Clammed Up (4 page)

Livvie’s mac and cheese was the perfect comfort food at the end of a long, horrible day. I ate heartily, savoring the rich tanginess of the cheese combined with the sweetness of the lobster. The tastes and textures perfectly complimented one another—the springy noodles and toothsome lobster along with the crunchy panko breadcrumb topping. People asked if I ever got tired of lobster. I’d discussed this with the family who owned the ice cream parlor in town, who fielded similar questions. The simple answer was no. If you loved something, you loved it.

After dinner was cleared up and Livvie, Sonny, and Page finally went home, I climbed the back stairs to my room and fell exhausted onto my bed. I wanted nothing more than to sleep. But once I was cleaned up and properly tucked in, sleep didn’t come. I couldn’t stop worrying about the clambake.

In the clambake business, when a day was lost, it was lost forever. The income projected for this weekend was gone, our ability to make it up later severely hampered by the short Maine summer season. I knew if we were still closed on Monday I’d have to have a conversation with our banker. And I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.

I lay awake, doing calculations in my head. What if we were still closed on Monday? On Tuesday? Wednesday? Being shut down through the next weekend would be catastrophic. I was certain if that happened, the bank would call our loan. I tossed and turned and started calculating again.

Eventually, counting our potential losses had the same effect as counting sheep, and I nodded off. But then, in that split second of twilight between conscious and unconscious, a vision of that awful, inert body hanging from the stairs leaped into my brain. My eyes flew open and I was wide-awake again. I couldn’t stop picturing how dead Ray Wilson was. Even in the few moments I’d stared at his body, I’d known there was no spark of life.

I started the counting again, and the cycle repeated—the nodding off, the awful vision, the wide-awakeness, then back to the counting. I don’t know how many times it happened, but it felt like most of the night. I must have slept some, but even those periods were disturbed by a dream where I ran from place to disconnected place— Manhattan, Busman’s Harbor and towns I didn’t recognize—struggling to tell people a man was about to be killed, but unable to produce a sound.

At dawn, I gave up and climbed out of my girlhood bed. Sunrise came early in coastal Maine. I looked longingly at the door connecting my room to Livvie’s old bedroom, wishing she were there so I’d have someone to talk to. I dressed quickly, though I had nowhere to go.

I considering putting on coffee and making breakfast, but the house felt like a cage. I had too much energy to be indoors. I headed out, not thinking about where I was walking, but somehow making a beeline for Gus’s.

The restaurant was packed with lobstermen, fishermen, the crew who ran the whale watch, and the ferrymen who took people to the summer colony on Chipmunk Island. Was it my imagination or did the noise level fall when I walked into the place? The murder on Morrow Island was the biggest news to hit Busman’s Harbor in years. It had to be the main topic of conversation, but no one came up to ask questions. No one spoke to me at all, a benefit of that famous Maine reticence.

I looked around hopefully for Chris Durand, but he wasn’t there.

Jamie Dawes was, however, sitting at a round table with the officer who’d taken him out to the island. They were in uniform, which I thought was a hopeful sign, ready to get to work nice and early. I briefly debated whether it would be weirder if I walked over to their table, or weirder if I didn’t. I decided on weirder if I didn’t and approached.

“Hey, Jamie.”

“Julia. This is Officer Howland. I’m not sure if you met yesterday.”

“Not properly. Hello, Officer. I think you were in my brother-in-law Sonny’s class at Busman High.”

Howland grunted in my direction around a mouthful of eggs.

“Are you going out to Morrow today?”

Jamie gestured toward the empty chairs at their table. “Yep. Waiting for the state police detectives and the crime scene team to get here from Augusta.”

“Thanks.”

As I walked back toward the counter, I was grateful for Gus’s “no strangers” policy. At least I wouldn’t run into any of the wedding guests, though I had to admit that was unlikely so early in the morning. I grabbed a stool at one end of the C-shaped counter.

Behind it, Gus unhurriedly fried bacon and made pancakes, despite the size of the crowd. He didn’t vary his pace for anyone. “You’re up early,” he said as he poured my coffee.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Ayup. Clam hash?”

