Crime and Nourishment_A Cozy Mystery Novel

by Miranda Sweet

  A glance at Ruth told her that she wasn’t going to find out from her: her lips were pressed together, sealed shut.

  “Did Aunt Margery and Raymond Quinn kill him?” Angie asked.

  The lips went a little bit thinner.

  Angie started to lose her temper. None of this was fair. “Loyalty is a waste of time if it means that the people who love you the most can’t help you.”

  Ruth still didn’t answer. Angie left by the back door, got in the car, and started driving. She was going to stop at a cove, get out, and watch the waves roll in. Instead, she found herself on the ferry headed over to Hyannis. From there she drove to Boston, checked to see whether there were any theater tickets she wanted. She splurged on a ticket for the new staging of The Phantom of the Opera—a single seat in the Mezzanine—and spent the evening allowing herself to be carried away by the emotion and drama of the show. If the people around her thought that she was a slightly over-emotional fan of musicals, so much the better.

  By the time it was over, she was satisfied to realize that she had missed the last ferry. She checked her phone: Jo had called and left a message. But not Aunt Margery.

  Angie texted Jo back: Rough day…tell you later. Fled to Boston for Phantom, staying the nite.

  Jo replied: Without meee!!!???!!!

  Sorry. Too upset. Didn’t want to drag you down. Or spend the night crying.

  Is it Walter?

  Not directly. Tell you later. Still too upset. Angie felt tears welling up.

  Tell me.

  Angie could almost hear Josephine sighing through the phone.

  Angie started to type in a shorter version of the story, then stopped and deleted what she had written. If Aunt Margery was guilty, or in some way involved with what was going on, she didn’t want to leave any evidence that she had known or suspected anything about it on her phone.

  In her heart, she knew that if Aunt Margery were guilty she would back her up. To the hilt. Angie wanted to be the kind of dry-eyed, analytical genius who could sort the innocent from the guilty based on the color of mud on the bottom of a suspect’s shoes, then turn around and dispassionately send the guilty to the cops, but she wasn’t. Family counted too much with her.

  Then again, even Sherlock Holmes had let some of his quarry escape. Or they had fooled him, like Irene Adler.

  Still in her car in the theater district parking lot, Angie wiped her eyes, then texted to Jo:

  I’m sorry…this isn’t the kind of thing you can do over the phone. When I get back.

  Tomorrow?

  She would have to open the bookstore in the morning. The earliest ferry was—she looked it up—6:15, which meant that she wouldn’t get in until 7:15, and wouldn’t be able to open until 7:30 or 7:45 at the earliest.

  She was being totally irresponsible. A child. And if Aunt Margery was in trouble, she wouldn’t even hear anything about it until the morning.

  She breathed in, held it for a count of ten, and exhaled.

  I’m going to get a motel room for the night…back ASAP in the morning. I won’t be able to open until 7:30 or 7:45.

  OK. We’ll talk when Aunt Margery takes over.

  I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or if she’ll even be in tomorrow. Angie shook her head at the phone.

  Whoa.

  Jo would probably go running straight to her mother to find out what was going on. Angie had to warn her without seeming to warn her. She chewed on her lip. She couldn’t think of anything to say that couldn’t possibly be used against one of them later, in case of a trial.

  I think everyone’s feeling a bit touchy at the moment, she finally texted back. I’d be careful about asking questions.

  So don’t be my normal bull in a china shop self?!? Hahahaha…

  The answer rang false. Angie hoped that meant Jo had realized that their phones could be used against them and was being discreet. A second later, Jo texted:

  OK, OK, won’t confront the Three Witches to find out the gossip. Sheldon maybe.

  Angie thumped her hand against her head. If only she had thought of that before she had spoken to Aunt Margery. Sheldon had been around the island forever, and probably knew more of the old dirt than anyone other than Aunt Margery and her clique. Jo texted again:

  Don’t worry, got you covered. Have a good night. Will text if emergency, otherwise will wait until a.m.

  Thanks.

