“Brendan lives right over there,” Willow piped up. “Just beyond that white fence and stand of pines.” His house was nearly invisible, but just a short walk from Sam’s.
“He’s a good chap,” Sam said. “He brought me a bottle of scotch and a case of beer when I moved in, then helped me make a dent in at least a few of the bottles.”
“Where is he, by the way?” Nell asked.
“Brendan’ll be here,” Jane said, carrying over a plate of bruschetta, each piece coated with creamy goat cheese and sprinkled with toasted pine nuts. The group helped themselves without hesitation. “He was our Clark Kent this afternoon. The police were at the Sobel Gallery, and when Natalie showed up, they suggested she leave until they were finished with their investigation. She became irate and essentially staged her own sit-in, poor thing, berating them and yelling at them to leave. She said it was her gallery, her things. It was pretty emotional. Brendan offered to take her to the Palate for something to eat and then take her home. He’d been helping Billy in the gallery a lot, and I think he understands her a little better than we do. We owe him big. And I think poor Tommy Porter will see that he gets a certificate of valor from the Sea Harbor PD.”
“But he was determined not to miss the clambake. He promised he’d be over before the lobsters were cracked,” Ham added. “He just wanted to be sure Natalie was okay.”
Nell listened, feeling a pinch of guilt. She had meant to check in on Natalie again that afternoon, maybe bring her along to the clambake, but time had gotten away from her. She vowed to stop in tomorrow—and tucked away a silent thank-you to Brendan for his kindness.
“Sam Perry, your kitchen is useless,” Cass yelled from the deck, using her cupped hands as a megaphone. “No butter. How’re we gonna eat our corn? And lobsters without lemon butter? Where are you from, man?”
Sam laughed and yelled back. “My kitchen is worse than useless. I wouldn’t even have salt and pepper if Izzy here hadn’t done a little care package thing for me.”
“No biggie,” Willow said. “I know Brendan has plenty of everything—he’s quite a cook. I’ll just run down—”
“Can you get in?” Izzy asked.
Willow gave an impish grin. “That’s not exactly a problem for me.”
The group laughed, but Willow quickly confessed that she had a key. She’d given up breaking into places, she said, at least for a while.
“I’ll walk with you,” Nell said. “I’d love to see the inside of Brendan’s place. These houses are so lovely.”
Together they walked down the beach, their bare feet kicking up sand and their heads held back to catch the evening breeze.
“Brendan’s place is different from Sam’s—a little more rustic. I think it’s the hiker in him.”
Willow motioned for Nell to follow her up the steps and into a screened-in porch running along the side of the brown-shingled house. Inside, the dwelling was clean and cozy, with a large stone fireplace along one wall, rough and rustic. A galley kitchen was off to the side and the dining table showed signs of Brendan’s teaching and his own hobby—a stack of art books and cups filled with pens and colored pencils.
Nell absently perused the titles of the books. Some textbooks, some on painting, and a familiar book on New England artists—the same one Archie Brandley had run out of.
People wanted to learn more about the reclusive artist so they could view the found paintings with knowledge and knowing some tidbits about his life, Archie had said.
Nell remembered that she had her own copy, confiscated from Aidan’s den, and made a note to look at it soon and then pass it back to Willow. Brendan, apparently, was one of the lucky ones who had gotten one before Archie ran out.
“Here it is,” Willow said, pulling a box of butter from the refrigerator. “What else?”
“Maybe some Tabasco sauce.”
Willow opened a cupboard and took out a slender red bottle. A row of medicine and vitamins was lined up on the shelf beneath.
“It looks like Brendan is into vitamins,” Nell observed.
“He’s kind of a health nut. Calcium, vitamins B, K, X—whatever. I don’t take much of anything myself. I don’t like medicine. Except one night when I was really upset and couldn’t sleep. Brendan lent me one of his sleeping pills—he has trouble sometimes. I was out like a light.”
“What was it?”
“That one.” Willow pointed to a small bottle.
