Musseled Out

by Barbara Ross

  Quentin’s huge, sparsely furnished stone house sat the end of a long driveway on Westclaw Point. The other houses on the road were used only in the summer, which made the road the town’s lowest priority for plowing. I could live there, but I knew what would happen. I’d end up staying at Chris’s so often, I might as well move in with him.

  We arrived in front of my mother’s dark yellow house with its familiar mansard roof and cupola on the top. We lingered on the sidewalk. “Thanks for the offer,” I said, “but I can’t stay at your house.”

  “Yeah,” he responded. “Good decision. It’s not right for you.”

  That aggravating saying of his. Even making allowances for Quentin being Quentin, his certainty about what wasn’t right for me was getting on my nerves.

  “Have you decided what you’re doing about Windsholme?” he asked.

  The image of the family mansion—scarred by fire, soon to be further destroyed by the elements—flashed into my mind. “No, Quentin. I haven’t decided anything about anything.”

  Chapter 12

  Quentin and I parted on the sidewalk in front of Mom’s house. It was dark and the cooling air carried the smell of wood smoke. People were stoking their wood stoves and fireplaces for the evening.

  Mom’s house was dark, too. Not a single light shone from the interior. She hadn’t left on a porch light in the front or the back to welcome her home. I let myself inside. My note sat on the kitchen table where I’d left it. I picked up a pen, underlined Call me three times and added a series of exclamation points.

  Mom, where are you? I dialed her cell. Straight to voice mail. I felt a little flutter in my chest. Not a complete freak-out, but genuine worry. As far as I knew, no one had seen my mother in at least two days, maybe longer. I considered calling Livvie, but I hoped she and Sonny were in the middle of an important, truth-telling conversation.

  I fished my keys out of the junk drawer, left the back porch light on for Mom, and went out to the garage. Across the street, lights were on at the Snuggles Inn. Fee and Vee must have arrived back from Campobello in the late afternoon as scheduled.

  I drove halfway up the peninsula, then turned off the two-lane highway onto the access road for Busman’s Harbor Hospital. My plan was to check on Mrs. Gus and see if Gus needed a dinner break. But once I’d parked the Caprice, I headed straight for the emergency room entrance. I must have been more worried about my mother than I realized.

  The receptionist was gray-haired and round-faced, and looked slightly familiar.

  “Has a Jacqueline Snowden come in here?” I asked.

  The woman blinked her surprise. “Why, no. I don’t believe so.”

  “Can you check?”

  She tippy-tapped her keyboard, then looked back at me. “No. She didn’t come in through emergency. And she hasn’t been admitted to the main hospital, either.”

  The next question was harder to ask. “Has a Jane Doe been brought in? I’m looking for a woman in her fifties, blond hair, petite. Kinda looks like me.”

  “Why, I know what your mother looks like, Julia Snowden! If they brought her in, I would certainly identify her. Is something the matter?”

  “No, no, no.” What torrent of rumors had I just started? I groped for a way to make myself sound less crazy. “She’s not home and my sister is worried. Probably the pregnancy hormones. My sister’s. Not my mother’s. Or mine.” I was sputtering. “Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about, Miss, Mrs. . . .”

  “Barkly. Melody Barkly. I was your assistant Brownie leader. At the Y.”

  I tried to remember those ancient Brownie days and came up with nothing except the sensation of a sash sliding off my shoulder as I ran around the Y gym with my classmates. I nodded gamely, pretending recognition. “Wonderful to see you. I’ll reassure my sister that my mother’s not here at the hospital. Can you tell me what room Mrs. Farnham is in?”

  I got off the elevator on the second floor and turned down the tan-painted, antiseptic hallway toward Mrs. Gus’s room.

  Her door was partially closed, but as I came up to it, I could see the end of a hospital bed, and hear the murmur of feminine voices.

  “We’re so sorry,” Viola Snugg muttered.

  “So, so sorry,” her sister Fiona agreed.

  I knocked softly and pushed the door open.

