Murder in Merino

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Murder in Merino Page 24

by Sally Goldenbaum


  Nell had no doubt that she was.

  She walked back across the street feeling somehow like she was the one who was doing the favor. She turned and watched Stella fairly bouncing through the door on her way up to the real estate office. Stella would soon be Sea Harbor’s top Realtor—there was no doubt about it. She was a young woman who knew her own mind. And she knew other people’s minds, too. That was her secret.

  The class Izzy was teaching on finishing knitting projects had already begun when Nell walked in. She had promised to be there in case Izzy needed help in working with individuals, although help in finishing sweaters was not exactly her strong suit. She approached each finishing project with fear and determination. Sometimes the determination won.

  There were about a dozen people in this class, small enough that Izzy didn’t really need her, but she liked being there, she enjoyed watching her niece teach, and she had carved out that hour, so she would stay.

  She stood on the top step and looked around. It was a new crowd, new college graduates doing jobs they didn’t go to college for—people who worked shifts. Hospitals. Restaurants. Yacht clubs. Galleries. Earnest young people who would someday move on to other jobs, maybe even in their college majors. And in the meantime, they were learning in the trenches, as her mother used to say. And that wasn’t always a bad thing, in Nell’s opinion.

  She noticed the pretty Ocean’s Edge hostess Jeffrey had hired that summer sitting with a woman who was now working with Rebecca Early at her Lampworks Gallery. And another who waitressed at Merry’s bar and grill. They had good role models, Nell thought. Tyler Gibson, Rebecca Early, and Merry Jackson. They would learn and achieve and move on to their chosen professions with tools they might not have gotten otherwise. Sometimes life worked out that way.

  When the class came to an end, Izzy invited people to stay if they had questions or needed extra help. She gestured to where her aunt was standing and told people Aunt Nell would be happy to help, too.

  As several people gathered around Izzy, the hostess from the Ocean’s Edge approached Nell, her almost finished sweater in her hands. “Mrs. Endicott?” she said.

  Nell smiled and said, “Call me Nell.” She complimented her on the cable sweater, finished except for the side seams and a button panel.

  “I’m Grace,” the young woman said. “I’ve seen you at the Edge.”

  “Of course. Grace Danvers, right? I know your mother and your cousin Laura—and I know that Jeffrey Meara hired you. He introduced us once, and then bragged to me about you, saying that he had hired the best and the brightest.”

  Grace blushed. “Mr. Meara was a good guy. He liked that I had a degree in philosophy. Sometimes on breaks we’d argue about Plato’s dialogues. He was really into the Euthyphro—that’s what we were pulling apart that week, that week when he died. Trying to figure out if Euthyphro should have done what he did, turning his dad in like that. Even though Euthyphro thought his father had done something bad, should he have let it slide for the sake of the relationship? he’d ask me. He liked all those ethical dilemmas. I did, too. The philosopher bartender, I teased him. He knew how to make the philosophers—like Plato—real. He would have been a great teacher.”

  Nell took the sweater and spread it out on the table, showing her how to line up the seams. “I agree. Jeffrey was very smart. And nice. But not all the staff saw that side of him. If I remember correctly, you called some of them out the day of his funeral.”

  Grace looked down at her sweater and smoothed down a cable. “You’re right. Some of the staff didn’t like him much. Jeffrey fired some guys, but it was because they were screwing around. Mr. Wooten hired them back—he just didn’t want the repercussions from the families around here, but he made them go through extra training. Probably a good thing.”

  “Grace, were you working the day Jeffrey died?”

  She nodded. “I remember it because we were really busy that day.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It was a Friday, and that day is always busy. Plus, the mayor was talking to the women’s guild in the private dining room. Also, we had to close the outdoor dining room because of the weather, so we were crowded and had to shove tables together to accommodate a couple large groups. The Ravenswood B and B staff was here, I remember—Mrs. Pisano treats them to lunch once a month. The gardeners, maids, decorators, painters—you name it, everyone. One time she had so many people we had to put them in the private dining room. She didn’t have that many the Friday we’re talking about, though—it was kind of a small group. Anyway, she’s another one of the good guys.”

