A Side of Murder Read online

  “You’re charming and hot,” I’d shot back. “I’m goofy and look like Big Bird.”

  But we got the job, and, I have to admit, once we’d learned the ropes, the tips weren’t bad.

  On our breaks, Krista and I would wander up to the deck where the college boys would chat her up and somehow fail to see the almost-six-foot-tall girl standing next to her. But truthfully, I didn’t care if those frat boys with their backward baseball hats and BU T-shirts talked to me or not.

  I only had eyes for the bartender; I only had eyes for Jason Captiva.

  I watched him hungrily at his post behind the bar, his long black hair pulled back at the nape of his neck, the muscles of his forearms sliding smoothly under his tan skin as he deftly shucked bivalves and uncapped beer after beer. He was a good bartender, calm and friendly, but always quietly on the alert for the guy who needed to hand over his car keys or stop hassling the girl in the corner.

  Though much the same age as his customers, Jason Captiva, it seemed to me, was a man among boys.

  For two months I flirted with him with all the subtlety that seventeen-year-old girls are known for. Which is to say, no subtlety at all. I was eager to get better at this new area of study, but Jason was not prepared to be my teacher.

  “You’re a kid,” he’d said, all Older Man just because he’d celebrated his twenty-first birthday three months earlier. “I don’t date kids.”

  “Particularly not really tall ones?” I’d asked, pretending it was a joke.

  “Not even really pretty ones,” he’d responded, taking the sting out of his rejection.

  So, with romance off the table, we developed a kind of easy banter, a gentle teasing that grew over the course of the summer into a real friendship. Everything had been great.

  Don’t go there, Sam.

  Until that kiss under the deck.

  Until Estelle.

  Estelle was a piece of work. She was in her early fifties and had a passion for flat red lipstick and hair in a clashing orange shade never seen in nature. She was a little overweight but still what my grandfather would have called a fine figure of a woman. She was the kind of waitress who called her regulars “hon” and knew their drink orders by heart. She had ruled the Logan Inn cocktail lounge for years, and she made it her mission to keep Krista and me in our place. It seemed she found me, whom she insisted on calling Miss Daddy’s Girl, particularly objectionable.

  Don’t go there, Sam.

  The enfolding darkness under the deck. Jason’s lips finally on mine.

  Then Estelle’s face, gargoyle-like in the flare of a cigarette lighter. “You’re gonna pay for that, boy.”

  No, Sam. You exorcised that ghost years ago.

  * * *

  * * *

  I shivered and brought myself firmly back to the present. Why, when all was warmth and light inside, was I standing outside under an abandoned deck in the cold and dark? It was a lonely spot and something about it, not just my own bad memories, made my flesh creep.

  I was turning away from the shadows when I saw it.

  As with all impossible sights, my brain struggled to make sense of it. My first thought was that it was the reflection of the moon, round and white, floating on the rippled surface of the water. You could almost see a face in it.

  But the body knows what the brain refuses to acknowledge. If this was just the mirrored moon, why was I covered with a cold sweat? Why was my heart pounding?

  I forced myself a step closer to the concrete bulkhead. The thing, whatever it was, was about six feet out from shore. I leaned forward, straining to understand what I was seeing. And then I wished I hadn’t.

  It was a face. Not the moon. A face.

  Estelle’s face.

  Estelle floating on the surface of the pond, her sightless eyes staring skyward, her mouth, smeared black-red with lipstick, open in a silent scream.

  SIX

  I stumbled backward, turned to run away, then caught myself. What if she wasn’t dead? If not, every minute would count. I forced myself to look at the terrible sight again. Estelle was wearing a dark foul-weather jacket, its rubberized fabric cinched at the neck and waist. This had created enough of an air pocket to keep her afloat, but I could see that the body was being rapidly pulled out by a receding tide made doubly strong by the full moon. Gingerly, I crouched down, then eased myself over the bulkhead. I gasped with the shock of the waist-high, ice-cold water. I forced myself to wade out toward the body. At one point something solid brushed against me, and I visualized Estelle’s ghostly hands reaching for me. My stomach lurched.

