Fogged Inn (A Maine Clambake Mystery Book 4) (11 page)

“You know about the missing driver?” A weight lifted off my shoulders. Jamie had asked me not to tell Chris, and I hadn’t.

“Julia, everyone in town knows.”

I should have figured. At least I was out from under my promise to Jamie.

The next morning I was awakened by the reassuring sounds of clunking and banging and the smell of bacon frying coming from downstairs. It was wonderful to wake up to a relatively normal day. Of course that also meant Gus’s Too would be open for dinner.

Chris rolled out of bed not long after me and was immediately on the phone with a supplier. In the background as I dressed, I heard him dickering about the price of scallops. They were in season—draggers were out along the Maine coast—but most of the catch would go to fish markets and restaurants throughout the northeast. It would be challenging to fill our relatively tiny order at a reasonable cost. Gratefully, I left him to it and headed down to Gus’s.

Gus was busy, but in a normal Thursday sort of way, not like it had been the morning before. With the crime scene tape gone, the gawking opportunity was over. Gus worked like a demon behind the counter filling orders. I wandered back and poured myself a cup of coffee.

Across the dining room I saw a familiar hand in the air waving me over. “Yoo-hoo,” Fee Snugg called. I took my coffee and sat down in the sisters’ booth. Vee’s plate was piled with Gus’s scrumptious blueberry pancakes, while Vee attacked two eggs over easy with a piece of toast. It was wonderful to see these two women, who worked so hard giving breakfast to tourists all summer, enjoying themselves at Gus’s.

“I’m glad I caught you,” Fee said. “After we talked last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about where I’ve seen that Caroline Caswell before. It drove me crazy. And then it came to me. At the yacht club.”

“The Caswells are members of the yacht club?”

“No. Or I don’t know,” Fee clarified. “I’m not talking about now. She’s in one of those old photos of the yacht club dances that line the hallway. I’d recognize her anywhere.” She hesitated. “Is it helpful I’ve remembered?”

“It could be.” If Caroline wasn’t really a newcomer to Busman’s Harbor, perhaps she had connections in town I didn’t know about. “Thanks. I’ll go over after breakfast and check it out.”

Gus appeared at the edge of the booth to take my order.

“Was the kitchen door locked when you came in this morning?” I asked.

“Ayuh. Thanky. Whaddya want for breakfast?”

“Oatmeal, maple syrup, raisins. Thanks.”

“Comin’ up.”

After we finished breakfast, I went back to my apartment. Chris completed a call with another supplier while Le Roi sat on the coffee table, regarding him with suspicion. Le Roi’s attitude was that he was the apartment’s original tenant. Chris was an interloper.

“I’m off to pick up supplies, and I’ll take the lock off the door downstairs to see if I can replace it or get parts. The seafood and produce trucks will be delivering this afternoon,” Chris said. “Can you be here as soon as Gus closes to help with prep?”

With all our do-ahead food gone, thrown out as a result of the police search, prep would be especially challenging.

“Sure.”

“Where’re you off to now?”

“The yacht club.”

Chris tilted his head. “A little off-season for that?”

“Something I want to look into.”

He grinned. “Be careful.”

“Always am. Gus said to thank you for locking the door.”

“Always do,” Chris said, and I knew enough to leave the subject alone.

* * *

The Busman’s Harbor Yacht Club sounded a lot more hoity-toity than it was. Not far from Gus’s on the working side of Busman’s Harbor, mostly it was a place to moor pleasure boats. Although some of the yachts there in the summer were pretty spectacular, most of the vessels were fairly modest sailboats and motorboats. The club also kept a small fleet of sailboats, and their school was where almost every kid in the community, summer and local, learned to sail. In the summer, I loved watching the parade of little yellow boats as the students followed each other around the harbor like ducklings.

The clubhouse itself was a ramshackle affair with a room full of wooden lockers for stowing boat-related gear at one end of a long hallway and a community room, which had all the charm of a drafty elementary school gym, at the other. The front door was locked, as I expected. Nothing worth stealing was stored over the winter, but the members didn’t want teenagers using their empty building as a hangout.

