Patrick and Charlie disappeared behind a row of rhododendrons bursting with clumps of lavender flowers. A reminder of spring. Though you’d never know it by the dismal weather we’d had over the past couple of weeks, but things were looking up.
I went up three wood steps and grabbed the handle of a worn screen door, opened it and stepped onto a screened-in porch with a view of the ocean on all three sides. The porch looked original to the cottage and even had a small potbellied stove in the corner. All the floorboards had been painted navy blue and were covered with a large sisal rug.
There were only a few pieces of furniture, making the view the star attraction. They included two wooden slat reclining chairs with navy cushions that looked like they belonged on the deck of the Titanic, and centered between the chairs was a round cottage-style bamboo table. Two seascape oil paintings hung from the white beadboard walls.
There was also a navy hammock hanging from the beamed ceiling. The hammock was only meant for one, reminding me of the pavilion at Enderly Hall and the impression of two bodies in the pillows. They hadn’t been there when I’d done my late-morning walk-through for the party around ten. Did that mean Roland definitely knew his killer? Stop, I chided myself. I needed to savor my surroundings. There would be plenty of time to review yesterday’s events. Unless . . . Jenna was still in danger.
His and hers (who was hers?) brass floor lamps with bamboo shades were stationed behind the deck chairs. Completing the porch décor was a large brass telescope for stargazing. I wanted to linger, happy that so far I hadn’t been disappointed by Patrick’s design choices. Actually, just the opposite: everything was classic, simple and welcoming. But in the few minutes I’d been on the porch the sky had clouded over. I shivered, needing that promised cup of coffee.
I opened one of the French doors and stepped inside, the anticipation killing me. The cottage’s overall feeling was that of a manly fishing cottage. It could have used a woman’s touch—a few soft pillows, a fluffy throw. Other than that, it was perfect. The great room housed a butterscotch tan leather sofa and easy chair, a wood coffee table with iron legs and a top made from a single slice of oak. If you counted the rings in the wood, you could probably guess the tree’s age. The wood gleamed from layers of soft wax. Had Patrick made it himself? Was he a do-it-yourselfer like me?
On top of the amazing coffee table was a cribbage board. I hadn’t played cribbage since I was a teen. Fond memories came rushing back of days in Northern Michigan on my grandfather’s sleeping porch, where we would play marathon games of cribbage and backgammon, Grandpa smoking his pipe and me imitating him by smoking a strawberry licorice Twizzler.
Pipe! After Shepherds Cottage had been trashed, it smelled of pipe tobacco. It seemed even though I was trying to forget about last night, little things kept creeping in to remind me.
I stepped toward Patrick’s flagstone hearth, noticing it was like mine, which I’d copied from my rental cottage. Only his flagstones covered the entire wall. The mantel was made from a wide cement slab that held a large mirror reflecting two wide bookcases on the opposite side of the room, separated by a window with an ocean view. As expected, especially knowing Patrick was an author, the bookcases were crammed with books, a mixture of antique and new. What was it about books that made every space feel cozy and insulated from the outside world?
Once again, I shivered and realized why. The only remnants of a fire were a few orange-and-scarlet embers that winked and spit up at me from inside the hearth. I grabbed some pieces of kindling from a leather tote and made a pile on top of the wrought iron grate. On top of the kindling I added three split logs. One thing I’d learned from living alone on the ocean was how to make the perfect fire. Matches. Where did Patrick keep the matches?
I spotted a box on the mantel and reached for it.
My hand froze in midair.
Next to the box of matches was a framed photo of a stunning dark-haired woman and a little girl who was around age five or six. The child had wheat-colored hair streaked with blonde. Just like Patrick’s. She smiled big at the camera, like someone had said Say che-e-e-se. She also had Patrick’s blue-green eyes. Her two front teeth were missing, and her face was covered in galaxies of golden freckles. It made my heart hurt to look at her. I switched my gaze to the woman in the photo. She was also smiling, but I could tell she wasn’t smiling at the camera. She was smiling at the person holding the camera, her husband. Patrick. As clichéd as it seemed, I saw love in her dark brown eyes.
