Clammed Up (A Maine Clambake Mystery)

by Barbara Ross

  Sarah came out of the bathroom. There was no way in that tiny apartment she hadn’t heard me come in.

  “I need to talk to you. It’s about Ray Wilson.”

  Sarah nodded toward Tyler and gave me a warning look. “Tyler, I’m going outside to talk to Miss Snowden for a minute. Stay with Grammie. I’ll be right out front.” She led me out onto the sidewalk in front of Gleason’s and gestured toward an outdoor bench.

  “I saw your mother at Ray’s funeral,” I said when we’d sat down.

  “She told me. I knew you’d wonder why she was there.”

  “Sarah, can you help me save the clambake? Please tell me what you know about Ray.”

  Sarah sat on the bench and stared off at our little town—the library, the post office, Small’s Ice Cream across the street. “I want to help you. I really do. Not just to save my job, but because your family’s been so good to me. Your dad hired me to work at the clambake when Tyler was only six weeks old. Remember, I used to take him out to the island every day and your mom would watch him and Page? I don’t know what I would have done without your family.”

  “Then tell me about you and Ray Wilson.”

  Sarah blushed deeply and took a deep breath. “I was sixteen, working for the summer in the Penny Candy Store in Bath.”

  I nodded to show I knew the place.

  “Ray came in with Tony and a bunch of his other friends. He was just out of college, working and taking his summer vacation in Bath, visiting his family and old friends.” She hesitated. “What can I say? I was his summer fling.”

  “You were nine years younger than he was!”

  “I told him I was twenty. It was all so glamorous. He took me sailing. We went out every night. We walked right into bars when I was on his arm. I got drunk for the first time. He was the handsome, sophisticated older guy who’d been away to college and lived in New York. My life wasn’t like yours and Livvie’s. I didn’t go away to boarding school. I’d never been outside of Maine. I fell hard.”

  I felt badly for her. The poor kid. It was easy to see what had happened. “And then?”

  “His vacation ended. He went back to New York. I went back to my life, except for one thing.”

  “You were pregnant.” I remembered seeing Sarah and my sister when I came home from college for Christmas, still looking like kids, with skinny legs and big tummies.

  “Now you know the whole story. Ray Wilson was Tyler’s dad.” Sarah let out a long breath.

  “Does Livvie know?”

  “I told her the same thing I told everyone else. Tyler’s dad was ‘some jerk.’ And he was.”

  “But I still don’t understand why Mrs. Wilson cut your mother down at the funeral. I would think for Tyler’s sake, Ray’s parents would try to get along with your family.”

  “So you saw that. Mom was so embarrassed.” Sarah balled her fists. She seemed to be marshaling her courage to go on.

  “You said you’d do anything to help the clambake,” I reminded her.

  “And I meant it. This is just hard for me.” If possible, her blush deepened. “The truth is, I never told Ray about Tyler. In those two weeks we were together, on some level, I understood that Ray drank too much. Not like his friends, getting a little wild on vacation. In my heart, I knew what the problem was. My dad was a drunk. So when I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t want to put my kid through what I’d been through.” She swallowed. “After Tyler was born, I did get in touch with Ray a couple times. I wanted to tell him. But each time I met him, he was drunk. So I never did.”

  She stopped again and I waited. I knew there was more she wanted to tell me. I just had to be patient.

  “A couple years ago during one of Ray’s attempts to sober up, he came to see me.”

  “Ray Wilson came here to Busman’s Harbor?”

  “Walked right up and knocked on my door. It’s not like we’re hiding or anything. Tyler answered and it took about thirty seconds for Ray to put it together. All he did was ask Tyler how old he was. Maybe Ray suspected. Maybe there’d been rumors. Ray was furious, as you can imagine. It’s a big thing to keep from somebody. That’s why Ray’s mother acted the way she did at his funeral.”

  Everything she’d told me made sense . . . except I still couldn’t figure out why she’d been at Crowley’s the night of the murder. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. I would have thought she’d want to avoid Ray, not seek him out. “Why did you go to Crowley’s that night, Sarah?”

