The Legend of Sleepy Harlow (8 page)

Legally, that is.

That didn’t stop criminals like Charlie Harlow or the thousands of others who made gin in their bathtubs or smuggled booze over the borders and into the US.

“What do you think?” I asked Levi. “Do you suppose Sleepy brought the booze here, then simply walked it across the street to the speakeasy?”

“That doesn’t seem like the smartest plan, even for back in the nineteen twenties before there were any sophisticated surveillance techniques.” The furniture in the living room was cushy leather, a couch and chair, both black. There was a TV on the wall opposite the bookshelves and a glass and metal coffee table in front of the couch that was scattered with sports and restaurant management magazines, a remote control, and an iPad. Levi perched on the arm of the couch.

“From what I’ve heard some of the old-timers at the bar say, there are supposed to be caves around the island where the smugglers stored their booze.”

It made sense. After all, as the ghost getters had so recently reminded me, South Bass is made up of limestone, and there are caves all over the island. “So he’d bring in the booze—”

“Probably from Middle Island, north of here,” Levi said, then shrugged and glanced at his iPad. “All right, I admit it. After you told me Sleepy used to live here, I was intrigued. I did a little online research about Prohibition in these parts. The island was a hotbed of activity.”

“We’re less than ten miles from Canadian waters.”

“Exactly. Which means Sleepy and other bootleggers like him could easily pick up alcohol in Canada, where it was perfectly legal, and bring it back here, where it was illegal and all the more lucrative because of it.”

“Sounds perfect, but remember, things didn’t end happily for our Sleepy.”

“Done in by a rival gang,” Levi said. “At least that’s what my research says. Sleepy was scheduled to hand over a load of Canadian liquor at a spot not far from your B and B. Your house would have been there at the time, of course. It was built well before Sleepy’s time. But most of the other places, like Kate’s and Chandra’s—”

“They’re too new. They wouldn’t have been there.”

“Which meant that was the perfect spot,” Levi said. “They would need to make the exchange someplace where they wouldn’t get interrupted by the local boys in blue. Sleepy went to the meet thinking it was nothing more than that, but he’d apparently ticked off some of the other bad guys. They killed him.”

“And cut off his head.” Not a good thought on the best of days. Coming so soon after we found Noreen, bludgeoned and bloody, the thought made my stomach swoop.

“Sorry.” Levi popped up, grabbed my elbow, and escorted me into the nearest chair. “You look a little green, and I don’t blame you. The other gangsters killing Sleepy, that was one thing. But even for Prohibition-era mobsters, the whole beheading thing, that was pretty out there. They really must have been mad at Sleepy about something.”

“I’m fine. Really. I mean, it is part of Sleepy’s story. You can’t have a headless ghost if he’s still got his head.”

“You want water?” Levi asked, and before I could tell him I didn’t need it, he disappeared into the kitchen and I heard the tap running. When he came back, he held out the glass to me, but even when I took it in my hands, he didn’t let go.

“Somehow, I can’t think of Marianne having enough imagination to care about what Sleepy saw when he looked out these windows,” he said.

I tried for a smile. “That’s why I’m helping.”

“Because you’re the one with imagination.”

“Because I’m being thorough.” I refused to play tug-of-war. If he wasn’t going to relinquish the glass of water, I didn’t really much care. I stood, and when I did, Levi had no choice but to back up a step. “Marianne will be grateful that you let me look around.”

“And you’re not.”

“Of course I’m grateful. Taking a look at the apartment gives me a better sense of who Sleepy was.”

“He worked at Wilder’s, you know.”

Though I’m sure Marianne must have mentioned it, I’d yet to find that in the pee-soaked pages. “If it was illegal to make liquor—”

“There were a few exceptions.” I guess Levi realized that he sounded like a know-it-all, because he grinned. “Just more of what I was reading about online. A few wineries were allowed to stay in business to produce church wine. And all of them were allowed to keep making grape juice. If customers bought that juice and chose to take it home and ferment it . . .”

