Steamed Open

by Barbara Ross

  At last, Quentin spoke up. “Since the estate is a crime scene, I don’t know when we might be able to see it.”

  “How long can the police keep the public out?” Wyatt asked.

  “It depends. Until they have what they need,” I told her.

  “Great,” Wyatt responded. “Once they’re gone, we’ll find out who inherits and we’ll get permission. Who does inherit, by the way?”

  Now there was a good question.

  * * *

  Dinner service went off without a hitch. It was a clear, warm night, perfect for folks to linger after finishing their meals, talking and drinking, while the children chased fireflies and lovers walked to the island’s westernmost point to watch the sun go down in a blaze of pinks and yellows.

  Clean up went quickly. Mom and I hugged Livvie and Sonny good-bye. Their kids were long in bed. Emmy Bailey put Luther in his stroller, grabbed Vanessa by the hand and we all climbed aboard the Jacquie II to ride home with our guests. The night sky was still clear, the stars out in profusion.

  The journey back was much shorter than the one to the island. Instead of the meandering route he took out to the island to make sure our guests saw the seals and the osprey, the lighthouses, and the islands crowded with big summer homes, Captain George steered us around Westclaw Point to the entrance to the outer harbor, and then made straight for the town dock. He didn’t narrate in the dark, and the crowd was quiet, full of rich food and drink.

  We were never far enough out at sea to completely avoid the ambient light of the town, but the sky was still a deep black. Up above, I saw a shooting star dropping fast and straight, and then another. The Pleiades. Other people saw that one, too, and then the three that followed in quick succession. A murmur spread around the boat, the voices of children roused from near sleep, the awed tones of the adults.

  About ten minutes out from the pier, my cell phone dinged quietly, downloading messages it hadn’t been able to retrieve while I was on Morrow Island. I checked quickly to make sure there was nothing from Chris. If things were slow, sometimes he invited me to have a drink at Crowley’s on my way home. But on a Saturday night at the height of the season, he’d be way too busy for that. None of the other messages required an immediate response. I put the phone back in my pocket.

  Mom and I walked through the bustling town with Emmy and her little family. Luther was asleep, Vanessa silent. When she was at work, Emmy kept her old car in the unused third bay of Mom’s garage so she didn’t have to pay to park downtown. I helped her load the sleeping Luther into his car seat. Vanessa didn’t say a word as she buckled herself in beside him. She’d be asleep before they were out of town on their way to Thistle Island, where they lived.

  After they drove off, Mom gave me a hug. “Good day today,” she said.

  “Good day,” I agreed.

  When I got home, I showered and got into my jammies. It was hot up in my top floor studio. In coastal Maine, most of us didn’t have air conditioning. There were only three or four nights a year when we needed it. I feared this was one of them. I opened the windows in the dormers at the front and back, the big one facing the water and the small ones in the alcove that housed the bathroom. Mercifully, a breeze moved across the room.

  I settled onto the couch, which faced the front window, the best place to catch the breeze. I could hear the chatter of people aboard the boats at the yacht club, the low murmur of voices, the clink of glasses.

  I had a lot rumbling around in my brain. The Snugg sisters’ request that I help Ida Fischer. My concerns about Will. Wyatt’s question poked at me, too. Who did own Herrickson House now? Who got the art, the land, and presumably the money to support it all?

  Perhaps because I’d been there, possibly the last person to see Bart Frick alive except for his killer, I’d thought of the events of the last few days as the trigger for the murder, and the people around me as suspects.

  But Bart Frick must have done something before he arrived in Busman’s Harbor. A man in his forties, by the look of him. Did he have a family? He’d been living at Herrickson House alone, but maybe he had a wife and kids who were coming later?

  I opened my laptop and typed “Bartholomew Frick” into a search engine. Fortunately, it was an unusual name. All the first hits were stories about his murder. It had been covered locally, of course, as well as in the big Maine papers and the Boston Globe. The articles told me nothing new.