  Angie found a reasonably cheap hotel nearby and booked a room with her credit card. She hadn’t eaten. She grabbed a late meal at a dumpling house, of ginseng chicken soup, steamed pork buns, and fried bitter melon. As a girl, she’d never been an adventurous eater. But as she ate she realized that this whole trip to Boston had been almost exactly like one that she’d taken with Aunt Margery when she was twelve.

  The theater—Les Misérables back then—for a matinée showing, and then to an Asian restaurant for an early supper before heading back across on the ferry before nightfall. The restaurant she was in now was too new to be the same one, but it was in the same area. Maybe even the same location. Her memories were too fuzzy to be sure.

  If Aunt Margery wasn’t involved, then why had she burned the clothing?

  The only thing that Angie didn’t understand was why, if she and Quinn had gone to confront Snuock, she’d worn the old paisley dress in the first place.

  Or why he’d let them in…

  Chapter 11

  The Little Grey Lady of the Sea

  Jo had already opened up the bookstore by the time Angie arrived back on the island. She walked in the back door to find the early rush already tended to and contentedly slurping their drinks in the café area, reading newspapers. The only difference was that Jo had left out the wrong sorts of books—mind-blowing New Wave sci-fi, mostly, stuff that she liked to read and recommend. Several Harlan Ellisons were prominently displayed.

  The problem was that you could lead customers to a good book, but you couldn’t make them read. Angie had long ago made up her mind that, given the choice between dictating the tastes of the island and giving them what they wanted to read (even if she had to hold her nose as she filled out the order form), she would choose the latter. Although if someone asked for a recommendation, she might tilt the scales a little toward books of which she was especially fond.

  It didn’t matter, though. Angie gave her friend a hug. Jo turned it into something almost unbearably tight.

  “I can’t breathe!” Angie gasped.

  “I’m just happy to see you,” Jo beamed. “You okay?”

  “I think I’ll be okay.”

  “I talked to Sheldon. He was a little cryptic, but I think your aunt’s just looking out for you.”

  “I know. I can’t talk about this now.”

  “Gotcha.” Jo squeezed Angie’s shoulders. “Why don’t we go to Sheldon’s for lunch. You’re going to need a break and I know you’re mind won’t rest until you’ve cross-examined all sources.

  Angie smiled and nodded.

  She took over on the espresso drinks, finishing up the last of the line, while Jo fled back to the bakery. Angie wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been up all night.

  Angie had to do her best to keep the regular hours at the store. If Aunt Margery didn’t show up, she’d close for the lunch hour and then be back at it until closing time. She couldn’t afford to lose business now, after all the good work that she’d done over the fourth, passing out fliers, shaking hands, and kissing babies. She had to let the store find its new momentum.

  As usual, she got caught up with the daily business of the store, and was going through an ordering catalogue when the front door slammed shut.

  She looked up. Phyllis Snuock had walked into her store.

  For the first time ever.

  She had a mad look in her eye. The same purse dangled from her arm, still bloated with yarn. Captain Parfait lifted his head and watched her as she crossed the room.

  She headed in a beeline for Angie’s counter.

&n
bsp; “Hello, Phyllis,” Angie said. “How can I help you? Are you looking for knitting books?”

  There was more purpose behind Phyllis’s stride and sour expression than the search for a knitting book could ever arouse, but Angie couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “No,” Phyllis snapped. “I would like a café au lait and a pastry.”

  It almost sounded like she was saying, don’t lie to me…confess! Her tone was so direct and angry that Angie had to wonder if there was some kind of horrible rumor going around about her and Walter, and the woman had come to confront her about stealing her son or something.

  Angie showed her the selections. Phyllis picked a puff pastry with lemon curd and berries. Angie made the café au lait, and happily rang up her charge card. Phyllis signed on the iPad screen with a finger that jabbed like a claw.

  Angie offered her a receipt—“No!”—and carried the small plate and large cup over to Phyllis’s chosen armchair. It was paired with a second chair across a diminutive table.

