A Side of Murder Page 8

  “Shut up, Diogi,” I said wearily.

  To my enormous surprise, Diogi shut up. Had Helene actually taught Diogi “shut up” as a command?

  “It’s open,” I called out. I wasn’t quite ready to give up my comfy spot on the couch.

  The door swung open, and in walked Jason Captiva wearing a thick Fair Isle fisherman’s sweater and faded jeans that clung like a promise to his slim hips.

  “Do you have some time to talk about the body in Alden Pond?”

  * * *

  * * *

  I don’t know who was more confused by what they saw. Me by Jason appearing at 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon looking like every girl’s daily recommended allowance of man beauty or Jason by me dressed to kill at 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon looking like some kind of secret drinker.

  Jason recovered first, but awkwardly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, half backing out of the door. “You’re . . . busy.”

  That made me laugh.

  “I should always be so busy,” I said, and patted the couch next to me. “Have a seat, I’ll get you a glass.” Two sips of wine and I’d already forgotten we weren’t friends anymore.

  “No, no,” he said, though he did step back into the room.

  Diogi was watching this ballet with great interest. Man steps in, steps out, steps in. Lady does not seem alarmed. Shut up command is still in place. This, of course, leaves only one option. Diogi pounced.

  To give him credit, Jason took his doggy kisses without totally losing his dignity.

  “Hey, fella,” he said, after allowing a single kiss on each cheek, European style, “that’s enough now. You can stop.”

  And Diogi stopped.

  “What are you?” I asked. “Some kind of dog whisperer?”

  “I like dogs,” Jason said mildly. Diogi gazed up at him soulfully.

  “Well, this one likes you anyway.”

  “This one does not impress me as being particularly discriminating.”

  “True,” I admitted. “This one even likes me.”

  “Well, that’s easy,” Jason said, not flirtatiously, just as if he was simply stating a fact, but I felt myself going pink anyway.

  “Please, have a seat,” I said, to cover my confusion. “I’m waiting for some friends who are coming over for Sunday dinner. Have a glass of wine with me or beer if you’d prefer. I’m afraid I’ve only got Sam Adams Summer Ale.”

  “Well, given that it’s about fifty degrees out, that’s more aspirational than accurate,” Jason said. “But sure, I’d love a Sam.”

  I felt my face flame at this unintended double entendre. I went over to the kitchenette and pulled a beer out of the half fridge. I was very conscious of his eyes on me.

  “Glass?” I asked as I levered the top off.

  “No, thanks.”

  I handed him the bottle and he took a long swig. Watching the muscles of his throat work as he swallowed, I was slammed by déjà vu. No wonder I’d always liked Sam Adams beer. It had been Jason’s beverage of choice that summer. You are totally pathetic, Sam.

  Oblivious to my scrutiny, Jason put the bottle down on the trunk that served as the coffee table and said, “Thanks. It’s been a long day.”

  I settled back onto the couch. “There’s something new?”

  “Yeah,” Jason admitted. “Can we talk off the record?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Let’s make that the default. When you want to talk on the record, you just let me know.” I didn’t tell him that I was officially off the story. And I didn’t say how surprised I was that he seemed to be taking my doubts about Estelle’s death seriously. But I was gratified. Maybe I wasn’t crazy. Just pathetic.

  Jason gave me one of his rare smiles, and I felt somehow rewarded. Yup, pathetic. “I’ll let you know,” he said.

  But before we could settle into our off-the-record chat, there was a tap at the door and Helene immediately let herself in. I don’t even know why she knocked. She was draped in a long, tie-dyed tunic in various shades of lavender and lime green and was carrying two chilled bottles of champagne.

  “Oops,” she said when she saw Jason. “I didn’t know the party had already started.”

  She handed me the champagne. Veuve Clicquot, no less.

  Noticing my raised eyebrows, she murmured, “We had a very bad marriage, so I made sure I got a very good divorce.”

  “Well done,” I said, patting her on the arm. “Very well done indeed.”

  Jason stood and greeted Helene familiarly. It turned out he was a library regular, mostly nonfiction, of course. Mostly history, of course. I love a good romantic novel, said no man ever. She told him that the best seller about America’s founding fathers that he’d ordered was finally in.

  “Ever since that Hamilton play,” she pointed out, “the signers of the Declaration of Independence are totally sexy.”

