Clammed Up (3 page)

Back in March, when I returned to town, I moved in with Mom because I only planned to stay for a few months. But sometimes living and working with family, all day, everyday, got to be too much, especially since Sonny and I had been at each other’s throats from the beginning. When I’d been home about two weeks, I’d slammed down the phone after an argument with Sonny and stomped out of my mother’s house.

Mom and Dad’s house in the harbor was a five-minute walk to the town dock, so I hadn’t bought a car yet. That meant I was stuck. Then I remembered Gus’s. I walked back over the top of the hill and down the other side and followed a long path past the boatyard to a low wooden building jutting over the water.

Gus’s restaurant had an old gas pump with a round top out front, like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Inside, you climbed down a long set of stairs into the main room where you found a candlepin-bowling lane on your left and a lunch counter on your right. In back was a dining room with the best view of Busman’s Harbor anywhere.

Gus looked up from the grill when I walked in and growled, “Get out. No strangers.” He was governed by the same public accommodation laws as any restaurant owner, but nevertheless had an ironclad rule. He didn’t serve diners unless he knew them personally or someone he did know vouched them for. I have no idea how he got away with it.

“Gus, I’m Julia. Julia Snowden. I’ve been coming here all my life. For goodness sake, I was born here in the harbor.”

Gus looked at me appraisingly. “Now Jul-ya, just because kittens are born in the oven don’t make them biscuits.” But then he said, “What’ll ya have?” and I knew I was in.

His fare was simple in the extreme—hamburgers, cheeseburgers, BLTs, hot dogs, lobster rolls, and fried clam rolls—all served with the best French fries on the face of the earth. He bought his beef from Maine farmers and ground it fresh daily. He only served Maine clams and potatoes.

You would never see the word
artisanal
on Gus’s menu. In fact, aside from the scrawl on the blackboard behind the counter, you’d never see a menu. Gus didn’t prepare food that way because he was some kind of a locavore. He did it because that’s the way he’d always done it. He’d missed the era of frozen food entirely, and now he was right back on trend. You had to reserve a slice of Gus’s wife’s scrumptious pie when you placed your meal order, because Gus didn’t like to be surprised later. I ordered a cheeseburger, cherry cola, and a slice of three-berry pie.

It was late for lunch by harbor standards and I had the dining room to myself. Since my last visit, someone in town had placed signs around that said things like G
US
DOESN’T SERVE HORS D’OEUVRES.
H
E DOESN’T BELIEVE YOU NEED FOOD WHILE WAITING FOR FOOD
, and Y
OU CAN ASK
G
US FOR SALAD
. Y
OU’LL NEVER GET IT, BUT YOU CAN ASK FOR IT
. I’d just settled back to sip my soda and stare dreamily at the view, when I heard the slam of a car door. I looked out the street-side window just in time to see a pair of work boots and jeans clattering down the stairs. I’m embarrassed to admit I recognized those legs before the head they were eventually attached to ever came into view.
Chris Durand
. I’d had a crush on him in junior high so strong I still felt its echoes.

Busman’s Harbor’s small junior high and high schools were in the same building. In seventh grade, I was assigned the locker next to Chris’s. He was a junior and so handsome I’d go weak in my thirteen-year-old knees whenever he came near. If we happened to be at our lockers at the same time, I could barely breathe.

Chris, football player, reputed wild man, was kind to the shy girl with the crush. “Hey, beautiful,” he’d say, while I fumbled with my lock or dropped my books. “How’s it going?”

We went along like that for two years, until he graduated and I went away to boarding school. For a while, whenever I went home, I’d pump Livvie for the details of Chris’s life. Who was he seeing? How was that going? She was sympathetic, but discouraging. I could tell she felt I wasn’t in his league, so I eventually stopped with the questions.

I sat in my booth blushing furiously at the memory.

Chris placed his order—fried clam roll and coffee to go—and asked Gus, “Anybody here?”

“Julia Snowden. In the back. Take her these.” Making patrons deliver food was just one of Gus’s many charms.

I wasn’t sure Chris would remember who I was. He’d never worked at the clambake, though he’d done just about every other job in town. But I was the only person in the dining room.

“Julia,” Chris said, handing over the red gingham paper boats almost all Gus’s food was served in. “You home now?”

“Just for the summer to help out with the business.”

“Yeah, lots of people have moved home.” For some reason, Chris having the idea I’d crawled back to live in my Mom’s basement mortified me, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that wasn’t the case without sounding defensive. It was such a longer story.

