It was MacTavish, in the end, who found her.
Andre had finished his pâté and thought it high time the drinks were poured. He came looking for Elliot and caught Tav scratching and whiffling at a closed door in the upstairs hallway. He clutched the Westie firmly around the middle, but Tav struggled free and shoved his nose under the doorjamb. When Andre reached for him again, he barked sharply in protest.
“You won’t believe this,” Elliot was saying as he came into the hall, but Andre had already opened Tav’s door and the dog shot up the flight of steps behind it.
“That’s not safe,” Roseline called. “The floorboards have rotted.”
Andre swung up the steps, Elliot after him.
Tav had stopped short in the middle of the attic. His paws rested on the third rung of a folding stair let down from the ceiling. The rungs were too narrow for Tav to climb. But his entire body quivered. If he could have leapt to the top of the ladder, he would have.
“Where does that lead?” Andre asked.
“To the roof walk,” Elliot answered.
And began, hand over hand, to climb.
Chapter Three
“Don’t work too hard,” Peter said as he kissed Meredith goodbye and swung his leg over his bike. He’d ridden to the Cliff Road house from his cranberry farm that morning. Now that he’d caved to a large white tent and dance floor, as well as six other items George insisted were necessary, he was headed down to Jetties Beach. He was training for a Boston triathlon in October and wanted a long swim in the Sound this afternoon. The water temperature was finally warm enough after a brisk June.
Merry hugged George and jumped into her police Explorer. She had a meeting at the station out on Fairgrounds Road, Peter remembered. But as he pedaled away, he saw that she was frowning, her eyes fixed on the radio near her console. Somebody on a moped has probably hit a street sign, he thought. It was constantly happening in high season. He waved goodbye and turned his bike toward town.
A few seconds later, Merry’s car roared out in the opposite direction.
The body was huddled in a fetal position near an overturned plastic Adirondack chair, a few feet from the roof walk’s northern railing. There was little else to be seen on the deck-like space, except a ceramic mug that appeared to have rolled into the walk’s far corner, and a cell phone that had long since run out of battery. The corpse might have dropped both in extremis. But the mug might just as easily have rolled in a gale of wind. There had been several, Merry thought, since Nora Murphy had gone missing.
More than a month ago, from what the housekeeper said.
Merry stepped gingerly around the perimeter of the roof walk, her shoes covered in a pair of sterile booties. She was waiting for Clarence Strangerfield, who handled forensics for the Nantucket Police, and she didn’t want to disturb the scene more than necessary. It had been mauled enough by the man who’d found the body—Elliot Murphy, the victim’s brother. She’d glimpsed him briefly on her way upstairs, a nondescript middle-aged man with sandy-colored hair and the mottled skin that so often went with it. He’d been marooned in the living room, drinking straight gin in the company of a friend.
She could tell from disturbances in the roof walk’s surface dirt that Elliot had moved quickly across the decking once he’d reached the top of the attic ladder. That was both predictable and forgivable. While one part of his mind must have known that Nora was dead from the moment he saw her, he would have grasped her shoulder and turned her on her back to be sure.
And then screamed.
Nora Murphy’s body was badly decayed. It would have bloated a few days after her death, emitting gases as the tissues necrotized, the skin bursting in places. It had been subjected to weeks of wind, sun, and rain. Birds—gulls, probably, which were notorious scavengers—had pecked out the softer parts of the face, including the eyes, and torn at the woman’s T-shirt. And then the corpse had started to mummify. The past week had been hot and dry. The hands were shriveled to claws.
Elliot couldn’t be sure it was his sister. But the housekeeper, her face twisted with suffering, identified the body. She had laundered the woman’s clothes.
From the distance of about a yard, Merry studied the head and huddled frame as well as she could. No obvious wounds. No bloodstains dried and fading on the deck planking. No visible signs of distress in the disposition of the limbs, as there might be if the woman had suffered a seizure of some kind.
And no weapon.
It was a death only the sky had witnessed.
Merry glanced over the rail toward the water lapping Steps Beach far below. The harbor was serene off the Nantucket cliffs. As she watched, a tiny figure knifed through the waves with deliberate strokes, its head seal-dark. She strained her eyes to focus on the flash of water and sunlight: Peter. He had no idea she was watching him from this height. The calm precision of his movements connected her isolated and melancholy platform with the normal world in a way that felt almost shocking. Other people were enjoying a summer’s day.
She looked back at the corpse. Nora Murphy might simply have lain down to sleep and never awakened. Merry hoped the woman’s last moments had been graced with peace and silence. Somehow, she doubted it.
“She arrived the Tuesday before the Wine Festival, and disappeared the following Wednesday, right before Memorial Day weekend,” Roseline DaJouste said. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair as she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on an impressionistic oil painting that hung on the opposite wall, a pastel square of boats and wharves and water.
“So she was here roughly a week,” Merry said. She had gathered the three inhabitants of the house in the living room while Clarence, along with his two assistants, worked the scene. Howie Seitz was seated at a side table with his laptop open; he was already taking notes.
“She’s been here for six,” Elliot Murphy broke in. “Roseline only thought she’d left.”
