Thread Herrings

by Lea Wait

  “It’s too dangerous. If that man did kill Clem, he’s threatened you and blown up your car. He’s hurt Clem’s family and yours. You and Sarah are putting yourself directly in the path of someone who may be seriously deranged.”

  I was scared. But Patrick was more scared.

  “Pete and Ethan will both be there. We’ll be meeting Holgate in Sarah’s store in Haven Harbor, not in a remote location.”

  “If you’re right, Holgate killed Clem in downtown Haven Harbor in the middle of the day, and it’s pure luck that you—or Tom—weren’t killed, too.” Patrick stared at me. “I keep thinking it could have been you getting in that car. It could have been you in the hospital. Or worse.”

  “I have to do this, Patrick,” I said, steadily, looking into his deep brown eyes. Eyes that showed his emotions when his words said something else. Now those eyes were dark with pain. “I’ll be all right, Patrick. I’ve confronted killers before.”

  Not by choice, but because darkness had seemed to follow me ever since Mama had hugged me and walked away into the night and never returned. For years I’d been angry at her for leaving, and at whoever had kept her from coming back. My anger was irrational. But it was still there, in a corner of my mind.

  I couldn’t fight for Mama when I was a child. I’d lost her to the night. But I could fight now. It had taken seventeen years for me to find out what had happened to my mother. Years of unanswered questions and dark holes in my heart. I couldn’t let that happen to anyone else’s family. Not if I could do anything to stop it.

  “I have a gun.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be hurt.”

  My phone rang. “Thank you, Pete. I’ll see you this afternoon.” I put the phone down and turned to Patrick. “Pete and Ethan have agreed. They’ll be there. Sarah will be with me. We’ve planned it to be as safe as we can.”

  “I should go with you,” Patrick said.

  A little batter from the spatula dripped onto the floor. I wanted to wipe it up before it stained the small antique hooked rug in the doorway to his kitchen. But I didn’t.

  “No, Patrick. Enough people are already involved. You’ll drop me off at Sarah’s at three this afternoon. Holgate will meet Sarah and I there at three-thirty. We want him to see that I’m alone, and I’m carrying the embroidery. Pete and Ethan will already be at Sarah’s and have set up a recorder, and maybe a camera.” I tried to smile. It was hard to reassure Patrick when I needed reassurance myself. “After it’s all over I’ll call, and you can come and get me.”

  “Are you sure this is the only way?”

  “It’s the only way anyone’s come up with. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. Holgate might go back to California.”

  “And if it wasn’t him?”

  “Then we’ll go back to the beginning and start again, asking more questions. Right now we don’t have many answers, but the ones we have all lead to Holgate.”

  “But he doesn’t have a motive.”

  “People kill for all sorts of reasons. You’ve seen it right here at Aurora, Patrick. People kill out of anger, jealousy, resentment, because of an old grudge.... Murder isn’t logical, except in the mind of the murderer. Whoever killed Clem had a reason. Maybe this afternoon we can find out what that reason was.”

  Chapter 37

  “In Memory of Samuel Gooch who died

  Dec 1 1822 at sea aged 16 years

  In memory of John Gooch who died

  Sept 12 1830 aged 18 years

  These lovely sons to parents dear

  Did find an early grave

  One in the bosom of the earth

  The other in the wave

  In distant climes though now they sleep

  Yet when the dead shall rise

  Both sea and land shall yield their trust

  To meet in yonder skies.”

  —Memorial sampler stitched by their younger sister, Olive Jane Gooch (1822–1902), in Wells, Maine, 1832. In 1848 Olive married Walter Littlefield and moved to Melrose, Massachusetts, where they raised their two daughters.

  Patrick didn’t say much more. We ate his pancakes for lunch, drenched in butter and generous servings of Maine maple syrup.

  We tried to chat about the weather. The Celtics. The cats. But we were both focused on what was going to happen that afternoon.

