by Barbara Ross
The aggressive young man wasn’t buying Bard’s talk of restraint. “We know those Coldporters have blood on their hands. They’d kill their own mothers—”
“Now just a damn minute.” A newcomer, a middle-aged man with slicked-back hair, stepped up to the table. “Say what you want about us Coldport Islanders, but don’t be talkin’ about my ma.”
This is why I hated it when people had these discussions in public. I wished we’d been enforcing Gus’s “no strangers” rule.
The young lobsterman jumped out of his chair. “What are you gonna do about it?”
I held my breath. Would there be a fight? It was one Coldport Islander against a dozen Busman’s men. I tried to signal to Vee or Fee in the other room, in case we had to call the police, but they were unaware, busy chatting with customers.
“Interesting you think us Coldporters had something to do with what happened on Murray’s boat. The way I hear it, Bard Ramsey’s son had a beef with the fellow who died, and everybody in Busman’s Harbor knew it.” The Coldport man looked directly at Bard. “And your son was supposed to be on the boat when it all went down. Who knows, maybe he was. Maybe he killed the both of them.”
“Why, you . . .” Bard jumped up. He was tall, and despite his recent enforced time off, well muscled. Even though he had one arm in a sling, the Coldport man backed up a step.
“You want a war?” the man said. “You’ll get one. But you don’t want one, Ramsey, do you? You’re too comfortable. You’ve got it made, rakin’ in the dough, while me and all these guys”—he gestured around the table—“fight over your leavings. It’ll all come back to bite you, wait and see. So says Hughie B. Hubler. Remember that name.”
Hughie B. Hubler threw some bills on his table and stalked out. The young lobsterman sat down, but Bard didn’t. He looked at the clock in on the archway to the dining room. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Remember, we do nothin’ until we hear something about Peter. Then we decide.”
His departure seemed weirdly abrupt. There was something off about it. I looked at the clock. It was 7:45 AM. I felt like I’d already put in a full day.
The lobstermen left and the restaurant quieted. Fee and I were clearing tables when the Snugg sisters’ B & B customer arrived. The young woman from Chris’s cab the day before came down the stairs slowly and stood, waiting. Despite her expensive haircut and sophisticated black dress, her heart-shaped face and big, round eyes made her appear childlike.
“C’min, C’min. Make yourself at home,” Fee called. She set a mug on Gus’s chipped Formica countertop. “We’ve got breakfast for you here. Coffee?”
The young woman sat on the stool as directed. “Julia, this is Genevieve Pelletier. She’s staying with us at the inn for a few days.”
I put the syrupy plates I’d cleared into a rubber dishpan and wiped my hands. “Julia Snowden. Welcome.”
“Thanks.” Her voice was little-girl breathy, which exaggerated her youth. She couldn’t have been older than mid-twenties, which I thought made her an odd business partner for David Thwing.
She scanned the menu board behind the counter and went with an eastern omelet. Good choice. There was none of Mrs. Gus’s homemade bread, so to go with the eggs, Vee toasted some store-bought I’d found earlier in Gus’s walk-in.
I sat on the stool next to Genevieve. I wasn’t going to lose this opportunity to speak to one person available to me who had known David Thwing.
“I understand you were David Thwing’s business partner.”
Her brown eyes darted from side to side. They were surrounded by thick, dark lashes, which emphasized their large size and round shape. She probably thought Fee and Vee had told me she was Thwing’s partner. I doubted she’d ever connect me with her handsome cab driver from the day before. With her city clothes and taxi-taking ways, she didn’t seem like a small-town girl.
“Yes,” she said. “The police needed someone to formally identify his body. The nice lieutenant let me do it from a photograph. But even so, after spending time in the water, the body was . . .” She shuddered.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that. He didn’t have a family member who could identify him?”
“David was all work. He had no family. No girlfriend. No time for any of that.”
Fee delivered the omelet. Genevieve picked at the edges as we talked. She didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. I felt a surge of the same protective instinct toward her Chris had shown and the Snugg sisters seemed to feel. I wondered if she always brought that out in people, or if it was just in her present circumstances.