  I could have sworn Jason blushed.

  They chatted for a few more minutes, but soon Jason began making polite noises about leaving.

  “Nonsense,” Helene said firmly. “There’s plenty of food. We’d love to have you join us.”

  We would? Because I for one did not want to talk about dead bodies over my apricot tart. I really wanted to be able to keep this meal down, thank you.

  Jason looked at me doubtfully, as if he could sense my ambivalence, which, of course, made me feel guilty.

  “Absolutely,” I said, and the note of false enthusiasm in my voice was clear even to me. I tried to tone it down. “Really. This is no fancy thing. Just a bunch of friends over for Sunday dinner.”

  “In that case,” Jason said, “I’d be happy to join you.”

  He paused, guessing at what had caused my reluctance. “And I promise, no shoptalk at dinner.”

  “Good,” Helene said with great satisfaction, as if she’d just negotiated the Treaty of Versailles. “In that case, I’ll just put these bottles in your little fridge and see you later.” She clanked the champagne into the mini fridge, then, in a whirl of purple and green, vanished through the door. I had never seen anyone appear and disappear as fast as this woman.

  Jason and I settled back onto the couch.

  “So, since we have some time before the shoptalk ban begins, what exactly is on your mind?” I asked.

  “That thing you said, you know, about the chances of a drowning victim being found faceup? That bothered me,” he said. “I started going through our computer files on drownings on the Cape, knocking out those that happened in plain view of witnesses.”

  “Like people getting pulled out in riptides at the beach?”

  “Exactly. In the past ten years there have been thirty-seven unwitnessed drownings, some in freshwater lakes, usually kids swimming alone or teenagers skinny-dipping at night. But most have been on the Outer Beach or in Crystal Bay and its ponds. In the two years I’ve been here, I’ve pulled out most of the bay drownings myself.”

  Pulled out. I shuddered, but said nothing.

  “You were right. In my experience and in almost every other case,” Jason continued, “the body is found floating facedown.”

  I nodded to show I was following.

  “But you found the body floating faceup,” he said. “How does a woman drown faceup?”

  “My question exactly,” I said. But suddenly I didn’t want to go where my mind had already taken me. I hazarded an alternate scenario.

  “She drowned facedown but then got turned over by a wave?”

  “Not likely. There’s not much wave action on a pond. And the weight of the arms and legs dangling down are usually enough to keep the body in the face down position.”

  I tried again. “Somebody found her and turned her over to see if she was dead?”

  “And then walked away without telling anybody?”

  “Maybe it was kids,�
� I said doubtfully. “Freaked out?”

  Jason snorted. “Kids don’t freak out. They love nothing better than a starring role in real-life drama. Believe me, if some kids had found her, we’d have heard all about it. So who was it who turned her over to see if she was dead?”

  He looked at me, willing me to say it.

  “Her killer,” I said, looking him squarely in the eye. “It was her killer.”

  TWELVE

  Further considerations of Estelle’s untimely end were postponed by the arrival of Jenny, Roland, and the Three Things. The boys were greeted with paroxysms of joy by Diogi, who promptly herded them back outside to throw his slimy tennis ball for him about ten thousand times. Minutes later Helene apparated in the ell and began uncorking and pouring the champagne.

  “Is there another time when we could talk about that-which-must-not-be-named-at-the-dinner-table?” Jason asked quietly, leaning in to me, very much aware of the eyes and ears around us.

  I confess the feel of his warm breath on my cheek threw me. “Um, okay, sure,” I said with my usual eloquence. “When?”

  “Weather report looks good for Tuesday, for what that’s worth.” The Cape’s weather is notoriously changeable, giving rise to the old saw that if you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes. “I have to go out in the morning and check on some channel markers in Big Crystal that may need to be moved. You could come with me, we’ll have that talk and then maybe we could take my lunch hour out there, too? Have a picnic on the boat?”

  As he trailed off, I suddenly realized he was nervous.

  “Of course,” I hastened to reassure him. “I’ll bring the lunch, if you want. Maybe some fried chicken, coleslaw, chocolate chip cookies for dessert? Easy-peasy.” Jason wasn’t the only one who couldn’t seem to stop prattling on.

  “That would be great,” he said. “Can you meet me at the pier around eleven? You can bring the pup, too, if you want.”