“You couldn’t find the coffee?”
I hadn’t heard him and Charlie come in. I jumped, not realizing I’d been holding the framed photo. It slipped through my fingers and went crashing onto the flagstones. “I, uh, was looking for some matches,” I mumbled, scrambling to my knees to retrieve the photo. Lucky for me, the glass was intact.
As soon as I stood, Patrick wrenched the frame out of my hand and placed it back on the mantel, only this time facing backward—as if protecting his family’s privacy from my prying eyes. If he would have slapped me, I would have felt better than I did. I gazed into his angry pain-ridden eyes. Eyes that refused to meet mine.
He stepped toward me and I flinched.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said sharply, then reached over my head and snatched the box of matches from the mantel. In a gruff, emotionless voice, he said, “As I asked before, why don’t you go into the kitchen and pour us a couple cups of coffee?”
I couldn’t fault his reaction. I had no right taking down that photo, and I had no right invading his privacy.
Charlie came closer to her master and looked up at him, confusion in her dark eyes as to why the tension in the room could be cut with a machete. When only minutes ago we’d all been friends.
When would I learn not to be so nosy?
I left him staring at the fireplace, his back rigid, his face a mask of control, and went through the open doorway to the kitchen.
Chapter 20
I hadn’t expected a full-blown epicurean’s kitchen that was maybe a notch or two above my father’s back in Detroit. It had every stainless-steel modern appliance possible, including a restaurant-grade Wolf gas range top and a double oven that even had a warming drawer. The wood center island looked custom-made, as did all the open raw-wood shelving stacked with white dinnerware. I took two white mugs off a shelf and filled them with coffee that smelled extra strong. The way I liked it. Jamaican roast would be my guess. Glancing to the right of the two double sinks, I spied a coffee/espresso maker that looked like it had been hijacked from the Starbucks in Bridgehampton. This guy made serious coffee, which was good because I was a serious coffee drinker. Although after what had just happened with the photo, I was already in hyper mode; caffeine might push me over the edge, and it probably wouldn’t help soften Patrick’s countenance, either.
I had no idea how he liked his coffee, so I took his cup and walked on tenterhooks to the open doorway and stuck out my head—afraid he might bite it off.
Speaking in a soft voice, I murmured, “I don’t know what you like in your coffee?”
He’d been staring out the window at the ocean. At first I didn’t think he’d heard me, but then he turned slowly and with a big grin said, “Black. I like it black. How about you?”
I handed him the mug, and when his hand touched mine, I felt relief that the awkward moment about the photo had passed. Or at least I hoped it had passed. “I like milk. No sugar.”
“Almost a purest,” he said, adding a wink. “How about I get going on those benedicts?”
I certainly wasn’t going to stop him. As he passed me, I said, “Do you need me as your sous chef?”
He laughed, knowing all about my lack of culinary skills. “It’s safer if you sit at the island and watch. But thanks for the offer.”
My father had snitched about my gastronomic shortcomings during the last New Year’s Eve party at my neighbor Claire’s. “Hey, I resemble that remark,” I said, feeling happy that his anger
from earlier had passed.
He grabbed a white apron from a hook, tied it around himself, then asked, “Have you decided what meal you’re making for your turn at the next Dead Poets Society Book Club’s meeting?”
I took a seat at the natural wood countertop. “Don’t worry, buster. I have things in hand.” Thanks to my father.
Patrick went to the refrigerator, took out a glass bottle of milk, poured some into the cup I’d left on the counter, retrieved a spoon from the drawer, stirred and handed me the mug.
I drank my coffee and watched him prepare the meal. He was organized and efficient, cleaning up as he went, the opposite of whenever I tried to make even the simplest of meals.
We ate at the island, which he explained he’d made in his workshop in the shed out back. The eggs Benedict didn’t disappoint. As I anticipated from the smells wafting toward me while he’d been cooking, it only took me five minutes to finish. And that was me trying to be ladylike. There wasn’t even one tiny sautéed onion left on my plate from the crispy hash browns he’d whipped up. Crispy, just the way I liked them. The old adage Food was the way to a man’s heart seemed reversed; food was the way to this woman’s heart. Was he a mind reader? Or a stomach reader? The hash browns even trumped the Waffle House’s. I thought no one did hash browns like the Waffle House, but I was wrong—Patrick Seaton did.
