A Side of Murder Read online

  The town of Fair Harbor is clustered around the shores of Crystal Bay, a dreamscape of brilliant blue waters dotted with green islands tenanted only by sandpipers and egrets. The locals divide the bay into two parts—Little Crystal, a smaller body of water surrounded on three sides by the town, and then, leading out from the little bay, Big Crystal, an enormous expanse protected from the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow, five-mile-long barrier bar of sand and dune grass known by locals as the Outer Beach.

  Along the bay’s inland shore, narrow saltwater rivers wind from the bay through dense cordgrass marshes into various saltwater ponds. Some of them are tiny hidden coves that are not much more than mud puddles at low water. The larger saltwater ponds are ringed by gray-shingled cottages and—more recently—gray-shingled mansions. The largest and deepest of the ponds are dominated by the town’s boatyards and marinas.

  Fair Harbor, when I was growing up, was very much a small town. It had grown, of course, since I’d left, but it still maintained its old-fashioned charm. It had been spared by the chain stores, which had preferred the nearby and much larger shopping hub of Hyannis, so Nelson’s grocery store, Livingston’s pharmacy, Karen’s Penny Candy, the Shear Beauty hair salon, and Taylor’s department store were all still lined up like cheerful soldiers along Main Street. The town hall, department of public works, and the post office were all to be found on our other major thoroughfare, called, unsurprisingly, Municipal Road.

  As Miles, Jenny, and I drove through the intersection of Main and Locust Streets, I craned my neck to see the house I’d grown up in. There it was, halfway down Locust, a white clapboard foursquare, solid and respectable, as had befitted Robert and Veronica Barnes’s solid and respectable position as the editor in chief and senior journalist, respectively, of the Cape Cod Clarion. It had been two years since they’d retired and moved to Florida, but I still thought of the house on Locust Street as theirs. As mine.

  The house slipped out of sight as we continued down Main. We turned right onto Memorial Road with its Civil War monument bearing a bronze statue of a Union soldier. As a child I’d been very impressed by his extravagant mustache. We always called the statue Andy Clyde. I have no idea why.

  Soon the truck was humming by Mirror Lake, one of the many freshwater, spring-fed kettle ponds on the Cape formed when the glaciers retreated some fourteen thousand years ago. Around the lake’s shores, tidy shingled cottages owned by year-rounders rubbed elbows with the far larger but equally tidy shingled houses of the summer people. It was a peaceful coexistence that had lasted for generations, cemented by a mutual love of the Cape and its traditions.

  Another quarter mile and Bower’s Pond, with its twisting saltwater river leading out to Little Crystal Bay, came into view on our left. I craned my neck to see if I could spot Aunt Ida’s house on the opposite bank. Once upon a time, the house on its little square of lawn had been visible through the tall locust trees. Now a wall of briars and underbrush had grown so high that only the chimney showed.

  Halfway around the pond, Miles slowed down and turned off Monument onto an unpaved, sandy road with a large wooden sign reading “Bayberry Point, Private Way.” On the Cape, “private way” does not mean “keep out.” It just means travel at your own risk. Because virtually every private way on the Cape (and there are hundreds of them) is a sandy, unpaved road booby-trapped with deep ruts and potholes carefully preserved in order to keep cars moving at a snail’s pace. This protects the kids and dogs walking in the middle of the road while daydreaming about dinosaurs or squirrels. It is, in my opinion, a good system.

  Miles slowed the truck. “Do you remember where the house actually is?” he asked. “Because all I know about Bayberry Point is that it’s a maze.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t been there in years. But I have the street address in my e-mail, Roland sent it to me.” I scrolled hastily through my Gmail. “Here it is: twelve Snow’s Way. I’ll put it into Waze.” I tapped a few more keys on my phone and within seconds an annoyingly cheerful virtual woman was saying, “Let’s get going!”