I went in search of Bud Barbour, who owned a small boat repair business just down from the yacht club and who picked up extra money as its caretaker.

Bud’s repair shop was locked up tight, riding out the quiet time until spring when boats were readied for the water. I climbed onto his deck and rapped on the back door. Morgan, his black lab, barked a noisy greeting from inside. In the background I heard explosions and gunfire. Old Bud was a dedicated video gamer.

“Coming!”

I waited in the cold while Bud killed off a few more bad guys and finally made his way to the door.

“Howdy, Julia. What brings you here on this dreary day?”

“I need the key to the yacht club.”

Bud pursed his lips behind his Santa Claus beard. “What fer?”

I’d learned in similar circumstances that when I was as specific and truthful as possible, people didn’t ask as many questions as you might expect. “I need to take a look at one of the photos in the hallway.”

If someone had said that to me, I certainly would have wanted to know why, but evidently my activities were not as interesting to Bud as I imagined.

“I’ll get the key for you.” He shuffled into the dark innards of the house and reappeared with a key chained to an enormous wooden tag that said
YACHT CLUB. “
You be sure to bring this back, Julia Snowden,” Bud said as he handed it to me. “I know where you live.”

I walked the key back to the yacht club and unlocked the outside door. The electricity had been turned off for the season, but in the first room, the locker room, there were plenty of windows to provide light, even on a gray day. The floor-to-ceiling wooden lockers were three feet wide and three feet deep to accommodate the oars, outboard motors, life vests, and other boating paraphernalia kept there. I admired the polished oak of the lockers. The yacht club might not be fancy or showy, but it was quality built.

The long hallway was reasonably light at each end due to the windows in the locker room and community room, but the middle was completely in shadow. The walls were lined with photographs, one after another, each at eye level. I realized too late I should have asked Fee for more details about the photo of Caroline she remembered.

The images of the yacht club dances were in chronological order up one side of the long hall and down the other. So the ones nearest the locker room door were way too old on one wall and too new on the opposite side to have Caroline in them. The yacht club dance was a right of passage for summer families, a special treat, only for the college-age kids. It was originally billed as a cotillion, a coming-of-age ritual. In the early years, by tradition, the girls wore white dresses, the boys dinner jackets.

On my right, the young adults of 1890 stared solemnly into the camera. The girls’ dresses had high necklines and tight waists. On my left, last year’s crop of rowdies hammed it up, the girls in short dresses, the boys’ jackets cast aside, ties loose. At some point, the white dress tradition had gone away and the girls’ shifts were awash in vibrant summer colors.

I kept walking slowly down the hallway, which grew increasingly dark, squinting at the photos as I went. The solemn-faced Victorians turned into sleek Edwardians and then smiling flappers. Photos were no longer formal portraits. The collegians of the 1920s weren’t afraid to show they were having fun. They held champagne glasses, despite Prohibition, and smoldering cigarettes in long holders. Then came the toned-down years of the Depression followed by the war years. For the first time, there were an unequal number of women and men in the pictures. There weren’t enough men left at home to go around. During World War II, the girls’ sleek dresses and wavy hair made them look old beyond their years. An entire generation that had to grow up too quickly. Most of them were smoking, too, just like in the twenties and thirties.

As I reached the end of the hall, light streamed in through the windows in the community room. I turned around and started back the other way. I looked at the photos on the opposite wall with interest, watching the changing fashions, wondering about the people. I was sure I must have looked into the eyes of several of my ancestors. But I’d also done some quick math. I knew Caroline was a recent retiree, so I could figure out more or less how old she was. The kids in the photos immediately after World War II still looked purposeful and adult, many of the men still in uniform. Then there was another shift, and in came big skirts and poufy hair and giggles at the camera. I slowed down as I reached the sixties, ticking up the years. And then, there she was. Front and center in the photograph for 1967, so I couldn’t miss her. Fee was right—Caroline had aged but was otherwise unchanged. I slipped the photo off its single hook and carried it back to the better light in the community room so I could examine it.

