Trimmed With Murder

by Sally Goldenbaum

  And then, just as quickly, she rid herself of the discomforting thought. What could she have done? Nothing . . . nothing but be anxious, something she was trying very hard not to be.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of brakes, then Izzy rushing in, leaving Sam and their daughter trailing after her. She pulled Cass into a hug so tight her friend could barely breathe. “I’m so sorry you had to see that, Cass,” she whispered into her hair. “It’s so horrible. So awful.” She finally released Cass and looked around the room, her eyes as round as little Abby’s. They rested on Nell.

  “Aunt Nell, where is he? Where’s Charlie?” Her voice was frantic, as if Charlie might be with Amber, lying lifeless in a blanket of snow. Or worse.

  Charlie.

  He’d been the first person the chief mentioned after telling Ben about the night’s tragedy. Charlie had come with Amber last night, hadn’t he? Jerry had asked. Tommy had said as much. That was all he’d said, telling Ben something he already knew. They had all been with Amber last night. Hundreds of people. But Charlie more so.

  “His car is here,” Ben said. “I checked the guesthouse and the shades are drawn. We decided not to wake him.”

  “So he doesn’t know about Amber?”

  Nell shook her head. “He’ll know soon enough and he’ll need the additional sleep.”

  Izzy was only half listening to her aunt’s rationale. She turned to Ben. “Uncle Ben, I watched him last night. Charlie really likes her.”

  Nell and Ben had watched him, too. Yes, somehow Charlie had fallen for Amber, a woman who made him crazy. But it didn’t seem to matter; as Izzy said, he really liked Amber.

  Birdie appeared at the door, as if by some mysterious telepathy. But it wasn’t that. Birdie usually showed up in the Endicotts’ kitchen on Sunday morning, sometimes because they were headed to Sweet Petunia’s for brunch. And if not that, it was the day Ella deep-cleaned Birdie’s elaborate home and she didn’t want Birdie around. But Birdie also came because Sundays meant being with Ben and Nell. No matter where they ended up.

  This morning Birdie knew there would be no Sweet Petunia’s, but she had brought some coffee cakes and banana bread her housekeeper had baked. She handed Nell the box.

  No one, however, not even Cass, felt like eating.

  “I think we should wake Charlie,” Birdie said without preamble. She had heard the news from Harold, who had a police scanner on his bedside table. A phone call to Esther Gibson confirmed what they hoped would be denied. Esther, who had so recently mourned her friend, would now be mourning her friend’s granddaughter.

  Cass and Danny got up and crossed into the kitchen. “Charlie doesn’t know,” Cass said. It wasn’t a question or even a statement, it was an expression of sadness for the realization that if there was one among them who would be more affected by this than the others, it was Charlie.

  Ben grabbed his jacket. “Birdie’s right. If Charlie doesn’t hear it from us, it’ll be from some stranger.” But as he reached the door, a bedraggled Charlie was walking across the deck, holding an empty coffee mug in his hand.

  “He looks like death warmed over,” Birdie said softly, the irony of her statement not escaping anyone.

  Ben opened the door and Charlie walked in. He wore the same clothes he’d had on the night before, disheveled and reeking of beer. His unshaven face spoke to a night he wanted to forget.

  But it was more than the hangover, they could see that almost immediately. His entire body spoke louder than a headline; Charlie already knew that Amber Harper was dead.

  Nell headed toward him as he fumbled with the zipper on his coat.

  She stopped, staring at his hand. “Charlie, you’re hurt.” An injury was much easier to deal with than the reality they faced. She took his hand in hers. The hair was matted down, scraped, and bloody.

  Charlie stared at it through blurred eyes as if it belonged to someone else.

  He pulled away. “It’s nothing,” he said, and took a few steps back. He looked around the room, surprised that others were there.

  “Charlie,” Izzy began, but he stopped her with a vigorous shake of his head “Amber is dead . . . ,” he said. His voice was husky and raw. “I got a phone call, a reporter,” he said, and then he rubbed his bloodshot eyes and waited for someone to deny what he had said.

  Ben took his mug and put it in the sink. He poured a fresh cup and handed it to him. “It’s awful news about Amber. We’re so sorry, Charlie,” he said.

  Charlie’s eyes were focused on the black coffee, his face changing expressions from sadness to anger, belief to disbelief, as his mind seemed to be assembling and disassembling whatever he knew and didn’t know about death.

  Finally he pulled out words and said, “There’re tweets out there, crazy things about Amber. She fell? Someone attacked her?” His voice was thick, his face immeasurably sad. “What happened to her?”

  Izzy took a deep breath. “No one knows much, Charlie. We know she’s dead. We know it’s a terrible, terrible thing. And we know this is so sad for you.” She touched him then, gently, without the estrangement of the past days and years. Those feelings melted away, at least for the moment.

  Nell could see the effort it took Charlie to hold himself together, especially when he felt Izzy’s fingers on his sleeve.

  She moved from the sink to the island and stood across from him. “Whatever you’re hearing is mostly rumor. People trying to make sense of someone dying in their midst, maybe while they danced or partied just yards away. People become desperate for instant answers so they make them up. But it’s foolish to listen to them.”