  We bumped around Bayberry Point for a few minutes until the virtual woman got us to Snow’s Way. A tangled wood of beeches, pitch pine, and locust trees lined the sandy road on either side, interrupted by the occasional crushed-shell driveway (made by throwing your empty oyster shells and clamshells onto a sand driveway and crushing them with your 4X4) leading back to well-hidden cottages. Eventually, we pulled into the sad, dilapidated excuse for a drive at number 12, which opened up on to a sad, dilapidated excuse for a lawn and Aunt Ida’s sad, dilapidated excuse for a house.

  This made the virtual woman very happy.

  “You,” she announced cheerfully, “have arrived at your destination!”

  THREE

  The three of us sat in the truck, unmoving, and surveyed my destination.

  It was, if anything, even more bedraggled than I remembered. The original house had been built in 1795 by a certain Eliakim Higgins, who had made a comfortable living as first mate on the whaling ship Bathsheba out of Barnstable. It was a full Cape, which meant that it looked like a child’s drawing of a house—a door with two windows on either side and a chimney in the middle of its peaked roof. The front of the house was painted clapboard, the rest sided with cedar shingles faded to silver. Over the years, the house had been added to in the typically haphazard Cape Cod way—a small formal dining room leading off the living room to a full, eat-in kitchen in the back, a downstairs bedroom and adjoining bath in addition to the three attic bedrooms above, and a large screened-in porch to defeat the mosquitoes in summer. An ell built off the kitchen wing contained the studio apartment that Aunt Ida had added on when the main house had become too much for her. It was an architectural crazy quilt that I’d always loved.

  But sitting there with Miles and Jenny, my heart sank. The structure was definitely showing its age. The once-bright yellow paint of its clapboard facade had faded to a sickly, peeling beige. Long patches of damp streaked the shingled sides where the gutters had long since ceased to do their job. Shutters hung at limp angles.

  The house was separated from its neighbors by an acre or so of woods on one side and a dense yew hedge on the other. The woods were the handiwork of Mother Nature. The yew hedge was all Aunt Ida’s. She’d planted it back in 1961, when a young couple from Boston had bought the property next door and commissioned Luther Crowell, a local builder descended from a long line of early Cape Cod ship captains, to build them the first of the modest “modernist” houses that later made his name. Aunt Ida had no truck with modern and no time for off-Capers. She had planted the yew hedge the minute construction had begun. When my father had gently pointed out that this wasn’t particularly neighborly, she’d responded tartly, “Good fences make good neighbors, and besides, I like my privacy.”

  Well, she’d gotten it. As Jenny, Miles, and I climbed out of the truck, you could believe that we were alone in all the world. Scrub oak, beach plum, and pitch pines encroached on all sides. Even the once-beautiful view of Bower’s Pond was now obscured by a great barricade of briars that only served to heighten the shabbiness of the house.

  “What a pile of doo-doo,” Jenny said. Or words to that effect.

  “Not really,” a bright voice responded. “It just needs some love.”

  The bright voice, it turned out, belonged to a sixtyish woman with electric blue eyes and a halo of curly silver hair who had materialized rather alarmingly at our side like a genie out of a bottle. On that cloudy, chilly day in May (there is no spring on the Cape, just mud season), she was dressed in several layers of hand-knitted outer garments, none of which could have reasonably been called a coat.

  “Helene!” Miles said, “where on earth did you spring from?”

  “I live next door, you big dope,” the woman replied, smacking him on the arm with a hand that appeared to have a ring on every finger. “Bought it from the original owners when I mo
ved to the Cape. I saw your truck through the gap in the hedge and thought I’d come over, see if I could help.”

  Miles remembered his manners.

  “Helene, this is Samantha Barnes, the new owner of this charming property. Sam, this is Helene Greenberg, your neighbor. She moved here from New York two years ago. She’s the town’s new librarian.”

  Really? I wanted to say. Because you look like no librarian I ever met before.

  “How do you do?” I said instead.

  “I’m great,” Helene said. “And I’m very happy to meet you. Miles has told me so much about you.”

  Oh god, really? What exactly?

  “And I’ve got a surprise for you,” Helene continued.

  Oh dear.

