The bar itself had been a bit of a controversy. Gus had never had one, but Chris and I felt strongly that we needed one. Gus’s vision was for a neighborly gathering place, and that wasn’t going to happen without a bar. And it wasn’t going to happen on nights the New England Patriots played if we didn’t have a TV.
Gus had a long unused candlepin-bowling lane on the opposite side of the front room from the lunch counter. I’d convinced him that Chris could use his carpentry skills to cover the lane over without harming it and put the bar in that part of the room. Chris had also built a back bar to house a sink, small fridge, and TV. It stood behind the bar a few feet out from the wall where it wouldn’t harm either the candlepin lane or Gus’s “décor,” which consisted entirely of white-washed wallboard. Gus was insisting we uncover the lane in the spring when we closed the dinner restaurant and Chris and I moved back to our tourist season pursuits. We’d agreed, even though I had never, ever seen anyone bowl there.
I returned to the Bennetts with their drinks.
“Thank you, Julia,” Phil had said, tasting his. “Excellent,” he pronounced.
Whew.
The Bennetts had owned a summer home out on Eastclaw Point since I was a kid, and every year they brought houseguests out to our clambake. We offered a harbor tour on the way to Morrow Island, our private island. Twice a day, during the high season, we served two hundred guests a real Maine clambake meal—chowder, steamed clams, twin lobsters, corn on the cob, a potato, an onion, and an egg—cooked over rocks heated by a roaring wood fire.
I looked from Phil to Deborah and was struck again by her face. I tried to remember from my teen years working at the clambake if Deborah had always looked like that. The smooth mask created by the surgeon’s scalpel was the only image I could conjure.
Phil looked at his menu. “What is this fish?”
I cleared my throat. “Hake. It’s a light, white fish. Tonight, we’re serving the loin, which is the thicker cut, nearer the head.”
He knit his brows together. “Never had it.” The implication was clear. If Phil Bennett hadn’t eaten it, it wasn’t worth eating.
Chris, it had turned out, not completely to my surprise, was a genius at creating meals that were both elegant and affordable. If we wanted to be popular with the locals, we had to keep our prices down. Chris had chosen hake because it was fresh, tasty, and inexpensive in the early winter.
“I’m sure you’ll love it,” I urged.
Phil had thrown me a skeptical look. “What’s this pineapple-avocado salsa the hake is served on? Is it spicy?”
“Not spicy,” I answered. “But sunny and happy. The perfect antidote to a foggy, icy evening.” I’d grinned like an idiot, hoping for a smile back. No dice.
“What else does it come with?”
“Rice and broccoli.”
Which is printed clearly on the menu you’re staring at.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Henry Caswell wave to get my attention.
“Hrrumpf,” Phil responded
“I’ll leave you to make your decision.”
As I left the Bennetts and crossed the dining room toward the Caswells, ready to take their order, a man had entered the front room. He was alone and without a reservation, which hardly mattered given the empty state of the restaurant. When I’d offered him a table he said, “I’ll sit at the bar, if you don’t mind.”
Chapter 4
The buzzing of my cell phone woke me up. Four short hours of sleep had taken its toll, and I’d dozed off sitting upright in my mother’s chilly kitchen.
“Julia? Jerry Binder. I understand you found our body.”
Lieutenant Jerry Binder of the state police Major Crimes Unit in Augusta. Suddenly, I was wide awake. “Not exactly.”
“We’re over at Gus’s,” he said. “I need you to come by and walk me through this.”
“On my way.”
When I got back to the restaurant Gus’s pickup was still in the parking area, and Dr. Simpson’s little SUV, a crime scene tech van, and the State Medical Examiner’s official car were parked on the street. Chris pulled up in his cab before I reached the front door.
Officer Howland waved us inside.
“Julia, Mr. Durand, come on in.” Binder met us at the bottom of the stairs. He had warm brown eyes, a ski-slope nose, and a fringe of brown hair surrounding his otherwise bald head. Tom Flynn, his second-in-command, was behind Gus’s counter, talking to someone who was inside the walk-in. No doubt its door had been open all morning as the ME and crime scene techs wandered in and out. We’d have to throw away everything that was in there. But I supposed we’d have had to anyway. As Jamie had said, the health department no doubt took a dim view of food that was stored with a corpse.
