She gave me a pained, sympathetic look, which was so sweet and sincere, it took away some of the disappointment of being the main topic of local gossip.
“Yes, news really travels fast in this town.”
Becky nodded, her brown eyes behind her modern cat-eye glasses still very kind. “It does, but you know, most people don’t believe the negative. I know I always take what I hear with a grain of salt. An accident is an accident.”
I believed she was sincere. Of course, there I was trying to prove it wasn’t an accident. That was ironic.
She continued on, directing us into the sunroom I’d seen from outside and to the bank of computers. “You can use any of these to look up our local papers. I’ll let you do your thing.” She started to leave the room, but paused again. “It was very nice to meet you. I know you will love it here.” She smiled, then looked toward Oliver. “I love your hair. I was thinking of trying a fun color in my hair. I might just do it.”
“You’d rock it,” Oliver told her with an approving nod.
Beth grinned wider and disappeared back down the hall.
“I like her,” he said. “You should be friends with her.”
“I really should,” I agreed wholeheartedly. She was much more my type of chick to hang out with than the savvy blonde Jessica I’d met at the pub.
I settled on a metal stool in front of one of the computers. Oliver pulled another one over and sat beside me.
“I have to admit I’m kind of disappointed we don’t have to go through reels of microfilm in some dark basement,” I said, jiggling the mouse to make the computer screen flicker to life. “Somehow that feels more covert and dangerous.”
“Ack, no, that sounds awful,” Oliver groaned. “Plus, you know I don’t have the attention span for all that. And the only danger I like is wearing last year’s fashions.”
I laughed. “Rebel.”
“You know it, baby.” He looked around the room while I typed. “This room is actually really nice. Airy yet cozy.” He turned his attention back to what I was typing. “Who is Mac again?”
I’d typed Cliff Robichaud and Mac into the search bar. “He was Cliff’s business partner. Apparently Cliff and he got into some sort of dispute about the business and it ruined their friendship. I’m hoping to find some court records or something. But I don’t have Mac’s last name.”
I hit search and several articles came up, including one from yesterday. I hesitated to click the link. But curiosity got the better of me. I moved the mouse and tapped it.
“Oh God,” I moaned. A full, front-page article on Cliff’s death. Including my name and Jack Kerouac’s. “Well, this explains how everyone knows about me. I didn’t even need word of mouth. Jack and I got actual press.”
Oliver scanned the article. “At least they didn’t get a quote from Karen.”
I guess that was something.
I closed that article and began to read through the other links. Cliff appeared in the real estate reports. Often.
“Wow, Cliff must have had some real money after all these land deals,” Oliver said after we finished reading about yet another sale.
“But I don’t see anything about him owning a business. And I don’t see anything about a Mac. Maybe if we at least had a full first name, we could find something. What would Mac be short for?”
“Malcolm Porter,” a raspy voice said from somewhere in the glass room. We both turned on our stool, scanning the room. Then we spotted her, an elderly woman, leaning forward to peer at us from a wingback chair several feet away from us.
“You’re looking for Malcolm Porter.”
Six
“Oh hello,” I said after my initial shock passed. I stood and walked over to the elderly woman. “I didn’t realize you were in here.”
“Clearly. You do know this is a library. You are supposed to be quiet. But since I could hear everything you were talking about, I decided to help you out. It’s hard to read when people are jabbering.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, noting the large-print novel laying on her lap. “We didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m Sophie and this is my friend Oliver.”
She snorted. “I know who you are. You saw your name was all over the front page of the paper. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
I frowned. What did she mean by that? I started to ask her, but she abruptly slammed her book shut and moved forward in her seat as if she was going to stand. Instead, she squinted around.
“I’m ready to go anyway, except my daughter has disappeared. She does that.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine why her daughter disappeared. This frail, almost skeletal woman exuded crotchety and difficult.
“Do you want me to see if I can find her for you?” I asked gently, hoping to soothe her bad temper just a bit.
“No, she’ll be back.” She scowled at me as if that was the stupidest offer she’d ever heard. I was starting to have some serious concerns about the false advertising of the name of this town.
“So you are looking for information about Cliff Robichaud, are you?” She pinned me with dark, shrewd eyes. Her body might be old and failing, but I could see her mind wasn’t failing her in the least. And although she was rather intimidating, I could see she wanted to share what she knew about him.
I sat down in the chair next to hers. Oliver stayed on his stool, regarding the ancient woman warily.
“Yes, we were actually trying to find out some information about a business he owned with Mac. Um, I guess Malcolm Porter.”
She nodded, leaning toward me. “Cliff did own a business with Mac. A seafood wholesale company. You know, a place that sells fresh seafood to other businesses around the area. They did a big business with the restaurants in Bar Harbor. Damned tourists can’t get enough lobster. Those two men made some big money, peddling shellfish all up and down this area.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “Why’d they end such a successful business?”
“Cliff was always too greedy for his own good,” the elderly woman said.
Greedy and a womanizer. Cliff’s charming image was getting shadier by the minute.
