by Barbara Ross
Binder held his hand up, signaling Flynn to back off. “Of course not.”
“You’re so worried about whether we’re considering every suspect. I’m reassuring you we’re being thorough,” Flynn said.
I didn’t miss the sarcasm, but I also didn’t let it deter me. “Do you really think Sonny killed Thwing, along with his own best friend?”
Binder looked me straight in the eye. “He’d be better off if he told us the truth.” He inclined his head toward the noisy room. “We’re not the only agency working this case. I can’t control what these other officers think, or even what they do. And I’ll tell you this, they know your brother-in-law is lying about his involvement.”
I caught that. Not lying about where he was. Lying about his involvement.
“Well, while they’re looking into people who are lying, tell them to look at Genevieve. I know she’s covering something up.”
I marched out of the room, back straight, determined to prove them wrong. Genevieve was lying. There were two places I could go to get more information it, Portland and Round Pond. Round Pond was closer.
Chapter 19
The drive from Busman’s Harbor to Round Pond was a pretty one on a late afternoon in the fall. Visitors might have gone all the way up our peninsula to Route One, but the locals knew the back way, a pleasant, winding drive past farms and woods to Damariscotta.
Main Street, Damariscotta, had always seemed like the perfect downtown to me. It had a great bookstore, an old-fashioned movie theatre, and fabulous restaurants and art galleries, all in quaint two-story brick buildings. It was a tourist town, but had much more of a year-round population than Busman’s Harbor. People bustled in and out of the stores.
I turned down Route 129 toward Round Pond. The Bristol peninsula was one of the most scenic places in a scenic state, and it dazzled in the fall. I wished I were on a casual visit to the lighthouse perched dramatically above the crashing surf at Pemaquid Point, but I was a woman on a mission, headed to the east coast of the peninsula and the breathtaking harbor at Round Pond.
Round Pond was a perfect bowl of dark blue water on the Muscongus Sound. Like Busman’s Harbor, it was mostly buttoned up for the coming winter. The pleasure craft were gone. But it was also a working harbor. Screaming gulls surrounded the lobster boats as they unloaded their catch at the dock. The lobstermen of Muscongus Bay had their own history of territorial wars with neighboring harbors, but things had been quiet there for a long while.
I’d gambled Bob’s Clams would be open so late in the season. Genevieve had said she and Bob were neighbors, so I hoped I could track down their homes if the clam shack was closed. I was relieved when I came around a bend in the harbor road and found the shack sitting almost squarely in front me, the front window open for orders. Bob must have been counting on leaf-peeping tourists to eke out the last few pennies of the season.
The heady days of Genevieve’s gourmet cooking were over. The dishes on the menu, lettered in dark red on a white-painted board, were typical, as Genevieve had described—fried clams, scallops, Maine rock shrimp, haddock, hand-cut French fries, and onion rings. I recognized Bob Harris working inside, slightly balder and heavier than in his photo with Genevieve, but otherwise the same. A small woman worked at his side. Though there’d been no mention of her in any of the articles, I assumed she was his wife. Their gently rounded shapes and steel-gray hair reminded me of matched salt and pepper shakers.
I ordered the fisherman’s platter—in other words, everything on the menu. It would be more food than I could eat in three meals, but it would keep them busy cooking for a while and I could hang around and talk.
“Good season?” I asked.
“Not bad,” Bob answered, which in Maine-ese means stupendous.
“Us, too,” I said. “Julia Snowden. My family runs the Snowden Family—”
“I know the place.” Bob moved away from the fryer and his wife seamlessly stepped in. He came to the window and looked over his glasses at me. I wondered if he’d bring up the murder on Morrow Island in June, or any of our other troubles, but instead he said, “Nice operation.” The highest form of compliment. “I’m Bob. This is my wife, Mil.”
“Nice to meet you.” I looked around, as if taking in the name on the hand-painted sign for the first time. “Isn’t this the place Genevieve Pelletier got her start?”
