Murder in Merino (25 page)

They complied, Nell adding a kiss to his cheek, just as Rachel came around the corner, lifted an eyebrow, and walked over. “Hanky-panky?”

Cass hooted. “I’m keeping an eye on them, Rachel.”

“Good. Thanks, Cass.”

“Are you two here for lunch? Dinner?” Don checked his watch. They were caught in between the two. Neither made good sense.

“I had a question about one of the fellows who works here.”

“Garrett Barros,” Don said.

“Now you’re reading my mind?”

“The police have talked to the poor kid three times now.”

“He wasn’t here the afternoon that Jeffrey was killed,” Nell said. “He lived right next door to where he died. And some of the jobs Jeffrey gave him were not very desirable.”

“All true. You’ve been doing a little bit of sleuthing, my friend,” Don said.

“Is that wise, Nell?” It was Rachel, her face pulled into a worry. “This is a murder we’re talking about. And you can’t get away with asking questions in this town and not have people know about it.”

Nell tried to brush her concern off. “You sound like Ben. But Jules Ainsley is getting a bad rap. And maybe Garrett Barros, too. It’s difficult to live your life under those kinds of clouds. And they desperately need to get back to living their lives. We all do.”

“You’re right,” Don said. “We’re all frustrated. I look at the restaurant every night and worry about it, wanting to be sure the staff gets home safely, then wondering about the people eating here. Is one of them a murderer? It does crazy things to our heads.”

“Yes, Don. That’s exactly it,” Nell said.

Cass looked over and saw Garrett walking into the kitchen. She nudged Nell, who followed her look.

“Would you mind if Cass and I talked to Garrett?” Nell asked Don.

“Will you be nice to him?” Don answered, with a half smile. Then he motioned to a waiter to get Garrett from the kitchen and excused himself to answer a phone call.

Rachel waved a good-bye, but Nell stopped her. “Rachel, a question before you leave. Do you remember any of Jeffrey’s other friends from high school? Karen mentioned there were three of them that were tight—”

“Hmmm. I don’t remember that. But Karen would know better than I. I remember her keeping an eye on Stan, even back then. She would have known his friends—”

Garrett appeared, ending the conversation, and Rachel moved toward friends waiting for her at a table.

“Hi, Mrs. Endicott,” Garrett said. He looked at Cass. “Hi, Cass. We’re friends now, right?”

“Gotcha,” Cass said.

“I was over at Jules’s today,” Nell said. “You’ve done a magnificent job on her backyard. It was very nice of you to help her out.”

Garrett’s smile grew and he stood a little straighter. “I like doing that. Kinda selfish, too. Now that it’s cleared I can use my binoculars to see all the way to the beach. Early mornings are the best time to see the shorebirds. Loons, sea ducks. Sometimes I even see migrating butterflies.”

His voice was almost reverential as he described the sight. When Nell looked away, she realized Grace Danvers had come up and was standing next to Cass, listening, too. She was carrying several books.

“Break time, Garrett,” she said when he finished. “Are you ready to hit the books?”

Garrett looked at Nell and Cass sheepishly. “School time. She’s teaching me to read better.”

Their puzzled looks brought an explanation from Grace. “Jeffrey Meara was helping Garrett with his reading. Somehow he got passed along in school without anyone noticing that he couldn’t read. After Jeffrey died, Don asked me if I could take over, and we’re having a good time. Right, Garrett? I’m not as good as Jeffrey, but close, he says.”

Garrett beamed. “She teaches me to read and I teach her about snowy owls and grebes and alcids. Right?”

“I think I get the better deal,” the hostess said, motioning toward the side door. It was a sunny day. They’d sit outside today.

Nell and Cass watched the odd couple disappear from sight.

“This must have been why he got the crummy jobs we heard about. It was what he could handle.”

“A surprise around every corner,” Nell said. “And the question I had for Garrett—how he and Jeffrey got along—was answered without asking it.”

