Death on West End Road

by Carrie Doyle

  The library, with its shelves of hardcover books and its blue-painted wicker furniture and green-striped cushions was the perfect blend of comfortable and lively. Antonia was always inspired by an abundance of books, and she had carefully curated the selection that she offered on loan. Of course, some disappeared forever in the hands of guests, but that was to be expected.

  She found Joseph ensconced in the corner chair, perusing the latest issue of The Atlantic, one of the many periodicals that Antonia stocked on the magazine racks of the inn. She was of the belief that if you were surrounded by reading material it elevated your behavior.

  “Dinner was delicious as always, my dear.”

  “Thanks, Joseph,” Antonia replied, handing him one of the glasses of sherry that she had brought in from the bar. Having a nightcap always made Antonia feel retro, as if she were stepping into an episode of Mad Men.

  She sat down on the couch and placed her phone on the white lacquered coffee table in front of her. She slid the potted geranium over so her view of Joseph was unobstructed.

  “I’m intrigued,” Joseph confessed. “I imagine this was what it was like back in the day when there was no TV and people listened to radio shows.”

  “You mean when you were young?” Antonia teased.

  “Very funny. I may be old but not that old,” he replied, his blue eyes twinkling.

  “I want to show you this first.”

  Antonia pulled a photograph out of the roomy pocket of her cardigan and handed it to Joseph. It was a close-up picture of Susie on the beach taken the year she died. Pauline had peeled it out of her monogrammed leather-bound photo album and handed it to Antonia. The colors were vibrant. Susie had been a pretty girl—with long blond hair and cornflower blue eyes. She had a round face and a smattering of freckles and was tanned with slightly chubby cheeks. She looked wholesome, youthful, and vivacious. Back in the day one might have called her a Breck girl, although if you were to ask a current teenager what that meant they would draw a blank.

  Antonia thought hard about what Susie would have looked like now. No doubt her baby fat would have melted away and her jawline would have been stronger. She would have been even more attractive when she was older as her features became more pronounced.

  “Pretty girl.”

  “Yes,” Antonia agreed.

  “Very all-American,” remarked Joseph. He shook his head with sadness. “Such a tragedy.”

  “I know. The more I look at her, the more I feel . . . I don’t know, a kinship with her. Sort of a familiarity. She looks like so many of the girls that I grew up with in California. She looks so excited in this picture. She had all of her hopes and dreams, everything in front of her . . . and then it was extinguished.”

  Joseph continued to study her picture. “I wonder if Miss Framingham has any video of her?”

  “I should ask. Good idea.”

  Joseph put the picture down, and Antonia pressed the button on her phone. Seconds later Pauline’s clear patrician voice came through the speaker:

  Susie was living with me that summer, as she always did. For the month of July and part of August we worked in the stables at Swan Creek, but we had both arranged for our jobs to end August fifteenth so we had the last few weeks of summer to sleep in and go to the beach and hang out. Some mornings we would go riding, but other days we just brought a ton of magazines to the club and stayed as late as possible on the beach with our friends. Alida often joined us, but she was working as a counselor at Boys Harbor during the weekdays, so usually only on weekends. Plus she had started modeling already so she often headed to the city for shoots.

  So on that day—August twenty-third—Susie and I had gone to the club and got home at about four. My parents were in Europe so it was just us. We decided that we had been lazy so we would play tennis. We went down to the court—you drove past it on your way up to the house—and we started to hit. Alida said she would come by to hit with us, and I left a message for my boyfriend, Dougie, to join us as well, so we were kind of waiting for them to play doubles. It was boring to play with Susie because I was a much better player than her. I easily beat her 6-0 in the first set without even breaking a sweat. She wasn’t competitive at all, which also made her not that fun to play with. She’d just laugh a lot.

  I told Susie to work on her serve while I went up to the house to call Alida and Dougie again and find out where the hell they were. Dougie hadn’t been at the beach that day, but his mom said he wasn’t home, and there was no answer at Alida’s. So I had Rosamund—she was our housekeeper at the time—make up a tray of lemonade and snacks, and I brought it down to the court.