Caroline was in the first row in the front, elegantly arranged on the floor. Her hair was boy-short even then, alone among the big hairdos of the other girls. If they were going for Katherine Ross in
The Graduate
, Caroline was Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
, though without the haunted look. She stared into the camera, bright-eyed, confident, happy.

I looked at the rest of the photo, searching the faces to see if any of the others who’d been in the restaurant that night were there too. I was astonished. They all were!

Henry was next to Caroline on the floor, her arm through his. His hair and brows were dark, his lean face not yet pixie-like. In a dinner jacket and skinny bow tie, he glowered, his features a map of simmering anger. His hostile expression didn’t seem at all like the Henry I knew.

The others sat in chairs or stood around them. After Caroline, Phil Bennett was the most recognizable, with his long skinny legs and arms. Slowly, Michael and Sheila Smith came into focus, mainly because Sheila’s thin figure and hairstyle of bangs and curls were unchanged. Even back then, Michael had mane of flowing hair, though whether it was light blond or prematurely white, I couldn’t tell from the black-and-white photograph.

Though both Sheila and Michael were in the picture, Sheila was standing next to Phil Bennett, his arm around her, and Michael was with . . . Fran Walker! It took a few moments for me to decide the young woman was really Fran. She was sleek and trim, every hair in her bouffant artfully arranged. With her overlarge features, she should have been ugly, but she was gorgeous.

Barry Walker was also in the photo. Like the other men, he was dressed in a dinner jacket, but he looked uncomfortable in his clothes. His long hair touched his collar and looked dark blond or light brown. I tried to remember back to my childhood. What color had Barry’s hair been? I couldn’t come up with it. Barry stood close to a pretty woman I didn’t recognize.

It took a long time for me to believe Deborah Bennett was in the photograph. I had assumed her plastic surgery had been an attempt to recapture the beauty of her youth, but the woman in the photo looked so different. She was stunning, for sure. The young woman in the photo had a beauty that jumped out of the frame. But her cheekbones were somehow differently shaped than Deborah’s, and instead of Deborah’s cascade of light blond hair, this woman’s dark hair was an elaborate construction that swept back and up, and then hung down into a flip. But as I stood in the cold, empty community room, studying the photo, I became convinced from her height and carriage and beautiful legs that the woman was Deborah. She stood with a man I was sure I didn’t know. He was in a U.S. Navy dress uniform, and the photographer had caught him laughing.

In the center of the photo were two other people I didn’t recognize, obviously another couple, her hand on his arm. They looked young and happy, the center of a charmed life. As in the other photos from that era, most of them held a lit cigarette and many held cocktail glasses.

Was one of the people in the photo whom I didn’t recognize the intended recipient of the fifth gift certificate? Was the couple in the center still together? Had the person who mailed the gift certificates hoped to stage a reunion?

As I made my way to the door, I stopped again and stared at the photo from 1959. Vee Snugg was at the center, her mouth open, caught in the act of tossing out a witty bon mot the others reacted to. Fee was there, too, dressed in a shapeless shift, her arm through the arm of her date, who, like all the other men, stared at the glamorous Vee. Fee thought of herself, even described herself, as homely, but I saw a shy woman with a sweet face and a comfortable figure. Neither sister had married. Vee had spent her childbearing years in love with a married man who would never leave his wife. I wondered about Fee. Had any man ever been in love with her? What if she hadn’t been the sister of the charismatic Vee?

I tucked the 1967 photo under my arm and kept walking until I reached the locker room and exited through the front door, locking it behind me.

I wasn’t sure how long I could keep the key before Bud came looking for it. I figured, let him come after me. I walked out of the back harbor with the photo and the key in hand. I kept the office where I ran the clambake business in the front room on the second floor of my mother’s house. Dad had operated the business from there for twenty-five years. With its bulky metal file cabinets, heavy oak desk, and view out the window to the Snowden Family Clambake kiosk on the public pier, the office made me feel like I carried on an important tradition.

