Fogged Inn (2 page)

Gus moved from behind the counter to clear the way for the tidy figure of Dr. Joellen Simpson to enter the walk-in. Dr. Simpson was a family practitioner with a good reputation in Busman's Harbor, and was also, apparently, our part-time medical examiner.

As soon as Howland and Jamie followed her into the walk-in, Gus stalked to a table on the far side of the dining room and motioned for Chris and me to join him.

“Now you're going to tell me what the heck is going on.” He gave us the full Gus treatment—a squint that emphasized his great white eyebrows—to show he meant business. “How in heck did you leave a dead guy in my refrigerator?”

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“We didn't.” Chris was more emphatic.

Chris and I had been running our restaurant, which we cleverly called Gus's Too, for five weeks. The idea had been all Gus's. He'd proposed that he serve breakfast and lunch and that Chris and I share the space and serve dinner, or as Gus called it, “suppah.”

The offer had seemed like a lifeline at the time, and I'd grabbed it like the flailing survivor I was. I'd returned to Busman's Harbor in the spring after fifteen years away for school and then work, the last eight in a venture capital job in Manhattan. My goal had been to rescue my family's clambake business from bankruptcy. With a lot of help from friends and family, and a few major calamities along the way, that mission had been accomplished. At least for this year.

But by the middle of October, the clambake was closed down for the season and I was at a crossroads. Return to my life and career in New York, or stay in Busman's Harbor with the man I loved?

Then Gus had offered the restaurant as well as the studio apartment above it. Chris, I had discovered, was a brilliant home chef. I had experience running my family's food business. The town, Gus felt strongly, needed a place to gather during the winter months. So win-win-win. Or so I'd thought.

The night before in the restaurant hadn't been typical, that was for sure. For one thing, we'd had only four reservations, but for the Monday night after Thanksgiving that seemed reasonable. Lots of people were still out of town and others were presumably home gorging on leftovers. Most of our business was walk-in trade anyway. I wasn't worried.

But then, as the sun went down, the fog rolled in. Fog in coastal Maine is like rain in Seattle. If we all stayed home because of it, we'd be home half the year. But this fog morphed into something more serious that our local weather people liked to call “frizzle.” As the temperature hit thirty-two degrees, the fog froze, leaving everything it touched—roads, cars, windows—coated in a thin, slippery veil of ice.

At 7:00
PM
, Chris and I had stood looking at each other across the empty dining room. Perhaps no one would come at all.

“I'm going to put more sand on the walkway.” Chris wasn't skilled at doing nothing. He'd done his kitchen prep. The pea soup was made, the stuffed chicken breasts prepared. The sweet and smoky aroma of slow-cooked braised short ribs wafted across the restaurant. It was the perfect do-ahead entree for our short-staffed kitchen.

“You just got back inside from the last time you sanded,” I had pointed out.

At that moment, we heard a car come to a stop. One car door slammed, followed by a second. Caroline and Henry Caswell descended the stairs into the restaurant.

“We're so happy to see you!” I'd meant every word of it. I took their heavy wool coats and hung them up on the hooks that lined the wall outside the restrooms.

“You look lovely,” Caroline had said.

At night, I traded in my work boots and jeans for black slacks and a nice top. I pulled my hair back and put on a little makeup. The restaurant was supposed to be a casual gathering place but nice enough for a couple to have a “date night.” We had spruced it up with candles and checkered cloths over the linoleum tabletops. After New Year's Eve, we'd be the only eat-in restaurant open in town, so we were trying to meet a lot of needs.

The Caswells lived just up the peninsula in Baywater, a “Community for Active Adults over Fifty-Five.” On a previous visit to the restaurant, Caroline had told me they both had connections to Maine going back to their childhoods, but like so many Maine retirees, they'd gone elsewhere to make their money. They had been early and loyal supporters of Gus's Too, coming in at least once a week, the closest thing to regulars at our fledgling operation.