  At quarter to three I pulled on my boots, tucked my Glock into its holder under my sweatshirt, covered everything with my parka, and picked up the padded envelope protecting the embroidery and the Foundling Hospital paper.

  “No gloves or mittens?” Patrick asked.

  I shook my head. If I had to fire my gun, it would be easier with bare hands, but I didn’t explain that. He was already worried enough.

  I’d been inside too long. My breath made a small cloud in the cold, but the world was beautiful. The sun was beginning to set. Already streaks of red and orange were reflected on the snow, glinting on the ice that sparkled beneath the latest flurries. Winter sunsets were more dramatic than those in summer, as if nature were rewarding those of us who lived in darker, colder, places.

  “You’re the bravest, most stubborn woman I’ve ever known,” Patrick said on our way downtown. “Just be careful, please?”

  “I will,” I promised. We both knew the words were hollow. I’d do what I needed to do.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” he said, stopping his car in front of Sarah’s shop.

  Lights were on inside the shop, and her windows were filled with antiques again. Nothing was quite the way it had been before the explosion, but order had been restored. New snow had already covered traces of where my little red car had burned, and where Clem had died.

  “I don’t want to lose myself,” I answered, giving Patrick a quick kiss. Before I changed my mind, I got out of his car.

  Chapter 38

  “Welcome hero to the West To the land thy sword hath blest

  To the country of the Free Welcome Friend of Liberty

  Grateful millions guard thy fame Age and Youth revere thy name

  Beauty twines the wreath for thee Glorious Son of Liberty

  Years shall speak a nation’s love Wheresoer thy footstep move

  By the choral paean met Welcome Lafayette.”

  —Stitched by Sarah Ann Minott (1814–1881), age nine, in Portland, Maine, October 1824, to celebrate the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824–1825 tour of the United States. Sarah included six alphabets in her sampler and a border of strawberries.

  My junior year in high school, at Gram’s urging, I’d joined the Haven Harbor High drama club. Gram was hoping I’d make new, more conventional friends.

  I sloshed paint on scenery and found that the prop room also served as a private place to meet boys.

  My favorite part of staging a new play was the moment when props and actors were in place, but silent. The moment before the curtain was raised and the action began.

  Sarah’s store this afternoon gave me the same sensation.

  It could have been a movie or stage set of any small-town antiques store. Sarah was behind the counter, making coffee. Old prints, oil paintings, and embroideries framed in Victorian gold or carved oak frames hung on the back and side walls, interrupted only by two large bookcases, one filled with flowered china cups, saucers, and teapots, and one with nineteenth-century leather-bound books and a few twentieth-century first editions. Rows of tables leading from the front of the store to the back were covered with black cloths, which showed off sparkling pieces of silver serving pieces, brass ornaments and kitchen utensils, and crystal glasses, vases, and decorative tabletop sculptures.

  Children’s toys, from iron banks and fire engines to dolls, tea sets, and miniature furniture the right size for a dollhouse, were on one table, near a small grouping of children’s furniture: an oak desk, a stenciled rocking chair, and two wicker porch chairs, all sized for a three-or four-year-old. A quilt pieced of velvet and embroidered with names and memories hung above the furniture.
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  Staffordshire china figures covered one table; sparkling green and blue and orange carnival glass another; and three blown-glass baskets Sarah had once told me were “end of the day” baskets because they combined all the colors the glassmakers had been using that day were on a third.

  Where were Pete and Ethan?

  “Angie!” Sarah said, looking relieved to see me. “You’re here. Put your coat behind the counter.”

  I walked toward the back of the store and took off my parka. As I handed it to her over the counter I saw a hand reach up from behind her counter and take it.

  I gasped, realizing how tense I was. And then I laughed, letting out the nervous energy I hadn’t realized I was holding in as I went around the counter and looked down. Pete was crouched underneath the counter where Sarah usually stashed empty bags, boxes, and wrapping materials.

  No one could see him unless they, too, were in back of the counter.

  “’Afternoon, Angie,” he said, grinning at my surprise.

  “Is Ethan here too?” I asked, looking around.