“The way I heard it,” the old woman said, leaning closer to me. “He and Mac agreed that they would open another such company farther down the coast to supply seafood to places like Rockport and Camden. So Mac took some of the money to purchase a new facility, and when he did, Cliff claimed he’d never agreed to such a thing and that Mac was trying to steal from him. He sued Mac, and somehow won. Well, that was the end of their business, but not before Cliff walked away with full ownership of the company. He sold it to some millionaire from Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Hmph.” She said the last bit as if that was the ultimate sin of the whole tale.
She sighed and fell back in the chair as if sharing all that had exhausted her, but then she instantly found her second wind and straightened up again. “Mac ended up with virtually nothing. No business, no equity in the company and a huge black mark on his reputation. As you can imagine, there was no good blood between those two after that.”
Yes, that definitely sounded like a situation that would cause a lot of anger and resentment between the two men. And frankly, it sounded like a very possible reason for Mac to want Cliff dead.
“Of course, there were folks in town who believed Cliff’s account of everything. He was wily like that. He could convince just about anyone just about anything he wanted. I was friends with his dearly departed mother. She was a good woman. A straightforward woman. And even she said she’d never been able to punish him as a child, because he could sweet-talk himself out of any mess.” She shook her head in dismay as if imagining what raising a child like that must have been like.
From what I was learning, it seemed more and more like someone finally gave him the ultimate punishment.
“Mom.” A woman who appeared to be in her sixties entered the sunroom. This was the missing daughter, obviously, although if
I hadn’t heard her call to her mom, I wouldn’t have guessed they were related. Where the elderly woman in the chair was thin and angular, her daughter was soft and round. Her figure was full, but her face was sweet and quite pretty. I imagined in her youth, she was probably quite stunning. Whereas her mother looked like she would have always been hard and somewhat masculine.
I stood up immediately and greeted her with a smile. “Hi there, I’m Sophie LaFleur.”
The new woman hesitated before taking my hand almost as if she really didn’t want to touch me. But after a second, she did. I was surprised to feel the roughness of her hands, which didn’t seem to correlate with the softness of the rest of her. Oliver joined me, also offering his hand, and I noticed she didn’t seem to have the same hesitation with him as she did with me.
“I’m Millie Hall, and this is my mother, Eleanor.”
“These kids were asking me about that awful Cliff Robichaud,” her mother said, her raspy voice dripping with dislike.
“Mom,” she scolded softly. “It isn’t kind to speak ill of the dead.”
Eleanor made a noise again and sank back in her chair. “When he was alive you said not to gossip. Now he’s dead and I can’t speak the truth? If you’re a lousy person, you’re lousy.”
“You’ll have to forgive my mother,” Millie said as if she’d said that exact phrase many times before. Which I had no doubt she had. “She can get caught up in the idle gossip that goes around this town. I’ve always found Cliff to be a very nice man.”
“So you knew him well?” Oliver asked.
“No,” she said quickly, almost too quickly. “No, not well. But what I did know of him, I found to be…” She shook her head slightly as if searching for the right word. “I found him to be quite decent.” For a moment, I thought I saw her pale blue eyes, also nothing like her mother’s, cloud with tears.
Behind her, Eleanor snorted.
I looked at the ancient woman, waiting for her to add more, but apparently the scoffing noise was all she needed to say. When I looked back to Millie, her eyes were no longer watery.
Millie sighed, a deep sound like that of utter exasperation and exhaustion, but her voice was soft and tolerant as she turned to her crusty, old mother and said, “Let me help you up, Mom. We should head home. It’s almost time for Wheel of Fortune.”
She moved to help her skeletal mother to her feet. Then she held out a black cane to her. The cane had a crooked handle and was stabilized with four small feet attached at the bottom that reminded me of the legs of some weird insect. The ancient woman snatched the cane from her. Eleanor didn’t utter a word of thanks as she was balanced on her black, orthopedic shoes and began tottering past us. Then she stopped and pointed at the chair with her cane. “Don’t forget my book.”
Obediently, Millie got the book from where it must have slipped off Eleanor’s lap when she stood.
“It was nice to meet you,” Millie said, taking her mother’s elbow and leading the stooped, shuffling woman from the room.
Eleanor said nothing.
“Wow, there’s a mother who could give Joan Crawford a run for her money,” Oliver muttered as soon as they were out of earshot. “Millie, you better hide all the metal hangers.”
I gave him a disapproving look, although I didn’t actually disagree. Eleanor was terrifying.
“Well, she certainly hated Cliff, that’s for sure.”
“Oh yeah, she couldn’t wait to start throwing shade on him. But there is no way she could have killed him. She’d still be shuffling her way to where he was killed as we speak.”
“True.” I nodded. “What about Millie?”
“I think that poor woman suffers PTSD from dealing with her mother,” he said dryly. “But I can’t imagine her hurting anyone, much less killing them.”
“Did you notice she looked almost teary when she talked about Cliff? Doesn’t that seem like a weird reaction to have about someone you say you didn’t really know?”
Oliver shrugged. “You get teary every time Augustus dies in Fault in our Stars, and he’s a fictional character.”
