Clammed Up (2 page)

Of course, I didn’t know who he was then. But I had a strong inkling when Michaela crumpled to her knees, shrieking, “Ray! Ray! Ray!” Instinctively, I herded the guests outside and slammed the door. I could tell there was nothing we could do for that poor man.

Once were were back on the porch, I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart banged in my chest as adrenaline surged through my body. I was responsible for these people and for Morrow Island. I took a deep gulp of air to steady myself, then hollered for Sonny and Etienne.

They were down by the fire which makes its own noise, but by the third bellow they heard me and came running. After Sonny took a quick look inside, he and I had a whispered argument about who to call. The Busman’s Harbor Police, the State Police, the harbormaster, the Coast Guard? We decided to call Busman’s Harbor PD and let them sort it out.

Sonny ran back to the
Jacquie II
to raise the police department via the radio. He also radioed his wife, my sister Livvie, who worked in our ticket kiosk, so she could let the wedding guests know the boat wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.

I ordered everyone back aboard the
Jacquie II
. They couldn’t be in Windsholme or roaming around the island, so the boat seemed like the best place to keep the wedding party and our employees confined. Once aboard, they clustered as Maine people do in the summer—locals to one side of the top deck, people “from away” to the other—both groups talking like mad. Several got out their cell phones, wiggled and jiggled them, and held them to the sky in the direction of some imaginary satellite. The local people knew it was pointless, but they did it, too.

Michaela sobbed, her mother and the maid of honor on either side of her. I felt terrible. This was supposed to be the happiest day of her life and now no wedding would take place. And she must have so wished Tony was with her during this awful experience. But he was stuck in the harbor, just as we were stuck on the island.

The first person to arrive was Jamie Dawes. I have never been so happy to see anyone in my life. Jamie and I were best buds as children. Until I went away to boarding school, we waited for the bus together every day, and we worked together at the clambake every summer through high school and college. In the few months since I’d been back in town, I’d been so buried in work I hadn’t reconnected with him. According to my mother, over the winter, he’d been appointed full-time to the Busman’s Harbor Police Department.

An officer I didn’t know steered their borrowed motorboat. Jamie jumped out before it stopped moving and I ran to meet him. He put a hand on my shoulder and looked directly into my eyes. “Are you okay?” He was tall and broad through the chest, but he still had the same blond hair, sky-blue eyes, dark lashes, and open, expressive face he’d had as a boy. I swallowed hard and nodded yes.

We walked up the hill to Windsholme and Jamie and his partner went to take a look at the body. They were only inside a few minutes. When they returned, Jamie signaled for me, Sonny, and Etienne to gather around him. “We have to call in the medical examiner and the state police major crimes unit,” he said in a low voice.

“Major crimes! Surely the poor man killed himself.” I said it because I wanted to believe it.

“You don’t know that, Julia,” Jamie responded. “It’s an unattended death with a boatload of question marks around it. Officer Howland and I will stay on the island to secure the scene.”

It didn’t matter to me why Jamie was staying, I was just glad he was. He knew us and he knew Morrow Island and that’s what counted.

Four more members of Busman’s Harbor’s police department arrived to help. The town only had nine sworn officers, and four of those were part-time. Two state police detectives arrived an hour or so later, hitching a ride out with the harbormaster. The medical examiner came on a commandeered lobster boat. Our island looked like it had been invaded by a tiny, mismatched flotilla.

The detectives and medical examiner went up to Windsholme. It felt like we waited for hours, though I was sure it wasn’t that long. Sonny banged around the
Jacquie II
in a barely concealed rage. “Weddings,” he muttered under his breath, as if holding wedding receptions at a clambake was the craziest idea anyone ever had. And then louder, “I hope you’re happy.”

Happy?
I wasn’t even supposed to be there. I was in Maine because of a panicked call from my sister Livvie.

In January, Livvie intercepted a call from the bank to her husband Sonny, who’d run the clambake for the five years since Dad died. The bank was calling our loan. Not only could we lose the clambake, but Sonny had persuaded Mom to put up her house in town and Morrow Island as collateral on the loan. We could lose it all.

“Livvie, how could you let this happen?” I’d yelled into my cell phone.

“I didn’t
let
it happen. Mom is a mentally competent adult. It’s her property. She can do what she wants!”

