The Wedding Shawl (30 page)

“So, like I said, we were walking along, thinking a hike might be okay, maybe one of the quarries or Ravenswood, when Izzy comes out of her shop looking lost.”

“Looking hungry,” Izzy corrected.

“Yeah. Harry’s Deli was packed. The Edge had too many ladies drinking tea.”

“So here we are.” Izzy smiled and grabbed for a cookie before Cass devoured them all. She spotted the familiar bag at Nell’s feet, and her eyes widened.

“Don’t touch,” Nell said. “We’re too close to finishing. You and your shawl are going to have to stay in separate rooms until your wedding day.”

Izzy’s brows lifted, and she pressed a hand into her chest. “Breathe, breathe,” she told herself. “Geesh, a wedding day.”

“And that demands more than cookies. At least let’s get some protein into you.” Nell disappeared and was back in minutes, her platter filled with a round of Camembert and hunks of aged Gouda, white cheddar, and a tangy goat cheese. A basket of bagel crisps and a bowl of grapes were on the side.

Pete eyed the tray. “This settles it. I’m moving in.”

Andy sat up, his legs bending over the side of the chaise. His smiled disappeared. “Hey, we heard what happened yesterday.”

“I suppose the world has, now that Mary has made us the lead in her ‘About Town’ column.”

“I heard it in the bar,” Andy said.

“When?”

“Last night. I was working for my dad so he could get a break. Some guys came in, vacationers, I think. I didn’t know them. They’d had a few. They said someone was working over some tires at Pelican Pier. They thought it was a big joke. They’d never have even seen it except one of the guys’ Frisbees flew in that direction. I couldn’t leave the bar, but M.J. and Alex Arcado were there with the Brewsters, and they all ran down to the pier. They didn’t see anything, though, and couldn’t find the car the guys were talking about. It was packed. Kids playing everywhere. Kites all around.”

“What time was it?”

“Around six, six thirty.”

Six thirty. Someone knew they were gone for the day and that the parking lot was packed at that time on a Sunday. People having dinner at the Edge or Gracie’s Lobster Café, picnicking on the wide green space adjacent to the pier. It was a favorite place to be on an early summer night.

And somebody, someone knew all those things.

It’d been planned so carefully. And done while it was still light, which was maybe the scariest part of all.

“It’s about Tiffany’s death, isn’t it?” Andy’s voice was low, his eyes looking at Nell in a way that demanded an honest answer.

“Yes, we think so.”

“Someone is worried that we’re asking too many questions,” Izzy said.

“Maybe you should stop, then,” Andy said. He looked down at his hands. One leg jiggled slightly as he talked. “The police …”

“Are doing a fine job,” Birdie said. “But there are such things as neighborhood watch groups that do a fine job, too.”

Pete laughed, a belly laugh that rolled around the deck and drew smiles. “So you’re now a neighborhood watch team?” He gave Birdie a bear hug.

“Someone has to be, young man.” She shook off his hug and lifted herself straight. Her eyes were on Andy.

Pete’s smile fell away. “I think that’s fine. But this is a dirty thing that’s happening here. It’s murder.” He looked hard at his sister. “Cass, when did you learn how to catch murderers? You had a hard time catching me in tag.”

But Pete wasn’t joking. And it wasn’t Cass’ lack of skill at tag that bothered him. Nell understood. But what Pete didn’t understand, what Ben and Sam and Danny didn’t, was that women sensed danger, too. And once their antennae detected it, they’d do what they needed to do to be safe. Beside her, Birdie took Pete’s big, guitar-strumming hand in her own and held it, two of hers to one of his. Her face was smiling but her words were dead serious.

“The thing is, Peter, the police have to go on facts. We can pepper those with intuition and emotions. Sometimes that works; sometimes it doesn’t. But until proven otherwise, that’s what’s going on here.”

“And the facts all point to me,” Andy said. His voice was resigned but ragged.

“That’s exactly right, Andy, dear,” Birdie said with just a touch of humor. “You could use a dose of emotion and intuition; all of you could.”

“There are facts,” Cass said, looking at Andy. “But not a shred of proof.”