Among the cognoscenti, which is to say the locals, Gus’s clam hash was famous. Like any hash, it’s made with lots of onions and potatoes, but he uses clams instead of beef or corned beef. The fresh, diced clams give the hash a salty-sweet taste that cannot be beat. And if you ask for it, he will top the hash with one or two perfectly poached eggs.

“Yes, please. With one egg.”

“Because one egg is un oeuf.” Gus repeated the oldest joke in the world.

Sitting diagonally across from me on the long side of the counter was a man dressed differently from everyone else in the place. He had on a tweed sports coat and a tailored blue shirt, and was reading, my heart went pit-a-pat the
New York Times.
He was one of my people
.

Suddenly, I was homesick for Manhattan. It was all I could do to keep from hiking out to the highway and sticking out my thumb. Back to the land of fresh bagels, high salaries and, best of all, no family responsibilities.

I stared at the backside of the man’s newspaper. It had to be yesterday’s. It would be hours before the Sunday
Times
made it to our end of the peninsula. But no, he was reading the wedding notices from the
Times
“Sunday Styles” section. My favorite part of the weekend. Where had he gotten hold of it?

“Do you two know each other?” Gus asked.

“Quentin here’s from New York City, too.”

“Not everyone in New York knows everyone else,” I said more grumpily than Gus deserved. I knew he didn’t think that.

He put my order down in front of me. I cut into the egg and watched its exquisitely cooked yolk run onto my hash. I put a fork full into my mouth and felt my mood lift.

The man waved at me across the counter. He was pleasant looking, somewhere in his mid-forties, with dark blond hair, expensively cut. “Quentin Tupper.”

Tupper.
That explained his presence at Gus’s. Like me, he was a legacy. The Tuppers were an old Maine family with many branches. If my father had been alive, he could have given me a complete genealogy and told me whose son Quentin was. But I’d never be able to ask my dad those kinds of questions again.

I leaned across the counter and stuck out my hand. “Julia.” I left off my last name in case he’d already heard about the murder at the Snowden Family Clambake. It was the last subject I wanted to talk about.

Quentin asked me where I lived in the city, and I told him. As was so often the case when Manhattanites were out of town, we discovered we lived four blocks from one another and shopped at the same delis, lingered in the same coffee shops. While I sopped up the end of my egg with a piece of toast, we had a long chat about our neighborhood. I even forgot for one brief moment about the events of the previous day.

Gus’s was all but empty by the time I finished eating. The harbor workers had places to go and it would be a couple hours before the after-church crowd arrived. Quentin Tupper finished his coffee and paid his bill. “Lovely to meet you,” he said.

I said the same and he took off, leaving me alone at the counter with Gus.

The only people still in the dining room were Jamie and Officer Howland. I couldn’t help myself. I approached them again. “Still waiting, huh?”

Jamie nodded. “They called. They were too late to have breakfast with us, but they’re here now. We’re meeting them at the station house.”

“You know it’s really important to me to be up and running again as soon as possible, right?” I tried to keep any hint of whine out of my voice, though I’m not sure I succeeded. Officer Howland gathered up his trash and stomped off toward the barrel.

“Julia, I get it.” Jamie stood to leave. “I told you yesterday, you can’t rush this.”

“Well, if you think I can open tomorrow, can you try to let me know in time for me to place food orders?”

“I’ll make sure the state police are aware of your time constraints,” Jamie answered formally. Then, in a friendlier tone, he added, “Honestly, that’s the best I can do.”

What could I say to that? I thanked him, returned to the counter, and asked Gus for my check.

Just as I was about to say good-bye to Gus, a familiar pair of legs came galumphing down the restaurant stairs. “Hey, beautiful,” Chris Durand called.

The place was empty except for the two of us. And Gus, of course. I looked down at my new uniform—Snowden Family Clambake sweatshirt, jeans, and work boots. Clearly, “hey, beautiful,” was a meaningless greeting as far as Chris was concerned.

“Keep me company while I eat breakfast?” he asked.

“It’s the middle of the day for you.”

“The cops want to see me again at nine. I figure I better get something in my stomach. Might be there for a while. My day is shot, anyhow.”

While Chris placed his order, I went to the dining room and sat down in the booth that, somehow over the last couple months, I’d come to think of as “ours.”