  Nell smiled. Young Grace was a fine judge of character. “But Jeffrey left that afternoon, even though you were busy?”

  She nodded. “But he said it’d just be thirty minutes, max. When he found out his meeting was moved up, he was mad at first, but then decided it’d be okay—he’d be back in time for the dinner crowd.”

  “His appointment was moved up?”

  “Someone called the front desk and left a message for him. I gave it to him myself.”

  “Do you know who called?”

  “I assumed it was the woman he was meeting, Julia Ainsley—the one—” She stopped, then dropped her thought and said, “But I don’t know. Somebody else took the message and gave it to me.”

  “Did Garrett take the message?”

  “Garrett Barros? Oh, no, no.” She answered as if to say, Of course not, but was avoiding being rude. “It was another hostess, I think. She asked me to give it to Jeffrey. So I did. And then—I don’t know why I did it, but I stood there and I watched him leave that day. Watched him rush down the steps and off to his car. He turned back once, saw me watching him, and waved. And then he was gone.”

  Her eyes fell to the sweater again, and she cleared her throat, then quickly wiped her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “I miss him, you know?”

  • • •

  They had already finished their Thursday-night meal at the yarn shop—lobster corn chowder with a generous splash of sherry added to the potatoes, vegetables, bacon, and chunks of fresh lobster.

  Comfort food, Nell said.

  Knitting needles filled the coffee table, along with carefully cleaned spaces to rest the sections of the anniversary afghan.

  It was nearly finished.

  “It’s beautiful,” Nell whispered. “Every inch of it, every single stitch.” She touched the zigzag cables on one of the pieces and thought of Ben, of their life. Walking together through all the curves and winding paths. Moving on. Together. Izzy had it all here in knits and purls, cables and lacy hearts. Their life together.

  A loud rapping at the side door brought her out of her reverie and Izzy scrambled across the room.

  Stella Palazola stood in the doorway. “Hi, guys,” she said. “I came out of my office and realized it was Thursday. Perfect, I said. They’ll all be over there in the back room knitting up a storm, and here you are.” She flapped several pieces of paper in the air.

  “What’s up, Stella?” Izzy asked, her eyes on the moving pieces of paper.

  “It’s for Nell.” She looked across the room and grinned. “Told you I’d get it all. And more.”

  “Stella, you’re wonderful.” Nell walked over and gave her a hug. “Thank you.”

  “And now I’m out of here. I have a big date. Ty Gibson. Who would have thought he’d ever look at me?” She laughed, completely unaware that over the years she had left the gawky teenager with braces behind and morphed into a lovely young woman. Stella was neither fat nor thin, neither ravishing nor unattractive. But her personality transformed the ordinariness into a presence that no one could overlook. Stella brightened up a room. As Harry Garozzo said recently, “From head to toe, our grown-up Stella is simply bella.”

  “He’d be crazy not to look at Stella,” Cass said as the door slammed shut behind her. “She’s d
efinitely a keeper. Now what did she bring you?”

  They settled back into the chairs around the fireplace and Nell put on her reading glasses. “Jules told us that when Jeffrey called her that day, he didn’t need directions to the house. He knew it well, he said.”

  “But in a personal way, right? Like maybe he had visited someone there?” Izzy said.

  “Or even lived there himself maybe. That house is old,” Birdie said.

  “Exactly. I don’t know how it all connects together, but there aren’t any real coincidences when you’re trying to find a murderer. So here we have these two things lining up beside each other: Jeffrey wanting to talk to Jules. Jules wanting to buy a house that Jeffrey knew well. So I asked Stella to put together a history of the house for me.”

  She looked down and began reading the information on the top sheet. “And you’re right, Birdie. The house is old. Over a hundred years. I suppose we knew that when Izzy bought it, but I’d forgotten.”

  “Although that’s not terribly unusual for this area,” Birdie added.