  I found his website easily. Frick had once worked for a large insurance company, but his website now said he was a consultant. I didn’t understand what the description said he did. It was somehow related to figuring out how to insure ship cargo. There was no list of clients on his site. My old boss had said, “Unemployed blue-collar guys are contractors, unemployed white-collar guys are consultants.” I wondered how robust Frick’s consulting business had actually been. The “About” section of the site was plain vanilla, nothing personal.

  Extrapolating from the date of his undergraduate degree confirmed my impression he was in his forties. Further searching showed he lived in a big apartment building in Brookline, Massachusetts. I couldn’t tell if he owned or rented. I wondered if he’d had the red Porsche all along, or if it was new since he’d become the “Responsible Person,” for Lou’s estate.

  I tried “Bart Frick,” and didn’t get much more, a few registrations for charity road races around Boston and on Cape Cod. A search for other Fricks in Brookline didn’t turn up a wife, though perhaps she’d kept her own name. But that wasn’t the impression I got as I read. He had no business partners, no siblings. No family I could find, except for Lou, of course. It seemed Bart Frick was profoundly alone.

  He must have a will. Presumably, he had assets of his own, not only what he’d inherited from his great-uncle’s wife. Was he planning to live in Herrickson House, at least seasonally? It seemed more likely he planned to tear it down and develop the land. Then it made more sense for him to block the access road. He was trying to prove the property had exclusive rights to the beach and lighthouse.

  Which brought me back to Busman’s Harbor. How many people would be infuriated if the beach and lighthouse became private, if Herrickson House was torn down and the land divided into prime oceanfront lots? Many people. Thousands. But who among them would be infuriated enough to kill?

  I felt the computer slipping from my lap. My eyes flew open and I grabbed it before it fell to the floor. I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep. I gave up and went to bed. I didn’t wake up when Chris came home.

  CHAPTER 12

  My phone clanged an alarm at four thirty the next morning. For a heart-pounding moment, I thought it was an emergency call waking me in the dark. Then I realized I’d committed to go clamming with Will. I slipped out of bed and into a pair of cutoffs, and an old Snowden Family Clambake T-shirt. I threw a tube of sunblock and a Red Sox cap into my tote bag, put on a pair of flip-flops and was on my way. Chris didn’t move the whole time.

  Keyport Beach was at the end of Eastclaw Point, farther away than Sea Glass and in the opposite direction. I stopped at the gas station mini-mart for coffee and a banana. The sun was a thin, bright orange line in the east.

  By the time I parked in the lot at Keyport Beach, the sun was up, a diffuse light across the landscape. Will’s dark red pickup was there, along with several others. I got out of my car and slathered on the sunblock. The tide was near dead low and the salty smell of the Atlantic Ocean woke me up better than the coffee.

  The clammers were spread out, working near the tide line as the water moved out. I spotted Will about midway down the beach and called to him. Unlike other forms of hunting, the clams couldn’t hear you and run away. Will didn’t hear me over the sounds of breaking waves and screaming gulls. He didn’t turn around.

  When I reached him, he greeted me with a smile. “Glad you came.”

  “Thanks for asking me.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Years ago, with my grandpa. He used
to take us for quahogs.”

  “Hard shells,” he responded. “Maybe we’ll try to get some later when the tide comes in. But mainly we’re looking for soft shells—steamers.”

  I nodded to show I understood. He handed me a clam rake, the short-handled fork with the bent tines and basket he and the other clammers had raised at Bart Frick’s gate. “Won’t you need this?” I asked.

  “No. It’s Nikki’s. I’ll use my shovel.” He pulled a rusty spade with a worn wooden handle from the sand.

  The clam rake he’d given me was shiny and new. Nikki must not go clamming frequently. I was sure Will had raised a rusty, well-used clam rake at the gate at Herrickson Point.

  “It’s about twenty minutes to low,” Will said. “We’ll follow the tide out and then back in again.” He put the spade over his shoulder, picked up a large galvanized bucket half-filled with seawater, and walked on the hard sand. He wore rubber boots as well as rolled-up jeans and a white T-shirt. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

  I tried to remember. “Bubbles?”