“How did you and Mr. Thwing become business partners, if you don’t mind my asking?” I wondered if she’d answer. If she recognized my name as her potential chief competitor in the harbor, she might think I was prying.
“I love to talk about how I met David. I’ve told this story so many times.” The Snowden name didn’t appear to have registered with her. Genevieve put down her fork and gave up all pretense of eating. “David discovered me. Right here on the coast. I worked summers at a little clam shack out on the harbor in Round Pond.”
Less than forty minutes from Busman’s Harbor by road, even closer by water. I’d been completely mistaken about her. I never would have taken her for a mid-coast girl.
“Our next-door neighbors owned the clam shack. I worked there from the time I was about twelve. At first I refilled the napkin holders and bussed the picnic tables, but by high school I was the main cook. The food they offered was delicious—whole belly clams, Maine shrimp, haddock, French fries, and the best onion rings on the planet—but I got bored to death with deep-frying things. I started to experiment, doing daily specials. It was a game between the owner and me. At the dock, he’d buy me the freshest seafood he could find and I’d figure out what to do with it.” Her cheeks turned an attractive rose color, and her face, so sad and stunned when she’d entered the restaurant, was happy and animated.
“Word spread about my specials. At first around our peninsula, and then farther. We had long lines every night in the summer. We bought more food, put in more picnic tables. I added a second special every night, and then a third. It was a miracle we pulled off the prep work in that little hut, but we did.”
She slowed down to catch her breath. “That winter, I studied all the great seafood chefs, read cookbooks, tried out recipes. I applied to go to culinary school for after high school graduation. The following summer was even more insane, and we got some write-ups in the press. People came from hours away. One day David Thwing was standing at the clam shack window. He ordered one of everything on the menu, even though he was alone. He took all his plates to a picnic table and sat there sampling the food. When he was done, he asked to have a word with me.”
I tried to remember if I’d ever heard anything about this cooking phenom from the next peninsula, but came up empty. Undoubtedly all this had happened during my long years away.
“The lines were still around the yard and up the street, so I told him he’d have to wait. He sat at his table for hours, while different groups of people joined him, ate and left. He talked to all of them: why did they come? What did they like? How had they heard about the clam shack?
“When we finally finished serving for the night, he told me he wanted to buy a restaurant in Portland and set me up as the head chef. In Portland, Maine! I was too young to appreciate what he was really offering. To me it was big city, bright lights. And making my living cooking. He told me he’d find the right place. He said I should get ready to move at the end of the season.”
Vee refilled Genevieve’s coffee and put a steaming mug in front of me. I looked at her gratefully.
“It must have been a challenge,” I said. “To move from working in a clam shack to running a restaurant.” In my job in venture capital, I’d worked with a lot of people running a business for the first time, but none of them had been seventeen-year-olds.
“It was hard at first. I had to learn how to run a rest
aurant, how to be a boss. I had no idea how competitive the food business was in Portland. They say there are more restaurants per capita in Portland, Maine, than there are in San Francisco.
“David never treated me like a high school girl. He consulted me on all the decisions—location, decor, menu, everything. He brought me to Portland to do the hiring, though I’d never worked with anyone but my neighbor and his kid. David believed in me that much. We called our place Le Shack to reference my clam shack roots, but also to indicate an upscale spin. In the end, the food won out. By the end of the next summer, we were as much of a sensation in Portland as I had been in Round Pond. David started talking about a second location. Bar Harbor was next. Then Ogunquit.”
“You had a steep learning curve,” I said. The food business was difficult. I had been brought up in it, and yet when I’d taken over the clambake last spring, I’d still felt overwhelmed. Labor costs were high. Margins were slim. Making a restaurant profitable was like landing a small plane in a fierce wind.
“I’d taught myself to be a chef. Then I learned to be an executive chef, in the sense that I was running several kitchens and had chefs with far more experience working for me. But I never was an executive chef, really, because I never learned the business side. David took care of all that.” All the happiness she’d shown while telling her story drained out of her. She dabbed at her eyes with a folded paper napkin.
