Clammed Up: A Maine Clambake Mystery Part 11

Chapter 29.

I woke up the next morning to a gray glow outside my windows. My bedroom usually offered great views of the harbor, but I could barely make out the Snuggles Inn across the street. I climbed back into bed. There was no clambake to run, anyway.

I was awakened a few hours later by my cell phone. "Ms. Snowden, Lieutenant Binder. You're cleared to go ahead and take down the rest of that porch."

"Does that mean we're open for business?" I could barely contain my excitement.

"No. Let's take this one step at a time. I said you could demolish the porch."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you." There followed a series of calls between Sonny and me and radio calls between Sonny and Etienne. We decided Sonny would borrow his dad's lobster boat-his dad hadn't gone out in the fog- because the big plywood sheets we needed to close off the dining room's French doors wouldn't fit in our Boston Whaler. Etienne would bring the Whaler in, then would return to the island with Sonny and the supplies in his dad's boat. I was responsible for returning the Whaler to the island.

After I hung up, I became aware of the sounds of voices and banging as well as a smell I remembered well from my childhood. Still in a T-s.h.i.+rt and pj bottoms, I descended the back stairs into the kitchen.

Livvie was there with Page, along with Sarah Halsey and her son Tyler. Mom had her back to me, facing the stove. They were all busily engaged in the process of making strawberry rhubarb jam. Rhubarb jam day was a family tradition, and judging by their jumpy, chattering ways, Page and Tyler were pretty excited about it.

"No school?" I asked.

"We got out yes-ter-day." Page sang it rather than said it. Like a lot of Maine kids, she loved foods that turned other children green. She was brought up eating all manner of crustaceans and bi-valves, after all. I'd seen Page and Tyler fight over the last fiddlehead fern in a bowl. But nothing, in my opinion, was stranger than her love of rhubarb, the plant that grew like a weed and tasted, unless mixed with something sweet, like bitter celery.

Rhubarb grew all around our house, and my mother, combining her skinflint upper-cla.s.s Yankee upbringing with her thrifty Maine housewife ways, couldn't stand not to use every bit of it. So on a day she designated in June every year, all rhubarb not previously used in pie, cake, or compote was cut down and turned into strawberry rhubarb jam.

I helped myself to coffee and sat on the back stairs out of the way. I smiled h.e.l.lo to Sarah, remembering how uncomfortable she'd been when I last spoke to her at the clambake. She smiled back as she chopped rhubarb stalks.

Livvie and Sarah were close friends. They were about the same age and had been pregnant at the same time-too young, in my parents' opinion, and in mine, truth be told. But while Livvie and Sonny were obviously deeply in love, Sarah had arrived in Busman's Harbor alone, taking what retail work she could get during her pregnancy. Her mother Marie showed up not long before Tyler was born and had never left.

They rented an apartment over Gleason's Hardware store on Main Street. Sarah got her GED and then her teaching degree, no easy feat with a baby and a job, especially when the nearest university was an hour commute each way. She taught kindergarten in town and worked for us summers and weekends. My father had hired her after Tyler was born, and I knew she depended on her clambake income. Her mother was a lunch lady, also at Busman's Elementary, and she, too, worked for the clambake in the summers, cooking with Gabrielle. Tyler had grown into a polite, funny boy who was Page's best friend.

Sarah had always been diffident around me, which was something I felt badly about. True, I was her summer boss and a couple years older, but neither should matter. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to be ashamed of and a lot to be proud of.

As I watched, Sarah continued slicing rhubarb while Livvie cut up strawberries. Page stood at the sink was.h.i.+ng another batch of rhubarb while Tyler removed the jam jars and lids from their boxes. Livvie had quietly co-opted the jam making, as she had all the other food preparation ch.o.r.es. My mother was still as much a part of the day as ever, but Livvie was the one who actually determined the amount of each ingredient and cooked the jam.

I shuddered remembering my mother's version-gray, slimy, awful. I died of embarra.s.sment every December when Livvie and I delivered jars of it, festooned with bright red bows, to neighbors for the holidays. Now that Livvie cooked the jam, it was delicious, but I wondered how many of our neighbors still poured it straight down the sink without even tasting it.

As I sat watching, I tried to recall where Sarah had come from. I remembered when she turned up in town, a pretty girl, her pregnancy already showing. Somewhere along the line, had I heard that Sarah and her mother had moved to Busman's Harbor from Bath?

