Murder at Teatime

by Stefanie Matteson

  Still another appeal of Maine, she thought as she snuggled under the antique quilt, was its belief in the old-fashioned values, values like pride in workmanship, self-reliance, and perseverance. Looking up at the rafters, she could see the marks left by the adze that the barn builder had used to hew a square beam from a round log. He had been just a simple craftsman putting up a functional building. But he had created a structure with such dignity of form and purity of line that it was as beautiful a hundred and fifty years later as on the day it was built. She was not a believer in genius. Like Edison, she believed that genius was ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. She had been taught from her youth to do her job well and to do it with humility; it was a lesson that had brought her tremendous success. With the years, she had come to see that it was the same in any profession. The greats were great because they were always the first on the job in the morning. Like the barn builder, they were dedicated craftsmen whose creations withstood the test of time. Things were different today: nobody wanted to pay their dues. The bright young stars expected to start at the top and often did, but what they failed to recognize was that their so-called genius would wither away unless it was nourished by skill, effort, and diligence.

  Thornhill had paid lip service to the Yankee values, she reflected, her thoughts shifting back to the murder. He had professed to be a man of plain living and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, in the best New England tradition. But he had betrayed those values: he had wanted the books, and he had wanted them now. He hadn’t been willing to wait to acquire them honestly. She remembered Felix’s taunting words at the herb luncheon: “It is not the yielding to temptation that oppresses me, but oh the remorse for the times I yielded not.” Perhaps the betrayal had cost Thornhill his life.

  Soft, fitful puffs of fog blew in through the screen, dampening her pillow. The fog bank that had hovered offshore all day was creeping toward land. Before long, the moon would be swallowed up. In the distance, she could hear a foghorn; its hoarse, haunting call sounding base to the clanking rhythm of a bell buoy, like a tin can being kicked along an empty street.

  She had just drifted off to sleep when she was suddenly awakened by heavy pounding on her door. “What is it?” she called, her heart beating wildly.

  “It’s Tom,” answered an urgent voice.

  She sat up in bed, alarmed. Her clock dial read eleven thirty.

  Tom opened the door, and stood silhouetted in the light from the stairwell, one hand on the doorknob and the other on the doorjamb. “It’s Daria,” he said. He was out of breath. “She’s missing. She went out in the runabout to paint the island by moonlight. She was supposed to meet me in the parlor at Ledge House at ten, but she hasn’t come back.”

  For one drowsy minute, Charlotte wondered why Tom was meeting Daria at ten o’clock, but then she remembered that he had spoken with her that afternoon. They had probably made a date then. The rest took a little longer. The channel! The current was most treacherous in the hour before low tide. She made a quick mental calculation. The tide had been out just before ten, when they had set off for Wes’s. Which would mean that the current would have been at its strongest around nine, just as Daria was about to come in. And the moon was full. Ordinarily the tidefall was twelve feet, but with a full moon it would be a couple of feet more, making the tidal current all the more swift.

  She threw aside her covers and sat up, groping for the pair of trousers that was draped over the back of a chair. The room was dark—the light of the moon had been extinguished by the advancing fog. She glanced out the window—a wall of white. How would they ever find her? “Damn. Did you call Tracey?”

  “Yeah,” he replied briskly. “He’s going out in the police launch, and he’s calling the Coast Guard. I already stopped by the gardener’s cottage. Lewis is going out in Donahues’ boat, and I thought I’d go out with Wes. I’m headed over there now. Can you and the Saunders search in their boat?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “Thanks,” he said as he turned to leave.

  “Did you search for her on the Ledges? Maybe she fell down and hurt herself on the path or something.”

  “Yeah. All the way down to the landing. She wasn’t there.”

  14

  The fog smothered the island in a shroud of white. It was an unearthly world—cold, wet, and strangely dark. A world of no bearings and no dimensions. A world of ships crashing on hidden ledges. A world without comfort or safety, in which the senses were heightened to danger, the eye more keen, the ear more sharp. Even the sea birds spinning out of the mist seemed like sinister emissaries from the underworld.

  Charlotte rubbed her hands together. Her skin was cold and clammy. She had been out all night in the Saunders’ boat, searching for Daria. At daybreak, Stan and Kitty had dropped her off to search the shoreline, on the chance that Daria had managed to swim ashore. She couldn’t see anything: the fog obscured everything outside of fifty yards. “So thick you could stick your knife in it to mark the passage back,” Tracey had said. She had circled the island once and was now on her second circuit, just past Ledge House where the road opened up onto the headlands that marched out to the point at Donahues’. She had never realized that the sea had so many voices: the deep, angry roar of the breakers as they crashed upon the rocks; the rumbling of the rounded rocks on the shingle beaches as they were sucked back into the sea; the undertone of hoarse gasping. Occasionally, there was a sound like a pistol shot as a big wave slapped against a granite bluff, sending a plume of foam skyward. From the edge of the cliff came the slow, steady hiss of the wind that carried the fog toward land. What was it she was listening for? she wondered. A cry, a moan, the thud of an oar? The sound of an empty boat splintering against the rocks?

