Steamed Open

by Barbara Ross

  From behind I heard a grunt. Pain seared through my shoulder. Will had hit me with the rake! I tripped, running an awkward three steps forward, but I was able to straighten up and continue. The rake clattered onto the pavement behind me again, too close, too close. Anne’s screams changed from warning to terror.

  And then there was whoosh of air and a horrible, sickening crunch of a noise, not metal on metal like a car accident, but metal on a sack of flesh, muscle and bone. Metal on a human.

  The air brakes of the big vehicle groaned. I hadn’t seen it, but Glen must have turned the RV around and, this time, instead of trying to cut Will off, he’d aimed straight for him.

  Glen, Anne, and I all reached the place where Will lay at the same moment. He was on the ground, face up, bleeding from his forehead, his leg bent in a way nature never intended.

  “He was going to kill you!” Glen yelled. He was red in the face, out of breath, shaking.

  “He was, I saw!” Anne’s tone left no room for doubt.

  I shook all over, the kind of shivering that rattled my teeth and loosened my joints. “Is he—?”

  Will groaned.

  Anne pulled out her phone and punched in three digits. “I’m at the beach at Herrickson Point. We need an ambulance and the state police immediately. A man was hit by an RV. He needs to go to a hospital and he needs to be arrested. Yes, ma’am, I’ll stay on the line.”

  * * *

  Jamie and Officer Howland were the first ones on the scene.

  “What happened?” Jamie signaled for the ambulance, which had arrived, siren blazing, at the entrance to the parking lot.

  “He was chasing me.” I was still shaking. “He hit me with his clam rake. Mr. Barnard over there,” I gestured toward Glen, “saved my life.”

  I was afraid Jamie would ask, “saved you how?” but he was too busy with Will, who had passed out again. Maybe it was obvious.

  A uniformed state cop who’d showed up asked the Barnards and me to stay around until the Major Crimes Unit arrived. I stood next to the Barnards while we waited. We didn’t talk beyond the occasional, “You okay?” followed by head nods from the other two.

  The ambulance was gone by the time Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn arrived. Jamie had ridden in back with the still unconscious Will, while Howland followed in their patrol car. One of the attendants had put a bandage on my shoulder where the rake had hit me. “A flesh wound,” she said. “You’re going to have a nice bruise from the force of the blow. When you’re finished here you should go to the ER to get it properly cleaned and dressed.”

  “Did Mr. Barnard aim the RV directly at Mr. Orsolini?” Flynn asked, after I’d told him what had happened. Glen and Lieutenant Binder were huddled on the other side of the parking lot. Anne stood by the RV with the uniformed state policeman waiting her turn to be questioned.

  “I don’t know. Not on the first pass,” I answered, “but the second was behind me. I didn’t see any of it.” I was glad I hadn’t. Let Glen tell Binder what his intent was. “I believe Mr. Barnard saved my life.” I touched the bandage peeking out from under my T-shirt for emphasis.

  “What were you thinking, confronting a killer?” Flynn’s posture relaxed a little. His question was more personal than professional.

  “I didn’t think I was doing that at first. But the more we talked, the more I realized it wasn’t anyone else. Will was angry at Frick for cutting off access to the beach. He has a new clam rake, and he was here at the property that morning. He told me he used to give steamers to Lou, and what better way for a person in sand-covered rubber boots to get into the house than through a cellar door that took him to a staircase to the kitchen? He went into the house that way when he killed Frick and left that way, too. He waited in the cellar until Vera French and the Barnards took off, which is why no one saw him. Plus, I remembered Duffy MacGillivray was Nikki Orsolini’s mom’s boyfriend when we were little.”

  “So MacGillivray would have a reason to lie?”

  “I think he would if Nikki asked him.”

  “Motive, means, and opportunity,” Flynn said. “Orsolini was the obvious suspect from the start.”

  “He was,” I agreed, “but I didn’t want him to be. He has a wife and three little kids who need him. And he’s always been good to me. Fair in business, friendly, polite. It’s a shame.”

