by Lea Wait
“Or that he and Silas are now dead?” Sarah said.
“Were the stars aligned wrong?”
Jeremy shrugged. “We can mourn Ted. But I’m not sure Silas was a great loss to anyone, except maybe Abbie. And she seems more devastated about losing her father’s money than losing her husband.”
“Maybe she’s in shock,” said Sarah. “Right now I don’t even know how I feel.” She pulled out her car keys. “Let’s get going. I need some time away from here to think. I’m going to open my store for the day.”
Patrick and I climbed into her van.
“Funny,” said Sarah, as she drove toward town. “All these years I wanted a family. I thought if I had a family, all my problems would be over. That my world would be better. I’d have people around me who cared. I’d have a place. Now, finally, I’ve met the only family in the world I have left alive, and I wish I were alone again.”
Patrick and I looked at each other.
“Families don’t always make sense,” he said. “I always wanted a brother. I thought if I did I wouldn’t miss Mom so much when she was away. I’d have someone to shoot hoops with or play video games with. But who knows? If I’d had a brother he might have been like Michael.”
“Or even Silas,” I added. “Why did Abbie marry him anyway?”
Sarah shrugged. “Relationships are hard to figure. Maybe she just wanted to get away from home.”
I’d wanted to do that, too. But I’d gotten on a bus by myself and headed west when I was eighteen. “I guess.”
“Maybe she was scared of being alone,” Sarah continued. “And she was pregnant. Maybe she didn’t want to be a single parent. Maybe she didn’t think she had any choices.”
Mama had been a teenaged single parent. Patrick’s mother had become a single parent after his father died. Very different people, in very different situations, but they’d both survived being unmarried parents. But everyone was different. I couldn’t judge. I hadn’t been there. I was twenty-seven now, and I had no desire to have a child. I was still figuring out how to take care of myself. Had Abbie wanted to be a mother? Had she and Silas grieved or celebrated when she lost her baby? I’d never know.
“And why didn’t Ted tell Jeremy he had a family before putting it in his will? How could he have announced I was a cousin without mentioning that Jeremy was his son?”
No one answered. Something else we’d probably never know.
“Angie, I’ll drop you at your house first.” Sarah interrupted my thoughts. “Patrick, since your car is still at the gallery, close to my place, we’ll just head down there afterward.”
A few minutes later she pulled into my driveway. “Thanks, Sarah. I know you said you were going to open your store, but get some rest, too. You were up most of last night, and the past few days have been incredible.”
“I’ll try,” she answered.
Patrick waved as they headed down to Main Street. I was tired. But I hadn’t worked as physically hard as Sarah had, I hadn’t had the dashed hopes Sarah was dealing with, and I’d slept last night, not cooked.
The weekend hadn’t left me in shock. It had left me curious.
Two men in one family dead within twenty-four hours.
What were the chances?
I turned my front door key in the lock and headed inside. Trixi greeted me near the sideboard where I’d left my gun. I reached down and scratched between her ears as she rubbed herself on my ankles.
Who would have thought I’d have a use for a gun at a family birthday party?
Sarah was right. Families couldn’t always be counted on.
Thank goodness I had Gram.
Chapter Thirty-seven
“Depth of mercy can there be
Mercy still reserved for me
Can my God his wrath forebear
Me the chief of sinners spare.”
—Twelve-year-old Ann Lucretia Mayo Scaggs worked this verse on her sampler, which she completed March 2, 1831, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Her work included five alphabets in different styles, a large basket of fruit and flowers, and a border of hearts, strawberries, and roses.
Trixi led me to her empty food dish, and sat calmly beside it. She trusted that I would fill it with something. She was right. A small black cat might not be everyone’s choice of family, but she was mine.
“I’m glad to have you to come home to,” I told her as I filled her dish with dry kitten food. Trixi wasn’t impressed by my words. She found her lunch much more interesting.
“You’re probably right,” I chattered. “I should eat, too. I don’t remember if I had breakfast.” I opened the refrigerator. Eggs, milk, cheese. Omelet materials.
I put an English muffin in my toaster, put water on to boil for tea, and started grating Swiss cheese. I wasn’t a gourmet cook, but no one was around to judge whether my omelet was perfect.
It tasted fine.
“Okay, Trixi,” I said. “We’ve both eaten. I suspect you’ll take a nap. What do you think I should do?”
Trixi jumped up on a shelf below the kitchen window and looked out. Gram had equipped the house with bird feeders in both the front and back of the house. The birds took full advantage, and Gram had made sure her cat, Juno, had inside seating near both feeders. I’d continued Gram’s tradition.
“Busy feeder?” I asked Trixi. I looked out at the yard. Two chickadees were devouring sunflower seeds, messily dropping the shells on the ground. I made a mental note to buy hulled sunflower seeds next time I went to the feed store.
Beyond the feeder was the stone wall. And the bright blue tarp Dave and I’d used to cover the bones.
That’s what I should do this afternoon. Bury the bones.
I grabbed gardening gloves and a spade in the barn.