Bath, where Tony and Ray were from? Maybe Sarah knew them. Maybe that explained her presence at Crowley's the night of the murder. Remembering how she'd freaked out the last time, I wasn't going to ask her anything in front of the kids.

I stood up. "Got to get dressed."

"Where are you off to today?" Mom asked.

"Over to the island. The cops said we're free to clean up."

Sonny and I had minimized our descriptions of the damage from the fire when we'd told Mom about it. Of course, almost every guest had a camera and there were plenty of ugly pictures and even videos of the leaping flames available online, but that was nothing Mom needed to know about.

"That's good, dear. It's foggy." My mother looked pointedly out the kitchen windows and it was true, the fog hadn't burned off yet.

"Maybe you'll see the ghost!" Page crowed. Then she and Tyler collapsed into giggles. "Woo-woo-woo! The ghost! The ghost!"

Like all good Maine mansions, Windsholme had a ghost. Actually, it had three. A stonemason killed during the mansion's construction, a parlor maid who died of a burst appendix during a storm in the 1890s, and my mother's great uncle Hal, who was killed in France during World War I. Why Hal had returned to the island to do his haunting, no one had explained.

"Have you seen the ghost?" I asked Page.

"Of course, silly." Page hadn't lived on Morrow during the summer the way Mom, Livvie, and I had, but she'd spent a lot of time there. Before money got so tight that Livvie had to work in the ticket booth, relegating Page to Mom's care, Page had spent almost every day on the island during the season, running pretty free.

During her spring vacation this year, while Sonny, Chris, and Etienne were cleaning up the island, Page had gone out every day, with Tyler, if I remembered right. I was glad she'd had that time on Morrow, climbing the rocks, exploring the tide pools, building forts in the woods. The island was a special place for a kid. You felt like you knew every inch of it, like you ruled it. I thought of Page in that unbroken chain of children in my family playing on the island, starting with my great-grandfather and his siblings and continuing to my grandmother, my mother, and Livvie and me. I was sick and sad that part of Page's childhood, of all our childhoods, might come to an end while it was my responsibility to save it.

"Page, did the men fix up the playhouse for you and Tyler to use when you were out on the island this spring?" I asked.

"No. It was a mess. But I think they should!"

Chapter 30.

It was still foggy when I set out for Morrow half an hour later. I couldn't see much, but I could see enough. I knew the route so well it would be easy to slip into mental autopilot when making the trip, always a dangerous thing on the water. I stuck close to the sh.o.r.eline and listened to the foghorn, bleating its warning from d.i.n.k.u.ms Light.

I came through the mouth of the outer harbor into the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the fog, I stayed close to Westclaw Point. I followed it until I could see Morrow Island. As I came up to the inlet across from our beach, a new house loomed out of the fog. Built of dark gray granite and gla.s.s, it seemed thrust up by the boulders on which it stood. The house was ma.s.sive and sleekly modern, more appropriate to Malibu than coastal Maine. But I didn't hate its looks. The building seemed oddly at home in its environment. I spotted Morrow Island across the water and headed for it.

I was happy to be heading out to the island before Etienne and Sonny. I needed to spend some time alone. Not alone, actually. I a.s.sumed Gabrielle would be there, but she usually stayed close to her house or her vegetable garden when she wasn't working.

I pulled up to the dock and called to Gabrielle. I didn't want to scare her. She appeared in a second story window of her house and waved to me. "I'm going up to Windsholme to wait for the guys," I yelled. She gave me a thumbs-up sign that she'd heard and understood.

I stood at the bottom of the lawn looking up at Windsholme. Even with its ruined side porch, the mansion was beautiful, perfectly proportioned, solid and strong. Until the fire when we'd almost lost it, I'd always viewed Windsholme as a burden. I'd never lived there and neither had my mother. It was too expensive to maintain, but even more expensive to demolish. Its plumbing was erratic, its wiring dangerous and shut off in all but the newly rewired rooms. The cost of gutting it, fixing all those things, and carting away all that horsehair plaster was prohibitive to even think about.

As I walked up the hill, I thought about my great-great grandparents who'd built it. My mother had an ancient photo of them with their five children and servants arranged stiffly on Windsholme's lawn. For the first time, I found myself wondering what they were like. Was this place a refuge for a happy family? Had they let their children serve them imaginary tea in the playhouse? Or, more likely, was the big house a place where they entertained to impress, their children watched over by nannies, seen but not heard? Why didn't I know the answer?

True to his word, Binder had already sent someone out to remove the security device on Windsholme's doors. I opened them and stepped inside.