Chris came in and sat across from me. He was so handsome that even all those years past my seventh grade crush, he took my breath away. He had light brown hair worn a little too long and the most astonishing pair of green eyes. His strong chin, covered with a day’s growth of beard, had at its center, God help me, a dimple. At thirty-four, his face had weathered from outdoor work, but that only added to his charm.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Moved down to my boat on Saturday.” Chris owned a beautiful wooden sailboat, the
Dark Lady
, a thirty-three foot Maine-made Hinckley he kept in the marina just around the bend from Gus’s place. He also owned a lakeside cabin he’d purchased from his parents when they couldn’t take the winters anymore and fled south. Every summer, he rented out the lake house for the season and moved onto the
Dark Lady
. Even with three jobs, it was the only way to afford both.

“That’s not what I meant.” I could tell he hadn’t misunderstood. He was deliberately avoiding the topic of the murder.

“I know,” he admitted.

I’d discovered Ray Wilson’s body on Morrow Island, and Chris had, apparently, been the last person known to see him on the mainland. The two events were separated by time and geography, but it still felt to me like we’d shared a traumatic experience. My sense was we needed to talk about it.

“Okay,” Chris said as if reading my thoughts. “You first.”

I walked him through that morning. Waiting for Ray on the
Jacquie II
. Tony leaving to search for him. Michaela’s nervousness on the boat. The moment when I opened the doors at Windsholme and saw what I saw.

“So he was just hanging there? That’s tough.”

The sympathy in his voice brought tears to my eyes. It was the first time, awake and fully conscious, I allowed myself to feel the horror of what had happened . . . because I felt so safe when I was with Chris.

I focused on lining up the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar, syrup, and catsup bottles in a row and managed not to cry. “But what about you? The state police want to see you again?”

“Two hours yesterday. More today. You heard I drove the victim back to his hotel Friday night in my cab? Of course you did. Everyone in town knows it.”

In a bigger town, it might be considered a conflict of interest for the bouncer in a bar to have the power to take away a patron’s keys and then load that person into a cab the bouncer owned. But in Busman’s Harbor everyone wore multiple hats and we thought nothing of it.

Gus dropped a huge plate of blueberry pancakes and a side of bacon in front of Chris. “Thanks.” Chris was genuinely surprised. Gus didn’t believe in table service.

“Don’t get used to it.”

Chris picked the plastic maple syrup dispenser out of the little formation I’d created and applied its contents to his pancakes.

“Tell me, from the beginning,” I said.

He dug into his pancakes and ate. The moment stretched and I wondered if he was going to say anything. Finally, he spoke. “They all came into Crowley’s about ten, a little after. Since it’s so early in the season, I was the only bouncer on, working just inside the door, checking IDs. From there, I can keep my eye on the bar and the dance floor, pretty much the whole place.”

“And by ‘they all’ you mean . . . ?”

“The bride, the groom, the best man, and three bridesmaids.”

The entire wedding party, except Michaela’s teenaged brothers, who were too young to go out to a bar after the rehearsal dinner. By three bridesmaids, Chris meant the maid of honor and the two others. I didn’t correct him.

“Were they drunk?”

“Not when they arrived. A couple of the bridesmaids were a little silly, but I’ve seen people come in a whole lot worse. The bride wasn’t drinking—she had seltzer and lime—and the groom nursed one beer the whole time he was there.”

Made sense, the happy couple would have wanted to be bright-eyed for the big day.

“And Ray Wilson?”

“I’d have sworn he was stone cold sober when he came in, but I must be losing my eye, because after a couple drinks, he was completely gone. And you know the drinks at Crowley’s.”

Over-priced and watered-down, especially for tourists. And more watered-down later in the evening. “So what happened?”

“The best man and the bridesmaids all got pretty happy. There was a lot of dancing, initially as a group, but later with some of the other customers.”

“Many local people there?”

“Aside from the employees? Just a few.” Crowley’s is mostly too expensive for the natives. “Any of my people?”

“
Your
people?” Chris grinned, but he knew what I meant. “I don’t think so.”

But then, he paused. I sensed there was something he wasn’t telling. “What? Who?”

“Sarah came in about 10:30.”

“Sarah Halsey?”

“She works for you.”