He’d even put sprigs of flat leaf parsley on top of the Benedicts’ rich sunny hollandaise sauce. I gave him a five-star review, then we discussed different uses for herbs, with me telling him I would harvest a nice batch from my garden and leave them by his doorstep in the early evening.
“No need to leave them at the door,” he said. “Knock. I’ll answer. Unless I’m on a deadline and bunkered in my writing cave. Even so, I’ll run down. We could share a drink on the beach.”
Heat flamed my cheeks. Even though there wasn’t a mirror around, I knew I was blushing at his invitation. Then, over bowls of fresh fruit and another cup of coffee, we talked poetry, even touching on politics and religion—a dangerous road to travel. I could tell we were both relieved that we shared similar views on both.
I wasn’t sure which one of us brought it up, but the conversation switched to the murder at Enderly Hall. It felt freeing to talk to someone who didn’t know all the players involved. It helped me see things more clearly.
After he asked me a few questions, he wrinkled his brow, then smiled. “Let’s go up to my study.”
“Said the spider to the fly.”
Luckily, he smiled at my suggestive reply. “Yes, I have some etchings to show you.”
“Welcome to my cave,” he said a few minutes later, opening the door at the top of the second-floor landing. I passed through and stepped into a room that was exactly as I’d imagined. The window over his desk looked out to the ocean and the beach below. On the desk was the lamp with the green-glass lampshade. The space was more like a loft than a cave, though I could imagine a few bats hanging upside down from the wood rafters in the steepled ceiling. A worn Persian carpet covered the wide-planked wood floor. There was a vintage floor lamp standing behind a brown leather recliner and end table. An acoustic guitar, facing backward, leaned against the shiplap wall.
“Do you play?” I asked him. Duh, who else? I doubted it was a prop, like I occasionally used as décor in my clients’ cottages.
“Used to.”
By the way he said it, I let it drop. I had a feeling he hadn’t played since the tragedy. Why keep it propped in full view? Maybe it was a hopeful sign he was thinking about picking it up again.
Patrick stepped toward the desk and pulled out the swivel desk chair, then pushed it in my direction, motioning for me to take a seat. Which I did. “So-o-o,” he said, “the reason I’ve called you up to my lair is to do a little brainstorming.”
He walked to a huge dry-erase board that was filled with writing. Before I could discern if he was working on a novel or another Mr. & Mrs. Winslow screenplay, he flipped the board over so that the blank side was facing us. “I use this board for plotting out my novels or screenplays. Writing a whodunit like Mr. & Mrs. Winslow is a little different from writing my suspense novels—more characters and a lot to keep track of. For Mr. & Mrs. Winslow, I added columns for each character and their motive to kill. I thought we could do the same for the murder at Enderly Hall.”
“I like your thinking,” I said, glancing at the bookcase next to his guitar. The top shelf was filled with glossy hardbacks of his New York Times bestselling corporate thrillers. I counted eight. The bookcase’s second shelf held his stand-alone literary novel, The Sting of the Sea, a melancholy novel that was written in the dark days after his wife and child were killed. The opening scene had a woman jumping off the bow of a sailboat and into the sea, not to resurface again.
Next to Sting of the Sea was Tales from a Dead Shore—A Biography of Tortured Poets, an engrossing book that talked of classical poets like Keats and Lord Byron and the tragedies in their and other famous dead poets’ lives. It was a good read but a tad on the depressing side, as evidenced in the title. I didn’t want to slip down that rabbit hole, especially after what had just happened with Cole.
The final book on the second shelf was a glossy coffee table book titled Montauk Moors. It was filled with photographs Patrick had taken on Montauk’s beaches. Below each photo he’d added a few lines of original prose. At the last book club meeting, he’d told everyone that Montauk Moors was the first time he’d penned his own poetry. The dead poets must have rubbed off on him because he’d done an amazing job. In a few short lines he’d managed to get to the soul of each photograph.
