Merry had traded her work clothes for a sundress and sandals. Her legs were shockingly pale, however, compared to everyone else; she was clearly doing something wrong with her life. Georgiana’s husband, Hale Whitney, had flown in for the holiday weekend. He was grilling butterflied lamb while his kids—the eldest was fourteen, now—played a wild game of croquet on the adjacent lawn, pounding each other’s balls into the hedges and rugosa at the edge of the cliff. Hale was grilling corn and peaches and scallops, too; in a moment they would pull out the heavy teak chairs ranged under the white-painted pergola and sit down to eat. But first, Merry snagged some prosciutto and burrata from Tess’s son, Will, as he swung by her with a tray. Tess had dotted the burrata with a nectarine and rosemary chutney. The explosion of flavors was stunning.
“This,” she said, halting Will with a sudden grasp of his arm. “My God! We have to have this at the wedding.”
“Nectarines in September?” He gave her a quizzical half-smile. “Could be tough. But Mom will pull something out with figs and pomegranates instead. That was on her menu last fall.”
He had grown up incredibly over the past year, his first at Boston College. His lean frame had bulked out a bit and the molding of his face had morphed into a man’s. He was brown from lifeguarding at Surfside, a coveted job he’d flown home to secure during the off-season. Merry realized with a jolt how handsome Will suddenly was. The gawky kid who’d stumbled over a body in a cranberry bog years ago was long gone.
“Heard you were out at Nobadeer yesterday,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s a real scene, Mer. Party’s still going. Had to be in the chair this morning, or I’d have gone back.”
Howie had told her that forty-three people were arrested. There would be more today, and still more tomorrow if the party churned straight through to the Fourth. “Don’t you guys have anywhere else to be?”
“Nowhere that we’d rather be.” Obviously proud of Tess’s cooking, Will was still watching her eat the burrata. “Beats working a murder. Pete says you’ve got one this weekend.”
She tucked a strip of prosciutto around an olive and popped it into her mouth. The briny splash against the nectarine salsa and the cured meat was swoon-worthy. “Not sure I’d call it that. It’s possible the woman died by mistake. She drank cyanide in her coffee. The question is how it got there.”
Merry noticed that the lighthearted conversation around her had stopped. John Folger was staring at her, his beer arrested midway to his lips. Any other year, he’d have known about a suspicious death before she did. But now that the two of them no longer worked or lived together, John was often the last person to learn the details of Meredith’s life.
“Ever run into Spencer Murphy at the Wharf Rats, Dad?”
He and Ralph Waldo exchanged glances. “Funny you should ask. We took him fishing for blues off Tuckernuck a few days ago. Why?”
“He can still handle a rod?”
“Of course, Meredith,” Ralph said testily. “His memory may be going, but the important things in life remain.”
Her impulse to laugh was swiftly checked. “What day was this?”
John Folger set down his beer. “Friday.”
“The day his daughter’s body was found on his roof walk,” Merry said. “The day Spencer Murphy went AWOL for about ten hours. He was out at the end of Tuckernuck with you two?”
“Whoa.” Mayling Stern was choking on her tonic. “This guy’s daughter was found dead on his roof?”
“You don’t mean Nora?” Ralph interjected. “Good Lord. I must go see Spence. He loved her so.”
“So you knew about her?”
“About her? Of course, Meredith. I knew Nora. I was still chief when Spence brought her back as a toddler from Laos.”
Merry told them then about the double disappearance at Step Above—first Nora, who never left the house at all; and then Spence, who failed to come home.
“No wonder he didn’t look exhausted or dehydrated when he finally turned up,” Merry mused. “He’d been relaxing in the cockpit of your boat, Dad, for most of the afternoon.”
“Drinking my beer,” John said.
“We’d had coffee with him at the clubhouse first,” Ralph explained, “and then we ran into him on the way to fishing. He looked a little bewildered, like he was at loose ends. So John invited him to come see the Whaler. After that, well . . . we weren’t going to leave him on the dock all by himself.”