  “I wanted to talk to him, but he was drunk again. Then he got into a huge fight with the bride. So I went home.” The blush dropped away and she turned pale and shaky. “I’m so sorry for any trouble I caused your family, Julia. Ray was my problem and I thought I had it handled. I never would have imagined everything that’s happened since.”

  “I’m sorry, too, Sarah, but you haven’t caused us any trouble. Whoever killed Ray did that.” I realized I was saying to her exactly what Jamie had said to me. “Have the police questioned you?”

  She nodded. “Originally because I was in Crowley’s that night.”

  “And you’ve told them everything you’ve told me?”

  She nodded. “Swear to God.”

  Chapter 37

  I still had a lot of time to kill before I went out to Morrow Island with Binder in the afternoon, so I borrowed my mom’s car and headed to Quentin Tupper’s house on Westclaw Point. Bob Ditzy had rung my cell phone two more times, but hadn’t left a second message, which I figured was all to the good.

  Twenty minutes later, almost at the end of the point, I turned down Tupper’s driveway, which was really just a double track. I was amused to see what I took to be his car parked out back—a mint-condition, antique wooden-sided estate wagon. I imagined Quentin driving up Route 95 from New York City in it. Quite a sight.

  I walked around the property to the ocean side and climbed the steps to his deck, calling “hello,” loudly. I imagined unexpected visitors, or even strange cars, were rare that far down the point. The house was massive, a three-story wall of dark gray granite, with huge windows all along the front looking out to the wild North Atlantic.

  Windows? Wasn’t that how Sonny said Tupper made his fortune? I leaned on the deck rail. A long dock ran from the property out to a sleek sailboat moored in deep water. Forty-footer, I guessed. A single-hand, high-tech, carbon-fiber racing boat. Custom-made, with all the bells and whistles.

  Despite the luxurious look of the house, the deck was sparsely furnished with a standard-issue picnic table and two worn Adirondack chairs. At the end of the deck next to the railing was a telescope, trained right on Morrow Island. I couldn’t resist. I looked into it.

  Across the water, I saw our little beach surrounded by great slabs of rust-colored rock. Beyond the rock, the hill rose up, covered on the backside of the island with a dense growth of scrub oak and pine. Rising above all that, I could see the slate roof, chimneys, and fourth floor dormers of Windsholme.

  I turned the telescope to look at the inlet just down the coast from Tupper’s property where the tide had deposited all the inflatable toys Livvie and I had lost when we were little. If Ray Wilson went to the island at low tide and left a boat on the beach to be washed out, that was where it would have turned up. But I didn’t see a boat or anything else.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” That man was always sneaking up on me.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” I said.

  “I’ve seen humpback whales breach right out there between your property and mine. Magnificent creatures.”

  “I’ve seen them, too.” From our island. “Your house is beautiful . . . to go with the beautiful setting.”

  “Thanks. I love it here.”

  “Did you design the windows?”

  “What?”

  “My brother-in-law told me that you invented some kind of window.”

  Quentin threw his head back and laughed. “Is that what they’re saying around town? Not windows, Windows . . . wi
th a capital W.”

  Oh my God, he invented Windows? No, of course he didn’t.

  Quentin motioned toward the two Adirondack chairs on the deck and we sat down. “I was a classics major. The kinds of language skills classics majors develop are perfect for computer programming. I dabbled in that, too and while I was still at college I developed a tiny piece of code that makes almost every computer program you use run minutely faster. Whenever someone buys a certain operating system or application that runs on it, I get a few fractions of a penny.”

  My God. I tried to figure out how much money that would be. Hundreds of millions was the best I could come up with. “Are you still a computer programmer?”

  “Nope. Never really was. Just hit it lucky with a few lines of code.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  He sat in the Adirondack chair, looking comfortable and at home with himself. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? No one does nothing.” My work in venture capital had given me a pretty clear idea of what the very rich do. They sit on the boards of nonprofits, they take up expensive hobbies, they dabble in politics. Sometimes they even invest in small companies where they drive the management crazy with suggestions because having once made a lot of money doing one thing, they think they know everything about everything. I was overly familiar with that kind of rich person. But someone who did nothing? That was outside my experience. Yet I remembered, I’d found not a single trace of Quentin Tupper on the Web.

