Death in the Off-Season

by Francine Mathews

  Tess Starbuck was standing at the kitchen door, holding the screen open with one hand and a towel with the other. She was a red-haired woman in her late thirties with tigerish eyes and a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. Merry waved in a friendly fashion. Tess nodded coolly back.

  Will took the bike from Howie and held out his hand. “Thanks, Officer,” he said, and turned the wheel.

  What a pathetically sweet kid, Merry thought, and then reminded herself that he was entering his sophomore year of high school. He seemed both younger and wiser.

  She followed him to where his mother stood and smiled at Tess. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Starbuck, Will hasn’t gotten into any trou­ble.”

  “Oh, Lord, you had a fall,” she said, bending down to examine his torn knee. “And these are your new jeans for school.” She was exas­perated, and showed it.

  A spot of color came out high on Will’s cheekbones, and he pushed past her into the kitchen, clearly a teenager now. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Torn jeans are cool.”

  Tess Starbuck looked inquiringly at Merry. “He was on his way to Peter Mason’s cranberry farm,” she said. “He left not two hours ago. Where did you come across him?”

  “Could I come inside for a moment, Mrs. Starbuck?” Merry asked. “I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “Of course.”

  Merry turned back to where Howie Seitz stood by the jeep. “Take the town shuttle back to the station, Howie,” she said, “and start typing up your notes. I’ll see you later.”

  Tess led her into the kitchen and motioned to a chair. She was clearly in the midst of prep work for the noon meal. Live lobsters, their claws bound with rubber bands, struggled to climb the sides of a galva­nized tin bucket. Chopped melons and fresh mint stood near a bottle of balsamic vinegar on the butcher block counter, and the smell of a corn chowder filled the air. “I was just making some melon salsa for the swordfish,” she said, motioning to the counter. Will was nowhere to be seen.

  Merry sat down, the kitchen’s odors reminding her sharply that she hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. She shrugged herself out of her slicker. The morning had turned humid, and the coat was too heavy.

  “Will did have a fall, Mrs. Starbuck, but that’s not why I brought him home. I’m afraid he found a body.”

  She was unprepared for the impact her words had on Tess Starbuck. Her weathered face drained of color, and Merry was afraid she was going to faint. She pushed back her chair and reached for Tess, but the woman motioned her away and groped for the stove behind her for support.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “It’s just that what you said, almost word for word, is how I heard of my husband’s death.”

  “I’m sorry,” Meredith said.

  “Will found him, you see. Dan was washed overboard during that nor’easter last year. It took a week for him to turn up on shore.” Her strange golden eyes sought Merry’s. “Will was frantic. I couldn’t keep him in the house. He never stopped looking for his dad.” She paused, staring sightlessly at her own red­dened hands. “He’s never spoken of it to me. I don’t really know what he saw, how Dan looked. But Will’s never been the same since.”

  A body lost in the ocean for a week wasn’t a pretty sight, and it smelled like nothing on this earth. Merry had heard that Will hadn’t spoken for a month after his father’s funeral. Tess had sent him to the mainland, to a cousin who was a psychiatrist, and Will hadn’t finished out the school year. “I should have remembered that, Mrs. Starbuck,” she said. “It helps explain Will’s reaction.”

  “My God, I haven’t even asked you,” Tess said, coming suddenly back to the present. “Was it someone he knew?”

  “No—at least, not really. I think he may have thought it was Peter Mason at first, but it turns out the man was his brother.”

  “Peter’s brother? He has a brother? I didn’t know.”

  “Apparently no one did. He hadn’t been to the island for a while.”

  Tess Starbuck looked anxiously toward the hall and the stairs leading to Will’s attic. “It must have been a horrible shock,” she said, “if he thought it was Peter. He adores Peter. He’s been like an older brother to Will.”

  Merry rose. “I won’t take any more of your time, Mrs. Starbuck.” The woman seemed not to hear her. “I’m sure he’ll be okay,” she said, with a cheerfulness she didn’t feel. Just in time for school to start again, she thought, and he had to be the one to find the body.

  Tess showed her to the door. As Merry walked down the gravel drive she turned and waved. The woman raised one hand, a gesture eloquent in its loneliness.

