A Side of Murder Page 5

  Then she noticed my gauzy dress and my silver Indian earrings. “But next time try to dress a little more professionally, okay?”

  “I didn’t know I was playing girl reporter today,” I pointed out. “And I haven’t actually agreed to do this.”

  “News pays twice as much as lifestyle,” Krista added unfairly.

  “I give up.”

  “Good,” Krista said, waving a beautifully manicured hand toward the door. “Go.”

  So I went. Stat.

  Diogi was waiting in the passenger seat of the truck (or, as I was beginning to call it in my own mind, Grumpy), his nose sticking wetly out of the few inches of window I’d left cracked open. I’d tried to leave him home that morning, but he’d given me a “please don’t desert me” look that no amount of “I’ll be back soon” had made any headway against. When I slid into the driver’s seat, he greeted me as if I’d been away for twenty days instead of twenty minutes.

  “Lay off,” I said, pushing him back to his seat. “We have to go to the police station.”

  He lunged at me again, giving me another slobbery kiss. I pushed him away again, more firmly this time. He looked at me balefully, but stayed where he was. Clearly I’d wounded his feelings. Which was fine by me. He’d taken advantage of a moment of weakness the night before and this morning. I wasn’t going to fall for that again.

  “You behave,” I warned him, “or my nice friend the policeman will put you in the pokey.”

  But Police Chief George McCauley, a big, beefy fellow with a neck that merged so seamlessly into his head you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began, wasn’t really interested in being my friend.

  “You’re a witness, lady,” he said flatly. “You can’t report on this case.”

  That got my dander up. Mostly the “lady” part. If he’d wanted to get me all fired up about reporting on this case, he couldn’t have found a better approach.

  “It’s my job,” I said. Like I’d been doing it for years instead of about half an hour. “Witness or not, I have a job to do. And you have an obligation to answer my questions unless making the information public might jeopardize your investigation.”

  It seemed I was, after all, my mother’s daughter. And I kind of liked it.

  Very reluctantly indeed Chief McCauley conceded that I was entitled to some information. The “who” was about all he was willing to give me. And even that was like pulling teeth.

  The dead woman was indeed Estelle Kobolt. (Tell me something I don’t know.) Sixty-seven years old, retired from waitressing two years ago. Childless, no next of kin as far as anyone knew.

  Then he clammed up. I needed background. Time for a switch from pushy journalist to friend and neighbor. I gave him my biggest smile and put down my reporter’s notebook.

  “You’re the expert here, Chief,” I said ingratiatingly. “I’ve been away a long time. Off the record, what’s your take on all this? I remember Estelle from when I was a kid waitressing at the Logan Inn. She was . . . one of a kind.”

  I waited to see if he would take the opening.

  McCauley couldn’t resist. “Off the record,” he said, “that old girl could really put it away. About a year ago, we had to take her license away for DUI. Not surprising she finally ended up in the drink.”

  He laughed at his own crude pun.

  I chuckled falsely, hating myself, and slid in a question. “Where’d she live?”

  “Out on Sandy Neck.”

  “That’s on the other side of town from Alden Pond,” I pointed out. “What was she doing at the boatyard, do you know?”

  “Maybe she’d been boozing it up at that new restaurant.”

  “But there are three bars closer to Sandy Neck.”

  “You’re forgetting the lady wasn’t allowed to drive a car,” McCauley said with a smirk. “But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t use her boat to get around. And the Inn or the Grill or whatever they’re calling it now has the only bar in this town on the water.”

  I didn’t mention Carol’s ban on serving Estelle at the Grill. If McCauley wasn’t going to share, I wasn’t either. Mistake number one, as it turned out.

  But what he’d said about Estelle using a boat to get around made sense. Pretty much everybody in Fair Harbor kept some kind of a skiff, usually with a little six-horse outboard, for getting around or doing a little fishing.

  “Is that how she got to the boatyard?” I asked. “Did you find her boat?”