  At first I didn’t see Susie anywhere, and I called her name, but there was no way she would have heard me, even if she weren’t already dead, because your friend Kevin Powers was mowing the grass with one of those beyond noisy lawn mowers. He wore headphones, of course, so the sound didn’t bother him, but it was a nightmare for the rest of us. Not to mention that he wasn’t supposed to mow the grass at that time. The rule was he did that type of work when we were out at the beach or away from home. Not when we were there. My father told him that repeatedly. He didn’t listen . . . but more on that later.

  So I called for Susie. I put the lemonade down on the table and then I saw that the gate at the far end was open. We never ever used that gate; we always came in from the gate closest to the house, and that was the gate closest to the street. I walked over and noticed a pile of laundry there, half on the court, half on the grass, and I was confused as to what it was. And then I realized it’s not laundry but Susie. At first I thought she was faking and I told her to stop being annoying and just get up. But she didn’t move and when I leaned in I noticed that her head was bleeding. I couldn’t see her face or her eyes. But I felt her pulse and she was still alive, so I rolled her over and saw a gash on her head, as if she’d been cut. So I run up to the house and call nine-one-one. You know the rest.

  There was a pause before Antonia’s voice broke the silence with a follow-up question. “Who do you think killed her?”

  My parents believed Kevin Powers did it. I had complained earlier in the summer to them that he was a creep, always leering at us when we were in bathing suits by the pool. And he was always around. It was so annoying, he bothered the hell out of me. And he knew it too. What bugged me is, whenever I wasn’t there, he would corner Susie and talk to her, and she was too nice to blow him off. She also felt awkward because it wasn’t her house so she couldn’t really say scram. But I could and did.

  My father thought that Kevin went up to the house to talk to Susie and she finally blew him off and he freaked out and hit her with her tennis racket. You know he was a big druggie. The guy was a loser, in his twenties and mowing two or three lawns a week for a living. But the police defended him because he was from an old local family and they stick together. They said he had no history of violence, blah, blah, whatever. My father always insisted he did it.

  Antonia spoke again. “Where were Alida and Dougie? Did you ever find out?”

  Alida stayed late at Boys Harbor because there was some camper play or awards ceremony or something like that. Dougie was AWOL all day because his dad made him play eighteen holes of golf with some business associates, which takes hours. There was no one else here but me, Susie, Rosamund—our housekeeper—and Kevin. My brother, Russell, was at the yacht club with his girlfriend, Holly. And Scott, the tennis pro who lived in our guesthouse, was teaching. No one had any motive but Kevin—a spurned lover. But that wasn’t the story the police or press wanted—too boring. They wanted it to be me. Poor little rich girl who killed her best friend. It was absurd.

  Antonia turned off the recording.

  “What do you think?” she asked Joseph.

  “This is a tough one,” he remarked. “It would be ideal if we could see the police files and find out why they didn’t pursue Kevin Powers.”<
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  “I know. I may have to pay a visit to my pal Officer Flanagan.” Antonia had “worked” with him on her last case. What had started as an acrimonious relationship—Antonia was wary of cops—had actually blossomed into a semi-friendship.

  “It’s interesting that Pauline dodges the question when you ask her who she thinks did it.”

  “What do you mean? She says Kevin Powers.”

  “No. She says that her parents and in particular her father believed it was Kevin Powers. But she doesn’t state that as her own opinion.”

  “Oh, you’re right.”

  “Are you planning on interviewing others?”

  “As many as I can find. Pauline said Rosamund, the housekeeper, is dead. The other woman who worked for them moved back to Colombia years ago. She gave me Alida and Dougie’s contact info, but otherwise I’m on my own.”

  “What about Susie’s mother?”

  “I asked Pauline if I could interview her and she said she would check with the nurses. The mother is very sick so it doesn’t seem likely. Not sure how much she would know, anyway, as she wasn’t here.”

