Fogged Inn (A Maine Clambake Mystery Book 4) (6 page)

“You were that close?”

“Barry practically slid under the Volvo. I pulled him out and up onto his feet. He’s a big guy, and with the ice it wasn’t easy. No doubt his backside’s black and blue today. But he was fine, came up embarrassed and sputtering at Jamie and Howland about their incompetence, when were they going to clear the scene so he could go home, etcetera.

“Jamie took one look at Barry, smelled his breath, and told him he shouldn’t be driving in the near term regardless. Then he pulled me aside and cautioned me about overserving. I said, ‘Officer Dawes, it would be helpful to know when you expect to open the road so I know when to cut people off.’ Jamie hemmed and hawed and said there had been complications. Finally he said he’d call or come over to the restaurant when it looked like they were wrapping up. Then he repeated his warning about overserving, which just pissed both me and Barry off.

“So that was it. Phil put an arm around Barry and we all made our way, slowly and carefully, up the hill back to the restaurant. You heard us report when we got back that there’d been ‘complications’ and the cops didn’t know when the road would open.”

“You didn’t mention anything about Barry’s fall when you got back to the restaurant.”

“It didn’t seem tactful. The only thing hurting worse than Barry’s backside was his dignity. He had to be soaking wet. He must have been uncomfortable the rest of the evening.”

“Was there any sign of what the complications at the accident site were?”

“Nope. Not injuries, I don’t think, unless one ambulance had already left. The one that was there was idling. The crew stood outside it. Ben Kramer was out of his truck, walking around.”

“And the other driver?”

“Didn’t see him. Maybe he was injured. Anyway, why all this interest in the accident?”

“It seems odd to me that there was a serious accident and a guy murdered in our walk-in the same night. I think they must be connected.”

“Julia.” Chris sighed. “I can’t imagine how. And maybe, just this one time, we should let the professionals handle it?”

Chris said he had to hurry and get to poker, so we signed off. I didn’t make any commitment not to get involved, nor did he expect me to. Murder had come straight to our doorstep, over our threshold, and into our home. Of course I would help out any way I could.

After we hung up, I sat on our broken-down couch and looked around the apartment. The big window framed a black sky, unbroken by stars or ambient light. The sun set early in December, especially when you were as far east in a time zone as coastal Maine. I let my thoughts wander. It had been a long, stress-filled day. Le Roi jumped up and settled beside me, purring loudly. He loved it when I was home and sitting still; it was such a rarity.

Suddenly I sat bolt upright, disturbing Le Roi, who meowed in protest. There it was. The fuzzy thing I’d felt was important but hadn’t been able to remember. All four of the couples that had come to the restaurant the night before had paid with gift certificates!

Because they’d stayed so long and drunk lots of extra coffee and after-dinner drinks, they all gave me some cash or a credit card at the end of the night, so I’d forgotten, burying the coincidence somewhere in my sleep-deprived subconscious.

Gus had an ancient, gigantic cash register on which he rang up his sales. He didn’t take credit cards, or checks for that matter. Chris and I were improvising. I ran credit cards through an app on my phone, and we kept cash in a cigar box that sat behind the bar. At the end of the night I hid it under my bed until I could get to the bank the next day to deposit whatever cash we weren’t keeping to make change.

I got down on my knees and felt under the bed until I pulled out the wooden cigar box. The four gift certificates were still in there, and as I suspected, the serial numbers were in order. The certificates looked real, but then I’d designed them based on a popular template I’d found on the web. The only thing that was off was the expiration date. Maine law prohibited expiration dates on gift cards. Yet there was a date on each one—November 30. Yesterday. Henry Caswell was the only person who had mentioned the date, but all the couples thought that their certificates were about to expire.

Heart pounding, I went to my desk. I fired up my laptop and looked at the spreadsheet I’d created to track the gift certificates. Gift certificates represented a liability to a business. Once you accepted the money, you owed the goods and they were carried on your books as a debt, so it was important to know how many were out there and for what amounts.

We hadn’t sold many. I’d started offering them only at the end of October. Sales had started slow but picked up as we got closer to Thanksgiving. I assumed it was because of the holidays. Gift certificates for a nice dinner were a great gift for an older parent or a couple on a tight budget who deserved a treat.

On my spreadsheet, I’d matched the purchaser with the serial number of the gift certificate. I’d created the gift certificates on my laptop. So as not to embarrass myself, I’d started the serial numbers at 100001 instead of 1. The four gift certificates I’d collected the night before had been sold during the first week of November as a part of a lot of five. That raised so many questions. First of all, who had bought them? I checked the app I used to process credit cards. It didn’t store or provide much information, just told me the credit card had been approved and gave me a transaction number. Yet I must have written down the name of the person who bought them. I had to have mailed the certificates to the purchaser somehow. I searched through the notebook I kept next to my computer, looking for the information. Nothing. Then I searched my e-mails and found nothing. I must have written the name and address on a scrap of paper and thrown it away.