  “Holes,” he answered. “Here I’ll show you.” In about ten feet he stopped. I stared at the sand, seeing nothing. With a big gesture, he shoved the spade into the sand. Immediately a dozen or more tiny holes appeared. “We scared ’em,” Will said. “They contract and push out the water that creates the holes.”

  “How did you know where they were?”

  He shrugged. “I just do. You learn to read the sand if you do this enough.” He caught my skeptical look. “Don’t worry. A lot of times the holes will already be there.” He took the spade and dug a shallow hole about six inches from the mini-dots in the sand. When it was eight or nine inches around, clamshells began to show at the edge of the bowl. Will stuck the shovel into the sand and dropped to his haunches over the hole. He reached in, quickly grabbing clam after clam and sliding them into the galvanized bucket. “Get in there,” he urged.

  I squatted across the hole from him, plunged my hand into the cool water and touched a clamshell. “Where’d it go?” I’d had a finger on one, but it had disappeared.

  “Soft shells can only move vertically,” Will said without pausing at his work. “You alarmed him and he scooted. Keep at least a finger on it so you can track it going down. Try again.”

  I reached into the hole again. There were three shells still visible. This time, I kept my index finger on the shell as it moved down through the wet sand with surprising speed. “Got you!” I pulled him out and dumped him into Will’s bucket.

  When the hole was empty, Will stood up and we moved down the beach a little. “The tide seems like it’s barely moved,” I said.

  “Tide moves the least in the twenty minutes before and after the low,” Will responded. “Here.”

  This time there were holes visible on the surface before he tapped the shovel on the sand. Will repeated his process, digging down next to the little holes, waiting until the bowl filled with water and digging the clams out with his hands. There weren’t nearly so many in this colony, seven total, but I managed to retrieve three of them.

  “Foraging for bivalves was probably the earliest form of humans hunting,” Will said as we worked. “No equipment or skill required. Well, maybe a rock to open the shells.”

  “Seems like a skill to me.” I watched his hands as, lightning fast, he pulled the last clam out of the water. I knew prehistoric man ate lots of clams and other shellfish. The middens, or mounds of shells, were still occasionally visible on riverbanks just inland.

  Up and down the beach, I could see about a dozen other people close to the water line, digging and bending, straightening up, and moving their heavy pails. Most were men, but there were a couple of women.

  “It’s crowded,” Will said, following my gaze. “That’s why I don’t usually come here. About half these folks are regulars. Truth is, they’re being nice about the rest of us clamming here because we can’t get onto Sea Glass. We stay out of each other’s way.”

  I was used to that sort of thing, people marking out a territory on land or water they didn’t own. Lobstermen did it in the harbor and along the coast. The people who fished for baby eels, called elvers, did it along riverbanks in the spring. Keyport Beach belonged to an association of cottages that lay over a line of boulders and across Eastclaw Point Road. They’d always tolerated or even encouraged clammers, dog walkers, surf casters, and others as long as people cleaned up after themselves and avoided prime beach hours.

  “Your turn,” Will said.

  “Here.” I indicated a circle of sand about a foot in circumference with lots of the tiny holes close together.

  “They’re probably too small,” he said. “But give it a go.”

  I used the claw-like tines of the rake to move the sand, creating a bowl that filled halfway with water about six inches from the tiny holes. Then I squatted and worked the sides of the bowl with my hands.

  The first clam got away from me. I got a hold of the second and pulled him out. Will was right. The shell was less than an inch from the hinge to the outside curve. To make sure, I pulled out another. Same thing.

  “How did you know they’d be too small?”

  “Holes were too close together.”

  I picked up the rake and we walked a little farther. The tide had turned, and was coming in. “Here?” I asked, indicating a few dots in the sand.