  “You have your work cut out for you, my dear.”

  “Yes,” Antonia agreed. “It is a bit daunting on so many levels. Pauline Framingham is intimidating and although I fancy myself as strong, there is that vulnerable side of me that she has a talent of tapping into. She’s a bully, and I don’t do well with bullies, as you know.”

  Joseph nodded. He knew Antonia’s history with her ex-husband Philip and how he was able to tap into that side of her as well. “If that’s the case maybe you don’t want to do this investigation. Why put yourself in a position of weakness rather than strength?”

  “You have a point. But my reason for doing it is for Susie, not for Pauline. Look at this picture . . .” Antonia held up the photograph of Susie. “She deserves justice.”

  “She does.”

  “I want to bring it to her. It’s the least I can do. But I don’t know the first thing about cold cases. I know I am a good snoop, but the technical aspect is a challenge. Even if I gain access to the police files, I have no idea how to analyze evidence such as fingerprinting or DNA. What if there’s DNA that needs to be looked at? I don’t know anything about that other than what I’ve seen on TV.”

  “But you know people. And you understand them. And don’t forget, profiling and criminal psychology are just as important to solving a crime as forensics. There may be a ‘what, where, and when’ in an investigation, but your job is to find the ‘who’ and the ‘why.’”

  “That’s true.”

  “Remember the words of advice from that legendary detective Hercule Poirot.”

  “What was that?”

  “He said, ‘Until you know exactly what sort of person the victim was, you cannot begin to see the circumstances of the crime clearly.’”

  “In other words, start with Susie.”

  “Exactly. If anyone can do it, it’s you, my dear.”

  10

  Antonia liked to take an early-morning walk every day in order to clear her head before the crazy busy workday unfolded. She’d made a promise to herself when she first moved to East Hampton to do it every day, but she had found that the promise was much easier to keep during the off-season when business at the inn was slower. Summer was nonstop for Antonia, and it took a Herculean effort just to leave the inn for an hour to meander along the picturesque coastline just a few blocks away.

  That Saturday morning, Antonia was determined to hit the beach. She wanted the soft sand under her feet. She wanted the cool frothy water to lap at her toes. She wanted to search for interesting shells and rocks and watch the sun rise high in the sky. She knew it would help her sift through some of the information that Pauline had given her and help her formulate a plan of attack. She parked her old Saab at Georgica Beach and set off westward in the direction of Wainscott. She needed to take another look at the Framingham house.

  When she reached it, she paused and stared. The house looked different from the beach side. It was still large and majestic, but without the giant yard that unfurled in the front, it was less imposing. Antonia’s eyes flitted to the screened porch where she had recently sat with Pauline. She couldn’t see anyone inside. In fact, the house looked deserted.

  “Beautiful house, isn’t it?”

  Antonia was startled. She hadn’t heard anyone approach. She glanced over and saw a woman dressed in tight athletic clothing, gripping two hand weights in her palms. She was attractive and fit, probably in her early sixties, but she’d had a lot of facial work done in order to appear younger.

  “It is.”

  “It’s too bad that such a nice house is home to such an evil person.”

  Antonia cocked her head to the side. “Why do you say that?”

  “The woman who lives there is a murderer.”

  “Pauline Framingham?”

  The woman gave her a fake smile. “Also known as a spoiled brat who enjoys wrecking people’s lives.”

  Antonia nodded. She didn’t want to engage, what was she supposed to say? It would be impossible to defend Pauline and this woman clearly had experienced some distasteful interaction with her.

  “I would discourage anyone from getting mixed up with her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The woman shrugged. “It doesn’t end well. Let’s just say I know where the bodies are buried. And I’m not talking about Susie Whitaker’s.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get your name? I’m Antonia . . .”

  “My Fitbit just went off. Have to finish this run before I cramp up. Bye.”

  The woman took off in a run, leaving Antonia alone in front of the Framingham house. What was that all about? Antonia mused. Was it a coincidence or was that woman threatening her? She decided to shake it off.