I let it go. There was no point in fighting about it by then. The money, borrowed during good economic times, was long gone, used to rebuild the dock, outfit our ticket booth for online sales, and replace the slate roof on Windsholme, which was desperately in need. Slate roofs were incredibly expensive and any work you had done on an island cost three times more.

Then the stock market crashed and the recession hit. The first summer wasn’t so bad. Lots of people canceled flying vacations to take driving vacations and Busman’s Harbor is a day’s ride from the most densely populated part of the country. But the second summer was a disaster. Driving vacations turned into stay-cations and to top it off, the weather was awful. In the harbor, restaurants and inns were half empty. Most of the art on the walls in the galleries and the clothes on the racks in the shops were the same ones at the end of the summer as were there at the beginning. The next two summers weren’t any better. No one was spending money and the Snowden Family Clambake Company was dying.

Livvie begged me to give up my venture capital job and my life in Manhattan to come home and run the business with Sonny. “You’re trained for this. You went to business school. Helping entrepreneurs is what you do. Julia, please. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

I promised Livvie I would give it one summer, which was all the bank had agreed to anyway. In March, I’d moved back to Busman’s Harbor.

Happy
. What a concept. I didn’t respond to Sonny. I’d had enough experience this spring to know it wouldn’t be productive. I tried to keep the guests and employees calm . . . and I waited. Finally the detectives emerged from Windsholme and made their way down to the dock.

“Who’s in charge here?” the older of the two yelled up at the boat.

I glanced at Sonny. The question went straight to heart of the issues between us. When he didn’t say anything, I stepped forward. “I am.”

“Where can we go to talk?”

I led the state cops through Gabrielle’s pin-neat kitchen to the front room of the little house by the dock. It had always been a comfortable place for me, cozy inside with views to Spain out every window. I sat on the window seat with my back to the view. The detectives pulled straight-backed chairs from the dining room and sat opposite.

“I’m Lieutenant Jerry Binder, Commander, Major Crimes Unit.” He had a bald spot stretching in a narrow strip from his forehead to his crown. Right away, I liked that he didn’t attempt to disguise it with some elaborate comb-over or shaved head. I sensed in him the same straightforwardness of character he displayed with his hairstyle. The fringe of hair he did have was medium brown with flecks of gray. The round brown eyes staring out over the ski-slope nose showed just a few wrinkles. I put him in his mid-forties.

“This is Detective Tom Flynn,” Lieutenant Binder said. Flynn was younger, early thirties I thought. He had the kind of body that only comes from hard work at the gym. Unlike his partner, Flynn had plenty of hair follicles, but the hair itself was cut so short I only had an impression of its sandy color. He had a New England accent, though it wasn’t quite Maine. Boston, or maybe even Providence. He sat with his back ramrod straight. The whole package—the hair, the posture, the toned body—said ex-military to me.

Binder was polite, even empathetic. He asked me about the island and the business. “Tell me about finding the body.”

I described step by step what had happened. Was I apprehensive when I threw open Windsholme’s heavy front doors? I couldn’t have been. But in the movie in my head, I hesitated, hand on the doorknob, knowing what awaited me.

“What happens next?” I asked when we’d finished.

“We’ll question everyone here and then let you take them back to the harbor,” Detective Flynn said. “From what you say, we should talk to this Etienne person next. Two of our colleagues are with your sister on the mainland. They’re getting information from the wedding guests. We’ll take their contact information and let them go back to their hotels. Same with these people here. Another officer in the harbor is talking to the groom right now.”

The groom.
Poor Tony. Not only had he lost his wedding day, he’d also lost his friend.

“Is there any chance Ray Wilson could have done this to himself?” I asked, because more than anything, that was what I wanted to believe.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Lieutenant Binder answered. “Preliminarily, the medical examiner thinks he was hung up there after he was dead.”

I’d only looked at the body for a few seconds, but I closed my eyes and let myself see what my mind had been denying. The dried blood covering the front of Ray Wilson’s pink polo shirt. “Is that where the blood came from? From when he died?”

Neither of them answered. Flynn brushed imaginary lint from his trousers.

I cleared my throat and asked the question I’d been dreading. “How long will we be closed?” I felt selfish asking. A man was dead. But the future of our business depended on the answer.

“No way to know,” Flynn said.

Binder followed, a little more sympathetically. “Certainly you’ll be closed tomorrow. After that, it’ll be day-to-day.”

