Fogged Inn (13 page)

“Get what?”

“All of it,” I said. “Someone gathered these particular couples at the restaurant. And whoever it was is now covering up by stealing the evidence. Whoever it was wanted those four couples, plus someone else, to be there. One gift certificate was never redeemed.”

Chris knit his brow. “The cops have bigger problems to deal with. They don't know who this dead guy is. They have the missing driver from the accident at Main and Main. If I were them, I'd be trying to figure out the murder victim's identity as the path to figuring out who'd want to kill him. You would too.”

“You know about the missing driver?” A weight lifted off my shoulders. Jamie had asked me not to tell Chris, and I hadn't.

“Julia, everyone in town knows.”

I should have figured. At least I was out from under my promise to Jamie.

The next morning I was awakened by the reassuring sounds of clunking and banging and the smell of bacon frying coming from downstairs. It was wonderful to wake up to a relatively normal day. Of course that also meant Gus's Too would be open for dinner.

Chris rolled out of bed not long after me and was immediately on the phone with a supplier. In the background as I dressed, I heard him dickering about the price of scallops. They were in season—draggers were out along the Maine coast—but most of the catch would go to fish markets and restaurants throughout the northeast. It would be challenging to fill our relatively tiny order at a reasonable cost. Gratefully, I left him to it and headed down to Gus's.

Gus was busy, but in a normal Thursday sort of way, not like it had been the morning before. With the crime scene tape gone, the gawking opportunity was over. Gus worked like a demon behind the counter filling orders. I wandered back and poured myself a cup of coffee.

Across the dining room I saw a familiar hand in the air waving me over. “Yoo-hoo,” Fee Snugg called. I took my coffee and sat down in the sisters' booth. Vee's plate was piled with Gus's scrumptious blueberry pancakes, while Vee attacked two eggs over easy with a piece of toast. It was wonderful to see these two women, who worked so hard giving breakfast to tourists all summer, enjoying themselves at Gus's.

“I'm glad I caught you,” Fee said. “After we talked last night, I couldn't stop thinking about where I've seen that Caroline Caswell before. It drove me crazy. And then it came to me. At the yacht club.”

“The Caswells are members of the yacht club?”

“No. Or I don't know,” Fee clarified. “I'm not talking about now. She's in one of those old photos of the yacht club dances that line the hallway. I'd recognize her anywhere.” She hesitated. “Is it helpful I've remembered?”

“It could be.” If Caroline wasn't really a newcomer to Busman's Harbor, perhaps she had connections in town I didn't know about. “Thanks. I'll go over after breakfast and check it out.”

Gus appeared at the edge of the booth to take my order.

“Was the kitchen door locked when you came in this morning?” I asked.

“Ayuh. Thanky. Whaddya want for breakfast?”

“Oatmeal, maple syrup, raisins. Thanks.”

“Comin' up.”

After we finished breakfast, I went back to my apartment. Chris completed a call with another supplier while Le Roi sat on the coffee table, regarding him with suspicion. Le Roi's attitude was that he was the apartment's original tenant. Chris was an interloper.

“I'm off to pick up supplies, and I'll take the lock off the door downstairs to see if I can replace it or get parts. The seafood and produce trucks will be delivering this afternoon,” Chris said. “Can you be here as soon as Gus closes to help with prep?”

With all our do-ahead food gone, thrown out as a result of the police search, prep would be especially challenging.

“Sure.”

“Where're you off to now?”

“The yacht club.”

Chris tilted his head. “A little off-season for that?”

“Something I want to look into.”

He grinned. “Be careful.”

“Always am. Gus said to thank you for locking the door.”

“Always do,” Chris said, and I knew enough to leave the subject alone.

* * *

The Busman's Harbor Yacht Club sounded a lot more hoity-toity than it was. Not far from Gus's on the working side of Busman's Harbor, mostly it was a place to moor pleasure boats. Although some of the yachts there in the summer were pretty spectacular, most of the vessels were fairly modest sailboats and motorboats. The club also kept a small fleet of sailboats, and their school was where almost every kid in the community, summer and local, learned to sail. In the summer, I loved watching the parade of little yellow boats as the students followed each other around the harbor like ducklings.