  The tide was low, so Antonia walked down close to the shoreline. Her bare feet made imprints in the wet sand. Maybe it was a good thing that she had been avoiding the beach. You never knew who you would run into. Although if she had, she never would have met him.

  She had met Nick Darrow one morning on the beach when he was walking his dogs and they had become friends and confidants. He hadn’t led her on; in fact, he most likely assumed she knew he was married, because, well, everyone on the planet knew that. But Antonia wasn’t big on celebrity gossip and had serious disdain for tabloid journalism, and so she was quite out of the loop on the personal lives of celebrities. If she had been interested, she would have known about Nick’s tempestuous on-and-off-again marriage to Melanie Wells, a well-known actress. And despite all the drama surrounding their union, it didn’t appear to be dissolving any time soon.

  Against every single morsel of her being, Antonia knew that being in love with a married man, let alone a married movie star, was not only absurd but self-destructive. And yet, she couldn’t help herself. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” Woody Allen had disgustingly said in defense of marrying Soon-Yi. He was a bad example and yet there was truth there, and the fact that he said it then, while defending a terribly immoral union, proved how accurate that phrase was. The heart wants what it wants. But. You also have to control the heart and not let it go in the wrong direction. And Antonia was making her best effort at this type of control. Of course it helped that Nick Darrow was currently out of town filming a movie in some far-flung exotic destination, with his wife and son.

  As Antonia ambled past the staggeringly beautiful mansions hovering in the dunes, she attempted to examine why she made bad choices when it came to relationships. Her parents had been happily married until her mother’s death when Antonia was twenty-one. Her father had grieved and remained true to her mother’s memory until his passing ten years later. They were a beautiful example of devotion and kindness and love. But despite that model, Antonia had married Philip, an abusive cop who had only become mo
re violent and aggressive as the marriage continued. And why hadn’t she left that situation earlier? She was a strong, competent woman. His friends—fellow cops—kept assuring her that he would change, that Antonia was overreacting. It did a number on her. In retrospect, she couldn’t relate to the person she was back then. She’d had resources. Her father would have helped her—as soon as he learned what was going on he had sprung into action. She had friends and extended family she could have reached out to for assistance. It was an aberration—as if she had lived that part of her life in a daze, which confounded her now because she had the strength and clarity to do something about it. Sadly, it took the death of her father after a blow from Philip to extricate Antonia from him forever. Even now, Antonia was still reeling from her father’s death and felt she hadn’t completely processed it.

  Since then there had been a few dates and dalliances here and there but nothing heavy in the romance department. Antonia would love to be married and she wanted children too, but she wondered if it would ever happen for her. Certainly not when she was so distracted by Nick Darrow. It wasn’t because he was gorgeous (although he was) or because he was famous (that was almost a negative); it was his intensity and brilliance that she admired. He would listen to her talk—really listen—and reference things in later conversations that she hadn’t even remembered saying. He never bothered with chitchat or gossip, instead preferring to discuss cerebral and philosophical issues, which Antonia found thrilling. They had once had an intense conversation about God and religion and the meaning of life that Antonia had found deeply moving. Nick was a religious, churchgoing person and persuasive in his belief in a higher power. They had conversed in a way she never had with anyone else.

  Thank God he was away. It couldn’t go on like this. She hoped that distance would make her heart grow less fond. If she kept harboring this crush she would be single forever.

  Antonia wondered why Pauline Framingham was still single. Antonia didn’t feel comfortable passing judgment on people’s romantic decisions, but Pauline was forty-four—eight years older than Antonia, and she was a beautiful and rich woman. Did Pauline have a boyfriend? What had her romantic life been like since Dougie? Antonia hadn’t even thought to ask. There had been whispers that perhaps Susie and Pauline had been lovers, and Antonia had dismissed it, but maybe Pauline was gay. Antonia wasn’t sure how important it was, but if she was investigating everyone she would have to find out. Only then would she discover who killed Susie.