  “It’s a challenge to do nothing, believe me. I’ve had to cultivate it carefully. All around are entanglements. Say one word at a meeting of your condo board and the next thing you know, you’re on a committee—or worse yet, running the thing. Attend a charity event or give a little money to your alma mater, and you end up calling all your friends to put the squeeze on them. It is very, very difficult to do nothing, but through hard work and attention to detail, I’ve accomplished it.”

  “You sail.” I pointed to the beautiful boat moored at his dock.

  “I do. It’s part of my overall do-nothing plan. I walk out to the end of my dock and sail away. I never plan ahead. I don’t race. I never give parties on my boat. I buy whatever supplies I need at the next port. ”

  Very soon, if the clambake failed, I’d probably be doing nothing myself, though that had never been part of any plan. Doing nothing without Quentin’s resources didn’t seem like much fun at all.

  “You arrived in Busman’s Harbor the morning of Ray Wilson’s murder,” I said. “The paper you gave me had a front section and a sports section from the early Sunday edition, as well as the parts of the paper only New York metro readers get. For you to be sitting at Gus’s by 7:00 AM on Sunday when we first met, you must have left New York in the wee hours. That seems like an odd thing for a man who has no appointments or obligations.”

  “I answer to no one. I come and go as I please.”

  He was starting to annoy me again. “Really, Quentin. Why did you give me that paper?”

  Quentin smiled, trying to diffuse my irritation. “My family has owned this land for eight generations. Did you know that? It was never any good for farming. There was almost nothing on it before I built this house, just a little fishing shack my ancestors used to enforce their traditional claim to lobstering in these waters. But this isn’t the first home I’ve built. I had a gorgeous place in the Hamptons. Peaceful, convenient to New York. But then some jerk movie producer bought the place across the bay from me and put in a helipad. It was like living in Fallujah. Helicopters coming and going at all hours.”

  I squinted at him, wondering what in the world does this have to do with me?

  He continued. “Tony Poitras and Ray Wilson have been looking at property in Maine for a while. Your island isn’t the first one they scouted. But they have very specific requirements. They need town water and power like you have. They need to be out of cell range for all carriers and likely to remain so. They need a flat spot for a helipad and they need a property with a single owner. They don’t share their islands with others. When you start applying the criteria, the number of target properties gets pretty small. And one of them is right across the water from me. Yours.”

  I knew Ray and Tony had considered buying our island. Ray had approached Etienne and Sonny. But now I understood better why they were interested in Morrow specifically. “So you thought you’d warn me?”

  “When I saw that article in the real estate section of the Times, and the announcement saying Tony Poitras’s wedding was on Morrow Island, I figured it wasn’t a coincidence. I got in my car that night and drove to Busman’s Harbor. When I got to Gus’s to have breakfast, I heard about Wilson’s murder. I honestly didn’t know who you were when I met you. But when I found out, I wanted to tip you off about what Tony and Ray were really looking for on your island.” He’d been speaking so rapidly he ran out of breath. He exhaled, blowing a rush of air out through his lips. “That’s it. That’s all. I swear. Just trying to help a neighbor out.”

  “Why didn’t you just talk to me?”

  “I was headed back to New York. I didn’t want to leave a message with your brother-in-law. I thought it was better to give you the facts I had in hand rather than my speculation.”

  There wasn’t much more to say. I thanked him for his explanation as he walked me to my car. When I started the engine, he put his head in my window. “Stay strong, buddy. Stay strong. Fight the bank. Solve the murder. A fancy resort with a helipad is the last thing I need across from my land.”

  I pulled out of his driveway, trying to remember. Had I said anything about the bank?

  When I got back to town, I walked to Gus’s. If he wasn’t too busy, I could fit in a quick lunch before I went out to the island with Binder and his people. I glanced at my cell phone as I walked. No new calls from Bob the Banker. A relief.

