Remember Me (17 page)

“Not at all. When Tom and I became interested in this house, we used to talk to Phoebe Sprague about it. She was fascinated by the story of poor Mehitabel. I'm glad Henry lent you Phoebe's papers.” She glanced at the table. “I can see you are caught up in them,” she said, smiling as she surveyed the stacks of files.

Menley checked on Amy and the baby, put on a kettle for tea, then placed cups and sugar and milk at the end of the table.

“Believe it or not, I have a computer and printer
and all the trimmings set up in the library, but there's something so inviting about this kitchen, or keeping room I guess I should call it, that I'm happiest working here.”

Jan Paley nodded in understanding. She ran her hand over a protruding brick on the face of the massive fireplace. “I can see you're very into the spirit of the house. In the early days the keeping room was the only room they really lived in. The winters were so bitterly cold. The family slept in the bedrooms under piles of quilts and then rushed down here. And think about it. When you have a party at home, no matter how much room you have, the guests will usually manage to work their way into the kitchen. Same principle. Warmth and food and life.”

She gestured toward the pantry door opposite the fireplace. “That used to be the borning room,” she said. “It's where the woman gave birth or where the sick person was brought to be nursed back to health or to die. Obviously it made sense. The fire kept that room warm as well.”

For a moment her eyes brightened, and she blinked back tears. “I hope you do decide to buy this place,” she said. “It could make a wonderful home, and you have the feel for it.”

“I believe I do,” Menley agreed. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell this intelligent, sympathetic woman about the unexplainable business of the figure on the widow's walk, of Hannah being moved during the night to the cradle and the sound of the train rushing through the house, but she could not. She did not want anyone else to look at her as though speculating on her emotional stability.

Instead she busied herself at the stove, where the kettle was now whistling, poured boiling water into the teapot to warm it and reached for the tea cannister.

“You know how to make a cup of tea,” Jan Paley observed.

“I hope so. My grandmother had a heart attack if anyone used teabags. She said that the Irish and the English always knew how to make a proper cup.”

“A lot of the early sea captains carried tea as part of their cargo,” Jan Paley commented. As they sipped the tea and nibbled on cookies, she reached for her oversized shoulder bag. “I told you I'd found some interesting material on Captain Freeman.” She brought out a manila envelope and handed it to Menley. “Something that occurred to me: Captain Freeman's mother was a Nickerson. From the beginning the various branches of the family began to spell the name differently—Nickerson, Nicholson, Nichols. Was your husband a descendant of the first William Nickerson?”

“I have no idea. I do know his ancestor came over in the early sixteen hundreds,” Menley said. “Adam never was terribly interested in tracing the line.”

“Well, if you do decide to buy this house, he might become interested. Captain Freeman could turn out to be a thirty-fifth cousin, generations removed.”

Jan watched as Menley began to read quickly through the material from the Brewster Library. “The coup I promised is on the last page.”

“Great.” Menley reached for a file on the table. “This is some of the data I've culled so far. I'd like you to take a look at it.”

As she turned to the last page of the Brewster material, Menley heard Jan Paley's disappointed protest: “Oh, look, you already have the captain's picture, and I thought I was going to give you a treat by digging it up for you.”

Menley felt her lips go dry.

Jan was looking at the sketch Menley had made
when she envisioned how she would portray the mature Captain Andrew Freeman in the new David book.

She was staring down at the copy Jan had made of the sketch of Captain Andrew Freeman at the wheel of his schooner.

The faces were identical.

S
cott Covey carried a beer out onto the deck while the team of policemen and detectives searched his home. His face set in grim lines, he sat with his back to the Sprague house. The last thing he needed was to see Henry Sprague watching what he had helped set in motion.
If Tina's name hadn't come into this, the cops wouldn't be here now,
was the thought that he could not shake off.

Then he tried to reassure himself. He had nothing to worry about. What did they expect to find? No matter how much they searched, there was nothing in the house to incriminate him.

Adam Nichols had told him to stay put until everything about Viv's death and will was settled, but Scott knew he was beginning to hate this house and to hate the Cape as well. He knew that for him it would always be like living in a goldfish bowl.

He'd worked last winter in the office of a struggling
playhouse in Boca Raton, Florida. He had liked it there, so that was where he would buy a home when this was all over. Maybe he would even buy into that playhouse, too, instead of starting a new one here, the way he and Viv had planned.

Think ahead, he urged himself. They have nothing on me and nothing to go on except suspicion and jealousy and dirty minds. There is nothing that will stand up in a court of law.

*   *   *

“This place is clean,” an investigator from the district attorney's office told Nat Coogan.

“It's too clean,” Nat snapped as he continued to go through the desk. What little personal mail they had found was addressed to Vivian, letters from friends congratulating her on her marriage; postcards from cousins traveling in Europe.

There was a small, neat pile of bills, all marked paid. No mortgage; no credit card installments; no car loan: sure keeps things simple, Nat mused. Also helps one to stay mobile, with nothing to tie him down.

The phone bill was not very high. He knew Tina's phone number but there had not been a single call to it in the three months of the marriage.

He also had Vivian's lawyer's phone number. There were no calls to him in the last three months.

The bank records were somewhat interesting. Vivian kept a single checking account in the local bank, and it was in her name only. If Covey had his own money, he didn't keep it locally. If he had been dependent on her for cash, she had been doling it out to him. Of course, a good lawyer could argue that the lack of records in the house validated Covey's story that his wife had not admitted to him the extent of her holdings.

The Carpenters had told Nat about the house being stripped of pictures of Vivian. Nat found them in the
guest room. Covey had also prepared a box to return to the family. He had not included any pictures in which he appeared with Vivian. Nat grudgingly acknowledged that that did show sensitivity.