“Except you did exactly that, whenever you got back from Tuck,” Merry observed. “Did it ever occur to you that Spence didn’t know his way home?”
Ralph looked a trifle alarmed. “He said he’d parked near Old North.”
“He was several wharves away, on New Whale Street. He never found his car, Ralph. He wandered into American Seasons late that night, hallucinating about the jungle and asking for a light.”
Sky Jackson handed Merry a fresh glass of rosé. “What about the cyanide?” he asked.
They were all looking at her now, except George’s kids, who were chasing each other with the croquet mallets. Even Hale had pulled down the domed cover of his gas grill and was pouring out a Madaket Sunset for himself, all ears.
Merry sighed. “I don’t mean to bring work with me everywhere I go. This is just a sad case of a man with dementia possibly killing his own daughter by accident. Unless he did it on purpose.”
“Oh, Meredith, no,” George said. She shot a swift glance toward her children. They were entirely uninterested in what the grown-ups were saying.
“But Spence loved that girl,” Ralph objected. “And she was devoted to him.”
“Except for the past ten years, when she never bothered to come home. There are some interesting background circumstances I’m still evaluating, Ralph.”
“Are you going to charge Spence?” he asked.
“I can’t say. Yet.”
“Merry.” Peter’s voice was quiet. “We understand this is an ongoing investigation.”
He was giving her an out. She slipped her arm gratefully around his waist.
“How often do you run into Spence at the Wharf Rats, Ralph?” she asked.
“Three or four times a week. He’s still a great storyteller, you know—even if he forgets his way home.”
“And people’s names. And faces,” John Folger murmured.
“So you’ve noticed a decline?”
“It’s been fairly steady since Barbara died last year. But worse, I think, since the winter.”
“You don’t think he could be . . . faking it?”
Ralph frowned at her. “For Heaven’s sake, Meredith, why would he do that?”
Merry shrugged. “To get away with murder?”
There was a pause. All of them looked at each other. The breeze suddenly whipped up, cooler now and dancing through the hydrangeas. Merry shivered.
“Dinner,” Hale announced.
At Step Above, Kate and Laney made hamburgers that night and grilled them outdoors under Spence’s old charcoal dome. They were both sunburned and tired; they had spent the afternoon tidying the flower beds that ringed the backyard’s perimeter. Kate was a dedicated and intelligent gardener, although she had no plot to speak of in Brooklyn. She hated to see Barbara’s carefully cultivated perennials overrun with honeysuckle, thistles, mulleins, and spurge that had invaded the beds from the cliff scrub below. Laney was enlisted as dead-header. Kate had trained her well in the neat, walled garden where she’d played as a child on Beacon Hill, and at the end of four hours Spence’s old metal wheelbarrow was piled high with black trash bags full of refuse.
Kate had wrestled with the canes of the climbing roses, tying them to the trellis with green-coated wire she found in the cluttered garage. It was placed neatly among Barbara’s gardening tools; she calculated that they had not been disturbed in several years, since the last summer befo
re Barbara’s final illness.
Laney finished out the day by dead-wooding the massive hydrangeas. They were the kind that bloomed on old wood, but they had suffered a lot of winter kill. Laney filled another two trash bags with hollow, withered stems.
“We’ll feed and compost them tomorrow,” Kate suggested. “That should boost their blooms.”
Laney carted the wheelbarrow around to the quahog-shell drive and stacked the trash bags on the backseat of Spence’s old Volvo. She had dutifully retrieved it from New Whale Street the previous night, and had kept the keys. Nantucket was fighting a battle with invasive weeds, and the Department of Public Works urged homeowners to dispose of their garden refuse in its high-temperature anaerobic digester, which effectively killed both roots and seeds.
“I’ll drive this to the landfill after the holiday,” Laney said.
“Let your father do it,” Kate urged. “Running errands would be good for him.”