The bones were so small. I reached out to touch the skull. I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to grow up, I thought. Didn’t have a chance to go to school or fall in love or have children of your own. But I believe Gram was right. You were loved.
I dug the hole a little deeper. You’ve been here a long time, and I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I’ll make sure you’re well covered. I hope no one will bother you again.
As I gently tucked the bones into the soil, I remembered playing in this yard when I was a child. This little boy or girl probably hadn’t done that. But maybe two hundred years ago his or her mother had put him out in the yard to lie on a blanket in the warm summer sun while she was hanging damp clothes on bushes to dry. Maybe he’d heard the cooing of mourning doves and screeching of herring gulls. Maybe a chipmunk had run by.
And maybe later on brothers and sisters he’d never met had played tag in the yard near him, or picked apples from the tree in back of the barn. Maybe some days his mother had told him he was loved, and missed.
His family had continued on.
I was a part of that family.
Gently I covered the bones with soil and patted it down.
Then I carefully chose stones with flat tops and placed them side by side over the soil with a few smaller sea stones filling in the spaces between them. The stones would sink when rains and snows came, but the bones of my small ancestor would again be protected.
My back was aching by the time I put a second layer of stones on top of the first. I’d finish another day.
In the meantime I’d taken care of my family. Would I have children someday who would play in this yard?
If I did, would I tell them about the small bones under the wall?
Probably not.
Bones should lie in peace.
I hoped Ted Lawrence and Silas Reed would rest in peace, too.
And that Sarah and her cousins would, somehow, accept each other. Perhaps not care for each other. But understand each other.
Families weren’t simple. They weren’t like television show casts where everyone supported everyone else and laughed over dinner.
I sat back on the ground and looked at the wall. Mama was under the ground now, too. She h
adn’t been a perfect parent. But she’d loved me as much as she could, and she’d tried to protect me.
Ted Lawrence had sent his children to boarding schools, and rejected Abbie when she’d gotten pregnant and, maybe because of that, he’d let Michael be dependent too long. He’d never told Jeremy he was his father.
But he’d accepted and been kind to Sarah.
She could hold on to that, no matter what happened in the future.
Someone in her family had welcomed her.
Chapter Thirty-eight
“O for an overcoming faith
To cheer my dying hours
To Triumph o’er the monster death
And all his frightful powers.”
—Sarah E. Atkinson (1843-1897), known as Sallie, lived in Alexandria, Virginia. She stitched her sampler in silk on linen and made the center of her work a large cat seated on a cushion or platform—perhaps its bed.
The end of that Monday called for a hot bath with bubbles and a glass of wine. I was only twenty-seven, and my arms and back ached. How did Gram manage to garden? She was over sixty.
I grinned to myself, imagining her response if I’d asked her that. “I’m tough, Angel. I do what needs doing. Keep that up another thirty years or so, and you’ll understand.”
Trixi tightroped around the top of my deep Victorian footed bathtub, occasionally batting at a nearby bubble.
She kept track of me wherever I was in the house, but I was nervous watching her circle my naked body in the tub. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was afraid she’d fall in. Maine Coon cats could swim—some even enjoyed the experience, I’d heard. But Trixi was just an ordinary short-haired cat whose mother had been feral. An uncertain heritage. I didn’t want to deal with a panicked, wet cat.
I didn’t have to worry for long. She got bored watching the bubbles before I got tired soaking. By nine o’clock we were both curled up on my bed—me under the covers, and Trixi on top. I started to call Sarah, but stopped. She’d probably gone to sleep before I had.
I picked up my file on the embroidery I’d been trying to identify. Maybe a little needlepoint research. . .
My last conscious thought was hoping neither Sarah nor I would have nightmares.
The next thing I felt was Trixi licking my cheek. Time for breakfast.
And, after that, answering my customer’s needlepoint question. I’d found what I was looking for the night before. The strange circle surrounding a D on the embroidery I’d been asked to identify meant it was stitched by members of the Society of Blue and White Needlework in Deerfield, Massachusetts, an organization founded by Margaret Whiting and Ellen Miller in 1896 to revive country styles of New England needlework. The circle symbolized a spinning wheel. Whiting and Miller employed between twenty and thirty women until the Society ended production in 1925, even overseeing their own spinning and dyeing. At first they only used three or four shades of blue; in later years they added greens and reds. Every summer the Deerfield Society held an exhibition and sale, selling coverlets, curtains, valances, tablecloths, place mats, and napkins. All their designs (strawberries, thistles, clovers, bird, bees, and berries) were based on colonial crewelwork done in wool, but the society used linen threads that were easier to launder.
Beautiful work. I finished my e-mail to the woman who’d asked about her heirloom napkins, and assured her she indeed had a treasure.
Then I focused on getting caught up with Mainely Needlepoint’s accounts. I was checking the status of recent orders when my phone rang.
“Is this Angie Curtis?” said a male voice I couldn’t immediately identify.
“It is,” I answered. Where had I heard that voice before?
“Sorry to bother you. This is Luke Lawrence. From The Point.”