I checked my phone. If the buyer hadn’t e-mailed, he or she must have called. But again, we were improvising, using my cell phone for reservations and other calls to Gus’s Too. As a result, I’d become even more attentive than usual about checking messages and deleting the ones I had dealt with.

As I’d feared, there were no calls on my phone from unknown numbers. I couldn’t find what I needed, because I’d thrown out a scrap of paper and cleaned out my voice mail box. Hoist by my own anal-retentive petard, as it were.

I called Lieutenant Binder but was sent straight to voice mail. I left a terse message about discovering something odd.

After thinking about it for a moment, I took most of the cash the customers had given me the night before and moved it to my wallet. I’d stop at the ATM to deposit it the next time I went out. I left the cigar box with the gift certificates in it on my desk, next to my laptop. That way I would be certain to remember to take them to the police station in the morning.

* * *

I went back to the couch, but exhausted as I was, I couldn’t settle. I realized I had to eat something for dinner. My refrigerator was cleared out for Gus as I’d promised, and the one downstairs was barricaded by crime scene tape. Over a mostly lazy weekend, we’d finished off the last bits of Thanksgiving turkey at my mother’s house. Her larder was as bare as my own. The supermarket closed at six in the off-season. It was almost seven.

I resigned myself to the only alternative left to me, unless I wanted to take a long drive off the peninsula, which I most certainly did not. I had to go to Hole in the Wall Pizza, the most depressing food emporium in the Western world. Since my return, I’d discovered by dint of experimentation that their Greek salad was passable—if you didn’t mind limp lettuce and picked your way around the pinkish tomatoes, which were as hard as baseballs and about as tasteless. As long as you didn’t order any “extras” like grilled chicken on the salad, your meal was likely to be edible. I’d made that mistake once, and whatever it was on that salad, it wasn’t chicken.

I called in my order. The owner had a passel of adult children who all seemed to work in unpredictable shifts. Each one had a unique spin on the Greek salad, and I wondered what I would get. Then I went downstairs and walked out into the parking lot, headed to my mom’s house to pick up my car, which I kept in her garage.

Just as I passed the Dumpster, my sister, Livvie, cruised into the parking lot in her ancient minivan. “You ready?” she called.

“Ready for what?”

She pantomimed an exaggerated sigh. “For the Sit’n’Knit. Don’t tell me you forgot.”

I had. I had completely forgotten the Sit’n’Knit. “It’s been a crazy day,” I answered.

“So I’ve heard.”

News of the body in the walk-in would be all over town. But that wasn’t the only reason I’d forgotten the Sit’n’Knit. Livvie had decided if I was going to stay in Busman’s Harbor permanently, I needed to make friends, and she’d put herself in charge of the operation. I wasn’t so sure. I had a new business and a new boyfriend, and I could have immersed myself entirely in those endeavors. But Livvie didn’t think that was healthy, and when Livvie had strong opinions, things usually went her way.

I stood outside her car, looking at her in the light of the dash. My rebellious little sister had grown into a gorgeous twenty-eight-year-old woman, with a strong face, chiseled cheekbones, a straight nose, and long auburn hair. She was expecting her second child in February, almost ten years to the day after she’d given birth to her first. While I’d gone on to prep school, college, business school, and a job in Manhattan, Livvie had stayed in Busman’s Harbor, married her high school sweetheart and raised a child.

I’d always been the good girl and she the wild one, but in the decade since the birth of my beloved niece, Page, somehow our roles had reversed. Now I was dating the bad boy with a past and she was the stable wife and mother. In that time, our ages had reversed as well. Now she was the older, wiser sister and had taken to bossing me around. Or at least trying.

I wasn’t so sure about the Sit’n’Knit. It was conceived as counterprogramming to Sam Rockmaker’s poker night and was roughly composed of the wives and girlfriends of the men who played in the game. For the most part, the women were married and had children, and the talk tended toward colic and daycare. I wasn’t bored by it, but despite Livvie’s best intentions, it made me feel even more like an outsider.

I started to make my excuses. “I don’t think I can go tonight,” I said.

“Get in the car.”

“No, really. I’m so terrible at the knitting.”

“It’s not about the knitting, Julia.”

“I haven’t eaten. I called a Greek salad into Hole in the Wall.”

“We’ll pick it up on the way.”

Game. Set. Match. I still wasn’t used to losing to my sister. I went back to my apartment and grabbed the bag that contained my knitting things. As I climbed into Livvie’s minivan, I said, “What I’m really worried about is everyone grilling me about the body in the walk-in.”

