“Of course, Nell,” Nancy said. “And thank you. I’ve been meaning to call Josie and do it myself, but you know how that goes. The phone rings, someone comes in, and on and on.”
Nell knew it to be true. Nancy Hughes was the best director they’d had since she’d been involved with the museum. She was sharp, energetic, and personable, and her instincts in museum direction had been right on target. Nell liked her very much. “Are you going to hire someone for Angie’s position?” she asked.
Nancy took a key from her desk drawer and motioned for Nell to follow her to the back of the building. “I’m going to try, Nell, but she’ll be difficult to replace. The project she had been working on, though, was nearly completed. I was starting to talk with Angie on what we should tackle next.”
They walked through a wood-paneled library, open to the public like the museum in the east wing, and to a back room that housed the research staff.
“So Angie was ready to do another project for you?” Nell asked.
“Well, let’s say I was ready for her to start a new project. Now that you’ve brought up the question of her time here, it makes me wonder.”
“What do you mean, Nancy?”
“Well, I never questioned that she would stay on after the quarry project ended. We had just given her a raise, and I know she liked working here. But when I talked about a new project, she was evasive. Noncommittal. I didn’t think much of it until you mentioned today that there was talk of her leaving.”
“It was just talk, Nancy. Little things she said that made people think she wouldn’t be around long.” Nell stopped at a wooden desk that she knew to be Angie’s. The top was littered with scattered yellow pads, a pencil holder, and a desk calendar. There were few personal things marking the area—a makeup case in a tote bag beneath the desk, but not much else. It wouldn’t take long to pack this up, but there was something decidedly sad about a workspace that was nearly neutral.
“The police looked through it, hence the mess. They declared it ‘inconsequential.’ That made me sad, that they would cast it off as not important. It’s a part of Angie. It’s important.”
Nell nodded. “I brought a couple sacks. And that’s probably more than I need. It doesn’t look like Angie had many personal things here.”
Nancy didn’t answer. She stood on the opposite side of the desk, her hands on her hips, frowning. “Something’s missing, Nell.”
“From the desk?”
“Her computer, that’s it,” Nancy said, snapping her fingers in the air. “It’s not here.” She pulled open the deep desk drawers, then checked the bookcases. “It’s a small laptop. White, I think. She liked it better than our clunky old models.”
“Maybe the police took it. That would make sense. There’d be e-mail, and maybe something of interest to them.”
“No, I’m sure they didn’t. I was back here with them. It wasn’t here that day.”
Nell looked around the room. Bookcases lined the inner wall, and windows looked out onto the small back parking lot. “I don’t see a computer.”
Nancy waved one hand through the air. “Of course it’s not here. She always took it home. I forgot. I guess all this mess has me rattled.”
But Nell knew the computer wasn’t at the apartment. The police had looked, Izzy said.
Nell shook out the shopping bag and set it on the chair. “We all are a bit rattled, Nancy.”
“Hopefully, it’ll be behind us soon. Margarethe mentioned that the police think it was a random act. Awful, but random, someone seeing a beautiful young girl and trying to force her into something she didn’t want to do. I guess Sea Harbor isn’t immune from unsavory people passing through now and then.”
Nell was silent. A random act. The words had become a mantra. People were going to start believing it. “Nancy, was most of Angie’s work done on the Internet? Is that why she used the computer?”
“Oh, no. That was some of it, of course. It’s amazing what you can find on the Web. But she did a lot of work in the library here—looking up old histories, pictures, deeds. And she spent hours over at the county building.”
“What did she do over there?”
“Looked up old deeds, information about the land around here and the quarries. She said it was an amazing place to find things. She’d come back excited, like someone who’d just found a buried treasure. The two of us would go through her pile of photocopies as if it were Christmas morning. She was a brilliant researcher, Nell.”
“I’ll pass that along to Josie. She’ll like hearing it.”
Nancy walked over to the door. “You won’t get anything done with me yakking, Nell,” Nancy said. “I’m going back to my office, but please call if you need me.”