  “When he called earlier, Jerry said she died of an injury,” Ben said. “They’re working on the assumption that the wound was inflicted by someone else. It probably happened sometime last night. Possibly while people were still at the party. The college crowd had taken over the tent, and the music was loud—”

  So if Amber had tried to scream, had called for help, no one would have heard her. The thought registered with all of them. Chilling and vivid.

  Charlie looked as though he was going to be sick. “I should have been there. I should have protected her,” he said.

  But it was his eyes, not what he said, that were filled with a terrible grief.

  Izzy leaned lightly into him. “That thinking’s not helpful, Charlie,” she said. “And it’s probably not valid. If someone wanted Amber dead and you had been with her, it would have happened at another time.”

  But maybe not, Nell thought. Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe it was a random killing, someone wandering through the trees, someone who had had too much to drink. And if so, if Charlie had been there, he might have been able to stop it.

  She stopped herself then, unwilling to give legs to her next thought. Charlie had brought Amber to the event last night. They should have left together . . . Why hadn’t he been with her?

  Ben pulled out a frying pan and began breaking eggs into a bowl.

  Nell watched him, knowing exactly what he was doing. Izzy began taking the coffee cakes out of the box, slicing them, and putting them on a plate, and Sam followed suit, pulling a stack of plates from the cupboard, cream and sugar, forks and knives. Put some routine into the day. Breakfast. Life.

  “Charlie, come with me,” Nell said, and while the others were busy with acts they could understand, she took him into the guest bathroom and wet a washcloth, gently dabbing at the wound on his hand, forcing her mind clear of questions. How did you get this, Charlie? Tell me you fell out of bed. Or you slammed it in your car door or . . .

  But her fingers felt the tiny traces of debris, a stone as small as a pinprick on the edge of his fist.

  In minutes she had washed away the blood and the dirt and covered the wound with antibiotic cream. “It’s not a bad cut and I don’t think you’ve broken anything on your hand. But you’re going to h
ave a bad bruise, Charlie.”

  Charlie listened dumbly, then followed Nell back through the hall.

  The family room and busy kitchen now smelled of eggs and spices and bacon. Of sourdough toast and strawberry jam. The ordinariness of it all was startling. But beneath the ordinariness was a sea of uncertainty.

  They all had questions, each one of them, about the terrible fact of Amber’s death. Cass and Danny had seen blood. A wound, the chief had said. Not self-inflicted.

  There were other unspoken questions, too, that swelled around the quiet breakfast, nearly blocking out the ordinary conversation going on around the room: questions about the evening, about people, about Amber’s frame of mind, her actions, her walking back into the woods.

  About the bruise on Charlie Chambers’s hand.

  And if anyone had answers to those questions—even partial, unimportant answers—it would be Charlie.

  But in the presence of the grief that had caused his body to slump and his face to sag, they couldn’t go there.

  Even Birdie, her heart and head filled with the last conversation she’d had with Amber.

  Not now.

  But later.

  • • •

  “The sooner we start the process, the sooner we’ll find answers, and the sooner we’ll find the person who did this,” Jerry Thompson explained as he accepted the coffee mug Nell had filled for him. He looked at each of them—Sam, Ben, and Nell—but his eyes lingered the longest on Charlie. “And one part of the process is talking to everyone who had contact with Amber last night and since her arrival in Sea Harbor. You all fit that description, I presume, so having all four of you together is making my life easier.”

  It was late afternoon and the sun was setting, casting long shadows across the room.

  “Tommy is talking to some folks down at the station. I thought I might as well make a couple house calls,” Jerry said. “No law says I can’t do that.”

  But they all knew another reason he did it was that he was a good friend, and he knew this was a hard time for Ben and Nell’s nephew, the person who knew Amber Harper best and who might have the answers the police were seeking.

  After the others had left earlier that day, Charlie had admitted to Nell what had been obvious: that he’d gotten wasted the night before, “awful stinking drunk,” he said. He had finally made it to the guest cottage, where he passed out on his bed.

  From the smell and sight of him, Nell believed every word of it. Even though he was functioning now, he was definitely hungover and didn’t seem to be in any position to explain why he’d done it.

  But Nell certainly could guess. She’d been standing next to him, she’d felt his fistful of anger, felt his whole body freeze at the sight of Amber in another man’s arms. She was a woman he’d known for a mere week—yet she had somehow evoked fierce emotion in him. It was a confusing image to Nell. But her nephew was a grown man. It was not her business. Nor was the developing bruise on the side of his hand, its puffiness already beginning to turn purple.

  After Jerry’s call, she suggested to Charlie that he go back down to the guest cottage to shower and change clothes—and maybe get a little sleep before the chief arrived.

  Now he sat on the leather couch in Ben’s den, looking almost like the old Charlie—or at least the one they had come to know in this past week.

  Sam had come back to the house with Ben after they checked out their boat. He knew the chief was coming and decided he’d like to stay. He’d been Charlie’s surrogate older brother lots of times growing up, times when Charlie’s older brother, Jack, wasn’t around. Now seemed a good time to play that role again. And he figured he’d been around Amber enough this past week to be someone the chief would want to talk to eventually anyway. No time like the present, he told Charlie.