  As she turned her car into Centre Street, a red Range Rover sped past her, headed for the Greengage. Merry looked over her shoulder. The Rover jerked to a halt, and Rafe da Silva got out. Tess met him at the door. Merry saw the woman crumple and begin to weep, her face buried in Rafe’s shoulder. His arms came up around Tess’s back.

  And suddenly, her face crimson, Merry drove quickly on. She felt ashamed, unsettled, and, dare she admit it, hurt. She thought she had forgotten Rafe da Silva.

  Peter toweled off his hair and picked up the phone. He had called his mother and discovered she was in Capri, temporarily out of reach. He left a message to call him as soon as possible, and dialed Georgiana’s number in Greenwich, hoping she, at least, was around. She had sense and compassion, and he had always valued both.

  Four rings. Voicemail kicked in. His youngest niece, charming and almost unintelligible at four, crowed in his ear. “Please—leave—a message!” Much giggling followed. Casey had clearly been coached. He sighed inwardly and waited for the beep. He had barely finished leaving a message when his phone rang—George calling him back.

  “Peter! Sorry I didn’t pick up. How’s the island? Miss us?”

  The entire Whitney clan had descended on the Mason ancestral home, high on the Cliff Road, for the month of July, and Peter had played surrogate father. Hale Whitney, a director of Salomon Brothers, flew in for only two of the four weekends, while George spent much of the time at work on her lifestyle blogging. So Peter built sand castles, led bike caravans to Surfside, and rented a boat for the boys’ first bluefishing. He had loved every minute of it. Yes, he missed them.

  “George, I’ve got bad news.” He felt rather than heard her small silence on the other end of the line, and knew she was gathering strength for calamity.

  “Is it Mother?” she said.

  “No. Rusty.”

  “Rusty?” She sounded decidedly relieved. “What’s he done now? Led a coup in Central America?”

  “He’s dead. His body was found here at the farm.” Peter shut his eyes and waited for her response.

  Unexpectedly, she laughed. “But that’s impossible. What would Rusty be doing on Nantucket?”

  Peter said nothing.

  Georgiana hesitated. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “No. He was murdered, George.”

  “Jesus. By whom?”

  “We don’t know. You hadn’t heard from him lately, had you?”

  “Me? Rusty hated me. Why would he get in touch now? No, I hadn’t heard a thing. My God, murdered? That’s just like him.”

  “I know,” Peter said, and reflected that only Georgiana could un­derstand that essential fact about Rusty: he’d victimize them all if he got the chance. “But as you can imagine, it’s made things rather awk­ward. Rafe seems to believe someone was trying to kill me, and got Rusty instead.”

  “Not likely,” George said. “I imagine some of his unsavory friends followed him up here and knifed him in the back. He probably welched on a drug deal. Was it a knife, by the way?”

  “No, the bog. He was run over by a car and left to drown, appar­ently.”

  “And Rafe thinks whoever drove the car intended to hit you,” George said. “Be careful, Peter. Do you need me to come?
”

  Peter thought of the ringing noise level of the Whitney household, weighed it against George’s energy and intelligence, and said regret­fully, “I’ll let you know when the funeral date’s set. Don’t worry about anything until then.”

  “Peter.”

  He waited for the inevitable.

  “Have you talked to Alison since—”

  “No,” Peter said. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”

  “Don’t you think perhaps you should—”

  “I’ll be in touch.” He punched off his cell before she could con­tinue, and stared in front of him. It had to be faced, and sooner rather than later. But first he would talk to Sky.

  Chapter 6

  Merry was trapped in holiday traffic on Broad Street, where a line of cars was snaking toward the Hyannis ferry and the last of the season’s tourists were setting out from the Jared Coffin House in sneakers and cotton sweaters. Probably headed to the Whaling Museum, she thought, to hear about Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Ezra and the rest of the famous Folgers who’d made fortunes, built houses, and left their names on the island’s streets, before kerosene put an end to fishing for oil. Museum business was invariably brisk when the island was fogbound; the horns and the shifting damp drove home the threat of the sea and invested the whaling past with a glamorous power. Glancing up at the gray sky, Merry decided that the island was mourning summer already; from now on even the brilliant days of September would have a note of sadness in them. She had lost her summer in relentless hours of work, compensat­ing, she told herself, for the state budget cuts and the smaller staff. On sleepless nights, she admitted she was trying to prove something else: that she merited her promotion to detective, regardless of her father’s influence or any unspoken gender quotas; and she would keep it.