“Hmpff.” Mil dropped a plastic basket filled with fried seafood in front of me. It smelled heavenly. “Cocktail or tartar?”
“Both, please. And ketchup for the fries.”
Bob watched silently while I ordered a soda and paid Mil for the meal.
“You asked about Vieve,” he said. “I heard about David Thwing getting murdered. It’s all people around here can talk about. Happened down your way, didn’t it?”
“I was the one who spotted the empty boat.”
“Doesn’t explain why you would drive all the way over here to ask questions.”
I hadn’t been as casual as I’d hoped. I went with a straightforward approach instead. “My brother-in-law was supposed to be on the boat with Thwing and the owner. The owner’s wife, and maybe some law enforcement types, think my brother-in-law was involved somehow. So I thought—”
“You could offer them another suspect,” Bob finished for me. “If you think Vieve could be involved in some way in murdering David Thwing, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Hmpff,” said Mil, like she didn’t agree.
Bob glanced at his wife, then looked at my basket of seafood. “That’ll get cold if you don’t eat it. Let’s go over to the picnic table yonder.”
Bob sat across from me. Mil didn’t follow and I assumed he wanted to put some distance between her and our conversation. I skewered a forkful of tiny Gulf of Maine shrimp. They were sweet and tender, with just enough breading to enhance, not disguise, their taste. Bob and Mil were pretty good cooks in their own right.
“Like it?” Bob’s pride was obvious.
“Delicious.”
He took his glasses off. His eyes were a gray, with a darker circle around the irises. “You wanted to know about Vieve.”
“Yes.”
“So I imagine you’ve read the magazine stories, how she and Thwing met and so on. That’s what brings you here.”
I recounted the story for Bob as I understood it. He sat back on the picnic table bench, arms folded.
When I finished, he said, “Now I’ll give you the real story, not the PR version.” He leaned forward, placing both elbows on the table. I waited, shoveling the food from the fisherman’s platter into my mouth as I did, savoring the salty crunch of the fries, the perfect sweetness of the onion rings and the lighter-than-air taste of the haddock.
“It’s true Vieve was a neighbor. Her family’s owned that place for four generations.” He pointed across the lawn at a huge shingled house on the harbor.
“Wowsa.” It was a marvel of Maine seacoast zoning, or lack thereof, that a mansion could have a clam shack practically in its backyard.
“Indeed. They’re summer people, of course. And since my place is so close, we’ve always been friendly. Once in a while, they complained about the noise or the trash, but mostly, it’s been good. I knew Vieve from the time she was a little kid.”
“Boating family?” I asked.
“Of course. Like all the kids around here, full-time and summer, Vieve knew her way around a boat. But it turned out, she wasn’t as interested in fishing as she was in fish, and what she could do with them. She was on her own a lot, so she’d come over and play at bussing the tables. ‘Help out.’ Cute stuff.”
“Where did she live in the off season?”
“Connecticut. I forget the town. Her parents are divorced and I think her stepfather adopted her. But when she started gaining a reputation for her cooking, she began using her real dad’s name, Pelletier. She never said why, whether it was trouble at home or she thought it was more chef-like. She got shuffled around a lot, spent m
ost of her time at sleep-away schools.”
I nodded sympathetically. Of course, I’d spent my time at boarding school, too, but I didn’t say that. The name change explained why I’d found no trace of Genevieve on the Web until the clam shack.
“I gave her a few bucks for helping. She came around more and more. The summer she was fifteen, she started in the kitchen. She was a good fry cook, fast-learner. I thought I’d be lucky to keep her for a couple of summers, maybe even through college. My son, Evan, could take over helping me then.
“But Vieve, who’d always been an unsupervised kid without much direction, got a fire in her belly. On her breaks from school, she had her mother send her for cooking instruction. New York, Paris. She came back the next summer with a goal. The ‘specials’ were her idea. It’s a myth of her making I bought the seafood and challenged her to prepare it. She charged the fish to her mother’s credit card. Picked it out herself. We always made plenty of money to pay it back.” He rubbed his eyes. A tired gesture, though he seemed to have plenty of enthusiasm about the subject of Genevieve Pelletier. “She was so full of life, I let her do it. I couldn’t argue about the results. Lines all around the place.”
