Death in the Off-Season

by Francine Mathews

“If you like.”

  Peter was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “I have about fifty million to play with. Does that give you an idea?”

  “Yeah.” Merry adjusted her glasses and typed the figure into her notes. All because some early Mason figured out whale oil wouldn’t last forever and opened a department store in Manhattan. History sucked. She looked up. “How’s your sister doing for cash?”

  Peter probably didn’t intend to patronize her, but the expression of amusement on his face felt like condescension, and she stiffened.

  “These are routine questions, you understand?” she said.

  “Completely. George inherited about the same amount as I did. My father disinherited Rusty. Everything else went to Mother.”

  “Your sister hasn’t gone through it all, or anything like that?”

  “I don’t think so. Her husband, Hale, would hardly let her. He’s a director at Salomon Brothers, the New York investment banking firm.”

  “Where Rusty worked.”

  “Yes—Hale probably got him his job when he was first out of col­lege. They worked in separate sides of the house, however—Hale does corporate finance. Rusty is—was—a bond trader.”

  “Your sister work?”

  “She blogs. Lifestyle stuff.”

  “And the kids? They know you left them your money?”

  “I doubt it. And the oldest is only nine. I think we can rule them out.”

  “Have you left anyone anything else?”

  “Odds and ends. I gave Rafe the price of a boat and Will Starbuck the cost of his college tuition. He’s pretty bright. I don’t know if Tess realizes what he could do in the proper environment in a couple of years. Call it about four hundred thousand altogether.”

  “So, if you died, would the money go to Will immediately?”

  “No. It would be invested in a tax-free education account, and Tess could draw down funds as the need arose.”

  “And if you’re alive, you’ll just pay the school bills as they come in, is that it? The trust only happens if you’re dead?”

  “Of course.”

  So Peter Mason dead was worth a great deal. Peter Mason alive wasn’t worth the shorts he was wearing. “Does Tess know about this?”

  Peter shook his head. “She’s very proud. I don’t want her to know about it until Will’s college-bound. I may even figure out a way for it to look like financial aid from the university. Whatever university he chooses. I haven’t worked that out yet.”

  The spark of an idea flared in Merry’s brain. “Who witnessed the will for you, Mr. Mason?”

  “Two of the family attorneys in New York.”

  The spark flared and died.

  “Rafe is the one who suggested I keep Tess in the dark originally,” Peter offered. “He came up with the idea of paying Will a fixed wage for his work on the farm, too, because she was so upset when I gave him my old bike.”

  “Rafe,” Merry said. “He knows about your will?”

  “The tuition bequest. Yes. He could be Will’s stepfather someday. I didn’t want Rafe to worry about college. He doesn’t make much, Detective. Tess’s restaurant, Will’s education—it can all look like a financial nightmare. It would be sad if fear of debt kept him from following his heart.”

  Merry’s breathing was suspended, and the circulation in her legs seemed to have stopped. She was numb from her waist to her toes. Good God, she thought, he doesn’t even realize that he’s giving Rafe a motive for murder.

  To her surprise, Peter grinned. “So it’s not much in the end. And if you go looking for love as a motive, you’ll come up even more empty-handed.”

  “On that note,” Merry said, “we need to talk about your friends, Mr. Mason.”

  “My friends?”

  “Yeah. Mayling Stern, the clothing designer, and the guy she lives with.”

  “Schuyler Tate-Jackson.”

  “What a mouthful that is.”

  “Why do you think we call him Sky?”

  “What’s the problem between him and Ms. Stern?”

  “Is there one?”

  “I’d lay even money on it. She was fishing for me to ask her why they’re not married. Any ideas?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I consider that their business, and not something I’d ask them.”

  “So your friendship doesn’t include trading secrets? No feelings, no personal stuff?”

  Peter looked perplexed. “Why do you care?”

  “Just wondering if you know enough about either of them to judge their characters, that’s all.”

  “I’m an excellent judge, Detective.”