  On impulse, she abandoned her official Explorer in a no-parking zone, aware that she was abusing police authority, and trudged toward Water Street and breakfast. Her reflection rippled in the storefront windows that lined Broad Street. The expensive goods catering to the off-island trade were plastered with sale stickers. Another month, and some of the shops on Main and Centre would limit their hours; after Christmas, others would close for the winter. Her steps slowed as she approached Mayling Stern, the New York designer’s island store, which she had never entered but could not pass without surveying. No sale stickers here. The window display had changed from late summer to early fall, with a collection of hand-knit sweaters spilling out of a scarred iron-and-leather trunk. She peered into the shop, not yet lit for the day’s business, and decided that if she ever became extremely rich she would buy everything inside. Her eyes strayed back to the sweater display. Perhaps if she solved the Mason murder she’d spend her fall clothing budget on one of them. Merry looked closer.

  Someone had propped a discreet card, penned in calligraphy, against a glass vase full of cattails: Island Wool from Mason Farms. Of course. With his family’s retailing connections, Peter Mason’s fleeces would go to nothing less than a New York designer. She eyed a mulberry-colored cardigan. An abstract geometric pattern in gray trailed across one shoulder and ended on the right front edge, where a leather toggle caught a single button.

  Merry’s jaw went rigid, and she felt a wave of heat wash over her. The button was of wood, cunningly made to look like ivory, and carved in the shape of a pig’s head. A quick check of the other three cardigans draped across the trunk’s edge revealed similar buttons, all of them representing different animals—a rabbit, a cat, and something she could only call a dragon. In her mind’s eye she saw a similar button, carved in the shape of a rat, half hidden in the grass by the side of an unpaved road. She dodged around the window to the door and tried the knob, unsuccessfully, only then noticing that the shop opened at the reasonable hour of ten. She moved on toward Water Street, lost in thought. She had glanced at it only briefly, but she would swear the button she’d picked up by the dead man in the bog had been one of Mayling Stern’s.

  “‘The fact of the matter is, Noah Mayhew,’ I said to him, ‘you’ve not enough faith in technology. Sure it’s true that a hurricane tore your garden to pieces. And it cannot be denied that I harvested my tomatoes two days before. But let us not forget that I surf the internet, while you’ll not have it in the house, and so were caught with your proverbial drawers down. There’s no cause to hold a grudge because you’re too dim to see a hurricane coming, even when it leaves calling cards all up the coast.’” The monologue was followed by a rich burst of laughter.

  Merry stopped and turned around. “You’re talking to yourself again, Ralph Waldo,” she said.

  The white-haired man striding briskly along behind her looked up and smiled. “I thought I was talking to you, Meredith Abiah. Why did you leave your vehicle in a no-parking zone?”

  Merry waited until he reached her and then stood on tiptoes to peck him on the cheek. She was tall, but her grandfather was over six feet, with a trim white beard and deeply tanned cheeks. “Habit, I guess,” she said. “I’m starving, and too exhausted to fight this traffic. You can issue me a citation.”

  “Only if you’ll stop at Fog Island first.”

  It was after nine o’clock, and the Fog Island Cafe had a line of breakfasters out the door.

  “Let’s get coffee and a cinnamon bun and eat by Old North, Ralph,” Merry said. “I need to talk to you.”

  He shot her a sharp glance from under his thick eyebrows—her eye­brows, as she well knew—and said, “Half a moment.” She watched as he edged past the tourists waiting for tables and made for the counter. He stood upright and distinguished despite his eighty years, khaki trou­sers clean and pressed, his shoulders broad in a teal-blue Patagonia fleece pullover that sharpened the whiteness of his hair and the dark­ness of his skin. In his twenties, before he’d returned to the is­land and joined the force, he’d trained as a Shakespearean actor. Traces of the stage were visible still in his bearing and the cadences of his speech.