“Living that way—it’s all so hard to imagine.”

“But not hard to imagine how smuggling booze would appeal to someone with a sense of daring.”

“Would you have done it?” I asked him. “If you lived back then, would you have taken the chance and pushed the envelope? A lot of people did, but would you? Would you have been a bootlegger?”

The fact that Levi didn’t answer right away told me all I needed to know.

“I’ve bothered you long enough.” I stepped away from the chair, and behind my back, I crossed my fingers. “I’ll let Marianne know what I found out, and she’ll take it from there.” The glint of the setting sun flashed against the front window, and I glanced that way. “Will they still have the wake tomorrow?” I wondered.

He shrugged. “Try explaining canceling a major event to a few thousand tourists who are ready to party hearty. If you ask me, the powers that be are going to sweep Noreen’s murder under the rug. At least for the next couple days. The party will go on, and Hank will work quietly behind the scenes.”

“There’s bound to be talk.”

“And speculation.” When he looked at me hard, as if trying to determine if I would be one of those speculating, and if I’d be acting on whatever it was I might find out, I strolled toward the window. “Do you have any theories?”

“I told you, that’s Hank’s job. I’d be happy to tell him what I’ve seen.”

“Which is . . ?”

It was my turn to shrug, not because what I had to say was unimportant, but because at this point, I wasn’t sure what any of it really meant.

“Dimitri—he’s a member of EGG—he didn’t get along with Noreen at all. In fact, yesterday afternoon, he was plenty mad at her about something. She told him they’d talk about it later. And there’s another woman, but there’s no way she could have done it. She arrived on the ferry right before we found Noreen’s body. Jacklyn didn’t like Noreen, either.”

“You mean that gorgeous brunette you were talking to in the park.”

I thought back to the way Jacklyn had made it loud and clear—with a look, with the way she fixed Dimitri’s coffee, with the casual way she rubbed against him or took his hand or flung an arm across the back of his chair—that she was warning me to keep my distance. “She says she didn’t like Noreen because Noreen fired her from the show. I wonder if there was more to it than that. Jacklyn’s just about the most jealous woman I’ve ever met.”

“Jealous, huh?” Levi thought this over. “Still, she’s mighty good-looking!”

I shouldn’t have minded hearing Levi talk about Jacklyn that way. I wasn’t, I told myself. After all, if I allowed a pang of envy to enter into the picture, then it would mean something I didn’t want it to mean. About someone I didn’t want it to mean something about.

Which, believe it or not, actually made sense to me at that moment.

“And there’s Kate, of course,” Levi suggested.

Just as he spoke her name, I caught sight of Kate walking down the sidewalk outside Levi’s bar. She was dressed in jeans and a navy sweater, and her coppery hair was the exact color of the blazing maple across the street. A few of our fellow island residents walked past, but Kate didn’t even bother to nod hello. She sidestepped a group of tourists who’d stopped to consult a map, and completely ignored Mike Lawrence, once a murder suspect, who was helping to unload a beer delivery truck parked outside the bar.

“Kate is hardly the murdering type,” I said.

“I never said she was. But there was bad blood between Kate and Noreen.”

“Because Noreen was an idiot.” I shot him a look. “There, now you know I didn’t like Noreen, either. Are you going to tell me I’m a suspect, too?”

“Just joining in the speculation.”

Apparently, Levi wasn’t the only one.

I was just about to turn away from the window when I saw Hank’s red, white, and blue police SUV cruise down the street. He spotted Kate, slowed to a stop, and got out of the truck.

“Of course Hank is going to talk to Kate,” I mumbled when I saw the police chief approach my friend, more to reassure myself than because I thought I had to provide Levi with some sort of explanation. “Hank was at the winery last night. He saw what went on.”

At my shoulder, Levi peered out of the window. “She’s getting into his car with him.”

Kate did, and the car turned down a street that we both knew led to the police station.

“It doesn’t mean a thing,” I said, whirling from the window. “Just because Hank is talking to Kate, it doesn’t mean—”

“No, but that might.”

