“Well, let me take care of that. Do you mind if I leave him a note? In his room.”
The hard eyes looked at me, but as I had figured, money was a great lubricant and she let me into the living room without any protests that oh no she couldn’t do a thing like that.
The house was too hot and the floor vent began pumping out more air as soon as I stepped inside. The carpets smelled like some kind of animal though I didn’t see a dog or cat.
“Tom’s benders don’t usually last this long,” the woman offered. “He’s kind of old for going off like this.”
“I wouldn’t know about his personal habits. We aren’t that close.”
“Hmph. Figures. No one is very close to him, the godless heathen. Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she said, after showing me down the hall papered in fading red flocked wallpaper to the last door on the right. There was no suggestion that I might like a cup of coffee.
“Thanks.” I could hear my grandmother saying that good manners cost nothing and I closed the flimsy door behind me with extra care.
Tom rented a small bedroom with a half bath whose sink and toilet were crusty with mineral deposits. There was no medicine chest or mirror, just a ledge around the scratched sink where he had left a toothbrush and a mostly used-up travel size mouthwash and a large tube of denture adhesive. There was also a razor but no comb. Everything had a fine film of dust on it.
The same yellowed linoleum covered the floor of the bedroom and had been run into the half-open closet. He had one dirty window that looked out on a littered backyard with a rusting garden shed and a hedge that hadn’t been trimmed in the last decade.
I shuddered. It was the kind of place where you expected to find bodies in the basement. Probably the late Mr. Kingman among them.
My first thought—and my second—was that this wasn’t anyone’s home. There were no pictures, no books, no CDs, nothing personal. My sock drawer is more interesting. This was a place to sleep, nothing more.
Deciding that this was no time for scruples about a stranger’s privacy, I opened the tiny closet door the rest of the way and then checked the battered dresser’s drawers.
No drawer liners, just blond wood and mothballs. Tom had left behind some wool pants, two flannel shirts, and a fur hat that the moths had been at. No shoes, five pairs of socks, two boxer shorts—worn but not worn out. Everything except the hat looked relatively new, cheap, and generic. Like someone had gone shopping for basics at a store that sold things in packs.
There was nothing under the bed or in the toilet tank. The folded up paper under the back dresser leg was a flyer for the grocery store with coupons that had expired three years ago. There was a small bottle of cheap gin in the nightstand drawer.
Gin? That didn’t seem much like Kelvin. As far as I knew, my great-grandfather had only liked Canadian whisky. But then, what did I really know about Kelvin?
Other than that, there was nothing but dust bunnies breeding under the furniture and some dead flies on the window sill which had to have been there since last summer. I stared out at the shed, bothered by the fact that there was a shiny new padlock on the door.
No shoes, no coat. He had obviously been wearing them when he went out.
He. Was this my great-grandfather’s home, or some other man’s lair? My gut said no to this place being Kelvin’s refuge. This room could not have housed my great-grandfather who had been comfort-loving and a thinker. An inventor and reader. This space with no books, no art, no personality could not have been even a temporary home for Kelvin Wendover.
There was also another point that bothered me. To stay in Maine—if you really believed in the Bane, or knew your neighbors really believed in the Bane—was an act of self-extinction. I couldn’t imagine why anyone, but especially Kelvin who had brains and resources, would do it.
But then maybe I had it wrong. Was I trying to redeem my great-grandfather, to make him into something he was not? Was it preposterous to assume that he was some kind of brave adventurer starting off on a new life when he was probably just a scared old man?
Frustration made me search the room again, but there was nothing. I returned to the window and stared some more at the shed with its new lock.
What was in it? The damn thing was almost falling down, so why lock the door like it was the entrance to the Bastille?
“Damn.” I wished that Kelvin—my cat—was there, though this wasn’t the kind of house where you found secret passages or hidden compartments in the furniture.
