Chapter 14
I locked up the restaurant and headed to Mom’s. Livvie and Page were already there when I arrived, and the place smelled like heaven. Livvie’s meatloaf was in the oven along with baked potatoes, and broccoli was cut and ready to go in the pot.
I gave my pregnant sister a hug. “Where’s Sonny?”
“Beat. I told him I’d bring a plate of food home for him.”
Most of the lobster boats in Busman’s Harbor were out of the water, tucked away in the lobsterman’s side yards, but Livvie’s husband, Sonny, was still hard at work every day on his father’s boat, the
Abby
. Lobster prices rose ever higher in the winter, due to low supply and high demand, especially from France, where Maine lobster had become a traditional part of the Christmas Eve meal. Bard, Sonny’s dad, was recovering from rotator cuff surgery and Sonny’s younger brother was in treatment for an addiction to painkillers. So it was left to Sonny, despite an inquiry of his own, to haul traps until the weather finally forced the
Abby
out of the water sometime after the New Year.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Help Page with the salad,” Livvie answered.
I sat down at the kitchen table next to my soon-to-be ten-year-old niece, who took a sharp knife to some carrots like a pro.
“How’s school?” I asked.
“Same as when you asked me on Sunday. And on Saturday. And on Thanksgiving Day before that.”
What else are you supposed to ask kids?
“So you would say it’s—”
“—the same. Yes, it is.” Page turned back to her chopping, humming happily as she did.
Mom came through the swinging door from the dining room. “Hullo, Julia.”
In spite of the schedule she’d kept lately, Mom looked great. Her petite frame was encased in a red cashmere sweater and a pair of navy slacks. Her shortish, thick blond hair was well cut, and she wore just a hint of makeup. This was quite a turnaround for my mother, who’d gone through five rough years after my father’s death. Her look, which had always been casual, had declined from “carefree” to “don’t care” during the years of her mourning. The “little job” at Linens and Pantries agreed with her.
The Snugg sisters arrived, taking off layers of coats and scarves in the front hall. Livvie took the meatloaf out of the oven, and we gathered at the table.
“Delicious,” Vee pronounced after her first bite of meatloaf, some of the roses returning to her cheeks. “Just like I taught you.”
Livvie had learned to cook in self-defense after enduring a decade of my mother’s attempts to turn herself from a privileged, motherless girl raised by a revolving-door series of housekeepers into a Yankee housewife. One of the places Livvie learned her skills was in Vee’s kitchen, and Vee’s meatloaf was one of our favorites.
“Wonderful,” Fee confirmed.
While Page was at the table, the conversation stayed light, but throughout the meal I felt the weight of words unsaid, emotions unexpressed. As soon as Page was excused to do her homework, the subject of the stranger and his murder came up.
“It’s so upsetting,” Fee said, rubbing her fingers bent by arthritis. “The state police have been back again. That Lieutenant Binder was around, without his handsome sergeant.” The sisters shared a crush on Flynn. “He kept asking about the stranger. The man we think was called Justin.”
“Or Jason,” Vee put in.
“Or Jackson.” Fee crinkled her napkin impatiently. “Why can’t we remember? But then, we barely spoke to him. Lieutenant Binder clearly thinks we’re ninnies. He kept asking, ‘When the man made the reservation, where did he say he was calling from?’ ‘When he arrived, where did he say he’d come from?’”
“What the lieutenant doesn’t understand,” Vee said, “is that innkeepers take their cues from the guest. If he wants to talk, so be it. But if he’s getting away to have time alone, we’re not going to force ourselves on him.”
“Speaking of innkeeping, do either of you know the Smiths who bought the Fogged Inn last year?” I asked.
“Goodness, yes,” Fee answered. She paused as though trying to figure out how to put the next part delicately.
“Out with it,” my mother said. “We’re among friends.”
“We’ve heard nothing but complaints about the place. When they first opened, I tried to be neighborly. If we were booked up, I’d refer guests over there. I figured I would help them get on their feet. But they found one reason or another to reject every single person I sent them. No children. Indeed,” Fee said.