Nell listened to the click of Nancy’s shoes on the hardwood floor, fading into silence. Then she dug into her task, filling the paper sack with the few personal things Angie allowed to enter into her work realm. She picked up a framed picture of Angie with her mother and father, standing near the Fisherman’s Statue in Gloucester. Nell looked at the smile on Ted Archer’s face, his arm looped around Josie’s shoulders on one side, and the little red-haired girl on the other. Angie was about five in the photo and was looking up at her dad with an expression of pure joy. Ted’s smile was filled with pride and love. He was a good man. And even when hard times hit, he tried his best to take care of Josie and Angie.
Nell wrapped the picture in some newspapers and slipped it into the sack, then continued with the few remaining items. A coffee mug from the Life Is Good store in Gloucester. Inside the top drawer she found some elastic hair bands, a box of tea.
Nell slipped it all into the bag with the other things—a few pens and pads of paper. Several old postcards of the quarries, Dogtown, the barn-red wooden fish warehouse in Rockport, and a beautiful sunset off Good Harbor Beach. Nell shivered in the warm air.
She’d collected a large part of Angie’s life in Sea Harbor—and it barely filled a Filene’s shopping bag.
Chapter 18
Nell tossed and turned in the bed, which was wider by a mile without Ben lying in it beside her. He was having a fine time, he’d told her when he’d called. The skies were blue and sunny, breezes cool, and the trout in the Colorado River were lining up for his bait. He missed her. He’d be home in a day.
Sometimes Nell went with Ben on company trips like this, and hiking a Colorado fourteener would have lured her to his side. But fishing she could easily forgo. She’d enjoy the trout once cleaned and filleted and basted with dill and lemon butter. Not before.
Finally, with sleep beyond her reach and the day brightening, Nell gave up and slipped out of bed. She pulled on a pair of lightweight warm-up pants and an old clambake T-shirt, tugged her pink Sox cap on her sleep-scrunched hair, and headed out the back door. She hadn’t been jogging for a few days and her body was feeling it. Some stretching and a short jaunt would clear her head and her achy back—and bring the world back into focus.
Some days Nell headed to Sweet Hollow Park for early-morning exercise—the thick trees offered a protected trail up through the piney woods. But today a southern breeze warmed her face, and she headed, instead, through the narrow windy path behind her home that led to the packed sand of Sandpiper Beach.
A short distance north of the harbor, Sandpiper Beach was a gentle curve of land protected by the distant breakwater. Mothers and babies found it a perfect spot to swim on warm days, but early in the morning it was a choice stretch of sand for joggers, strollers, and dog walkers.
Nell crossed the road, stretched her limbs on the rough wooden fence that marked a small parking lot, and began a slow jog down the beach. Slim, firm bodies passed her by, and she waved at familiar faces—some of Izzy’s friends, a young man she was on a board with, Mae’s teenage nieces running in tandem. She was happy in her slowness, and felt the aches disappear from cramped muscles as her body moved to its own rhythm.
“Nell,” a voice from behind carried forward on the wind. Ne
ll slowed as Izzy ran up beside her, her hair a mass of wet waves sticking to her cheeks and neck. She slowed her stride to match Nell’s.
“Want company?” she asked.
Nell smiled her answer, and the two jogged in comfortable silence for a while, Izzy accommodating her strides to Nell’s pace.
“How has your week gone?” Izzy asked.
“Yesterday was busy,” Nell said, her words coming out in puffs. She told Izzy about cleaning out Angie’s desk. “There was little there that spoke of a life at all, much less Angie’s.”
“No notes, letters? Did you check her e-mail?”
“She used her laptop at work,” Nell said. “And it was gone. Nancy said she always took it home at night.”
Izzy pumped her arms, her forehead wrinkling. “Are you sure? The police looked for a computer.”
“And didn’t find it.”
“No. They took very little, and not a computer. But Tommy said they hurried through things. I’ll look again. I think I may have someone staying up there for a while.”
“Oh?” Nell turned away from the water and jogged toward a wooden bench. Jogging was one thing. Jogging while carrying on intelligent conversation was another thing altogether.