“And that’s it? The rest is the same as the stories in the press?”
“Not quite. The summer after her senior year of high school, Vieve started talking about her plans. Her parents wanted her to go to college, or at least culinary school, but she was eager to get on with her career. She wanted us to open a restaurant together. Said I had the management know-how, she had the cooking skills. I figured she was right, we would be a great team. The same people who came here to the clam shack would come to a restaurant. We had enough local trade, I thought we could make it through the winters. So I started looking for a place. I signed a lease on a building on Main Street in Damariscotta. She picked out the decor and fixtures, developed the menu and set the pricing. I did everything she asked. I took a second mortgage on my house to pay for the improvements to the space.”
“Then David Thwing came along.”
“He’d been sniffing around the harbor all summer for something to sink his money into. He was going to buy a commercial fishing boat from a friend of mine, then backed away. He was going to buy a tour boat somewhere else. Then he fetched up here. I never liked him. Weird way of walking. Eyes darting all around.”
I knew what he meant. That’d also been my impression during my single, brief interaction with David Thwing.
I pushed the food away. I couldn’t eat another bite. Even if I hadn’t been full, I could see where this story was going, and it was enough to kill my appetite.
“Vieve went off with Thwing. Mil and I tried to run the restaurant in Damariscotta ourselves. The leasehold improvements were already done, but it was six ways from wrong. The prices we had to charge were too high for the food we were capable of cooking, and after all the renovations, the overhead was too high to support the right prices for our kind of food. Then came the stock market crash. The recession. We were done before the next season began.”
Bob rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on. He was stoic, but I could see the pain of that time. My family had almost lost our business, too. The loss of a family business was like a death.
“So now it’s just Mil and me, back at the shack, which we barely held on to along with our house. I’ll be paying that second mortgage ’til I die. Our son, Evan, went off to Maine Maritime. He has no interest in the business. When you’ve seen a train wreck like that at an impressionable age . . .” Bob didn’t finish.
“Was the relationship between Thwing and Genevieve platonic?” I asked. He had been thirty-seven to her seventeen when they’d met, but it wouldn’t have been the first time that line was crossed.
“Strictly business,” Bob answered. “At least while she was still here. To tell the truth, I think she was in love with success and he was in love with money. I never blamed Vieve for what she did,” Bob went on. “She got a better offer, plain and simple. David Thwing could give her everything she ever dreamed. There was nothing in writing between her and me. Not even an employment contract, which, now I look back, was stupid. But she was a minor, not quite eighteen. Who knows if it could even be enforced?”
Bob shifted his weight on the hard picnic bench. “Mil, though. Mil has some bitterness in her,” he continued. “She dreamed of retirement someplace warm. It’ll be a long time, now, if ever. That’s why I thought it was better to talk over here.”
A car with an Ohio plate pulled up to the clam shack and Mil stuck her head out the window. Bob gestured to my two-thirds-full basket of seafood. “Want me to wrap that up to go?”
I couldn’t say no.
Chapter 20
It was dark by the time I started back down the peninsula toward Busman’s Harbor. As I’d suspected, Genevieve’s little-girl act was just that. She had the kind of single-minded ambition that left a lot of victims in its wake. She might not have had a legal obligation to Bob and Mil Harris, but she had certainly had a moral one. To walk off and leave them stuck with that loan was reprehensible.
But was it enough to interest the police? Nothing about Bob’s story indicated Genevieve had the slightest inclination to kill David Thwing. In fact, the opposite. He was her patron. If anything, it was the Harrises who had a motive. I couldn’t picture gentle Bob killing anyone, though I wasn’t so sure about the taciturn Mil. It was all too far-fetched, and I felt silly for wasting the afternoon.
