A Deadly Snow Fall (4 page)

“Terrific. Want to join?”

“Nope, I read the blood and guts stuff
exclusively. And I heard you gotta’ cook. I live on beef jerky and
popcorn unless my mother stops by and fills the freezer with
casseroles. Well, gotta go.”

We parted and I continued on my way to
Souza’s Portuguese Market. Tish Souza, the owner with her husband
Manny, was behind the counter and in a questionable mood. Not that
Tish Souza was a grouch or anything like that but there were
certain customers who just grated her. Entering the shop on the
departing heels of one of her testy customers could land you in the
middle of a gray mood, although they never lasted long. As it
turned out on that day, Edwin Snow had just left and she was still
smarting from his visit.

“Hi Tish, how are things?”

“They’d be a lot better if that miserable old
coot Edwin Snow would move away--like to Timbuktu. Sorry, Liz.
Don’t mean to take it out on you, but the man just drives me to
distraction.”

Having spotted old man Snow and his dog
turning the corner at Seashell Lane as I reached the market, I
guessed who’d set her off. I gave Tish a moment to recover by
checking out a shelf of new teas. When Tish’s smile returned, it
seemed to me that it might be a good opportunity to get another
opinion on the old man with the nice dog. Basically, I am an
insatiably curious person, interested in what makes people tick.
Having come face to face with the old man on every villager’s most
hated list, I felt it behooved me to know more about him.
Ironically, that curiosity would become a useful skill when I
needed it most in the coming weeks.

Tish wiped her hands on a towel and
straightened a tray of sausages that didn’t need straightening.
“Everyone else in town tries to be pleasant. It’s a small town and
a long winter so it makes sense for us all to make an effort. You
know what I mean? But not that old bat. I just don’t understand why
he bothers to come in except to bug me.” Tish handed me a sample of
a new cheese. It was delicious.

“Frank Kavanagh gave me a little rundown on
the man but tell me what you know about why he is so miserable?
Usually, someone who acts that way is just plain unhappy and takes
it out on everyone around him. Is that his excuse, do you
know?”

“Let’s sit down, Liz. Just made a pot of
caramel chai and my daughter Shelley made a coffee cake for
breakfast. Never got a chance to try it because I had an early
delivery to unload. Join me?”

“Love to, thanks. As long as I am not taking
you from your work.”

“Hey, after a session with that nutcase I
need a break. He comes in here about once a week when he comes into
town for his meager rations. Not that he ever buys anything here.
Just looks around, makes a few critical comments, and leaves.
However, never without saying under his breath, ‘They ought to go
back to Portugal where they came from.’ Hey, Manny is from New
Bedford and I’m from Quincy. The man is unstable and just plain
mean.”

“Do you think he really is writing a book
about Granger the artist?”

“Well, someone does and someone is mighty
upset by it, I’d say.”

“Why do you say that, Tish?”

I never heard her answer since the shop was
suddenly very busy. It was the day Manny put out the newest batch
of homemade Portuguese sausages and the rush was on. After all, not
only were the sausages terrific, but there was a finite supply
every Tuesday morning. They were always gone by noon. Later, I
joined the anxious throng, rising early on Tuesdays to be there
first.

What Tish would have gone on to present as
evidence that someone was upset about Edwin’s real or imagined
book, Daphne filled me in on, a few days later at the scene of
Edwin Snow III’s fall into the snow. The man had been, if not
physically attacked, then at least, the victim of two attempts. The
cement block and the stone may have missed him but that did not
mean, necessarily, that he didn’t have an enemy out to get him.
Curiouser and curiouser

Chapter Five

When I’d told my mother about my inheritance,
she was far from pleased. “But, Mother, you know I love the sea and
I can have a little sailboat and swim every day and I’ve always
wanted to live in a small village. In addition, I can finally put
to use those lovely cooking lessons from the Cordon Bleu. Owning
and running an inn really appeals to me.”

My mother, Lady Gwendolyn, let out a loud
“harrumph” that travelled all the way from her townhouse in Holland
Park, London, across the wide ocean and into my ear like a
trans-Atlantic taser. I held the cell phone away from my head for
fear of hearing damage.

