Mike stood by the stove. “So what happened in here?”
I scanned the big room with its mix of modern appliances and antique furniture. “It looks like—nothing?”
“That’s the idea. But we know better.”
“A round of ‘Match Wits with Inspector Kennis’?”
“Something like that. Why did The Shoals stop running that column, anyway?”
“Nobody ever won—except Jane Stiles.”
“So that’s why you’re marrying her.”
I shrugged. “It’s a pretty good reason. Anyway, I wasn’t necessarily any smarter than the people who wrote in. But I’d read all the same Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr novels they did—and I remembered the tricks.”
“Well, this is no mystery novel. Just a real-life painting disaster. So have at it.”
I studied the room, sniffed the air, got down on my hands and knees. I looked into the translucent plastic “contractor” garbage bag by the side door and examined the furniture, the counters, and the glass-top cooking range. I opened the cupboard under the sink and inventoried the cleaning products lined up there. I squeezed and puffed and spritzed like a baffled husband at a perfume counter. Then I stood up, with a plastic bottle in my hand.
“The accident just happened,” I said.
“About an hour ago.”
“I can still smell the stove-top cleaner.”
“That’ll dissipate soon.”
But there was another odor in the house, much more pungent.
“With the drop cloth, the rosin paper, and the plastic working pot in the trash, along with the water pitcher on the counter and the stink of burnt fabric, it’s pretty clear what happened.”
His face fell. “Oh, boy.”
“First of all, you had two spills, not one.”
Mike stared at me. “How could you possibly know that?”
“The first spill was on the stove top.” I pointed to the blue-stained antique hutch. “But there’s no way the paint would have traveled that far or that direction. The tip-off is that faint little smudge in the side, the color variation where you cleaned it with thinner.”
He kneeled down to look. “Shit.”
“It’s just like forensic blood analysis—the angle of the spatter gives you impact and direction.”
“So—the first accident?”
“I’d say you were painting the door casing at the other side of the stove. You had the counter and the stove dropped off, with the paint can on the counter. It’s obviously a big tarp. The section covering the stove hid the controls from you, and somehow you turned on one of the burners. Probably just by leaning against it. You smelled smoke, freaked out, filled that pitcher with water to put it out, knocking over the first pot. You doused the drop, pulled it off onto the floor, and started with the glass cleaner on the stove. Charred cotton as well as paint. The burned-on fabric must have been the tough part.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, you did the right thing. Smart move—that stove top would be an expensive item to replace. And it worked. Nice job, by the way. Like it never happened. Problem was…you forgot that your main paint can was sitting on the same drop cloth, and it tipped over when you yanked it. The paint was going down the side of the cabinet while you were putting out the fire. Understandable—you were a little distracted.”
“Try panic-stricken.”
“But you did good. Glass cleaned, fire out, incriminating material stuffed into the trash. If you’d noticed the main spill sooner, the paint on the hutch would have come off without leaving a mark. Also, you missed a drop of paint—see, down there by the foot? And you left a scrap of rosin paper under one of the legs. So, I can tell most of the paint must have hit the paper, which you pulled up and bagged, along with the ruined drop cloth. Am I missing anything?”
“Nope. Inspector Kennis wins again.” He shook his head. “I am so fucked.”
“No, you’re not. The Callahans are off-island.”
“But their caretaker could show up any second.”
“No problem. Open the window, clear the air, get that trash bag out of here, put away the water pitcher and the stove-top glass cleaner—you’ll be fine. No one the wiser.”
“Except you.”
“And I’ll never tell.”
“Yeah, but I mean…”
“No, no, you’re missing the point, Mike. The only reason I could piece it all together was that I knew something happened. I was trying to reconstruct an event. No one else will know about the spill, and trust me—if you’re not looking for something, you don’t see it. That’s always been my experience—in police work and regular life, also. People don’t notice much. No one will notice this. Not even the caretaker.”
I opened the kitchen window. A mild breeze drifted in.
Mike nodded. “As long as he doesn’t show up for an hour or two.”
“Or see that paint speck on the hutch.”
“That I can handle.”
He pulled a single-edged razor blade from his toolbox, walked back to the hutch, kneeled down, and scraped off the white speck with a single flick of the blade.
I was impressed. “Looks like you’ve done that before.”
“Don’t ask.”
“Anyway, your caretaker’s not that observant. He never noticed that this storm window is installed upside down.”
Mike stepped beside me to look. “Oh, my God, you’re right! That’s hilarious.”
“No one else seems to have noticed either, so…”
“It’s like the old-time carpenters used to say when they banged in a bad miter or left an un-set nail—‘Good enough for Nantucket’—where all the customers act picky but none of them know shit.”
We lugged out the big trash bag and heaved it into the back of his truck. I followed behind him, and we leaned against the tailgate for a minute or two. “I thought you hated working on the weekends,” I said.