“Is he still . . . ?” I asked.
“No,” Binder answered. “Loaded in the medical examiner’s van and on his way to Augusta.”
Dr. Simpson and the state ME talked in low voices in a corner. When Binder mentioned her title, the ME looked up, nodding a greeting to Chris and me. Gus sat slumped on the last stool at the counter. Jamie stood behind the counter, looking as exhausted as I felt.
“You’re here,” I said to Binder. “That must mean you suspect something.” The only cities in Maine big enough to employ homicide detectives were Bangor and Portland. Murders, child abuse, and other serious crimes were investigated by two state police Major Crimes Units, one for the southern part of state, one for the northern. If Binder and Flynn were in town, it meant they suspected this was more than an unattended death.
Binder gestured toward Dr. Simpson. “Your sharp-eyed local ME spotted an injection site between the ring and index fingers on the deceased’s left hand.” Binder looked at Jamie. “Any sign of drug use, prescription or otherwise, in the victim’s room at the B&B?”
“No, sir,” Jamie answered without hesitation. “But then, there wasn’t much of anything there.”
Dr. Simpson and the ME pulled on their coats and prepared to leave. Binder indicated one of the larger tables in the center of the room. “Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?” he said to the rest of us. “Why doesn’t everybody sit down.” We gathered around the table. I sat across from Binder and Flynn. Chris sat next to me, a comforting presence. Gus and Jamie were at the ends.
“Mr. Farnham,” Binder said as Flynn pulled out his pen and notebook, “You weren’t here last evening.”
“That’s right.”
“And your role in all this is that you found the body this morning.”
“Well, that, and the body’s in my damn refrigerator.”
Binder allowed a small smile. “Yes, and that. But what I’m getting at is, you weren’t here last night, which is what I want to talk to Ms. Snowden, Mr. Durand, and Officer Dawes about. So, if you’d like to go home, we’ll contact you later when we’re ready to take your statement.”
“The heck I will.”
Binder hesitated a moment, then seemed to accept Gus wasn’t leaving. “Okay.” He turned to face Chris and me. “I understand the deceased ate here in the restaurant last evening. What time did he arrive?”
“Around seven thirty,” I said.
Binder looked at Chris, who nodded his agreement. “I was cooking,” Chris explained. “Julia would be more aware than me. But that’s what I remember too.” We’d already been over this ground with Jamie.
“Who was in the restaurant when he got here?”
“Chris, me, Caroline and Henry Caswell, Deborah and Phillip Bennett.”
Flynn wrote the names down and read the spellings back to me. “That’s it?” he asked.
I felt a little defensive. “It was a Monday night and right after the Thanksgiving holiday.”
Flynn glanced at his notes. “So the Caswells and the Bennetts were here, and then the victim arrived. Tell us about that.”
“There’s not that much to tell. He came in by himself. I offered him a table. He said he wanted to sit at the bar.” Binder and Flynn looked at me expectantly, so I went on. “I turned on the football pregame show with the sound off for him, gave him a menu, and offered him a drink.”
“Please describe him,” Binder said.
“You saw him in the walk-in.”
“I’d like your impression from when he was alive.”
“He looked like he was in his middle to late forties.” I’m not great at judging ages. I was going by the wrinkles around his eyes, a certain heaviness to his body. “He had long, dark, wavy hair that fell to below his collar, and large features—big blue eyes, big nose, big mouth. Big eyelashes,” I added. “Thick, both top and bottom.” Unusually thick, which was why I’d noticed.
I paused, trying to sort out my first impressions from what I’d seen this morning. My memory of the empty eyes staring up at me blotted out everything else. I took a deep breath and looked at Binder.
“Did you notice any distinctive—”
“You mean the scar.”
