Clammed Up (5 page)

I climbed the steps from Gus’s restaurant to the street. Gus was right. Nobody in town cared as much about solving the murder of Ray Wilson as I did. But that didn’t mean I knew what to do.

I did absolutely know what I
didn’t
want to do. Yet, inescapably, it was the thing I had to do next.

A couple months earlier when they booked the reception, Michaela and Tony had given me a deposit for half the wedding costs. Yesterday morning, before the whole day exploded, they’d given me a check for the balance. Depositing the second check would be wrong. Our contract gave me the right to, but Michaela and Tony hadn’t, at the end of the day, had a wedding. The circumstances were so extraordinary I didn’t think it was the right time to be a stickler for legalities. But I was already out of pocket for more than the original deposit check covered.

I needed to have a conversation with Tony and Michaela about money, and much as I didn’t want to have it on the day after their best man was found murdered and their wedding spoiled, I did want to have it in person. That meant catching them while they were still in town.

I dialed their hotel room from my cell.

Michaela picked up and told me they’d just returned from another interview with the state police. They’d meet me in the hotel dining room for coffee.

Michaela and Tony had stayed overnight in the honeymoon suite at the Bellevue Inn, a rambling wooden structure on the other side of the harbor from the hotels and B&Bs where their guests were staying. I’m sure the isolation had seemed like a great idea when they made their reservation, though I wondered how they were feeling about it now.

The breakfast crowd had almost cleared out of the dining room by the time I got to the Bellevue. I spotted Michaela and Tony in a quiet corner and rushed toward Michaela to give her a hug. She stood and returned it. Even more than I had with Chris, I felt like she and I were comrades who’d been to war together, and talking about money seemed even more uncomfortable. But once I’d sat down and poured a cup of coffee from the carafe on the table, Tony leveled his gaze at me and said, “You’re here about the bill.”

I knew they were paying for the wedding themselves, and I’m not sure why, but I had the impression Tony was the source of most of the funds. I nodded, indicating I was, indeed, there to talk about the money.

“How much are you out of pocket over and above our original deposit?” Tony asked.

“The lobsters are alive, stored under our dock,” I said. “If the police give us permission to open tomorrow, I can use them. And I can resell the liquor. But the rest of the food, the flowers, and the fuel for one roundtrip on the
Jacquie II . . .
”

I gave a figure and, to his credit, Tony didn’t flinch. Across the table, Michaela remained silent, though she did sigh softly when I mentioned the flowers. I was sure she was thinking about her hopes for a beautiful day and all she’d lost.

“And the labor cost?” Tony prompted.

That was the part of the conversation I dreaded. People were the biggest expense of running the clambake. True, most of the employees hadn’t actually worked. But they’d lost the day and most couldn’t afford to lose the wages. I gave Tony the amount.

“And the gratuity?”

A service charge would have been added to the bill to be pooled and split by the employees. But that was the problem. There had been no service. I hesitated.

“Just tell me how much.” Tony sat, pencil poised over the paper napkin he’d been taking notes on. “I want to pay it all. There’s no reason for your employees to suffer because of what happened.”

I named another figure. Tony wrote it down. As he added up the numbers, I studied him and Michaela. If long-term couples grow to look alike, they had a significant head start. Both were dark-haired and dark-eyed, and each possessed a pair of perfectly arched eyebrows. His were not in the least feminine, and hers were not at all masculine, but both pairs were striking in their shape. Each had a gender-appropriate version of the same long-limbed body, and they moved with the kind of casual grace the rest of us noticed and envied. As I watched them, Tony reached across the table without even looking at Michaela and grabbed her hand as if he always knew by some sort of built-in sonar where every part of her body was in relation to his own.

I genuinely liked Michaela, but something about Tony caused me to keep my guard up. I was relieved he was willing to pay the employees. It would be much harder to manage the clambake if word got around we’d stiffed people. But he was being too agreeable. Too generous. Why? Did he want to get this sad business over and done? Or did he have some other reason to care whether the citizens of Busman’s Harbor thought well of him?

“What are you planning for the rest of your day?” I asked.