“I understand, Mr. Murphy. Ms. DaJouste?”
“I get here about ten o’clock in the morning each day and stay until dinner—around five-thirty. Mr. Spence likes it early,” the housekeeper said. “I never saw her that Wednesday. I thought she was just out somewhere. Down to the beach, maybe. But the next day her bed still wasn’t slept in. Her bath was still clean, like I’d left it. And she didn’t come back, all through June.”
“It didn’t occur to you to file a Missing Person’s Report?” Merry asked.
Roseline shook her head. “That is not my place. That would be for Mr. Spencer to do.”
“And he wasn’t worried when his daughter failed to return?”
“Not much worries him these days.” Roseline looked imploringly at Elliot Murphy. “I didn’t think to check the roof, Mr. Elliot. Nobody’s gone up there for years. I’d have told her it wasn’t safe.”
“She didn’t die from rotting wood,” he replied. “It’s not your fault, Roseline. The roof walk was one of her special spots when she was little. She used to sit up there and write in her journal. Dad would’ve had to nail the door shut to keep her out.”
“Where is your father?” Merry asked.
Roseline’s worried eyes shifted abruptly to the doorway. “He should have been home by now. He was down to the Wharf Rats, miss. Goes there every day. But I never knew him to stay so late before.”
So Ralph would certainly be familiar with him, Merry thought. She knew Spencer Murphy’s public reputation, which rivaled the late David Halberstam’s or Morley Safer’s, but she had only seen him from a distance, walking the streets of town. She remembered a wife. One who’d died not long ago.
“That’s all we need,” Elliot muttered, breaking into her thoughts. “Dad AWOL. Could you put out an APB, Officer, for an elderly man in a Volvo almost as old?”
“Yes,” Merry replied, “once you give me a good description of your father, his car, and his license plate. And it’s Detective
, Mr. Murphy, not Officer.”
Elliot lifted his brows in mock apology. He was irritated by her insistence on the point; but she wanted him to be aware of her seniority and take her questions seriously. He was obviously shaken by his gruesome discovery on the roof walk, but he was also strangely cavalier about his sister’s death. Shock?
“This whole thing is crazy, Detective,” he said, with emphasis on the final word. “I had no idea Nora was even in the country, much less on Nantucket. That she also managed to die, with nobody in the house aware of it, is unbelievable.”
“Is it?”
“Of course! Think about it!” His voice rose slightly. “For weeks—a month—whatever it is—my dad and Roseline have been going about their lives, totally unaware that she was rotting up there on the roof! It’s like something out of Hitchcock!”
It was probable that Nora Murphy had died of natural causes—an undetected heart ailment or aneurysm, a stroke hitting unexpectedly in relative youth. But Merry could not rule out the possibility of a drug overdose of some kind.
“How old was your sister?”
He closed his eyes in brief calculation. “She was twelve years younger than I am. So that would make her about forty.”
“You two don’t keep up with birthdays?”
“We don’t keep up, period.”
Merry digested this. If she could have her brother, Billy, back from the grave, she’d give him a birthday gift every day of the year. “She was considerably younger than you are. There’s another sibling, I understand?”
“My brother, David. He’s three years older than I am. Nora was adopted just before her fifth birthday, Detective. She came into our lives when I was leaving for college. We never really knew her. She was never really . . . one of us.”
“I see. I assume your parents didn’t feel that way?”
He shrugged. “It was Dad’s decision to take in a half-Lao kid and bring her back here to the States. Mom—I don’t really know how Mom felt.”
There was a story here, but one Elliot Murphy looked unready to share. His body had stiffened and his expression was wary.
“Your mother passed away recently?”
“One year, two months, and seven days ago,” he said. “Cancer.”
And her death, clearly, was far more painful than his sister’s would ever be.
“Dad hasn’t really been the same since.”
“It’s been worrying us,” his friend offered. “That’s partly why we came up here for the Fourth of July weekend. We wanted to check in.”
He spoke as though he were family. Merry knew that his name was Andre Henrissaint, that he lived at the same address as Elliot in Manhattan, and had just arrived on-island with him that afternoon. Partners, then? Or married? An interesting pairing, regardless; Elliot was in his early fifties, his sandy hair starting to gray, the most mundane of middle-aged specimens, while Andre looked about fifteen years younger. He was also a foot taller, and might justly be described as beautiful.
“Can you tell me about Nora’s health?”
Elliot shrugged. “I never heard there was anything wrong with her. But to be honest, I don’t really know. We haven’t—hadn’t—seen each other in about ten years.”
Merry felt impatient, suddenly, with his desire to distance himself from this death; it was too much like a shirking of responsibility. Nora Murphy was more than just a casual vagrant who’d died on the roof walk upstairs. “She didn’t come to your mother’s funeral?”
“No. It took some time to get word to her, actually—we had to track her down through Facebook. By the time she responded, Mother was buried.”
“You didn’t even have her cell phone number?”
He shook his head.
“When you say you had no idea that she was in the US—where did your sister live, Mr. Murphy?”
“Most recently? Singapore, I think,” he said.