I had put this off for days, but, finally, I
had no choice. The call to my parents to let them know that I was
beginning a new career had to be faced. I didn’t kid myself that
they would be pleased--particularly my patrician mother.

“Sometimes I do believe that you are not my
child. Why must you do such a foolish thing as go into that
business (her tone might have been in response to my announcement
that I was driving a rubbish truck)? A subservient business.
Running an inn. Darling, you will be a servant. Does your trust
fund not provide enough for your needs, my darling? Tell me how
much you need and MaMa will send it. I have more than I need. Or
better yet by far, do come home and marry that lovely man who has
adored you since childhood, Cecil Bottomley. Have a few little ones
and learn to garden. But pleeeeze, darling, not commerce.”

But, by then it was too late. I was settled
in and enjoying my new life as innkeeper. My aunt’s very capable
manager, a grad student in hotel management, Katy Balsam, had
quickly immersed me in learning the business when I arrived on a
lovely August day. The inn was full and the town was, as Katy
described it, “a zoo with all the animals un-caged and on the
rampage.” I rather liked the crush of tourists. They added a
carnival air to the little seaside village. Katy was an excellent
instructor. In fact, in the interim since my aunt had died she had
carried on so well, that, as she said, “I don’t mean to be
disrespectful Liz, but it seemed important to me to continue on
doing my job in such a way that the guests would never suspect that
Mrs. Huntley had checked out.”

When Katy returned to school that first
autumn of my new career, leaving me in charge, I actually enjoyed
myself. Perhaps, if I’d known what was waiting for me in the not
too distant future, I might have run like a rabbit. But, maybe
not.

That first winter, I put my own mark on the
inn. Never having painted a wall in my life I took on four
bedrooms, turning them from my aunt’s evidently favorite colors of
lilac and aqua and blushing pink to Williamsburg Blue, Tanbark Red
and Scrivener’s Gold. The white woodwork had been fairly recently
done and was just fine so I left it in place. The shiny wide pine
floors were lovely, needing nothing more than the handsome striped
Dash and Albert cotton rugs that I ordered on-line.

I turned a long sun room off of the kitchen
into an office that did double duty as a sitting room. There I
could work at my laptop, read on sunny afternoons (the room had six
long windows that offered wonderful light on all but the darkest,
stormiest days) or serve tea to friends. I bought a wonderful,
antique pine hutch where I stored, out of sight, everything related
to running the inn. I replaced the old brown tweed, cat
hair-infested couch with a glove soft, navy blue leather sofa and
added two deep, comfy wing chairs. Thus, over time, the Cranberry
Inn Bed and Breakfast was transformed from a charming, out-dated
summer hotel into a nautical-style oasis. The addition of framed
nautical charts on the two windowless walls completed the picture
along with a wicker coffee table and two matching lamp tables. As a
house-warming gift, Daphne had painted six white cotton duck cloth
throw pillows with assorted nautical themes. A wonderful antique
brass sextant from a local antique shop sat proudly on a side table
and an old a ship model graced the mantle. The Great Age of Sail
meets Ralph Lauren in a nautical mood.

It was during my re-decorating period that
I’d met Daphne Crowninshield who was to become my dearest, new
friend in the “new world.” I was becoming more American every day.
Not that my giveaway British accent matched the transformation, but
I was one more lump in the “melting pot.”

I’d popped into Daphne’s art gallery called
Galimaufry, on my way to Souza’s Market one morning that first
autumn. I was greeted by a statuesque runway model obviously
impersonating a struggling artist. “Good morning. Welcome to
Galimaufry. I know, a weird name but a good one nevertheless, I
assure you.” Daphne said by way of introduction.

Immediately, I liked her. “Hello. I am Liz
Ogilvie-Smythe. I just love your work. So…local.”

We laughed and were immediately friends.
“After all,” as Daphne said that day, “we bounders must stick
together while in the colonies.” Although I wondered at her
butchering of the King’s English, I found her to be great fun and
always a breath of fresh air. Even so, things sometimes got mighty
weird and there were days when I wondered if I just might have to
return to England and marry simpering Cecil Bottomley.

