by Sarah Graves
Outside, a gaggle of little kids who were up way past their bedtime galloped by, waving toy lightsabers. “Then what?” I said.
Lionel watched them wistfully. “On the dock? Stood there and talked to a guy. He was telling me about the boats. Nice guy.”
“Uh-huh,” I said skeptically. “And for how long did you talk to this guy? Did he have a name?”
Lionel looked regretful. “Half an hour, maybe. I got a hot dog. He saw it and decided to get one, too, and we sat.”
At one of the picnic tables overlooking the boat basin behind Rosie’s, I guessed. When I suggested this, Lionel nodded.
“Didn’t ask the guy’s name, though,” he added. “I just know he was driving a—”
Just then the little bell over the shop door jingled brightly, and Sam came in.
“Hi, Mom.” He looked around curiously. “What’s going on?”
Lionel looked astonished. “Hey, this is him!” he said.
Four
Sam’s rangy build, dark curly hair, and lantern jaw are like his dad’s, but fortunately his temperament isn’t. Mostly he’s as cheerful and outgoing as a pup; that he’d befriended Lionel didn’t surprise me at all.
Now he grinned in pleased recognition at his new acquaintance. “Hey, man, how’re you doing?”
I cut in. “Wait a minute, you’re telling me you two know each other? Sam, you met Lionel on the breakwater and spent what, half an hour with him, like he says?”
Sam shrugged. “Yeah, we were there. Had lunch. Why?” He looked inquisitively from me to Lionel and back again.
“Nothing. Never mind,” I said. This put a whole new complexion on things. I shooed both young men toward the door.
“Lionel, you and the others will be staying at the cottages for a while, is that right?” Ellie asked, and he nodded resignedly.
“Yeah. That police chief, Bob Arnold, came and told us that we’d better. Until we get, like, questioned.”
He put an unhappy emphasis on the word. “So I guess I’ll, like, see you around,” he finished, turning to go.
But before they both left, my son dropped his own bombshell:
“Hey, Mom, did you know somebody stole one of Wade’s swords from his weapons demonstration?”
I felt my jaw drop. So that’s where it had come from.
“No,” I said. “I mean, I knew one of them was . . .”
Wade had set up a Weapons of the Caribbean display on the breakwater the day before, but only for a few hours because he’d had to go to work; until now it hadn’t occurred to me that the vintage knife might’ve been snatched right out from under his . . .
“Wade says he was breaking down the weapons display and he just turned his back for a minute, and—”
Well, at least I didn’t have to be the one to break the news that it was missing. Meanwhile:
“Darn,” I said to Ellie when both young men had departed. We’d clearly gotten all we were going to out of Lionel, at least for now; on his way out the door he’d looked so haggard and shell-shocked, I could’ve pushed him over with a finger.
But our interview with him hadn’t done us much good. “Here we have someone with a wonderful motive, but where’s his opportunity?” I went on.
“Right, an estranged son who’s about to be fired and blacklisted sure seems like prime suspect material to me,” she agreed.
By now we were in the shop’s kitchen, where Ellie was creaming butter and sugar together in a large bowl, because the cellar was still off-limits as far as we knew, but the upstairs wasn’t.
Which meant we needed even more freshly baked goodies so we could open The Chocolate Moose tomorrow. Ellie beat in four eggs and some vanilla.
“Too bad he’s got an alibi,” she finished. “Lionel, that is. Here, beat this while I put the dry ingredients together, will you?”
I obliged, wielding the wooden spoon with what energy I could muster. By now, Lionel wasn’t the only one who was practically dead on his feet, but the batch wasn’t big enough to bother with the electric stand mixer.
“So now we need another suspect,” I complained.
Outside, a fake pirate with a fake knife in his chest staggered by the shop’s front window.
“And you know there won’t be another one even half as good as Lionel,” I went on. “The guy’s actual son.”
“Yes, there’s a reason they call them blood relatives, I guess,” Ellie replied, looking up from measuring out chocolate morsels.