  “Yeah,” McCauley said. “An old aluminum Jon boat tied up to the end of the dock.”

  Jon boats are low-sided, flat-bottomed motorboats. They offer no shelter from wind or from the water that comes flying up as the boat smacks through the waves.

  “That would explain the foul weather gear,” I mused, all Sherlock Holmesish.

  McCauley ignored me. He wasn’t interested in amateur speculation. From a lady amateur, no less. “My theory is she was getting out of the boat, fell in, that’s all she wrote. Probably drunk.”

  “But not so drunk that she couldn’t navigate through the river out of Town Cove into the bay, through Alden’s River, and then dock the boat,” I pointed out.

  McCauley looked at me balefully and declined to address that fact. I moved on.

  “And besides, the tide was going out. If she fell from the dock, she wouldn’t have floated in toward shore. And another thing—”

  But McCauley cut me off. “Anyway, none of that is your problem. On the record, we’re proceeding along the assumption that this was a tragic accident.”

  It seemed to me that the police chief didn’t seem to find anything particularly tragic about Estelle’s accident. And he was, in my opinion (and in my vast—not—experience of police procedure), being awfully casual, maybe even cagey, about her last hours. I was feeling pretty skeptical about Chief McCauley and his handling of the case, such as it was, and I wasn’t ready to let it slide. It’s entirely possible that my feelings showed on my face. My feelings usually do.

  McCauley stood up to indicate the interview was over. I tried not to look at the way his khaki shirt strained against his stomach. I thanked him politely and went back to the truck, where Diogi again greeted me as if I’d been gone for months.

  “Come on, Watson,” I said. “We’ve got some sleuthing to do.”

  EIGHT

  The Singleton ménage inhabits an enormous old captain’s house just off Town Square. It had been something of a wreck when Jenny and Roland had bought it, and Jenny had overseen its restoration with sensitivity and respect for its heritage. Indeed, it may have been the only rehab of the last two decades in which a wall had not been ripped out to “open up” the kitchen to the dining room.

  “Believe me,” Jenny had said to her architect, “nobody wants to see my kitchen after I’m done cooking.” Which was true. Jenny did not believe in clean as you go. She believed in making a huge mess and then leaving it for the next morning.

  She brought me into the kitchen and shooed Diogi out to the backyard, where we could see him paying goofy court to Jenny’s cocker spaniel, Sadie. This consisted of sniffing Sadie’s butt while Sadie ignored him and then bounding around her in exuberant circles while Sadie continued to ignore him. Men.

  Jenny’s kitchen is wonderful. It is big and sunny and painted yellow and has a big old farmhouse table in the middle. Today the table was covered with kids’ drawings and littered with Legos. Jenny swept all this aside, saying, “Eli is building the Washington Monument for his history project.” Eli, I was pretty sure, was Thing Two (seven years old, second grade, blond hair, an info kid, the kind that memorizes the state capitals for fun).

  “I’m sure you’ll get a good grade on it,” I said dryly, well aware of Jenny’s propensity to take over her kids’ projects.

  “I’m sure I will,” Jenny said unapologetically. “I usually do. My science
fair volcano won Best in Show. My projects are always the best.”

  She began excavating under a pile of drawings of what looked like space aliens—nobody in them had the proper number of limbs and their heads were the size of pumpkins. Crooked crayoned letters identified the subjects as MY FAMBLE. Clearly the work of what’s his name, Thing Three (five years old, kindergarten, red hair, no filter, the kid who had once looked up at me and asked, “Are you a giant?” I liked him anyway).

  Jenny knocked over a pile of Great Shelby Holmes and Diary of a Wimpy Kid library books (Thing One, nine years old, brown hair, big reader, athletic) and finally pulled an iPad out of the mess. “Take a look at this video I made,” she said proudly.

  She tapped a few icons and the next thing I knew I was watching a video of Thing Three’s kindergarten play, Our Garden. But this was no ordinary helicopter-mom video. Jenny had combined voice-over with clever cutting and close-ups to create a perfect parody of an online review. Thing Three had apparently played Dead Lima Bean, the one that, Jenny’s solemn voice-over informed the viewer, had tragically failed to germinate in its wet paper towel.