  The lights were low and the sisters sat in plastic chairs on either side of the prone figure in the bed. Mrs. Gus was still unconscious, hooked up to so many machines it was hard to see her.

  “Julia!” Vee jumped up from her chair.

  “I came to see if Gus needed anything,” I said.

  “We sent him to the cafeteria,” Fee said. “The poor man needed a break.”

  “We came the moment we heard. Dropped our bags in the front hall and hightailed it here,” Vee explained. “We have a guest at the inn. No prior reservation. Thank goodness she wasn’t expecting dinner.” At their B & B, the Snuggs only served breakfast.

  “What happened?” I asked. The machines hooked up to Mrs. Gus were whirring and wooshing, binging, bonging, and booping. She’d always been slight, but sinewy. All the toughness had been stripped away from the figure on the bed, leaving a wraith of a woman behind.

  “She collapsed,” Fee said, smoothing Mrs. Gus’s long white hair back from her brow. I’d never seen it loose before. “This morning she got up, started her baking and then dropped to the floor. Gus heard the thud and called the ambulance right away. Otherwise . . .” Fee couldn’t bring herself to say what would have happened “otherwise.”

  “Do they know what caused it?”

  A look passed between the sisters. Vee said, “Not yet.”

  “Can I get you ladies something? Coffee, snacks?” I offered.

  “We’re fine, dear,” Fee said. “You go along.”

  “I could stay—”

  “No, no. Gus will be back soon. Then we’ll go home and get ready for tomorrow.”

  I hated to leave them, but I’d been dismissed. I knew better than to argue with the Snugg sisters. I wondered what Fee and Vee would have to apologize to Mrs. Gus about. Going off and leaving her behind? But it was just as well. The situation would have been even more terrible if Mrs. Gus had collapsed on their road trip.

  I pulled my cell out of my pocket as soon as I walked out of the hospital. No message from Mom or anyone else. I got in my car, about to head to Chris’s cabin, when my phone brrupped. Mom.

  “I have a note from you to call urgently?” Her voice was clipped, the way it got when she was irritated. Or overtired.

  “No one’s seen you in two days. Livvie’s worried.” I hoped all this scapegoating wouldn’t get back to Livvie, who wasn’t worried at all.

  “Why would she be worried? Is it a problem if I leave my house occasionally?”

  “Where were you?” I tried to keep my voice curious, not anxious or accusatory.

  “As I said, I was out.”

  What was she, fifteen years old? “Okay, don’t tell me.”

  “Julia, I’m a grown woman,” Mom responded wearily. “I don’t have to report in to you or your sister about every move I make.”

  I decided not to pry further. “Did you hear about Peter Murray?”

  “Yes, terrible. And Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn are in town investigating that man’s death. Thwing, I think he’s called.”

  Wherever my mother had been, it hadn’t been far. She’d picked up all the local news.

  “Okay, you’re home now. The next time you take off, could you maybe tell someone?”

  My mother didn’t promise anything of the sort. “‘Bye, Julia.”

  “‘Bye.” As I turned the key in the Caprice’s ancient ignition, my cell phone brrupped again. Chris.

  “On my way,” I said, nosing the car out of the parking lot.

  The moment I opened the door to the cabin, the smell of Chris’s stew enveloped me—curry, onion, and garlic. I sat in my usual place at the kitchen island. Chris put a steaming
bowl in front of me, along with a piece of crusty bread. I took a taste. It was hearty and warm, the perfect meal for a fall evening. The curry and a subtle flavor of coconut milk complemented the fish and the smokiness of the chunks of sausage I found in the bowl. I loved the different textures of the vegetables, chickpeas, squash, cauliflower, and kale.

  “Another recipe of your mom’s?” I asked.

  “No, this one is all me.”

  “How did you learn to cook?”

  “Taught myself. Not without a few disasters along the way. I was single, the winters were long. I decided to try cooking and found I really liked it.”

  I laughed. “I don’t believe you. Slaving in your kitchen alone, no one to appreciate you.”

  He laughed, too. “All right. I wanted to impress women and there’s nowhere on the peninsula in the winter to take a date.”