  At the side of the road ahead emerged the silver, skeletal shapes of a forest of dead trees; it was the dri-ki, the word the Indians used for the trees that die when a beaver dam raises the level of water in a pond. They stood like an army of ghosts, their bones clothed in a miasma of fog, their feet rotting in the dark, fetid water. She was reminded of a leg-end Kitty had told her about the seamen who’d lost their lives in shipwrecks on the ledges surrounding the island: their ghosts were said to haunt the island when the fog was thick. “Cobweb-shaped creatures,” Kitty had called them. She imagined she could hear them moaning, but it was only another of the sea’s many voices. She hastened her step; the place made her uneasy. In a minute, she had left the dri-ki behind in the fog. She walked in a trance, her thoughts dwelling vaguely on the death that was omnipresent in the wind, the fog, the sharp rocks; the death that demanded the sacrifice of the youngest, the most fair. By turns, she fought off the succession of feelings—outrage, impotence, poignant sadness—that are left to the living when youth and beauty are taken before their time. Thornhill, yes, he had lived his life, but not Daria.

  She had been missing now for nearly twelve hours. The only explanation for her disappearance was that the boat’s outboard motor had failed. The boat was equipped with oars, but the consensus was that her chance of overcoming the treacherous tidal current was slim; strong men had lost their lives in its grip. “As swift as a mill race,” Tracey had called it. She thought of another local legend related by Kitty, the legend of a schoolteacher who’d been engulfed by a wave while she was reading on the rocks. Her body had washed up on shore a week later, looking as neat as if it had been laid out in a funeral parlor, her bonnet still tied under her chin, her shawl still neatly pinned across her breast. She shuddered, and pulled up the collar of her jacket against the damp. Looking out over the cliffs edge, all she could see was waves crashing on the rocks, and an angry swirl of white foam that reminded her of one of Stan’s paintings: the elemental battle between land and sea. But the sky was brightening: the sun had tentatively begun to shine through the gauze-like fog, tingeing it with a pearly luminescence. She could hear the invisible gulls greeting the morning with their raucous cries … and another sound. She cocked
an ear: could it be a groan?

  It seemed to come from the channel where she and Tom had watched the seals at play. She walked over to the edge, half believing that her ears were deceiving her, that it was the sound of the sea, the clamoring of the voices in the waves. But it was not: there, on a rock, was Daria, her slim body thrown up on shore like a piece of flotsam. She lay face-down on the slab of granite where the mother seal had sunned herself, the cheerful red of her sweater strangely incongruous in the grim, gray scene. One leg was skewed at an awkward angle, like a rag doll’s, and the rising tide was lapping at her feet.

  Slipping and sliding on the seaweed and algae, Charlotte clambered down the cliff. “Please let her be alive,” she prayed. Her hands and shins scraped against the sharp shells of the mussels and barnacles that clung to the rocks, but she barely noticed. Reaching Daria, she gently pulled her dank, fishy-smelling hair away from her face. “It’s Charlotte,” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay.” Daria opened her eyes and nodded weakly in response. Beneath her tan, her face was drained of color, and her lips were an alarming shade of gray.

  Removing her jacket, Charlotte draped it over Daria’s slender shoulders.

  Once Charlotte had called the police from the Donahues’ house, Daria’s rescue was quick work. A rescue squad plucked her off the rock within half an hour, and she was now resting in the hospital with Tom at her side. Fran’s prognostications had been accurate in one respect: Tom was Dana’s lucky guy. If he hadn’t been there to notice that she hadn’t come back, she would probably be dead. Instead she had a broken leg—a simple fracture—a couple of cracked ribs, and contusions and abrasions, which meant that she had taken a beating on the rocks. But she would be all right. The breeze that had driven the fog inland had been her salvation. Once the tidal currents had eased, the breeze had blown her back toward land. She had been guided by the lights at Donahues’. Thank God Marion was an insomniac. But she hadn’t made it all the way. The boat had been grounded on a ledge exposed by the tide—one of the ledges on which so many ships had met their doom. She had been forced to swim to shore. It was Only through the grace of God that she’d ended up in the channel, where she was protected from the waves. Charlotte had found her just in the nick of time. Another hour and she would have been drowned by the rising tide.

  Charlotte was now sitting in Tracey’s office, waiting for him to finish a phone conversation about a stolen piece of lumber.

  Hanging up the phone, Tracey asked how Daria was doing.

  “Fine,” said Charlotte. “The doctors say she’ll probably be able to go home tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Good. I can talk with her then. I was supposed to go over the report on the book theft with her this morning, just to check some facts.”

  “Have you recovered the boat?” asked Charlotte.

  “Ayuh. Stove all to hell—the prop’s sheared off, the lower housing’s knocked out. Drove on a ledge just east of that little channel. She’s a lucky girl,” he continued. “I thought we’d seen the end of her, sure as shooting. It would have been the end of her, too, if it hadn’t been for that breeze.”

  “I wonder if she’s as lucky as you say,” said Charlotte.

  “What’re you driving at?” he asked, curious.

  “Do you know anything about engines?”

  “Depends.”

  “She said that the engine ran fine on the way out, but that she couldn’t get it started again when she was ready to come in.”