The clubhouse itself was a ramshackle affair with a room full of wooden lockers for stowing boat-related gear at one end of a long hallway and a community room, which had all the charm of a drafty elementary school gym, at the other. The front door was locked, as I expected. Nothing worth stealing was stored over the winter, but the members didn't want teenagers using their empty building as a hangout.

I went in search of Bud Barbour, who owned a small boat repair business just down from the yacht club and who picked up extra money as its caretaker.

Bud's repair shop was locked up tight, riding out the quiet time until spring when boats were readied for the water. I climbed onto his deck and rapped on the back door. Morgan, his black lab, barked a noisy greeting from inside. In the background I heard explosions and gunfire. Old Bud was a dedicated video gamer.

“Coming!”

I waited in the cold while Bud killed off a few more bad guys and finally made his way to the door.

“Howdy, Julia. What brings you here on this dreary day?”

“I need the key to the yacht club.”

Bud pursed his lips behind his Santa Claus beard. “What fer?”

I'd learned in similar circumstances that when I was as specific and truthful as possible, people didn't ask as many questions as you might expect. “I need to take a look at one of the photos in the hallway.”

If someone had said that to me, I certainly would have wanted to know why, but evidently my activities were not as interesting to Bud as I imagined.

“I'll get the key for you.” He shuffled into the dark innards of the house and reappeared with a key chained to an enormous wooden tag that said
YACHT CLUB. “
You be sure to bring this back, Julia Snowden,” Bud said as he handed it to me. “I know where you live.”

I walked the key back to the yacht club and unlocked the outside door. The electricity had been turned off for the season, but in the first room, the locker room, there were plenty of windows to provide light, even on a gray day. The floor-to-ceiling wooden lockers were three feet wide and three feet deep to accommodate the oars, outboard motors, life vests, and other boating paraphernalia kept there. I admired the polished oak of the lockers. The yacht club might not be fancy or showy, but it was quality built.

The long hallway was reasonably light at each end due to the windows in the locker room and community room, but the middle was completely in shadow. The walls were lined with photographs, one after another, each at eye level. I realized too late I should have asked Fee for more details about the photo of Caroline she remembered.

The images of the yacht club dances were in chronological order up one side of the long hall and down the other. So the ones nearest the locker room door were way too old on one wall and too new on the opposite side to have Caroline in them. The yacht club dance was a right of passage for summer families, a special treat, only for the college-age kids. It was originally billed as a cotillion, a coming-of-age ritual. In the early years, by tradition, the girls wore white dresses, the boys dinner jackets.

On my right, the young adults of 1890 stared solemnly into the camera. The girls' dresses had high necklines and tight waists. On my left, last year's crop of rowdies hammed it up, the girls in short dresses, the boys' jackets cast aside, ties loose. At some point, the white dress tradition had gone away and the girls' shifts were awash in vibrant summer colors.

I kept walking slowly down the hallway, which grew increasingly dark, squinting at the photos as I went. The solemn-faced Victorians turned into sleek Edwardians and then smiling flappers. Photos were no longer formal portraits. The collegians of the 1920s weren't afraid to show they were having fun. They held champagne glasses, despite Prohibition, and smoldering cigarettes in long holders. Then came the toned-down years of the Depression followed by the war years. For the first time, there were an unequal number of women and men in the pictures. There weren't enough men left at home to go around. During World War II, the girls' sleek dresses and wavy hair made them look old beyond their years. An entire generation that had to grow up too quickly. Most of them were smoking, too, just like in the twenties and thirties.