Izzy followed her up the sandy incline and stopped in front of the bench, bending her body at the waist and grabbing the toes of her tennis shoes. Her eyes were focused on the sand, and strands of damp hair fell over her face. “Don’t give me that look, Nell,” she said without looking up. “I don’t have to see it—I can feel it as clearly as if I were looking directly into those all-seeing eyes of yours.”
Nell sat down on the bench and stretched her legs out in front of her. She pulled the baseball cap from her head and shook out her hair, all the while smiling at the back of Izzy’s upside-down head. “So I think it’s a good idea, Izzy, that’s all. So does Ben. But I didn’t instigate it.”
Izzy straightened back up and sat down next to Nell. “What I don’t get is why a guy would want to live above a knitting store when he could be in a cottage right by the ocean.”
“Izzy, the Seaside Knitting Studio is about as close to the water as you can get.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, for starters, Sam isn’t here to sit on the beach and get a summer tan or party it up. He’s here to teach at the Canary Cove Arts Academy and to take photographs. If he wants to learn about Sea Harbor, living above your shop is a much better place to be.”
Izzy brushed her hair from her eyes and looped it behind her ear. “I’m just being stubborn. Sam’s not so bad—he’s grown up nicely.”
“And he’d probably say the same about you,” Nell said. She held back a smile.
“Seeing him was a surprise—good and bad. One tiny part of me resented that somehow my past was moving into my present. I like having it separate, controlling it. Sam was around, you know, during some of those times when Dad made it clear that my love for art was a great hobby. But law—” Izzy’s voice dropped an octave and she tucked her chin into her chest. “Law, my lovely, smart daughter, law is a career.”
Nell patted her hand and laughed at Izzy’s imitation of Craig Chambers. Nell loved her brother-in-law dearly, and Izzy loved her dad, but she also knew Craig had placed some of his own formidable hopes and dreams on his daughter. And it had caused much angst for the young Izzy Chambers.
“But about the apartment,” Izzy went on. “Though I hate to admit it, you’re right, Nell. Every little noise I hear overhead sends shivers through me. It’s just the wind or the fact that the shop is older than Methuselah, but it jars me. Having Sam up there will be a good thing. Especially now.”
“You’re saying that in a tone that scares me a little, Izzy.”
“I don’t mean to scare you. But if I don’t tell you, you’ll hear it from someone else.”
“Hear what?” A familiar pang squeezed Nell’s chest, an uncomfortable feeling that she’d had before when Izzy was reluctant to talk to her about something. She remembered the phone call after Izzy’s big court case nearly two years ago. Izzy had called from the courthouse, happy and buoyed by the compliments of the lawyers in her firm. “Way to go, Izzy Chambers,” they had cheered loudly. “You’re on your way to the top.”
But when Ben and Nell pulled up beside Izzy’s town house later that evening, with congratulatory flowers and champagne in their arms, the curtains were pulled and reporters blocked the front steps. They slipped around to the back, unnoticed in the commotion, and found Izzy in the kitchen, alone, her face damp with tears. And Nell had the same squeezed feeling when Izzy looked up at her, not wanting to speak, but needing to explain.
Izzy’s court case hadn’t been a difficult one, but it had been her first. A young man, not much older than Izzy’s brother, Jack, had been accused for the third time of armed robbery. Through keen reasoning and logic, Izzy convinced the judge that her client was innocent—and he got his life back. A third conviction would have meant a long sentence. He hugged Izzy tightly, and the television cameras dutifully filmed the embrace for the six o’clock news. But a short while later, in a neighborhood shopping area not far from Izzy’s place, the newly freed man quietly held up a deli and shot the owner and his wife dead.
Izzy went back to Sea Harbor with Ben and Nell that night. And not too many days later, after long discussions with the Elliot & Pagett law firm, all came to an agreement, and Izzy finished up her current cases, sold her brick townhome, and bought the Seaside Knitting Studio on Harbor Road. Nell had suffered Izzy’s pain during those difficult days, then welcomed her to Sea Harbor—and a life that fit Izzy like a well-knit pair of socks.
“Tell me, Izzy,” Nell said now, knowing she might not like what Izzy was going to say.
“You know that Tony and Pete went fishing the other day. I don’t know why, exactly, since they aren’t friends, but they did.”