I stood stock still on the spot where I'd been when I first saw Ray Wilson's body. I breathed in and out, evenly and deliberately, willing myself to roll back my memory to the great hall before it had been sullied by that sight. The air smelled of its familiar damp, with a new smokiness added. I tried to block out the acrid smell. I wanted to feel the same way about the house as I had before all the terrible things occurred. I knew from experience it was the best way to handle my panic attacks.

When I was recruited out of business school to the venture capital firm, the job was great. And I was pretty good at it. But then the economy turned and instead of helping entrepreneurs grow their companies, my work was all about downgrading projections, laying off staff, and selling a.s.sets. Too often, during the worst of the credit crunch, we were closing companies up altogether. My job became more like presiding over a dozen deaths a year. And right after my own father died.

The panic attacks had started then, in the worst of the downturn and always when I was faced with a difficult task, like telling a company board no more money would be coming to keep them afloat or telling a founder he was no longer the right person to lead his own company. I was in my twenties. What business did I have relaying that kind of terrible news to people?

I'd suffered from panic attacks in the anonymous ladies rooms of a dozen start-up companies and in airports on my way to San Jose, Provo, and Boston. My body always reacted badly when my head forced me to do something my heart resisted. The best way to combat the attacks was to get back up on the horse-to go back into the boardrooms, to get on the next plane. I had to do the same thing with Windsholme. Exorcise the demons and make it mine again.

I stood for several minutes in the great hall until I felt I could move on, then started moving through Windsholme's empty rooms. Most of the furniture had been carted off the island and sold at auction during the Depression. The rest, legend had it, had been broken up and burned in the fireplaces on cool summer nights. I thought about that generation, too, my mother's maternal grandparents. They'd been wild partiers in the twenties, but in the 1930s they were the first generation faced with keeping the island in the family. In truth, Morrow probably hadn't been sold because at the time there was no one to buy it. But the taxes had been paid somehow and the town hadn't seized the island.

I roamed through the ground floor. In the two-story kitchen, I climbed the iron spiral staircase to the balcony that ran all the way around its second level. The built-in cabinets once held china, silver, crystal, and table linens within easy reach of the footmen and butler attending to the dinner guests. I moved through the swinging door into the dining room and inspected the hand-painted Asian scenes on the wallpaper, especially in the east end of the room, where it had been damaged by smoke and water. The sight made me sad. I stood for a few minutes, breathing in and out, getting comfortable with the sight.

From there, I walked through the empty office and the billiard room before crossing to the living room and the ladies drawing room. Both opened through French doors onto the front porch.

When I was ready, I went back to the great hall again and climbed the stairs, pa.s.sing the point where Ray Wilson had hung. I walked methodically from one end of the long upstairs hall to the other, opening each door, making the rooms my own again. In the master bedroom, which was over the dining room, there was more smoke and water damage, but it was limited to the wall adjacent to the side porch roof.

I continued up the curving staircase to the top floor, open to the ceiling, giving drama to the great hall three stories below. The rooms on the top floor were much smaller than those in the rest of the house, with lower ceilings and small dormered windows. It was the territory of the servants.

As I had on the other floors, I opened each door and stood in the doorway or entered the room. At the midpoint of the hallway, across from the open landing, I turned a k.n.o.b, but the door stuck. It was a perennial problem in a house that was always damp. I put my shoulder against the door and pushed as hard as I could. Nothing.

I felt something whoosh past my feet and jumped a mile. "Le Roi!"

The Maine c.o.o.n cat sat by the door frame, looking at me, fully aware that he'd scared the bejesus out of me. Morrow was his island. He merely suffered our presence.

"How did you get in here?" I'd closed the front door behind me, and he couldn't have pa.s.sed through the burned French doors in the dining room.

"Julia? What are you doing?"

I looked over the railing. Gabrielle was in the great hall below. I must have been so focused, I hadn't heard her enter the house.

"Up here. I can't seem to get one of the doors opened."

Gabrielle ran up the stairs, wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n. "That happens always. You know-the damp. Etienne just radioed from the town dock. He and Sonny are on their way. They'll need your aid unloading when they get here."

"Sure. Help me open this door?"

Gabrielle shook her head. "Leave it be, Julia." She surprised me by taking me in her arms and giving me a fierce hug, which I returned. When she released me, she said softly, "What do you do here, Julia? Etienne told me what happened yesterday, how you broke down right in this hallway."

"I'm fine. Really I am." How could I explain I was exorcising my fear of a house I'd known all my life? "I'll be right down."