I turned back around and looked where Levi was pointing. Dominic Bender was a fixture on South Bass, an attorney whose clients included many of the island’s most well-to-do families, some of its biggest businesses, and, coincidentally, Kate Wilder. Dominic was a big man and he drove a big car that was instantly recognizable by anyone who’d spent any time at all on the island: a black Lincoln that was always waxed to a finish that made the sun shimmer off its sleek surfaces like light on water.

The Lincoln pulled around the corner from the direction of the park.

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” I told Levi. “It’s not unusual for Dominic to be seen around town.”

“Of course not. But you know Dom as well as I do. The weather is perfect, and he’s not out on his boat? I dunno.” When Levi pressed his lips together, his expression was grim. “It could mean something.”

“It doesn’t. It can’t,” I assured him, and I believed it.

Or at least I tried.

I went right on believing it, too.

Right up until I saw Dominic’s car follow Hank’s to the police station.

  7  

I
called the League of Literary Ladies into action.

Well, not the entire League, of course, because one of our members was at the police station, and I had no doubt why—Hank was questioning Kate about Noreen’s murder.

“Do you really think we should do this?”

Of all people, I didn’t expect Chandra to be the one to protest.

At the front door of Wilder Winery, I paused and looked over my shoulder to find her wide-eyed and dancing from foot to foot.

“The winery is closed,” Chandra said. She glanced left, then right, and her pumpkin earrings brushed the black sweater she wore with an orange turtleneck. “Kate always closes the winery the day before the wake. You know, so her employees can get ready for the last official weekend of the summer season and because she knows they’ll be slammed tomorrow once all the tourists arrive. That means there’s nobody here and the place is all locked up and—”

I didn’t wait for her to finish. Instead, I reached behind one of those planters filled with a riot of yellow and orange mums I’d seen looking all ghostly the night before. That evening, with the sun quickly slipping below the horizon and turning the waters of Lake Erie to a fiery orange, the darker flowers took on the color of blood.

So not an image I wanted to think about. Not with the memory of Noreen’s body still so fresh in my head.

Rather than dwell, I reached around the flowerpot. Tucked between it and the building was a decorative stone about the size of a softball. Behind that was a smaller, less showy piece of granite, and under that—

I stood up and showed the front door key to Chandra and Luella, who was standing on Chandra’s right.

“A couple months ago, Kate told me where to find the extra key. You know, just in case of an emergency,” I explained.

“Well, if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.” Luella stepped forward. “We’ve got to do something.”

“Exactly.” I opened the door and stepped inside.

Except for the quickly failing evening light, the winery was dark. Long shadows spilled across the floor from the direction of the windows, and in between the racks of wine bottles, the display of hand-painted stemware, and the cooler where Wilder’s offered a variety of cheeses, olives, and other goodies for tourists who wanted snacks with their wine, the shadows were even darker.

I couldn’t help myself.

As casually as I could, so that Luella and Chandra wouldn’t think I was some sort of nutcase, I checked and double-checked each and every one of those shadows, and, satisfied that none of them looked the least bit like a headless gangster, I ventured a few more steps into the winery and was enveloped by the silence that filled the place, from the open-beamed ceiling to the hardwood floor. Though Luella and Chandra were only a few feet behind me, I felt suddenly and inexplicably alone.

“‘One of the quietest places in the whole world,’” I murmured.

“What?” From behind me, Chandra’s voice bounced against the walls.

When I was done flinching, I managed a smile. “Just a line from
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
,” I said. “You know, right at the beginning, when Washington Irving is describing the little place called Sleepy Hollow. He says it’s an enchanted place. That it’s quiet and dreamy.”

“Too quiet.” When she glanced around, Chandra’s eyes were big. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Don’t forget, Bea, this is where those investigators got the video of Sleepy last year.”

“They got a video,” I told her, and reminded myself. “That doesn’t mean it was a video of Sleepy. Since we both know there’s no such thing as ghosts—”

I should have known better. I did know better. But it was impossible to call the words back.