On the other hand, the pictures of Covey and Vivian together were piled on the floor of a storage closet. Not exactly the place you keep sentimental objects, he thought.

Vivian's clothes were packed neatly in her expensive luggage. Who was going to be the recipient? he wondered. Not Tina. She was too heavy for them. Nat's bet was that the clothes and suitcases were headed for a secondhand shop.

He hadn't really expected that they would come across the emerald ring. Even if Covey had it, he wouldn't be stupid enough to keep it where it could be found. Vivian apparently wasn't really into jewelry. They had found her engagement ring, some chains and bracelets and earrings, all in a small jewelry box in the master bedroom. Nothing, including the engagement ring, had any significant value.

Nat decided to make his own inspection of the garage. Attached to the house, it was a good-sized structure, capable of holding two cars. Shelves in the back were neatly stacked with diving and fishing gear, an ice chest, some tools—the usual paraphernalia. The diving gear Vivian had been wearing when her body washed in was still being evaluated.

Covey and Vivian had only one car, a late-model BMW. Nat knew that it had belonged to Vivian. The more he'd seen this afternoon, the more he'd thought of his mother's disgust when her older sister married years ago. “Jane's worked all these years for everything she has,” his mother had fumed. “What did she see in that miserable leech? He went into the marriage with one set of underwear.”

It looked to Nat as though Covey had brought about
the same amount of worldly goods to his union with Vivian.

Then his eyes brightened. The BMW was on the left side of the garage. The floor on the right side was stained with oil.

Nat got down on his knees. There was no sign of oil drippings from the BMW, and he knew there were no oil stains in the driveway.

Who had parked here, not once but a number of times, he wondered, and why would a visitor's car be driven into the garage? One reason, of course, would be to ensure that no one would know it was there.

Nat knew that his next stop would be to see if Tina's car leaked oil.

D
eb Coogan was having a marvelous time. Usually she washed her own short, curly hair, toweled it dry and went every six weeks or so to the small hairdresser's at the other end of town to have it shaped. This was her first visit to Tresses, the premier beauty salon in Chatham.

She was relaxed, thoroughly enjoying the luxurious pink-and-green interior of the chic salon, the prolonged shampoo that included a neck massage, the frosting that brought gold highlights to her medium
brown hair, the hot-oil manicure and the first-time pedicure. Deciding that it was her civic duty to try to get into conversation with as many operators as possible, she'd elected to have all these services.

Any fear she had that the salon's employees might be reluctant to talk disappeared quickly. Everyone in the place was buzzing with the news that Scott Covey might be a suspect in his wife's death.

Deb found it easy to get Beth, who shampooed her hair, to talk about the late Vivian Carpenter Covey, but all she learned was that Beth nearly fainted when she read that Vivian was worth so much money. “Never a tip to me and just a chintzy one to the hairdresser. And take my word for it. One drop of water got near her ear and she'd howl about her sensitive eardrums. I ask you, how sensitive could they be? She was always bragging about learning to scuba dive.”

The hairdresser was a bit more charitable. “Oh, we all had a turn having Vivian as a client. She was always worried that she didn't look just right. And it was always the operator's fault, of course, if she thought she didn't. It's really a shame. She was a pretty woman but shifted between being on her Carpenter family high horse and getting upset about everything. She'd drive a saint crazy.”

The manicurist was also gossipy but, unfortunately, not especially helpful: “She was crazy about that husband of hers. Isn't
he
gorgeous? One day he was crossing the street to pick her up, and one of our new girls saw him through the window. She said, ‘Excuse me, I'm going to run out and throw myself in front of that hunk.' She was joking, of course, but wouldn't you know she was just finishing Vivian's nails? Talk about going through the roof. Vivian yelled at her. ‘Why does every tramp in the world want to make a play for my husband?' “

Want to make a play,
Deb thought. That suggests
he did not take them up on it. “When did that happen?” she asked.

“Oh, about two or three weeks before she drowned.”

It was when she was having her pedicure that Debbie knew her afternoon had not been an extravagant waste. The pedicures were given in a separate, screened-off area with two raised chairs side by side over footbaths.

“Try to keep your toes still, Mrs. Coogan,” said Marie, the pedicurist. “I don't want to cut you.”

“I can't help it,” Debbie confessed. “I have very ticklish toes.”

Marie laughed. “So does one of my other clients. She almost never has pedicures, but when she was getting married we all told her she absolutely had to have pretty feet.”

Recognizing an opening, Debbie brought up Vivian's name. “When you think that Vivian Carpenter only lived three months after she was married . . .” She sighed and let her voice trail off.

“I know. It was awful, wasn't it. Sandra, the client I was telling you about, the one who never wants to have pedicures?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the day she had one for her wedding, she was sitting right in this chair and Vivian was next to her. They started talking. Sandra's the kind who tells you all her business.”

“What was she talking about that day?”

“She was telling Vivian that she was on her way to her lawyer's office to meet her fiance to sign a very tight prenuptial agreement.”

Debbie sat up straighter. “What did Vivian say?”

“Well, she said something like, 'I think if you can't go into a marriage loving and trusting each other, you shouldn't go into it.' “

Marie applied lotion to Debbie's feet and began to massage them. “Sandra wasn't the kind to take that lying down. She told Vivian that she'd been married once before, and they broke up after three years. Sandra has a couple of boutiques. Her ex claimed he helped her a lot because—get this—at night she talked about her expansion plans to him. He got a big settlement. Sandra said when she married him he didn't know what the word ‘boutique' meant and he still didn't know what it meant when they separated. She told Vivian that when one spouse has money and the other doesn't, if the marriage breaks up, the one with money pays through the nose.”

“What did Vivian say?” Debbie asked.

“Vivian looked kind of upset. She said that that was very interesting and a good point. She said, ‘Maybe I'd better call my lawyer.' ”