At my desk, I turned the wooden frame of the photo upside down, poking at the brads that held its back in place. When they proved too stiff for me to move, I used a scissors to pry them open. I glanced at my cell phone on the desk surface. No call from Bud yet.

When the frame opened, I slid the photo out, put it in my printer–scanner–photo-copier, and pressed the start button. The machine chugged along while I shifted nervously from foot to foot, mentally urging it to go, go, go. For my trouble, I got a passable copy. I put the photo back in the frame and put it and the copy into an L.L.Bean tote bag I had stowed in the room. I took the tote bag with me when I left the house.

I hurried back to the yacht club, unlocked the door, and returned the original photo to its place. As I left, I noticed the images from later years along the row. The photograph I’d returned to the wall of the group from 1967 marked the gateway to a turbulent time. In the next photo, girls with straight hair parted down the middle, pale lipstick, and simple shifts with hemlines skimming their thighs stared into the camera. Boys, with jackets off and ties loosened, made faces.

Then there was a four-year gap in the photos. I suspected there had been no interest in fusty yacht club dances on the part of the young people during the end of the sixties and early seventies. Starting in 1972, the photos returned. They were in color, though everything was slightly yellowed. The color photos hadn’t held up as well as the black and white. The white dresses for the girls were gone by then, and most of the boys were long-haired, dressed in blazers and khakis. Smoking in the photos seemed to have gone out of fashion, too, though I had no doubt people did it, tobacco and other things, just no longer for the camera.

In 1977, I found my mother, standing two feet away from her date, looking miserable. She was already in love with my father, the local boy who’d delivered groceries to her house on Morrow Island in his skiff. No doubt her widowed father had forced her to go to the dance, probably with some poor kid deemed “appropriate.” I felt sorry for the girl standing alone, and even a little sorry for her poor, unaware date.

In 2005, I found me, looking almost as unhappy as my mother. As the offspring of a summer person and a townie, I’d never felt like I fit in. My parents hadn’t made me participate in many of the summer people’s rituals, but they’d insisted on this one, for reasons I couldn’t remember anymore. When her time came, Livvie got out of the whole thing by being Livvie. And being married. And the mother of a two-year-old.

I left the building, locked the door behind me, and went back to Bud’s. He looked suspiciously at my tote bag and growled, “What tookya so long?” when I handed the key to him.

“Sorry!” I called, and lit out for the police station.

* * *

There were no state police vehicles in the parking lot. “Is Lieutenant Binder in?” I asked the civilian receptionist.

“In Augusta with Sergeant Flynn. Back tomorrow.”

I wondered what was keeping them there. “Officer Dawes?”

“On patrol. Can I take a message?”

“No, thanks. I want to talk to one of them in person. I’ll come back later.”

I walked up the hill as far as the Snuggles. Fee deserved to know she’d been right about the photo.

Their Scottish terrier ran to meet me, with a tail wag that involved his entire rear half. I squatted, petting him. “Hello, Mackie.” He rolled over, exposing his belly.

“Come in, come in. Your mother’s here,” Vee said, leading the way to the kitchen.

Fee and my mother were seated at the kitchen table. On it was a teapot, a sugar bowl, and a creamer.

“Not at work?” I asked my mother.

“I go in at one and work until close.” The long holiday shopping season would be a marathon for Mom. Not that she was afraid of hard work. Like my dad, she’d worked her tail off at the Snowden Family Clambake for twenty-five years.

I sat down and gratefully accepted a cup of tea. The Snugg sisters served coffee to their B&B guests but didn’t touch the stuff themselves.

I put the copy of the yacht club photo on the kitchen table. “You were right,” I told Fee. “It is Caroline Caswell.”

“And is that,” Vee said, pointing, “Franny Walker? Chapman, she was then. My word, she was beautiful. This photo brings it all back.”