Nell slipped on her glasses and looked at it. “This would definitely put you out,” she agreed. “My brother-in-law had a terrible bout of insomnia in college and had to take Nembutal a couple times.”
“Yeah. Brendan is so healthy—but that sleeping problem is the pits. He loves to hike—and worries sometimes that he’ll be camping up on a mountaintop and won’t be able to sleep all night, and then he’ll have climb down without being alert. He’s a very careful guy.”
Nell walked through the living area. “This is a lived-in place. It’s comfortable. It looks like Brendan.” She pointed to a GIS-rendered topographic map tacked to the wall. “The White Mountains—one of my favorite spots. Is that where Brendan hikes?”
“I think he hikes wherever there’s a rise in the ground. He runs over in Ravenswood Park sometimes, just for the view. But yes, he talks a lot about the White Mountains. He knows every trail, I think. He has a stack of pictures somewhere.”
Willow looked around, then picked up a stack of photographs from the bookcase and handed them to Nell.
Nell slipped on her glasses and looked through the photos. “What memories these bring back. Ben and I camped our way through graduate school. We’d go up to the Whites every chance we got.” She held one picture up to the natural light. Brendan was sitting on top of a mountain with peaks of smaller mountains in the background. “Amazing,” she murmured.
“Is any of it familiar?”
Nell nodded, smiling. “I think this is Mount Lafayette. We’ve hiked to the top several times, though the trails can be tricky. It’s a beautiful part of the country.” Nell put the photos back and spotted more signs of Brendan’s hobby—hiking gear was stashed in the front hall: a backpack and boots and a rain jacket. On the wall was another topographical map of all the New England peaks. His running shoes were nearby, and a bike was visible through the back door.
“I think he is at home here—he likes Sea Harbor—though he misses the mountains. I don’t think he’ll stay here forever. He’s like me: a wanderer.”
“Does he have any of his own paintings here?”
“He’s funny about his paintings. He told me he’s very good. But then he changes the subject. I think he’d like to be known for being a great painter—but I told him that’ll be kind of hard if he doesn’t let anyone see them.”
Nell smiled. “Maybe he’s modest.”
“Maybe. I found one in his den—he never finished it, though.” Willow led Nell across the hallway into a small room with a television set, a desk, and more bookshelves. Willow pulled out a painting from beside the desk.
Nell looked at it admiringly. It was a lovely watercolor of a sunrise over the ocean, the play of color on water nearly blinding to the eye. The view was an unusual one, from high above, as if he had been sitting on a hill or mountain—Cadillac Mountain, maybe. A harbor and sailboats were visible before one’s eyes fell to the spectacular sunrise—but it was only roughed in and part of the scene was missing. “He’s a talented young man.”
“Not that young.” But Willow clearly agreed.
“Will he finish this?”
Willow shrugged. “Maybe not. Brendan is pretty religious about his paintings being one hundred percent plein air. And to finish this, I guess he’d have to climb that same mountain again, find the same view.”
“I guess that’s one of the disadvantages of restricting yourself that way.”
Willow nodded and slipped the painting back down next to the desk.
The slamming of a door brought pulled them back into the ha
llway, where Brendan stood with a surprised look on his face.
“Company?” he asked, frowning. “I didn’t see a car.”
“I hope you don’t mind, Brendan,” Nell began. “We’re raiding your refrigerator. We walked down from Sam’s. His food supply is pitiful.”
“No—of course I don’t mind. I’m pretty well stocked. That’s one thing I do well—eat.”
“And I see you do well on other fronts as well. Willow showed me one of your paintings. It’s lovely, Brendan.”
Brendan looked at Willow. “Painting?”
“You know. That half-finished one.”
“Oh. That’s not worth seeing. You shouldn’t be showing anyone that, Willow.” He walked toward the door. “Anything else we need from here?”
“I think we’re set,” Willow said.
“Good. I’m starving.”
Nell and Willow followed Brendan down the steps to the beach. “Is Natalie doing all right?” Nell asked his back.
