Scone Island

by Frederick Ramsay

  Scone Island

  An Ike Schwartz Mystery

  Frederick Ramsay

  www.FrederickRamsay.com

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Frederick Ramsay

  First E-book Edition 2012

  ISBN: 9781615954100 epub

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

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  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

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  Contents

  Scone Island

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  The original Neil Bernstein

  Had we not shared office space for a few years,

  there would have been a sheriff, but probably not Ike.

  Thank you

  Acknowledgments

  It is usual to thank the people who helped in the writing of a book for all their efforts. In the past I have done so always fearful I’d left someone off the list. With that in mind I want to thank again all the staff at the Poisoned Pen Press (you know who you are) for their encouragement and help. It is not easy, I think, to deal with the sort of stuff authors shove at them and turn it into a marketable, much less a readable book. Luckily, it is a small press and, unlike its grander competitors with large and mercurial staffs, it is possible to know and thank them all.

  Also, many thanks to my publisher, Robert Rosenwald and my editor, Barbara Peters, both for their patience in the process and their continued willingness to provide a home for Ike and his friends.

  Finally, to my wife who thinks I am doing something worthwhile in my office instead of merely scribbling, a special thank you for pretending it is so.

  Frederick Ramsay, 2012

  Epigraph

  Archer had tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called appropriately enough Mount Desert) where a few hardy Bostonians and Philadelphians were camping in “native” cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence amid woods and water.

  Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

  Map

  Chapter One

  Harmon Staley would never be thought of as a patient man. Those who knew him well kept their distance unless business or necessity required them to do otherwise. Yet he’d listened to Barstow’s offer several times. His response never changed. Would he sell Cliffside? No, he would not. Neither would he approach the Scone Island Owners Association about the project. Yes, he would support any plan within reason to develop the island into an upscale resort. He would not do so, however, if it meant investing in Barstow’s company or a substantial dollar assessment on the other owners.

  “Barstow, you do not strike me as Colin Tennant, and Scone Island is certainly no Mustique,” he’d said at the time.

  Barstow had replied, “Pardon?”

  “Not important—some Scottish Lord who bought an island like you’re trying to do, and after he had his fun with celebrities and their entourages, he lost his shirt. Are you prepared to lose your shirt, Barstow? There is no electrical power here, no certain supply of water, and no phone service. How do you plan to turn this rock in the middle of nowhere into a resort?”

  But the man only smiled. “I suppose the same way you intend to turn that tumbledown monstrosity of yours into a bed-and-breakfast.” And then he shrugged as if the two of them shared a secret, as if they alone knew what others did not, as if they coconspired in a complex scheme, an adventure. Harmon guessed that Barstow had no clue as to what either of them might or might not know, and the smug “I know something you don’t know” expression infuriated him almost as much as the constant pestering. Only reluctantly had he agreed to meet Barstow for what he hoped would be a final and successful attempt to get rid of the developer. He couldn’t possibly know the secret.

  “A compromise,” Barstow had said. “A sweetener.”

  In the days Harmon would refer to as his “previous life,” he might have wondered at Barstow, would have had his antennae up, so to speak. Certainly he would have been more cautious. After all, he had not lived this long by being careless. But since he’d reinvented himself for this new stage in his life and since this was a piece of the Maine coast at the end of never, what were the chances something could go wrong?

  Against his better judgment, he’d agreed to meet the man one last time. He paced the length of the big house’s porch, oblivious to the structure’s peeling paint and badly weathered and missing shakes, nothing that a small infusion of money could not fix. Where this money might come from remained a mystery to those who saw this latest member of the island’s population as a somewhat seedy and down-at-the-heels opportunist. They could not have guessed that Harmon had assets. That he only had to sit tight for a few more months until no one would notice, or care, or dare object to the slow hemorrhage of funds from one or more of those ubiquitous off-budget, off-shore accounts into his personal account.

  No need to stir up the suits in accounting or the IRS, not yet. Especially the IRS. Slow and steady would do the job. Hell, as far as Harmon was concerned, they owed him for all he’d done for them over the years, ungrateful bastards! They owed him big time. Instead, they’d chosen to dump him. Well then, they’d pay for that, simple. No way would he’d give it back either. To hell with the big shots and all the pussies who worked down there. He’d paid his life insurance premiums, and as far as they were concerned he was officially dead. So, okay fine, now he’d be his own beneficiary. He looked at his watch. What had happened to Barstow anyway?