  Get a grip, Sam, I told myself. You cut a crazy man’s finger off with a knife. You can do this.

  Finally I was close enough to touch the body, though it was the last thing I wanted to do. Nonetheless, I grabbed the slippery fabric of the foul-weather gear and pulled Estelle’s head and shoulders up high enough to really see what I was dealing with. The tide tugged against me as if determined to claim its prize. Exhausted and freezing, I looked at Estelle’s face.

  That she was dead was inescapable. Her skin was gray white, streaked with mud, and her head lolled like a rag doll’s. As I stared at her, I noticed a tiny snail crawling along her cheek.

  And just like that, I whoopsed up all my free eats.

  * * *

  * * *

  I really cannot tell you how I got back into the restaurant. I do remember dropping the body in horror and stumbling back to the shore. I have a vague memory of my friends’ shocked faces and the restaurant’s owner—a short, no-nonsense woman with short, no-nonsense salt-and-pepper hair who’d introduced herself as Carol—calling 911 after I’d blurted out what I’d seen, what I’d found. Then she wrapped me in a blanket and gave me a glass of brandy. Then, looking at my friends’ strained, white faces, she poured out three more slugs. By the time she could get outside to check out the situation, as she called it, the body was no longer visible from shore.

  The restaurant had emptied by that point and while we waited for the police to arrive, I, in some kind of strange aftershock, felt obliged to make small talk with Carol. It was a way not to think about what I’d just seen.

  “The place looks good,” I said. “A big change from when the Logans had it.”

  “I still see Mr. Logan,” Carol said. “He comes in once a month for a drink and a chat. Always the first Tuesday of the month, always one Manhattan, no more. Very supportive of what we’re doing. He’s a lovely guy.”

  I could tell Carol was talking out of nerves, but that was okay, so was I.

  “And you’re so lucky to have this waterfront location,” I said. A second later, the inanity of that statement hit me. Yeah, you’re so lucky to have this waterfront location so that people can conveniently drown just steps outside your front door.

  “I mean, not tonight you’re so lucky,” I said, backtracking madly. “Just in general.”

  “I know what you mean,” Carol said kindly. “And, yes, we are lucky. Estelle not so much though.”

  “You knew her?” I asked.

  “Everyone knew Estelle,” Carol said, and I could tell there was no love lost there. “In fact, all my bartenders have . . . that is, had . . . strict orders not to serve her.”

  Then what was she doing here? I wanted to ask, but somehow that seemed rude, like I had some right to question this nice woman who was giving me brandy. And anyway, the police had finally arrived in the form of a cop who looked to be all of twelve years old.

  When he understood the situation, he pulled out his cell phone, punched in a number, and asked someone called Denise to get the harbormaster out to Alden Pond.

  “Tell him he’s gonna need a searchlight and maybe a frogman. We got a floater out in the pond or the bay somewhere and we need to fish it out before it makes it to the ocean.”

  A floater. For a moment I was afraid I
was going to whoops up that expensive brandy, too.

  “Can I leave now?” I asked when he’d put his phone away.

  “If you could just wait a couple of minutes,” the young policeman said. It wasn’t really a request. “The harbormaster shouldn’t be long. He lives above the office at the municipal pier. He can come now in the Whaler. His team will follow with the cutter.”

  Helene spoke up then. “If Sam’s got to wait around and go through all this again, we need to get her out of those wet clothes.”

  She turned to Carol.

  “Have you got some spare chef’s whites?”

  Carol came back with the standard double-breasted white jacket and black-and-white checked pants, and Helene pointed me to the ladies’ room.

  “In you go,” she said.