“Yeah. I’m just surprised. A schoolteacher with a kid at home—”

“She’s not allowed to blow off a little steam?”

“Sure, I guess.” I indicated he should go on.

“The groom left after about half an hour.”

“Wait. Tony left?” It seemed odd for the groom to leave his own party so quickly. “Why?”

Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No idea. I didn’t think about it at the time. Anyway, not too long after that, the best man started drinking heavily, getting handsy with the women on the dance floor, stumbling. At a little before one, the bride and bridesmaids wanted to leave. The bride told Wilson to go back to his hotel and go to bed. He refused. She was pretty mad. They were both yelling. So I stepped in and told her I’d take care of him.”

“And?”

“The ladies left. It was almost closing and the place had really emptied out, so I left the bartender to close up, put the best man in my cab, and drove him to the Lighthouse.”

The Lighthouse Inn was a large hotel about five minutes from Crowley’s. It was called the Lighthouse because, rumor had it, from one of its thirty-eight rooms, if you leaned as far over the balcony as was humanly possible, you could see Dinkums Light. Ray and a number of the wedding guests were staying there.

“Did you walk him inside?”

“Nope. Now I wish I had. I wish I’d tucked him into bed, to tell you the truth. I thought he could make it on his own. Last I saw him, he was stumbling out of my cab toward the lobby.” Chris rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. The chin with the dimple. “That’s all I got.”

He glanced over my head at the big clock over the threshold between Gus’s dining room and the counter area. I’ve always felt the clock was Gus’s way of saying, “You’ve finished eating. Now get the hell out of here.”

“Can’t keep the cops waiting.” Chris stood and I did, too. I wanted to go with him to the police station, but figured that wouldn’t look good, what with him being the last to see Ray and me finding the body. I wanted to give him a hug, but we’d never actually touched. So I walked him to the front door and wished him good luck.

“Earth to Julia.”

I realized I was standing in the front room of Gus’s, my mind a million miles away, while Gus refilled the saltshakers and the catsup bottles and got ready for the post-church rush. I grabbed a gallon jug of syrup from behind the counter and helped out. Preparing to feed a big crowd was something I knew how to do.

We worked in silence for a while, then Gus said, “I’m sorry for your trouble. Is it bad?” He knew the murder was bad. He was asking about the business.

“I don’t know when they’re going to let us open. Every day that goes by is killing us financially.” And increasing the chances the bank would call our loan. “That’s assuming anyone will want to come party on an island where there’s been a grisly murder.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll probably get so many of those rubberneckers out to see where it happened, you’ll make more money than ever.”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t comforted. I didn’t like the idea of profiting from Ray Wilson’s death.

“The police know who did it?”

“I don’t think so. From the questions they asked her yesterday, Livvie thinks it’s got something to do with the people from New York who hired us to do their wedding reception.”

“The state police think people from New York City took a man out to your island in the middle of the night and strung him up on your staircase?”

“Absurd, isn’t it?”

“State cops. They don’t know this harbor.” In Gus’s opinion nobody from out of town knew much of anything, but he had a point. Busman’s residents knew how hard it would be to take someone out to Morrow in the dark, but would state cops know?

“I think this murder will finally bankrupt the Snowden Family Clambake,” I said. “And the worst part is, there is not one thing I can do about it.”

That did seem like the absolutely worst part. I’d put my career and my life in New York on hold. I’d worked like a dog all spring and battled with Sonny. And none of it was going to matter. We were going to succumb to something completely beyond my control.

Gus wasn’t having any of it. “Now Julia Snowden, I don’t want to hear you talk that way. Your business is too important to this town. We can’t be losing any more employers. You say there’s not a thing you can do? Do you know these people who hired you to do the wedding, the ones from New York?”

“Vaguely.”

“Do you know them better than the state cops do?”

“Maybe, but—”

“And do you know Morrow Island better than the state cops do, and who might have business there?”

“Of course, but—”

“And aside from the dead man’s family, is there anyone who has more interest in getting this murder solved than you do?”

“Probably no, but—”

Gus wagged a finger at me. “‘Not a thing you can do about it.’ We don’t talk that way in Busman’s Harbor, Maine, missy. I’m sure you if think about it, you’ll know exactly what you have to do.”