  N
ight rolled in from the west like the twelve foot tides that characterized this part of the Maine coast, accompanied by a salty mist that hung in the air and made Harmon uneasy. He couldn’t say why. He walked to the center of the porch ignoring the squeak of loose boards, pivoted on his heel and started back the way he’d come. Soon he’d need to light a lamp. He stretched and searched his pockets for a match. What was keeping that smarmy wheeler-dealer anyway? He heard a scraping sound behind him. How had Barstow arrived at Cliffside without walking up the path? Harmon turned and squinted into the darkness.

  “So, it’s you,” he said. And after a pause, “How’d you find me?”

  “It was only a matter of time. I have friends in high places.”

  “How high would that be? Never mind. So, what happens now?”

  “We walk. We talk.”

  ***

  Mary Smithwick had celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday the previous month, shortly before she left Chevy Chase to take up her annual summer residence on Scone Island. Her early arrival in late May meant it was her year to open her house before the rest of the family, if any, arrived in the third week of June.

  She and her family, when she still had one, had spent the three summer months, June, July, and August, on the island every year as far back as she could remember. No, that wasn’t correct. There were those years in the mid-forties during the war when it was not possible to travel from Utica, where she’d grown up, to the island. Her memories were sketchy as she’d been very young at the time. The government restricted travel back then and the Coast Guard had taken up a position on the island. They’d replaced the old light house on the eastern point of the island with a watch tower to surveil for German U-boats and to track convoys heading across the Atlantic to England or Murmansk. Also, they had established a Coast Guard Station in Southport in the Bite ostensibly to serve as a rescue point should one of the ships, Liberty Ships they were called, be torpedoed and sink.

  The coast artillery arrived shortly afterwards and built gun emplacements on the point next to the tower as well. She couldn’t remember if they’d ever fired at a German submarine—or was it aircraft? She never found out which, but in any case, she liked to think they had. During the war years, most of the cottages had been commandeered by the government to house their personnel. The few families who’d managed to get to the island then had stories to tell. Oh, my, yes. Well, that was a long time ago and the world had changed so much. Now she enjoyed her retirement after thirty years of government service, alternately living out the winter months in the snug condominium she owned in Maryland and summering on the island. Old friends from the past made sure there was always something for her to do so her mind stayed active and excited even if her body had lost some of its spring.

  She walked steadily along the gravel path the residents insisted on calling West Road, to Cliffside, the largest house on the island. Harmon Staley, who’d bought Cliffside from the Willards back in the fall had said, “Yes, indeed, you’re more than welcome to pick wild strawberries over on the fence line.” Cliffside, for as long as she could remember, had had tiny wild berries ripening under the leaves that collected at the fence every spring—weeks before the cultivated ones were ready elsewhere. It had become a Scone Island tradition—or once was. Not many of the new owners or the descendents of the old ones cared for that sort of thing. Nobody picked wild berries anymore, much less put them up. If she gathered enough, she wanted to put up one jar of jam for Mr. Staley, poor thing.

  Mary had a generous spirit and excused Harmon Staley’s misanthropy where others might not. It must be, she thought, the result of burdens acquired in a previous, and by some accounts, very troubled life. She could only guess at what those troubles might have been. The sketchiest details surfaced when he arrived. Most folks on the island maintained it was none of their business what other folks did, and so made allowances for Harmon. Nevertheless, some of the newer families thought he was plain rude and said so. On the other hand Mary might admit, if pressed, that she found him rather dashing, in a superannuated Errol Flynn sort of way. The late actor had been a school-girl crush of hers, one she shared with her sister and at least half her high school class—Errol Flynn and also Billy Prescott, the captain of the football team and very dishy himself, but that was a long time ago and besides, no one called people dishy anymore.

  As a courtesy, she knocked on the door of the guest house. Harmon Staley had been required to move from the big house to this smaller version when the former’s leaky roof finally overwhelmed any of the local tradesmen’s ability to repair it. The building was falling into disrepair, and Mary did not see any hope for its revival in spite of Harmon’s insistence that he would get it into shape and open it as a Bed and Breakfast by next summer. The notion seemed unrealistic to her, there being neither electricity nor water available, not to mention the lack of telephone service. But who knew? Perhaps he was right. Very ambitious, this Mr. Staley.