Binder nodded, and I continued. “I didn’t see it at first. He had long hair, and the scar kind of crept up from his neck to his ear. It was pretty well hidden. If anything, I might have vaguely thought he’d had acne when he was younger.” I stopped, looking across at Chris. Binder and Flynn waited silently. “Later, I noticed his ear.”
“Tell me about that,” Binder coaxed.
“We just set up the bar. We only have the basics. He asked me for a lot of specialized labels, fancy ryes and such. Finally, I put every bottle I had on the bar, and he chose.”
“What did he go with?” Flynn asked.
“Wild Turkey.” I shrugged. “That’s as exotic as brands get at Gus’s Too. Anyway, all this required a fair amount of conversation. I was distracted because two more couples came in and needed to be seated, but I did notice his ear. It’s some kind of prosthesis, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Binder confirmed. “The ear is not his.”
“Will that help you identify him?”
“Only in the sense that we know we’re looking for a man who was missing an ear. According to the ME, ears aren’t like prosthetic limbs with unique serial numbers. Their only function is cosmetic.” Binder paused. “Who were the other couples?”
“The Smiths and the Walkers. Michael and Sheila Smith, and Barry and Fran Walker.”
Flynn wrote that down, obviously for follow up later.
“And then what?” Binder prompted.
“Just regular restaurant stuff.” Suddenly, we were busy. Not that the restaurant was crowded, but everyone had come in at once. I juggled taking orders, getting drinks, and bringing the Caswells their starters—pea soup for her, salad for him. Chris was a skilled home cook but not yet used to the pace of restaurant cooking. For us, this constituted a rush.
“Until?” Binder prompted.
“Until a little more than an hour later, when Officer Dawes came in and told us no one could leave.” The Caswells had been settling up. They hadn’t ordered dessert, and their gift certificate was going to cover just about the whole meal. Everyone else was eating his or her entree. Jamie had come to the door, in his heavy policeman’s raincoat, and told us there’d been an accident.
Binder looked at Jamie. “Officer Dawes has already told us about the accident.”
There was a single road in and out of Busman’s Harbor. Main Street started at the two-lane highway at the end of town and traveled through the downtown, past the shops and hotels. It continued up the hill along the inner harbor, past the Snuggles Inn and my mother’s house across the street. Then it looped around, following the contour of the harbor hill, passing the back harbor and Gus’s, the marina, and the shipyard until it turned again and intersected itself across from the library at the only traffic light in town. Plenty of smaller roads branched off it, supplying access to almost all the residences in Busman’s Harbor proper, but only Main Street got you in or out of town. So when Jamie had come into the restaurant, nose red from the fog and icy drizzle, to say there’d been an accident and two vehicles were blocking the intersection of Main and Main, I was surprised but not shocked. It had happened before.
“So then what?” Binder asked.
“The Caswells decided to order dessert after all. They split a brownie sundae.”
He smiled. “And then—”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant.” Officer Howland was at the kitchen door. “You’re all needed.”
Jamie, Flynn, and Binder jumped up. “We’ll continue this at the station later,” Binder said.
“Hey, wait,” Gus called. “Can I open tomorrow?”
“We’re not finished here,” Binder said. “I’m taking the team with me now. We have something else we need to attend to, but they’ll be back. If they finish today, and I think they will, you can open tomorrow as long as you can operate without using the walk-in.”
“Where are you going?” I called as they all trooped out the kitchen door. I wasn’t surprised when no one answered.
Chapter 5
For a minute, Gus, Chris, and I stared after the police. I couldn’t imagine where they had gone, or what had been so important they’d left the crime scene during an active investigation.
Gus rose from the table. “If they’re going to let me open tomorrow, I need to buy some food.”
“You can use the refrigerator in my apartment for storage,” I offered. “And I’ll clean as much as I can out of the little one behind the bar.”
“Thanky.” Gus strode over to the counter and hefted the stack of homemade wooden boxes he used to transport Mrs. Gus’s pies from their kitchen where she made them. “Want a pie?” He turned toward us, offering the boxes.
“Save them for tomorrow,” I said.