  Merry felt a flicker of amusement. “Yeah, well, whether you’re accurate or not is another question. Let me ask you this: does Ms. Stern lie?”

  “Does she lie?” Peter closed his eyes. Her questions were tiring him. “I suppose we all do, if the reasons are compelling enough. Why?”

  “Mayling Stern’s Mercedes has a damaged front end. It’s pretty recent. Anything older than a week would rust in this humidity. But she doesn’t mention it when I ask her what she did this weekend, and there’s no accident report on file at the station.”

  “A lot of people don’t report accidents.”

  “But when your partner is being blackmailed by an old friend, who just happens to be run over . . . it doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  “Mayling never knew Rusty.”

  “And another thing.” Merry fished in her purse and pulled out a plastic evidence bag. It held the rat button. “I’ve been carry­ing this around so long it’s started to feel like a good-luck charm.”

  “What is it?” Peter turned the bag curiously in his fingers.

  “A button from one of Stern’s sweaters.”

  “The Chinese New Year ones,” he said. “I bought one for a friend’s birthday.”

  “Lucy Jacoby. The English teacher. Did she like it?”

  “She said so.”

  “I found that button near your brother’s body. I also found a Stern sweater with a missing rat in Rusty’s luggage we recovered from Low Beach. I figure whoever murdered him got blood on her clothes when she dragged Rusty to the bog, and so dumped the sweater with your brother’s stuff. I don’t know whether he—or she—knew one of the buttons had been lost.”

  “And you think the sweater you found is Lucy’s?”

  Merry shrugged. “Mayling Stern owns one exactly like it. And if I believe Lucy, she hates rats, and gave your gift away to a clothing drive a little while after she got it. Which means anybody who went to Our Lady of the Island’s bazaar might have picked it up, worn it to murder Rusty, and dumped it in the ocean. If we believe Lucy. The people who ran the bazaar have no record of individual items or purchasers. I checked. But you know her best. Does the story make sense?”

  “Yes and no. I thought she liked the gift, but if she hated rats, she’d never tell me in a million years, and it would be like her to get rid of the sweater quietly—and charitably—behind my back. Mayling’s sold a lot of these sweaters, Detective. Any kind of killer could have worn one.”

  “True enough,” Merry said. “Tell me about Lucy Jacoby, Mr. Mason. Why’s she so paranoid about strangers? I spoke to her the day after the murder, and she was constantly looking over her shoulder. You’d think she’d killed Rusty herself.”

  “You can rule out that possibility, Detective. Lucy never knew my brother, nor did anyone she cares about.”

  “Except you.”

  He looked up at her quickly, a fleeting expression of pain crossing his features, and Merry realized that he knew Lucy Jacoby was in love with him, and that the fact didn’t make him happy.

  “She’s not the sort of person who resorts to violence,” he said. “She takes her suffering as though it were expected, and fades away.”

&
nbsp; “Any idea why she skipped the first day of school?”

  “One or two,” Peter said warily. “Why?”

  “I think she’d tied one on the night before.”

  There was a brief silence. “How to explain this?” Peter said. “Lucy came to Nantucket to escape an unhappy marriage. Her hus­band—a man she met in Europe during a junior year abroad—is what is known as a gray arms dealer.”

  “A what?”

  “He brokers the sale of components for deadly weapons. He lives two lives—one, that of an Italian aristocrat with estates in Portofino and Milano; the other, surrounded by dangerous people. Lucy lives in fear of them. Her husband wants her dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she left.” Peter gave Merry an appraising look. “Have you ever been beaten by a man, Detective?”

  Her face flooded with color. “I take it you don’t mean that spanking I got when I was four?”

  “I mean blows strong enough to raise bruises—but never on the face, or the arm, or the leg, where they might be visible. Lucy says she was beaten daily. The bruises never healed.”

  “Why’d she marry him?”

  “For the reason most women marry men. She thought she could save him.”