Gus’s outer door banged open, distracting us both as we turned to look at the source of the noise. A pair of gray pants appeared on the stairs, followed by a blue sport coat and finally by the good-looking face and crew-cut head of Sergeant Tom Flynn as he descended into the restaurant.
“There you are,” he said to Genevieve. “You were supposed to be at the Snuggles. We told you to let us know if you went anywhere.”
“That was our fault, Sergeant,” Vee called from behind the counter. “We didn’t have time to feed Genevieve at the B & B, so we asked her to come here.”
“Great. Thanks.” Flynn brushed Vee off and turned his full attention to Genevieve. “We’re ready for you. Come with me.”
Without a word, she picked up her expensive leather bag and followed him out.
After they left, I washed dishes using Gus’s old-fashioned conveyor washer. Flynn’s behavior toward Genevieve had been odd. He’d expected to find her at the Snuggles, and seemed angry she wasn’t there. If she was in town to identify the body and provide background about David Thwing’s life, why did she have to account to Flynn for her every move?
Could they be looking at Genevieve as a suspect? There was something about her little-girl act that didn’t ring true for me. In my former job, I’d known plenty of successful entrepreneurs. One thing they all had in common was drive. And the food scene in Portland was a competitive jungle. Someone as naive as Genevieve Pelletier pretended to be couldn’t have survived, much less thrived.
A soft hand clamped my shoulder. Fee stood behind me. As always, she was simply dressed, her short hair more chopped than styled. I wondered what it had been like, growing up the “plain” sister, compared to the glamorous Vee. Fee’s back was bent even more than usual.
“How’s the arthritis?” I asked. Working at Gus’s must be difficult for her.
Fee smiled, stood up a little straighter, and said she felt fine. “I’ve had a new medication for a few months. Much, much better.” She paused. “You seem like you have somewhere else you need to be. You go along. Vee and I can handle lunch.”
“Really?”
“Go,” she commanded, in a tone that left no room for argument.
Fee was right. I did have somewhere else I needed to be. Le Roi the cat had been cooped up in the house on Morrow Island for a day and a half. No doubt he was furious with me.
Chapter 14
I drove my car from Gus’s to Mom’s house. No surprise, her car wasn’t in the garage. I decided not to fret about it. She’d made her feelings clear. I returned my car keys to the junk drawer in the kitchen and walked down to the town pier to pick up our Boston Whaler and head out to Morrow Island.
After a bumpy boat ride out, I turned the key in the lock of the little house by the dock. It was already unlocked. Strange, I was sure I locked it. A sharp chill caught me as I stepped inside. The unseasonably warm day hadn’t penetrated the house, and last night’s temperatures lingered.
“Anybody here?” My voice echoed though the empty house.
“Here puss, puss, puss.” Le Roi hadn’t run to greet me. I imagined him upstairs, sacked out in the square of sun on my bed, ignoring me, for spite. But when I looked in my bedroom, he wasn’t there. “Puss, puss, puss.” I was sure I’d left him in the house.
I returned to the kitchen where a quick glance at his bowls told me Le Roi had eaten, so he’d definitely been inside when I left. “Puss, puss, puss.” I didn’t take long to search the house, which was maddeningly quiet and still.
I called him again. No response. How could he have gotten out? I mentally reviewed the list of people who had keys and might have come out to the island, unlocked the door, and let him escape. Sonny and Livvie. Unlikely. My mother still had a key as far as I knew, but she hadn’t set foot on the island since my dad died. Clearly, I hadn’t locked up, even though I’d thought I had.
I opened the door to the outside and called the cat. He usually came like a dog when summoned, but not that day. I went back inside and filled his bowls, hoping he’d shimmy out of some indoor hiding place, but no dice. I opened the outside door again. “Puss, puss, puss.”
