Murder Most Maine

by Karen MacInerney

  “There’s plenty on both of them. Dirk had a couple of lawsuits written up in the press—no judgments against him, at least not that I could find, but there are a few still pending. He seems to have been in Boston for the last six years—before that, I can’t find anything.”

  “His bio says he’s been a personal trainer for many years,” I said. “Maybe he was working for a small gym somewhere.”

  “Vanessa, on the other hand, has had quite a history. She was engaged to marry a big shot in New Jersey about two years ago, but called it off.” Audrey took the papers from my hand and flipped through to an engagement announcement featuring a picture of Vanessa, her hair longer than it was now, glowing next to a handsome blond man with a very toothy smile.

  “Did you find anything more on it?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. But unless the wedding is still on hold, it never happened. I checked the date.”

  “I heard her say she was engaged to a real estate mogul,” I said. “I wonder what put the brakes on?”

  “Hard to tell,” she said. “But she seems to have done quite well for herself since then. She’s been interviewed in all kinds of articles, and her business seems to be getting a lot of good press.”

  She certainly did; the program—and Vanessa—had been featured in Cosmopolitan, Self, and even O! Magazine. No wonder the literary agent was interested in her proposal; if she could wangle a spot on Oprah, Vanessa’s book would be golden.

  I leafed through the pages again, thankful that Audrey had taken a couple of hours of her day—and her superior research skills—to come to my aid. “This has been a huge help,” I told her. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “If you need anything else, let me know,” she said. “I’ve been getting a lot of requests from Cranberry Island these days.”

  “Really? Who else have you been talking to?”

  “Matilda Jenkins,” she said.

  “Of course. The lighthouse.”

  Audrey nodded. “Exactly. Matilda is obsessed with that building—always has been. And now that they’ve found that body there …” She shivered. “Have they found anything else out?”

  “The first lab results show that the bones are African,” I said, “but they’re getting a second opinion. Matilda found a reference to a black slave-catcher who was here around then, and she thinks there may have been an Underground Railroad way station on Cranberry Island—maybe at the lighthouse. Have you ever run across any mention of one?”

  She shook her head. “No, but then I haven’t looked. Tell her I’ll poke around a little and see what I can find.”

  “She’ll be delighted to hear that, I’m sure. She won’t be happy until this mystery is put to rest!”

  Audrey peered at me over her sparkly glasses. “And I hope for the sake of the inn that you put your mystery to rest, too. I’ve been telling people all day that Gertrude doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but you know how folks are. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned up in the Bangor Daily News soon.”

  “Let’s hope not,” I said, conveniently ignoring the fact that they were already calling. Repeatedly.

  “I hear two of the islanders have been taken to the station for questioning,” she said as I shuffled the papers together.

  I glanced up. “I heard that too.”

  “Somebody said one of them is the head of the lobster co-op over there on Cranberry Island,” she said. “He was having an affair with that Vanessa woman, I heard—and he wasn’t the only one. Apparently the other fellow they hauled in was seeing a bit of her, too.”

  “Really?” I asked, feeling my throat close up. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lots of folks are talking about it—not much else going on right now, so it’s big news. It may just be a rumor, but I’d be willing to bet there’s some truth to it.”

  “You think?”

  “Almost always is, it seems.” She shook her head. “I guess it’s not too surprising that one of her fellows turned up dead. I just hope it’s not one of ours that did the deed.”

  When I made it back to the inn about an hour later—I’d stopped at one of the stores in Somesville to pick up some snacks to keep up in my room, just in case they banished me from the kitchen overnight—I was hoping to find the place still deserted, so I could revisit Greg’s room and see if I could turn up a connection to Dirk.

  Unfortunately, I was out of luck. Detective Rose was gone, but the guests were in the living room, lifting weights under Vanessa’s direction. Despite the recent tragedy, she was dressed for spring in a fuchsia spandex exercise top and skin-tight shorts that showed off the kind of honed physique I could never hope to have. I had to give the woman credit—she was still doing her very best to give the retreat participants what they’d come for, even though her hearty “One, two, three, fours!” seemed strained.

  Several pairs of eyes flicked nervously to me as I entered—maybe because Dirk had been poisoned and I was the cook. I told them in cheery tones that we’d be dining at Spurrell’s that night. Then, after checking the messages (three more from Bangor, two from Gertrude) and saying a brisk ‘hello’ to the two officers who were destroying my kitchen, I high-tailed it to my room.

  Ripping the wrapper off a Snicker’s bar—by now, all thoughts of dieting were long gone—I peered through the curtains at John’s carriage house. Was he back yet? I finished the bar and then crept down the stairs and out the door, my heart hammering in my chest as I tapped at the door. But the only thing that greeted me was the wind, moaning eerily around the corner. I tried again, and then went to the workshop next door. But no one answered there, either. Something tightened inside me as I knocked a fourth time before conceding defeat.

  Was he still being questioned at the station? I wondered. And if so, why?

