Musseled Out

by Barbara Ross

  Livvie eased off the bed and moved toward the door. “If Mom is with Bard, it would be only fair. We’re both with men she didn’t approve of, at least at the beginning. Now she’s giving us a taste of our own medicine.”

  “She started it,” I reminded Livvie. My mother, descendant of a genteel and formerly wealthy summer family, had married the boy who’d delivered groceries to her island in his skiff.

  “Family tradition,” Livvie agreed.

  “I’ll remind you of this conversation in a few years when Page starts dating.”

  “Argh. Thanks, pal.” She hesitated in the doorway.

  “Will you and Sonny be all right?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Livvie answered. “I’m not sure how right now, but I can’t imagine my life without Sonny.” She shifted her weight onto her left foot. “Will you and Chris be okay?”

  I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 29

  I awoke at first light to the sound of voices floating up the back stairs. Sonny, Livvie, and Page were in the kitchen, eating breakfast and packing lunches. In other words, getting ready for a normal family day.

  I lingered upstairs so they’d have time together. It must be difficult enough for Sonny and Livvie to face each other, without adding me to the mix.

  Listening carefully, I heard brittleness in Livvie’s voice, an abruptness in Sonny’s. It would take them time to find their way forward. I was surprised at the level of investment I felt in their relationship. After all these years, I counted on Livvie and Sonny to be a couple. Page seemed completely back to normal. She jibber-jabbered at her parents as they went about their morning.

  At last, I heard the ka-thunk of the minivan’s sliding door, followed by the sound of the old engine receding down the drive. I glanced at my phone. 7:00 AM. I sprinted to my car and drove to Busman’s Hospital.

  I’d done a lot of thinking about the call Sonny had gotten from the PT room. It had come a little after eight on Monday morning. On Wednesday morning, at Gus’s, I’d seen Bard Ramsey leave abruptly at 7:45, announcing he had “someplace he needed to be.” I felt sure that place must be physical therapy. I hoped the appointments were scheduled at regular times and intervals, like 8:00 AM Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  I was certain Bard was behind the call to Sonny. Maybe he hadn’t actually made the call, but he’d made it happen. He wouldn’t easily admit doing something so horrendous to his own son, so I gambled if I confronted him, at the scene of the crime, so to speak, I’d have the upper hand.

  The 7:00 AM people were already inside the therapy room when I arrived. If someone had made the call when therapy was in session and the waiting room was empty, he could have used the phone without anyone overhearing.

  At about twenty minutes before eight, the next group of PT patients began trooping in. I held my breath, wondering if Bard would arrive, and how he’d react when I confronted him.

  A few minutes later, a familiar face entered the room, leaning on a cane and limping slightly. My old dentist, Gil Garretson.

  “Julia! How nice to see you!” He sat down next to me. “What’re ya in for? Me, broke my ankle,” he continued without taking a breath. “Walked off a curb and came down on it wrong. Can you believe it? One minute I’m leaving Gleason’s Hardware and the next, I’m flat on my back staring up at the sky. It was embarrassing, I can tell you. If it was winter at least I could say I did it skiing, not buying a replacement hinge for my screen door. Like that’s a dangerous assignment. So how are you? When did you get back to town? Who are you using as your dentist? I still have your files, so you should make an appointment with Marie and—”

  My parents had called him, “Garrulous Gil Garretson.” He was notorious for loading up your mouth with cotton, Novocain, and equipment and then asking you a question. No wonder he never waited for answers. Most of his victims couldn’t talk.

  I leapt in front of his conversational freight train. “Sorry about your ankle. How long have you been coming to PT? I bet you see a lot of the same people every day. Do you ever see my brother-in-law’s father, Bard Ramsey? I’m supposed to pick him up, but maybe I have the wrong day, or the wrong time.” I figured I’d get as many questions in as I could, because there was no telling when I might get another chance.

  “I’ve been coming here for four weeks. Yes, we are quite a close group. Right, Rosa?” he shouted at a young woman across the room, not waiting for her answer. “I see Rosa every time she comes. And Bard, of course. All the time. He’s Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so he should be here any minute. Usually it’s his son, the younger one, who brings him. Scruffy-looking kid. But who am I to judge? My daughter lives in a yurt in California. A yurt, I tell you. It’s a big round tent. She gave birth to her youngest right there on the yurt floor. But what can I do about it? She’s allegedly an adult. Kids, right?”