“That is a sad movie,” I said. “And you get teary too.”
He shrugged, not denying it.
“Well, if there is one thing I’m quickly learning during this whole experience, it’s the fact that you can’t really judge anyone on first impressions.”
“Except Karen.”
“Yeah, except Karen.” That was one woman who did not inherit her father’s charm.
“Let’s go down to the boardwalk and get lobster,” Oliver suggested, clearly done with detective work for the night. “I recently heard damned tourists love lobster.”
I had to admit it was nice to simply go out and have something to eat with Oliver and not think about Cliff or potential murder for just a while. The small boardwalk was as quaint as Oliver had promised, lined with a few shops, a small arcade, and a restaurant that looked out over the harbor. I also discovered why tourists loved lobster.
I groaned as we walked back to the house. “I’m stuffed. All that butter and deliciousness. I think I might have to eat lobster every day.”
“And don’t forget those clams at the pub. Those are dangerous. I’d weigh three hundred pounds if I stayed here,” Oliver said, blowing out his lips to illustrate his overweight, clam-filled self.
I laughed, then fell silent as we walked along Water Street. The sun had disappeared below the horizon while we’d been sitting outside enjoying our lobster and wine. But I could still hear the crash of the ocean and smell its saltiness in the cool air. Warm light shone from the windows of all the gorgeous, old houses, lining the street.
“This place is really very cool,” Oliver said, reading my thoughts.
It was. Despite all the craziness of the past couple days and the few grouchy people I’d encountered, I had to admit I was falling in love with Friendship Harbor. Suddenly, I wished I could speak to my grandmother and tell her how thankful I was for all this.
We turned up Main Street, walking slowly, stopping to look in the windows of the shops. Most of the places were open, summer hours for the tourists. Quite a few people roamed the street, enjoying the late summer evening like we were, but there was still such a peacefulness that just couldn’t be found in L.A.
I stopped to admire some handmade pottery in one of the storefronts, when I spotted a decorative llama doll of wool and sticks.
“We should probably head back and check on Jack,” I said, suddenly feeling guilty. “He’s got to be lonely. I’ve been gone all day.”
“I hung out with him for a while today,” Oliver said. “He does like company. So I showed him some llama videos on YouTube and we hung out in the sun for about an hour.”
“Aww.” I smiled appreciatively. “You are falling in love with Jack too.”
“I’m just trying to stay on his good side. I saw the damage that beast can do.”
When he saw my stricken expression, he immediately clarified. “Not his possible deadly kicking ability. I was talking about when he spit on Karen.”
I sighed with relief. I didn’t want my best friend in the Killer Jack camp. Then despite myself, I laughed. “He really does have amazing aim.”
“And her face,” he said, laughing too. “That was priceless.”
We were still chuckling when we reached the house and headed around the back to Jack’s pen. I could see the white fur of the llama, glowing in the back porch light. He stood at the fence as if he was waiting for us.
“Did you leave Jack out when we left?”
Oliver shook his head. “No. I definitely put him back in his stall. He gave me attitude the whole time, because he’d found a particularly delicious patch of clover.”
“I’m starting to think he should have been named Houdini instead of Jack Kerouac.”
I started across the lawn, when I saw it. The shadowy figure I’d seen last night. But this time the figure was inside the pen with Jack.
“Hey,” I yell
ed, feeling a bit more emboldened having Oliver with me. “What are you doing?”
The figure turned toward us, and unlike the night before I could make out part of a face, although the person again wore a hood that shielded most of their features. But I had to admit I was relieved to see it was an actual person. In the wee hours of last night, I had started to let my mind mess with me, imagining the figure was a ghost. A dark spirit lurking out here, waiting to get me.
But now I could see the shape was clearly a human, and a smaller human at that. That realization made me even braver. I did take kickboxing lessons as prep for a scene in Murder, She Texted where Jennifer got training from a gym in exchange for solving the murder of a beloved instructor. The man had been crushed to death by a weight bag.
“Who are you?” I called to the petite person, rushing toward the paddock.
The person looked wildly around as if trying to find the best way to escape, but to my surprise, he or she didn’t run.
“Who are you?” I demanded when I reached the gate and the person was mere feet away from me.
The person looked down at the ground, remaining still, shoulders slumping in defeat. After a moment, the hooded figure looked up, and I could see young, pixie-like features clearly. It was definitely a she. A young she.
The girl tugged at the hood of her sweatshirt to reveal long, strawberry blonde hair, pale skin, a small, upturned nose, and tear-filled blue eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice wobbling. “I was just coming to see Jack, and he got out of his stall. I was trying to get him back inside.”
“It’s okay,” I said, immediately moved by her distress. “Really, it’s okay.”
More tears rolled down her face. “I just wanted to make sure he’s okay.”
“Of course, he’s okay,” I reassured her.
She sobbed harder. This really wasn’t going well at all. What had her so upset?
Carefully, I opened the gate and stepped inside, still leaving space between myself and her. Jack came over to sniff my hair, then wandered over to sniff the teenager. She rubbed his woolly head, although that didn’t seem to calm her either.
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