“The police said we could leave, so we’re headed to Bath to spend time with Tony’s parents.” Michaela’s dabbed at her eyes with her napkin.

I looked at Tony. “You’re from Bath?” That was a surprise. Bath was just a twenty-five minute drive south along Maine’s jagged coast.

“Both Ray and I are. Were,” Tony replied. “We grew up together.”

How could I not have known? I could’ve sworn when Tony introduced me to his parents on board the
Jacquie II
, he said they’d just flown up from Florida. Then again, that wasn’t an unusual migration for an older Maine couple.

“That’s why we chose your place for the wedding,” Michaela said.

“I thought it was because you knew me in New York.”

Michaela shook her head. “No, no, no. Tony picked your place.”

Tony signaled for the waitress and signed the bill for our coffee. “We’ve got to get going and pack the cars,” he said to Michaela.

“Cars?” I said. “You didn’t ride up together?”

“Michaela came up early to meet her family,” Tony answered. “I was supposed to drive up with Ray, but when he came to pick me up, he had a big camp trunk taking up the whole backseat of his Porsche. There was no way his little car was going to fit me, Ray, his luggage, and all my luggage for the wedding and the honeymoon. So I drove myself up.” Tony shook his head and smiled. “Freakin’ Ray.”

Big camp trunk? Wasn’t that a little odd? “What did he say was in the trunk?”

“He didn’t. Some stupid thing would be my guess.” Tony smiled again indulgently. “Some prop for the best man speech or some other prank.”

“Did you tell the police about the trunk?”

“They didn’t ask. But they took all the stuff from his hotel room into evidence and towed his car from the lot at the Lighthouse Inn, so I guess they’ve found the trunk by now.”

On my way back across the footbridge, I stopped halfway, took off my sweatshirt, and tied it around my waist. The day was still cool, but the sun was beginning to work its magic. A perfect day for a clambake. It was supposed to be our first day open to the general public for the season. I didn’t want to think about it.

I put my elbows on the rough wooden handrail and stared across the harbor, past its little islands to its mouth. Ray was from Bath, Maine. That increased the odds tremendously that he had the skills to get himself out to Morrow Island in the dark. It also meant he knew people who lived not too far away from Busman’s Harbor. For the first time, I began to believe Ray’s murder was the result of some trouble that had followed him to Morrow Island.

Even if some out-of-towner, whether from New York or Bath, had killed Ray, I still couldn’t imagine why the murder was committed on our island. And why had Ray’s body been left hanging in Windsholme?

I looked out at the harbor. Over the last few months, it had come alive. When I arrived in March, there’d been no boats in the frozen water. By the end of April, most of the working lobster and fishing boats were out or at least being readied for the season. In May, the tour boats came—day boats and whale watchers, the ferries to Chipmunk Island, and our own
Jacquie II
. Now the pleasure boats were beginning to arrive—cabin cruisers, beautiful sailboats, catamarans, and the yachts. Some came from Florida or the Caribbean, others from just down the coast. It felt great to see the harbor bustling, and I stood for a moment and enjoyed it all—the sun, the salt air, the
clang-clang
of the warning buoys out on the water.

On a map, Busman’s Harbor looked like the silhouette of the head and claws of a lobster dangling from the Maine coast into the sea. The residential part of town was built on the lobster’s head, my parents’ house sitting at its highest point. Off the lobster’s right shoulder was the inner harbor, lined with hotels and restaurants. On the other side, off the lobster’s left shoulder, was the back harbor where the working boats were anchored. The boatyard was there, with Gus’s restaurant nestled just beyond it. The points of land that made up the lobster’s claws surrounded the big outer harbor as if holding it in an embrace, and left an opening to the ocean just wide and deep enough for commercial traffic. These points, where the millionaires lived, were called Eastclaw and Westclaw.

As I stood on the footbridge, drinking in the sights and sounds of the awakening harbor, I was surprised to see the Boston Whaler we kept at Morrow Island speeding toward the town dock. I squinted to see who was in it. The royal blue baseball cap and matching windbreaker told me it was Etienne steering the small boat. I hurried the rest of the way across the footbridge to meet him.