  Helene put two fingers to her mouth and let out an earsplitting whistle. A blur of fur came flying up the steep path that led down to the salt pond. I had a confused impression of a wet nose and large pink tongue in my face and enormous muddy paws on my chest.

  I’d had dogs as a kid. I knew how this was supposed to work.

  “Down!” I shouted. Nothing. The creature continued to lick me to death.

  “Down!” Miles shouted, also to no avail.

  “Down, Diogi,” Helene said calmly, holding up a dog treat that had miraculously appeared in her hand.

  In a nanosecond, the beast turned his attention to Helene and stood gazing fixedly at the dog treat.

  In this brief moment of calm, which I suspected was only the eye of the storm, I could see he was your typical Cape Cod mutt, part yellow Lab, part whatever. Great water dogs, good with kids, gentle. This one was remarkable in no way except for his size. He was ginormous.

  “You’ll have to forgive his manners,” Helene said. “He’s still just a puppy,”

  “You mean he’s going to get bigger?” I yelped.

  “Oh yes,” Helene said. “He’s still just a baby. But he’s a fast learner.”

  She handed me a dog treat. “Tell him to sit. Diogi will do anything for a treat.” She pronounced the name dee-OH-gee.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the treat gingerly just in case the dog got overexcited and jumped me again. “That’s an . . . unusual . . . name.”

  “It’s a joke,” Helene said, blue eyes dancing. “Dee, oh, gee. D-O-G. Get it? Dog!” She laughed delightedly as if hearing the joke for the first time. “It’s spelled D-I-O-G-I.”

  I had to smile.

  “Is there a cat called C-A-T?” I asked.

  Helene rewarded my wit with another peal of laughter. “See, ay, tee,” she crowed. “That’s rich!”

  I held the treat up and said, “Sit, Diogi” in my firmest voice.

  Diogi ignored the command, instead leaning against my leg with all his considerable weight. I gave him the treat anyway.

  “I think your dog needs some more training,” I said to Helene.

  “Well, we’re working on that,” Helene acknowledged. “But he’s not my dog.”

  “Whose dog is he?” I asked.

  “Why, he’s yours, Sam,” Helene said, as if the answer was obvious. “Diogi comes with the house.”

  It took me a moment to absorb the fact that in addition to leaving me her wreck of a property, Aunt Ida had left me her untrained dog. Why she’d seen fit to lumber herself with a puppy in her eighty-seventh year was a mystery to me.

  “I can’t take care of a dog,” I protested. “I really haven’t decided what I’m going to do about the house. Or how long I’ll be around. I’ve got a few things to handle, but then I’ll be heading back to the city. Can’t you keep him?”

  “Oh no,” Helene said firmly. “He’s yours. Ida got him for you.”

  Well, that solved that mystery. I was beginning to see Aunt Ida’s evil plan. She’d never approved of me moving off Cape. Sorry, Aunt Ida, but if you think you can trap me into coming back by giving me a falling-down house and a not very bright dog, you have another think coming.

  Helene bent down and waggled her head at Diogi. “You wuv Sam already, don’t you, sweetheart?”

  “He wuvs the treats,” I corrected her.

  “Whatever,” Helene said, moving on. “Time to take a look at the house.”

  Helene trotted briskly toward the one element of the house that actually looked fairly sturdy, Aunt Ida’s studio ell. I’d never been in it. I hadn’t been back to the Cape since my parents had moved to Florida, and before that, on my annual visits home every August, Aunt Ida had preferred to catch up at our house on Locust Street, where I would make her China tea and her favorite raisin scones and she would try to talk me into coming home for good. (Tip: For featherlight scones, use pastry flour, not all-purpose flour.)

  Helene bent down and picked up a conch shell from the patch of weeds next to the front door of the ell. She shook it briskly and a key tumbled out of the shiny pink interior. Everybody in Fair Harbor hides their spare key in a conch shell by the front door. That way the burglars know where to find it.

  “When Ida knew she was dying,” Helene said over her shoulder, “she asked me to keep the ell ready for you.”

