by Barbara Ross
“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!”
Chapter 30
It was still foggy when I set out for Morrow half an hour later. I couldn’t see much, but I could see enough. I knew the route so well it would be easy to slip into mental autopilot when making the trip, always a dangerous thing on the water. I stuck close to the shoreline and listened to the foghorn, bleating its warning from Dinkums Light.
I came through the mouth of the outer harbor into the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the fog, I stayed close to Westclaw Point. I followed it until I could see Morrow Island. As I came up to the inlet across from our beach, a new house loomed out of the fog. Built of dark gray granite and glass, it seemed thrust up by the boulders on which it stood. The house was massive and sleekly modern, more appropriate to Malibu than coastal Maine. But I didn’t hate its looks. The building seemed oddly at home in its environment. I spotted Morrow Island across the water and headed for it.
I was happy to be heading out to the island before Etienne and Sonny. I needed to spend some time alone. Not alone, actually. I assumed Gabrielle would be there, but she usually stayed close to her house or her vegetable garden when she wasn’t working.
I pulled up to the dock and called to Gabrielle. I didn’t want to scare her. She appeared in a second story window of her house and waved to me. “I’m going up to Windsholme to wait for the guys,” I yelled. She gave me a thumbs-up sign that she’d heard and understood.
I stood at the bottom of the lawn looking up at Windsholme. Even with its ruined side porch, the mansion was beautiful, perfectly proportioned, solid and strong. Until the fire when we’d almost lost it, I’d always viewed Windsholme as a burden. I’d never lived there and neither had my mother. It was too expensive to maintain, but even more expensive to demolish. Its plumbing was erratic, its wiring dangerous and shut off in all but the newly rewired rooms. The cost of gutting it, fixing all those things, and carting away all that horsehair plaster was prohibitive to even think about.
As I walked up the hill, I thought about my great-great grandparents who’d built it. My mother had an ancient photo of them with their five children and servants arranged stiffly on Windsholme’s lawn. For the first time, I found myself wondering what they were like. Was this place a refuge for a happy family? Had they let their children serve them imaginary tea in the playhouse? Or, more likely, was the big house a place where they entertained to impress, their children watched over by nannies, seen but not heard? Why didn’t I know the answer?
True to his word, Binder had already sent someone out to remove the security device on Windsholme’s doors. I opened them and stepped inside.
I stood stock still on the spot where I’d been when I first saw Ray Wilson’s body. I breathed in and out, evenly and deliberately, willing myself to roll back my memory to the great hall before it had been sullied by that sight. The air smelled of its familiar damp, with a new smokiness added. I tried to block out the acrid smell. I wanted to feel the same way about the house as I had before all the terrible things occurred. I knew from experience it was the best way to handle my panic attacks.
When I was recruited out of business school to the venture capital firm, the job was great. And I was pretty good at it. But then the economy turned and instead of helping entrepreneurs grow their companies, my work was all about downgrading projections, laying off staff, and selling assets. Too often, during the worst of the credit crunch, we were closing companies up altogether. My job became more like presiding over a dozen deaths a year. And right after my own father died.
The panic attacks had started then, in the worst of the downturn and always when I was faced with a difficult task, like telling a company board no more money would be coming to keep them afloat or telling a founder he was no longer the right person to lead his own company. I was in my twenties. What business did I have relaying that kind of terrible news to people?
I’d suffered from panic attacks in the anonymous ladies rooms of a dozen start-up companies and in airports on my way to San Jose, Provo, and Boston. My body always reacted badly when my head forced me to do something my heart resisted. The best way to combat the attacks was to get back up on the horse—to go back into the boardrooms, to get on the next plane. I had to do the same thing with Windsholme. Exorcise the demons and make it mine again.
I stood for several minutes in the great hall until I felt I could move on, then started moving through Windsholme’s empty rooms. Most of the furniture had been carted off the island and sold at auction during the Depression. The rest, legend had it, had been broken up and burned in the fireplaces on cool summer nights. I thought about that generation, too, my mother’s maternal grandparents. They’d been wild partiers in the twenties, but in the 1930s they were the first generation faced with keeping the island in the family. In truth, Morrow probably hadn’t been sold because at the time there was no one to buy it. But the taxes had been paid somehow and the town hadn’t seized the island.
I roamed through the ground floor. In the two-story kitchen, I climbed the iron spiral staircase to the balcony that ran all the way around its second level. The built-in cabinets once held china, silver, crystal, and table linens within easy reach of the footmen and butler attending to the dinner guests. I moved through the swinging door into the dining room and inspected the hand-painted Asian scenes on the wallpaper, especially in the east end of the room, where it had been damaged by smoke and water. The sight made me sad. I stood for a few minutes, breathing in and out, getting comfortable with the sight.
From there, I walked through the empty office and the billiard room before crossing to the living room and the ladies drawing room. Both opened through French doors onto the front porch.
When I was ready, I went back to the great hall again and climbed the stairs, passing the point where Ray Wilson had hung. I walked methodically from one end of the long upstairs hall to the other, opening each door, making the rooms my own again. In the master bedroom, which was over the dining room, there was more smoke and water damage, but it was limited to the wall adjacent to the side porch roof.