  The only thing you can do to help him is to prove he didn’t do it, I told myself as I headed back up the green slope to the inn. I was still smarting over Audrey’s comment about John’s supposed affair with Vanessa. Even if things between us were beyond repair, though, that didn’t mean I was going to let him be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.

  Assuming I was right—and John was innocent.

  ___

  A little while later, as I walked through the living room, checking on the guests, I examined the portly, reddish-haired Greg—who was snuggled up with Megan on the couch—with new interest. Was he really just here to lose weight and chat up attractive fellow dieters?

  Or had he come to find out more about Dirk for a client?

  But Dirk was dead, and Greg was still here. Which didn’t make sense if he was here just on business. Unless he had stayed because he had fallen for Megan. I watched the two of them talking in low tones on the couch; even with Boots, Cat, and Sarah eyeing them, there was an air of intimacy that made it uncomfortable to be near them. Megan’s blond head was inches from his, and the two of them were deep in intense discussion. Carissa was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t surprising—she tended to avoid Greg, and I imagined she was seeking solace in a Snickers bag in her room somewhere. Vanessa was absent, too.

  “Where’s your fearless leader?” I asked Boots, who was relaxing on the couch under the window with her sorority sisters.

  “She went upstairs to take a shower,” Boots said.

  “And to escape that reporter,” Sarah added, adjusting her oversized pink sweater. It was bulky, but the color brought life to her pale face and light hair. “That woman has been hounding poor Vanessa all day. I don’t think she’s writing a travel article.”

  “Do you think?” Cat asked from a wingback chair. She still looked a bit haggard, but she didn’t appear to have been crying recently.

  “I’m positive,” Sarah said. “She’s been asking some very personal questions.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Boots leaned forward. “Like whether or not she and Dirk were dating. And whether there were any disagreements between them over how to run t
he business.”

  “What did Vanessa say?”

  “Not a whole lot. A polite version of ‘no comment.’ I think Elizabeth’s getting frustrated, to be honest,” Sarah said.

  Boots stood up then, straightening her fine-gauge turtleneck, which was cut perfectly for her curvy figure, and patting her stomach. “When did you say dinner was?”

  “In a couple of hours,” I said. “Down at Spurrell’s Lobster Pound.”

  “Oooh, does that mean we’re having lobster?”

  “Not yet,” I said, hoping that the cops would open my kitchen in time for me to prepare the lobsters Tom had brought. “Scallops instead.”

  “With brownies for dessert?” Sarah asked hopefully.

  “Not till you get home, I’m afraid. Or unless you can manage to sneak over to the store,” I joked.

  “I just might get hungry enough to do that,” she said. “How late are they open?”

  Boots tsked at her. “No cheating, Sarah. We’re here to lose weight, not gain it. Remember that reunion!”

  ___

  Vanessa trotted everybody out for one last exercise session before dinner—the whole group trooped out of the inn carrying objects that looked like rubber hoses with handles, and I wondered exactly what they were planning on doing with them. She informed me that a bunch of bicycles would be coming over the next day, and I knew what to do with those, but how exactly did you exercise using hoses with handles?

  As they all puffed up the hill together, toting their lengths of rubber, I was glad not to be joining them. And thrilled that I would finally have an opportunity to check Greg’s room.

  Grabbing the skeleton keys from the cabinet by the front desk, I headed up the stairs, trying to look nonchalant. I didn’t have particularly high hopes for this visit; after all, I’d been through his room many times before and seen nothing untoward—with the exception of a couple of stray blond hairs, that is. On the other hand, I hadn’t really been looking.

  Today, though, was a different story. Locking the door behind me, I headed first for the desk, hoping to find some explanation for why Greg was here—other than the need to drop thirty pounds, that was.

  Unfortunately for me, all of the desk drawers were empty. Nor was there a briefcase in the room—or anything else to indicate he was at the retreat on anything business-related.

  Maybe my instincts were wrong, I thought, crossing my arms and surveying the room to see if I’d missed anything. Maybe he really was here just to drop some excess weight.

  As a last-ditch effort, I peeked into the shallow drawer of the nightstand next to the bed. I don’t know what I expected to find—I was hoping for Carissa’s sake it wouldn’t be condoms—but what I did find was a moleskin notebook, like the ones they sell in bookstores.

  Perching on the edge of Greg’s bed (which had no more blond hairs on the pillow, I was happy to see) I picked up the book and leafed through it. The first few pages had been torn out, but there were several remaining, all with dates and times on listed them. And short entries such as “Tuesday afternoon, April 20. Went to movie at mall alone at 12:05—shopped at Lane Bryant, returned home at two.”

  Lane Bryant? That was a plus-sized women’s clothing store. Why would Dirk be shopping there?

  I flipped through the rest of the pages, which read like a surveillance report. But why would anyone want a report on someone whose most interesting outing consisted of a trip to an Outlet Mall?

  The entire document was about as exciting as the lighthouse log had been—only with trips to various shopping centers and restaurants recorded instead of weather reports. And there were absolutely no references to possible smuggling activities—or anything else illicit, for that matter.

  On the sixth or seventh page, the word RETREAT was listed in block letters. The date was listed as two days ago. “Established contact with subject today,” read the first entry. “Made initial overture; response was promising.”