Searching the whole wooded island would be ridiculous, but I did have some idea of Le Roi’s favorite places. I checked the kitchen in the clambake pavilion and behind the bar. Finding no sign of him, I continued up the great lawn toward Windsholme.
Even in the bright, late morning light, the old mansion looked sinister and ruined. As I got closer, I spotted an unmistakable hole on the bottom of the orange hazard fence. “Oh, Le Roi.” There was no question he had made it. He and I were the only mammals on the island.
Concerned he was somehow trapped inside, I eased myself through the fence and followed. The mansion’s center, where the massive, winding staircase had climbed for three stories, was a charred ruin. The two wings of the house—the kitchen and dining room with bedrooms and servants rooms above on one side, and the ladies’ withdrawing room with bedrooms above on the other—were still intact.
I entered by the French doors in the dining room and made my way gingerly into the house. “Puss, puss, puss.” I was amazed at how well this part of the building had survived. The hand-painted wallpaper, though smoke-damaged, could probably be restored. Slowly, testing each piece of floor before I put my weight on it, I went through the swinging door into the butler’s pantry, and then onto the balcony ringing the second floor of the two-story kitchen. “Puss, puss, puss.” Nothing.
I’d reached a dead end. I couldn’t cross the ruined great hall, so I retraced my steps, calling for Le Roi as I went. I was at a huge disadvantage. The cat could get so many places I couldn’t. I walked across the front porch to the other wing and entered through the French doors into the ladies withdrawing room. “Puss, puss—”
“Hello.”
I screamed and jumped three feet in the air, turning like a corkscrew. Quentin Tupper was in the doorway behind me.
“You scared the crap out of me!” I yelped.
“Sorry. As I tied up at the dock, I spotted you walking around up here.”
Focused on Le Roi, I hadn’t even noticed the Flittermouse arrive.
“Cat lost?” he asked.
“How did you . . . ? Oh.” He’d heard the Puss, puss. “I can’t find him.”
“I’ll help you look.” We moved through the rooms together. “See, I told you this place wasn’t in such bad shape,” Quentin said. “It’s only the area up the main stairs and the roof that’s destroyed. You should repair it.”
“Isn’t there some kind of expression about the center not h
olding? Anyway, we’ve been through this. To what end? It’s too expensive.”
He put a hand on my forearm to stop me. “Julia, you know I’ll lend you the money. Windsholme is an architectural treasure. It should be saved.”
“Maybe.” Quentin had invested a good sum in the Snowden Family Clambake Company. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take any more of his money. “Puss, puss, puss,” I called.
He could afford to lend me the money, of course. He could probably write a check to restore Windsholme without breaking a sweat. But we couldn’t afford to repay him. His investment in the clambake, yes. All we needed was to string together a few years of decent weather, a decent economy, and, I could admit it finally, no competition from David Thwing. Windsholme was another story. It didn’t generate income. Paying off Quentin would be impossible.
A ringed plume of a tail, sticking straight up, appeared, it seemed, out of nowhere. “Meow!”
“There you are.” I took him in my arms. No mean feat with a twenty-pound, wriggling cat. “Bad boy. How did you get out of the house?”
Le Roi, wisely, said nothing.
“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked Quentin as we walked down the lawn.
“I got so caught up in the hunt for this guy, I forgot to say.” Quentin reached over and ruffled Le Roi’s fur affectionately. “I came to check out Windsholme for myself. Get a sense of the amount of damage. Part of my plan to talk you into restoring it. Do you mind if I look around some more?”
“Help yourself.”
As I opened the door to the cottage, the cat jumped from my arms and ran to his food. I had to take him to the mainland. I’d slept at Chris’s every night and spent my days in town. It wasn’t fair to Le Roi.
But where would I take him? The thought of Le Roi loose in the construction zone that was Chris’s house sent a shiver down my spine. “Mom’s house it is,” I said to Le Roi. Le Roi spent his summers ruling Morrow Island and until now had spent his winters in an isolated house at the end of a dirt road on the mainland. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about being a town cat, but there weren’t any other options.
