Murder in Merino (9 page)

I
t was midnight when Sam and Ben returned to Sandswept Lane. The bread pudding was gone, but the Friday-night group was still there, and except for Abby, who was sleeping soundly in the guest bedroom, they were all wide-awake. Nell had put on a pot of coffee; Ham had found Ben’s cognac and had glasses waiting.

The story they brought back to the group was simple—and horrifying.

Ben had found Jules and Stella on the back porch, sitting on the swing. They were talking to Tommy Porter, the young policeman who’d been a part of the Endicotts’ life since he mowed Ben’s parents’ lawn years before. In his usual efficient way, Tommy carefully recorded everything the women said.

Stella’s face was streaked with tears, her hands knotted in her lap, Ben said. Jules sat expressionless, her face impassive except to offer brief answers to questions. She’d heard nothing. Seen nothing. Until the moment she walked over to the potting shed and stumbled upon a pool of blood—and Jeffrey Meara lying in it. His hand-knit sweater was matted, the soft merino wool soaking up the blood like a sponge.

When Stella arrived shortly after, she had found Jules leaning over the body, futilely pressing a scarf to the wound. A serrated garden knife lay on the dirt beside the body.

Stella leapt from the swing when she saw Ben. She melted into his arms, tears flowing freely, along with choked and needless apologies to Sam that she had screwed up the open house.

Jules had been strangely calm, the two men said. Her only visible emotion—and that wasn’t much—had come later when she thanked them for driving her back to the Ravenswood B&B, where Mary Pisano was waiting for her. Esther Gibson had been on duty at the police station and alerted Mary, thinking Jules might need someone to be with her.

The group sat in silence for a while, each nursing private thoughts of a friendly bartender who made the Ocean’s Edge a little bit like Boston’s Cheers, a place where Jeffrey, at least, knew everybody’s name.

“Dear Jeffrey,” Nell whispered softly. “Everyone loved Jeffrey.”

It was a refrain that would be echoed from Coffee’s patio to the Ocean’s Edge, from Gloucester to Rockport, one that would roll down the streets of Sea Harbor, gathering momentum and passion in the days and weeks to come.

Even when it was challenged.

B
y Saturday morning the rain had stopped, the wind had relaxed, and white clouds scuttled across a blue sky. It was as if the storm itself had provided a background for the horrible happenings at Izzy’s cottage. And then it was over.

Today was a new day, a beautiful day.

Except it wasn’t.

Ben was already up and the coffee was brewing when Nell came down the back stairs. She had slept little, her dreams tangled up in a jumble of images—Jules Ainsley, a tearful Stella Palazola, Jeffrey Meara. So many lives shaken by a horrible act that had happened while the rest of them were going about their ordinary lives, making dinner, checking the weather, cleaning up the family room.

Ben wasn’t alone in the kitchen, as often happened on Saturday mornings. Usually it was because he made blueberry or Scottish scones on weekends. Today it was simply for a cup of coffee, maybe a hug. Today it was for friendship.

Birdie looked up as Nell walked into the room. Izzy sat across from her, poring over the
Sea Harbor Gazette
.

The headline was big:

STABBING DEATH ON RIDGE ROAD

The article was short.

“There isn’t much to say,” Ben said. “Not yet.”

Nell nodded and leaned over Izzy’s shoulder, reading the article, which talked more about what a Sea Harbor legend Jeffrey Meara was than about the cruel way his life had ended.

“Sam is meeting Jerry Thompson over at the Ridge Road house this morning,” Izzy said. “There’s yellow tape all over it right now and they’re pulling up Stella’s ‘For Sale’ sign.”

“Poor Stella,” Nell said. “This must be absolutely awful for her.”

“It’s awful for everyone. I saw Mary Pisano out walking this morning. She was clearly upset,” Birdie said. “Jeffrey was a longtime friend.”

Izzy looked up from the paper. “Was Jules with her?”

“No. She was out running. Mary said she left at the crack of dawn.”

It was probably a panacea for Jules. Nell pictured her running into the breeze, hair flying, escaping from the haunting images. She was happy Jules had an outlet. She would surely need one to get through all this.