Don Wooten was at the front door when they went to leave. “When Jeffrey was on his firing rampage, that guy was the one I wanted to fire first,” he said. “Jeffrey adamantly refused. I didn’t get it at first. He said the kid needed something to do to feel better about himself. He didn’t mind the jobs Jeffrey assigned him. He was grateful. Big Barros doesn’t show emotion much, but he was pretty broken up when Jeffrey died. I promised him that his job was safe. That we’d figure it all out.”

Nell smiled. “And so you have, my friend,” she said.

“B
en, did you ever study the
Euthyphro
in college?” Nell handed Ben the cutting board and a bowl of vegetables.

“Graduate school. A business law professor had us read Plato’s dialogues to see how well we could mess them up.”

“What do you remember about that one?”

“That I had trouble spelling it.”

Nell laughed. She poured freshly squeezed lime juice into the food processor. They’d agreed to keep the Friday-night dinner as simple as possible. Grilled coconut lime shrimp and a hearty couscous vegetable salad. The friends coming to dinner were in need of more than carefully prepared delicacies. Friendship and talk would go much further in aiding weary spirits.

“It’s actually strange that I remember it at all,” Ben said. He pulled out the basket for the shrimp. “But I enjoyed the class and the professor. He wanted to pull out the ethical dilemmas, and then he wanted us to try to construct a justice system that was better than the Athenians’.”

“No small task. I imagine you got an A.” She added the coconut, rum, honey, and milk to the processor.

“Why are you suddenly interested in Plato?”

“Jeffrey Meara was talking about Plato with Grace Danvers shortly before he died. Sparring with her, she said. They both loved philosophy and spent some of their breaks that way. But that week, right before he died, Jeffrey seemed obsessed with the
Euthyphro
’s theme
—
exploring the right thing to do in difficult situations. For example, if you thought someone close to you had done something wrong. Should you turn the person in—and upset their life—or let it pass for the sake of the relationship? To keep peace. Not ruin people’s lives.”

“In the dialogue, Euthyphro turned his own father in, if I remember, because he’d let a slave die.”

“Something like that. But it presented an ethical dilemma. Grace seemed to think Jeffrey’s interest was more personal than academic.”

“That’s interesting.” Ben took the ice out of the freezer and filled the silver bowl. The furrows in his forehead deepened. “He was going to talk to Jules, but what could he possibly be telling her that would have dire consequences?”

“Maybe that’s the question.”

The sound of footsteps broke into the conversation and a group came in, all at once, not the ordinary way the Friday-night crowd appeared. Ben disappeared to get the grill and martinis started. Sam deposited Abby with Izzy and he and Danny followed Ben outside to help. Birdie came in with Cass, talking before she reached the kitchen.

Her afternoon with the old gals had been interesting.

“They confirmed that the Brogans were the family who owned the Ridge Road house,” she said without preamble. “Stella was right. And yes, it was James, the patriarch, who then sold it. But it’s why he sold it that’s interesting.” She looked around at the expectant faces around the kitchen island.

“There was one child in the family, James the Third. He went to school in Sea Harbor, Amelia Oliver said. She used to teach at the high school and remembered him. His parents were never around—they spent most of their time in Boston. Remember, this was forty years go. They probably had a houseful of servants to take care of things in the main house.”

“Things, meaning their son?” Cass asked.

“I suppose. But don’t forget that the memories of some of these ladies leave a little bit to be desired. But what Fiona Riley remembers about that summer is that the son was home from college, living in that little house. Apparently he didn’t like staying in the mansion over on the Point. And she vaguely remembers that he got in trouble.”

“Trouble?” Nell said.

“That’s what she remembered. But Amelia argued with Fiona. She said Jimmy Brogan was a wonderful young man.”

“What kind of trouble?” Izzy asked.

“Something big, Fiona insisted. But she couldn’t remember what. And then he died, she said.”

“While so young? How awful,” Izzy said.

Birdie nodded. “After the son’s death, the family immediately sold everything they owned in Sea Harbor and never returned. They even left furniture behind, Fiona said.”

