“Oh my,” Sheila answered. “We bought it last fall, but it had to undergo extensive renovations. We opened over Memorial Day weekend.”
I tried to picture the house in earlier times. I had a vague memory of flaking white paint and sagging porches. The inn was right at the entrance to our little downtown, which should have been a great location, but over the years it had a For Sale sign on its small front lawn more often than not. Owners died, went broke, or gave up the business. It was one of those places that never seemed to take hold. In earlier times, people might have said it was cursed.
In June, I’d visited every hotel, motel, and B&B in the harbor, passing out Snowden Family Clambake brochures for them to give to guests, but somehow I had missed the Fogged Inn. I was surprised I hadn’t heard it had reopened, the harbor grapevine being what it was.
Of course, I said none of this to the Smiths. Instead, I asked, “What brought you to Busman’s Harbor?”
“Michael has always wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast—to live in a big sea captain’s home overlooking a harbor. So when we retired and this inn came on the market, he thought it was our destiny to own it. We sold our place in Westchester County outside New York City and, well, here we are. It’s been challenging, let me tell you. A constant struggle. The traveling public isn’t what it used to be. But we are living his dream. Our dream,” she corrected.
Michael cleared his throat. “I think you had some questions for us about the man who died?” It was the first time he’d spoken since Mrs. Smith had joined us.
“Yes, thank you. Did you speak to him that night? Do you have any ideas who he might have been?”
“The poor man,” Michael murmured.
“No idea,” Sheila said breezily. “None at all. Didn’t talk to him.”
“Did you happen to notice what time he left?”
“Absolutely not,” Sheila answered for both of them. “We told the state police all this.”
I continued, undeterred. “You paid for your meal with a gift certificate. Where did you get it?”
“Came in the mail,” Michael answered. “Introductory offer, it said. I’d cooked us Thanksgiving dinner. It was just the two of us. We’d been living off turkey in one form or another for days. A meal out sounded like just the thing, even though the roads were treacherous. We didn’t have to go far.”
It was true. Though the Fogged Inn was on the other side of Main and Main, it was only a mile and a half or so from Gus’s restaurant.
“Do you still have the envelope the gift certificate came in?”
“Heavens, no,” Sheila answered. “We don’t keep our trash. Out it goes right away with the recycling to the dump.”
Sheila was as ruthlessly efficient as I was. I hoped I didn’t resemble her in other ways. The conversation was getting me nowhere. I tried one last question. “I noticed as the evening went on, you were chatting with the other couples. Are you friends or acquaintances of the Bennetts, the Caswells, or the Walkers?”
“Certainly not,” Sheila answered. “It was just . . . we were all stuck there . . . and, well, one has to be polite.”
Michael walked me to the door and said good-bye. I climbed down the wide steps and continued out to the sidewalk. When I turned and looked back at the Fogged Inn, he stood, long white lion’s mane surrounding his face, framed by the window in the door, watching me go.
Chapter 13
I walked back down Main Street, chewing on what I’d learned. Which was to say, nothing new, except that I hoped I’d never spend the night in a B&B like the Fogged Inn. If the beds were as uncomfortable as the chairs, it would be like spending a night on the rack.
On the way past the police station, I noticed Lieutenant Binder’s official car in the parking lot. I pushed open the heavy glass door to the building and stepped inside.
“Is he in?” I asked the civilian receptionist, tilting my head toward the door of the large multipurpose room that Binder and Flynn used when they were in town.
“On the phone.”
“I’ll wait.” Through the door I heard the low rumble of a male voice, and then silence as he listened to the person on the other end. Then the voice spoke again.
The voice stopped and the receptionist glanced at the lights on her console. “You can go in now,” she directed.
Binder sat, laptop open, behind a folding table set up to accommodate the state cops on a temporary basis. “Well, speak of the devil and she appears.” He stood and gestured to the folding chair across from him.
“What does that mean?”
“I just got off the phone with one of your many fans. You’ve been bothering people with questions about the man who died in your walk-in.”
Phil Bennett.
It had to be. He’d warned me off Deborah and then he’d called Binder to complain.
“Who was it?”
As if I didn’t know.
“I’d rather not say. What are you up to? It alarms me you’ve bothered so many people, you can’t figure out which of them complained.” He let that sink in. “Anyway, what brings you in?”
“Jamie—Officer Dawes—said the autopsy was this morning. Any results?”
“If I tell you, will you stop pestering folks and let us do our job?”
I didn’t respond. That depended in large part on how this conversation went.
Binder sighed. “The initial screens are back. That was the ME on the phone just now. Our victim had enough diazepam in his system to subdue him but not enough to kill him.” Diazepam was the generic name for Valium, I knew from my little-used prescription.
“Were there any signs of sedatives in his room?” Jamie had said the search at the Snuggles turned up no drugs.
“Not in his room at the inn. Not on his person.”