I continued up the curving staircase to the top floor, open to the ceiling, giving drama to the great hall three stories below. The rooms on the top floor were much smaller than those in the rest of the house, with lower ceilings and small dormered windows. It was the territory of the servants.
As I had on the other floors, I opened each door and stood in the doorway or entered the room. At the midpoint of the hallway, across from the open landing, I turned a knob, but the door stuck. It was a perennial problem in a house that was always damp. I put my shoulder against the door and pushed as hard as I could. Nothing.
I felt something whoosh past my feet and jumped a mile. “Le Roi!”
The Maine coon cat sat by the door frame, looking at me, fully aware that he’d scared the bejesus out of me. Morrow was his island. He merely suffered our presence.
“How did you get in here?” I’d closed the front door behind me, and he couldn’t have passed through the burned French doors in the dining room.
“Julia? What are you doing?”
I looked over the railing. Gabrielle was in the great hall below. I must have been so focused, I hadn’t heard her enter the house.
“Up here. I can’t seem to get one of the doors opened.”
Gabrielle ran up the stairs, wiping her hands on her apron. “That happens always. You know—the damp. Etienne just radioed from the town dock. He and Sonny are on their way. They’ll need your aid unloading when they get here.”
“Sure. Help me open this door?”
Gabrielle shook her head. “Leave it be, Julia.” She surprised me by taking me in her arms and giving me a fierce hug, which I returned. When she released me, she said softly, “What do you do here, Julia? Etienne told me what happened yesterday, how you broke do
wn right in this hallway.”
“I’m fine. Really I am.” How could I explain I was exorcising my fear of a house I’d known all my life? “I’ll be right down.”
“Okay, but I don’t like to leave you.” Gabrielle left reluctantly.
When she was gone, I worked my way down the hall to the other end, opening every door. I went back to the door across from the landing and tried it again. It didn’t budge.
By the time Sonny and Etienne arrived, the fog had burned off and the island was bathed in sunlight.
Demolishing the porch was a delicate operation. The last bit of roof had to come down without killing us, then the remaining pillars and rails, and finally the last of the burnt decking had to be pried off. The great stone footings would remain, a sort of ghost porch until it could be rebuilt. We aimed to get the area as cleaned up as possible so our guests wouldn’t look at Windsholme and ask, “What happened?” That was the last thing we wanted to revisit at every clambake.
Etienne, who actually understood construction, mostly directed. Sonny, of course, argued with him, because Sonny was the greatest living expert on everything. I could sense Etienne losing his patience.
“When we finish this, we should take down as much of that damaged plaster inside as possible so I can haul it out on my dad’s boat,” Sonny said.
“Let’s just get this porch job done so we can open up the clambake,” Etienne warned.
“But while we have the boat—”
Etienne lost his temper. “We have enough to do! We only have your father’s boat for a few hours.”
Both of them looked at me, the tiebreaker. That had been our dynamic all spring. Once again, I had to side with Etienne. I had no way to tell if the porch part of the job would take the rest of our time, but any work required to get the clambake open had to take priority.
“Let’s just take care of this porch.”
“Figures,” Sonny grunted and walked away, hauling some boards toward the fire pit.
I didn’t tell Sonny and Etienne about my desensitizing walk through Windsholme. When the time came to nail the plywood over the space where we’d removed the destroyed French doors, I simply went into the house and braced the boards from the inside. Nobody said anything about it.
While Sonny carried another load down to the fire pit, I approached Etienne. “When we were here with the building inspector, you said you’d met Ray Wilson before.”
“Yes. He came to the island. He said his best friend was getting married here and he wanted to play a trick, so he needed to take a look around.”
“A trick?”
“You can’t very well tie old shoes and cans to the groom’s car out here, so he said he was looking for something ‘more creative.’”
“And you let him look around?” Knowing what I knew about what Ray and Tony did for a living, I had my own suspicions about why Ray wanted to see the island.
“Sure. Why not? You said you wanted to do whatever we could to accommodate these private events people,” Etienne reminded me.
I hate having my own words come back at me. But that triggered a happier thought. “How did Ray get to the island?”
Etienne looked at me like I was crazy. “On the freeway.”
“No, I mean did he get himself over or did someone bring him?”
“Came by himself.”
“Did he rent a boat or borrow it or what?” Etienne raised his shoulders and turned up his palms, the universal symbol for “who knows?”
Ray could have come out to the island the night of the murder on his own to set up his trick on Tony. If there even was a trick. If it wasn’t just a pretense to see the island. But could he have made it, drunk as he was? Chris said he seemed more sober after he threw up.
Even if Ray could have navigated on his own, that didn’t answer the question of who might have met him. And killed him. And hung up his body from the staircase.
When the porch was demolished Sonny and I took his dad’s lobster boat filled with debris back to the harbor. As soon as we got within cell range, I called and left a message for Binder, thanking him for allowing us take down the porch and begging him to let us open tomorrow. When I ended the call, there was a message from Michaela providing directions to Ray’s funeral that afternoon. And urging me to come. Poor Michaela. She was friendless at such a stressful time and stuck with that gargoyle of a mother-in-law.