  I flipped the page to see what was written down for the next day, but that was the end of it. Greg hadn’t written anything after the initial opening. Which was strange, because up until then, he had recorded his subject’s every move in mind-numbing detail.

  Was the sudden halt because Dirk—the subject—had died?

  I leafed through the strange notebook one more time, then returned it to its drawer in the nightstand before slipping out the door and closing it gently behind me. I glanced down the hall toward Dirk’s door. The forensics people weren’t in there anymore, and for a moment I considered doing another investigation of my own. But in truth, I doubted I’d find anything that I hadn’t already discovered—and if there was anything, I was sure the police had probably taken it.

  Instead of slipping back through my former guest’s door, I headed down the stairs and into Bethany’s room; other than Vanessa and possibly Elizabeth, she was my best option for the position of murderer.

  The room looked just the same as it had the other day—pictures of Dirk smiling out from a dozen frames on the dresser—but with one difference. The smell of something burning filled the air. I sniffed a few times, scanning the room for smoke, but the air was clear, so I headed for the nightstand, anxious to get a look at Bethany’s journal. If she had killed Dirk, would she have recorded it? It certainly would make solving the case easy if she had, I thought.

  The journal was no longer on the nightstand, so I opened the drawer, expecting to find it hidden there. But the drawer was empty. I searched the entire room—under the mattress, under the bed, in her suitcases—but it was nowhere to be found. Then I noticed a pile of ashes in the fireplace, and a scorched fragment of paper, and realized why I hadn’t been able to find the journal.

  Bethany had burned it.

  I poked around in the ashes to see if any of it had survived, but other than a few blackened bits of leather and a couple of curls of scorched paper, the book was gone.

  But why?

  Had there been something Bethany hadn’t wanted the police to find?

  I left Bethany’s room in deep thought, wishing I could tell Detective Rose about the diary, but afraid that if I did, it would look bad—like I’d been rooting around in my guests’ things. Which, to be honest, I had.

  I thought again about the restraining orders Bethany had had in the past. Why had the objects of her attraction resorted to court orders? Had she threatened them?

  And there was one more thing I needed to ask about, too, I realized as I locked Bethany’s door behind me. I’d given Audrey the names of all of my guests to research, but I hadn’t asked her to find out what she could about the mystery ingredient in Dirk’s weight loss supplements: EPH.

  ___

  By the time the guests had returned, looking winded, their rubber hoses draped over their shoulders like strands of limp spaghetti, the forensics folks had packed up and given me permission to put my kitchen back together, even though I wasn’t allowed to cook in it. Not for guests, anyway. The police were gone, but the kitchen was still a jumble, and after calling the library to ask Audrey to look up one more thing, I spent the next hour trying to bring some order to the chaos.

  I was trying to organize my spices when the kitchen door nudged open and Vanessa slid into the kitchen, slim and lithe as a snake.

  “Oh!” she said with a start. “I didn’t know anyone was in here!”

  “Can I help you with something?” I asked.

  Her dark eyes darted to me. “Oh, no,” she said, looking … shifty, somehow, I realized. She surveyed the counters, which were still covered with packages of food from the pantry. “I was just going to see if I could get a glass of water.”

  “Glasses are above the sink,” I said. “Help yourself.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  This was the first time I’d had an opportunity to question Vanessa alone, I realized. As she retrieved a glass and filled it, I tucked a bottle of nutmeg onto a shelf, trying to decide which of the many questions to ask first. As much as I wanted to dive
in and ask the big ones—like, Did you kill Dirk? and Are you and John seeing each other on the side?—I decided to ease into things.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked solicitously as she turned off the water.

  “All right, I guess.”

  “You’re doing a great job keeping things going, with everything going on. It must be hard losing your business partner—and your boyfriend, all at the same time.”

  “Dirk and I weren’t really … together,” she said. “But we were close.”

  “You and John seem to be pretty close, too,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

  “We’ve had a good time catching up. And he’s really been a rock for me this last day or two.”

  “I understand you two were an item for a while, way back when,” I said.

  “I guess we dated one summer, but nothing ever came of it,” she said offhandedly. As if she hadn’t spent almost every moment of her free time down at John’s carriage house since she’d arrived.

  “How about with Tom Lockhart?” I asked. “I heard you two were out catching up on old times the other night.”

  “What?” she said, jerking her head up sharply.

  “You know,” I said. “The night you went out for a walk—your first day here.”

  “I was alone,” she said, the friendly tone vanishing from her voice. “I told you—I just went out for a stroll. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a retreat to run.” She finished her water in one gulp and high-tailed it toward the door.

  “I notice you haven’t been giving out Dirk’s supplements since he died,” I said before she could leave. “I’m kind of surprised; I thought that was a big part of the program.”

  She turned to face me, her smoky eyes flashing with suppressed anger. “I appreciate your concern for the retreat,” she said, “but I think you might want to leave the weight-loss business to the professionals.” She raked a critical glance up and down my less-than-streamlined form, then swept out the kitchen door.