“I mean, who has better motives than the nearest and dearest,” she added as more fake-wounded pirates streamed past outside; one of the fake stabbing victims even wore a fake parrot on his shoulder.
“Somebody,” I grumbled, “has got a big mouth.”
No one was supposed to gab about anything regarding a fresh murder scene—not the EMTs, the evidence techs, or anyone else professionally involved with the crime or its aftermath.
But human nature being what it is, and the details of the crime being what they were—parrot! cutlass!—not to mention Hadlyme himself being so very unlikely to complain about anything not being done strictly by the book . . .
Not like he was in life, I thought uncharitably, and then it hit me. “Ellie.”
But she was already staring out the front window, too. “Knives,” she said softly. “I mean, why that knife?”
Precisely. Because you could get a decent hunting knife at the hardware store, with your choice of bone, plastic, or carbonite handle, and the people who turned their freshly killed deer, moose, and other game animals into freezer portions could buy a variety of specialized blades locally, too, for dismantling the carcass.
But a cutlass was different, especially one that could be traced back to . . .
I turned to Ellie, who’d begun chopping cherries to bits. Cherry juice flowed down the groove around the cutting board’s edges.
Suddenly that juice looked entirely too much like blood. “You know what?” I said faintly.
Ellie got a look at me and brought me a glass of sweet lemonade. Other than a piece of toast, I had not, I realized, had any dinner.
Or lunch. “No, what?” She put a chunk of bittersweet chocolate into the top of the double boiler and turned the burner on.
“Somebody had to go to a lot of trouble to get that blade.” I sipped lemonade. “I mean, how’d they even know?”
She’d put a chocolate biscotti in front of me, and I bit into it even though I knew it would make the lemonade taste sour.
Everything tasted sour suddenly. “Right,” said Ellie, “I was wondering when you’d get around to that part.”
That it was deliberate, she meant; not just the murder itself but the setting up of one particular suspect. Getting that cutlass out of Wade’s collection, then using it to murder Hadlyme . . .
“So,” I said slowly, feeling my heart sink at how much bigger and more difficult this whole snooping project had suddenly become.
Because it wasn’t just the murder. Once the cops learned that I’d had all three of the things a proper murder suspect requires—motive, method, opportunity—they were going to pounce.
But the killing—and who knew how much more, I thought with a sudden burst of darkly ominous premonition—had been planned not only to finish off Henry Hadlyme.
But also—and possibly even more important; who knew?—to implicate me.
* * *
“Wade, I’m so sorry about this.”
My husband is tall and broad-shouldered, with blond brush-cut hair, blue-gray eyes, and the kind of solidly muscular build that comes from a lifetime of physical work done mostly outdoors.
Also, he is devoted to me; minutes after I went home and told him about everything that had been happening lately, we were in his old pickup truck backing out of the driveway.
“Hey, not your fault.” He slung an arm around me.
I didn’t know where we were headed, only that when I’d gone over the whole story, Wade had been raring to go.
Now in the truck’s dashboard glow, his look was deceptively mild. Deceptive to anyone but me, that is. Oh, he was ripping mad.
“I took a musket, a blunderbuss, a flintlock, and that cutlass—the one that went missing,” he said. “And while my back was turned, somebody must’ve . . .”
Relief touched me, but only briefly. “I was at the shop then,” I said. “We were getting ready for the kids’ cookie party, and we had a sale going on, too, under the tent by the fisherman statue.”
Before the party, I meant, because I don’t care how bloodthirsty the pirate, he or she will always want a chocolate-dipped chocolate cookie with skull and crossbones piped onto the top in vanilla icing.
“And in the crowds, nobody would’ve noticed if I’d slipped over to your display table on the breakwater and snagged the thing, would they?”
No, they probably wouldn’t, and that was how the cops were going to be thinking about it, too—that I still could’ve done it.