  But rather than resent it as Sam thought he might, the grown-up Charlie seemed to welcome Sam’s presence.

  Nell moved in and out of the den while they began talking. She was finding it difficult to sit still. No matter how routine all this was—and how practical and nonthreatening Jerry Thompson was in his questioning—the process was still thick with tension and grief, an unsettling combination. But no matter, she listened carefully as Jerry began with Charlie, asking him to go back to the beginning, to how he’d met Amber on that freezing night just over a week ago.

  A week. An eternity. Nell took a deep breath, released it slowly, and went to the kitchen to brew another pot of coffee.

  Jerry took some notes, but mostly listened, except to pose a question that would take the conversation in one direction or another.

  “What was Amber like? How would you describe your relationship with her?” he asked.

  Charlie sat still at first, as if trying to figure it out for himself. Finally he untangled his thoughts and started in. “She was abrasive. I didn’t like her at all the night I picked her up. She was this rude kid—woman, I guess, but young—and I was the grown man, years older—five at least—and wiser.” His laugh was hollow, but he forged on. “I had no idea who she was and didn’t really want to know. I had my own problems, coming to town the way I did.”

  “To help Dr. Virgilio,” Jerry said. “That doesn’t sound like a problem. She tells me you’re doing a great job.”

  Had he talked to Lily already? Nell wondered. Why? Surely not to check up on Charlie—

  Charlie went back to talking about Amber, avoiding discussing his unannounced reunion with his family. “Amber was like a boomerang. I dropped her off and never expected to see her again. But boom, the next morning there she was. It was as if she inserted me into her life—texted me at odd hours, called me for rides. This last week—it was like a year—ups and downs, arguments, even all-night conversations. Some days it was like I was at her beck and call. She’d show up unexpectedly.” He looked up at Ben as if for confirmation.

  Ben nodded and detailed the encounter last Sunday, when Amber had shown up at their house with Charlie’s cell phone.

  “She stole it from you?” Jerry asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “It didn’t matter. She gave it back.”

  “You said she expected you to be at her beck and call. That must have been irritating.”

  “It should have been. But it wasn’t. I started liking it. I liked her. A lot.”

  “Romantically?”

  Charlie glanced at Sam, then his aunt and uncle.

  Nell felt sudden pity for this grown man whose cheeks were suddenly flushed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She was volatile, but somehow it was okay. We had quiet, close moments. She’d drop the facade, and we’d talk about things on her mind—about her mother, why she had come back here, all sorts of things. I wasn’t used to that, to having someone trust me that way. Amber could be rude and insulting—but also loving and sexy and someone I wanted to get to know, all in the space of a breath. Crazy.”

  Jerry leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “It’s interesting that she confided in you so quickly.”

  “She didn’t know anyone else here, not really, at least I didn’t think she did. Except for the Gibsons, maybe. They were good to her when she was a kid. She never knew the Cummingses. They were family in name only.”

  Jerry nodded, as if the information wasn’t new. Esther Gibson worked for him, and the police dispatcher was like family. He was surely familiar with that part of the story.

  Charlie lifted up his coffee cup at the same time Jerry looked up from scribbling something on his yellow pad.

  Jerry looked at him and frowned. “Hey, what happened there? Looks like you got a nasty bruise. That one’s going to hurt.” He reached out toward Charlie’s hand.

  Charlie looked at his hand.

  “How’d you do that?”

  Charlie took a deep breath. “Clumsy, I guess.” He looked beyond Jerry and Ben, through the den window where the barren
branches of the maple tree brushed back and forth against the side of the house. “I slammed it against something,” he finally said.

  “When was this?”

  “Last night. I was angry at Amber. Or maybe with myself for letting her get to me. I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure.”

  “Go on.”

  “She had switched moods on me, just like that.” He snapped his fingers on his good hand. “It had happened before. I should have brushed it off because I knew she was going through a hard time. She did that off and on during the week when she was disturbed about something. I think she took it out on me because for some crazy reason, she knew I’d stick around. But last night, I let it get to me because I wanted to help her, you know? To be that guy who could make it better. I went off and took out my feelings on a rock down near the shore.”

  The room was silent for a minute that seemed to stretch into an hour. Finally Jerry went back to his yellow pad, scribbled a few notes, then looked up and said to Ben, “Amber didn’t show up for the reading of the will, is that correct?”

  “The first meeting we scheduled, yes, that’s right,” Ben said. “That was Sunday, the day she borrowed Charlie’s car so she could do some errands and, or so we thought, get to the meeting. But she didn’t show up.”

  Nell had almost forgotten. It seemed so long ago. At first they thought she had stolen the car, left town. But they were wrong.

  “Do any of you know where she went that day?” Jerry asked.

  Nell repeated what Amber had told her that next day. It was the first time she had visited her mother’s grave, she had said. Time had fallen away.

  “What about the rest of the week? What did she do?”

  Ben explained about Monday’s meeting, the one she attended.

  “What was her reaction?”

  “No one really knew at first. She left abruptly when it ended.”