“Right, no proof, nothing like that, but the chief is pretty up front with me. Tommy Porter is, too. I may act like life is a cakewalk, but I know what’s going on, and I know my picture is probably sitting in front of some Sea Harbor cop right this minute, wondering what they’ve missed. They called me last night, soon as they started working on the tire slashing. ‘Where were you at such and such a time?’ I guess I was lucky I took over for Pop—I had a dozen witnesses who wouldn’t have had a beer in their hand if I hadn’t been there. But I might not have. I might have been home alone. No alibi. Again.”

The wear on Andy’s face grew more obvious as he talked. He had walked in with a smile in place that Nell suspected he worked hard at keeping there, probably for Jake’s sake. But once the smile was stripped away, Andy was in pain.

“Andy, that night, the night she died,” Nell began.

“Which one?” he said, and the sky seemed to darken with his words.

Not which night.
Which girl?
he was asking. Nell looked out toward the yard and the guest cottage. Claire had turned off the music, gathered her things, and gone on inside.

“The night Harmony died.”

He nodded.

“Did something happen that night that you haven’t told a hundred times?”

“I doubt it. It’s kind of like you said, though. With the police, I told them every fact I could think of. But emotion wasn’t part of it, not like talking to you guys, or to my dad.”

“Could you tell us, then?” Birdie asked. Her question brought with it enough compassion to wrap Andy up on a winter night and keep him warm.

“Graduation. Somehow Harmony got her mother to sneak her out for the party that night, so we met up at school—Harmony, me, Tiff. But I was anxious that night. Things hadn’t been right with Harmony and me for a couple months.

“We’d been best friends, inseparable since advanced algebra class. We were newbie freshmen and she was better at math than I was. She helped me get ready for a test.” He looked up at the sky, as if saying,
Yah, you know you were, Harmony.
“I don’t think we ever studied alone for a math test after that. She was … she was everything to me. My best friend, my girlfriend.”

“But something happened?”

“It was about the time I noticed my mom getting so tired—so it was spring, senior year. I remember because my mom liked Harmony a lot—and Mom missed her when she stopped coming around. She’d say she was coming over, and then I’d see her drive off in another direction.”

“Where’d she go?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. But she was pulling away. We were both crazy busy studying that last semester. I had band practice; she was on a basketball team. But something between us was strained. It was a hard time. For me, anyway.

“Harmony and I had always told each other everything. I knew all about her crazy father, how hard her mom worked to make her life good, pushing her to study, to join the basketball team when she didn’t want to—and then she loved it, just like her mom said she would. She told me it was the best thing that ever happened to her. I knew how her mom scraped to buy her the kind of clothes she wanted. And then the talk stopped. Days would go by without us getting together, and then I’d see her at school and it would be like nothing happened. She’d hug me. Maybe come over after school that day.”

“Do you think she was seeing another boy?”

Andy was silent for so long, Nell thought he wasn’t going to answer, and she stepped in to ease the moment. “That’s probably hard to ans—”

“No, it’s okay. For a long time I didn’t think so. I’d watch her at school, see who she talked to. Crazy, huh? One day I noticed she didn’t have her class ring on, and I asked about it. I thought maybe she’d left it at some guy’s house. She looked at me with kind of a startled look, then walked away. It was strange. Tiffany didn’t know what happened to it, either, but she still insisted that Harmony told her everything—they had absolutely no secrets and she’d be the first to know if there was someone else. And there wasn’t, she said. Finally, though, I realized that Tiffany was saying what she wanted to be true—but she was wrong. This was one thing Harmony wasn’t telling even her best friend.”

“Why did you think that was?”

“That’s a mystery. If she really liked another kid, her mom would probably have been okay with it, just like she was with me. And Tiffany would have been okay with it, too. She didn’t care who Harmony’s boyfriend was.”

“But Harmony still came over to your house sometimes, even fooled Tiffany into thinking you were still together. You went with her to the dance that night.”

“I think I was her front, her protection. And I couldn’t see it because I didn’t want to lose her. For whatever reason, she didn’t want to tell her mother—and it was fine for her to be with me. So I was her excuse.”

“And the night of the dance?”