Gus’s beak nose wrinkled. “I don’t serve day-old pie. Besides, what would Mrs. Gus do tomorrow morning?” After a recent illness, Mrs. Gus had cut down to making five pies a day, which made pieces harder to get, and therefore more precious. With this in mind, ignoring the vow I’d made after Thanksgiving dinner to eat lighter until Christmas, I asked if there was a pecan. When Gus said there was, I accepted it and thanked him.
Chris and I remained at the table after Gus left.
“I was the last one in the walk-in, wasn’t I?” Chris said. “Around ten? I’ve told the cops that twice. I want to make sure it’s what you remember.”
“It is,” I confirmed.
“And was the dead guy still sitting at the bar when I went in there?”
“Yes, but he left just after.” I’d thought about little else all day. I was sure I was right. Unlike the rest of the crowd who’d driven to Gus’s, the dead man had walked over the hill from the Snuggles. The accident at Main and Main didn’t affect him. He was free to go, even if the rest of them were not.
“Where’d he go?” Chris asked.
“I thought he’d gone back to the Snuggles.”
“And came back here and got himself killed in the walk-in?”
“We can’t be sure of that,” I said. “Maybe he was killed somewhere else and dumped in there.” Maybe that’s why Binder had taken the techs with him. Somewhere there was another crime scene. Maybe it wasn’t even murder. Maybe the ME was wrong about the injection and, as I’d said to Jamie, when they did the autopsy they’d discover he’d died of a heart attack or a stroke. Which still didn’t make sense. Why would he have been in our walk-in?
Chris took my hand. “We locked the doors when we went up to bed. There’s no sign of a break-in. That means Mr. Anonymous and possibly his killer were in the restaurant when we went upstairs.”
I shuddered. Chris was right, but until he said it, I hadn’t thought it all the way through, as he had, and come to the obvious conclusion.
“Did you actually see him go out the door?” Chris asked.
“I’m not sure. I can’t remember. Did you?”
“No.” Chris thought for a moment. “When was the last time you checked the bathrooms?”
The bathrooms. Because we still felt like guests in Gus’s space, I was hypervigilant about inspecting the restrooms last thing at night before I went up to bed. But the previous night had dragged on and on, with our guests trapped in the restaurant by the accident. It was so late by the time we got everyone out, I’d staggered off to bed without looking in the washrooms.
I admitted this to Chris, who shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, Julia. He couldn’t have hidden there the whole time. We had guests who were using the restrooms right up until we closed.”
He was right about that. I specifically remembered that the Bennetts, who had the farthest to drive, had used the facilities immediately before they left. That was almost three hours after I’d last seen the man at the bar who’d died in our walk-in.
“You can’t lock your apartment,” Chris pointed out.
We’d had this discussion before. “I’ve told you, Gus says the lock broke ages ago. Besides, what difference does it make? We lock the outside doors to the restaurant.”
“Normally, no difference,” Chris conceded. “Julia, face facts. We were locked in the building with a corpse, and possibly a killer.”
“I get it. Don’t keep saying it. It freaks me out.”
Chris’s features relaxed. “Okay.”
“What were you going to do with your day off?” I asked. “Originally.”
“Get some work done on my house. Then Sam’s tonight for the game.” As soon as his summer tenants had moved out of the cabin he’d bought from his parents, Chris had torn the second-floor walls back to the studs. It was a long, slow process building it up again. He paid for the upgrades, including the heating system, electricity, and plumbing, as he made money. The work all had to be done by the spring so he could rent out the cabin for the summer.
The “Sam” he’d referred to was Sam Rockmaker, bartender and part owner of Crowley’s. Chris played poker with a group of guys at Sam’s house every Tuesday.
“Do you want me to stay? Are you nervous about being here?” Chris asked.
“No. You go. I’m fine. The cops have been all over the building. This is probably the safest place in the harbor.”
Chris stood and bent over to give me a fast smooch. Then he was out the door and I was alone in the empty restaurant.
