“Hello, dear,” Ruth said. She wore her reading glasses on the tip of her nose and her arms tinkled with bangles. “Did you get it all worked out?”
“Hasn’t Aunt Margery talked to you?” Angie asked.
“I finally stopped checking the phone,” Ruth said in a distracted tone. “There was just too much to keep up with.”
“No, we haven’t worked everything out.”
“Have you come over to try to send a message to Margery via the side channels, then?”
“It had occurred to me,” Angie admitted. “But I didn’t want to pressure you.”
“Ha. Tell that to your great-aunt.”
Angie stopped to think through what she wanted to say, and how she wanted to say it. “Ruth, I saw Aunt Margery and Raymond Quinn on the beach the other night. I know that they were together a long time ago, and I know that she doesn’t want me to know that.”
“Mm-hmm,” Ruth said. “Well, I’m sorry you had to find that out.”
“What? That she was seeing Quinn?”
“No, that your great-aunt is the kind of person who’s so paranoid about what other people think about her that she keeps secrets even if they mean that she spends the next forty years nursing a broken heart.”
“Over Quinn?”
Ruth shook her head, still filling out tags. “For such a singularly unlovable man, he was much pursued at the time. But then at the age of seventeen, he was handsome and owned his own boat already. We all thought he was destined for greatness, in a literary sense at least. Of all of us, he was the one mostly likely to write the Great American Novel, a northeastern Old Man and the Sea, if you will. But he wasn’t the one who was published.”
“That was Aunt Margery with The Little Grey Lady of the Sea, wasn’t it?”
Ruth looked up from her pricing. “My, my. We have been doing our research, haven’t we?”
“We have,” Angie said.
“Did you see the thing about your great-grandfather?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“I want Aunt Margery to trust me and tell me what’s going on. She should know that I’ll never do anything to hurt her, or to let anyone else hurt her.”
“The police, for example?” Ruth asked.
Angie didn’t answer.
Ruth said, “I’ll tell her. But you, my dear, should also keep in mind that Aunt Margery not telling you what you think she should tell you might not be a trust issue. She doesn’t want you hurt either.” She lifted the newly priced shirts off the counter. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few things to finish up before I can close for the evening, and I’d like to get to them.”
Ruth’s words and tone struck Angie hard, letting Angie know she was being foolish and was in over her head. No matter, the drive in Angie to figure out what was really going on just wouldn’t quiet. She said, “The picture with Dory Jerritt and Raymond Quinn in front of the boat…they were engaged for a while, yes?”
“Yes.”
“If I looked carefully under the other photos, would I find one of all five of you together, say, in a group photo for a literary club at school?”
“You might.”
And if I looked even further, would I find out who was dating Alexander Snuock?”
Ruth’s jaw clenched. “No need to go stirring things up, Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie Prouty,
“Where were you on July third?”
“What’s my alibi?” Ruth asked. “I was having a late supper with Sam Elliott on a yacht out in the harbor. Thousand-dollar champagne. I’m going to be the love interest in his next movie, if you can believe that”
“Right.” Angie didn’t appreciate her wit. “So you weren’t with Dory and my Aunt Margery?”
“Sam Elliott is mine, all mine.”
Neither Ruth nor her Aunt Margery wanted to come clean. Maybe that was why Aunt Margery wasn’t talking: she wasn’t sure how long she could keep her story straight before spilling the beans.
”You three weird sisters were doing something that night.”
Ruth locked her eyes on Angie, “And what would that be?”
“You tell me.”
Ruth sighed, her shoulders rounded in slight defeat. “Angie, go home. This doesn’t concern you, and you can’t possibly make things better. Only worse. I know you’re one of the staying Proutys and that means that you’re insufferably nosy, but trust me, now is not the time.”
“Did saying that ever work with my great-aunt?” Angie asked.
“No,” Ruth admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I have to put up with it from you. Go home now, Agnes. And stop coming in my back door.”
The next stop on Angie’s tour was Dory Jerritt’s house, a place that Angie had spent a lot of time in as a child and teenager: a place that she’d barely seen since she’d moved back onto the island. It was on the southwest side of the island, outside of town, closer to where Angie had grown up with her parents than Aunt Margery’s small, tidy house.
It was a newer home, although it had been built in the same shake-shingled style. The rooms were bigger, the ceilings were high, and upstairs they were square, rather than angled to follow the roof. The living room had pine wall panels and a loft with a ladder leading up to it, that she and Josephine and Mickey had played in, and watched TV over the side rails. There was a stairway down to the beach off the back porch. The beach was changing on that side of the island, and a lot of the houses were for sale: living on the beach was amazing until the ocean started eating the land out from underneath you.
Dory was the kind of woman who would probably stay in the house until it collapsed around her. She was just that stubborn.
Angie pulled up in front of the house and knocked on the door. Dory’s car was in the driveway. Aunt Margery’s wasn’t. The sun had set and the sky was turning from its long ocean twilight, to the purple just before full dark.
A knock at the door and Dory answered. It was a big house for a single woman with no grandkids or dogs. How she could stand to live on her own, Angie had no idea.