  “At your service,” he said, stepping down the staircase to Sarah’s apartment. He’d been standing where I had been the day I’d overheard Sarah’s customers asking her about samplers.

  “All set?” I confirmed.

  “We put a small camera in the corner of the store to record what happens in the next hour. Plus, I’ll be recording everything from the time Holgate comes into the store. If he does.”

  “Is there any doubt?” I asked.

  “He answered my e-mail and said he’d be here,” said Sarah, taking the padded envelope I’d been clutching to my chest and putting it on her counter. “We just have to wait and see. Cup of coffee?”

  “Sure. Black,” I said, keeping my eyes on the door. Sarah, Pete, and Ethan were more relaxed than I was. Or maybe they were acting, the way I was. Pretending that arranging to meet a possible killer in an antiques shop was an everyday occurrence.

  “How did Patrick react when you told him what we were going to do?” Sarah asked, handing me a bone-china cup hand-painted with forget-me-nots and filled with dark coffee.

  “He wasn’t happy,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’m not surprised. But did he understand?”

  “I hope so.”

  I walked toward the front of the store. “What if another customer comes in while he’s here?”

  “The store isn’t usually open now. Pete and Ethan suggested putting a ‘store closed’ sign outside. But somehow that seemed too staged. I doubt if it’ll be a problem. This time of day in February I don’t get many drop-in customers.”

  I glanced at my phone. Three-fifteen. Three-twenty. No one said anything. I wandered through the store, looking at everything, but seeing nothing. A mantel clock rimmed in brass and set in black marble ticked loudly in the corner.

  I’d been in Sarah’s store dozens of times and never heard it before. Today the sound of the seconds ticking off echoed in my head.

  Had we made the right decision? Was Seaward Holgate the man we were looking for? Was he dangerous? Were we—was I—crazy?

  No answers. Only questions.

  At three-thirty the clock chimed. One bell.

  What if Holgate didn’t come?

  What would we do if he did? Sarah and I hadn’t talked through every possibility. She was depending on me to guide whatever was said.

  I finished my coffee and handed the empty cup back to Sarah.

  In back of me, the door of her shop opened.

  Chapter 39

  “So when the morning shineth

  So when the moon is bright

  So when the eve declineth

  So in the hush of night

  So with pure mind and feeling

  Fling earthly thoughts away

  And in thy chamber kneeling

  Do thou in secret pray.”

  —Harriet Robinson (1828–1894) of Exeter, New Hampshire, worked this sampler while she was attending the Exeter Female Academy in 1839. In 1859 Harriet married Abner Little Merrill, a member of a wealthy local family. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. They lived in Boston, but remained involved with life in Exeter, and donated money to local organizations, including Phillips Exeter Academy, throughout their lives.

  The man in the doorway was tall and slender, wearing a suit and tie under his overcoat. He was dressed as the Seaward Holgate I’d seen on television, not the man who’d stood at the back of the auction hall.

  But he was the same man. Maybe he’d had a business meeting in Portland or Westbrook today. Maybe he was trying to impress us, or himself.

  I glanced at Sarah, to see if he was also the man who’d been in her store before. She nodded slightly and went to greet him.

  “I’m glad you got my e-mail. I’m Sarah Byrne. We met a few days ago.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged, and then looked at me. “And you’re the woman I saw on television. The woman with the embroidery I’m interested in.”

  The conversation could go in several directions. We could stand and discuss embroidery without acknowledging that we knew this man’s name. Or we could let him know his identity wasn’t a secret, although so far he hadn’t introduced himself.

  I was too nervous to be subtle. “And you’re Seaward Holgate. I saw you on television, too. You’re donating an arts center to Maine.”

  He blinked, as though surprised I’d identified him. “That’s right. I’m naming it after my mother. She introduced me to the arts.” He turned to Sarah. “You met her the other day. She’s also interested in old samplers and other types of embroidered work.”

  “And you were at the Holgate and Gould families’ auction in Augusta last week,” I added.