Daphne told me that Galimaufry was an archaic
term meaning “a mixed collection of things, a kind of hodgepodge of
unrelated objects.” She explained that her goal was to bring in
different styles of painting, eventually. We spent an hour and a
half bonding and then went off to the Lobster Bowl for lobster
rolls. “The best on the east coast,” proclaimed Daphne. She’d been
quite correct. Yum.

I told her how I’d come to end up in
Provincetown. She told me that she’d known and very much liked my
aunt. We talked about art and I told her about attending the Edward
Granger show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts while temporarily
staying in the city. She told me that she liked most of Granger’s
work except for his local paintings. I laughed until my sides hurt
when she commented on her impression of the paintings Granger had
done while summering on the Cape.

“Sort of American Gothic without the
pitchfork. Or, Norman Rockwell meets Grandma Moses on the day the
Valium ran out. I don’t really think the area was ever so forlorn
and seeming to be waiting for true life to begin.”

We’d been good chums ever since. The day
after Edwin Snow III’s body was found in the snow, Daphne and I met
for breakfast at Beasley’s fifties-retro restaurant. Known for the
best breakfasts for miles around as well as superior comfort food,
Beasley’s was run by a family from New York grown sick of the
hustle bustle of the city. Daphne told me that it was where Edwin
Snow III had eaten his breakfast every day, for years. She’d added
that none of the waitresses but DeeDee Bradford would wait on the
difficult old man. It seemed to be a place to start.

As it was not very busy, I asked DeeDee if
she could tell me a little about the dead man. She looked around to
see if any of her customers needed her and finding that everyone
was still busy eating, she sat with us in the booth.

DeeDee’s story was captivating. Even Edwin
Snow’s eating habits were weird. “Every morning at seven minutes to
eight he arrived. Folks could set their watches to his schedule. He
checked around until he discovered a booth or table where a
previous customer had left the daily Provincetown Banner or the
Boston Globe and there he sat. I was the only waitperson who’d
still wait on him by the time he…died. The others refused to go
near the fussy man.”

“What was he so fussy about DeeDee?” asked
Daphne.

“Everything, but mostly his food. If you
could call what he ate food. I mean, he ignored all the great stuff
on the menu and ordered the very same thing every day. You know,
sometimes I’d start feeling sorry for the lonely old man and then
he’d just go and do something so outrageous that I’d go back to
disliking him. But, I was sweet as honey and always smiled at the
old goat. Might have saved up those smiles for a rainy day. He
never smiled back, of course.”

“What did he order?” I asked DeeDee.

“Three pieces of burnt toast with no butter
but with a “thin skin” of orange marmalade. He’d say, ‘As thin as
tissue paper.” Trouble was, he said the exact same thing, day after
day, as if I was a dumbbell with a lobotomy and couldn’t remember
something so damned simple. Then he’d add, ‘and don’t knock off any
of the crispy edges, I want my full money’s worth.’ Can you
imagine?”

“Did he drink coffee or tea?” My inner
amateur sleuth was most certainly awakening, burgeoning inside my
head. Every question was meant to add a new detail to the profile
of the recently dead man. I was becoming a hybrid of my favorite
small village sleuths. Then it struck me like a welcome thunder
bolt. If I could not dig into ancient tombs and catacombs and
buried religious sites, I could dig into a possible murder. A surge
of delight raced through my mind as I was pulled back to the
fascinating subject at hand.

“Get ready for a really good laugh.” DeeDee
laughed herself as we awaited some gem.

“He always ordered a cup of hot water and the
ketchup bottle. Yup, made his own mix-in-place tomato soup. Is that
a hoot or what? Guess you’re not supposed to laugh about the dead
but, hey, the man was a trip. Get this, he paid in small change.
Yup, had an old leather change purse full of it. Never carried a
single bill. He went to the bank every other Monday regularly and
withdrew forty dollars in small change. My sister works at the
bank. Lived on next to nothing although everyone knows, er…knew he
was rich as Croesus.”

DeeDee drifted off for a second then returned
to the present. “I was just remembering something odd I once saw
when he went to pay the bill. Never tipped, of course. Mrs. Beasley
always slipped me what the tip ought to be. Well, anyway, he pulled
out some dimes and nickels and in the process, he dropped something
on the floor. I leaned down to pick it up for the old coot. It was
a torn-in-half tarot card. That creepy one with the grim reaper on
it. The death card.”