Beanie!”
Though everything Lynn said was consistent with the feelings she’d expressed about Ray the day before, it was a little shocking to have her speak so badly about someone who’d just been murdered.
“Michaela’s taking it pretty hard,” I pointed out, thinking regardless of her feelings about the deceased, it was the job of someone close enough to be her maid of honor to support Michaela, not to go badmouthing her choice of friends to relative strangers.
“I bet she is,” Lynn smirked. “Tell me, you say you just saw them. Who was taking it harder, Michaela or Tony?”
I hesitated for a moment. People show grief differently. True, Tony had been calm and businesslike, the much less affected of the two. When he’d talked of Ray, it was with fondness, not sadness—which might have been a little odd, considering he and Ray were best friends and grew up together. But maybe Tony had some macho inhibition about showing his emotions, especially to someone he barely knew. Who was I to judge? And what was this woman saying? That Michaela cared about Ray too much? More than she cared about Tony? It seemed absurd.
Lynn, however, took my silence as agreement. “My point exactly.”
Beanie, also looking like she’d slept in her clothes, appeared at the front door of the Snuggles carrying an overnight case and a garment bag identical to Lynn’s. She jogged to the passenger side, threw her bags in the back, and jumped into her seat.
Before I could ask anything else, Lynn slid behind the wheel. “No offense, but I hope I never see you or this godforsaken place again,” she said just before they zoomed off, leaving me standing on the sidewalk.
Chapter 13
I looked across the street at my mother’s house where Sonny, good as his word, was taking down my mother’s porch windows. It was a terrible job. Twenty huge, wooden windows ran the length of the porch. They were ungainly and ungodly heavy, as I knew well, because it had always been Livvie’s
and my job to carry them to the garage once Dad had them off the house. The porch was high, so you had to stand on a ladder when you took the windows off, carrying them down one at a time. If that wasn’t bad enough, the windows were old, a little warped, and covered in layers of paint, so removing them always involved a lot of shoving and swearing, which is exactly what Sonny was doing as I came up the walk.
“Hey!” I called softly, hoping not to startle him.
“Hey, yourself.” Sonny paused on the ladder before starting on another window. He was red in the face and his dark green T-shirt was soaked with perspiration. “Man, I hate this job.”
“Dad hated it, too.”
When you think about men who’ve hauled lobster traps, chopped wood for towering bonfires, and disposed of the lobster shells, corn cobs, and clamshells left by four hundred people a day, it says a lot about the rottenness of the window job.
“Times like this, I really miss him.”
I nodded, thinking about how few the years had really been, between when Dad had accepted Sonny as a permanent fixture in Livvie’s life, and when he’d died. For those few years, Dad had help with the windows.
“I checked the Internet reservations,” Sonny said. “We’re almost full up for tomorrow.”
“Really?” I’d turned the reservation system off for today, but I’d left it on for tomorrow in the hope that we’d be cleared to open. Mondays were usually decent days in the clambake biz. Lots of people came to Maine for three-day weekends. But full, in June? “Ghouls,” I said.
“Julia, you don’t know that. Maybe it’s people who wanted to go today, but couldn’t. That’s why we’re full.”
“I doubt it.”