  “Don’t waste your pity,” Flynn said. “Plenty of people have their income threatened and don’t kill the person responsible.”

  “You’re right, I guess, but it still doesn’t feel good. Can I go home now?”

  “Yes. Come into the police station tomorrow to review and sign your statement.”

  “What will happen to Glen?”

  “That depends on a lot of things. What he says. What the accident reconstruction team analysis shows about what happened here. The District Attorney’s office will decide whether and how to charge him.”

  “I felt Will behind me. I heard the clang of the rake on the pavement inches from me right before Will was hit.”

  “I hear you.”

  “The Barnards’ son was a policeman, killed on the job.”

  Flynn nodded. “He told us the first time we interviewed him.”

  There was shouting at the far other end of the parking lot. The state police had blocked the entrance. Behind their cruisers, I saw a familiar green pickup truck with landscaping equipment in the back. I couldn’t hear what Chris was yelling from so far away, but he was insisting they let him in. I waved, using my good arm, to let him know I’d seen him and was okay.

  Flynn looked over at Chris. “I’ll let you go.”

  “Thank you. See you tomorrow.”

  I ran to Chris as fast as my aching legs could carry me.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Are you up to talking?” Chris asked. We were on the couch back at our apartment after a trip to the ER, where my wound had been cleaned and re-bandaged. I’d been given a tetanus shot, which was more painful than the scrape on my shoulder.

  “I’ve been waiting,” I said.

  “I know you have. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Tell me.”

  He rose from the couch and began to pace like a restless runner before the start of a race. “My family isn’t like yours.”

  He’d said it before, many times. I waited.

  “My father is not Terry’s father. He brought Terry up, but he never accepted him. There was always something missing in their relationship.” He looked at me. I nodded for him to continue. “My dad is not a nice man. He drank, all my childhood, and when he drank he got nasty, biting, critical. For my sister, Cherie, and me, there was a sense that he did it out of love—in his own screwed up way, he wanted to turn us into better people. But with Terry, it was brutal, and constant, and not done with the slightest glimmer of love.”

  Chris stopped pacing and stood in front me, looking right at me. “My dad reserved the worst of it for my mother. He constantly belittled and berated her. If dinner wasn’t on time, if there was a dish in the sink, if we were moping around the cabin. Anything could set him off.”

  He waited to see if I’d understood. I nodded and he went on. “One night when Terry was eighteen, Dad came home drunk. He raised his hand to Mom for the first time ever. Up to then it had been threats, rules, and insults shouted at the top of his lungs. He’d never hit her. Terry threw him out of the house physically. Left him sitting on the front step on his ass and slammed the door.”

  The pacing began again. As he walked, Chris clenched and unclenched his fists. Telling this was killing him. Not telling me, but revisiting it himself, going into the dark cupboard in his head where he kept this stuff.

  “My dad didn’t come to the cabin after that. He was around town, living at my grandma’s house. We’d see him from time to time. Cherie would go over to Grandma’s to be with him. It meant more to her to see him than it did to Terry or me. She told us he’d quit drinking, but we didn’t believe her.

  �
�When he was twenty, Terry joined the Army. We hardly ever saw him after that. Then it was just the three of us, Mom, Cherie, and me. Grandma passed and Dad moved to Florida. We didn’t even know where he was.”

  Chris sat down next to me and breathed in deep, as if he needed more oxygen to continue the story. “When I was a freshman in high school and Cherie was in seventh grade, Mom began to drop things. And forget things, and trip over nothing at all. She was adopted and had no idea what it was. We joked about how she was getting older, but she was only forty-two. She finally told a doctor about it. She was misdiagnosed, I think two or three times. Then came the terrible truth. But even then, she didn’t tell anyone. Cherie and I didn’t tell anyone. It was like we were ashamed.”

  I remembered the Chris I’d had the enormous crush on when he was in high school and I was in middle school in the same building. Wild man, captain of the football team, dating the head cheerleader, he hadn’t seemed to have a care in the world. How wrong we can be about people when we only know their outsides.