  Will shook his head. “Naw. Someone’s been there before us.” He pointed with his shovel to a small mound of sand, nearly washed away with the tide, the remnants of someone else’s digging as the tide went out. “Keep looking.”

  “How many months do you clam?” The Snowden Family Clambake bought steamers from Father’s Day to Columbus Day. The rest of the year we were shut down.

  “Now, all year round.”

  Clamming was legal all twelve months in Maine. It was hard work all the time, but especially miserable and dangerous in the winter. The question had been my way of asking Will what other kinds of work he did. No one in Busman’s Harbor, as far as I knew, made a living entirely from clamming. It was a good supplement to something else, or multiple something elses. The word “now” in Will’s answer told me there was more to the story. I waited to see if he’d explain.

  “I started off as a commercial fisherman, when I was just out of school. Leave it to me to pick something there was no future in.”

  Busman’s Harbor had once had a thriving fishing fleet, but a poorly understood combination of over-fishing, foreign competition, and a warming ocean had decimated the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic. One by one, the boats had disappeared from the harbor until there were none.

  “I shrimped in the winter,” Will said.

  Catching the delicious, tiny Gulf of Maine shrimp had been lucrative winter fishery for Maine lobstermen and others. The season had run from December through February for many years, but there had been no season at all for the last five. With the catch down dramatically, the state had called it off, creating another hardship for fishermen. I loved the tiny, sweet shrimp and missed them in the summertime, fried and served in a basket with French fries and coleslaw.

  Will stopped at the next set of holes we came to and dug with his shovel, talking as he worked. “For a while, I had a winter gig doing security at the oceanographic lab, but it didn’t work out. Nikki’s mom watches the kids so she can work at Kidder’s Department Store four days a week during the season.” Kidder’s was right off the town pier, a jumble of Maine-y souvenirs. Will dropped to his haunches and plunged his hand into the cold water in the hole. “Nikki’s worried all the time. It’s been hard. I won’t lie. The Snowden Family Clambake being a regular customer has been a godsend.”

  It was a sadly familiar story in a place where seasonal work dominated. I hadn’t realized things were so tough for Will and his family.

  We spread out and each worked on our own. Will returned to his truck a few times to get another pail. Maine clammers were allowed to take three bushels a day. A bushe
l of soft shells weighs fifty pounds, so Will used pails that held smaller quantities to make them easier to carry. The work was backbreaking. As the sun rose, Will took off his shirt, revealing heavily muscled chest and arms. I put more sunblock on the back of my neck.

  When the third pail was full, Will stood up, stretching his back. “Time to go.” The beach was empty. I hadn’t noticed when the other clammers had taken off.

  As we gathered our equipment, a Busman’s Harbor PD patrol car pulled into the parking lot, which was empty except for my Caprice and Will’s truck.

  “Did you go to town hall and get that shellfish license I told you about?” Will asked.

  My stomach dropped. “You didn’t tell me to—” I stopped. Will was grinning, obviously kidding. But I should have known to get a day license.

  The patrol car stopped and Jamie Dawes got out, swinging his long legs to the ground as he pulled on his cap. “Hey, Will,” he said as we approached.

  “Hey, Jamie.”

  “Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn want to interview you again.”

  “That so.” Will hefted the big pail into the back of his pickup. The water sloshed out, hitting him in the chest.

  “And they’d like you to bring your equipment with you,” Jamie said. “Voluntarily.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “We’re talking to all the people who protested at Frick’s gate on Thursday, and we’re looking at everybody’s equipment, if they’re willing.”

  “You should talk to a lawyer,” I told Will. “This is the second time they’ve questioned you. You don’t have to turn over your equipment.”

  Up to this point, they’d both ignored me. The conversation, the tension, was between them.

  Will turned to me. “I can’t afford a lawyer. Don’t need one anyway.” He turned back to Jamie. “I’ll come. Can I stop at my house and get cleaned up?”

  “We’re on a tight schedule.” Jamie kept his voice even, all business, though he’d told me dealing as a cop with townspeople he knew well was one of the toughest parts of his job.