“They were grieving,” Nell said.

“Maybe. But Bernice Risso thought it was their pride. They were older, quite aloof. And the whole thing with their son was tarnishing their good name.”

“Did any of them remember how he died?”

“It was all hush-hush, Bernice said. But the rumor was that he had killed himself.”

“What a sad story,” Nell said. But the summer had been a happy one for Penelope Ainsley. What had happened?

She looked out the window at the men on the deck. Danny Brandley was smiling at something Sam said.
Danny
. Their resident expert on finding scoops. Perhaps he would help them fill in the gaps.

When Jane and Ham walked in, the attention turned to art. “Jules wasn’t sure if she’d make it over here tonight,” Jane said. “But if not, she’ll pick the paintings up tomorrow. In the meantime, she said I could show off Ham’s excellent restoration skills.”

Ham carefully took the paintings from the portfolio and they gathered around the table. There were two paintings, both beautifully restored. Ham pointed out the places where the pigment had lightened, but the attention wasn’t on the pigment.

It was on a car. A very distinctive car. British racing green—BRG, as it’s known in the field, Ham said.

The rest of the men came in from the deck and passed out the martinis as everyone took a turn examining the paintings closely.

“It’s a great little car,” Ben said. He turned to Birdie. “You’re probably the only one of us who has ever driven one. I took a few spins in the Mark III and IV but never came across one of these, except in magazines.”

“Have you lost your mind, Ben Endicott? I never once sat behind the wheel of Sonny’s Sprite. It wasn’t allowed. That man would have given me the moon if he could have lassoed it—but driving the Mark I? No, that was off-limits. I suspect Jeffrey Meara felt the same.”

They looked at the car, then into their memories of the congenial bartender. Somehow the two images didn’t mix easily.

The paintings had charged the room with energy. Positive energy. Nell would even go so far as to call it happy energy. And for this brief time, they were putting a murder in their town in the wings and out of their heads. And in its place, a mystery of a different sort was taking center stage. A much more palatable mystery.

Finding Jules’s father and giving her back her past.

They gathered eagerly around the story of a young pregnant woman and the child raised without her father.

“The car in the painting wasn’t Jeffrey’s, not when Penelope painted it,” Birdie said. “It was his friend’s.”

“And that friend may well have lived in the house Jules just bought. The man who owned this car—and perhaps Jules’s mother’s heart,” Nell said.

The third Musketeer.

She knew they were leaping over a chasm without a bridge. The Brogans could have loaned the house to someone. Rented it. But somehow she didn’t think so. The chasm was very small, and with a little research perhaps they could step right over it.

Jimmy Brogan
. She liked the sound of his name.

The shrimp and couscous were served without a single break in the conversation. They’d been given a beneficent gift: an evening free of murder. An evening filled with hope.

It was only when Nell crawled into bed and turned out her light that the darker thoughts came back, the ones she had pushed as far out of her mind as was possible.

What was the connection between Jules’s father and Jeffrey Meara’s murder?

She lay on her side and curved her body into Ben’s, the pillow cushioning her head and his body supporting and warming her, his arm looped around her. She pressed into his chest until she could feel the beat of his heart on her back, and she willed the thoughts away.

But they were stubborn thoughts, ones that lingered long into the late night.

B
irdie called Maeve from the table at Coffee’s. It was warm enough to be outside, cool enough to be wearing soft wool sweaters.

“I have the whole day off,” Izzy said to Birdie when she was off the phone. Abby sat on her lap, her large blue eyes following the coffee cups and bright colors moving across the patio.

Nell brought over a tray of coffee mugs and passed them around the table.

“Maeve is out this morning but will be back this afternoon,” Birdie said, putting her cell phone back in her bag. “We can go over then. I didn’t tell her that we wanted to prowl around in her garage rafters looking for the box she saw Jeffrey holding that day. Some things are better said in person.”