Without thinking, my hands reached for the window bolt. It took some doing, but I got the old frame open and flicked the flies outside. It is the way of curiosity to turn an ill-advised passing thought into irresistible forbidden fruit and I didn’t fight it. What macabre relics might I find behind that locked door? Nothing would have surprised me.
Outside the bedroom’s flimsy door a vacuum started up. It was a symphony of slipping belts and clattering brushes that struck the floor unevenly and made the motor whine. Mrs. Kingman was busy for the moment. I took that as a sign that I should proceed.
It wasn’t a large opening since the house was not generous with its windows, but I would fit even with my coat and purse and it wasn’t far to the ground. Of course, I would have a hard time explaining what I was doing, if Mrs. Kingman caught me snooping in her yard, but the thought didn’t deter me as it should have done. Desperation and frustration were growing.
I hit the ground, breaking a small clay pot that was hiding in the snow, which fortunately swallowed most of the noise of the minor destruction. I paused there, gripping the sill, and listened as the cold slithered up my spine and thickened my breath, but the only disturbance was from the abused vacuum whose distant, painful flutters sounded like a wounded bird, thrashing on the ragged carpet.
“Move,” I whispered and forced my hands to let go of the sill.
My calm went from threadbare to tatters in the time it took me to cross the yard, hopping from clear patch of ground to clear patch of brick—there was something about the aged patio that bothered me, though I didn’t take time to have a nice long ponder of my subconscious worries. I was being careful to leave no footprints and to hurry. I did not have faith in Mrs. Kingman’s inclination to keep cleaning.
The shed’s door didn’t fit tight. I was able to open it a couple of inches and peer inside. I managed to stifle a small gasp when I saw what I thought was a shrouded body but turned out to be a sack of grass seed. There was also a new lawnmower. A very new, very shiny red electric lawnmower. And that was it. No shovels, no rakes, no tools of any kind.
I felt like an idiot and wasted no time getting back to my open window and hauling myself inside. It took me a couple moments to straighten my clothing and brush the dust off my coat, but I felt relatively safe from discovery after I got the window closed.
My heart was beating so hard that it hurt. My enthusiasm and energy for my self-appointed task reached a nadir. I was done playing sleuth. I did not have the proper apparatus for climbing through windows and sneaking around strangers’ yards. Perhaps ten years ago—or maybe twenty—but not now. My mind writhed at the embarrassment I would have faced if Mrs. Kingman had called the police to report an intruder. There wasn’t anything I could say that would make my visit sound good. What if I had been forced to call Harris or Bryson to bail me out of jail?
“Damn.”
I hesitated about writing a note since I didn’t really want to leave behind any hard evidence for the police to find when they eventually made it to Tom’s featureless den. And they would when people finally realized that Tom wasn’t coming back. Finally I decided that Tom, whoever he was, had to know enough about his history to figure out who I was and where I was, if he wanted to see me.
If he was still able to see me, which I really doubted. Missing man, dead body on a beach—and both of us with features similar enough for people to know us as kin.
I left the bedroom feeling unsatisfied and annoyed. Fortunately I had e
nough cash on me to cover the inflated rent, though why it seemed important to keep the uninformative room intact I couldn’t say. It just seemed the right thing to do and I didn’t want to write a check. Mrs. Kingman seemed like the kind of woman who might look me up for reasons of blackmail.
“So, what last name is Tom using these days?” I asked. Perhaps I was maligning an innocent man, but I needed to know at least this much. “Not Jones, I hope.”
Again a hard look, but no expression of surprise that the man renting her room might be using an alias.
“Fischer,” she said.
I nodded and handed over the small stack of twenties. She didn’t say thanks or offer me a receipt.
Getting back out into the wet streets was a relief even though my nose began to run at the first deep breath and my eyes stung. The house, the whole town had disheartened me. Tom or Kelvin, moral imbecile or no, I felt sorry for whoever had been living here. Not that being dead was an improvement over a room at Mrs. Kingman’s boarding house, but this wasn’t a life I would wish on anyone.