  Bertha Shambles, who ruled Fog Island, beamed at him. There wasn’t a woman on the island who hadn’t carried a torch at some point for Chief Ralph, as he was still called, even after his son had taken over and he’d begun to talk to him­self, spending his hours growing tomatoes, or scalloping in Madaket Harbor. Merry wondered if he recognized his charm, if he was conscious of his minor eccentricities, and felt a fierce love for her grandfather

  “You look schnockered,” he said, appearing at her elbow.

  “Night shift.” She reached for one of the steaming coffee cups he held precariously in his right hand and led him to the marina that bounded Water Street and Old North Wharf. Most of the boats were safe in their slips, gleaming palely in the fog.

  Ralph eased himself stiffly onto the dock, his legs dangling over the side. Merry sat down next to him and breathed deeply of salty sea, boat tar, and rotting fish. She summoned her flagging energy. “I need you to dredge your brain for Mason family history, Ralph.”

  He cocked one eyebrow at her and took a massive bite of bun, chewing ruminatively before he answered. “I assume you’re not asking idly. Masons, Masons. So many stories to tell, so little food. Hang on, I’ll go get us some more and think about it on the way back.” He rolled to his feet before she could protest, and left her to glance at her watch and appraise the quality of the fog. She never managed to sleep during the day before a night shift, and at this point she had been up for twenty hours. A Forster’s tern glided to a landing on a piling five feet away from her and eyed her breakfast. She broke off a bit of bun and tossed it to the bird, knowing Ralph Waldo would disapprove.

  She considered the button. If the designer and Peter Mason did business, it was possible it had been dropped long before the murder, during some sort of fashion consultation. Or Rusty Mason could have been killed by a wealthy socialite who favored Mayling Stern clothing. Or, she supposed, Mayling Stern could have taken a sudden, violent dislike to Mason Farms wool and
decided to kill Peter, but had gotten Rusty by mistake. None of it seemed even remotely plausible. Perhaps she needed more coffee.

  “I got you some more coffee, too,” Ralph Waldo said, sliding down beside her, “which I recommend you get inside of you. Eat this bacon sandwich instead of feeding the gulls. How far back in Masonry do I have to go?”

  “You can skip the founding of the island,” Merry said, “but not the founding of the empire.”

  “That would be somewhere around 1840, I do believe, and canny John Paul Mason. Saw the handwriting on the wall when kerosene was discovered in 1839 and got his money out of whaling. By the time the rest of the island figured it out ten years later, the sandbar had started to block the harbor, and a lot of fortunes went out with the tide. By then, John Paul had moved to New York permanently and his department store was quite the rage. Pretty much ignored Nantucket for the rest of the century, except for visiting relatives. He was married to your Great-Great-Great-Aunt Hermione, by the way, which makes us some sort of relation.”

  “You’re kidding. Masons related to Folgers?”

  “Masons had been marrying Folgers for two centuries at that point. But once the two families’ fortunes parted ways, what with the island economy in decline and John Paul moving Hermione to New York, the habit kind of died out.”

  “I suppose so,” Merry said shortly, thinking of the quiet, but clearly moneyed, elegance of Mason Farms. “I can’t imagine two more differ­ent worlds.” She felt oddly cheated. She had disliked Peter Mason enough to readily suspect him of murder. Knowing he was a distant relation brought her up short. She wondered if her antagonism was solely in response to his arrogance and apparent lack of grief—or if she had been intimidated by his status and her own lack of experience. That thought made her uncomfortable.

  “Next we come to Fletcher Mason, and his son August—Fletcher’s first wife died childless and then he married a German girl around 1890, but he only lived a few years after August was born. The family fortune, by the way, diversified and multiplied and revivified and what­not. I think they set up the newspaper chain around the turn of the century. Anyway, August went off to World War I and came back a flying ace, only to die in the influenza epidemic of 1919. Poor kid. His bride was pregnant at the time and was sent off to Saratoga to avoid the flu.”