They had decided not to tell Jules, either. There were still too many holes in their theories, and getting her hopes up that they might have found her father seemed to serve no purpose. Especially when the details surrounding their suspicions were hazy—and perhaps dark.

The evening before, before they had left the deck, Danny had suggested a course of action. Look up the obituary. Find some concrete dates. Then newspaper clippings. They might find some of it online, he said. But the library would be useful.

“Decide exactly what you’re looking for,” he’d said. And then he climbed into his car and drove off alone.

“The last thing Danny said should be first on our agenda. What are we looking for?” Birdie said.

She brought out her iPad and began to type.

Information about Jimmy Brogan,
she wrote, then looked up
.
“We’re assuming, of course, that Amelia’s memory is correct and he was staying in the small house his parents owned.”

“And that he had a Sprite.”

“The timing is too exact for it not to be the case,” Izzy said. “I know we are on the right track. I never imagined when I lived in that house what secrets it held.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Birdie said. “Sometimes it’s difficult to sleep with too many secrets weighing you down.”

Izzy agreed. The house had held them close all those years, but now was releasing them one by one.

“Hopefully we’ll uncover more secrets at Maeve’s—maybe something in the car that will confirm things or tell us more about Jimmy Brogan,” Nell said. “And maybe . . .” Nell took a drink of her coffee. “So, we’re set, then?”

“Except for that last ‘maybe,’” Izzy said. “What were you going to say, Aunt Nell?”

Nell shook her head, as if to brush it away and move on. But that would be difficult to pull off with Izzy, Birdie, and Cass. So she finished her thought. “I know that this is all about helping Jules find out who her father was. But it’s more than that.”

Birdie nodded, and Cass’s and Izzy’s expressions showed no surprise. The paths had been merging for days, maybe from the beginning, although they wouldn’t have said so then.

As Nell often said,
There are no coincidences
. And clearing their newfound friend of an evil act might well bring great distress to other people in their town. She thought back to Jeffrey’s—and Plato’s—dilemma.

Birdie stood up and brushed the crumbs from her lap. “If we look in the right places—and we certainly will—we’ll find more than we’re looking for. We’ve always said Jeffrey would lead us to his killer. He simply forgot to mention that we’d have to go through the garage to get to him.”

•   •   •

They dropped Abby at home with a sitter and headed to the library. The computer room was nearly empty when they arrived and they commanded two machines—Izzy and Nell on one, Cass and Birdie on the other, all looking up obituaries.

“We should check the
Globe
as well as the Sea Harbor paper. And who knows where else the Brogans may have lived,” Birdie said.

It took Cass two minutes to come up with the senior Brogans’ obituaries. “It looks like they died a dozen or so years after that summer—and within months of each other. They say that often happens with older couples.”

Birdie scrolled through a long body of text. “He was on many Boston company boards, owned some real estate, a house in Florida where they retired . . .” She looked closer. “Well, that’s interesting.”

Cass leaned over. “What?”

“They moved to Florida the year they sold the cottage up here—and their other Cape Ann properties. They sold the Boston residence, too. It looks like they sold everything and moved on.”

Because of grief?

“Does the obituary mention family members?” Nell asked.

“It says they had one son who preceded them in death. ‘Name withheld for privacy reasons,’” Cass said.

“Withholding children’s names in obituaries used to be very common,” Birdie said. “Especially in wealthy families.”

“But it seems a little strange when the person preceded them in death,” Nell said. “I wonder if they were ashamed of their son.”

“Maybe they had reason to be,” Cass said.

That quieted them, except for the clicking of the computer keys, and they realized how much they wanted this story to have a happy ending.

“Here is the James III obituary from the Sea Harbor paper, along with a small photograph that looks like a high school graduation photo,” Izzy said, pulling up a computer screen. She read out loud: “James Arthur Brogan III. Died November 22. James, called Jimmy, was the son of James Brogan, Jr., and Florence Brogan of Boston, Massachusetts, Palm Beach, Florida, and Sea Harbor. He was an honor student and studied at Yale University.”