Nell nodded.
“They stayed out late, apparently. They’d gone out to the island, drank a few beers. According to Pete they spent a little time fishing, a lot of time talking. Tony pumped him with questions about Angie. That was the whole reason he’d invited him, Pete said. What was their relationship like? How did they meet? What did they talk about? Did she talk to him about her work? When was she leaving? And on and on. Pete had a terrible time, he said. Tony didn’t seem to give a hoot about Angie. He acted as if Angie had told Pete some kind of secret. And Tony was trying to get Pete to tell him what it was. But Pete didn’t have a clue what Tony was getting at. So everything went sour and they ended up mostly drinking beer.”
“And?”
“They pulled into the harbor late and saw lights behind my shop as they brought the boat in. Just in the back—you could only see them from the water. They thought they saw a shadow, too, but they were too far away to be sure of that. They were sure of the light, though.”
“Maybe it was Gideon’s flashlight.”
“It could have been. It’s probably no big deal,” Izzy said. “Pete went by and checked on his way home and he said someone was sitting on the bottom step and ran off as soon as Pete drove up. By the time Pete got out of the car, the person was gone.”
“Izzy, isn’t it Gideon’s job to see that things like that don’t happen?”
Izzy shrugged. “Nell, it’s probably nothing. I know from my teenage summers here that kids sometimes go into empty cottages to drink a six-pack or smoke a cigarette. It’s for the thrill of it. The danger. But no harm intended and once Sam moves in, no one will think twice about shining lights in my shop.”
Nell knew Izzy didn’t believe her own hypothesis any more than she did. A second-story apartment in the middle of the village wasn’t exactly a cottage. And it wouldn’t even be thrilling.
“Nell, look over there—” Izzy whispered, and nudged her gently in the side. Nell looked up and saw Angus McPherron standing just at the edge of the water, looking at her and Izzy. He stood still, his heavy shoes barely visible as they sank beneath his we
ight into the sand until the tide formed a frothy cuff around his ankles. He wore black baggy pants and an old cap pulled down until it nearly touched his bushy eyebrows. But his eyes were clear and focused.
Nell lifted one hand in a wave and smiled at him.
Angus nodded, then slowly made his way across the narrow stretch of beach, the wet sand sucking at his boots and their imprints forming a trail of smooth wet holes behind him.
“Good morning, Angus,” Nell said.
Angus nodded again at both of the women, his gnarled fingersplaying with his beard. It was soft and white, a Santa Claus- type beard that seemed out of place on Angus’s weathered skin.
“ ’Morning ladies,” he said. “I’m thinking it’s a nice day to walk in the water.”
“Yes.”
“I know you were her friends. I used to walk along the water with her.”
“With Angie,” Nell said, instinctively knowing whom Angus was talking about. She wondered, briefly, if Angus had been able to hear their conversation, but just as quickly, she dismissed the thought. The sound of the sea made most conversations private, and even if the wind had been carrying voices, Angus’s hearing, she knew, was not as sharp as it had once been. “You and Angie were friends, too,” Nell said.
He nodded and a smile softened the serious look on his face. “Angie liked my stories. We’d sit on the village pier or out on the breakwater. We both liked to do that. We’d let the breeze cool our faces. And we would talk about the old days.”
Angus looked north as he spoke, as if seeing Angie out there on the breakwater, waiting for him. “People don’t fool me. I tell them my stories, but I know they aren’t usually interested.” He shrugged. “Some are, some aren’t, I guess. But I like to talk to people, and if they don’t want to listen, my feelings aren’t hurt. Half the time I make the stories up. But the ones I told Angie were true. She liked those better.”
Nell slipped strands of loose, damp hair back over her ear. “I like your stories, Angus. A lot of us do.”
He shook his head. “Thank you, Nell. Angie was my best audience, though, and I don’t mean for you to take offense at that.” He smiled, a sad, enigmatic smile. “She breathed in my stories, and then she remembered them, word for word. Sometimes she even wrote down things that I said. And she always asked questions. She liked me, you know. And I liked her very much.”
Death By Cashmere Page 14