  Nell scanned the sheet, her finger moving from line to line. “The little Ridge Road neighborhood was part of a fishing community. Not the fleet captains, but the crew. They couldn’t afford widow’s walks on their homes, so they built homes up on that hill, where they could look out to sea, waiting for the boats to come in.” She paused and skipped over some mundane facts. Stella had been quite complete in her task.

  “It looks like houses changed hands every few decades, and then in the fifties Jules’s house, along with some others, were bought by families who modernized them and used them as vacation homes. Actually, it looks like a Sea Harbor family owned this house, but they had another house they lived in. The Brogans.” She looked up and took off her glasses. “Does that name sound familiar, Birdie?”

  Birdie wrinkled her forehead. “Hmm. Yes. There was a Brogan family. I think it was James Brogan. He owned some companies in Boston, but he had a huge house over near Elliott Danvers on the Point. Quite enormous. No one knew them well because they spent most of their time in the city, although the mansion here was supposed to be their primary residence. They were an older couple.”

  “Kids?” Cass asked.

  “I think so. Raised here, probably by servants.”

  Nell looked back at the sheet. “They owned the Ridge Road house from the fifties until . . .” She took off her glasses and looked up. “Until the year that Jules Ainsley was born.”

  They sat quietly, processing the time frame in their heads.

  Izzy spoke up, detailing the facts. “So the house was owned by the Brogans when Jules’s mother did the painting of the house. They owned the house when Penelope Ainsley got pregnant with Jules.”

  “And they sold it the next year,” Nell said. “That’s interesting.”

  “I don’t see Jeffrey’s name on the list of owners, so that rules out him having lived there—at least as an owner. After the Brogans sold it, a couple lived there until they moved into retirement. And then Izzy bought it.”

  “This could mean something or nothing, but it would be helpful to find out more about the Brogans.”

  “I can do that easily,” Birdie said. “Tomorrow afternoon is teatime with the old gals. Someone will have the scoop.”

  That brought a chuckle. It was Birdie’s affectionate description of a group of mostly wealthy Sea Harbor residents of her own generation who, like Birdie, could buy and sell the town if they so chose. They met semiregularly, though “tea” was a misnomer, that having long ago been replaced by fine sherry.

  “So do we think there is something about the house itself that got Jeffrey killed?” Cass asked.

  “It’s the dead man who has the answers,” Birdie said. “We need to get to know Jeffrey even better. Figure out why he wanted to talk to Jules. And if that was the reason he was killed—or was it simply where he happened to be when the murderer acted?”

  Nell repeated her conversation with Grace Danvers. “Someone had called and asked Jeffrey to come early that day, before Julia got there. Perhaps someone wanted to talk to him before he talked to Jules.”

  “That means someone knew he was meeting her that day—and when,” Izzy said.

  “Which could have been anyone at the Edge. Jeffrey always let people know where he was going,” Nell said. “Even customers could have overheard him. Jeffrey wasn’t the quietest man in the world.”

  Customers. Nell repeated Grace’s list of groups who ate there that Friday afternoon, including Mary Pisano’s group. Looks passed around the room as they silently thought about people who might have seen Jeffrey leave that day.

  “There were people at the Edge who would have been thrilled if Jeffrey hadn’t returned. Pete hangs with some of the guys he fired,” Cass said. “They were furious, especially because jobs are hard to find.”

  Nell thought about Zack Levin and Ryan Arcado. And about their parents. “We’re talking about good families here,” she said. “Good people with good habits and sound values that rule their lives.”

  “People break rules all the time,” Cass said.

  “Those boys had already lost their jobs when Jeffrey was killed. What would they have gained by killing him?” Birdie asked.

  “But Don Wooten hadn’t lost his partner. And he wanted to.” Nell spoke the words quietly, as if she didn’t want anyone to hear.

  But of course they did hear her.

  Don and Rachel were their friends.

  Good people with good, sound values.