They waited.

Izzy looked up. “That’s it. That’s all there is.”

Nell reached over and scrolled down. Nothing.

Cass shook her head. “I just pulled one up from the
Boston Globe
. It’s identical.”

“There’s something terribly sad about all this,” Nell said. “Even those who die young leave more of a legacy than that.”

“The dates line up, though,” Izzy said. “Stella said the house sold that next January.”

“And it looks like that’s when the parents got out of Dodge,” Cass said.

“The death of a child is a terrible thing, but this makes me think there’s more to the story.”

And there was, which the next hour of poring over articles, using Jimmy Brogan’s name as the key search word, proved. But none of them said very much. Cass clicked on the printer and they pulled out the pages.

There was one article that held their attention, one written at the end of that August—that magical time when wild parties and anticipation precede college kids’ return to school—that told of an accident, a hit-and-run in the wooded area just outside Sea Harbor.

George C. Claiborne, 87, of 22 Seacliff Road, was walking his dog around 1:30 a.m. in a wooded area of Sea Harbor when he was hit by a car. He was killed instantly. Police say the driver, who was speeding around a curve, lost control of the car and left the scene. The driver has not been found. Police are questioning people in the area.

But it was the next article, posted a few days later, that brought their searching to a halt.

Police have found the owner of the car that killed George Claiborne last Friday night. James Brogan of Ridge Road has been arrested.

And two months later, a short, succinct notice was printed on page four of the Sea Harbor newspaper.

James Brogan, 20, formerly of Sea Harbor, was found hanging in a jail cell. His body was cremated.

“Now I understand why you don’t remember this, Birdie,” Izzy said, sitting back in her chair. “There is barely any mention of it. How can that be?”

“A story like this would have legs,” Cass said.

“Mary Pisano’s grandfather, old Enzo Pisano, owned all the newspapers around here at the time. I wonder if Mary remembers hearing any stories about this and why there wasn’t more coverage,” Birdie said. “Enzo was a character, and, well, in a word, he could be bought.”

Cass laughed and several library patrons shushed her with frowns.

“I found one article that was chatty,” Izzy said, “but it was printed in a free newspaper, one that had a short life, apparently. So the legitimacy of it might be suspect.”

The article talked about a party at Jimmy’s house the night of the hit-and-run—an end-of-the-season wild college student bash. According to people interviewed, everyone drank way too much, and by party’s end the man who lived in the house, Jimmy Brogan, along with several friends, had passed out on the floor. Jimmy couldn’t have been driving the car, according to his friends. He rarely drank, but was celebrating something special that had happened in his life, and he ended up dead drunk.

But the facts said otherwise. The police found the car keys beside him, half out of his pocket. The car belonged to him. And marks on the car proved it to be the vehicle that had killed the old man. End of story.

And the end of the free newspaper.

“There isn’t a single mention of Penelope,” Cass said. “In fact, there are few names anywhere.”

“Jeffrey would have been at that party,” Birdie said.

“And Stan Hanson,” Nell said.

The Three Musketeers.

“None of these articles say that Jimmy was proven to be the driver of the car. Just that they couldn’t prove he wasn’t,” Nell said. “I wonder if Jeffrey knew more. Maybe somehow he had proof that Jimmy couldn’t have been the driver.”

“And he would have wanted Jimmy’s daughter to know—and maybe other things about her father,” Birdie said. They gathered up their things and walked out into the sunny day, their minds reeling. In the distance, the sounds of gulls and horns and people moving through a lovely day masked the sinking feeling that a long-ago party had somehow laid the way to a murder forty years later.

They walked into Harry’s deli, looking for a booth out of mainstream traffic. The familiar aroma of garlic and wine, butter and oregano filled the warm air.

“I gain three pounds walking through here,” Izzy said. “But it’s worth every ounce.”