“I wouldn’t blame her if she was running as far away from Sea Harbor as she can get,” Izzy said. “It must have been terrible for her, finding Jeffrey like that.”

Ben poured Nell a cup of coffee. “No, she won’t be heading away from here—not soon anyway.”

“I don’t mean literally,” Izzy said. “But imagine, being here on vacation and finding the dead body of someone you barely know at an open house?”

“Not a pleasant thing, for sure, but Jules may have known Jeffrey better than we think. Apparently he had called her and insisted on meeting her at the Ridge Road house yesterday. That’s why he was there, she said. They were supposed to meet before the open house.”

“Good grief. Why?” Nell asked.

“That’s the question. Jules told the police she hadn’t the faintest idea. She had met Jeffrey, but only casually.”

“That’s how it looked to me when I saw them talking at the Ocean’s Edge a couple times.” Nell thought about the previous Sunday night—which now seemed like a lifetime ago—when Danny had introduced Jules to Jeffrey. Or was it the Hansons he had introduced Jules to? It was all hazy, even though it had been only a few days before. Death seemed to squeeze time into a meaningless blur.

“That’s what Jules said, too. That she’d met him at the Edge bar. He had seemed a little odd, she said.”

“That isn’t a word any of us would use to describe Jeffrey,” Birdie said. “
Odd?
Why would anyone think sweet Jeffrey Meara was odd?”

“She had the feeling he was staring at her, as if he’d met her before,” Ben said. “But in any case, Jerry Thompson has asked her not to leave town for a few days, not until they get their arms around all this.”

“No wonder the poor girl was out running,” Nell said. “That’s awful, Ben. Surely they don’t think she had anything to do with it.” But even as she said the words, she knew the police would most certainly look at Jules.

Ben spelled it out. “At this point they have to suspect everyone,” he said. “But Jules was right there at the scene. She was meeting him, according to phone records. Her fingerprints were all over the knife. And the fact that she’s a relative stranger here certainly won’t help.”

“Geesh,” Izzy said. She walked over and impulsively wrapped her arms around her uncle.

Ben hugged her back, smiling down into her hair. “I love you, too, Izzy. And the chief is on this. Don’t worry.”

But she was worried. They all were. Nell watched her niece and her heart ached. Izzy was a mother now, and the thought of evil lurking in their town was doubly awful with baby Abby to protect.

Izzy finished her coffee and was off to the yarn shop to teach a beginning knitters’ class—a futile effort to make it an ordinary Saturday.

Ben left to meet Sam at the Ridge Road house. “Moral support, if nothing else,” he told Nell, and kissed her, a little longer than usual.

“Father Northcutt is over at Maeve’s,” Birdie said. “She’s in good hands.”

Nell nodded. “Jeffrey told me about his love affair with Maeve the very first time I met him. ‘I fell in love with an
older
woman,’ he said. ‘And me just a bumbling kid.’ And by some miracle, he said, she had noticed him. Then, years later, after she went to college and lived for a while in the big city, she came back to Sea Harbor and she remembered him—still a bachelor, much to his mother’s dismay. And a few years after that . . . she married him. It was a long time in coming, Jeffrey said, but well worth the wait.”

They seemed to be the perfect pair, balancing out each other’s personalities. The social bartender and his quiet wife. He had his restaurant; Maeve had her garden and her crossword puzzles. It worked for them.

“I don’t think Jeffrey showed his face around Our Lady of Safe Seas much, but Maeve more than made up for his absence and knows Father Larry well,” Birdie said, getting up and slipping on her sweater. She looked out the kitchen window at the sun-splashed yard. A light breeze moved through pine trees. “He’ll take good care of her.”

She turned back to Nell. “And you and I, Nell, we need to take care of us. Before the day gets away from us, let’s get in that walk you promised me. I’m in need of stretching these legs and cleaning out my head.”

They went out the back way, across the deck and backyard and down the wooded path to the beach road. Several runners passed them, and an old man with his dog walked slowly along the narrow stretch of beach. Teenagers sat on the rocks, tapping messages into cell phones. But even on the beach, a feeling of sadness weighed down the air.

It was the weight of
death
—for that’s how people would talk about it for a while. “Murder” was too harsh a word, too awful to comfortably weave into September days.