Chandra might still be wide-eyed and on-edge, but her shoulders shot back. “Are you saying that the Egyptians were wrong? That the Romans and the Greeks and the Mesopotamians didn’t know what they were talking about? They all believed in ghosts, Bea. People still do. All around the world.”

“But not right here. Not right now.” I wasn’t about to confess that I said this more for my own benefit than for hers. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Things more important than the shifting veils between the dimensions? Than the vast, unknown universe or the shadows that reside on the Other Side?” Chandra shivered and the witch on the front of her sweater did the hoochie-koochie. “I don’t think so, Bea.”

“Then I’ll tell you what”—I looped an arm through hers, the better to distract her—“we’ll worry about Sleepy another time. For now, Kate has to be our first priority.”

Chandra might be a little out there (okay, a lot out there) when it came to her beliefs in ghosts and tarot and the power of crystals, but deep down, she had her priorities plenty straight. She knew that friendship came first. Which was why she was so upset at seeing EGG’s return in the first place. I was counting on her loyalty, but I guess I underestimated how frightened she was.

“We should go.” She stepped toward the door. “I mean all of us. We should go. We shouldn’t be poking around where we don’t belong. We can come back another time and—”

“You want to explain again why we’re here and what you want us to do?” Luella asked, effectively cutting off Chandra.

I hated to admit (again) what I’d already admitted to both Luella and Chandra when I called them thirty minutes earlier. “I don’t know. Not for certain. I know we have to figure out a way to help. Hank is talking to Kate and Kate’s attorney is in on the conversation.”

“Of course he’s talking to Kate.” The hand Luella put on my arm was supposed to be reassuring, and had we been talking about anyone else but Kate, it might have been. “He knows about the fight Kate had with Noreen last night. You told us Hank walked in here in the middle of it. He’s just doing his job, that’s all. Just getting his ducks in a row. He’d be crazy not to talk to Kate.”

“He is crazy,” Chandra added, but neither Luella nor I paid much attention. After all, Chandra had once been married to Hank. Her opinion of his mental status didn’t exactly count. “He knows Kate would never kill anyone.”

“We know that, too.” I was as sure of this as I was of my own name. Funny, that didn’t make my voice, echoing back from the ceiling at me, sound any more certain. “I wouldn’t think anything of Kate talking to Hank, or of Dominic Bender hanging around, if it wasn’t so late in the day. The fact that Hank wants to talk to Kate now and that her attorney is present—”

“Hank just wants to get it out of the way. So he can move on to the real suspects.” Luella gave me another reassuring pat.

“Or he’s just being a pain in the neck,” Chandra insisted.

“Either way, we’ve got to make sure we’ve got all the bases covered. I thought we should start here . . .” I twirled around, taking in the winery. “Because this is where Kate and I found Noreen and her crew last night. We know Kate didn’t kill Noreen. But whoever did . . . I don’t know. Maybe there’s some sort of clue here. Something we can tell Hank about. He’s too smart to think Kate could actually be guilty, but if word of her being suspected gets around, it could hurt her business, and we can’t let that happen.”

“Agreed.” Luella pulled in a long breath and let it out slowly. “So tell us what to look for.”

I only wished I knew.

“We can each take one part of the winery,” I suggested, “and just walk. And look. And see if anything is odd or out of place or weird.”

“Like the ghost of Sleepy Harlow?” The second Luella and I gave Chandra
that
look, her lower lip protruded. “It’s not like I’m the only one who believes in Sleepy. Plenty of people have seen him, and you saw that video, Bea. If it was filmed anywhere else, I wouldn’t be so worried. But it happened right here in the winery. If you want us walking around alone, anything could happen. We could see him. Or hear him. Or bump into him.” Her gaze darted past me toward the fermenting room and the warehouse beyond, and her shoulders shot back. “All right. If we have to. I’ll check back there,” she said. “That’s where they shot that video last year. Since I’m the only one around here who actually believes in Sleepy—well, maybe he’ll take pity on a true believer and he won’t jump out of some dark corner and scare me.”