* * *
I went upstairs to my apartment. Le Roi was at the top of the stairs, vocalizing in my direction, upset at the day’s intrusions on his rigorous routine of napping, eating, and napping again. Even though he’d been an outdoor cat on predator-free, car-free Morrow Island, he’d taken to the life of an indoor town cat like a champ. We’d both felt instantly at home in the apartment over Gus’s restaurant.
The place was a big studio, tucked under the eaves of the old warehouse that Gus’s restaurant had once been. There was a high central ceiling and four dormered nooks, one on each side of the building. The one facing south contained my bed, still in the unmade state it had been in when first I, and then Chris, answered Gus’s summons this morning. The east-facing nook contained the bathroom, the north-facing one the kitchen. The fourth was part of the main living space and held a giant, multipaned window facing west that framed a view of the back harbor. Outside, the boats belonging to the hardiest, most dedicated lobstermen were still in the water, but all the other slips were empty.
Now that feeling of home had gone, replaced by a creeping unease that tensed the back of my neck and pinched my shoulders. What if, as Chris had suggested, the stranger or his killer had hidden in my apartment while our guests dined and Chris and I worked downstairs? Had the murderer or victim sat on my couch, touched my stuff?
And then there’d been the cops this morning. They had searched the place too. I’d given them permission to do so when I signed the release. I shivered as I gazed at the rumpled bed. At least nothing embarrassing had been left out. But I wondered, had they been in my bathroom? Had they opened my drawers? They must have.
I went into the kitchen nook, preparing to clean out the refrigerator for Gus as I’d promised. The warehouse attic had been converted to living space during World War II. Gus and his family had moved out in the late 1950s, and nothing had been done to it since. The appliances were tiny and ancient. The freezer was a small metal box inside the refrigerator. If left unattended too long, it had to be defrosted with the hammer and chisel Gus kept in a toolbox behind the lunch counter in the restaurant.
As I’d remembered, there wasn’t much in the old refrigerator. Chris and I had spent most of the previous weekend at my mom’s, enjoying Thanksgiving with my family and our guests. Even without the holiday, it was hard to get motivated to buy food and cook with a restaurant right downstairs. I threw out some expired cartons of yogurt, the remains of a sub, and a few wilted stalks of celery. When I was done, I took the plastic bag out of the kitchen barrel, planning to take the garbage to the Dumpster behind the restaurant.
Gus didn’t need to reopen right away for financial reasons. Unlike the Snowden Family Clambake, Gus’s restaurant was on a secure footing. His house was paid for, his middle-aged children were prosperous, and Gus was the tightest of tightwads. I had to imagine that he and Mrs. Gus were pretty comfortable. But if he wasn’t running the restaurant, I didn’t think Gus would have the slightest idea what to do with himself.
But then, I was the pot getting all judgy about the kettle. When Chris and I had agreed to serve dinner at Gus’s place, I’d assumed we’d do it seven days a week. After all, that’s what Gus did. And that’s what my family did at the Snowden Family Clambake during the tourist season.
But Chris had balked. “Julia, what part of ‘off season’ don’t you get? This is when we spend time with friends, enjoy our hobbies, and take an occasional nap. That’s why we work like dogs during high season.”
As far as I knew, we worked like dogs during the high season to make money to survive the long winter and cold spring, but point taken. I’d always had workaholic tendencies. Long weekends away at boarding school without much to do except schoolwork, the pressure of business school, the crazy hours and relentless travel of my venture capital job had all reinforced my habits. But I had to admit, most of my workaholism came from inside me. I could have snuck off campus like my friends did at prep school, had more fun during college, and taken time during my work-related travel to do a little sightseeing, but that wasn’t me. Maybe I wasn’t that different from Gus.
“Besides,” Chris had continued. “If we work seven days, when will I finish my house? When will I get my deer?”
That took me aback and made me reflect once again on the new life I was living. Throughout my sporadic dating life and short-lived relationships in Manhattan, I couldn’t recall a single man telling me he needed time to bag his deer.
So we’d agreed. We would close Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Chris had returned to his life, his friends, and his off-season routine. I had nothing to return to.
I grabbed the trash bag, gave Le Roi a rub behind the ears, and headed for the stairs.