“So someone might have given him the sedative in order to subdue him, so they could then give him the injection?”
“That’s the theory. Now we wait for more test results, to see what he might have been injected with.”
Phil Bennett had told me Deborah took medication for panic attacks. Did the police know about this? That brought me up short. Did I actually suspect that one of the diners was a murderer? Not really, was the answer. But I was certain, based on the gift certificates, that someone had brought those specific eight people to the restaurant that night. Why, or what the connection was to the murder, I didn’t know, but I thought it was worth finding out.
“What did the medical examiner say about the dead man’s scar?” I asked.
“She thinks whatever caused it happened a long time ago, when he was a kid. To try to find information about a kid injured like that, years ago, when we have no idea what part of the country . . . Doesn’t make sense.” Binder shook his head. “If he’s a legit guy, with a job and a wife or a girlfriend or kids, someone will report him missing. Then the scar will make it easier to be sure he’s a match.”
“And if he’s not a ‘legit guy’?”
“Then some law enforcement agency somewhere will have run into him. Did he have an accent?”
“No. Not a Maine accent, not a foreign accent.”
Binder shifted in his seat. “Okay, I’ve told you what I know. Time for you to tell me what you’ve been doing.”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering where to start. Binder had known me for a while now. There was not much chance that he’d think I was crazy, but I had a slightly crazy tale to tell.
I took a deep breath. “Someone deliberately gathered those four couples—the Caswells, the Bennetts, the Walkers, and the Smiths—in our restaurant on the night of the murder.” I explained about the gift certificate each of the couples had received.
“It seems to me, someone is trying to steal from you,” Binder said when I finished.
“No, the certificates were all paid for. Someone charged them to a credit card. The only thing added was the expiration date.”
Binder fiddled with his laptop. “Let’s see. The Caswells are retirees from Maryland. They’ve been here for two years, live in that active adult community. The Bennetts have had a house on Eastclaw Point for thirty years, but last winter and spring they renovated it and moved up here from Connecticut full-time this summer. The Walkers have been in town forever. He owns the art supplies store on Main Street. She works at the Cranberry Convalescent Home. Finally,” he continued, “we have the Smiths. They’re from Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York. Bought the Fogged Inn last November. Started running it as a bed-and-breakfast over Memorial Day this year.” He looked up from the laptop. “You’ve apparently been out questioning people. Did you learn anything more than we did?”
I thought over my visits with each of the couples. “No,” I admitted. “I get it. No obvious connection. And since we don’t know who the dead guy is, there’s no obvious connection to him, either. But it’s it a little hard to believe that the unusual things that happened that night are completely unrelated. A group was gathered in our restaurant. An accident trapped them there. A stranger who came into the restaurant was murdered. That can’t be a coincidence.”
The driver of the car in the accident that night has disappeared
, I added in my head, because Jamie had sworn me to secrecy.
“It can be,” Binder said, “and it probably is. One thing you learn early in law enforcement is that coincidence is alive and well and far more common than people think.” He paused. “By the way, we took down the crime scene tape this afternoon and gave Gus the go-ahead to use the walk-in. He was cleaning it with bleach before the officers left the restaurant.”
“Thank you for clearing that up quickly.” Much more quickly than when there’d been a murder on Morrow Island last spring and he’d shut down the Snowden Family Clambake, already teetering on the brink of financial ruin, for days and days.
He shrugged. “The walk-in has told us everything it has to tell.” He glanced at his laptop screen, as if anxious to get back to it. “I’ll send someone over to pick the gift certificates up, along with the credit card information. We can get to the bottom of what happened more quickly than you can.”
I explained that the gift certificates were missing and I thought they might have been stolen.
Binder looked amused. “You think someone came into your apartment, in the middle of the night, while you were there and took the gift certificates, and only the gift certificates?”
It sounded ridiculous when I heard someone else say it. I felt my face redden. “Yes.”
“Can I assume Mr. Durand was asleep in your apartment as well when you allege this happened?”
Okay, now it truly did sound crazy. “Yes.”
Binder took pity on me. “Relax, Julia. You probably mislaid them. Did the victim pay with a gift certificate?”
The exact thing Jamie had asked me. “Er, no.”
“Then it probably doesn’t matter. Give me what information you have on the credit card and don’t worry about it.”
“I e-mailed it to Officer Dawes.”
“Then you’ve done all you can. I’ll be sure to catch up with him. Our best strategy for figuring out who killed our victim is to figure out who he is and why someone would want to murder him. I’ll follow up on everything you’ve given me, and I thank you for bringing it to my attention, but you have to let me do things in my own time, in my sequence. Okay?”
When I didn’t immediately agree, he continued. “Julia, I’m not fooling around. Do I need to remind you that the perpetrator of this murder has not been identified or captured, and this person may have been inside the building where you live and work? This isn’t a joke.”