Laney wheeled the empty barrow around the far side of the house to where her grandmother’s venerable compost pile still sat. Barbara had never thrown weeds on her compost heap because a wise gardener does not seed her restorative soil with tomorrow’s enemies. Scraps of vegetables, the rinds of melons, coffee grounds, eggshells, brown paper bags from Stop & Shop, the soft platinum ash left in Step Above’s grates from driftwood beach parties and winter fires, grass cuttings, corn husks and corn silk, apple cores, corncobs, peach pits, autumn leaves, withered pumpkins, and, yes, the snipped heads of Barbara’s tulips and peonies, had all been laid to rest on the heap; and worms had eaten them. Laney took her grandmother’s shovel and dug down through the layers, left undisturbed since Barbara’s death, to the moist brown granulated compost. It had the texture and faint scent of chocolate cake.
She half-filled the wheelbarrow in readiness for the morning, propped the shovel slantwise across it, and trundled it back to the far end of the yard, where she parked it near the rose trellis.
She took a long, hot shower before she joined her mother at the grill.
“It felt good to work,” she said as Kate exited the kitchen with a platter of tomatoes. “Dad hired landscapers for Charles Street once you left.”
“Of course he did,” Kate said. “How’s Spence doing this evening?”
“I’m great, thank you very much,” her father-in-law replied. “So are the flower beds. Barbara would be so pleased, if she could see them.”
He was sitting in one of the plastic Adirondack chairs not far from his French bedroom doors, watching them cook. He was nursing a gin and tonic that Andre had decided he could have, his eyelids half-closed against a pale gray stream of cigarette smoke. He had been quiet all day. Laney was uncertain what he remembered of the previous night’s anguish. Or where he’d found the cigarettes. Then it struck her: there’d been a pack left in Nora’s bedroom.
“When did you start smoking again, Grandpa?” she asked.
“While your sister was here.”
She didn’t bother to point out that she had no sister. “Nora?”
“Yes. She knows all my vices and secrets.”
“Like the fact you’re a Marlboro man.” Laney smiled at him uncertainly and reached for the old clamshell ashtray, half-buried in the unkempt grass. “Here. We don’t want to start a fire.”
“Nora knew the truth.” Spence tapped off his glowing ash, rolling the cigarette between his fingers. “Most people only know the lies. I made a fortune off ’em. Telling stories. Once I started, no reason to stop.”
Laney studied him, a faint line between her brows.
“Nora won’t write the book, now. Thanks to Kate.”
“Kate?” Laney said. “You mean . . . Mom? What did Mom do to Nora?”
Spence didn’t answer. He was staring toward the arched trellis at the end of the lawn, his expression blank. His drink was nearly gone.
Kate touched her daughter on the arm. “Run in and get that platter of vegetables. I want to put them on the grill when I turn the burgers.”
The screened door slammed behind Laney. Kate quietly reached down and dumped what was left of Spence’s gin and tonic into the grass. “I think you’ve had enough, Dad,” she said.
The roof walk of the Cliff Road house was in much better shape than Step Above’s, Merry thought. It was bigger, too, and had been swept that afternoon by the Whitney kids, who had also carried folding chairs up to the attic in anticipation of the fireworks. Peter straddled the open hatch between the roof and the floor below, reaching down for the chairs as Rafe handed them up. There were fifteen people, counting the kids, gathered under the night sky. They were facing north, toward Jetties Beach and the harbor where the fireworks barge was moored. Somewhere over Merry’s left shoulder the sun was setting.
Peter had his arm around her waist and her head was resting against his shoulder.
“The view is so beautiful from up here,” she said. “I can see the whole world unrolled at my feet.”
“—Or as much of the world as matters. The walk has always been one of my favorite places. I used to come up here all the time as a kid. I even asked my dad to build one on the Greenwich roof—as a sort of winter clubhouse.”
“He didn’t, of course.”
“He wasn’t in the business of granting whims.” Peter surveyed the horizon. “The view would be different, wouldn’t it, if the wind farm had gone through? We should raise a glass to the defeat of Cape Wind.”