“It doesn’t seem real,” Nell said. She watched the waves lap up against the smooth sand, then suck it back into the sea. Retreat. Return. Retreat. Nature’s simple rhythm usually brought quiet to her spirit, but today the waves seemed somehow menacing.

Birdie nodded and quickened her pace, as if speed might put some time and distance between them and Jeffrey’s death.

They walked up the winding road at the end of the cove and through a neighborhood of fine, elegant homes, then around a bend to another stretch of beach, where Izzy liked to push Abby in her stroller. Pete Halloran jogged by, arms pumping. When he noticed Birdie and Nell, he slowed to a walk, moving in step with the women.

His face was somber. “Old man Meara gave me my first busboy job,” he said, wiping away the beads of perspiration dotting his forehead. “I sucked at it and he fired me. He said I needed to make better use of my time and suggested practicing the guitar. He was right.”

“There’ll be lots of Jeffrey Meara stories being told this week,” Birdie said, patting Pete’s arm. Cass’s lanky brother dwarfed the older woman by nearly two feet and he lowered his head to hear her, a band of sandy hair falling across his forehead.

“Losing the Bartender is a sad thing. But having it happen the way it did . . . that’s . . . it’s . . .”

Trying to grasp the horror of murder defied words. They’d try and try, but it was a reality that shunned adequate emotional descriptions. It happened. It was awful. And that was that. There was nothing they could do about it.

Except find the person who did this, who ended a life so purposefully and cruelly. And then begin to piece their lives back together again.

As the beach narrowed further, Pete waved them off and picked up his pace, running down to the water’s edge and around a mound of granite boulders.

Birdie and Nell walked back toward the road, suddenly aware of how far they’d come. Birdie sighed. “Was it just a heartbeat ago we were standing in this same spot with Isabel and Abby, enjoying the breeze and the magic of a September day?”

“A simple day,” Nell murmured. She looked down the road, toward the bushy hill that climbed up to the house on Ridge Road.

“Birdie,” she said suddenly. “Look.”

Birdie stopped and followed the point of Nell’s finger. “Good grief. Déjà vu.”

Jules Ainsley stood at the foot of the incline, staring beyond the yellow tape that marked the property, up through the trees to the top of the hill. To the top of the house. The porch with the hanging swing. To the potting shed.

“Come.” Birdie touched Nell on the arm and they walked briskly down the road. Jules seemed not to notice when they stopped beside her. Instead, she remained focused on the hill, as if waiting for something to happen. Maybe for time to turn back. For yesterday to be gone.

Nell tried to imagine what she was seeing when she looked up at Izzy’s old house, tried to read what was going through her mind. But beyond the trees and bushes, all she could see was the scene Ben had described to them the night before. The awful scene of a man dead outside a potting shed, lying in a pool of blood. The same scene, she supposed, that was even more vivid in the memory of the woman standing beside her.

Finally Jules turned toward them and managed a sad smile. “Who was he?” she asked. “Why was he wanting to be in my life? Why did . . . ?” Her words dropped off. She shook her head as if dismissing them, and then she looked back up at the house, her hands on her hips, as if somehow the answers she sought would be up there, hanging from a bush or the yellow tape that was visible through the trees.

“He was a good and decent man,” Birdie said. “That’s who Jeffrey Meara was.”

Jules was so quiet Nell wasn’t sure Birdie’s words had registered.

Finally she asked, “When will the police take the tape down?” Her voice was neutral now. Almost businesslike, as if she were asking what time the bank opened or when the train left for Boston.

“The police tape?” Nell asked. Her brows lifted in surprise. Somehow, the day after a terrible death, police tape seemed supremely unimportant.

Jules turned away from the woods, the house, and Nell’s words. She climbed onto a bike that was leaning against an old post and said, more to herself than the others, “Maybe the Realtor will know.”

“Why is it important?” Nell asked.

Jules looked puzzled and taken aback, as if she had asked a most logical question, perhaps
the
question that needed to be asked at that precise moment, and Nell was somehow remiss in not having the answer.

Then she said slowly and patiently, as if speaking to someone who might have difficulty understanding: “So I know when I can move in.”