“Not just Fran Walker,” I said. “It’s all of the couples who were in the restaurant that night. Henry Caswell. Phil Bennett. Deborah. Barry. The Smiths.” I pointed to each one as I named them.

“Well, I’ll be.” Fee was astounded, even though she’d been the one who remembered the photo.

“Did you know them?” I asked.

One by one, the women shook their heads. “Not really,” Fee said.

Fee and Vee were almost ten years older than the group in the photo; my mother was ten years younger. I could see why none of them had much of a recollection of this particular group of teenagers.

Then Vee said, “Rabble Point Road.”

“Yes!” my mother exclaimed. “They’re the Rabble Point set!”

“Rabble Point set?” I asked.

“They were a group of families that summered on Rabble Point Road, out near the end of Eastclaw Point,” Fee said. “It was a summer colony, with a tennis court, beach access, and a deep-water dock. The families were all very close, as I remember. Parties every night. Now that I see them in the photo, looking so young, I know this group. They were the children, the older children, the first group born after the war.”

“Except for Franny,” Vee said. “Funny, I don’t remember her being part of that group. Her parents certainly didn’t live on Rabble Point Road. Her dad worked in maintenance for our father on the golf course, and her mom worked as a housecleaner and took in laundry.”

The Snugg sisters’ father had been brought from England to serve as the golf pro and manage Busman’s Harbor Golf Club. As a result, they lived in the same half-in, half-out world I did. Their father was well respected and they lived surrounded by summer people, but at the end of the day, he was their employee.

“Well, she was certainly with the group that night,” Mom said, pointing to Fran.

“What happened to Rabble Point?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s gone,” Fee said. “The cottages were bulldozed years ago.”

“Bulldozed? Why?”

“I don’t know. It happens with summer families. Children grow and move to the other side of the country or around the world. Too many heirs inherit to share the place. They sell up. At least, that’s the usual,” Fee answered. “My word, it’s been a long time since I’ve been out to the end of Eastclaw Point.” Their duties at the Snuggles kept the sisters tethered to the B&B in good weather.

“Do you recognize the couple in the center of the photo?” I asked. “Or the man in uniform? Or the woman with Barry Walker?”

All three of them shook their heads. “I can’t dredge up a name from my old memory banks,” Fee said. “I can tell you only that they look familiar. I’m sure they were part of that Rabble Point group.”

Mom stood. “Thank you for the lovely tea. I’ve got to get to work.”

I drained my cup and stood too. “Thank you, ladies. And Fee, thanks for remembering Caroline in this photo.”

“Yes,” Fee said, “but now that you know, what will you do?”

* * *

I stood on the Snuggles’ porch for a moment, zipping up my coat against the cold. Across the street, I saw Mom pull out of the driveway in her ancient Mercedes and head to work.

Lieutenant Binder had warned me off the case, told me there might be a dangerous killer on the loose. But from the moment I’d remembered the gift certificates, I’d been convinced there was a connection among the diners. The yacht club photo gave me proof. Binder was a good cop and his approach of identifying the victim and then tracking his associates might eventually work. It was true, as he said, that just because someone brought those people to the restaurant that evening didn’t mean any of them had a connection to the victim, or the killer. On the other hand, I was increasingly sure there was and I wanted to prove it, but how?

Clearly, whatever I did, I had to stay away from the Bennetts. I was sure it was Phil who complained to Binder.

I collected my car from Mom’s garage and headed toward the Baywater Community for Active Adults. Besides Deborah Bennett, the Caswells had been the most welcoming to me when I stopped by the day before.

They’d also lied. Those adorable pixies had lied. Or Caroline had while Henry sat there. “I don’t really know any of those people,” she’d said of the others.

I pulled into Baywater, driving carefully over the speed bumps. Since my last visit, someone had tacked up a wreath on the unused gatehouse, getting ready for the holiday to come. There was a small group of dog walkers in the road, collars up against the wind. I edged by them and stopped in front of the Caswell house.