"Okay, but I don't like to leave you." Gabrielle left reluctantly.

When she was gone, I worked my way down the hall to the other end, opening every door. I went back to the door across from the landing and tried it again. It didn't budge.

By the time Sonny and Etienne arrived, the fog had burned off and the island was bathed in sunlight.

Demolis.h.i.+ng the porch was a delicate operation. The last bit of roof had to come down without killing us, then the remaining pillars and rails, and finally the last of the burnt decking had to be pried off. The great stone footings would remain, a sort of ghost porch until it could be rebuilt. We aimed to get the area as cleaned up as possible so our guests wouldn't look at Windsholme and ask, "What happened?" That was the last thing we wanted to revisit at every clambake.

Etienne, who actually understood construction, mostly directed. Sonny, of course, argued with him, because Sonny was the greatest living expert on everything. I could sense Etienne losing his patience.

"When we finish this, we should take down as much of that damaged plaster inside as possible so I can haul it out on my dad's boat," Sonny said.

"Let's just get this porch job done so we can open up the clambake," Etienne warned.

"But while we have the boat-"

Etienne lost his temper. "We have enough to do! We only have your father's boat for a few hours."

Both of them looked at me, the tiebreaker. That had been our dynamic all spring. Once again, I had to side with Etienne. I had no way to tell if the porch part of the job would take the rest of our time, but any work required to get the clambake open had to take priority.

"Let's just take care of this porch."

"Figures," Sonny grunted and walked away, hauling some boards toward the fire pit.

I didn't tell Sonny and Etienne about my desensitizing walk through Windsholme. When the time came to nail the plywood over the s.p.a.ce where we'd removed the destroyed French doors, I simply went into the house and braced the boards from the inside. n.o.body said anything about it.

While Sonny carried another load down to the fire pit, I approached Etienne. "When we were here with the building inspector, you said you'd met Ray Wilson before."

"Yes. He came to the island. He said his best friend was getting married here and he wanted to play a trick, so he needed to take a look around."

"A trick?"

"You can't very well tie old shoes and cans to the groom's car out here, so he said he was looking for something 'more creative.'"

"And you let him look around?" Knowing what I knew about what Ray and Tony did for a living, I had my own suspicions about why Ray wanted to see the island.

"Sure. Why not? You said you wanted to do whatever we could to accommodate these private events people," Etienne reminded me.

I hate having my own words come back at me. But that triggered a happier thought. "How did Ray get to the island?"

Etienne looked at me like I was crazy. "On the freeway."

"No, I mean did he get himself over or did someone bring him?"

"Came by himself."

"Did he rent a boat or borrow it or what?" Etienne raised his shoulders and turned up his palms, the universal symbol for "who knows?"

Ray could have come out to the island the night of the murder on his own to set up his trick on Tony. If there even was a trick. If it wasn't just a pretense to see the island. But could he have made it, drunk as he was? Chris said he seemed more sober after he threw up.

Even if Ray could have navigated on his own, that didn't answer the question of who might have met him. And killed him. And hung up his body from the staircase.

When the porch was demolished Sonny and I took his dad's lobster boat filled with debris back to the harbor. As soon as we got within cell range, I called and left a message for Binder, thanking him for allowing us take down the porch and begging him to let us open tomorrow. When I ended the call, there was a message from Michaela providing directions to Ray's funeral that afternoon. And urging me to come. Poor Michaela. She was friendless at such a stressful time and stuck with that gargoyle of a mother-in-law.

Chapter 31.

After Sonny and I loaded the remains of the porch into his truck so he could make a run to the dump, I hurried home. I was so intent on getting changed for the funeral, I nearly tripped over Fiona Snuggs, who knelt on the winding walk outside my mother's house, pulling weeds. "Sorry, Miss, er, Fee."

"Just tidying up."

When my father died, Sonny had taken over the tasks of mowing the Snugg sisters' lawn and shoveling snow off their walks. The sisters had gone on caring for the gardens at my mother's house, just as they always had. Over the spring, I'd gotten used to finding a seventy-five-year-old woman crouching in our garden. Though it made me feel awkward, I knew Fee would refuse all offers of help. My sister did a little better with her. Instead of asking, Livvie just jumped in. Fee had decided that of the two of us, Livvie was the potential gardener, probably a reasonable perception, and had started mentoring her in the art of flowers and shrubs.

I helped Fiona to her feet.

"I was thinking about our conversation the other day," she said, brus.h.i.+ng dirt from her denim skirt. "About the night of the murder. I think I've remembered something more."