“Good morning, Luke.” Why would he be calling me?
“Last weekend someone—I think it was Dad—told me you used to be a private investigator.”
“I worked for a private investigator,” I corrected him. “Yes. When I lived in Arizona.”
“Good. I wondered if you’d help me out with something.”
“What’s that?” How could I help Luke Lawrence? But I was curious enough to listen him out.
“Two policemen were just here,” he continued. “Fact is, they’re still here. They’re questioning each of us separately. Turns out both Dad and Silas may have been poisoned.”
“Red Tide?” That wasn’t a new idea.
“For Dad, I think so. But the police won’t confirm anything. And Silas drowned. But he had both alcohol and drugs in his system.”
“Suicide?”
“I guess all options are possible, but that doesn’t make sense to me. Clearly the cops suspect one or probably both Dad and Silas were murdered. You were with us last weekend. You know everyone who was here. And you’re the only one who had no connections to Dad or Silas. I’m sure these Maine police will do their best, but I want answers, and I want them quickly. We have to bury my father and brother-in-law, and settle their estates. None of us live here in Haven Harbor. Police investigations can take months. I want to hire you to find out what happened here last weekend. Preferably establish that both deaths were accidental.”
I took a deep breath. “I can’t promise what I’ll find out. Everyone who was there will be a suspect.” Including Sarah.
“In the eyes of the police, probably so.”
“Who are the investigating officers?”
“A Sergeant Lambert from here in Haven Harbor. Some young guy who keeps looking around the house as though he’s never seen a summer cottage before. And a statie—a trooper—Ethan Trask. He looks familiar. Maybe I knew him years ago.”
“He’s from Haven Harbor,” I confirmed. “Now he’s a Maine State Trooper. Homicide division.”
“Whoever he is, he’s spent too much time questioning Abbie. She’s a lot more fragile than she looks. And I have a feeling I’m next. So . . . will you help us? Whatever you charge will be fine.”
“I’ll have to ask questions, too,” I said.
“I understand that.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t need or want to get involved with another murder. But I agreed with Luke about one thing. The sooner whoever was guilty (assuming someone was) was found, the sooner Sarah, and everyone else who was innocent, could get on with their lives.
“Call me when Pete and Ethan have left and I’ll come over to The Point. I can’t promise I’ll find anything—or, if I do find something, that it will be anything you’ll like. But you have yourself an investigator.”
I hung up. Okay. So I wasn’t really an investigator. I hadn’t put in enough hours to qualify for a license. But I knew these people. I could ask questions and maybe get answers the police couldn’t. That had happened before.
And a little extra money would come in handy. Maybe I could hire someone to cut up the rest of that maple lying in large chunks in my backyard, and put some extra insulation in the attic before winter. Gram hadn’t added any in years.
But before I did anything else I wanted to warn Sarah about what was happening. It would be logical that Pete and Ethan would begin at The Point. If there had been a murder, that was the crime scene. That’s where Ted might have been poisoned, and where Silas died. Soon enough they’d be around to talk with Sarah, and Jeremy, and Patrick. And me.
Sarah should hear what was happening from a friend.
I put on a Fair Isle cardigan Gram had knitted for me a dozen years ago. All those years it had waited for me in a plastic bag in my bureau drawer.
Gram had always believed I’d leave Arizona and come home. And when I did, I’d need sweaters.
As usual, Gram had been right.
Chapter Thirty-nine
“May I govern my passions with absolute sway
And grow wiser and better as life wears away.”
—Mary Ann Amanda Fall of Virginia stitched this verse, plus five alphabets above a line of closely set houses and trees. She completed her sampler when she wa
s twelve years old, in 1839.
Chilly gusts of wind were blowing fallen orange and yellow leaves from one side of the street to the other as I headed down toward Main Street and the harbor. It was a quiet morning. Occasionally a jogger passed me, or a pickup or car headed out of town. A plastic pot of orange marigolds caught by the wind rolled down the sidewalk ahead of me.
I’d forgotten the strength of fall. My cheeks stung, and I tucked my cold fingers inside the sleeves of my sweater.
Sarah should be at her store by now. Jeremy would have opened the gallery. I suspected Pete and Ethan would be out at The Point for a while. They had two possible crime scenes to check and three people to interview at The Point. They’d check the house and grounds too, and were probably cussing out the beach cleanup we’d done Sunday.
They wouldn’t disturb Sarah or Jeremy for a while. Patrick and I would be even farther down their priority list.
I reached to open the door of From Here and There before I realized it was locked.
Sarah always opened on time, even in the off season. And this was leaf peeper time. When the “newly wed and nearly dead”—couples with money and without children—visited the coast of Maine to relax, see the colors . . . and spend money. Shops Mainely Needlepoint supplied made sure their Christmas sachets and ornaments and other gifts were in stock well before September. This time of year customers were Christmas shopping as well as buying souvenirs of their visit to Maine.
I peered through Sarah’s shop window. No lights; no Sarah.
Maybe she’d overslept?
I took the stairs on the side of the building that led to the outside entrance of her second-floor apartment.