“What are you doing now?” I asked, the best defense being a good offense.

“Oh, you know.” He rolled his impressive shoulders. “This and that. I own Harbor Cab. I landscape in season. And I’m still the bouncer at Crowley’s.”

I could believe it. The impressive shoulders were paired with an impressive set of biceps and a broad chest that tapered to a narrow waist and those long legs—
Geez, Julia. Get ahold of yourself.
“That sounds great,” I stammered.

I was saved by Gus calling to Chris that his order was ready.

“See ya around.” Chris turned and walked away, proving the part about the landscaping. You don’t get a backside like that from driving a cab. I hunkered down in the booth and ate every morsel of Gus’s delicious meal, including the pie.

Since then, whenever we’d end up at Gus’s at the same time, which seemed to be every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, Chris and I ate lunch together. It wasn’t a thing, exactly. I’m not sure what it was. Chris became my sounding board, the person I poured my heart out to, cataloging my troubles, confessing my fear I wouldn’t be able to save the clambake. He was the only person I ever talked to who wasn’t a family member, an employee, or a vendor—in other words, who wasn’t depending on the Snowden Family Clambake financially.

At least, he’d never been a vendor until I’d hired him to help Etienne and Sonny clear the winter’s damage off Morrow Island and get it ready to open for the summer. So Chris knew Morrow Island. Really well. And he’d apparently been the last person in the harbor to see Ray Wilson alive.

It was late afternoon by the time Lieutenant Binder told us we could return to town. Jamie came along on the
Jacquie II
and I was grateful for his presence. He’d worked at the clambake for so many summers it was like having another member of the crew. Somehow I’d missed him on my last couple holiday visits to the harbor, but we’d been so close as children, we fell right back into being comfortable with one another. He was a grown man, very much the cop, but I still saw the boy—long blond hair, nose perpetually peeling, baggy surfer shorts—when I looked at him. Jamie was like a cousin to Livvie and me.

On the ride back, I tried to get him to tell me something, anything, about the investigation. “Do they know yet if Ray Wilson was killed on the island or brought there dead?” I hoped my tone conveyed appropriate concern, not panic or morbid curiosity.

Jamie shut right down. When he was in his new police role, he wasn’t the kid who waited for the school bus with me. He was all business. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“It’s just . . . I keep wondering why the island? Whoever took him there, killed him, and hung him up went to a lot of trouble. Why go through all that? What was the point?”

Jamie’s blond brows rose, providing an even better view of his sky-blue eyes. His look communicated clearly he was getting a lot more out of me asking questions than I was going to get from him by way of answers.

“Just tell me this,” I persisted. “How long do
you
think we’ll be shut down?”

That did get me a look of sympathy, which scared me more than his just-the-facts-ma’am persona. “Julia, I’m sorry. I’m sure Lieutenant Binder told you it will take as long as it takes.”

When we pulled into the harbor, the dock was in chaos. The wedding guests surged toward the boat, shouting questions, while the passengers rushed to get off. Sonny and Jamie immediately took charge, helping people disembark one at a time.

Michaela ran down the gangway and fell weeping into Tony’s arms. He held her close, whispering into her hair. Around them, the crowd quieted, all eyes on the couple. At some point during the afternoon, Michaela had changed out of her wedding gown into a pair of tailored white trousers and a fitted navy blouse that must have been her “going away” outfit. She’d thought she’d be wearing those clothes as she and Tony sailed off as man and wife after their wedding reception. I wondered if she’d ever be able to wear them again.

Damn
. That reminded me I had to cancel the little boat I’d hired to take them away.

The crowd shook itself alive and the low throb of chatter resumed. As Tony walked Michaela off the dock, my sister Livvie came out of our ticket booth, searching the crowd for Sonny and me. When she spotted us, she trotted over and hugged us each in turn.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” She let me go and stared at the two of us. “Oh, my God!”

“What’s it been like here?” I asked.

“Insane.” Livvie cocked her head toward the ticket booth, which I took to mean we should speak more privately. The three of us crowded into the little space, which was claustrophobic for one person . . . and Sonny was a big guy.

“It was awful,” Livvie said. “There were police cars at the entrance to the dock, so people knew right away something was up. They’d walk up looking kind of uncertain and scared by all the uniforms and the people milling around. The state police took names from everyone and asked their relationship to Michaela and Tony. They said someone had died on the island and there wouldn’t be a wedding. The police never exactly said it was a murder, but people aren’t stupid. If it was an accident or a heart attack, why would cops be taking names and asking for their contact info?”