He turned onto the campgrounds road, with the Hadlyme crew’s cottages perched on the bluff at the very end of it. The big pines lining both sides of the road blocked the moonlit sky, creating a long, gloomy avenue, and the air coming in through the truck’s open window smelled like evergreens and cold salt water.
“Wade, what’re we doing back here again?” I looked around in puzzlement, wondering what he had in mind and wasn’t talking about.
But he just grinned in the half-darkness. In the past, he’d been lukewarm about my snooping habits; gradually, though, he’d realized that I never nagged him about his own ridiculously dangerous boat trips, during which he had to climb an open ladder dangling from an ocean-going freighter without any ropes or other safety equipment . . .
Bottom line, nowadays we didn’t stop each other from doing what we had to. Or felt that we had to. I leaned against him as the pickup truck pulled into the clearing near where Ellie had parked before, up under the trees.
No one was around, not even in the cottage that had been lit up earlier. I looked questioningly again at Wade. “Your cutlass won’t be here, you know.”
I’d thought I’d made it clear that the police had it.
“Yeah, I do know that.” He turned the truck’s engine off. He’d already doused the lights as we were driving in. “That’s not what you’ll be looking for.”
He scanned the clearing some more. The moonlight still didn’t pierce the tree canopy, but it bounced off the bay and reflected onto everything in the clearing with a sideways-slanting silvery gleam.
“I was in the Happy Crab for a little while tonight just before I came home,” he remarked conversationally.
Although the cottages were dark inside, all the porch lights were still on, late-season bugs bouncing in their yellowish glow.
He squeezed my shoulder companionably. “And if I’m not mistaken, it was Hadlyme’s crew on the stools down the bar from me.”
“Really. Young big-city types, they look like the cool kids on the block?”
“Yup. Had little bits of electronic gear in their pockets, and so on.” For somebody who was so new to the whole snooping thing, he was good at it.
“And?” I asked. No wonder he’d wanted to come out here right now. He knew that the cottages’ occupants were elsewhere.
“And they didn’t look grief-stricken,” Wade replied.
He gazed out into the clearing thoughtfully. “Ordered food and another pitcher of beer. They were playing pool on the table out back and a couple of ’em were dancing.”
“Huh. So they probably won’t be back soon.” I eyed the distance between us and the cottages, thinking that I would very much prefer staying there in the dim-lit truck’s cab with the heater running and my husband’s arm securely around me.
Still, he’d brought me out here, and the cottages were empty . . .
“Not unless they crawl back,” Wade agreed. “They were getting cheerful, and Bob Arnold was right outside, waiting for prospective drunk drivers. Like he does, you know.”
Right, I did. So if they were tipsy when they emerged, they’d be even more delayed until Bob found time to give them a ride back here.
I slipped out from under Wade’s arm. “So I could go in here, dig around, see what I can find out that might be useful in, uh, saving my bacon?”
He nodded firmly. “And not only that. I know you’re not going to find it here, but somebody stole a weapon, a pretty valuable one.”
Genuine pirate weaponry could go for many thousands of dollars depending upon provenance and condition. And this cutlass, I happened to be aware, was nearly perfect and so authentic that it practically had Captain Hook’s fingerprints on it.
Or, you know, his hook marks. “But that’s not the main thing,” Wade went on, turning from his scrutiny of the cottages.
“Somebody not only killed a guy with my cutlass but framed my wife for it. Jake, this could be a disaster for the whole family.”
He was right, I knew, as the seriousness of all this struck me again. Between paying an attorney and sitting in custody until trial—there’s no bail on a murder charge in Maine—all our lives would be in tatters, even Ellie’s.
“Not to mention . . .” he began.
I was already unbuckling my lap belt. No shoulder strap; what with the elderliness of the work vehicles Wade bought and then drove until they were disintegrating into rust flakes, we were lucky the old truck didn’t need to be started with a crank.
“Not to mention what?” I asked when I’d finally freed myself. But in reply he just wrapped his arms around me.
“That anyone who tries hurting you,” he murmured into my hair, “is on my list. My you-know-what list.”