“That’s when I knew for sure. We were there together. The three of us, just like always. But Harmony kept looking at her watch. Tiffany had gone off somewhere, and I asked Harmony point-blank what was going on with her. I needed to know. I
had
to know.

“So she told me.”

“She told you she had another boyfriend?” Birdie asked softly. Except for an occasional clink of a beer bottle against the table or the knife slicing through the cheese, the deck was silent.

“Not at first. She started walking away, out to the parking lot. I followed her. I was mad, tired of it all. I demanded that she tell me. Yelled it at her back. People were looking at us, so she hurried up, and then I hurried up, all the way to the far end of the parking lot, where she’d parked her car. I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back. I told her I had to know the truth.

“She turned and looked at me like I was a stranger. She told me she was in love. It was for real, and if I loved her at all, I would turn and walk away. And then she jumped in her car, slammed the door, and locked it. I pulled on it—I don’t know why, I guess to stop her from leaving me, as if it would have done any good—”

The fact that it might have saved her life was on everyone’s mind, but Andy was deep in the moment, and he went on.

“She started up the car and tore out of the parking lot. She nearly backed over my foot.”

“Did anyone see her racing out?”

“I don’t think so. Some people were going into the gym and saw me chasing her to the car. And maybe someone saw the car tearing out of the lot. I took a shortcut through the bushes to my truck and went out after her, but I was too late. When I pulled out onto the street, she was gone. I drove all over the town all night. I was sure if I found her, I could make it all right.”

“What about Tiffany?”

“We just left her stranded at the gym. Cool of me, huh? I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Later that night I drove by her house to see if Harmony might have come back there. I saw Tiffany in the window, but Harmony’s car wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.”

She wasn’t anywhere.
The words lingered as silence fell over the somber group.

Andy rested his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and looking at none of them. “It took me a long time to come to grips with all of it. I think I put everything on hold while my mom was sick. Then I reached a degree of acceptance of it all. It was a bad time in my life.”

“Was the experience something you could share with Tiffany?”

The question seemed to startle Andy. “Tiffany?”

“You had this shared experience, this mutual friend,” Birdie began, but Andy was shaking his head.

“Our link was Harmony, sure. But when Harmony was gone, there was no link.”

“Maybe to you, man, but not to her.” Pete’s comment was thoughtful, not judgmental. “My take is that even back then, Tiff probably had the hots for you, Andy. And once she did all that beauty school stuff, she decided to go for it. To go for
you
, I think is what I’m saying.”

Andy half smiled. “I don’t seem to have the best luck with women, do I?” He looked up through a swatch of blond hair that had escaped his ponytail and fell in front of his eyes. “Yeah, I don’t know. After Harmony died, she called a few times, but I never called back, and then she kind of disappeared. I didn’t even know she was around Sea Harbor until a few months ago when she appeared at one of our gigs. She was more assertive than the quiet girl who hung around Harmony. She’d lost weight, colored her hair. She seemed to be everywhere I looked.”

“So what was that about?” Izzy asked. “Seems she was starstruck.”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s like Birdie said; she suddenly wanted there to be this link between us. It was uncomfortable at first, but then it was kind of nice. You know how that is. Sometimes you just don’t want to be alone, and she took all the uneasiness out of ‘dating.’ So we started being together. It was good. For a while, anyway.”

“And then?” Nell said.

“Then recently she started getting really possessive, like we were joined at the hip. Like she had some claim to me. She even mentioned marriage the other night at the Palate. It was probably partly my fault. I just went out with her for fun. To be with a woman. She was easy to be with. But she looked at it differently, and I didn’t see that at first. I was dumb. But when I did, I tried to explain, to back off.”

Nell was quiet. Andy had been so forthright. But they were all pushing him, and moving into areas that might be too private.

Pete took a swig of his beer. “Okay, there’s an elephant in the room.” He looked at Andy. “People heard her at the Palate that night, man. She was loud. And she said something about having a baby.”

An awful silence fell on the group. Oppressive and uncomfortable.

Cass glared at Pete, but Andy just shook his head as if too tired to protest.

“It’s okay. I figured someone heard her.”