“Did the police question you?” Sonny asked.

Livvie nodded. “They asked a lot about Michaela and Tony. What did we know about them? Why did they hire us to do the reception? Did I know this Ray guy? I told them they had to talk to you, Julia. You were friends with them in New York.”

Friends
was a strong word for my relationship with Michaela, let alone Tony. Michaela and I had run on the periphery of the same crowd when I first got to New York. I assumed that’s how she’d heard I’d moved to Maine to run a place that could host wedding receptions. But she and I had never been close—never been alone just the two of us, that I could remember. Tony was even more distant. Over the last couple of years, I’d seen him with Michaela at big parties, places far too noisy for conversation. I’d gotten to know them only slightly better while we were planning the wedding, but we definitely weren’t friends.

I’d never met Ray at all. For all I knew, he was mixed up in something criminal in New York. I didn’t wish anything worse for Tony and Michaela than they’d already been through, but I fervently hoped if Ray’s death was a homicide, that it was trouble that had followed him to town. As much as I wanted to believe that, I couldn’t reconcile the idea of a criminal from New York taking a man out to our island in the dead of night, landing a boat on our little beach, and then murdering him. Why go to so much trouble? I couldn’t make sense of it.

Out on the dock, the crowd slowly dispersed.

“We should go back to Mom’s. She and Page will be worried,” Livvie said.

“You two go ahead. I’ll be right along.” I had a few things to take care of.

After Livvie and Sonny left, I called the lobster pound and canceled my order for the next day. I hoped they’d be able to sell some of what I’d contracted to other customers. We still had two hundred lobsters stored in the cold water under the dock on Morrow Island, and I didn’t know when we’d be able to use them. I also canceled the clams, the eggs, and the produce.

I was pretty sure, small-town grapevines being what they were, all our employees, let alone everyone in Busman’s Harbor, knew we wouldn’t be opening tomorrow. I sent a group e-mail just in case, grateful this form of communication demanded brevity. No explanations or predictions about the future required.

As I locked up the ticket booth, Sarah Halsey approached. She was one of Livvie’s closest friends and a teacher at Busman’s Elementary. Both she and her mother worked summers at the clambake. Neither of them had been booked to work at the wedding—the smaller crowd meant a lighter staff—but they were both scheduled to work the next day, which should have been the first day the Snowden Family Clambake was open to the general public.

“No work tomorrow, huh?” Sarah said it pleasantly, but I could hear the tiny bit of worry in her voice. Teachers in Maine don’t get paid much, and she was the single parent to a nine-year-old son.

“Not tomorrow, Sarah.”

“What do you think about Monday?”

What indeed?
“I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

“Thanks, Julia. Take care.”

“’Bye, Sarah. See you . . . soon.”

I walked the block from the town dock to my mother’s house. Perched at the peak of the hill that formed the residential part of Busman’s Harbor, the house was a solid foursquare with a cupola on top of its flat, mansard roof. The house was painted a deep yellow with dark green trim and you could see it from anywhere around, land or sea. I always felt it was like a bright beacon leading me home.

My father bought the house for my mother before I was born. A town person marrying a summer person was unusual, but even rarer when my parents wed thirty-two years ago—especially a union between a high school educated boy and a girl from a family who owned an island. My father built the Snowden Family Clambake Company because he loved my mother. He understood that even though she loved him, she wasn’t prepared to be poor. Her hopes and dreams weren’t outlandish, but she expected a roof over her head, heat in the winter, and to give her daughters the same kind of education she had received. So my father built the clambake company to provide all that, and to keep Morrow Island in the family. For my mother, who loved it.

When I came along, I dutifully followed the path my parents set for me. Prep school in New Hampshire, college in Massachusetts, business school in New York City followed by a job at a top venture capital firm, each step taking me farther in every way from Maine.

My sister Livvie, two years younger, rebelled at every chance. She’d finally flunked out of so many prep schools my parents relented and let her finish high school in the harbor. At eighteen, she got engaged to Sonny Ramsey whose father was a local lobsterman. She got married and got pregnant, though not, as she’ll cheerfully tell you, “necessarily in that order.” She gave birth to my niece Page.

Our life trajectories seemed set. Livvie stayed in Maine with her little family and she and Sonny joined the clambake business. My life was in Manhattan. But then came Dad’s awful diagnosis and his death, followed by the recession, and finally, the frantic phone call from Livvie. So, I was back in the last place I expected to be.