  “So she drinks?”

  “Not usually. She handles stress with exercise—running sprints with me, for instance,” Peter said. “But on Labor Day, Lucy thought she recognized a guy on the ferry. One of Marcello’s thugs. She’s terrified—waiting for her ex-husband to appear on her doorstep. I offered to put her up in my old family house on Cliff Road, I even suggested she head for the mainland. She thought that running was pointless.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Merry said. “She could go to the police.”

  Peter shook his head. “I suggested that, too. She seemed more afraid of police involvement than of anything else.”

  Merry thought of Lucy Jacoby, half-hidden in the vines of her loggia like a nesting bird, and felt a spark of pity for her. Peter was right. There was no way he could explain the circumstances of that life to Merry. It was as alien as a foreign tongue—as alien as Peter Mason, if she was honest with herself. Over the past few days she’d viewed his life more closely, and had almost come to believe it was little different from her own. But she was wrong. They existed on two separate planes, thrust into sharp contact by violence and death. Once she found the murderer—once the violence ended—the planes would part again.

  Worry was alive in his face. Merry knew that she had called Lucy’s danger to his mind at a time when he was physically ill-equipped to help her. Give him something else to think about, she advised herself grimly.

  “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Tess Starbuck.”

  “What about her?”

  “If you’re alive, the tuition money goes to Will. If you die, she takes control. Do you have any idea how well the Greengage is doing? Can Tess make it until next season?”

  “I don’t know.” Peter passed his good hand over his eyes. “God, this is awful, isn’t it? Looking closely at everyone you know, wondering what price they’ve placed on your life.”

  “As I said, I’d rather it were about dollars and cents than about the people I love,” Merry said dryly. “Unfortunately, you’re stuck with both.”

  “That’s always been true,” Peter said. “I thought it might be different, here on the island, if I called myself a farmer. I thought I could stop wondering if my friends were really my friends, if a woman loved me for myself instead of what I could buy.”

  Merry was silent.

  “But tell me something, Detective: If I’m the one this murderer wants—for love or money—why am I still alive? A real killer would have finished the job.”

  Chapter 19

  When merry had gone, Peter lay back on the sofa cushions and closed his eyes. Rusty’s face as he had last seen it in death—lined, emptied, and forever unreachable—hung in his mind. He had felt no sense of loss at the murder, and no rage toward the killer; those had been felt long ago, in the presence of another form of death. But in the void left by his brother, a simple conviction remained: that in the world he valued, justice must be done. How dispassionate, he thought, how like a man of my class. I am doing the decent thing, to keep me from feel­ing the unthinkable—relief that a door has closed.

  He allowed himself to consider his brother’s disease. He had never personally known someone with AIDS before, and he realized, suddenly, that this is what it meant to live on an island. Rusty brought the illness into his study, as he lay caught in a shaft of sunlight, and forced him to look at it. Rusty, who had played rugby like a god, who had loved too many women to re­member, who had burnished his strength like a bright shield held before the eyes of everyone—Rusty was incurably sick. Peter felt a strange pity. His fingers clenched and the movement of his sore left arm caused him to curse in pain.

  Footsteps clattered down the hallway from the kitchen and Re­becca pushed the door open. “What happened?” she said hoarsely.

  He cradled his arm in the least painful position and grimaced at her. “Sorry. Just jogged it a bit.”

  She rolled her eyes and turned on her heel, annoyance in every line of her body. Poor Rebecca. Alone in her room in the converted icehouse the previous night, she hadn’t slept, and despite her obvious relief at his return from the hospital, she would probably be up again tonight worrying the gunman would come back.

  Peter glanced down at the copies of the letters Merry Folger had left on the sofa next to him—Rusty’s letters. He picked up the first, addressed to Sky. It was undated.

  Barra da Tijuca

  Rio de Janeiro,

  Brasil

  Dear Sky:

  I know it’s been a while, and I’d apologize, only why bother? We’ve both got our lives, and I’m sure you haven’t spared much thought for mine.