  I nodded my agreement. Dr. Garretson’s daughter was at least a decade older than me, but hey. Kids.

  The dentist went on without missing a beat. “Me, I’m here every day. Not for sessions, mind you, but on my off days they let me use the equipment on my own. My wife insists on it. Drives me here herself. I’m in a hurry to get this rehab done. I can’t work ’cause I can’t stand without the cane. Can’t drill teeth with one hand, eh, eh. Sometimes my wife forgets to pick me up, though.”

  I have never felt pity the way I felt it for Mrs. Garrulous, stuck at home with this guy and his relentless palaver. She must be ready to put her head in the oven. “Dr. Garretson, do you remember if Bard was here on Monday of this week?”

  “Of course he was. Why wouldn’t he have been?”

  As he talked, a line of physical-therapy-weary patients came out of the exercise room, rubbing various body parts and moving as fast as their ailments allowed.

  A young woman with a clipboard came to the door and shouted, “Eight a.m. group! Check in with me. Let’s keep moving.”

  “That’s me,” Gil said, pushing himself up with the cane.

  I jumped up. “Can I help you?”

  “Nope. Thank you. I can do it on my own. You should have seen me before. I’m a thousand times better now. Guess Bard’s not going to make it today. Sorry you came all this way to give them a ride.”

  Dr. Garretson moved haltingly toward the PT room door.

  “Wait,” I called. “You said them. Give them a ride. Did you mean Bard and his son Kyle?”

  “No. Why would the kid need a ride? Delivers them to the room here and takes off. The daughter usually picks them up.”

  Daughter? “Bard doesn’t have a daughter.”

  “Not Bard’s daughter. Her daughter. His girlfriend’s. Belle. Her daughter drove them home after almost every appointment. Lorrie Ann Murray. I’m sure you heard—terrible tragedy.” Dr. Garrulous seemed poised to speed off down that conversational boulevard, but the attendant tapped her clipboard and he limped off toward the PT room.

  Mom wasn’t dating Bard! I was shocked by how relieved I was. As Livvie had insisted, Bard wasn’t so bad. Dad had been gone for five years, but I wasn’t ready for Mom to move on. Pretty selfish. Of course, now I was back to square one on where the espresso machine had come from. Was there some other Cappuccino Casanova waiting in the wings?

  Bard’s girlfriend was Belle. What did this additional connection between the Ramseys and the Murrays mean?

  Before I left the hospital, I checked on Mrs. Gus. Her door was angled open, and from the hallway, I spotted Fee and Vee, seated at her bedside. Mrs. Gus appeared unchanged. She laid in the bed surrounded by her slightly fewer machines, her skin the same gray color. Her eyeballs jumped around behind her thin lids, but didn’t open. She clenched and unclenched her hands. She even sighed from time to time.

  Fee reached for her hand and clutched it in her own. Fee’s hand was fleshier and pinker than Mrs. Gus’s, but they shared the same twisted knuckles, the same disfiguring pain. Tears slid down Fee’s cheeks. She wiped them away with her other hand.


  “Oh, Vee, what have we done?”

  I stepped into the room. “What have you done?” I asked.

  The sisters locked eyes; then Vee gave a small flick of her head. Fee nodded. “We were going to confess anyway.”

  There was no third chair in the room, so I stood against the wall opposite the bed where they both could see me.

  Fee let go of Mrs. Gus’s hand and turned to face me fully. “About our seniors’ trips,” she started.

  It turned out they had gone to Campobello Island, at least for the day. And to all the other places they claimed to have been over the last few years. But then, every time, after their touristing, they went over the Canadian border to fill their prescriptions.

  “Why would you do that?” I was astounded. “Aren’t you all on Medicare?”

  “Most of us, but not all our prescriptions are covered,” Fee said.

  I leaned against the wall and folded my arms expectantly.

  “Some of our drugs are expensive, difficult, or even impossible to get,” Vee explained. “So, for years, a group of us have been traveling over the border. It’s all on the up and up. We see a reputable doctor, then go straight to the pharmacy with our own prescriptions.”