He expelled a tight little breath, squinting into the dappled sunlight. “Yeah. Cindy always says, show me a painter working seven days a week in the off-season, and I’ll show you a guy who’s got problems at home. I worked quite a few Sundays during the, uh, the Tanya Kriel business. That was how Cindy knew something was up. Kind of ironic, because it’s all about Cindy herself, this time.”
“She’s having an affair?”
“I don’t know. But it’s tense and weird at home, and she won’t talk to me. Not to mention we have a preschooler crashing around the house. Cindy’s someplace else. That’s all I know. So I hire a sitter and go to work…and this shit happens. Because I can’t fucking focus, man. Seriously. This is bad.”
“So—what are you going to do about it?”
“I did it already.”
“Mike—”
“I hired a detective. To find out what’s going on.”
That shocked me. “Really?”
“Totally.”
I was about to say that I wasn’t aware of any private detectives working on the island, but one had just moved here from Seattle. I’d had dealings with him a few months before, during the Horst Refn murder case. In fact, he’d helped me solve it.
“Rob Roman?” I asked.
Mike nodded. “He’s a good guy. And pretty smart. If something’s going on, he’ll figure it out.”
“He fell in love with the last runaway wife he tracked down. FYI. That’s why he had to leave Seattle.”
“Thanks anyway, Chief, but that’s not my main worry right now. Roman’s not her type.”
“Fair enough.” I patted his shoulder. “Let me know what you find out.”
Cindy wasn’t the first to vanish that autumn, but I barely noticed those early missing persons reports—those that were even filed at all. The island was swarming with friends and relations, bridesmaids and groomsmen, rowdy
groups of young men in tuxedoes riding in big open cars, packs of identically dressed young women swirling down Main Street brandishing flowers and champagne. In churches and private mansions overlooking the harbor, on the South Shore beaches, under white tents set up in the moors, dozens of couples were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their nuptial revelries.
But the past was hunting some of those people, it turned out. And the festivities provided a perfect cover. People slipping out of a reception or a rehearsal dinner? I had rarely attended one of those shindigs that I didn’t want to escape—including my own. For any rational adult, sensibly fatigued with small talk and dreading the next platter of maple bourbon-candied bacon or beet-pickled deviled eggs, fleeing the tent hardly seemed like a criminal matter or even a surprise.
So I ignored those first reports, just like everyone else. These were adults, after all, not lost children. They were free to come and go as they pleased.
Besides, I was distracted—planning my own wedding, settling my mother into the Darling Street house, helping my kids negotiate the first weeks of the new school year. Not to mention trying to prevent one of my friends from being framed by a rogue cop. I understand why I overlooked what should have been as obvious as the paint speck on the Callahans’ hutch. I had a full inventory of explanations for that fatal neglect, plenty of excellent reasons.
But no excuse.
Chapter Three
The Look-Alike
I followed Sippy into the boy’s bathroom after the incident in the dining hall. “I hate those girls,” I told him. He shook his head and said, “No, you don’t. You just wish you did.”
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
Bondi Beach, New South Wales, Australia
September 10th, 2019
The police departments of three countries along with various inquiries directed to the international law enforcement agencies INTERPOL, EUROGENDFOR, and CLACIP had discovered no connection between the five murdered women.
From different countries—Canada, Ecuador, Belgium, Belarus, and Sri Lanka; from wildly varying economic backgrounds—from trust-fund Uber driver to trophy wife; with diverse criminal records—from pristine to probation to just out of prison—the only common feature was their age. All of them were in their midthirties, but a well-known statistical spike for violent crimes against females in that demographic rendered the fact insignificant.
There was one common feature that all the cross-referenced files and judicial records failed to note. The women all looked alike. They could have been sisters. They could have been quintuplets. And all of them, including this new Australian victim, looked shockingly similar to the face on the dust jacket of the book responding officers found at the scene of the crime.
The book was called Beyond Brant Point Light. It was a “cozy” mystery set on the island of Nantucket, thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts, in the United States of America, ten thousand miles away.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Arthur C. Prelmonte held the book gingerly between surgical-gloved fingers. The crime scene techs fluttered around him, measuring and photographing, poking and prodding, sprinkling and spraying their preferred fluorescent fingerprint powders. He had no idea what evidence the forensic side of the investigation might uncover, and, in any case, he preferred to work the old-fashioned way, the analog way, as his old partner Derek Kilvert had always said. Prelmonte preferred to call it the acoustic way. He had never been much for the electric guitar, either.
The orphaned and ignored item in his hands was all the proof he needed that the old ways were best. It was more than a clue; it was a living thing, throbbing and urgent, trembling against his palm like a wounded bird. He could almost feel the heartbeat.
The woman lying on the carpet in a coagulating lake of her own blood was nothing more than a substitute for the look-alike author of this “Madeline Clark” mystery. She stared back at him from the photograph, a shrewd, pretty woman with a flirtatious half smile that indicated she knew something he didn’t. Not this time, madam, he thought to himself. This time the tables are turned. I know something you don’t, and that something could be the death of you.