“Hello, Angie,” she said.
“I’m here to talk about Aunt Margery.”
A sigh, and Dory opened door. “Come in. Would you like some coffee? Rum? Coffee and rum?”
“Just the coffee.”
“Cream, right?”
“Yes, please.”
Dory led her to the living room, still decorated with wood paneling. The loft was still there, too, facing the big-screen television. However, the heavy, indestructible furniture that Angie remembered from her childhood had been replaced with a surprisingly delicate white rattan living room set with flowered pink-and-white cushions, brightened by a few small square red accent pillows. One wall was lined with bookshelves, and a bouquet of fresh flowers stood on the glass-topped rattan coffee table. A few botanical prints hung on the walls, delicate and exact, illustrating the leaves, flowers, and fruits, seeds, or nuts of different species; thistles, hawk’s beard, jimsonweed, even a dandelion that showed both a yellow flower and one that had gone to seed.
Dory came back in with two cups of coffee on a small flowered tray.
“You’ve changed things,” Angie said.
“Since I was a mother with a pair of rowdy twins? You bet I did.” She straightened up and looked around the room. “I remember the three of you up in that loft. You were the giggler.”
“I have a lot of good memories of this place.”
“Well, it’s sliding into the ocean now,” Dory said. “Erosion will probably pull it off its supports in about twenty years or so, if a storm doesn’t take it first.”
“That’s too bad.”
Dory shrugged. “It’s just a house. Hopefully by the time the house is gone, I’ll be in a nursing home.”
“A nursing home?”
“Nobody lives forever. Besides, can you see me living with Josephine or Mickey? Even if they’d have me, I’d kill myself within the month.”
<
br /> Angie laughed. Dory had always had a dark sense of humor. Angie had learned a long time ago not to take it too seriously: she was just joking.
“Your Aunt Margery is lucky to have you,” Dory said.
“Even if she doesn’t think so right now,” Angie said.
“Family,” Dory said. “Loving them sometimes drives you and them crazy. ”
Angie smiled, and started to relax. Dory didn’t always bother to put people at their ease, but she was taking mercy on Angie’s obviously tense state.
“Don’t worry,” Dory said. “Things with your Aunt Margery will work themselves out. This will all be over soon, and then things will get back to normal.”
Angie’s eyes started to fill up with tears. She took a sip of coffee to try to cover it, but she could see that Dory had noticed from the look of pity on her face.
“Aunt Margery is messed up in this, isn’t she?” Angie asked.
“I can’t speak to that,” Dory said, shifting uneasily in the rattan chair. “But if you’re upset about Alexander, don’t be. He had all that money, and what good did he do with it? Nothing. He could have built libraries and hospitals. He could at least have donated to the animal shelter. But no. He sat on that money like a dragon on his hoard, too cheap even to hire enough help to keep his place from falling apart.”
“Falling apart?”
“My part of the island isn’t the only one falling into the ocean,” Dory said. “The bluff that Snuock Manor sits on is slowly sliding into the water, too. He had the money to shore it up, but did he? No. He just pushed the problem on down the road for Walter to handle. He didn’t even set up a trust fund to help protect Walter’s inheritance from taxes. Couldn’t be bothered. He did get everything set up so that he could raise rents all over the island, sure. But a lot of that money’s going to get lost to taxes.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Pure idiocy, that’s what it is. Stubbornness and pride, and greed.”
“Dory, was Aunt Margery here on the night of the third?”
“Tracking down an alibi, are you?” Dory pushed her hands through her hair. She looked tired. “Honey, I’d love to be able to tell you that she was here, that the two of us were having a grand old time that evening, but I was with my daughter.”
She looked Angie straight in the eye when she said it.
Angie, on the other hand, blinked. She knew Dory was lying: Jo had been with her mohawked lover. Unless Jo was lying about that, too? No, she couldn’t have been. Angie knew all her tells, both in and out of card games, and knew that Jo had been telling the truth—mostly, anyway.
“Where was she, then?” Angie asked.
“Your Aunt Margery? She was helping a dear friend out of a sticky situation.”
“Raymond Quinn?”
Dory shook her head. “This town still holds a few secrets. Don’t think that because you’ve just learned that she and Quinn were together once, that he’s the only friend that she’s ever had.”
“If she wasn’t with you, and she wasn’t with Quinn…with Ruth, then?”
Dory shook her head again.
“With Snuock? Was she still friends with him?”
Dory lifted her chin. “What if she was?”
“I thought she hated him? And what kind of sticky situation was she getting him out of, if he ended up dead?”
Dory said, “Think about how much Alexander loved life, Angie. The passion with which he lived, his joie de vivre, his generosity of spirit.”
“But…”
“Think about it,” Dory repeated.
It was obvious Alexander Snuock didn’t have any joie de vivre, except where money was involved, so what was Dory suggesting? That Alexander Snuock had asked Aunt Margery to shoot him because he was too scared to take his own life?
The whole situation was becoming more and more confusing.
“Is it true,” Angie said, “that Raymond Quinn and Aunt Margery were in love?”
Dory leaned back in her creaking rattan chair. “I’m not sure,” she said.