The Snowden Family Clambake was teetering on the brink as it was. Every day we were shut down would bring us closer to financial ruin. And to losing the island—which I was convinced would break my mother, still recovering from my father’s death. That’s why I’d come home. To save the business that provided for my family. And to save Morrow Island for my mother.

“Lieutenant, we have a short season here on the coast. Everyday we’re shut—”

“I understand, Ms. Snowden. I do. But we need to process the scene. We also need to make sure the island is a safe place for you and your guests.”

A safe place?
“You think this could have something to do with the island?” It was another question I hadn’t wanted to ask, though it was all I had thought about for a couple hours.
Why here? Why on the island?

I climbed back aboard the
Jacquie II
. The name of the boat was a bit of a joke. My mother’s name was Jacqueline, but I couldn’t imagine anyone, even my father, calling her Jacquie. My father had purchased the boat seven years ago, when the economy was flying high, to replace the refitted minesweeper that had been the
Jacquie I
. It was a logical thing to do at the time, even a necessity, but when Sonny took out the new loan, he’d rolled the boat loan into it to get a more favorable rate. So the boat was part of the giant debt endangering my mother’s property.

People seemed to have accepted we’d be stuck aboard the boat for a while. Sonny had opened up the bar and was serving water and soft drinks, no alcohol since everyone still had to be questioned—though I’m sure some people could’ve used it. He put all the snack food we normally sold on the boat—chips, candy bars, small bags of cookies—out on the bar for people to help themselves. It was a small financial hit for us to take, compared to the enormity of what might come.

When Etienne came aboard the
Jacquie II
after meeting with the state police, Sonny and I huddled up with him in the pilothouse to compare notes.

“I told them no one landed a boat at our dock last night. No way.” Etienne’s English still rolled with the soft syllables of his native Quebec. Even in his late fifties, he was a powerful man who did hard, physical work every day. The hair that was left on his head was mostly gray, and he had great, bushy eyebrows and a mustache. He’d come to work for my dad just a few years after the company started, so I’d known him for as long as I could remember. I trusted him with my business and property, and, if it ever came down to it, I would have trusted him with my life.

“You were asleep,” Sonny challenged, running one of his big hands over his forehead and through his buzz cut.

“Non, non,”
Etienne insisted. “We leave the dock lights on all night. Look how close the house is.” Etienne pointed from the cottage to the dock as if Sonny and I didn’t have the whole island memorized. “Gabrielle right now is telling the police the same thing. No one landed on the dock.” His voice was insistent and I was afraid he and Sonny would be off on another one of their arguments.

There’d been tension between Sonny and Etienne all spring. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They’d worked together for a dozen years, the last five without my father, and somehow they’d gotten on. But not anymore. I thought maybe my presence in the business exacerbated the tensions between them, especially since Etienne almost always took my side.

When Paul Simon sang that orangutans were skeptical about changes in their environments, he’d described my brother-in-law perfectly. Sonny even had the flaming orange hair and barrel chest to go along with his deep suspicion of anything new or different. Etienne had proved much more flexible when it came to saving the clambake, ready to try anything. The only idea of mine he’d opposed was rewiring the two rooms in Windsholme, which he’d argued was a terrible use of our severely restricted cash. But I’d gone ahead and done it.

For once, perhaps because of the weight of the events of the day, Sonny didn’t push his disagreement with Etienne further. Instead, he looked at me. “If not the dock, could he have landed on the beach?”

“It’s possible, I guess.” Our little beach was on the other side of the island, as far from the dock as it could be. It’s a long walk, but we kept a path cleared for clambake customers who wanted to explore. You could land a small boat there, if you were very skilled.

Sonny nodded. “A local then. Knows the harbor, knows the island.”

A chill ran through me and I huddled into my sweatshirt. I nodded toward a cluster of college students on our waitstaff. “What do they say?” Fed and talked out, they were sunning themselves on the top deck.

Sonny answered. “Some of them have friends who work at Crowley’s. What’s going around is Ray Wilson was at the bar last night at closing time, drunk off his ass and picking fights. Chris Durand threw him out of the bar, loaded him into his cab, and drove him away. Nobody saw Wilson after that.”

Sonny and Etienne looked at each other, and I could tell they were thinking the same thing I was.
Chris Durand. Local.
Knew the harbor well. And he knew the island. Thanks to me.