  My heart ached a little bit. Aunt Ida had been so certain that I would love her house as much as she had. And I didn’t. I really didn’t love it at all. And I really didn’t love her dog.

  Helene unlocked the door, reached in to turn on the lights, and stepped back to let me enter first. Jenny and Miles peered in over my shoulder.

  The studio was not what I’d expected. The uncluttered space was painted white and was open to the rafters, which made it feel larger than it was. The wall opposite the front door featured a casement window that, before the briar patch took hold, had once had a view to the pond and still offered lots of natural light. A small cherry wood table with two harp-backed chairs stood in front of the window. To the right of the window was a mahogany four-poster bed, neatly made up with linen sheets and a handmade blue and white quilt. Next to it, along the wall to our right, was a door leading to a bathroom, another to a small closet and a handsome burl-wood bureau. To the left of the front door was a sitting area with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanking a small Vermont Castings woodstove. A couch, its deep down cushions covered in faded chintz, faced the stove, with a small flat-topped trunk serving as coffee table. A Dutch door in the wall to our far left led from the sitting area to the rest of the house, but it looked like it hadn’t been opened in ages. Taking up the rest of that wall were two built-in closets with louvered doors. Helene walked over and folded back one of the doors, revealing a small desk and an Internet router.

  “Aunt Ida was online?” I asked in surprise.

  “Of course she was,” Helene said. “There was nothing wrong with Ida’s mind. She ordered groceries, paid bills, all of that on her laptop. Not to mention playing Angry Birds and online solitaire.”

  She closed up the workspace and pushed back the other louver, uncovering a tiny kitchen comprised of a two-burner electric cooktop, a minifridge, a tiny sink, and just enough butcher block counter to chop an onion on. She must have seen my face fall, because she said brightly, “This will have to do until we get the old kitchen up to speed.”

  Until we get the old kitchen up to speed?

  While I was processing this assumption, Helene touched a match to a small pile of logs and kindling in the stove, which she’d clearly prepared for just this occasion.

  “Take a seat,” she said, gesturing to the couch. “I’ll just make us all a cup of tea.”

  She filled a kettle that had been waiting on one of the burners and pulled out sugar and tea from a small cupboard above the counter. Miles and Jenny pulled over the harp-backed chairs, and within minutes, the four of us were sipping Earl Grey and watching the flames dance behind the stove’s glass window.

  Diogi padded over to me, and put his head in my lap. The knot of tension that had lived in my chest ever sinc
e I’d starred in my very own YouTube video somehow began, ever so slightly, to loosen.

  Okay, Aunt Ida. You win.

  Then I shook my head. I wasn’t giving up that easily.

  For now, I amended. You win for now, Aunt Ida.

  FOUR

  I decided to stay at Aunt Ida’s house for the duration of my exile. The ell was more than habitable and did not come with a lawyer husband and three little hellions. Perfect.

  After Jenny and Miles had driven off and Helene had disappeared through the gap in the yew hedge, I sat on the couch engaged in a kind of staring contest with Diogi. Clearly I was expected to do something, but I couldn’t imagine what.

  I was relieved when my cell began to ring. I recognized the number. It was Krista, Krista Baker. Krista had assumed the role of editor in chief of the Cape Cod Clarion two years ago, when my father had suffered a mild heart attack and my mother had decided within days that both of them needed to retire and “concentrate on a healthy lifestyle.” Within weeks they’d sold the house on Locust Street and moved to Florida. Florida? I’d wanted to wail. Who are you? And what have you done with my parents?

  Krista was an old and good friend, but I felt myself hesitate just a moment before answering her call.

  Krista is a force of nature. Not one of those nice forces of nature, either, like sunshine or a gentle rain. More like a lightning bolt or a forest fire. In high school, Krista had been part of our little group, though she was everything Miles, Jenny, and I were not—beautiful and talented and super smart. Always the lead in the high school play. President of the debating team. Almost perfect SATs. And yet somehow she liked us, awkward Drama Club geeks that we were. Maybe it was because Miles and Jenny and I made her laugh. Krista hardly ever laughed. She was too busy being successful.