  “And we do our sightseeing. Have a nice little trip,” Fee put in.

  I nodded. I was sure they did, though whether it was for enjoyment’s sake, or so the seniors didn’t have to tell quite so many lies to their friends and families about where they’d been, I wasn’t sure. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Can’t you do all this over the Internet nowadays?”

  “So many scams,” Vee responded. “You pay your money and then nothing comes.”

  “Or worse, the drugs aren’t from Canada. They’re from China, or anywhere. Unregulated. No quality assurance,” Fee put in.

  “We’re so close to the border. It’s safer to go,” Vee continued. “Fee’s arthritis drug is approved in Canada, but not yet here.”

  “My pills make me feel so much better. And I have less inflammation, more strength in my hands,” Fee said.

  “So you talked Mrs. Gus into trying this miracle drug.” I had just worked that bit out.

  Fee began to sniffle again. “Yes. Only she wasn’t well enough to come on the trip with us.”

  “What did you do?” A chill ran through me. I was afraid for Mrs. Gus, and for the sisters.

  They looked at one another again. With another silent nod, something between them was resolved. “There’s always been another way. A friendly boat owner picks up prescriptions for people who can’t make the trip. People like Mrs. Gus who are too sick or people who can’t get the two days off work. So I asked this person to pick up the drugs for Mrs. Gus. He was going anyway.”

  “But Mrs. Gus didn’t have a prescription.”

  “That was the tricky part. We gave this person a copy of my prescription.” Fee started to cry again.

  I looked at Mrs. Gus, who lay restlessly in the hospital bed. The sisters had been so foolish. I wanted to shout at them, something about wisdom not coming with age. But what good would it do? They would only feel more awful, and surely the punishment had far outstripped the crime.

  “We don’t know what went wrong. We realize now it could have been so many things. She’s a good deal smaller than Fee, so maybe the dosage was wrong,” Vee said.

  “Or maybe the drug didn’t mix with one of her other medications. And now we’ve killed her!” Fee put her handkerchief, embroidered with purple pansies, to her face.

  “Wait a minute. Have either of you told Gus about this?”

  They shook their heads in unison. “We thought he had enough troubles.”

  “Gus told us that first day he gave her medication to the ER doctor,” Fee said. “So we knew they had whatever information they needed to take care of her. We haven’t discussed it with Gus since then.”

  “So he hasn’t told you. It wasn’t the arthritis prescription that did this to her. The capsules were cut with a poisonous substance. Whoever you dealt with did not pick up prescription drugs in Canada. They bought something cheap and dangerous.” I paused, so they could take this in. “Ladies, who did you ask to get this prescription for you?” I moved my head back and forth so I could stare at each of them.

  Fee looked away, but Vee stared right back. “We asked Peter Murray. He’s the one who does the runs now.”

  “Have you told this to Lieutenant Binder?” I asked.

  They looked at their laps.

  “You must.”

  “Do you think we’ll go to jail?” Fee asked meekly.

  Visions of these women, so proper and so dear to me, serving mandatory minimum sentences swirled in my head. And what if Mrs. Gus died? Would they be some kind of accessories? But Binder had to learn what the sisters knew about Mrs. Gus’s tragedy. For all I knew, he was close to figuring it out on his own.

  “Did you give Peter Murray money for this prescription?” I asked. Perhaps if they hadn’t paid, hadn’t transacted anything, they wouldn’t be charged.

  “Yes. We got the money from Mrs. Gus and gave it to Peter upfront, like he asked.”

  “Who delivered the medication to Mrs. Gus?”

  The ladies blinked. “Not us,” Fee said. “We didn’t get home until later in the day, long after she’d taken them.”

  It wasn’t Peter Murray, or David Thwing, that much we knew. Neither of them had returned from the voyage. There had to have been a third person involved. The police believed that third person was Sonny. Perhaps one day Mrs. Gus would wake up and tell us who had dropped the brown pill bottle at her house. Until then . . .

  “Grab your handbags,” I said. “You’re going to see Lieutenant Binder. I think, to be on the safe side, you should call an attorney.”