  It sobered the conversation, stilled them, while Birdie got up and refilled everyone’s glass. She sat down again and took out her section of the anniversary afghan, her needles magically knitting a row of lacy hearts. “Taking the personal out of this,” she said matter-of-factly, “Don had motive and opportunity. He knew where Jeffrey was going and he would have known when.”

  “As did the others who worked there. They may have known Don would hire them back—as he, in fact, did—if Jeffrey wasn’t around.”

  And Jules. Opportunity, but what earthly reason would she have had to murder a man she barely knew . . . ?

  “And Garrett,” Birdie said. “I think our feelings for him have softened. But he may have known the property better than anyone.”

  “According to Grace Danvers, Jeffrey gave him grungy jobs to do at the Edge. But she said Garrett didn’t seem to mind,” Nell said. “And there’s the spying, if that’s what it was—”

  Birdie leaned down and dug around in her purse. She pulled out a brochure. “Ella gave me this.” She flapped it in the air. “It’s the Feathered Friends brochure. Garrett Barros was a bona fide member, and an avid one at that. He especially enjoys their night watches.” She looked over the top of her glasses. “Yes, for anyone who doubted it, one can go bird-watching at night.” Then she read from the brochure. “‘It’s the best time to hear a black rail, least bittern, or barred owl.’”

  Nell nodded, somehow relieved. The answer would come in the details, and eliminating those small items that pointed to one person or another was a helpful thing.

  Izzy leaned forward in her chair, her elbows on her knees. “One of my law professors always warned us against committing what Sherlock Holmes said was a capital offense—theorizing who did it, and then twisting the facts to support it. I think that’s what is happening with Jules. People want it to be her because they don’t know her. She doesn’t live here. Or Garrett, because he’s a little off the grid. So we try to twist the facts to seal the deal.”

  “I agree,” Nell said. “We need to find out all the facts first, line them up.” She looked down at the beautiful pieces of the afghan in front of them, the gentle zigzag of the cables winding through the design. They were zigzagging, too, this way, then that. But without the beauty of the whole, their zigzags were getting lost.

  “I agree with Birdie that t
he person with the answers is Jeffrey. If we could walk in his shoes that week, figure out what was going on in his head and his life, maybe we could solve this,” Izzy said.

  They all thought back over the week and tried to pull up the things they’d seen or knew to be true. The steps Jeffrey Meara had taken the last week of his life.

  “He had a terrible argument with Don Wooten on Sunday,” Nell said. “Don came an inch away from threatening him. And within days of the funeral, Don was reversing plenty of decisions Jeffrey had made, hiring back people and vendors.” It didn’t at all convince her that Don had done it and she didn’t like talking about it. But those were clearly facts.

  “We know Don called him at home, the day before he died, trying to buy him out,” Birdie added.

  “There was something else about that Sunday night that was odd,” Izzy said. She looked at Nell. “Remember? Jules came in, and we talked for a few minutes at the bar.”

  Nell’s brows lifted. “Of course. I had forgotten that. Jeffrey acted strangely.”

  “As if he knew Jules.”

  “How could he?” Birdie asked.

  “Exactly. He couldn’t. But he kept asking her questions about why she was there, staring at her the whole time, as if memorizing her face.”

  “It was uncomfortable,” Nell remembered. “And Jules said he did the same thing another time, when she was at the Edge trying to get some information on the house she’d seen.”

  “Maybe he finally remembered why he thought he knew her, and he was going over that day to explain it. Apologize for making her uncomfortable by staring at her that way,” Izzy said.

  It was a logical explanation, but one that didn’t explain why he ended up dead.

  Nell thought back through that week, still trying to follow Jeffrey through it. They knew from Maeve that he had been troubled about something that week. He’d left work a couple of times, missed several meetings, someone had told them. Nell had seen Jeffrey again that week but couldn’t remember where. It wasn’t where she would expect to see him. Somewhere else, but where? And there was something else, too. Another loose strand they hadn’t explored. “Jules mentioned that Jeffrey wasn’t the first person who thought she looked familiar. There was someone else.”

 

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