“When you’ve been in the business long enough, you learn that guests are self-selecting. The parents who choose a B&B for their family know their kids can live without in-room televisions or a pool. We’ve never had a problem with young people,” Vee added.
“Have you met the new owners?” I asked.
“The Smiths? Just at the post office,” Vee said. “I said hello. She didn’t seem to know who I was.”
That was an enormous breach of protocol. Savvy inn owners would have introduced themselves at all the other B&Bs in town before opening. The hospitality industry lived and died by referrals. Not only did innkeepers refer guests to other inns when they were full, they were also sometimes tasked with finding rooms in multiple B&Bs for big parties in town to celebrate weddings or other events.
“That place will be up for sale by a year from now, just like always,” Fee said. “Mark my words.”
“Do you know the Caswells, Caroline and Henry?” I asked.
Mom, Livvie, and Vee all looked blank, but Fee wrinkled her brow. “The tennis players? I see them quite often when I walk MacCavendish.” MacCavendish, called Mackie, was the latest in the sisters’ long line of Scottish terriers. Their last one had passed away peacefully of old age just before the hectic summer season began. Vee had held the line over the summer, but in the fall Fee prevailed, and Mackie, a five-year-old rescue, had joined their family. For all the warmth and hospitality Fee exuded with her B&B guests, she was really most at home with her dogs.
“So you know the Caswells?” I persisted.
“No. Just to say hello.” Fee paused. “They’re quite new, I think.”
The Caswells needed an additional two decades in the harbor not to be considered “new.”
“Yet there is something so familiar about her face,” Fee said. “Every time I run into her, I’m sure we’ve met before. Where are they from?”
“Maryland.”
Fee shook her head. “Then that’s not it.”
The conversation drifted on to other things. The sisters excused themselves and Mom, Livvie, and I gathered in the kitchen to clean up.
* * *
“Did you know Jamie took a double shift on Thanksgiving because he had no place to go?” Out of old habit, we’d formed an assembly line—Livvie washing, Mom drying, and me putting away the clean dishes. Every time we did it, I missed my dad, who should have been there, joking and laughing as he cleared the table and put away the leftovers. Without us ever discussing it, I had added his duties to my own, but the hole remained in our family.
“Jamie knows he’s welcome here,” Mom said. “Or he should.”
For years, we’d had Thanksgiving at our house with Mom, me, and Livvie’s little family, plus Fee and Vee, Bard and Kyle Ramsey, and Jamie and his parents. Jamie’s three older siblings were so much older, his mother called him the period at the end of the sentence. “More like an exclamation mark,” his father joked. “Surprise!”
Jamie’s older brother and two sisters had gone off to college and then moved out of state, establishing careers and raising families of their own. Jamie had stayed in town, coping with much older parents who depended on him. This year, they’d gone to Florida to spend the winter with one of his sisters. As far as I knew, Jamie was still rattling around their empty house next door.
“I thought he was spending Thanksgiving with that Gina,” Livvie said, stepping away from the sink, the last of the dishes done.
“He told me that’s not happening anymore.”
Livvie sighed. “Too bad.”
“He didn’t want to talk about it,” I added.
“I’m sure.”
Mom hung her dishtowel on the stove handle. “We can’t let him spend the winter mooning around in that big house. Julia, you need to talk to him.”
Livvie crinkled her eyes at me to show she understood it wouldn’t be that easy. Jamie and I hadn’t been capable of resuming our easy friendship since I got back to town. Partially, that was my fault. I’d been so crazed trying to get the Snowden Family Clambake back on its feet when I first got home, I hadn’t even called him. Then things just got weird between Jamie and me after that kiss.
“I guess I should,” I responded to my mother, making no promises. I didn’t know how to recapture the easy comfort Jamie and I had as kids.
* * *
When I got back to my apartment, I went to my refrigerator, thinking I’d help Gus out and, oh-by-the-way, keep him from stomping through my apartment in the early morning hours by moving his remaining food back down to the walk-in. But when I opened the door, the fridge was empty. Gus must have been by to drop off food downstairs and cleared it out himself.