  No answer at the guest house. He must be out and about the place. No problem, she’d catch up with him eventually. She made her way to the fence and began picking, carefully raking the leaves aside with a gloved hand and plucking the dime-sized berries from their racines. The weather had been unseasonably mild, so berries were plentiful. In an hour, her peck basket nearly full, she reached the end of the east portion of the fence. She would, she hoped, fill a second or third on the longer section to the west. The fence came to an end at the point where it intersected the cliff face. Cliffside took its name because it had been built atop the sixty-foot granite cliffs that dropped sharply down to the ocean. Years had eroded some of the face away and in the last decade at least one section of fence on the western end and ten yards of back lawn had dropped onto the rocks below. Everyone knew that sooner or later the island would be swallowed up in the fury of the Atlantic storms. But granite was not limestone, and that time would be measured in centuries, perhaps millennia.

  Mary had had a fear of heights since that day at age twelve when she’d slipped off the porch roof of the house in Utica. She’d gone there to play Amelia Earhart with her sister and discovered that a bed sheet made a poor parachute. Like others who suffer from acrophobia, she could not resist the temptation to peer over the cliff and into the abyss. She called it her “little death wish.” She knew she would not fall, but she also knew she would have an adrenaline rush that would cause her heart to leap into her throat. “One day,” she’d said to her sister, “I will have a heart attack doing that and then I might as well have thrown myself off the precipice after all.”

  She grasped the fence post, shook it to be sure it remained firmly anchored in the ground, leaned over the edge, and took a quick peek. Usually one look would have been enough. But today something down on the rocks, a splash of color, caught her eye. She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and risked a second look. No doubt about it. That was Harmon Staley down there looking more like an untidy pile of laundry than a man.

  Chapter Two

  Ike Schwartz awoke early, an unusual event for him. In fact, the sun would not clear the mountains to the east for another half hour. The advantage his A-frame, as a result of its location on the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lay in the countless sunsets he’d witnessed over the years. For someone who remained a determined “night person,” this advantage was a godsend. However, his circadian rhythm seemed to reverse when he vacationed, and his normal night persona flipped to that of an early riser. So it happened that had he looked for it, he could have seen a sunrise. He didn’t bother. The fact he almost never saw a sunrise meant little or nothing to him. Sunrise, sunset, the only difference he could detect between them was the sequence of events. Rising, setting, setting, rising—dark, gold, orange, light, or the reverse—same thing. Morning people disputed that, of course, but then morning people, as a class, believed that all night people were irresponsible slackers. In his darker moments, he suspected they were the same people who’d foisted Daylight Saving Time on an unsuspect
ing public. How is it possible to save daylight—or waste it either, for that matter? He had a friend in Arizona who assured him that since his state refused to follow the practice they had as yet not lost one hour of the stuff and, in fact, had a surplus, some of which they would gladly trade for Seattle’s rain.

  He stepped to the kitchen as quietly as his size fifteen hiking boots allowed and started the first of what would be several pots of coffee that he’d brew over the next twelve to fifteen hours. He’d decided to let Ruth sleep as long as she wished or needed. When she woke up he would help her in and out of the tiny tub/shower and reposition the cervical collar that for the last several months had made her look more like a vicar in an Anthony Trollope novel than president of a moderately prestigious mid-Atlantic university. That, of course, assumed that Trollope’s nineteenth century clerics would have countenanced a woman among their number. Ike felt certain they would not.

  It had been an extremely difficult year for her, but one that had finally come to an end, as T. S. Eliot would say, not with a bang, but a whimper. Thank God for small mercies. All the conflicts and the potential scandal that had spewed forth like so much hot lava after the murder of her vice president in the fall had finally settled and cooled. Not, however, without what passed in academe for land grabbing and looting. Faculty, Ike thought, more accurately tenured faculty in the rarified air of universities, were behaviorally more like supermodels with PMS than the academic super stars they were alleged to be. He’d said that to Ruth and she’d smiled then smacked him with a manila folder for “acting like a sexist pig.” He’d said he’d take that as a compliment given what she used to think of him when they first met.

  “What was that?”

  “You called me a Nazi.”

  “And you think sexist pig is an improvement?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “You must be growing on me, Schwartz. You’re right, I’m getting soft.”