“She’s in shock. She gave the police a hard time today—I guess you heard—but, hey, it’s understandable. She just lost a husband. She’s trying to figure out what she should do.”
“What we need to do is figure out who committed these murders and put it all to rest.”
“It sounds like the police have a grip on it. It’s still hard for me to believe that Billy would kill Aidan Peabody. But I guess it makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Nell said.
Willow was silent.
Nell could tell that it was still hard for her to be in the middle of conversations about her father.
They walked down the steps to the beach and headed back toward Sam’s. The two dogs were still chasing Frisbees up and down the beach, their owners enjoying the cool breezes, and youngsters appeared on the beach with their parents, one last chance to skim a stone along the darkening seas before night called them to their beds.
In the distance, steam from the pit rose above the tarp and a soft breeze carried the smells down the beach.
“Natalie isn’t trying to make decisions about her life at this difficult time, is she?” Nell asked.
“Well, you know she never liked it here much.”
“But she seemed to be fitting in better in recent weeks.”
“She says she has a lot of friends back home in New Jersey—and the gallery was Billy’s thing, not hers. She doesn’t even like art. She already has people interested in the James paintings, she said, and once those are off her hands, she could pretty much do anything she wanted to do. Billy was considering that, I think, when he died: just letting someone take them off his hands.”
“And not have an exhibit here?” That was a surprise. Canary Cove had been counting on the exhibit to bring new crowds to the art neighborhood. She wondered what else Billy had planned that he hadn’t shared with the rest of them. He had certainly been concerned about something the week before his death.
“Billy was hard to read. An interesting guy and I liked working in his gallery with him, but he wasn’t very, well, stable—at least from what I could see.”
“Recently, at least,” Nell agreed. “He’s always been a little tough, maybe, but a kind man underneath it all. It was only recently that his behavior became erratic.”
Willow was quiet between them, her arms swinging beside her as they walked. She looked up at Brendan. “I didn’t know Billy at all, but I know for sure something was on his mind,” she said.
“He said something to you?” Brendan asked.
She nodded. “He was talking more to himself, I think. But I was there in the gallery, waiting for you. He was tapping his fingers on the glass counter like beating a drum, looking frustrated. He mumbled something like ‘Enough already.’ And then he looked up and saw me. He looked startled at first, and then he told me, just out of the blue, that he needed to go to confession, and he wondered if I knew when Father Northcutt’s boxes—that’s what he called them—were open.”
Brendan stopped and picked up a stone. He skimmed it into the water. “Maybe he knew that whoever he owed money to wanted to call it in?”
“I don’t think so,” Nell said. “I simply don’t buy that theory, that someone from his past had come to Sea Harbor and killed him. For starters, there weren’t many people around that night. A strange car—a stranger—would have been noticed. And we think Billy was waiting for someone. Merry Jackson said he was looking at his watch, looking out the window.”
“Did Merry see him with someone?” Brendan asked.
“Yes, she did. It was raining so hard she didn’t recognize the person, but she swears she saw someone. We also know he got a phone call from someone earlier that night.
“And even the place where he was killed—that’s an old dock that only people from around here know about. I think someone from Sea Harbor killed Billy—and Aidan. And we need to find out who did it sooner rather than later.”
“Time to uncover our feast,” Pete yelled from down the beach, and Nell’s sentence was torn off and carried on the breeze.
“We need Brendan’s strong arms to help pull off this tarp,” Ben added.
The flurry of food, friends, and chilled glasses of white wine and beer pushed the talk of Billy Sobel into the background.
And as they sat together on the steps and on the Adirondack chairs in front of Sam’s new house, savoring bowls of juicy clams and lobster swimming in butter, disturbing thoughts were tucked away and replaced by a few hours of family, friends, and the treasures of a clambake.
But the conversation with Brendan and Willow stayed with Nell into the night. She needed to talk to Birdie, Izzy, and Cass.