“It’s not always about you, Julia,” Livvie said, stepping on the gas.

* * *

After we picked up the salad, we drove halfway up the peninsula. Livvie turned off the highway and bumped carefully down a dark lane toward the home of this week’s hostess. I was glad I wasn’t trying to find the place on my own. Finally, we turned into a circular drive and saw warm lights shining from every window of a large, Cape Cod–style house. When we got out of the car, I caught one of my favorite aromas—wood burning in a fireplace nearby.

We entered through a breezeway between the house proper and the garage into a spacious mudroom. Following Livvie’s lead, I left my work boots in a line of similar footwear and padded into the house in my socks.

As soon as I entered the kitchen, I realized the house was newly built, not an old Cape. What I’d taken as the second floor was actually an illusion. The rooms on the main floor soared to the roofline, full of windows and skylights that must have made the house bright even on a winter day.

Most of the knitters were already there, drinking mulled wine from blue mugs around the kitchen island. The evening’s hostess, Kendra Carter, greeted me warmly. Then she took the pitiful to-go container of Greek salad and deftly emptied it into a green-trimmed soup bowl. As she did this, I apologized for not eating before I came.

“Don’t even think about it. You’ve had a tough day, I know.”

Kendra led us into a spacious great room dominated by a fireplace, which contained a roaring fire. There was plenty of seating, so everyone found a spot and rooted in their knitting bags, while I sat outside the circle and focused on my salad. Kendra took a seat in a comfy-looking chair by the fireplace and removed a portion of a delicate, white shawl from her canvas bag. She had curly brown hair she wore pulled back in a low ponytail and had a magnificent smile that crinkled upward to her rosy cheeks and chocolate brown eyes. She and Livvie had been close friends at Busman’s Harbor High School, but each had gone her own way—Livvie to marriage and pregnancy, though not, as she would cheerfully tell you, in that order; Kendra to university and then a PhD in marine biology. Along the way, she’d acquired a husband and two kids, and now she’d returned to work at the oceanography lab on Westclaw Point, site of some of the best jobs in town. She crossed one long, lean leg over another and began to knit. She’d been back in town only for a year, yet she appeared perfectly at ease in her surroundings and with these women. I envied her easy integration into Busman’s Harbor, which seemed in particular contrast to my own.

I finished my salad, took the bowl to the kitchen, rinsed it, and put it in the dishwasher. In the beautiful room, I looked at the childish drawings on the bulletin board and marveled that friendly, calm Kendra seemed to have it all—job, family, happy home.

When I got back to the great room, all eyes were on me.

“Spill,” Livvie commanded. “What happened at Gus’s this morning?”

I gave them the shorthand version, the one that had to be all over town already. A stranger—no, I didn’t recognize him or know his name—had died in Gus’s walk-in. The ME had questions about the death, so the state police were in town investigating.

“You mean he was murdered,” someone clarified.

“Maybe. Probably. The police are waiting for lab tests.”

“So this murderer was in the restaurant last night, after everyone left?” Kendra asked, her pretty brow wrinkled.

I didn’t answer. I truly didn’t know, but I was sure everyone took my silence as a yes. I decided to turn the tables and start asking questions of my own before the evening turned into an interrogation.

“Do any of you know the Bennetts, Phil and Deborah? They live on Eastclaw Point,” I asked.

“Sure,” Kendra answered. “Were they in the restaurant last night?”

“Yes.” I didn’t see any harm in answering.

A few people nodded. Marley Bletcher, former middle-school class clown and one of the few other singles in the group, pulled back the skin on her face that same way I’d done when talking to Chris, imitating Deborah’s plastic surgery. “She comes into Hannaford’s all the time.” Marley was a checkout clerk at our local chain supermarket.

“Their home was on the Garden Club’s house tour last summer,” someone added. “It’s amazing. Gorgeous. Huge. She’s a decorator.”

“And what about him?” I asked.

“Retired,” Kendra answered. “I think he was something in Big Pharma.”

“He’s a big farmah?” Marley asked. “Because he doesn’t seem like a farmah to me.”

“He was an executive with a large pharmaceutical company,” Kendra corrected gently.

“When did they start staying in town year-round?” I asked.

“This is their first winter,” Kendra answered. “They have two boys, mid-thirties, a little older than us.” She looked at me. “They’re close to Chris’s age. Maybe he knows them?”

Summer kids?
I doubted it. I shook my head.

“Anyway,” Kendra continued, “he’s retired and they’re here full-time. They completely did over that house. Still, it’s an isolated place to live in the winter. All the neighbors are gone for miles out to the point.”