He studied the corpse. The brutality of the murder suggested an exasperated frustration. The substitutes—even then, Prelmonte suspected there had been others before this one—wouldn’t satisfy this madman for much longer. A check through the databases would confirm Prelmonte’s intuition, but he didn’t plan to wait. The killer was on the prowl, unsatisfied, hungry, looking for the genuine article.
His next victim would be author Jane Stiles herself.
Prelmonte had to send her a warning, soon, now, today. He calculated the time. It was still only eight in the evening yesterday in New England. He despised electronic communications, but they could beat any plane flight if the perpetrator was already on his way. Nevertheless, Prelmonte felt an asthmatic premonition as he stepped out of the sweltering apartment onto the wooden deck. He took a deep breath against the stifling wheeze of apprehension. He was resolutely unsuperstitious. He couldn’t see the future, but he was far from helpless in the face of it.
He tasted the ocean air, letting his eyes rest for a moment on the immense opal sea beyond the steep roadway and the beach. Then he climbed down the outside stairs, folded himself into his official car, and drove back to Sydney at top speed, siren blaring.
He had emails to write.
Chapter Four
Homecoming
I sprained my ankle when I slipped down the climbing rope. I lost my balance, and I fell—right into Jane’s lap. She screamed as I thrashed and pawed at her, trying to get up and get away, and I left bloody handprints on her blouse. But I saw the concern in her eyes. She said, “Are you all right?” and then, to the gym teacher, “I think he’s hurt!” After that, I had hope. I had felt the connection between us. I was walking on air. It feels just like flying, until you hit the ground.
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
Two days after Mike Henderson’s heart-to-heart with Chief Kennis, Mike’s wife, Cindy, was having a late Friday lunch at Faregrounds Restaurant with her old friend Vicky Fleishman. The tone was different, but the topic was the same.
“So you’re leaving him?” Vicky asked. She had to raise her voice against the clatter of the crowded bar, everyone cheering the Red Sox on the giant TVs. By a small-town miracle, there was no one Cindy knew at any of the surrounding tables. No one was paying attention to them. It was the bottom of the seventh inning, and the bases were loaded. Chris Sale was pitching a two and two count.
Cindy took a sip of her beer. The glass had come frosted, but her Bud Light was tepid now. She didn’t usually drink at lunch, and the state of tipsy serenity she had hoped for wasn’t materializing. She just felt woozy. “I don’t know.”
“You have a four-year-old child.”
“Really? That must have slipped my mind.”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean… I’m just saying—”
“Maybe she’d be better off without me.”
Vicky stared at her. “That is an objectively false statement.”
“Mike could be a single dad.”
“No, he couldn’t! He can barely function as a married dad. He works eighty hours a week. Is he going to put Katie on the crew? Bring Your Daughter to Work Day is one day, Cindy.”
Cindy knew it was meant as a joke, but she couldn’t quite manage a smile. She stared down at her plate and pushed her salad around with her fork. There was too much dressing on it. She should have ordered the oil and vinegar on the side. But somehow mixing her own vinaigrette spoiled the whole idea of going to a restaurant in the first place. Should she help out with the dishes afterward, also? That was the move when you couldn’t afford to pay. She inventoried the plastic in her wallet. Having a card declined would be the final humiliation. “I’m just so sad all the time,” she said f
inally.
“And Mark Toland makes you happy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Vicky snorted. “Well, that’s a stirring endorsement.”
“He’s fun to be with.”
“And he leaves his wet towels on the bed just like every other guy. And gets that same look on his face when he stops listening to you. Plus, if the work thing bugs you? Movie guys never stop. It’s twenty-four seven, supposedly.”
Cindy looked up. “They make a lot more money than house-painters, though.”
“So this is about money?”
“People get rich for a reason. Mark is smart. And talented.”
“And lucky. Everyone who ever won an Oscar admitted they were lucky.”
“Well, I could use a little luck right now.”
They ate quietly for a few minutes. Cindy picked the cherry tomatoes from the slurry of wilted lettuce. What was that old ad her dad loved to quote? “A salad without Wishbone salad dressing is just a bowl of wet vegetables” How true.
“I never liked that guy,” Vicky said.
“You never knew him. He was only at NHS for one year, anyway.”
“He was stuck-up and lazy and mean.”
“He was not!”
“He outed Lonnie Fraker. Remember? He made poor Todd Fraker’s life a misery, just because he could. He called them the Others Brothers because he thought they were weird.”
“Right. And it was nobody but Mark.”
“It wasn’t everyone, Cindy. Don’t pretend it was. Mitch never—”
“Mitch! The perfect peerless prince of whatever. Who dumped you for boot camp and the chance to kill Muslims in some third-world hellhole.”
“Okay, one, he joined the Marines and it wasn’t just to kill Muslims. Jesus, Cindy. And Afghanistan isn’t a third-world country.”
“Yes, it is! Are you kidding me? Of course it is. They don’t even have clean drinking water in those cities.”
“Unlike Detroit.”
Nantucket Penny Page 3