Sometimes thoughts that became tangled in her head were just like a half-finished sweater pulled out from the bottom of an old knitting bag, the strands tangled, seeming not to fit together. A sweater started a year before, then forgotten for one reason or another.
But once you pulled it out again and stretched it out on the table, examining each stitch, picking up any that were dropped—the pattern would become clear. Sometimes.
The pattern of happenings in Sea Harbor was certainly a messy one right now, in desperate need of straightening.
The unanswered questions were becoming suffocating.
For starters, Nell thought—sitting in the protective warmth of friends and wiping the juice of fresh corn on the cob from her chin—why was Billy Sobel, a self-proclaimed nonchurchgoer seeking Father Northcutt’s services?
And perhaps that was the next straggly piece of yarn that a Thursday night gathering would help straighten out.
Chapter 27
Nell knew as soon as she and Ben finished their morning coffee and Ben drove off to a business meeting in Boston that if she didn’t move quickly, she’d be stripped of the resolutions she’d made the night before.
She’d already received three phone calls and one request to attend an impromptu meeting of the Sea Harbor Historical Society.
What she needed to do before she did anything else was stop in to see Natalie Sobel. And that wouldn’t happen if she didn’t leave the house soon and stop answering her phone.
But Birdie had beat her to it.
“Nell, dear,” Birdie said, “I’m meeting Natalie at the tea shop in Gloucester—she gets her hair done near there. You’ll join us.”
Nell smiled into the phone. Birdie had tried to pull her aside the night before at Sam’s, but the evening had passed way too quickly and there was little chance to talk privately. And then they had all gone their separate ways, Birdie riding with Pete and Cass, and Nell following Ben home, his car filled with a trunkload of coolers, a few tarps, and some long metal pokers they’d used for the clambake.
But they were of the same mind—and she knew Izzy and Cass, too, were wanting to regroup, to spread their thoughts out in neat rows on the knitting room table. And to try their best to put the pieces of the pattern together.
The Pleasant Street Tea Shop was one of Nell’s favorite p
laces to sit and compose herself, to think things through, and to almost always find a friend to chat with.
And she hadn’t had a slice of their cinnamon bread in days.
Nell arrived a few minutes before Birdie and Natalie, and spotted Cass’ mother, Mary Halloran, pushing her chair back from a table in the front of the shop. Father Northcutt sat opposite her, eyeing the remnant of a flaky scone as he got ready to leave.
“Nell,” Mary called out, her white head bobbing as she waved.
Nell walked over to the table and greeted them. Seeing Father Northcutt reminded her of the conversation she’d had Willow about Billy’s interest in confession.
“Father Larry,” she said cautiously, understanding the priestly seal of secrecy, “did Natalie and Billy Sobel join Our Lady of Safe Seas? I don’t remember seeing Billy at church.”
“Ah, poor Billy, God rest his soul,” the priest said with a brief bow of his head. After an appropriate pause, he looked up again. “Natalie Sobel is becoming a devout member. She comes to the seven o’clock on Sundays, Nell, which is why you never saw her there. Too early for you.” He winked. “And this past Lent, Natalie was there every morning. She’s a good woman, in my humble opinion. Now why are you askin’, my dear?”
“I just wondered about Billy.”
“Billy, bless him, not so much. Natalie was working on him, though. And he came by the day he died, if you can believe it. Wanted to learn about confession, he told me, but I was off to a parish council meeting, so he said he’d come back.” The good-sized priest pushed back his chair and left some bills beside the teacup.
With promises to get together soon, Mary and Father Larry walked out the door and across Pleasant Street to Mary’s car. Mary Halloran was probably promising to join one more church committee that needed her drive and energy, Nell thought. She was an Irish dynamo, and Nell honestly didn’t think Our Lady of Safe Seas could survive without her.
Nell watched them through the window for a minute, but her thoughts went almost immediately back to Billy Sobel. He was upset that day—that whole week if Brendan read him right. He was troubled. Because someone was threatening him? Because someone wanted something from him?
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