L
ater that morning, Nell and Birdie ordered an antipasto plate and a selection of Garozzo’s choice cold cuts and Italian bread to be sent over to Maeve Meara’s house. As an afterthought, they had Harry pack up a bag of sandwiches for themselves and headed down the road to the Seaside Knitting Studio.

The encounter with Jules lingered with both women, her odd comments troubling. They had wanted to comfort her, to ease the awfulness of what she’d so recently seen.

And Jules wanted to take down police tape and move into a house where a man’s blood still stained the potting shed floor and walkway.

Perhaps Izzy would know more.

Mae sent them immediately to the back room. “Stella Palazola just flew by me on her way to see Izzy. The poor girl looked awful,” Mae said. “White as a sheet. No young girl should be witness to such a horrible thing.” She turned back to the computer and a customer wanting to place a special order.

Stella was sitting at the old wooden table, looking like she hadn’t slept in days.

Izzy looked relieved when Birdie and Nell walked down the steps. She eyed the familiar white bag Birdie carried. “Harry’s sandwiches? You’re an angel, Birdie. Stella needs food.”

Birdie set the bag down and gave Stella a hug. She noticed several sheets of paper on the table in front of her. “These look official,” she said.

Stella fidgeted with one, curling back the corner. She nodded. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a makeshift ponytail, the scattering of freckles across her nose looking more prominent than usual. She had contacts in today, swimming in watery eyes.

“Has Jules Ainsley contacted you?” Nell asked. She sat down on the other side of the table.

“We’re closed today,” Stella began, as if the answer to Nell’s questions required some background information. “Uncle Mario was a friend of Jeffrey’s and he didn’t want us opening the office. Mostly, I think he wanted me to get some sleep if I could. Wishful thinking, I guess.”

Birdie patted her hand. “It wasn’t a good night for sleep. Tonight will be better.”

Stella managed a half smile and then went on. “I was in the shower when she knocked on my door. Jules, I mean.”

“She came to your apartment?” Izzy asked.

“Yes. She went to the office first, and when it was closed she somehow found out where I lived.”

Izzy picked up one of the papers and looked at the
PALAZOLA REAL ESTATE
heading at the top. She scanned the text, her eyebrows pulled together. “This is an offer on my house.”

“She wants it, Izzy. Real bad.”

“She wants that house. Now? Today? Even after—?”

“That doesn’t seem to matter to her,” Stella said. “She doesn’t want to wait. She even offered more money than you and Sam are asking, just so you wouldn’t have to wait for other offers and would feel okay about it. She wants it now—like right now.”

“Other offers?” Izzy said. She looked up at Stella, then stared again at the formal offer. “She wanted you to bring this to me today? What was she thinking?”

Nell told Izzy about their morning walk. “It was just like the other day, when we saw her staring up at the house from the street below. But this time, we thought she was there because of the murder, that maybe she was in shock, or trying to make some sense out of what she’d seen, or maybe she’d gone back to see if it was real or simply a bad dream.”

“But we were wrong. It wasn’t any of those things,” Birdie said. “She was wondering when she’d be able to move in.”

Stella shook her head, her ponytail swinging back and forth. “It’s nuts. Uncle Mario says houses where someone has died in such an awful way are hard to sell. Sometimes they never sell, and the house is taken down and something else built in its place. Or maybe they put in a park on the land. Like with a memorial. You know—like Cass did with old Finnegan’s house over near the water. Jules told me that was her fear, that someone would tear the house down. Maybe even you, Izzy. She said that we can’t let that happen.”

Izzy ran her fingers through her hair, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. “Sam and I haven’t even talked about what we want to do with the house. It seems so unimportant in the light of what’s happened, especially while everyone in town is trying to come to grips with the awfulness of Jeffrey’s death and to help Maeve deal with the tragedy. The man isn’t even buried yet.”

Her words matched Birdie’s and Nell’s thoughts perfectly.

Nell pulled out the sandwiches and passed the wrapped parcels around. Stella opened hers immediately and bit into a juicy Reuben on Harry’s homemade rye bread. Thousand Island dressing oozed out the sides. Izzy was right—Stella hadn’t eaten in a while.

“I’m mystified about something, Stella,” Birdie said. “Maybe you know the answer. What does Jules find so unique and special—not to mention urgent—about that particular house? What does she love so much about it?”