“You’re not sure?”
“Love is complicated,” she said. “Raymond had always carried a kind of fascination for her, even if she denied it. They were always at each other’s throats, like a couple out of a romance. You could see the sparks fly between them. Destiny, some would have said. And then, of course, they were both too stupid to unbend enough to be good for one another, and it all fell apart, practically before anyone else knew about it.”
Dory continued, “What things look like to the world aren’t always what they seem. The inner truth is different. You’ve been in love before, that fiancé of yours who was stealing your ideas and passing them off as his own. Do you feel like what he did with the other woman was worse, or what he did with your ideas?”
Angie kept silent and sipped at her coffee.
Dory nodded. “To the world, it would have seemed that the woman was worse. But in your heart, it was the theft from you that hurt worse, that was the real violation.”
Angie had already settled this point with Walter Snuock. Was she really so transparent? But this wasn’t about Angie.
“What did Alexander Snuock steal from you?” Angie asked. All five of them had been in the same literary club. All five of them.
Dory smiled a little and shook her head. “That was a very long time ago and not a subject I’m willing to talk about.
“And the book?”
“The book?”
“The Little Grey Lady of the Sea.”
Suddenly Dory seemed to soften, slouching backward in her chair. “What an incredible book that was. Full of stories that couldn’t be proven or disproven. The ghost stories were supposed to be fiction, you know. But Margery couldn’t get it published. So we went back through everything and changed the names back to the real ones, cleaned up a few details, took out the gore, and…voilà. A sordid little tour-guide book was born. It didn’t sell too badly. I still get royalty checks.”
“You get them?”
“All five of us do.”
“Five of you? But there are such awful things about Alexander Snuock in the last chapter.”
“He wrote them himself,” Dory said. “‘I can’t pretend to be a real-life pirate,’ he said. ‘So at least I’ll be the evil businessman.’ Raymond teased him mercilessly for that. Back when they were still speaking to each other. Ironic, isn’t it? Considering that’s what he became.”
“Evil?”
“Raising his rents so drastically in order to drive an old friend and rival out of business? And not caring who else suffered for it? What do you call that, just an ordinary day in the business world? That’s New York thinking. Manhattan thinking. It’s definitely not Nantucket thinking.”
“But he didn’t deserve to die for that,” Angie said.
Dory closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. “No, he didn’t. But he was still an evil man, who was more concerned with owning things—and treating people like things he owned—than he was with living. I’m sure he found death a mercy of sorts. One flash of pain, and then it was over. The long battle that he had been waging against his destiny was over.”
“You think he was destined for this?”
“Sometimes we’re destined for things that aren’t any good for us. Remember that, when this is over.” Dory’s eyes narrowed, the wrinkles around the corners deepened. “You might want to remind my daughter of that, too.”
Chapter 13
Mistakes, Excuses, & Vicious Circles
On the way out of the house, Angie stopped at the photo wall in Dory’s hallway. It wasn’t the layered, complex, bohemian creation that covered Ruth’s back wall in her shop. The photos all had matching frames, for one thing, and nothing overlapped.
She saw a few photos of the three of them—her, Jo, and Mickey—from their childhood, lots of photos of either or both of the twins, and a lot of faded old photos of Hank Jerritt, tall and gangly and with Mickey’s infectious grin. He
’d died in an industrial accident on the docks almost exactly a year ago. Dory had been living off the company’s payments since then.
Before the accident, Dory used to work on the docks with Hank part-time. Since then, she had tried a few different things—working at a couple of tourist places in the summer, volunteering at a local nursing home, walking dogs. Now her main activity was helping at the bakery.
She had enough time and money to do whatever she wanted. Ironically, she was at just as many loose ends as Snuock had been: living on her own, isolated from everyone around her, with no real need to work or accomplish anything. The only difference was that Snuock had a hobby or two—collecting things and reading books—and Dory had a family she hadn’t chased away.
“Are you going to start writing again?” Angie asked.
“Oh, I never really was the writer,” Dory said. “I loved books, but not really the writing. I always enjoyed editing more.”
“You could do that now.”
“I could.” Dory reached out and touched one of the photos of her with Hank and their kids. “I’ve been so caught up in getting the twins on their own two feet…and about Hank, that I forgot about myself for a while. I could travel. I’ve always wanted to do that. If only Margery and Ruth weren’t tied down with the shops.”
“I’m thinking about hiring an assistant,” Angie said.
“That would be nice. Then Margery could go traveling with me.”
Toward the edge of the cluster of photos was a picture of five teenagers standing with their arms around each other, grinning fiercely. Handsome young Raymond Quinn was in the center at the back, with a girl on either side—Dory and Aunt Margery. A younger, skinnier, not-quite-as-handsome-as-he-would-be-later Alexander Snuock knelt in front, supporting a dramatically posed Ruth—one arm dangling on the floor and her head thrown back in a mock faint.
“There we are,” Dory said. “The infamous yearbook picture. I like to remember the good with the bad, you know, even if Margery always turns up her nose as she walks down the hall and pretends she can’t see it. She doesn’t like being reminded.”
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