  “That’s the Chris Durand I know.” I was happy to take advantage of the hard work he’d put into impressing those other women.

  While we ate, I filled Chris in on the events of the day. One of the things I loved about him was he never asked questions like, “Why’d you talk to Lorrie Ann? Why’d you go to Bard’s?” He knew exactly what I was doing and accepted it, even though my activities in past murder investigations had put me in real danger. He always treated me like I was an adult who knew what she was doing.

  “Why is Sonny lying?” I asked as I finished my story.

  He stood and pulled another beer from the fridge. “How the heck would I know? We’re not exactly buddies.”

  Although Sonny was three years younger than Chris, they’d been friends in high school and teammates at football. But they’d long ago stopped being friends. For a decade Sonny had been a husband and father and Chris had been single, so maybe they’d drifted apart. I sensed it was more than that, though neither of them would talk about it.

  “The DEA and Customs are involved in Thwing’s murder case,” I told him.

  Chris moved his dish to the sink. “You don’t say.” His voice had a wary edge to it.

  “That must be what Binder meant when he said he might not be able to control the direction of the investigation.”

  Chris was noisily rinsing dishes. “Uh-huh,” he said quietly. He turned back to the sink.

  Drugs, smuggling, and boats. Any time we got within a hundred miles of the topic of what he might have done during his disappearances over the summer, he shut down out of anger, and I shut down out of fear. Fear of knowing the truth, fear of how angry he’d be if I demanded he tell it to me. No matter how much we tried to ignore it, no matter how often we said to each other the past was in the past and we had moved on, we hadn’t.

  I picked up a dishtowel and moved to his side at the sink, plucking dishes from the rack as he washed them. We had a well-practiced rhythm that normally represented something solid, even domestic. But all I could sense was the space between us.

  “Quentin thinks I should get Windsholme buttoned up for the winter. To, you know, at least preserve the ability to rebuild it. He says if I don’t, I’ll have pretty much made the decision.”

  Chris turned, up to his elbows in soap. His eyes met mine, grateful for the change of subject. “It’s worth considering if you can find the money. It seems a shame to lose that part of your history.”

  I gestured around the first floor of the cabin. “Is that why you bought this house from your parents? To preserve your history?”

  Chris scoffed. “I bought it because they needed to get out of here and needed the money from the sale to do it. The kind of shape it was in, nobody else was going to buy it. When the right time comes, I’ll sell it.”

  Really? I was starting to get attached to the cabin. Sometimes, as we puttered around the old house, I imagined the second floor finished and as gorgeous as the first. I’d daydreamed at times about living there.

  Later, I read as we listened to the Red Sox on the radio. Chris picked up an acoustic guitar that had been gathering dust in a corner of the living room and strummed a little. His fingering was stiff, as if he hadn’t played in a long time, but I could tell he knew what he was doing.

  What else didn’t I know about this man? There was the big what else, of course—where had he disappeared to during the summer? But how many small things were left to learn? Was I really considering giving up my career and my life in New York to stay here with a man about whom I knew so little?

  But staying in Busman’s Harbor wasn’t just about Chris. It was Mom, Livvie, Page, my new niece or nephew, and even, I had to admit, Sonny. It was also Gus, and Fee and Vee, and all the laughing, happy families at the clambake in the summer. And, I had to make sure I didn’t romanticize my memories of my job in New York. I’d been overworked and lonely at times. I’d lived on airplanes and often had to give people bad news about their businesses and their dreams. Did I really want to go back to that life?

  The ball game went into overtime. Chris gave up and went to bed. Through the open framing of the cabin’s second story, I watched him move around the master bedroom, completely unaware he was on stage. I wished I could be as sure of everything in my life as he was.

  Chapter 13

  Before sunrise, Chris and I left the cabin and headed for Gus’s. Keeping the restaurant open was important to Gus and we wanted to support him. The strain of the previous evening was gone, though as I drove along in the Caprice, following Chris in his truck, I worried what turn of phrase, change of topic, or unexpected situation might bring the tension roaring back.