  “Old Farber did our wills and whatnots,” Fee said.

  Old Farber was so old, he had a son called Old Farber. “Perhaps he can recommend someone.” I held Cuthie Cuthbertson in reserve in case Sonny needed his services. “Let’s get going.”

  As we walked down the hospital corridor, I asked the thing I’d dreaded asking. “Before Peter Murray, who went to Canada to pick up the prescriptions?”

  Fee stopped walking. “Julia, do you really want to know?”

  And of course, the moment she said that, there was no need to say the name.

  “He’s at Gus’s,” Vee said. “Showed up this morning looking for you and we set him to work helping Genevieve. In case you want to talk to him.”

  Chapter 30

  I said good-bye to the Snugg sisters when they reached their elderly Subaru. They promised to go straight to police headquarters and meet with Lieutenant Binder.

  I drove toward town, feeling depressed and discouraged. I loved Fee and Vee, and while they’d done something very, very foolish, I didn’t want any harm to come to them. My cell phone rang. I picked it up without looking at the display, hoping it was Chris.

  “Julia. Owen Quimby.” The HR director at my old firm, calling for my answer. Would I keep my job and return to New York, or stay in Busman’s Harbor?

  “Hi Owen. I’m in the middle of something. Can we talk later?”

  “We agreed today would be the deadline.”

  “We did say today,” I agreed. “But I have until five.”

  “I don’t think we set a time.” Owen sounded reluctant. “I have a great candidate for your job if you aren’t coming back. I don’t want to keep him waiting all weekend.”

  “I’ll be back to you by five.” I hung up the phone. My relationship with Chris was the strongest reason I had to stay in town, and I didn’t know what the state of that relationship was.

  I drove straight to Gus’s. Chris’s pickup was parked on the street. He was still there.

  I entered through the kitchen door. It was the quiet time between breakfast and lunch. Genevieve looked up from cleaning the grill. “I’ll give you two some alone time,” she said. She took off the apron and slipped out.

  Chris’s back was t
o me. He turned around when Genevieve spoke. As soon as the door closed behind her, he strode across the dining room floor and enveloped me in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a jerk.”

  In that instant, all my doubts melted away. I snuggled in deep and then kissed him on the lips. “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  We homed like pigeons to “our” booth. When we were settled, I said, “You know the thing we never talk about?”

  “Vee called me from their car.”

  Oh, really? Perhaps they hoped to soften the blow of having ratted him out. “You can see it never would’ve worked to keep it secret,” I said. If I was hurt about anything, it wasn’t about having my worst fears realized. It was that apparently everyone in town knew except me.

  Chris ran both hands up over his brow through his light brown hair. “I never brought in illegal drugs. You have to believe that.” He paused. “That’s not technically true, of course. It was all illegal. But I never brought in anything to resell like this oxycodone the cops told you Thwing smuggled. I never did anything like that. Every single drug I picked up had a prescription from a doctor and had a specific person waiting for it. I didn’t even take extra money to cover my fuel costs.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Whatever I might have thought about what I was doing, it was illegal. Punishable by years in prison. So when you and I got serious, I decided I had to get out. Partly because you were asking so many questions, and partly because my being gone for days at a time caused so much trouble between us. I decided the less you knew the better off you’d be.”

  “Can you help me understand what happened to Mrs. Gus?”

  Chris placed his clenched hands on the table and stretched his fingers open, palms up. He was opening up to me. “When I got out of the business, I walked away. I didn’t look for someone to replace me. I told my regulars I was done.”

  “How did that go?”

  “People were disappointed, but they understood. A few weeks later, I heard through the grapevine Peter had agreed to make the next run. I caught up to him at the marina, and asked if it was true. He said it was, so I gave him some tips. I told him my rules. Only prescriptions, only intended for a specific person, get your cash upfront. I gave him some routes. I told him”—Chris hesitated for the first time—“how to avoid Customs agents, the Marine Patrol, Coast Guard, the whole array of people who might wonder what a lobster boat like his was doing so far from home. In that sense, he had it harder than me. Sailboats move up and down the whole coast all summer. And that was it. He asked me a few questions, nothing important, nothing I remember. It was August. I was crazy busy with work. I didn’t think about it again.”