Chris arrived soon after me, and we had a chance to catch up with each other. We snuggled while he talked about his projects at the cabin. As I listened to his description of the work he’d done, the problems he encountered, and the solutions he found, I reveled in the easy domesticity of our conversation. Even though I was thirty, I hadn’t ever had a relationship like this.
After five months, my heart still pounded and my knees turned to jelly whenever Chris walked into a room. My favorite thing was to catch a glimpse of him while he did something mundane—buttoning a shirt, chopping vegetables in the restaurant, or getting out of his truck—and had no idea I was watching. When that happened, my need to touch him was so great that sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out to feel his forearm or his stubbly cheek. I knew this desperate, physical yearning couldn’t last forever, or so I’d been told, but it hadn’t quieted yet, or even diminished.
As a couple, we still had a lot to work out. We had problems with possessive pronouns. Was it my apartment or ours? Though he stayed almost every night, most of Chris’s stuff remained at the cabin, so it was “my” apartment. But Gus’s Too was definitely “our” restaurant. We were both all in.
When I talked about my day, Chris listened carefully, without interruption. Despite his statement about letting the professionals handle it, he’d never been one to tell me what to do or to caution me not to get involved.
“I think the four couples in the restaurant that night are somehow connected, and someone—maybe one of them, maybe someone else—wanted them there.”
“I think you’re right,” Chris agreed. “Remember I told you when Barry fell, Phil said, ‘Buddy, are you all right?’ All day today, that phrase circled in my brain. It wasn’t what Phil said, it was the way he said it. Like ‘buddy’ wasn’t an expression, but was Barry’s name.”
“So you think that in the moment, when it looked like Barry might be hurt, Phil forgot himself and called Barry by an old nickname?”
“Exactly.”
Phil had said he’d been in Barry’s store “a couple of times.” Hardly the type of relationship that led to intimacy and nicknames.
“They have a connection,” Chris said. “You’re right about that.”
I said, tentatively, “I think the gift certificates were stolen.”
“What? Out of this apartment?”
“I can’t figure out how else they disappeared.”
Chris took my hand. “Think about what you’re saying, Julia. Someone came in, while you and I were both asleep, and took one very specific item, nothing else, out of a very specific place, the cigar box.”
His touch gave me the courage to say what I was thinking, crazy as it was. “I know it’s nuts, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. Think how little sleep we got the night before last. And yesterday was a stressful day. We were exhausted.” I warmed to my argument. “You were out late at Sam’s. Everyone who’s been in the restaurant knows about the cigar box. I keep it behind the bar and I’m always putting money in it, taking change out. Last night, I left the cigar box out on the desk in the apartment instead of putting it under the bed like I usually do.”
Chris took his hand back and rubbed his dimpled chin. “Anyone who’s ever come to the restaurant might know about the cigar box, but only twelve people knew the gift certificates were in it. One of them is dead. One’s a cop. One is you. One is me. That leaves the four couples who were guests that night. Do you really think one of those people broke in here and stole them?”
“I’m almost sure of it.”
“I’m putting a lock at the bottom of the apartment stairs tomorrow.”
I took that as a statement of support. “Thank you. For the lock and for believing in me. Please, let’s not tell Gus. It will only upset him and raise the issue of the unlocked kitchen door again. Let’s be supercareful about locking it going forward, so we can be absolutely sure.”
Chris didn’t fight me, or repeat that he was sure he’d locked the door last night. What Jamie had implied was true. It had been late and Chris had more than likely had a few beers at the poker game. Had he fumbled the latch, thinking it had caught when it hadn’t? I wasn’t going to raise the possibility. I had Chris’s support. We were on the same team. That was all I needed.
“If you get it, why doesn’t Lieutenant Binder get it?” I asked.
“Get what?”
“All of it,” I said. “Someone gathered these particular couples at the restaurant. And whoever it was is now covering up by stealing the evidence. Whoever it was wanted those four couples, plus someone else, to be there. One gift certificate was never redeemed.”
Chris knit his brow. “The cops have bigger problems to deal with. They don’t know who this dead guy is. They have the missing driver from the accident at Main and Main. If I were them, I’d be trying to figure out the murder victim’s identity as the path to figuring out who’d want to kill him. You would too.”