  When we arrived at the restaurant, Vee and Fee were already inside, setting up for the day.

  “I thought you had a guest staying at the inn,” I said.

  “We told her she had to eat breakfast here,” Vee answered. She’d put on one of Gus’s white aprons, which went with her upswept masses of white hair. “Time to make the pancake batter,” she said.

  Chris was visibly relieved. “I’m way behind closing cottages.”

  “You go, I’ll stay.” I grabbed an apron and helped Fee set tables.

  We’d barely set out the last of the plastic syrup dispensers when a dozen or so lobstermen trooped into the restaurant. Bard Ramsey was with them, his blue sling tight against his flannel shirt. Kyle and Sonny were absent.

  Bard gave a curt nod. “Hi, darlin’,” he said as he passed me. The lobstermen were uncharacteristically quiet, faces grim. This was more than a social breakfast.

  They moved as a group to the back of the dining room, pushing tables together and gathering chairs. Bard sat at the head of the table without hesitation, as if it was his right, which it was as the highliner. The others sat along the sides. I brought over a fresh pot of coffee and poured each one a mugful.

  “I hauled a line of traps yesterday,” one lobsterman said. “Not a bug in them. Not a one.” Lobstermen often called their prey “bugs.”

  “Inside the harbor or out?” another asked.

  “Outside.”

  “Somebody got there before you,” the other concluded.

  “Ayup,” the original lobsterman agreed. “If I set traps inside the harbor, there’s nothin’ in ’em. Go much outside and I’m provoking those Coldporters. Can’t win fa losin’ in the lobstah game.”

  I took their orders. Lobstering was strenuous work and they all wanted huge breakfasts. As I told Vee what they’d ordered, I thought about what they’d said.

  The year had been a great one for lobsters, but not for lobstermen from mid-coast ports like Busman’s Harbor and Coldport Island. Record catches in Maine had driven lobster to its lowest price in years. It was easy to believe the lobstermen were always complaining. If the catch was high, the price was too low. If the price was high, it was because lobsters were scarce.

  But the last few years had been unique. People might argue the reason why, but everyone agreed the Gulf of Maine had grown warmer. As it did, the lobsters moved north and east. Lobstering boomed in Down East Maine, while on the mid-coast, lobstermen worked harder and use
d more bait and fuel to trap their catch. The price was set based on the catch throughout the state, so Busman’s lobstermen got the same price as their brethren Down East who had a much easier time trapping lobsters. In addition, as ground fish disappeared and the great fishing banks were closed down, more fishermen turned to lobstering, crowding the harbors with traps. In October, as the lobstermen followed their prey to the deeper water outside the protective harbors, it was predictable that territories would overlap and collide. The Coldporters claimed the area beyond the mouth of Busman’s Harbor was theirs. The Busman’s guys maintained that in colder weather they had to trap outside the harbor to survive.

  The restaurant filled up and I got busy elsewhere. When I returned to the table with the lobstermen’s breakfasts, they were still talking about Coldport.

  “My lines were cut. I lost eight traps and God knows how many lobsters. I can’t afford this, not this year,” said the man with the beard whom I’d noticed the day before.

  “I say we go over to Coldport Island and make those guys feel the pain.” The same young guy who’d been agitating for confrontation yesterday put it back on the table.

  “What are you suggesting?” the man with the beard asked.

  “They’ve stolen our lobsters, messed up our lines, lost our traps. I’m suggesting we go over there tonight—”

  “And what? Vandalize their boats?” one of the older men responded. “They’ll come here the next night and attack ours. I’m already out lobsters and traps. I can’t afford for anything to happen to my boat.”

  “Do what you want. I’ll do it my way,” the younger man retorted.

  “Now wait a minute.” Bard had been quiet up to this point, but now he broke in. “We stick together. We’re loyal to the group. We move as one. No retaliation until we find out, for sure, what happened to Peter Murray. Let the police take care of it. If those Coldporters had anything to do with it—”