  Maybe I’d better start over. The bitterness is something I can’t control anymore, even if I’d like to, and it invades even this attempt at writing a letter to an old friend.

  I’ve heard about you from time to time, from chance encounters in Rio bars with people you know, or have once known. I’ve liked getting the occasional email you send out, even though I’ve never answered them. You’ve been a sort of lifeline to the past. It’s good to know you’re doing so well. As for me—what is there to say after ten years?

  Maybe spending a few years in a minimum-security country club would have been better than rotting in this beautiful hell. Was I a fool to run? The only difference between wisdom and idiocy is how it looks in retrospect. I’ve wasted a third of my life here, figuring out what paradise really means: a dream come true has the profile of nightmare.

  It’s time to wake up. For both of us.

  I’m going through rough times—you have no idea how bad—and while money can’t solve everything, sometimes it helps pretend. We both know I could end your career by informing certain people how it began. I wouldn’t be above keeping silent, however, for a price.

  Pretty bald, isn’t it? Pretty brutal? But then, so am I. How much is your life worth, Sky? Add it all up, like the honest broker you are—the houses, the partnership, the professional esteem, the reputation you’ve spent a decade building. The love of that woman who keeps you sane. Think about it long and hard. If you talk to the police I’ll go public.

  Contact me at Peter’s on Labor Day. You know where he lives; I don’t.

  Yet.

  But I will.

  There was, of course, no signature. Someone from Merry’s forensics team had dutifully typed the word “Socks” at the bottom, Rusty’s nick­name from college. He had rarely done his laundry on a regular basis, and his roommates had gone from calling him Rusty to Musty and fi­nally to Socks. The innocence of the moniker placed at the end of such a letter, filled as it was with the perversion of Rusty’s history with S
ky, jarred Peter. Or perhaps it was the vividness of memory that it brought, and the sense of lost youth. He shrugged off his thoughts and turned to the body of the letter itself. Sky, contrary to his words, knew why Rusty had left, and that knowledge somehow in­criminated him. Or so Rusty believed—enough to think Sky would be willing to pay him not to talk. What could Sky know? He was supposed to meet the lawyer in New York tomorrow and interview his father’s former CFO, Malcolm Scott. But should he confront Sky with this letter now, while they were both still on the island?

  This letter. He stopped, his gaze suspended in midair, and saw once again the interior of Mayling’s studio, the dim light of a foggy Labor Day, and her fingers scrabbling desperately at scattered sheets of paper. She had been angry and afraid. Was the piece of paper he’d just read only a copy? Had Rusty actually sent his blackmail note to Sky—and Mayling knew it?

  Peter turned to the second letter, hoping for some answers. Like the first, it had been written in Rio; but this one was dated August 20. He scanned it quickly, and stopped short at the sight of his own name. He went back to the top and read it more slowly, trying to understand what it meant.

  Dear Sundance—

  Bad pennies, like bad drugs, always come back to haunt you. Don’t ask how I found out where you are; we’ll have hours to catch up with each other when I get to Nantucket. I’m coming home. I don’t ex­pect you to greet me at the dock.

  I need money; I’m sure you must have some. Sudden death has a way of making people wealthy. On the other hand, if you’re unwilling to part with cash, I can offer you the destruction of that safe little world you’re in the process of building. You realize that all I have to do is say a word to my brother Peter. So I think we’ll have a lot to discuss.

  I’ll be in touch.

  There was infuriatingly little to suggest what sort of hold Rusty had on Sundance, or who he—or she—was. Only that Sundance lived on Nantucket, had known Rusty at some point in the past, and possibly now knew Peter. That could be anyone, he thought impatiently. It was as though Rusty was afraid that Sundance, whoever he was, might de­cide to expose him to the law; and his letter, as a result, revealed noth­ing that could be taken as blackmail. Rusty had become careful in his final years.