  This time his reaction was stronger. He took a step toward me. “I was. One of my cousins was auctioning items that should have come to my mother. I was buying some of them for her.”

  “But you didn’t bid on the samplers, or any of the needlepointed items.”

  Seaward Holgate’s eyes were dark. He hesitated before replying. I suspected he hadn’t expected to have been identified. “No. I didn’t realize then how important they were to my mother. But when she saw the coat of arms you’d bought displayed for anyone to see on television, she was upset.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Your mother knew the embroideries would be in the auction. If they were from her family, she must have been familiar with them. I’m surprised she was most interested in the embroidery in the worst condition.” I pointed toward the samplers Sarah had bought at the auction that were hanging on the back wall of the shop. “The ones Sarah bought are much more valuable.”

  Holgate looked from me to Sarah and back again. “You probably came from families that respected one another. That respected inheritances and traditions and bloodlines.”

  I glanced at Sarah, who’d paled. My family was like that, in some ways. Sarah’s wasn’t.

  I stepped toward him. “In the television interview you said you grew up poor, with a single parent. And yet Senator Holgate’s husband, your uncle, is a well-known philanthropist here in Maine.”

  “You heard right. He’s my mother’s brother, but, after their parents disinherited her, he followed the tradition. Nothing from the Holgate family was to come to my mother, or to me. Jonathan paraded around Maine, being applauded for the money he donated to worthy causes, but he never felt his sister, who struggled to keep food on our table, was worth a dime.” Holgate’s face reddened. “Now I have more money than he ever had. I’ve bought my mother the kind of house she deserves, the kind of house she grew up in, and should have been enjoying all the years she worked at menial jobs so I could stay in school. But when she went to Jonathan and asked for some of the family furnishings, pieces she’d loved when she was growing up that he’d kept in storage, he refused. He told her he’d rather sell them to strangers than let her have them. That she’d disgraced the family by having me. Me! I was the disgrace! Jonathan inherited his
money. I’ve earned mine, working long hours and focusing on business, not on social giving.”

  “So you went to the auction to buy things your mother had remembered from her childhood and had treasured.”

  “And that’s what I did. Distant cousins bought a few pieces, so did dealers, but I got the pieces my mother remembered most fondly. It meant a lot to her.” He looked from me to Sarah. “For years she’d struggled, while her brother pranced around Maine attending museum benefits and being hosted by the best classes of Mainers, because he was a Holgate. Old Maine family. Old Maine money. Old Maine roots. And all the while he ignored his sister’s suffering.”

  “And when your mother saw the coat of arms embroidery on the television . . .”

  “My mother didn’t remember it. And I don’t think anyone—certainly not Jonathan—knew about the paper you found in back of it. An illegitimate Holgate! It was perfect! All these years Jonathan and his parents had lorded it over my mother. She was the one who’d brought bad blood into the family. She was the slut . . . the promiscuous one. And here, you found proof. Proof that the Holgates in England had thrown away an illegitimate baby, like Mother’s family had thrown her away. Why else would anyone from a powerful English family have left a child at the Foundling Hospital? I wanted that paper. I wanted to publish it, and then to frame it, to celebrate life and survival. To stuff it up the nose Jonathan’s been looking down all these years. He always said ‘blood will tell.’ I wanted him to know his blood wasn’t pure blue; perhaps it included tinges of the kitchen or the street. I wanted him to know what it felt like to have invisible branches on his family tree.”

  “But you didn’t contact Clem Walker, or me, to tell us that. Or offer to buy the needlepoint and paper. You threatened us. You bullied us.”

  “I wanted to be the one to tell Jonathan about the history of his perfect bloodline. I wanted to see the expression on his face when he found out he was the descendant of a bastard like me. I wanted to frame that piece of paper and present it to one of those museums or organizations that’ve been fawning over Jonathan Holgate for years, and his father before him. I wanted to prove that my mother was as good as any of her ancestors, that she couldn’t be ignored any longer.”