  “Evan Singleton’s role”—Evan! That was Thing Three’s name!—“though not a big speaking part,” the announcer continued, “was played for full dramatic effect.”

  Close-up on Evan—hair and face spray-painted green—clutching his chest and crashing to the stage. His performance was greeted with thunderous applause from his fellow kindergartners up onstage, who had not quite grasped that applauding was traditionally the role of the audience. Evan was so inspired by this response that he proceeded not to germinate two more times. Three little nasturtiums were particularly enchanted with his performance and jumped up and down so enthusiastically that their papier-mâché flower petals fell off. It was with some difficulty that the teacher brought order back to the proceedings.

  I was gasping with laughter when the video finished.

  “That was brilliant,” I said. “How did you learn to make something like that?”

  “It’s all the iPad,” Jenny said modestly. “The video itself is better quality than I can get on my iPhone and the editing tool is totally intuitive.” For someone who found written instructions more of a hindrance than a help, intuitive was important, I knew.

  “But it’s your creativity and smarts and humor that make it,” I said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “I’m working on that,” Jenny said with a little inward smile.

  She put the iPad away and, when she saw me trying to cover a yawn, fetched me a cup of coffee. This is why I love Jenny. She understands that a yawn is a silent scream for coffee.

  “Sorry,” I said after a few sips. “Krista woke me at the crack of dawn this morning.” I ran through the day’s events, by which point my coffee cup was empty.

  Jenny smiled and topped up the mug. “I can’t believe you let her talk you into this reporting thing.”

  “I didn’t let her talk me into it,” I said. “I let her money talk me into it. And you are the best person to help me with the cast of characters.”

  Which was true. What Jenny Snow Singleton—with her vast network of Snow siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins—didn’t know about the good people of Fair Harbor wasn’t worth knowing.

  “Tell me about Estelle Kobolt,” I said.

  “Well, mostly she was famous for complaining about her feet or, as she so colorfully called them, her ‘dogs,’” Jenny said. “She was really too old for that gig. But she was a cocktail waitress, for Pete’s sake. It’s not like she could retire, like she had some nice pension waiting for her. But somehow, about two years ago, she just up and quit. My cousin Pammy who works at the post office—you know how everybody stands around gossiping while they wait in line at the post office?”

  I nodded impatiently and did that circle thing with my hand that means get to the point, please. Jenny’s stories had a tendency to meander.

  “Well, anyway, Pammy says the rumor is that Estelle found herself a rich old boyfriend a couple of years ago, probably married, since nobody ever saw them together. Anyway, she really left poor Norman Logan in the lurch.”

  “Whatever happened to Mr. Logan?” I asked, now distracted myself from the topic at hand. I’d always liked Mr. Logan. “I heard somewhere that he got cancer.”

  “Well, there’s some good news there,” Jenny said. “He was down to skin and bones after all his chemo, had to stop working, finally sold the restaurant after Mrs. Logan had her stroke.”

  “Mrs. Logan had a stroke?” Boy, I really was out of touch.

  “Yup, two years ago. It was Fourth of July and everybody else had cleared out early to go see the fireworks at Shawme Beach so she was there alone. Mr. Logan was really sick with the cancer then. He hadn’t been to the restaurant for weeks. So Mrs. Logan stayed to close up and then went out on the dock—you can sort of see the fireworks way off in the distance from there—and, wham, stroke. They didn’t find her ’till the next morning. My sister Meghan, who does the books for the hospital, she says she might have made it if they’d found her earlier.”

  I adored Jenny, but she dearly loved to make a dramatic or tragic story even more so. “And the good news is?” I reminded her.