After Montauk Moors he’d written the screenplay for Mr. & Mrs. Winslow, a two-hour pilot episode for premium TV, still in production in nearby Bridgehampton.
Not on any shelf was The Dark Light, his most recent book. The Dark Light was a historical suspense novel based on the true World War Two story of German spies who came ashore in Amagansett, were caught and executed. The light in the book’s title referred to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. I knew all this not from Patrick, or from reading the book, because it hadn’t been released yet. Stalker that I was, I’d signed up at an online bookstore for news of Patrick Seaton’s upcoming books. The book was due out in a week, and I’d already preordered it.
Patrick noticed me perusing his shelves. “I promise, I’m not an egomaniac by having all my books on display.”
“Of course you’re not. I’m impressed. I haven’t read your suspense books yet, but I’ve read your last three books. I have a question.”
“Shoot,” he said as he put on a pair of black-framed glasses that made him look scholarly and sexy at the same time.
“On page one of Montauk Moors, there’s a photo of my old rental cottage. Why’d you choose it over all the others?” Under the photo he’d written, Moonlight brightens the dull edges, where dark sand meets darker sea.
He grinned. “I chose it because it was the quintessential shot of a lone cottage atop the moors. And I remember the color of the moon was the same shade as the light in your window.”
“Are you the one who brought me kindling and cleaned up that mess someone left as a warning by my gate when I’d first moved in?”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” he said, smiling. “You’re no stranger to trouble, I can tell.”
“I knew it!” Once again, I sounded like a stalker—Kathy Bates’s character in Stephen King’s movie Misery.
He seemed embarrassed by my outburst and picked up the dry-erase marker. He turned to the board and said, “Let’s write down everyone’s motive and opportunity. How many suspect columns do we need for our murder mystery?”
Our? I counted in my head, hesitating on including Jenna, but decided she had to be on the list. “Seven. I mean six. I don’t count.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said, grinning.
“Maybe add the victim’s name, also.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, the
n turned his back to me and went to work. Roland Cahill Victim was written at the top of the board, then Patrick assigned columns for each suspect. His method of listing suspects was very similar to the way I analyzed past murders. Only I used my Cottages by the Sea corkboard, and instead of a column for each suspect, I used circles coming out from the spokes of a wheel, the hubcap being the person murdered, then I’d add index cards with the particulars of each person involved. When decorating my cottages, each circle would be a different room.
I decided not to share my personal detecting methods, afraid of scaring him away by drawing attention to the fact that Roland Cahill would be my fifth murder. I wondered if one day soon I’d be contacted by someone at Guinness Book of World Records. Or if word got out in Dave’s Papers, I’d be persona non grata in the Hamptons. If I wasn’t already.
For the next half hour, I called out as much information as I could for each person, starting with Jenna.
Jenna Eastman – Millionairess, owner of Enderly Hall, wife of victim. Claimed her husband Roland was trying to kill her by running her off the road in his silver Mercedes after she asked for a divorce. Wanted divorce because she overheard Roland tell his former stepdaughter, Vicki, he planned to sell Enderly Hall. Jenna got a text from victim’s phone hours after he was dead to meet him in the pavilion. Owns gun, she claims (Patrick added, not I), Roland gave her for protection while he was out of town.
Vicki Fortune – Roland’s former stepdaughter from when he was married to Vicki’s mother, Veronica. Roland is chief operating officer of Vicki’s inherited Manhattan interior design company, Veronica’s Interiors. Poor interior decorator (Patrick turned and raised his eyebrows at that one). Company in financial trouble per Jenna. Not fond of Roland. Very interested in architect Nate Klein. Lives in Manhattan but has been staying in Roland and Jenna’s Amagansett rental.
Nate Klein – Owner of Klein and Associates architectural firm in Amagansett. Architect who recently made Roland a partner in his firm. Jenna’s cousin. Protective of Jenna. Possible friend of Chief Pell. Roland possibly had something on him in order to become partner.
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