Caroline answered my knock. “Hello, Julia. I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon.”

“I know. I apologize for dropping by. Is this an okay time? I have a few follow-up questions from yesterday.”

She stepped back from the door so I could enter, but her face was uncertain. “Henry’s at the gym. He just left, so he’ll be a while. That is, if you wanted to speak to both of us.”

I was happy to talk to Caroline alone. I don’t know why, but I sensed that made it more likely she would open up to me.

“Come,” she said. “We’ll sit . . . over there.” It seemed that after two years in the open-concept house, Caroline still had trouble putting names to spaces. She sat me again at the table near the kitchen where we’d been the day before.

“Coffee?”

I was awash in the tea the Snugg sisters had given me, but I thought it best to say yes. When Caroline finally sat, I took my copy of the yacht club photo out of my tote bag and handed it to her.

“Oh.” She was clearly surprised. Moments ticked by before she spoke again. Then the round “O” of her mouth relaxed into a small smile. “I haven’t seen this for years. We were so young.”

“My neighbors, Fee and Vee Snugg, said something about the Rabble Point set.”

“That is what they called us. I suppose it fit. We were all close in age, the oldest kids in the group, the original baby boomers.”

She turned the photo in her hands. “When I was growing up, we came to the cottages at Rabble Point every summer, year after golden year. On that private lane we ran completely free, in and out of each other’s houses all day long. The grown-ups drank, smoked, played bridge, and argued about politics, but we were utterly carefree. We played tennis and swam at the little beach across the road. The water was freezing, but you’d never get one of us to admit it. I don’t think there was a group of children anywhere as completely happy as we were.” Her voice was thick with emotion. She looked at the photo, and then looked away.

I gave her a moment to compose herself. “And you were all members of the yacht club?”

“All of us kids learned to sail there. And later, when some of us could finally drive, we hung out there all the time, leaving the moms and the little kids back at Rabble Point. Except Franny Chapman, of course. She didn’t summer at Rabble Point or belong to the yacht club. Her mom cleaned for the Lowes and often brought her along to play with us when she was little. She grew up to be so beautiful and smart and funny. Each of the boys had a crush on her at one time or another.”

Beautiful and smart and funny. The Fran Walker I knew, the bent-over woman with the giant pocketbook, seemed defeated by life.

“Caroline, when I was here yesterday, you said you didn’t know the other people in the restaurant the night of the murder. And yet here you all are in the photograph.”

She chewed on her lip. “I said I didn’t really know them. And truly, I don’t. We were all in college when this photo was taken in. We grew apart, followed different paths in life, lived in different states.” She looked at me to see if I believed her. I kept my expression neutral. Evidently that wasn’t good enough, because she continued. “I haven’t talked to any of these people except Henry in more than forty years. Honestly, when they came into the restaurant, I didn’t even recognize Fran and Barry. I didn’t know they were a couple for one thing. And they’ve let themselves get so old. And Deborah.” Caroline shuddered. “You’d think all that plastic surgery would make a person look younger, more recognizable, but the person I saw that night didn’t resemble the Deborah I knew at all.”

I pointed at the man in uniform who stood next to Deborah Bennett. “Who is he?”

“Oh, poor Dan Johnson.” Caroline sighed. “He was a couple of years older than the rest of us, finished with university by the time this was taken and an ensign in the navy. He died in Vietnam less than three months later.”

“And then Deborah married Phil?”

“More or less.” Caroline squirmed in her seat. “Eventually.”

“Eventually?”

“Yes. She was sad for a time. Then she married Phil.” Caroline was curt, like she didn’t expect me to understand. “Henry left college and joined the navy that fall.”

The U.S. Navy?
He must have barely made the height requirement. And if he’d dropped out of college to join the service, how did he become a doctor?

Caroline fell silent. I gave her the time to gather herself. Then she exhaled noisily and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m sorry. These are difficult memories for me.”