  “Then things got worse. Cherie told my father’s sister, and she called Dad. He showed up like a knight in shining armor, saying he would take care of Mom. But there was a catch. He wanted to move her to Florida. I didn’t trust him and I didn’t see how Mom or Cherie could, either, after all he’d put us through. I was terrified we’d get stranded down there where we didn’t know a soul, with a sick mom and a drunk or absent dad. I begged Mom not to go. He told her she had to choose. Him and his support or her kids and Maine.”

  Chris didn’t say anything for a long time. I could tell he was summoning the courage to tell the rest of the story. I waited, watching the sun sink in the sky through the big front window.

  “Mom chose him.” Chris’s voice shook. “She chose him. I was furious at him, at her. Cherie was destroyed. I think she would have gone with them, but when he made it a choice between us and him, he pushed Cherie aside.

  “The next day, Dad packed Mom up and drove her away. I was supposed to go to UNH that fall to play football, but I stayed home with Cherie while she finished school. She left town the day after her high school graduation and never looked back. I couldn’t blame her.

  “I didn’t hear from my either of my parents for ten years. Then Dad called me to say they’d have to sell the cabin. It was time for my mom to go to a place where she’d have full-time care. I bought the cabin from them, as you know.” Chris stopped talking. I took his hand. It was stiff with tension, but I didn’t let go. “The sale was all done long distance. He never came up here.

  “Since then, I’ve tried not to think about Mom, or Dad, or Terry or Cherie, but it’s always there. Now that I’m grown, I understand my mother’s choice a little better. She had to choose between living with two kids who really couldn’t help her, and the grown man she’d spent a good bit of her life with. She probably thought she was doing Cherie and me a favor, removing the burden of her care. Her I forgive. Him I never will.”

  Chris was breathing heavily by the time he finished. The man I loved. He didn’t cry. I’d never seen him cry. But I stopped fighting and gave in to my tears. It was worse than I’d imagined in all my fevered, fear-driven speculations. I hated the disease that had done this to him. I hated his father, too.

  “And that’s the story,” he finished. “The long, sad story. You can see why I don’t talk about it.”

  He put his head in his hands and I put my arms around him and we sat like that until long after the sun went down.

  CHAPTER 30

  It was the Monday of Labor Day weekend, the last weekday the clambake would be open to the public. We’d be open weekends until Columbus Day, but midweek only for bus tours that booked in advance. There had been a parade of good-byes every night for two weeks as our college students returned to school and our summer employees with teaching jobs out of town left.

  I was fixing my plate for the family meal when I heard Mom’s voice. “Julia, Wyatt and Quentin are here.”

  Mom stood across from me, flanked by the two of them. Bess stuck her retriever nose between them. I’d been so deep in thought, I’d missed Quentin’s sleek sailboat gliding into our dock, them disembarking, greeting my mother, walking over to me. Who knew what else I had missed?

  “Wyatt has preliminary drawings of Windsholme for us to see. Let’s go down to the cottage.”

  “Livvie and Sonny can’t come.” Livvie would be back in the kitchen prepping for the next meal, while Sonny and his crew rebuilt the clambake fire.

  “Wyatt can show them later.” There was no mistaking my mother’s anticipation. She bounced up and down on the balls of her feet.

  “Sure.” I put my plate back and followed them to the little cottage by the dock. Mom pushed open the door.

  Inside, Wyatt spread a thin pile of large papers on the table in front of the big picture windows that looked out across the Atlantic Ocean to the horizon. We pulled up chairs and each of us sat.

  “Before I show you these, I want to review your requirements.” The skin over Wyatt’s nose was creased, her voice solemn. I could tell unveiling her first set of drawings, however preliminary, was meant to be a solemn occasion. She cleared her throat, a delicate, hut-hum. “As we’ve discussed, the mansion is to be divided into three spaces. A public space, so the Snowden Family Clambake can expand its operations to include wedding receptions, reunions, corporate retreats, and the like. You’ve also expressed a desire for an apartment to be created on the second floor for Jacqueline to occupy during the summer, and a living space to be created from parts of the second and all of the third floor for Julia.”