  “Do you think someone might have tampered with it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Tracey, standing up and reaching for his windbreaker. “She’s down to the town pier.”

  The sun was shining brightly through the fog as Charlotte and Tracey walked down the steep slope to the town pier.

  “Looks like it’s going to scale off,” said Tracey, squinting in the glare. “Good weather for the fireworks tomorrow.”

  The pier was aswarm with volunteers helping the crew from the fireworks company set up for the Fourth. Metal stands in the form of a waterfall, a pinwheel, and the American flag had been erected for the set displays, and sand-filled oil drums and steel cylinders were being set into place for the launching of the rockets. The fireworks were expected to draw a crowd of four thousand or more, at least half of which would be tourists. The fireworks could always be depended upon to create a controversy, Tracey complained. Every year, someone raised the issue of whether the tourists ought to be allowed to view the fireworks at the expense of local taxpayers, and every year the Chamber of Commerce defused the controversy by raising the money for the fireworks fund, on the theory that fireworks were good for business.

  It was going to be a busy day: the schedule of festivities included a lobster feed put on by the Rotarians; a parade with prizes awarded by the Chamber of Commerce for the best float; and a field day at the ballpark. The annual lobster-boat race would be held in the afternoon. Two dozen lobster boats would be challenging the defending champion, Wes Gilley. The fireworks would be preceded by a band concert and a reading of the Declaration of Independence by the local Catholic priest, whose recitation could always be depended on to bring a collective lump to the throat of his audience. Following the fireworks, there would be a square dance on the town pier, with a demonstration by the Bells and Buoys Square Dance Club. All of which meant extra work for the police, Tracey complained.

  At the end of the pier they headed down a ramp to the docks where the boats were moored. They found the Ledge House runabout in a slip near the end of the dock, her bow splintered where she had hit the ledge. Maybe she was being paranoid, Charlotte thought, as she watched Tracey check the fuel line and then unscrew the gas cap. Who would want to kill Daria? Her paintbrushes were still scattered on the floor of the boat. Picking up one of the longer ones, Tracey stuck it handle first into the gas tank. Could someone have added something to the gas? she wondered. Sugar, or water? As she watched him rub the liquid on the paintbrush handle between his fingers, she knew from the frown that crossed his genial face that her hunch had been right.

  He stepped back onto the dock a few minutes later carrying a spark plug in one hand, which he held out to show her. “Somebody put chain saw bar oil in the spare tank,” he said. “See how the plug’s all gummed up? The main tank’s okay: she had enough gas to get out there, but once she switched tanks, she was in trouble.” He wrapped the plug in a handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.

  They turned to walk back up the ramp.

  “Hard to fathom why anyone would want to kill her.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. The only reason I can think of is that she knew something incriminating about the killer.”

  Tracey looked at her with a quizzical expression.

  “There are a couple of other explanations. One is that this is more of the same mischief, that there was no intention of harming anyone.”

  “I’ll buy that. What’s the other?”

  “That Daria wasn’t the intended victim. The innocent bystander theory.”

  “But if she was the intended victim, because, as you say, she knows something, wouldn’t she have told us?” asked Tracey.

  “Maybe she doesn’t know that she knows.”

  “You mean that she said something or did something that made the murderer think she knew he had poisoned Dr. Thornhill.”

  “Exactly.”

  It was strange how both she and Tom had the feeling that the murderer wasn’t finished. But maybe it wasn’t so strange: he was being hunted, and the natural response of the prey is to defend itself. If the murderer had tried to kill Daria, maybe he was beginning to panic. Thornhill’s murder had been an act of cunning; the risk of detection had been very small. But tampering with the boat’s gasoline tank had the smell of recklessness about it. On the other hand, the killer’s boldness might also be a manifestation of the sense of infallibility that comes of having committed a serious crime and gotten away wi
th it. In either case, his chances of making a misstep were increasing.

  Tracey and Charlotte parted company at the foot of the pier. He was headed back to the station to report their latest findings to Detective Gaudette, and she was headed up to the hospital to see if she could find out what had prompted the attempt on Dana’s life.

  Charlotte sat in a chair at Daria’s bedside, watching a nurse arrange the flowers that had been presented by her well-wishers; she had already received visits from John, Felix, and the Saunders. As she waited for the nurse to finish she found herself hungrily eyeing the remains of Daria’s lunch, and remembered that she hadn’t eaten since the night before. Putting the thought of food out of her mind, she turned her thoughts back to Daria. She and Tom had been asking Daria about her activities over the last two days. The only facts to come to light that might be connected to the attempt on her life—if that’s what it was—were one, that she had spent Sunday afternoon wandering the island with John and yesterday lunch picnicking on the rocks with him; two, that she had told several people that she planned to paint the island last night by moonlight; and three, that she had spent yesterday getting the herbals ready for presentation to the botanical society.

  The first didn’t tell them much—she couldn’t remember seeing anything unusual. The second told them only that anyone who wanted to kill her would probably have known she was going out alone in the boat. But the third just might be a clue: the nagging thought still lingered in Charlotte’s mind that the murder was somehow connected to the books.