Binder and I had had our differences in the past, but he’d never warned me off like this. His words shook me. And I didn’t want to tell him about the continuous sense of unease I had in my own home, because that would only make it worse.
“And be sure to lock your doors,” he added.
“I hear you.” I gave him the envelope, flyer, and card I’d collected from the Bennetts. He took them solemnly and walked me to the door.
* * *
As I walked out of the town building, my cell phone rang. Mom.
“Hullo, Julia. I’m calling to invite you and Chris to dinner tonight. Fee and Vee will be here.” My mother lowered her voice, even though she was probably alone in her kitchen. “The poor dears are upset by what happened to that man who was supposed to stay at their inn. You know, that man who was killed—”
“In my home,” I finished. “Believe me, I get it.”
“So will you come?”
“Who’s cooking?” I tried not to sound anxious, but my mother was a terrible cook. I was happy to spend the evening in comfortable companionship with the Snugg sisters if that’s what they needed, but I wasn’t sure it was worth the potential damage to my taste buds.
Fortunately, Mom took my question the right way. She laughed. “Don’t worry. Livvie and Page are on the way. Your sister’s helping me with dinner.”
“Well, in that case, I’m in. Let me call Chris and see what he’s up to.”
“Great,” Mom said. “Six o’clock? See you then.”
I called Chris right away. “Julia, if you’re going to your mom’s, do you mind if I stay here and do some more work on the cabin? I lost almost all of yesterday.” If he couldn’t rent out the cabin by summer, the whole underpinnings of his economic existence would be threatened.
“Sure. You stay there. See you later.”
“Yup. For sure.”
I arrived back at the restaurant with an hour or so to kill before I was due at Mom’s. Gus was gone for the day, the door locked, lights out. I flipped the lights on and was grateful to see the walk-in divested of its crime scene tape.
I locked the kitchen door behind me carefully, climbed the stairs to my place, and fetched my laptop. When I had moved into the apartment, I’d paid for cable and Internet. There’d been a big discussion with the cable company and with Gus. Chris and I wanted a TV in the bar, for Monday night football and Sunday evenings. Gus was already opposed to the bar; the idea of a TV gave him apoplexy. “I won’t turn my establishment into some doctor’s waiting room with talking heads blabbing on about the Cardonians.”
It took me a moment to figure out he meant the Kardashians. I was surprised he even got that close. Eventually, we negotiated a truce, whereby we got the TV and I promised to hide the remote in my apartment while Gus was in the building. Internet was even more of an issue. We needed it to run credit cards for our restaurant, and since cell service out at the end of the world was just too iffy, we needed Wi-Fi. Plus, I wanted it for my apartment. You can take a girl out of Manhattan, but only so far.
“No Internet!” Gus fumed. “Absolutely not. That’s the last thing I need, people sitting here all day checking their brokerage accounts and writing the great American novel. Never!”
Again, we reached a compromise. We would get Internet and Wi-Fi, but I wouldn’t tell anyone the password.
“No one,” Gus emphasized.
The cable company became convinced we were going to offer connectivity to all our patrons and wanted to charge us an exorbitant business rate. When the cable guy showed up, I let him spend five minutes on his own with Gus. He emerged shaking his head and said he’d be happy to tell the company to charge me the residential rate.
Sitting on my couch, my computer in my lap, I web-searched my way through the couples who’d been at the restaurant two nights before. I was sure someone had brought that group of people together deliberately, and if that was true, there had to be a connection.
I looked up Dr. Henry Caswell first. There were lots of websites ready to tell me his specialty (anesthesiology), but the sites didn’t offer the ratings from patients I’d become accustomed to seeing for doctors. Possibly because his patients were mostly unconscious. He’d worked for the previous twenty years at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Some of the websites noted his retirement, but most did not. I looked for, but couldn’t find, anything controversial—a news report about a malpractice suit, for example.
There was much less information online about his wife, Caroline. She was a stalwart of her garden club in their Maryland suburb and was active with the botanical garden in Busman’s Harbor. Perhaps that was her local substitute for having her own garden, something that wouldn’t be possible at the Baywater Community.
There was tons of information on the web about Phil Bennett. He’d been the chief financial officer of a huge pharmaceutical company until an even bigger European conglomerate had purchased it a year before. I read enough to realize the Bennetts were rich. Not comfortably retired, like the Caswells, but truly wealthy. Deborah had told me they were getting away to Palm Beach for a couple of months. What she hadn’t said was that they owned a house there and an apartment in a New York City co-op building in addition to their Busman’s Harbor “summer cottage.” They’d sold their house in Greenwich, Connecticut, before they’d moved up the harbor, and the listing photos were still available online. The house looked like a palace and was beautifully decorated, as I would have expected.
I thought I’d find a website for Deborah Bennett’s interior decorating business. What little people seemed to know about her always included the information that she was a “professional” interior designer. But there was scant mention of her on the web, and I wondered if all the homes she decorated were her own.