  I sighed, and did as I was told. I stripped off my sopping clothes, including bra and underpants, and stepped commando into my borrowed finery. Carol’s chef, it seemed, was both much wider and much shorter than I. The jacket flapped around me like a giant pillowcase, and the pants stopped attractively at mid-calf. A pair of men’s black socks, donated to the cause by Miles, completed the ensemble. Not that I really cared, but I had had a difficult evening and this did seem like the final insult.

  Which it wasn’t.

  I wandered back out to the dining room, carrying the blanket and my wet clothes. I dropped the mess onto a chair, at which point my bra made a break for freedom and tumbled to the floor. I was just picking it up when the door to the restaurant opened with a whoosh of cold air.

  The man framed in the doorway was tall by most standards, though not by mine. I guessed he had an inch or two on me. He had a wild tangle of dark hair that looked like it had landed on his head rather than grown there. He was wearing khaki pants and a green windbreaker with a patch on the chest that read “Barnstable County Harbor Patrol,” so I figured he was the fabled harbormaster. The hair was probably the result of his trip across the bay in an open Boston Whaler. He was staring at me, which wasn’t surprising given the clown suit I was wearing and the soggy foundation garment dangling from my hand. He seemed to have forgotten that he was still holding the door open.

  “Do you mind closing that?” I snapped. “That is, unless you want your witness dead, too.”

  That’s what happens when I’m embarrassed. I get snarky.

  The man shook himself a bit and pulled the door shut. He stepped into the room, using his fingers to comb the hair back off his face.

  His face.

  Oh god, oh god, oh god.

  “Jason?” I squeaked. It is not often that you will hear a tall, strong woman who sang alto in the high school chorus squeak, but I managed it.

  “Sam?”

  Oh god, oh god, oh god.

  His eyes took me in from top to bottom. He seemed to have regained his composure. I wished I had.

  “I like the outfit,” he said. “Very fetching.”

  He looked pointedly at the soggy bra dangling from my hand, adding, “And so well accessorized.”

  “I picked it out specially for you,” I said, grinning at him, although my one overwhelming thought was, Why tonight of all nights did I have to wear my oldest bra?

  “I like the new do,” I added, pointing my bra at the hot mess that was his hair. “Good job on the styled-by-a-Cuisinart look.”

  “Thank you,” he said modestly. “It takes me hours.”

  And we were back.

  It was as if nothing had changed, as if we’d just dropped into our natural banter, our old friendship. This is going to be fine, I thought.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  * * *

  * * *

  Our little talk didn’t start out badly. We’d found our old footing, and when Jason began to segue from Friend to Harbormaster I wasn’t particularly surprised. After all, he had a job to do. When had I first seen the body? Where exactly? How far out from shore?

  I did my best to answer his questions and then waited while he barked instructions on a walkie-talkie to his waiting crew on the patrol boat.

  “First, check the cut through the Outer Beach to the ocean. If the tide’s already pulled the body through, we’re out of luck, but I don’t think there’s been enough time for that. Then work your way back along the channel. Call me if you don’t find anything in, say, the next thirty minutes. I’ll come out.”

  He turned back to me. The rapid-fire questions started up again. Why hadn’t I called for help? Why hadn’t I brought the body in?

  I stared at him. When had this turned into an interrogation?

  “I didn’t call for help because I was busy trying to see if she was still alive. I didn’t bring the body in because the tide was too strong and I was almost hypothermic.” And freaked out.

  “Any chance you knew the victim? Could identify her?”

  I stared at him. “Of course I can identify her, Jason. I already told Opie over there.” I cocked my head toward the baby cop. “It was Estelle. Estelle Kobolt, from the Logan Inn.”

  Jason got very, very still.

  He hadn’t known. The cop hadn’t told him.

  Then he seemed to gather himself and pulled out a notebook from his hip pocket. “Estelle Kobolt,” he repeated neutrally, writing the name carefully in his notebook.

  What? Did he think he might forget it? Why was he acting like the name meant nothing to him?