  “Sit,” Phyllis ordered.

  There was no one in line, and no one looking around as if they needed assistance. Drat.

  Angie sat gingerly in the other chair.

  Phyllis pointed a finger at her. “You know my son.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you must think well of him.”

  “I do.”

  “I won’t say that it’s love. What is love? It is something that cannot be defined. You can only hope that your heart isn’t lying to you when love strikes. You do not have the look of love. It’s a stupid look.”

  Angie blinked.

  Phyllis chuckled, almost evilly. Several of the men reading newspapers nearby shifted their weight slightly, leaning away from her as they read. Their papers rustled.

  “Now, knitting. You know where you are with yarn. Yarn is the adversary. It’s always trying to drop stitches and make you lose count. Come unraveled. Or roll across the floor and tangle itself in knots. And yet you can do nothing about it. To me, that is how love should be seen: a big fat mess. And yet no one does see it that way, instead they all get carried away.”

  Coming from a woman whose ex-husband had both paid for her to live and had threatened to cut off those payments when she rebelled, Angie could understand her point of view. Not that she agreed with it.

  “But that’s not what I came here to talk about. What I came here to say was: my son is innocent. He had nothing to do with the death of his father.”

  The men rustled their papers again as they leaned closer. Phyllis leaned toward Angie, lowering her voice.

  “And I’ll tell you a secret. I didn’t either!” She leaned back, her eyes as big and round as donuts, as if she had just given Angie the key to the mystery.

  Angie suppressed her first reaction, which was to laugh. “What were you doing on the night of the third, Phyllis?”

  She snorted. “That’s not what you want to know, is it? I was at home, with no alibi whatsoever. I’m a lonely old woman. What you want to know is…where was Walter!”

  “That’s true.” Angie said. “ Although, I was under the impression that he went home after he left me.”

  “Because you were on a date!” A finger pointed in Angie’s direction again, then the hand swooped down to pick up the latte and slurp noisily from it. “Why didn’t you just say that he was with you all night?”

  “Because…he wasn’t. And because—”

  “But you could have said it! A normal person would have said that. A normal person would have provided an alibi without thinking twice. A normal person would have shown loyalty.” Her words almost ended in a growl and her eyes seemed to burn with passion. If she hadn’t been creeping Angie out, it would have been fascinating.

  “If you’ll let me finish,” said Angie.

  “Go ahead,” Phyllis snarled.

  “No one asked me where I was on the third.”

  “Humph.” Phyllis stuck her pointy nose in the air.

  “And even if, say, Detective Bailey had asked, I would have told the truth. And I did tell him the truth about the fourth. He never asked about the third. I don’t like to lie,” Angie said.

  “Nobody does! But that’s what you do. I want you to remember that when Walter is released from prison. You haven’t got it in you to love him, not the way he should be loved.”

  Angie felt heat coming up into her face. She shoved her hands alongside her legs and clutched them into fists where Phyllis couldn’t see them. Was that what the woman had come to the bookstore to do? To castigate her for not lying for her son? The nerve!

  “Maybe not,” Angie said. She wasn’t going to argue. This woman was crazy. Poor Walter.

  “Don’t toy with me,” Phyllis said. “I need you to find a book for me.”

  Angie gave a little shudder. Could the woman be any more strange and random? “A knitting book?” she asked, her voice coming out sharper than she intended.

  “Ahhh…now we see her true colors,” Phyllis said. “A knitting book. She wants to know if I want a knitting book. In fact, I do not want a knitting book.” She squinted. “Or…it depends. What do you have?”

  Angie took a breath. “We can look at them in a moment, Phyllis. What other book did you want?”

  “A book on local history. The Little Grey Lady of the Sea: The Mysteries of Nantucket Island, by David Dane.”