I didn’t need another ghost getter on my hands. “You and Luella can go together,” I said. I made a grab for Chandra’s arm so I could send her off with Luella, but she would have none of it. She marched on toward the fermenting room where, the night before, Kate and I had found the ghost getters.

She would have kept right on going if we didn’t hear a small sound from the direction of the front door. Chandra froze in her tracks and spun around.

“You heard that, right? Bea, you heard that?”

“I heard a squeak.”

“A squeak and a—”

The front door swished open, and Chandra’s statement was lost in a burble. I was so busy listening to her, I barely heard the noisy bump of my own heart.

That is, until I saw Kate step into the winery.

“It’s you!” I hoped I didn’t look or sound as relieved as I felt. I was, after all, trying to put up a brave front. “Hank didn’t arrest you.”

“Of course he didn’t arrest me.” Kate flipped on a phalanx of overhead spots and we squinted at each other through the sudden flood of light. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would Hank arrest me? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

I believed her. Hook, line, and sinker. But that didn’t stop me from noticing the lines of worry at the corners of Kate’s mouth or the way she twisted her hands together.

“So you didn’t kill Noreen?” Chandra asked.

For once, I thought Kate was perfectly justified in rolling her emerald green eyes.

“Of course she didn’t kill Noreen,” I reminded Chandra, then, for Kate’s benefit, added, “That’s why we’re here. To look for clues so we can figure out who did.”

“Clues, good.” Kate paced a nervous little pattern in front of us. She was wearing knee-high boots and her heels clicked like gunshots against the wood floor. “Suspects, better. Because I’ll tell you what . . .” She froze in place, and when she looked at the three of us standing there watching her, Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “Maybe he didn’t arrest me, but Hank thinks I did it. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I swear, he actually thinks I killed Noreen. He . . .” Kate’s breathing sped up, and she pressed a hand to her chest. “He knows I was mad at her. He made me admit it. About last year and the way Noreen and her friends trampled my grapes, and about how I felt when I found her here last night and saw them and how it all came back to me, all the anger, and how I would have wrung her neck if you weren’t here with me, Bea.”

“Those are nothing but facts.” I kept my voice as calm as possible, which was no easy thing, considering that Chandra had tears rolling down her cheeks, Luella was wringing her hands, and I was close to losing it. “None of that means a thing. Facts are just facts, and facts help Hank build a timeline. You know, so he can figure out where Noreen went when she left here. I just assumed she came back to the B and B.”

“You mean that’s where she was killed?”

I hadn’t even considered it, so Chandra’s question gave me an extra-special case of the creeps. I twitched it away with a shake. “I think someone would have noticed,” I said. “My cleaning people were in this morning and they didn’t say anything about blood. The way Noreen looked . . .” The memory washed over me and left me cold. “Wherever she was killed, there must have been a whole lot of blood.”

I was already edgy enough; this was not something I wanted to think about. It was better to stay focused, stay centered, stay objective. I tried. “You have nothing to worry about,” I told Kate. “Before Hank can make an arrest, he needs proof. You might have been mad at Noreen. Nobody can blame you. But before Hank can say you did it, he needs to prove you had means, motive, and opportunity.”

“Means.” Kate nodded, and her complexion turned green. “I heard her head was bashed in. Anybody could have done that, I guess. With anything. A rock. Or a bat. Or a brick. Or a—”

“We get it,” Luella told her.

Kate nodded again, and paced some more. Faster. Harder. Her heels banged against the floor. “Motive. Okay, yeah, I admit that part. I did have motive. Last year’s destruction, for one thing. And this year, with her coming here without my permission. I guess so-angry-my-head-was-going-to-pop-off is a legitimate motive. But don’t forget, there have to be a bunch of other people who have motives, too. There can’t be anyone anywhere who actually liked Noreen. She was pushy and rude and—”