As I reached the end of the hall, light streamed in through the windows in the community room. I turned around and started back the other way. I looked at the photos on the opposite wall with interest, watching the changing fashions, wondering about the people. I was sure I must have looked into the eyes of several of my ancestors. But I'd also done some quick math. I knew Caroline was a recent retiree, so I could figure out more or less how old she was. The kids in the photos immediately after World War II still looked purposeful and adult, many of the men still in uniform. Then there was another shift, and in came big skirts and poufy hair and giggles at the camera. I slowed down as I reached the sixties, ticking up the years. And then, there she was. Front and center in the photograph for 1967, so I couldn't miss her. Fee was right—Caroline had aged but was otherwise unchanged. I slipped the photo off its single hook and carried it back to the better light in the community room so I could examine it.

Caroline was in the first row in the front, elegantly arranged on the floor. Her hair was boy-short even then, alone among the big hairdos of the other girls. If they were going for Katherine Ross in
The Graduate
, Caroline was Mia Farrow in
Rosemary's Baby
, though without the haunted look. She stared into the camera, bright-eyed, confident, happy.

I looked at the rest of the photo, searching the faces to see if any of the others who'd been in the restaurant that night were there too. I was astonished. They all were!

Henry was next to Caroline on the floor, her arm through his. His hair and brows were dark, his lean face not yet pixie-like. In a dinner jacket and skinny bow tie, he glowered, his features a map of simmering anger. His hostile expression didn't seem at all like the Henry I knew.

The others sat in chairs or stood around them. After Caroline, Phil Bennett was the most recognizable, with his long skinny legs and arms. Slowly, Michael and Sheila Smith came into focus, mainly because Sheila's thin figure and hairstyle of bangs and curls were unchanged. Even back then, Michael had mane of flowing hair, though whether it was light blond or prematurely white, I couldn't tell from the black-and-white photograph.

Though both Sheila and Michael were in the picture, Sheila was standing next to Phil Bennett, his arm around her, and Michael was with . . . Fran Walker! It took a few moments for me to decide the young woman was really Fran. She was sleek and trim, every hair in her bouffant artfully arranged. With her overlarge features, she should have been ugly, but she was gorgeous.

Barry Walker was also in the photo. Like the other men, he was dressed in a dinner jacket, but he looked uncomfortable in his clothes. His long hair touched his collar and looked dark blond or light brown. I tried to remember back to my childhood. What color had Barry's hair been? I couldn't come up with it. Barry stood close to a pretty woman I didn't recognize.

It took a long time for me to believe Deborah Bennett was in the photograph. I had assumed her plastic surgery had been an attempt to recapture the beauty of her youth, but the woman in the photo looked so different. She was stunning, for sure. The young woman in the photo had a beauty that jumped out of the frame. But her cheekbones were somehow differently shaped than Deborah's, and instead of Deborah's cascade of light blond hair, this woman's dark hair was an elaborate construction that swept back and up, and then hung down into a flip. But as I stood in the cold, empty community room, studying the photo, I became convinced from her height and carriage and beautiful legs that the woman was Deborah. She stood with a man I was sure I didn't know. He was in a U.S. Navy dress uniform, and the photographer had caught him laughing.

In the center of the photo were two other people I didn't recognize, obviously another couple, her hand on his arm. They looked young and happy, the center of a charmed life. As in the other photos from that era, most of them held a lit cigarette and many held cocktail glasses.

Was one of the people in the photo whom I didn't recognize the intended recipient of the fifth gift certificate? Was the couple in the center still together? Had the person who mailed the gift certificates hoped to stage a reunion?

As I made my way to the door, I stopped again and stared at the photo from 1959. Vee Snugg was at the center, her mouth open, caught in the act of tossing out a witty bon mot the others reacted to. Fee was there, too, dressed in a shapeless shift, her arm through the arm of her date, who, like all the other men, stared at the glamorous Vee. Fee thought of herself, even described herself, as homely, but I saw a shy woman with a sweet face and a comfortable figure. Neither sister had married. Vee had spent her childbearing years in love with a married man who would never leave his wife. I wondered about Fee. Had any man ever been in love with her? What if she hadn't been the sister of the charismatic Vee?

I tucked the 1967 photo under my arm and kept walking until I reached the locker room and exited through the front door, locking it behind me.