Stella shifted in the chair and looked at Birdie sadly, as if regretting her whole decision to become a Realtor. Her buoyant enthusiasm of a week earlier was buried somewhere deep beneath the tragedy that should have been her first open house.

“She hasn’t even seen the inside the house, Miz Favazza. All she’s seen of the property is a dead body on a stone floor. What is there to love?”

•   •   •

Izzy tucked the papers into her purse and brought them with her to dinner that night. Cass and Jane Brewster had gone early and saved a large table in the corner of Gracie’s Lazy Lobster Café. The unpretentious restaurant was out on the pier and Pete’s band often performed on the deck, a wide structure that hung directly over the water. No one was in the mood for a night of fun, but Gracie needed the business, and Pete, Andy, and Merry—the Fractured Fish threesome—needed the moral support. Playing in the shadow of the Bartender’s death would be difficult.

Merry Jackson, singer and keyboard player in the band, came over to the table and hugged everyone. “The loss of someone we all knew and liked is awful enough,” she said, repeating aloud what all of them were thinking, “but beneath all that, beneath the sadness of Jeffrey’s passing, is the scary and horrifying fact that someone murdered him.”

Jeffery was a man who had never left his hometown for longer than a honeymoon trip to Nantucket, a fishing trip in the White Mountains, and infrequent errands in the city—certainly not places or events where one went out of his way to make enemies—so his murderer was likely a resident of Sea Harbor, Massachusetts. Someone they knew. Perhaps someone seated in Gracie’s lobster shack that very night, listening to the Fractured Fish play a medley of old Beatles tunes.

Ben looked over the papers Izzy handed him while Sam flagged down a waitress and ordered Gracie’s lobster special for the table.

“Did you see this, Sam?” Ben asked. He pointed to a line in the offer.

Sam’s eyes widened. “I missed that.”

“It’s a cash offer,” Ben explained to the others. “Not unheard of, but a little surprising.” He moved aside several water glasses so the waitress could fit a plate of crab-stuffed mushrooms and a pitcher of beer on the table.

“Especially for someone who has never seen the house,” Izzy said. “The offer is more than generous. In fact, it seems wrong to sell it for that price. I can’t imagine how Jules can afford it. Mary Pisano got the impression money might be tight for her.”

“The offer looks legitimate. Earnest money and all, and it doesn’t sound like Jules cares much what an inspection might turn up,” Sam said.

Ham Brewster stroked his beard. “I dunno. It somehow seems disrespectful. Not that it makes a lot of logical sense, I suppose. But the property is a crime scene right now. A man died there. Can’t she wait until we’ve gotten through these next few days?”

Izzy nodded. “I’m with you, Ham.”

“I am, too,” Ben said. “Let’s get through the next few days, do what we can for Maeve. Try to deal with the rumors that will surely begin to fly with Monday’s paper and the workweek beginning.” He looked at Sam and Izzy. “It’s something you don’t need to deal with this weekend.”

“Wednesday,” Sam said. “Jules had Stella write in that the offer was good until Wednesday.”

“Geesh,” Cass said, then hid her own thoughts behind a frosty mug of beer.

Two waitresses appeared with the lobster special served family style—bright red lobsters, baked potatoes with sour cream, coleslaw, and Gracie’s famous garlic bread. A pile of lobster utensils sitting on top of plastic bibs filled a basket at the end of the table.

Nell sat at the one end, her back to the wall, listening to the hum of conversation around her but only tuning in to bits and pieces. Concentration didn’t come easily and she finally gave up, letting the Fractured Fish music take over.

She was surprised at the number of people filing into Gracie’s tonight. Perhaps it was the same need she and Ben had felt. Not a desire to go out for fun or food, really. But to be in the gentle embrace of friends.

She looked around and spotted the mayor at a table near the deck, sitting with his wife and the Pisanos—Mary and her husband, Ed. A mayor, his wealthy wife, a bed-and-breakfast owner, a fisherman. It was one of the things Nell loved about Sea Harbor: the blurred lines of social standing.