As I drove along, I considered. If Genevieve was out as a suspect, the best lead I had was the person who’d called Sonny Monday morning. Whoever it was hadn’t wanted Sonny on the El Ay. Which meant either they’d known something was going to happen, or they’d been planning something and wanted Sonny out of the way. Which meant whoever they were, they knew something I needed to know. Halfway down the peninsula, I pulled off the highway onto the access road for the hospital.
In the emergency room, Melody Barkly had been replaced by a woman in her twenties I didn’t recognize. She had a stud in her eyebrow, a crease in her forehead, and the evident assumption, before she even raised her head to look at me, I was going to be a pain in her neck.
“Fill out the form, return it to me,” she said, handing me a clipboard without looking over the high counter separating us. The waiting room was quiet, except for a mother with a coughing child in her lap and a guy holding his swollen hand.
“I’m not here about—”
“Whatever you’re here for, first you fill out the form.” She looked at me then, as if my lack of cooperation merited eye contact.
I put the clipboard back down on the counter. “Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I’m wondering who helped my brother-in-law, Sonny Ramsey, the day before yesterday, in the morning around eight? He received a prank phone call from inside the hospital.”
Instantly, her officiousness melted away. “Oh, that was me. I normally work mornings, but I’m covering for someone tonight. That was so creepy! I felt bad for him. He was shaking like a leaf. Has he figured out who it was?” She stood up, setting her elbows on the counter. Her nametag read, BRITTANY B.
“No he hasn’t. He’s quite upset about the incident, and he’s asked me to help him figure out who called him. I was hoping you could supply some information. Do you remember the number of the extension he was called from?”
Brittany’s eyes narrowed. “If he asked you to help him, how come he didn’t give you the extension number?”
I stuck my hand in my tote bag and flailed around a bit. “He did. And he wrote the number down. But I can’t find—”
Brittany B. took pity on me. “Maybe I did write it down. I wanted to follow up on my end because it’s somewhat myster—here it is.” Triumphant, she held up a little piece of white notepaper. “4927.”
“And you’re sure it isn’t the number of any department or doctor?”
“No. It’s not listed in the hospital directory.” She tapped her keyboard, then turned her monitor so I cou
ld read the list of names and departments paired with extensions. The list was alphabetical by person, not numerical by extension, so I had trouble understanding what numbers were used and which were skipped.
“What happened when you dialed 4927?” I asked.
“It rang and rang. You can try it again from the phone over there if you like.”
I stepped over to a house phone at the other end of the high counter, picked up the handset, and dialed the extension. As Brittany said, the phone on the other end kept ringing until I hung up. No outgoing message, no prompt to leave a voice mail, nothing.
When I moved back to her station, Brittany B. was giving her “Talk to the hand, fill out the form” speech to someone new, so I waited until she was done. “It just rang,” I confirmed. “No voice mail or anything. Can you think of any reason an extension would be live, but not assigned to someone?”
“I wondered, too,” she answered. “In the olden days, in the waiting room for each service there was a receptionist who had an extension. But now with budget cuts, you do your paperwork at centralized reception in the lobby, and most waiting rooms are unattended. The nurses and technicians call patients in for tests or whatever.”
“So these receptionist extensions are still active, even though no one sits at the desks?”
Brittany frowned. “Maybe. The docs might use them once in a while, like if they get a page.”
“So how do I get a list?”
“I don’t think there is one. I’d send you to talk to the switchboard, but no people work there anymore, only computers. You’ll have to look for the phone attached to the extension.”
Great. But it was important to know who had called Sonny, so I thanked Brittany. “If you find an unattended phone, you can call me.” She jotted her extension on a piece of scrap paper. “I’ll read back the number that shows up on my phone.”
I wended my way from the ER to the lobby and looked at the directory for the hospital and the related healthcare facilities in the annex that shared the same exchange. There were departments related to tests—ultrasound, X-ray, MRI—and departments for every body part—eyes, ears, feet, and so on. I took the elevator to the top floor of the main hospital building, planning to work my way down.