  “The good news is, Mr. Logan’s doing a lot better lately. Meghan says it was that new immunotherapy. It’s expensive, and you never know who it’s going to work for, but it sure worked for him. And he’s opening another, smaller place, lunch only, all healthy food.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Whatever that means. He’s taken over that empty building that used to be the bait shop—you know, down by Reedie’s landing?”

  I nodded. Reedie’s landing was a public boat launch in south Fair Harbor on the shore of Crystal Bay. It was a little out of the way in the off-season, but it was busy in the summer with day-trippers and weekend warriors sliding their trailered boats down the concrete slipway into the water.

  Jenny again felt compelled to fill in all the details. “When Reedie died a few years ago, he left most of his land, almost twenty acres I think, to Cape Cod Conservation. He was dead set against development. He left his son, Levi, the quarter acre that included the bait shop, though, and Levi sold it to Mr. Logan for his restaurant.”

  “I love the idea of turning a bait shop into a restaurant,” I said. “That’s hilarious.”

  “Yeah,” Jenny agreed, laughing. “But I hear it’s going to be really nice. My second cousin Charlie, he’s a carpenter, he’s working on it and he says it’s the exact opposite of the old Logan Inn—lots of blond wood and windows and light.”

  “Well, the Inn was definitely created in Mrs. Logan’s image,” I said. “She was not a woman with a lot of taste or imagination.”

  Jenny nodded. “But she had family money and she controlled the purse strings.”

  “Not a good recipe for any partnership,” I noted idly. “When one person has all the cash and calls all the shots.”

  Jenny looked stricken, and I wanted to shove the words back into my stupid mouth. I’d just described Jenny and Roland’s marriage.

  I was suddenly very anxious to be on my way. “Well, I’ve gotta go.”

  “You’re leaving already?” Jenny looked bereft.

  “Some of us have work to do,” I said. And once more wished I hadn’t said anything. I knew perfectly well that Jenny was at loose ends since Thing Three (whose real name had already deserted me) had started school.

  “I’m sorry,” I added quickly. “Of course you have work to do, too.” I waved vaguely to indicate all that I imagined was involved in taking care of the Three Things, a big house, and a rather old-school husband.

  “Not really,” Jenny acknowledged. “A lot of it’s been outsourced.” By which I knew she meant the twice weekly house cleaner and after-school mother’s helper.

  Jenny’s cell buzzed. “Sorry,” she
said, “I have to take this.” She moved out into the hall, which I thought was weird. I played with the Legos for a while until I heard her coming back. As she walked into the kitchen, I heard her saying, “Thanks so much, Brooklyn. I’ve gotta go now, but it sounds like just what I need. Just don’t say anything to Roland, okay?”

  This was not good.

  There was only one person named Brooklyn in Fair Harbor (quite frankly, it’s amazing that there’s even one). Brooklyn Stever, a local real estate agent. I’d read Big Little Lies. I knew what it meant when a wife was talking to a real estate agent and didn’t want her husband to know.

  Did I ask Jenny what this was all about? I did not. I suppose I could have pushed things a little, tried to help her open up about whatever troubles she was having in her marriage. But Cape Codders, though happy to talk about others’ woes, are on the whole very reluctant to discuss their own. We are stubborn, prideful people. I knew that Jenny would be as embarrassed as I was. She’d tell me what this was about in her own good time. I didn’t really think Roland was beating her or anything like that. But something was definitely up.

  Instead I said, “Well, I’m off to interview the harbormaster.”

  Jenny seized on the new topic with relish. “Oh yeah!” she said. “Jason Captiva. What was that ruckus all about last night? How do you know him?”

  For some reason, I’d been reluctant to talk about my feelings for Jason with Jenny and Miles that summer, particularly after the magnificent flameout. Normally I didn’t mind their good-natured teasing, but this had felt too real, and later too painful, for jokes.

  “We worked together at the Inn one summer,” I said as casually as I could. I didn’t tell Jenny about Jason then, and I wasn’t about to tell her now. “It’s nice to see that he’s done so well for himself.” I couldn’t help myself. I was curious. “How did that happen?”