Hearing this, I relaxed into his embrace. Back when I first found Eastport and met Wade, I was snarky, sarcastic, and unlikely to cut even the pleasantest new acquaintance an ounce of slack.
Then there was the fact that on account of my ex-husband, I’d given up men; this seemed reasonable at the time, like swearing off arsenic or not huffing methane out of a plastic bag.
But Wade just kept showing up: moonlight boat rides, long walks by the bay . . . the guy had a bag of tricks, and he brought all of them to the party—the whole shebang, as Bella would’ve put it.
And there were only so many times that his fingers could brush the back of my hand before even I had to admit it: I was up to my eyes—and other portions of my anatomy—in love. So we got married, and now here we were, but:
“Wade? Why’re we really out here?” Because sure, he was on my side, and he was mad about that cutlass. Worried that I might end up in the clink for Hadlyme’s murder, too, just as he should be. But none of that should’ve made him dive right into the deep end of the snooping pool; tolerant as he was, it just wasn’t his style.
His lips pursed. “George Valentine and Lee were in the Crab when I was there,” he said. Ellie’s husband and their daughter, he meant.
“Getting burgers,” Wade went on. “And George saw that bunch of podcast crew members just like I did.”
“Ohh,” I breathed. “And . . . you mean he recognized them?”
Wade nodded. “They were talking about it pretty loud, how now that Henry Hadlyme was dead they’d all have to be looking for jobs.”
He turned to me. “So, yeah, I think he knew who they were.”
And when he went home, he’d tell Ellie, and—
“Wade. You knew that if Ellie found out that these cottages are empty, she’d want to come back here and—”
“And do just what we’re doing now,” he agreed. “Only instead of Ellie, you’ve got me as backup. Okay?”
In other words, Wade knew that when she did find out, she’d be eager for the opportunity to take advantage of the cottages’ vacancy, to snoop around in them and find out what cooked.
He knew I’d go with her, too, if she asked me to, which she would. But instead he’d gotten the jump on her.
“Okay,” I said. It wouldn’t be okay with Ellie when she foun
d out; she’d have wanted to be in on this. But what the heck. Wade was big, he was strong, and have I mentioned he was a weapons expert?
Which of course meant he’d have brought a gun. Sliding my hand under the old denim jacket he was wearing, I felt bulking in it: the rig he had strapped over his left shoulder.
“So here you go,” he said, handing me a flashlight and a key fob with no keys on it.
“Alarm,” he explained, pointing out the small red button on the fob. “In case of emergency. See the horn icon? You push it, a siren blares.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” Personally I felt that a siren should already be blaring, and big letters in the sky should be spelling out DANGER in neon red. Where, for instance, was Lionel’s snake, Linda, right now?
Also, in an emergency a siren that betrayed my location might not be . . . but never mind, it was too late to worry about any of that.
“I’ll tap the horn if anyone shows up,” Wade assured me. “If I do, you make a beeline for the truck. Or if you hit trouble, press that button and I’ll come running.”
“Deal,” I agreed, making a mental note to amend it if need be. Then, gripping the flashlight and pocketing the alarm fob, I hustled across the clearing.
The cottages were black cutout shapes, dark angles against the silvery bay. Beyond them, the Cherry Island lighthouse strobed the waves, flaring and fading.
A foghorn whonked. Waves crashed on the rocks just below where the cottages perched. Salt and evergreens, new-mown grass, and the faint acid tang of the first fallen leaves perfumed the night.
As I paused by the clearing’s edge, the hairs on my neck rose, then settled uneasily. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t being watched, I told myself, and then, Of course you’re not. No one knows you’re here.
Which was convincing enough for me to turn my attention back to the cottages: dark, lonesome-looking, poised at the top of a sharp drop overlooking the cold salt water . . .
Stop that, I scolded myself, and chose to begin my search in the first cottage, the one the whole crew had gathered in earlier, and leave the other two cabins that they were using for my second and third snooping destinations.