  At Gus’s, I looked for Chris. I longed to see him. So much had happened since we’d talked outside the police station. But he wasn’t there, even though it was Thursday, one of our days. It had been a rough twenty-four hours for me—the fight with Michaela, the fight with Sonny, the calls from the bank. My head was spinning after my conversations with Quentin and Sarah. I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything. I really needed to talk to someone. To talk to Chris.

  I wandered over to the counter and sat down. The place was medium crowded. And to their credit, nobody asked me anything about the murder or fire. I silently blessed the Mainers’ credo of “mind your own damn business.”

  “You’re lookin’ a might droopy,” Gus said when he came to take my order.

  “Oh, Gus.” Tears sprang to my eyes. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I wanted to see Chris. Needed to talk to him. I was overwhelmed by everything I was dealing with. I was alone. One tear escaped from the corner of my eye and rolled down my cheek before I blinked it away.

  “There, there. There’s no crying at Gus’s place.”

  That seemed like a new rule, and like all Gus’s rules, it seemed arbitrary and unenforceable, but somehow Gus got everyone to tow the line. “What’s troubling you?”

  What was troubling me? Was he kidding? I took a quick spin through my life looking for any single area that was “fine,” and came up empty.

  When Gus realized I wasn’t going to answer, he continued. “Murder? Arson? Bankruptcy? Is that all? Nil carborundum illegitimi, Julia. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Your family business is too important to this town.”

  Murder. Arson. Bankruptcy. Plus, I kissed the wrong boy when I was drunk. I started to tear up again. I stared at the menu scrawled on the blackboard. I’d memorized it when I was six and Gus hadn’t added or subtracted an item since.

  He turned away with a frustrated sigh. Before I knew it, he’d put a double-sized piece of his wife’s three-berry pie and a cup of coffee in front of me. “Pie solves most things.”

  He went off to attend to other customers while I drowned my sorrows in the flakey, buttery crust. I c
losed my eyes and rolled the tangy blue, black, and raspberry filling across my tongue, hoping to hit every taste bud. Pie. Gus might have something there. I definitely felt a little better.

  I hadn’t allowed myself think about the six million dollars Ray Wilson had mentioned to Etienne. I took just a moment to fantasize about it and about my life with no debt, no family responsibilities, no obligations. I felt a wonderful sense of freedom, like I was floating.

  My cell phone chirped. Sonny. Great. I answered.

  “You on your way, Your Highness? We’re all waiting for you down at the dock.”

  Chapter 38

  I ran over the hill and down the other side toward the town dock. Was this the new me? A person perpetually late to important appointments?

  On the stern of the harbormaster’s boat stood three state cops I didn’t recognize, along with Detective Flynn and Lieutenant Binder, who was staring with annoyance at his watch. And Sonny, who I hadn’t seen since the tense dinner following our fight last night. And Jamie, who I hadn’t seen since he kissed me at 1:00 that morning.

  I scrambled aboard. All the ship required was Robert Forman Ditzy and it would have in its tiny stern every man on the planet I did not wish to see at that moment. Binder nodded to the harbormaster and we were off.

  The Boston Whaler was tied up at our dock, which meant Etienne and Gabrielle were on the island. I hoped Binder had the courtesy to let them know we were coming. I knew how skittish having strangers on the island made Gabrielle, and all of us showing up without notice was sure to increase her nervousness. As soon as we tied up, Etienne came bounding out of their house. I could tell by his look of surprise that Binder hadn’t told him about this last search. Gabrielle followed Etienne closely, as if using him as a shield.

  Binder assigned each of the three state cops to search a third of the island. He asked Sonny, Jamie, and Etienne pair up with one of the officers. Etienne hemmed and hawed like he didn’t want to accept his assignment. I thought he might be uneasy about leaving Gabrielle alone while there were cops looking under every rock on the island. I understood. Even though I liked Binder and had never found him to be anything but professional and fair, I too, felt the violation. Finally, reluctantly, Etienne agreed to go. He kissed Gabrielle on her forehead and urged her toward the house. Binder gave a nod to Flynn who silently joined Etienne’s party.