Cape Wind was an energy company that had fought for years to launch the first offshore wind farm along the coast of the United States—in the middle of Nantucket Sound. The idea was to erect one hundred and thirty turbines, each half a football-field wide and rising three hundred feet above the water, on Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow sandbar that sat five miles from Cape Cod and sixteen miles from Nantucket. The wind farm was projected to cost more than two and a half billion dollars and cover twenty-four square miles. The electricity generated would provide power to at least one hundred thousand homes.
But influential local residents on the Cape and Islands had banded together to fight the project, as had local fishermen, the Wampanoag Tribe, and various congressional representatives. The fishermen had sued, claiming that the disruption of spawning grounds and juvenile fish caused by the turbines’ construction—Horseshoe Shoal was known as a great place to hook bluefish—would set back local fisheries for years. Geologists had argued that grounding so many massive structures on the shoal would cause the tides to form unpredicted gullies and new bars on the Sound’s floor, changing the known boating channels. And Cape Wind had alienated voters by negotiating noncompetitive bids that would have raised utility bills in the short term. They had outsourced construction contracts overseas, which hadn’t improved their popularity. So now the first offshore wind farm in the United States sat off the coast of Rhode Island—built by a different company, and on a vastly smaller scale. Although the state of Massachusetts had endorsed wind farms in an effort to shift energy consumption away from fossil fuels, it had barred Cape Wind from bidding on future state wind-farm contracts.
“Global warming,” Merry said. “If sea levels rise as much as they are projected to do in the next hundred years, our descendants will never live on Nantucket. This beloved place will be a speck in the ocean, and we will be hailing saviors from this roof walk.”
“Impermanence is healthy,” Peter said.
“From the man whose ancestors, like mine, founded this island three hundred and fifty years ago.”
“And who hopes technology will solve the problem. Without entirely destroying romance and natural beauty.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Merry said. “I kind of liked the idea of huge white sails turning in the middle of the sea. I bet the turbines would have had guide lights at night. The Sound would be lit up like Christmas. People would start partying out there in the summertime, popping champagne corks on deck
s, under the man-made stars.”
“I’ll take the real ones,” Peter said, and kissed her.
At that moment the first rocket went off from the fireworks barge. Automatically, they all cheered.
The sound floated above the greater roar from Jetties Beach below. The rocket exploded in a glare of white light, and Merry caught the sharp silhouette of Peter’s profile, etched on her eyelids for seconds afterward. Then the whistle of the second rocket caught them and the sky flowered in vivid petals of green and rose and blue.
She groped behind her for a chair and sat down. Peter leaned against the roof walk’s balustrade next to his brother-in-law, Hale, his eyes fixed on the darkening sky.
“Here,” Georgiana said. She was crouching next to Merry’s chair as though afraid of blocking the view. In her hand was a pashmina shawl. Naturally, being George, she had made sure the color—which was periwinkle blue—complemented Merry’s sundress. “It gets cold up here fast at night.”
Merry swirled the shawl around her shoulders and allowed herself to feel free, for an instant, of everything but joy in the spectacle bursting in front of her. She’d watched Nantucket’s fireworks every year of her life. As a child she’d been forced to sit well back from the waves with her mother while Billy, her older brother, stood seriously with his police chief father and Ralph, barring the staging area on the beach. By the time she was a teenager the fireworks had been exiled to a floating barge anchored in the harbor, in an excess of caution and concern over terrorist attacks. But she’d never seen them from a position like this before, almost on a level with the sky; the spectacle was magical. As the streamers of fire trailed over their heads, Tess Starbuck clapped and hooted like a little girl. She’d never had this view on the Fourth, either, Merry knew. She and Tess weren’t Summer People.
“Would you let me know when Nora Murphy’s funeral is scheduled?” George asked in an undertone, close to Merry’s ear. “If it’s not private, I’d like to go. Or at least send flowers.”
The cacophony surrounding them almost drowned the words. “Of course,” Merry said. “Why?”
Death of a Wharf Rat Page 11