“Kuala Lumpur,” Andre corrected. “Nora was a freelance journalist, Detective. She wandered pretty widely over the years, primarily in Asia.”
“So she followed in her father’s footsteps,” Merry mused.
“Adoptive father,” Elliot said. His lips compressed with frustrated contempt. “Of course she did. She adored Spence. She’d do anything to win his approval.”
“So would you. So would David.” Andre’s voice was soft but slightly reproving. “You’ve tried all your lives to be the one he loves best.”
“Pathetic, right?” Elliot lifted his palms in capitulation. “But Nora really was the worst. She was intensely competitive. She told me once that she was glad Dave and I were so much older—because she could pretend she was an only child.”
“What did you think of her, Mr. Henrissaint?” Merry asked.
“I never officially met her.” Andre turned his remarkable eyes—almost as green as her own—on Merry. “Elliot and I have been together seven years. She hadn’t come back during that time.”
That you know of, Merry thought.
“Ms. DaJouste,” she said, “how did Nora seem to you? Was she healthy? Happy?”
“She needed fattening up.” Roseline’s mouth curled downward. “Just a tiny little woman, Miss Nora. But polite. And so good to her father. She told him about her adventures, the two of them out in the lawn chairs all day long. And she cooked for him. Asian things. Mr. Spence liked Nora’s food.”
“What about her mood?” Merry persisted.
“Unsettled,” Roseline replied after a moment. “When I asked her how long she planned to stay, she didn’t know. Maybe months, maybe days.”
“I’m surprised some editor hasn’t been trying to find her,” Andre observed.
“One may be,” Merry said. “We can’t know. Her computer’s shut down and her phone battery has been dead for a while.”
Merry had placed both in evidence bags; she would be setting one of the technically savvy officers on the task of circumventing their passwords.
“Miss Nora was done with reporting.” Roseline waved a hand in abrupt dismissal. “She told me she wanted to write a book. She thought she might stay here, on Nantucket, and look after Mr. Spence while she worked on it.”
“Did David know that?” Elliot demanded. “He’d have had a pretty strong opinion about Nora moving in.”
“Why?” Merry asked.
There was a slight pause. “Let’s just say that he’s never trusted her farther than he could throw her.”
Surprisingly harsh words, with the woman lying like a dried husk upstairs.
Merry glanced at Roseline. “Has David Murphy visited this house in the past six weeks?”
“No, miss.”
“Did he know that his sister was here?”
The housekeeper shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Spence.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elliot broke in impatiently. “David’s in Boston. Nora’s here. Dead. She must have been on something. Drugs of some kind. It’s obviously an overdose.”
“There are no medications in her bathroom,” Merry pointed out. “No recreational drugs that we’ve found, as yet, although we haven’t gone over the entire house. Did she have a history of drug abuse?”
“Not that I know of. But then again, I know nothing about her anymore, right? Roseline? Was she taking something?”
“I never saw that. Just her cigarettes.” The housekeeper’s voice was stubborn; she had obviously liked Miss Nora.
“Even so.” Elliot was talking to Andre now. “That is so completely Nora—to come back here just to kill herself. Force us all to notice.”
“Except you didn’t,” Merry said. “Notice.”
“And if that’s what she wanted,” Andre added quietly, “all she had to do was jump off that roof walk.”
His logic was so clear that not even Elliot could argue.
“I assu
me she didn’t leave any kind of note, that day you noticed she was gone?” Merry asked.
Roseline shook her head. “Just laundry. I washed and folded it and put it back in her closet.”
“Did Mr. Murphy ever ask you where his daughter was?”
“After a few days, miss, he couldn’t remember she’d even been here.”
“Dad’s mind is a sieve,” Elliot said. “Hence the request for an APB.”
“Then why is he still driving?” Merry asked.
“Because he’s Spencer Murphy! You try to take a car away from the man who risked his life in war zones all over the world! It ain’t gonna happen, Detective. He’d rather die first.”
And now he’s lost, she thought. And his daughter’s been rotting on the roof for a month.
“Seitz,” she said over her shoulder, “take down the pertinent details on Mr. Murphy’s car and send out that APB, will you? And, Elliot, I need your brother’s contact information.”
Chapter Four
The EMTs carried the black body bag carefully down the main staircase. A woman Merry guessed to be about her own age—middle thirties—followed them. Her dark hair was neatly caught up at the back of her head and covered with a plastic shower cap; her clothes were hidden by a sterile jumpsuit. She held a plastic evidence bag in gloved hands. Inside the bag was a ceramic mug—Nora Murphy’s.
“You’re Detective Folger?” she asked, halting at the foot of the stairs.
“Yes. And you are?”
“Summer Hughes. I didn’t introduce myself when I arrived, just went straight up to find Clarence Strangerfield. I’m covering for Dr. Fairborn while he’s off-island.”
Fairborn was a general practitioner who also served as the Nantucket Police medical examiner in cases of unexplained death.
“He left town before the Fourth of July?” Merry said in disbelief. “Has he told you what you’re in for?”
Death of a Wharf Rat Page 3