Etienne tied up the Whaler and was just coming up the dock when I got there.

“Hey there,” I called. “What are you doing here?” I tried to sound chipper, as though my question was motivated by simple curiosity, but that’s not the way I felt. I wanted to say
I was counting on you to stay on the island and make sure those people from the crime scene investigation team don’t destroy it.
Or,
I’m surprised the police let you off the island.
Or,
You hardly ever leave the island during the summer.
But I didn’t say any of those things.

“The lieutenant wants to talk to me again.”

So Lieutenant Binder isn’t out supervising the crime scene team on the island. He must be the one Chris, Tony and Michaela had their interviews with this morning.
I said to Etienne, “I’m sorry this has been such an ordeal for you.”

“The police are convinced I must have heard something that night. To tell you the truth, I am happy to be off the island. They have asked us to stay in the house. Out the windows, we see them searching every blade of grass, stomping in and out of Windsholme with their dirty boots. It is like a violation. I could not stand to watch. That sergeant said to come to town. So I have.”

I believed what Etienne said, he couldn’t stand to see the state police having their way with the island. He probably also couldn’t stand sitting in his house. Being still wasn’t one of his talents. He was built for constant work.

Etienne and Gabrielle had a nice house on the mainland where they spent the off-season. It was an old farmhouse with a pond, just a couple miles out of town. During the winter, he toiled in his woodshop making large wooden animal sculptures that were sold in shops up and down the coast. She hand sewed quilts that fetched breathtaking prices in the same stores. They always rented their farmhouse out for the entire summer season. The same family had taken it for years.

“How’s Gabrielle doing with all this?”

“Not well. I tried to get her to come to town with me, but she doesn’t like to leave the island in the summer. She’s lying down.”

Gabrielle lying down in the middle of the day? I could barely imagine it.

She had always been shy and far more self-conscious about her English than was warranted. It was actually quite fluent when you got her talking, but that was rare. An angular woman with graying hair cut in a neat pageboy, she wore dresses, never pants, and sensible shoes. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her, morning, noon, or night without an apron on. When we were little, Livvie and I had giggled about Gabrielle wearing her apron to bed. She had a vast collection, mostly floral prints, bib-front style, she’d made herself.

Livvie had told me Gabrielle’s shyness had become even more severe in recent years. She was too wedded to her routines and her places, Livvie thought. Changes in plans and unexpected events made her anxious and there had been so many unexpected events on Morrow Island in the last two days.

“She waits for him,” Etienne said.

His expression was so sad I reached out and touched his shoulder. It was solid muscle. “I know.”

Etienne and Gabrielle’s son, Jean-Jacques, had been a year ahead of me in school. He was quiet like his mother and a hard worker like both his parents. We’d grown up together on the island and worked at the clambake every summer. Jean-Jacques and I had had an easy day-to-day relationship, like siblings. But he was hard to know.

At school, his parents’ foreignness made him something of a curiosity. We had that “outsiderness” in common. He with his Québécois parents, and me with the mother who’d been a summer person. Following high school, he’d gone to the University of Maine, but it didn’t take. He drifted back, worked different jobs in the harbor, and joined the army after 9/11. He stayed in for two tours, first to Afghanistan, and then Iraq.

Six years ago, his parents held a party for him when he was home on leave. I wasn’t there, but my parents were, along with Livvie and Sonny. Jean-Jacques had accepted everyone’s well wishes in his quiet way, then walked out of the house, down the road, and was never seen again. At least, as far as I or anyone in my family knew. Perhaps Etienne and Gabrielle knew more, but they didn’t say.

It might have seemed strange to many people that Gabrielle waited for Jean-Jacques in a place with no phones or cell coverage, a place that could only be reached by boat. But I understood her vigil. Morrow Island was where Jean-Jacques had spent every summer of his childhood. It was as much in his blood as it was in mine. That’s where he would return.

Etienne and I stood in silence for a moment, lost in our own thoughts.

“I’ll walk with you.”

“To the police station?”

“Now that I’m sure Lieutenant Binder’s there, I want to ask him again when we can open.”