I had led them through the archway into the dining room. “Table or booth?” I asked, gesturing around the empty space. They selected a booth in one of the far corners.

The word that came to mind whenever I saw the Caswells was “pixieish.” They were both small and lean with white hair and twinkling eyes—his blue, hers brown. Caroline even wore her hair in a pixie cut.

“How is it out?” I asked. “Tough traveling?”

“The fog!” Caroline had answered as they took their seats. “You could barely see five feet in front of the car.”

“And the ice. Terrible,” Henry affirmed. “But it's Maine, right?”

“We're just glad you could make it.”

“We wouldn't have missed it,” Henry said.

“We spent the holiday at our eldest daughter's house in Massachusetts. All three of our girls and their families were there. We are so lucky.” Caroline had said it like she truly felt it. “But there's not a thing to eat in our house.”

“Plus, we had the gift certificate that had to be used by today,” Henry added.

I had handed them their menu books with the paper inserts that Chris and I changed daily.

“Oh, pea soup,” Caroline said when she looked at her menu. “How appropriate. For the fog.”

“We couldn't resist. It's hearty—full of pea flavor and ham. I tasted it this afternoon.”

“Your beau is a great cook,” Henry said.

I took their wine order. Merlot for him, chardonnay for her. I'd been selling the gift certificates only since the week before we'd opened, and none of them had an expiration date. But who was I to contradict a good customer, particularly one who had just driven in terrible weather? I'd kept mum on the whole gift-certificate-deadline topic.

* * *

I just finished telling this part of the story to Gus and Chris when a thunk and a bump echoed from inside the walk-in, and we all turned our heads to stare. “Now you know why I don't allow strangers in my restaurant,” Gus said.

It was true. Against all laws—of the United States, capitalism, and common sense—you didn't get food at Gus's unless he knew you or you arrived with someone he did know. When I first moved back to Busman's Harbor, I'd viewed Gus's rule as a characteristic, if extreme, example of the native Mainers' feelings about people From Away. But during the high season last summer, with day-trippers clogging the streets, I'd come to treasure the refuge of Gus's, where not only did everybody know your name, everybody knew
everybody's
name.

Chris and I had ignored Gus's policy. If you wandered into our restaurant for dinner, you got served. And though I knew Gus hadn't created his rule to prevent strangers from dying in his refrigerator, I was having a bit of a rethink about our position vis-à-vis the whole strangers thing when Dr. Simpson walked back into the room, trailed by Jamie and Howland.

* * *

“You call the state police. I'll call the State Medical Examiner's Office in Augusta,” Dr. Simpson said to the officers. It sounded like she was repeating instructions to a reluctant student.

“But you said you don't know how he died,” Howland protested.

“Exactly,” Dr. Simpson confirmed. “I don't know how he died. I'm a part-time ME. I can sign off on unattended deaths with obvious causes, and accidents. But you've got a guy who looks like he's in his middle forties, who's not where he's supposed to be, with no obvious cause of death. I need an autopsy and tox screens, and until we know what's going on here, you need to treat this like a crime scene.”

“Can we at least roll him over and see if he's got a wallet or a phone in his back pocket?” Howland asked.

Simpson shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

“Wait a minute. How long am I going to be closed?” Gus demanded.

“As long as it takes.” Jamie's mouth was a grim line. He'd had, if anything, less sleep than I had, and he appeared to be fraying a bit around the edges.

There was a banging on the restaurant door. I scooted to answer it.

“Hello, darlin'.” It was my brother-in-law's father, Bard Ramsey, and three of his lobstermen cronies. The local lobstermen gathered at Gus's most days for breakfast, especially now that winter was closing in and most of them had their boats out of the water. “What's goin' on?”

Bard looked pointedly at Jamie and Howland's cruiser parked on the street and Dr. Simpson's navy blue compact SUV next to it.

“Gus is closed,” I explained, reluctant to say more.