I found Mom in the kitchen with Page, my nine-year-old niece. Mom stood at the counter chopping vegetables for salad. She was small like me. Or rather, I was small like her. Livvie got my father’s height and athletic build and auburn hair. I got Mom’s petite blondness. But that was where our resemblance ended. My mother was all romance. I was all practicality.

Page folded dinner napkins at the kitchen table, her head bobbing up and down to a tune playing in her head. She had Sonny’s fiery red hair and Livvie’s tall, swimmer’s build. She’d be a gorgeous adult, but I feared in the next few years she’d grow to hate her bright hair, lightly freckled skin, and height. I hoped with all my heart she’d mature through that phase and remain the special person she was. Page’s warmth, innocence, and humor had held our family together during my Dad’s illness and gave us all, especially my mother, a reason to go on afterward.

“Julia, how are you?” Mom’s eyes slid meaningfully toward Page. I understood we weren’t to discuss murder in front of my niece. Ray Wilson’s death would be the talk of our little town for weeks to come, so Livvie and Sonny would have to find a way to explain it, but later, in their own home.

I responded, “Fine,” in the same chipper tone my mother had used. “What’s for dinner?”

“Lobster mac and cheese.” Mom indicated the contents of the heavy glass pan bubbling away in the oven.

“Oh—”

“Livvie made it this morning before she went to work.”

Thank goodness.
My mother was a terrible cook. Livvie, on the other hand, was world-class, and lobster mac and cheese was one of her specialties.

“Why don’t you let Page and I finish up?” Mom said.

The rich aroma of sweet lobster meat and sharp cheese filled the room. My tummy rumbled in response, reminding me I’d eaten next to nothing all day.

I grabbed a Sea Dog ale from the fridge and joined Livvie and Sonny on our wide front porch. The heavy, wood-framed windows were still up and I looked through the wavy glass out toward the harbor and its six tiny islands. Morrow Island was farther out, beyond the harbor’s mouth. My mother claimed she could see it from the cupola at the top of our house. Sonny, Livvie, and I knew that was impossible, but in the years since my father’s death, we’d given up arguing with her.

“I’ll take these porch windows down tomorrow, put up the screens,” Sonny said. “Might as well. No work.”

“So what do we think?” Livvie asked from her seat on the porch swing. “Who did it?” Like most Mainers, Livvie was nothing if not direct.

“From the questions the cops asked you, sounds like they think it’s trouble Wilson brought with him from New York,” Sonny answered. He turned toward me. “Were these people into something shady there?”

“I don’t know. I barely know Tony and I’d never met Ray.” I flashed on the body hanging from the grand staircase at Windsholme.

“So that’s it then,” Livvie was as eager as I was to pin the murder on outsiders.

“But why on the island?” I asked them the question that had bugged me from the beginning.

When no one had an answer, Sonny offered an alternative. “Chris Durand was the last to person in the harbor to see the dead guy.”

“I’m sure Chris had nothing to do with it,” I responded, a little too vehemently.

“Julia, I know you and Chris have this
thing
,” Sonny said. “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have done it.”

“What
thing
?” I glared at Livvie.
Betrayer
.

“That thing where you eat lunch with him at Gus’s three times a week,” Sonny answered.

Oh, that thing.
I remembered what I hated about living in a small town.

Sonny continued relentlessly. “I know you have a big blind spot where Chris Durand is concerned, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t involved.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do,” Sonny insisted. “He’s been in and out of trouble since high school.”

I looked at Livvie to see if she was going to give me any help, but she sat on the swing, apparently in agreement with her husband.

“Chris is a respected citizen of Busman’s Harbor.” My voice rose. “He owns three businesses in this town. God forbid if we were all judged by the things we did in high school. You especially, Sonny.”

“You don’t live here, Julia,” Sonny raised his voice to meet my own. “I do. I hear stuff. Current stuff.”

“What stuff?” I demanded. I’d been arguing with Sonny so long and hard all spring, it was reflexive. I yelled, he yelled. Such a well-worn road.

“Dinner.”

The three of us had been so caught up, we hadn’t heard Page open the front door. “What are you guys fighting about?”

“Nothing important, honey,” Livvie jumped off the swing and moved toward her daughter. “You know how Daddy and Aunt Julia are.”

“Always yelling,” Page grumbled.

Livvie put an arm around Page and escorted her into the house, followed by Sonny. I brought up the rear. Passing him on the way into the dining room, driven, as always, to have the last word, I hissed, “Even if Chris had something to do with it, which I totally discount, it still doesn’t answer the question
why on the island
?”