  “That’s right,” Mom said.

  “I don’t see why I get the bigger—” I started.

  Mom waved away my objection, as she had in every previous conversation. “I’m at the point in my life where my need for space will only get smaller. You’re the one who’s likely to need more.”

  Wyatt looked from one of us to the other. Quentin kept his elbow on the table, his hand cupping his chin. They’d both heard the argument before.

  When Wyatt was confident we’d run through the usual script, she went ahead. “I want to emphasize this is the first set of drawings we’re looking at, based on my conversations with you and my assessment of the structure. I’ve also tried to take into account changes to the property that the feds, the state, and Busman’s Harbor Code Enforcement are most likely to allow. You’re on the water. You’re on an island. There are a lot of rules.” She paused. “Finally, though the budget is as yet undetermined, we all have a sense of what it might be. I’ve taken it into account as best I can at this early stage. As you know, building on an island triples the price of almost everything—infrastructure, transport of materials, equipment, and crew—”

  “Yes, do show us,” Mom interrupted. We’d heard all this before, many times, and would no doubt hear it many times again.

  Wyatt turned over the first sheet of paper with a flourish. It was an elevation, the outside front of Windsholme. It looked, exactly the same. Only better. No plywood covered the big hole where the fire had burned through the roof. The cornices on the porch columns, missing as long as I could remember, had been replaced, along with the railing on the second-floor porch that jutted from the master bedroom. Wyatt’s drawing fixed the steps, graded the land, and placed rich shrubs around the high foundation.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mom said. “Show us more.”

  Wyatt flipped to the next sheet. The big old rooms on the main floor had been repurposed. The billiards room was a function room for meetings or ceremonies, the ladies withdrawing room was a dressing room, the living room offered space for receptions. The great hall was for dancing. The dining room and window-walled breakfast room were set up with many tables for sit-down meals, so we could book parties and not worry so much about the weather. Restrooms and closets had been placed in spaces that had previously been pantries and passages for servants.

  Mom pointed to the kitchen. “It’s on the
main floor?”

  “Caterers aren’t going to want to run up and downstairs,” Wyatt answered.

  I expected Mom to flinch. The china cabinets and linen closets on the balcony that ringed the two-story kitchen were still intact, and though she’d never lived in Windsholme, I thought it would be hard for her to let them go.

  But she didn’t so much as bat an eyelid. “And this?” she asked, pointing again.

  “The back stairway repositioned for private access to your residence. Do you want to see it?”

  “Yes, yes!” Mom clapped her hands.

  Wyatt had done a good job with the living space, too. Mom’s apartment made efficient use of one half of the second floor. It included a small kitchen, large sitting room, bedroom, and bath.

  Mom asked a lot of detailed questions. Could the bedroom hold a queen-size bed? Could a desk fit here? An eating table there? She pointed at the spaces on the drawing with her long, beautiful fingers as she asked. She’d already moved in mentally.

  I couldn’t get there. Wyatt had made great use of the other half of the second floor, and all of the third. As she showed me my space, I tried to imagine the view of the Atlantic from my office, the straight line of the horizon. But my father’s old office in Mom’s house in town kept pushing the new one out of the frame.

  I looked around the crowded cottage. It had only two bedrooms. Livvie’s family would outgrow it. Had already outgrown it. Maybe they’d use the new space at Windsholme and I’d settle here.

  Maybe my own family would need the second bedroom someday.

  Chris coming clean about his family history had been like a fog lifting. Since the day he’d told me, he’d been noticeably happier, smiling more, laughing more, an extra spring in his step. I’d been happier, too. I no longer felt like I was tiptoeing across a minefield.

  He’d agreed not to approach Emmy about the DNA test or anything equally scary. “My family was so blindsided when my mother got sick. I wanted to spare them. I can see I went about it the wrong way.” He had been back to visit his brother in prison and he believed Terry might be willing to talk to Emmy after he got out.