“No, he isn't. Everyone knows Gus only closes for February when he and Mrs. Gus go to visit their kids out west.” Bard craned his thick neck, attempting to look down the stairs into the restaurant. “Something happened to Gus?”

“Gus is fine.” I wasn't sure what else I should say, but Bard and his friends didn't budge, so I added, “There's a bit of a situation.”

Which was like opening Pandora's Box Full of Questions. The lobstermen bombarded me with plenty, until I finally announced I had to go. I shut the door, wondering what kind of rumors I'd just started.

As I reentered the dining room, Jamie clicked off his cell phone. Dr. Simpson finished her call too. “They're on the way,” she said to Jamie. He turned toward Chris and me. “You'd best cancel any reservations you have booked for tonight.”

“Gus is open every day, but Julia and I don't serve dinner on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings,” Chris informed him.

He nodded. “That's a break. Did you lock both outside doors last night?”

“Yes,” Chris and I said at once.

“Which one of you did it?”

“I locked the kitchen door.” Chris raised his hand.

“What time was that?”

“About eleven.”

“I locked the street door,” I said. “At around twelve forty-five.”

The layout of Gus's restaurant was quirky. The old former warehouse sat on pilings on a boulder that thrust out into the harbor. The harbor walls were steep at that point, so Gus's public entrance, which was at street level, led to a staircase that customers took down to the restaurant level. The front room housed a lunch counter and a few small tables. An archway opened to a second, much larger dining room, which had faux-leather red booths along the walls and tables at its center. The dining room offered one of the town's best views of the back harbor, the working part of the waterfront.

The second exit, the kitchen door, was at the back of the first room, behind the lunch counter and the open kitchen area where Gus cooked. The passageway to the walk-in refrigerator and the little hallway that led to the door to my apartment stairs were also back there. The kitchen exit opened onto a flat area of asphalt that offered a few parking spaces and a Dumpster. From there, a steep driveway climbed back to street level.

“Did you lock the refrigerator?” Jamie asked.

Gus glanced at the old walk-in with something that looked like affection. “Wouldn't even know how. Bought it used in '84. Never had a key.”

“Right.” Jamie addressed Chris, Gus, and me. “You all can go. We know where to find you.”

“The hell I will,” Gus said.

“Can I stay upstairs in my apartment?” I asked.

“Better not,” Jamie answered. “And we'll need your permission to search it. I'll get you the form.”

“You don't think the dead man was up there?” I couldn't keep the alarm out of my voice.

“I don't think anything yet.”

“Who was at the door?” Gus asked.

“Bard Ramsey and some of the other lobstermen,” I answered. “I told him you were closed.”

Gus sighed. “I'd best phone Mrs. Gus before someone calls to ask her if I'm dead.”

“Officer Howland will stay to secure the scene,” Jamie said. “I'm heading over to the Snuggles Inn to see if we can find out who this guy is.”

“You should bring me with you,” I said.

“Why?”

“So the sisters aren't alarmed when they see you.”

“They've known me all my life, Julia, just like you.”

That was true. I'd grown up across the street from the Snuggles Inn. Jamie, who was my age—thirty—had always lived, still lived, in the house next door to my mother's.

“You're in your uniform, on their front porch at, what?” I looked at my phone. “Seven in the morning.”
My, how time flies when you're not having fun.
“You know it will go better if I'm standing next to you.”

Jamie hesitated. He was well acquainted with Vee Snugg's love of the dramatic. “Okay,” he finally said. “Get your coat. Hurry.”

I ran upstairs; put food and water in bowls for Le Roi, my Maine coon cat; grabbed my coat; and called good-bye. Le Roi lifted a lazy head out of the folds in the duvet, blinked, and went to sleep again.

Chris was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when I came back down.

“It's definitely the same guy,” he whispered.

“Yup. I saw the, uh, scar,” I responded.

“Me too. How the heck . . . ?”

“I don't know.” I inclined my head in the direction of the cops and the ME. “Let's talk soon. Where are you headed?”