I dug out my keys and headed for the car. The only other soul braving the cold was an old man tending a bonfire in his front yard. The leaves and twigs were damp and it smoked so much it made him cough. I wondered what needed burning so badly that it couldn’t wait until the snow was gone. I also wondered if he was the neighbor that Mrs. Kingman feared would sneak in and take her lawnmower.
I heard a noise overhead and looked up quickly. His pyre had attracted more than my attention. A row of unusually large starlings had taken up watch on a phone line upwind of the smoke. I like birds, but their fixed stares were kind of creepy and I hurried for the car at double time as a downdraft of stinging wind pressed heavily on my back. I did not need the added burden of cold and weight to hasten my parting. I was more than ready to leave that horrid little town that would probably wither like a slug if it were ever blessed enough to see a bright sun.
No children, no dogs, no cats, no voices. The place was under an evil spell.
I sped away, but the final moments of sunset were still sour and I began hoping that I could find someone to run me to the island after dark. It would cost extra for a night run but I didn’t want to spend a night at the B&B, though I had made a reservation just in case I was delayed on the mainland. The outside world was ugly and unfriendly. I needed to be back in the islands. Yes, they were kind of like sausage—attractive as long as you didn’t look too closely at what was in them—but they were my sausage now. And they were worlds’ friendlier than the rest of the outside realms I had visited. It was time to go home.
It did not escape my notice that I was thinking of Wendover House as home in a way that I had not done since my parents’ death. Odd and perhaps unwise, I had made that mental transition almost immediately and my old life seemed impossibly far away. I belonged to the islands now and forever more.
Chapter 6
The car’s heater worked efficiently. There had to be another reason for my lingering chill and I didn’t need to look very far to find it. This adventure, which I had thought would feel like a wife trysting with a lover while her husband was at work, had been something else entirely. If a lesson in patience and humility was needed, then I had had one. It was time to admit that being good at research did not mean that I was good at being a sleuth. The sweet taste of conceit at my other triumphs since coming to the island had misled me. Research involved ordering information. A detective had to unravel the motives of people and convince them to talk to her.
The distant clouds were heavy, barely clinging to the sky, but as I traveled north the weather slowly warmed and I stopped worrying about snow. I wanted to be home though. Wanted Barney and Kelvin and a warm fire. In fact, I half promised myself that I would go back to Little Goose and not think about the awful body on the beach ever again. Yes, I had committed myself to the task of finding out who the body was, but by that evening I was ready, even eager, to go home and forget everything. My brain understood the consequences of knowledge, even with a lot of its critical capacity worn away by exhaustion. Easier to walk away. Cowardly, but easier. Let Bryson and Harris handle it.
Except that didn’t work. Even in that moment of longing, my brain kept picking at things.
So naturally I thought about Tom’s—or Kelvin’s—dreary room. The whole town had seemed rundown as well as the people in it. Why? Why no pride of place, like the other villages I had been through? Though, come to think of it, there had been a sense of diminishing cheerfulness as I traveled farther from the islands. At the time I had blamed it on the worsening weather, but was it something else? The islands, for all that they were strange in some ways, seemed very prosperous. Unusually prosperous for a country in an economic downturn.
Perhaps because they were.
I turned that idea and examined it from a few angles. I didn’t let myself think about causes and reasons for this prosperity. Just asked if this was actual truth or merely perceived truth brought on by fondness and perhaps pride in my new home. The conclusions made me uncomfortable.
The return trip went faster since I wasn’t stopping anywhere, but it was still full dark when I turned in my rental car. After the paperwork was done, I took a detour by the docks. No ferry and no boats I recognized. Of course not. It was dark and it was raining. Depressed, I pulled out my phone and began walking for the bed and breakfast where I had made my reservation. I knew Ben wouldn’t mind looking after Barney overnight but I hated making the call and admitting I wasn’t going home until morning.