They settled into a booth and picked up the menu, which rarely changed, knowing what they would order before Patti, Harry’s niece, approached. Until Mary Pisano spotted them from across the room and suggested the meat loaf. “It’s never been better,” she said, scurrying over to their table.

“Mary, you’re exactly the person we need to talk to,” Birdie said. She scooted over on the padded bench, nudging Izzy closer to the window. “Sit, dear. You’ve eaten, I presume?”

Mary had, and had all but licked her plate, she said, detailing the ingredients Harry had blended into the meat loaf—fresh basil and oregano, wine and his special tomato sauce. “And his homemade sausage can’t be beat. Magnificent,” she said, and told Patti to bring four specials for her friends.

When the waitress had left, she said, “You’re wanting more information about the anniversary party. I’ve been negligent.”

“Reports are definitely not necessary,” Nell assured her. Today they needed a bit of Sea Harbor history, and if there was anyone who could give it to them, it was she.

Mary listened carefully, her reporter antennae on high alert.

It was true that her grandfather, Papa Enzo, would have been the man in charge of the Pisano-owned papers back then. He had a dozen under his thumb, but because Ravenswood by the Sea was his estate and where he spent most of his time, he paid special attention to the locals and the Sea Harbor paper. From the stories Mary had heard, he had his fingers, every single one of them, in just about everything in town.

Birdie remembered Enzo in his prime. “Someone should have made a movie about his life. Except he turned into such a sweet teddy bear when he retired that no one would have believed it.”

“He wasn’t exactly the Godfather,” Mary said. “But he would have liked to have been. His own version, anyway.”

Mary agreed that it was odd to downplay a story like the hit-and-run. It had all the ingredients Enzo loved: a wealthy family, Ivy League kids, Boston connections. And a suicide on top of it? He would have been in heaven, she said.

She took out a small pad of paper and a pen, took some notes, and promised to get in touch with one of her relatives who still had his hands in the inheritance pie. “Uncle Petey loves talking about the old days. I’d bet my bottom dollar he’ll know exactly what went down with this.”

•   •   •

Mary had been right about the meat loaf. Forty-five minutes later, they pushed themselves out of the booth, collected their doggie bags, and headed to Maeve Meara’s on full stomachs.

Maeve met them at the door and was thrilled that the group had grown. She ushered them inside, where coffee and tea were waiting in the living room, along with a plate of petits fours.

When they were settled in easy chairs, with coffee poured and cream passed around, Maeve got down to business. “I understand you’re interested in the car. Now what can I do to help?”

They had decided on the way over that there was no reason to keep the story of Jimmy Brogan from Maeve. Jeffrey was involved, after all, and maybe hearing it would trigger her memory.

Only afterward would they suggest they take her spotless garage apart.

Maeve listened carefully, frowning at some places, nodding at others.

“I don’t remember the accident, but I wasn’t living here then. My mother did have the rather annoying habit of cutting things out of the Sea Harbor newspaper that she thought I’d be interested in—people getting married, winning awards, taking trips to Europe or having babies, that sort of thing. They always came with a secret agenda, hidden messages, like, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a wedding, Maeve?’”

“My mother did the same thing.” Nell laughed.

Maeve offered her another petit four. “Such a sad story. Both the man being killed, but especially Jimmy going to jail. Everyone knew the Brogan name—they had that huge mansion over on the Point—and we always wondered how three people could live in that gigantic house and still keep in touch with each other. But then you’d see Jimmy around and he was just this nice kid who didn’t see himself as anything special.”

“So you knew Jimmy?”

“Not really. He was like Jeffrey—enough years younger than me to be unimportant. But his family was known here, so I remember the name—and some of the rumors. I remember people liking their son, even though they didn’t expect to. With all that wealth I suppose people thought he’d be a spoiled little kid. I can’t imagine his life ending so terribly.” She looked across the room, toward the back door. “And I can’t imagine that I’ve had Jimmy Brogan’s car in my garage all these years. My Jeffrey is continuing to surprise me.” That thought amused Maeve and her eyes brightened.