  “You remember our old friend Estelle, Jason,” I said.

  Now, it is true that I meant to get under his skin with that crack. But when he looked up at me from the notebook, I was not prepared for the coldness in his dark eyes.

  “We’re done here,” he said very quietly.

  He snapped the notebook closed, stood, and without another word walked out the front door, followed hurriedly by the patrolman, who’d been watching our little show, rapt. As had my three partners in dining.

  “Woo-hoo,” Miles said as the door closed behind them. “I didn’t know there were going to be fireworks tonight.”

  “Shut up,” I said miserably. “Just shut up, and take me home.”

  Did I just say home?

  SEVEN

  It’s true, Aunt Ida’s house was not my idea of home. But that night, the night I found Estelle and stared horrified at her cold, white face, the night I understood that Jason Captiva had not forgiven me for my betrayal so many years ago—that night, Aunt Ida’s house saved me.

  To take a long, hot soak in the claw-foot bathtub, then to crawl into the solid four-poster, to pull the warm blue and white quilt over my trembling body, to lay my cheek on the soft pillow—all this was to feel the safety and comfort of home and family enfold me.

  When Diogi entreated me with those soft brown doggy eyes of his to let him up on the bed, I was too exhausted to resist. With his big puppy bulk warming my feet, I fell into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

  Which was a good thing, because the next morning Krista had a little surprise for me. She called at literally the crack of dawn. Before I could do much more than mutter, “Yeah, what?” into the phone, she said, “I need you in the office stat.”

  I hate it when people say stat. Unless you are a heart surgeon, you probably don’t actually need whatever you are demanding stat. So I took my time, putting on a nice floaty dress and dangly earrings to make me feel like a pretty girl and not someone who had wrestled with a corpse the night before. If that wasn’t stat enough for Krista, then, well, tough. I believe in self-care (obviously not true).

  The night before, Helene had blessedly taken charge, calling a car to take us back to Aunt Ida’s house and insisting on the nice hot bath and nice soft bed. Carol had promised to have someone deliver Miles’s mother’s truck back to me in the morning, and looking out the window I could see that she’d been as good as her word. So I wouldn’t be totally un-stat.

  *
* *

  * * *

  It was strange to be sitting in my father’s office at the Clarion. No, in Krista’s office, I reminded myself. That was Krista, not my father, sitting across from me at the old wooden desk. Krista, beautiful and remote, sitting slim and upright in her navy suit and crisp white blouse. Krista with her straight, jet-black hair cut in a chic Anna Wintour bob.

  “I want you to write up this drowning story.”

  How had this happened? I was supposed to be a chef. Then I was supposed to be a restaurant reviewer. And now I was supposed to be a reporter?

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “You heard me,” Krista said distractedly, her attention caught briefly by something that had flitted across her computer monitor. “I want you to write up this drowning story.”

  She looked back at me. “Harbor Patrol found the body in the rocks off Skaket Point last night. I want you to go to the police, talk to whoever’s in charge of the case, probably Chief McCauley. I want to know how Estelle died. You were at the scene; you know the background. You can hit the ground running.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I protested.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Krista said. “You practically grew up in this office. Veronica Barnes is your mother. She was the best reporter this newspaper ever had.”

  This was true. My mother had been a crack investigative reporter who covered the Cape’s environmental beat. The tension between the Cape’s old industries like fishing and boatbuilding and the new industries of tourism and development had only increased over time, so there was always plenty to investigate. And she was very, very good at it.

  “Anyway,” Krista continued, “there’s no trick to it. Who, what, where, when, how. Five simple questions.”

  “But what about my Bayview Grill review?” I asked in a desperate attempt at distraction.

  “Oh yeah, I need that, too,” Krista said. “Great timing. We can run the drowning story online today and the review online tomorrow and both in the Sunday print edition. You should get going—you’ve got a busy day ahead.”