Stan looked tired, Nell thought. The campaign was getting to him. Karen rested a hand on his sleeve, a sweet gesture, even from where Nell sat. Stan was exceedingly handsome, she thought, realizing she rarely had the opportunity to observe him like this—quietly, discreetly. Next to him, Karen’s pleasant appearance was almost diminished, but her presence always carried a certain control. A helpmate, a perfect first lady—roles she seemed to cherish.

Izzy followed her aunt’s look. “Do you suppose Beatrice is here?” And then they both spotted the councilwoman at the same time. Her bright green dress was difficult to miss. She was sitting with Rachel and Don Wooten and another councilman Nell knew only slightly. Their conversation looked to be engaging, though somber, to all except for Don, who sat slightly removed from the others, nursing a beer.

Thinking of his partner, Nell thought. This would be a difficult time for Don. The angry exchange she had overheard came back to her as she watched a range of emotion wash across his face—sadness, frustration, weariness. The unpleasant encounter he’d had with Jeffrey would make this all even more difficult for him, to have had such unpleasant words with Jeffrey and then have him gone so tragically.

She didn’t see Jules Ainsley in the small café and felt a momentary twinge at forgetting about her. No matter what she and Birdie had seen that morning, one didn’t easily erase the image of finding a murdered body. Nell knew firsthand what that was like, about the haunting images that appeared at the least-expected moment. Jules couldn’t be immune to that, however it might have seemed. And unlike those sitting around Nell’s table, unlike Stella Palazola and others so intimately connected to this crime, Jules had no one to comfort her.

Nell pivoted toward Cass, sitting next to her, her chair slightly turned. She, too, had removed herself from the conversation and seemed to be wrapping herself up in the music, her meal untouched. Not a usual scenario for Cass.

Nell leaned over and asked softly, “Where’s Danny tonight?”

“He said he’d stop in later. He had something to do first.” Cass’s eyes remained on the band, her fingers strumming on the table along with her brother’s guitar. Finally she scooted her chair closer to Nell’s and looked at her, her palms flat on the table. “He went over to Mary’s B and B. He said it was the right thing to do—Jules doesn’t know a lot of people in town.”

“Maybe it was the right thing to do.”

Cass’s fingers began their light tapping again. “Maybe.”

“It had to be awful for her, finding the body like that.”

“If that’s what happened,” Cass said.

“What do you mean?” Nell picked a piece of lobster meat from the shell and dipped it in a pot of lemon butter.

“I don’t know what I mean. But why would Jeffrey call her and insist she meet with him like that? It doesn’t make sense. It sounds . . . it sounds made up.”

Nell had played with the same thought, but excused it by admitting that Jeffrey was looking strangely at Jules that night at the Ocean’s Edge. Izzy said she’d noticed the same thing. It could have been for the same reason a lot of people looked at Jules—she was striking looking, attractive in an unusual way. She turned heads. But when she replayed the scene, she realized it was a different kind of look the bartender had sent Jules’s way. It’s why Jules thought the bartender was odd. It was as if he had seen her before and was trying to figure out where. “There are certainly missing pieces,” Nell admitted. “And it’s true we don’t know Jules very well, but she certainly seems like a straight shooter, even when it might not be to her advantage. I can’t imagine why she’d lie about this. Besides, all the police have to do is check Jeffrey’s cell phone.”

Danny Brandley’s long shadow fell over the table. “Mind if I sit?” He squeezed a chair in next to Cass, greeted the others at the table, and then turned toward Nell and Cass. His face was somber. “I caught the end of your conversation. You’re talking about Jules.”

“Cass said you went to see her. How is she?” Nell asked.

“She’s a survivor, that’s for sure. And it’s a good thing, I guess. She sure didn’t plan on all this when she came to Sea Harbor.”

“What did she plan on?” Cass asked. Her layered message was carried in the hard tone of her voice.

Danny took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He ignored the tone in Cass’s voice. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t know for sure. Originally she just wanted my help finding out how to access old records, that sort of thing. She wanted to know more about the town, she said, and she figured since I was an investigative reporter I should know how to do those things.”

“What was she looking for?”

“Just things about the town, its history, maybe some genealogy stuff, she said.” He took a pair of tongs and transferred a lobster from the platter to his plate. “And she asked me not to talk about it, so I didn’t.”