Chapter 31
After Sonny and I loaded the remains of the porch into his truck so he could make a run to the dump, I hurried home. I was so intent on getting changed for the funeral, I nearly tripped over Fiona Snuggs, who knelt on the winding walk outside my mother’s house, pulling weeds. “Sorry, Miss, er, Fee.”
“Just tidying up.”
When my father died, Sonny had taken over the tasks of mowing the Snugg sisters’ lawn and shoveling snow off their walks. The sisters had gone on caring for the gardens at my mother’s house, just as they always had. Over the spring, I’d gotten used to finding a seventy-five-year-old woman crouching in our garden. Though it made me feel awkward, I knew Fee would refuse all offers of help. My sister did a little better with her. Instead of asking, Livvie just jumped in. Fee had decided that of the two of us, Livvie was the potential gardener, probably a reasonable perception, and had started mentoring her in the art of flowers and shrubs.
I helped Fiona to her feet.
“I was thinking about our conversation the other day,” she said, brushing dirt from her denim skirt. “About the night of the murder. I think I’ve remembered something more.”
I waited.
“I told you that maid of honor called Michaela several times and left messages apologizing for their fight. But I’ve remembered she called someone else.”
“Do you know who?”
“No, but she said something like, ‘She’s with Ray. Where do you think she is?’ And then ‘You need to come over here, right now.’”
Tony. It had to be. Add to it the evidence that his bed wasn’t slept in that night and who else could it have been? But why would Lynn order Tony to come to the Snuggles? Wouldn’t she have sent him out to look for Michaela and Ray?
“Did Lynn leave the inn that night?”
Fee pushed a hand through her short, gray hair. “I don’t know. Remember, I fell asleep in the chair.”
“So soundly you might not have heard the maid of honor going out or coming in?”
Fee blushed. “Well, I didn’t hear Michaela come in, did I? And yet there she was in the morning.” The older woman put a steadying hand on my shoulder and stepped back to admire her handiwork. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I looked across our front yard, which was dotted with irregularly shaped flowerbeds. In one, bright pink peonies blazed in contrast to cool purple irises. In the shade, astilbe bloomed among the variegated greens of hosta. In the sun, yellow day lilies reached for the sky and red roses climbed the side of the garage. When had all this bloomed? I’d been so heads-down busy and obsessively worried about the clambake, I hadn’t even noticed.
“It’s beautiful, Fee,” I said, giving her a little hug.
Now what had I come home for? Oh, yes, I was in a hurry to get to a funeral.
“Julia!” Michaela was at the back of the nondescript, 1960s Catholic Church when I entered for Ray’s funeral. She threw her arms around me and hugged tight, confirming my suspicion that she really needed a friend. She led me to one of the very front pews, just behind the couple I took to be Ray’s parents. I hadn’t known Ray Wilson when he was alive, and I wouldn’t have presumed to sit in such a prominent spot if I’d been on my own, but I was there to support Michaela, so I followed her lead. Not long after we settled into our seats, an elderly priest and an adolescent altar girl took their places on the dais and the organ began a slow, sad hymn.
The doors at the back of the church opened and six men entered, standing beside the flower-draped coffin. Tony was at the front right corner as they wheeled Ray Wilson’s body slowly d
own the center aisle. I could tell at a glance Tony’s suit was worth more than the total cost of what the other pallbearers wore.
As I stared back up the aisle, following the coffin’s progress, I was surprised to see a woman I recognized scuttle into the next-to-last row. Marie Halsey, Sarah’s mother. What is she doing here? I’d wondered just that morning if she and Sarah were from Bath. Marie’s presence seemed to confirm it. I looked around to see if Binder or Flynn or even one of the local Busman’s officers was there, but couldn’t spot anyone.
The coffin made its slow progression to the front of the church where the pallbearers turned it over to the care of the priest. Some of them genuflected before they made their way to the front pew opposite Ray’s parents, though Tony did not. The priest welcomed the mourners and we moved into the funeral mass. A young woman who may have been a cousin read some lines from the Bible. Next to me, Michaela snuffled and wiped her eyes. Beside her, Tony’s mother sat with the same disgruntled expression she’d worn the morning of the nonwedding. She looked as if she longed to run up on the altar and explain to the priest what he was doing wrong. Tony’s father sighed.
Tony ascended to the lectern to give the eulogy. He removed a folded piece of paper from his suit pocket, spreading it carefully in front of him, though once he started speaking, he never glanced at it. “Ray Wilson was my best friend,” he began. “He was my business partner, and my brother.” Tony’s voice broke slightly.
I felt Michaela quiver beside me as she fought unsuccessfully to hold back her tears. She gripped my hand.
“We found each other in Mrs. Kearney’s kindergarten class right here in Bath. Ray came up to me on the first day and announced that we would be best friends and would play together at every recess. How did he know, at five years old, that we’d be able to accomplish so much, good and bad, together?
“On the good side of the ledger, there was the basketball championship we finally brought home for the Shipbuilders in our senior year, the college scholarships we both earned as a result, and the successful business we built together.