  Angie knew the book and even had a copy or two in the bookstore. She hadn’t read it, but she knew enough about it to know that it didn’t have the most factual information available. It was a sensational view of Nantucket history, from the earliest history, through the whaling days, and up to the 1980s. It had been sold by a local tour company in the 1980s and early 1990s as part of their promotional material—“You’ve taken the ghost walk! Buy the book!” That kind of thing. It was the sort of fluff that Alexander Snuock would have sneered at, yet almost a collector’s item.

  “I may have a copy of that.”

  “Good. Go get it,” Phyllis said.

  Angie could be of service if it would get Phyllis out of the store. She unclenched her fists, stood up, and walked between the cluster of newspaper-reading men toward the shelves as calmly as possible. She could feel Phyllis staring at her.

  She picked up one of the two copies and returned with it. “Here it is.”

  Phyllis took the copy from her and riffled through the pages, stopping near the back of the book. She flipped through a few pages and stopped at a page with a black and white photograph on it. Angie tried to catch a glimpse of the page number, but Phyllis clapped the book shut.

  “It’s there,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

  “Okay,” Angie said, perplexed. “And the knitting book?”

  She expected the woman to storm out of the store without paying for the book; instead, her eyes widened slightly and she smiled with sardonic pleasure. She stood up, positively towering over Angie.

  “Let’s see what you have,” she said.

  “If you don’t mind,” Angie said, now struggling to keep the bemusement out of her voice more than anything else, “I’m not a knitter, and I could use any good advice you have on how to shore up what I have. Tourists often look for this sort of thing, and I have no idea what to order from the catalog…”

  “You can order knitting books?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Phyllis picked out one of the books, on Irish cable knitting, then spent another fifteen minutes leaning over the counter and looking at book catalogues. Angie ordered a slim collection of eight different books, with five copies of one book, two copies of two others, and one each of the rest, under advisement. The first book would be for tourists who knew how to knit a plain scarf, if that; the next two were good intermediate books with easy projects that let the knitters learn new stitch patterns, and the other three were “excellent ruminations on the nature of pattern design and the philosophy of crafting.” Whatever that meant.

  When the woman finally stepped out of the fro
nt door and let it fall gently closed behind her, Angie felt like she’d sidestepped a land mine. And the newspaper-reading gents in the café area seemed to exhale a collective sigh as well.

  On her way out the door, Phyllis had tapped the cover of The Little Grey Lady of the Sea and said, “This book contains nothing but the truth. If anyone were looking for the truth, they could do worse than to search its well-researched pages.” And had given Angie a significant look.

  Angie tidied up the café area, asked her gentlemen if they had everything they needed—really just assuring them that it was over now and they could relax—and checked the rest of her customers. All was well, other than the fact that she needed to brew another pot of coffee, which she’d missed earlier.

  She went back to the ordering catalogue and tried to work out the rest of her next order, but her heart wasn’t in it. This last distraction from Phyllis had been one too many. She checked the clock on the register—it wasn’t even ten a.m. yet.

  This day was going to drag.

  She went into the back room, booted up the computer, and loaded the accounting program. If there was one thing she had learned about running a small business, it was that there was always something that needed to be done with the receipts…

  She couldn’t focus. “Fine,” she told herself, got up, and plucked the other copy of The Little Grey Lady of the Sea off the local history shelf. She poured herself a cup of hot coffee, added a little cream then started paging through it.

  The book was a collection of scandal, rumor, gossip, and outright lies, the kind where every Native American burial ground is haunted, a dozen young women were murdered by sailors, the Quakers were all British loyalists during the Revolutionary War, the Great Nantucket Fire of 1846 was set by a business rival and not caused by a defective stovepipe, and so on. Her great-grandfather, Captain John F. Prouty, was mentioned as a possible cannibal. Angie rolled her eyes.

  Parts of the more recent sections of the book were about Alexander Snuock. Angie found herself settling in for some juicy gossip, and had to remind herself that she couldn’t believe anything the book said. The authors didn’t care about facts, although they did care about getting sued for libel; the worst of the information was presented as speculation and gossip. In Angie’s opinion, they had walked a very thin line, especially where Snuock was concerned.