Carlton House augmented its hired rooms by having a small bar on the ground floor that served simple drinks like beer, wine, and whisky. A glass of wine was sounding like a good idea. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and bed. It wouldn’t make me happy, but it might make me forget the day and that was cause for happiness.
An orange cat was napping on the desk, half covering the registration book with his fluffy tail, but fortunately I could sign on the left page without breaking in on his reverie. Between the heat and the slumbering feline, I began to feel better.
“Here’s your key. The Indigo suite is the first on the left at the top of the stairs,” Mrs. Hampton said. She smiled happily, such a contrast to the last woman who had had rooms for rent.
“Thank you. I’m sure it’s perfect. Your house is lovely.”
She beamed.
Given that I was back in home territory, I was not terribly surprised when I turned away from the registration desk and found an out-of-uniform Bryson standing in the doorway to the parlor bar. I figured that the first person I saw would either be Harris or Bryson. Bryson was a better choice given my mood. Harris always seemed to take my darker moments as personal criticism of his failure to make me happy. It made it hard to enjoy a well-justified wallow. Bryson, on the other hand, seemed to find everything about the human condition—including people’s moods—to be vaguely amusing.
I did wonder briefly if Harris and Bryson had talked it over and decided that he should be the one to bell the cat. You should do it. You have a house on the mainland and it will look more natural.…
And maybe I was just being paranoid because I was tired. It would be best if I stopped thinking like that or I’d sprain my few remaining brain cells. I also refused to think about the possibility of a biological connection.
“Miss MacKay,” Bryson said, raising a beer. “You’re here for the night?”
“Yes, sadly.” And it was sad, though seeing a familiar face helped a little.
“Could I maybe interest you in some dinner?” he asked. “Something of the Italian persuasion?”
He remembered that I am not wild about fish. That was nice.
Of course, if I went to dinner, he was going to quiz me about what I had been up to on the mainland.
I decided I didn’t care. If I didn’t want to answer a question I wouldn’t. Refusal to speak would hurt Harris because of its implied lack of trust. Bryson would just shrug and try something else.
&nb
sp; “Thank you. Let me take my bag up and I’ll join you.”
Bryson nodded. He didn’t offer to help me up the stairs. I was carrying a small tote and obviously didn’t need assistance.
My room was nice, small but furnished with good reproductions and the prints on the wall were not unbearably nautical. There were maybe a few too many throw pillows and no warm, fuzzy bodies to warm the bed, but it would do for one night.
Bryson had on his black trench coat and hat when I came back down and he looked unusually dignified and somber, like he was going to a funeral and not out for dinner. I wondered what had happened. Thanks to cell phones, bad news travels quickly.
He didn’t say anything about being called away though, so I decided not to ask. Suffice it unto the day the trouble therein. I had enough bothers of my own.
“Is it far?” I asked, feeling tired and half regretting that I had agreed to share a meal with him. Especially if we had to be out in the cold for any length of time.
“No. You won’t even get wet if we walk quickly enough.”
That was an overstatement. The drizzle was cold and the street was mostly deserted and had a lot of black patches between streetlamps which seemed ugly and out of place and made the shadows hard. The only bright spot was the neon OPEN sign in the window of a house about three doors up. Except for that, we might have been walking through an old black and white movie, one with Bogart and Bacall and Peter Lorre lurking in the gloom.
We quickstepped the short cobble path and stepped up on the wide porch. Bryson opened the narrow door and a blade of light cut into the dark, letting out color and scent. The air inside was thick with garlic and butter and my mouth began to water as my lungs filled with succulent smells.
My ears were caressed with the soft incantation of Italian love songs, and a lot of my weariness and frustration fell away.
“Just what the doctor ordered?” Bryson asked, helping me out of my coat.
“Exactly.” My smile felt natural this time.
On Deadly Tides (A Wendover House Mystery Book 3) Page 5