  I was touched that he’d thought about Diogi. “He’d love it,” I said. “We’ll be there at eleven.”

  He smiled and nodded and walked away to talk to Jenny, leaving me staring after him.

  Miles arrived soon after, bearing the wine and his boyfriend, Sebastian Wilkes. Sebastian is a pediatric oncologist at Hyannis Hospital. He is everything Miles is not—slight, with horn-rimmed glasses and a reserved temperament. He lives for his work and rarely has a free night or weekend, so a Sebastian sighting was a rare treat. I offered him a glass of Helene’s champagne, and sure enough he declined, saying he was on call. Miles sighed audibly.

  I introduced them both to Jason and left them happily discussing shell-fishing regulations, a source of endless debate on the Cape.

  Arriving fashionably late was Krista, looking beautiful in skintight jeans, a white silk blouse, and red cowboy boots. The sleek black bell of her hair framed her almond-shaped eyes in a way that made them look even bigger than they were. Helene poured her some champagne and she joined the rest of the group over by the woodstove.

  I stood to one side, marveling at how my friends had grown and changed since our high school days.

  When Jenny was in her early twenties, she had surprised us all by marrying Roland, who was almost two decades her senior and was as buttoned-up and buttoned-down as Jenny was lively and open. I knew Jenny considered her role as their family’s primary caregiver a career choice, and I respected her for it, though I wondered sometimes if she’d closed off her other options too soon. But she was hands down the best mother I’d ever known. Just look at that science fair volcano.

  Miles, after getting his degree in agricultural science at the University of Iowa, had returned home, officially come out to his elderly parents and took over the family farm, one of the few left on the Cape. Now all organic, of course. This had been very difficult for Miles’s dad to accept. Not the gay part, the organic part.

  “I always knew he’d go gay,” Mr. Tanner once said to me in his charmingly un-PC way, “but I never figured on him going organic.”

  And then there was Krista. After college, she had convinced my father to hire her as a part-time assistant at the paper. Within weeks she was writing feature stories. In two months, she was moved to news. She was a dynamo. She was brilliant at the work.

  When my parents moved to Florida, I had assumed the chronically unprofitable Clarion would be shut down by the small New England media company that owned it. But Krista had convinced the big cheeses that the future of newspapers was local and online. She walked out of that meeting as the Clarion’s new editor in chief. Two years later, the Clarion was both a print and online publication with a growing reputation and even a small profit.

  I was proud of them all. Of course, I did not tell them that. Heaven forfend.

  I was also happy to see that Jason, though he said little, had been accepted into the group with hardly more than a raised eyebrow (shared between Jenny and Miles, of course). They assumed he was my friend, and therefore he was their friend. I, of course, was not sure he was my friend, as that seemed to be an on-and-off thing, but I didn’t reveal that little insecurity. Heaven forfend.

  Krista, it appeared, already knew Jason, and I watched in awe as she deftly cut him out of the bivalve discussion.

  “You never got back to me on that dredging report for the inlet,” she said, somehow making dredging sound very intimate. Which is ridiculous, Sam. There is nothing intimate about a dredging report. “Is there really a chance that it will spread red tide?” Or about red tide.

  Nonetheless, Jason seemed captivated by the topic.

  I left my guests in the ell and went out to the kitchen, ostensibly to take the lamb out of the oven and let it rest for fifteen minutes or so, but mostly because I’d just discovered something about myself that I didn’t like very much and hoped wasn’t obvious on my face. I was jealous of Krista.

  This was something new. I’d never been jealous of Krista. I’d always admired her and rooted for her. I’d reveled in her successes. What had changed?

  This emotion, I decided as I spooned the roasted potatoes onto a platter and popped them back in the oven to stay warm, was unworthy of me. Yes, I admitted to myself as I made a quick reduction from the pan drippings and a glug of red wine, my star was dimmed and Krista’s was ascendant. And, yes, she was trying to block me from investigating Estelle’s death, I thought resentfully as I drizzled the honey vinaigrette over the salad. But it was Krista, I reminded myself as I uncorked Miles’s wine and set it on the table, who had given me the job in the first place. And it was Krista who had kept my parents’ dream alive. The green-eyed monster crawled back into his cave, ashamed.

  My guests wandered into the kitchen as I was slicing the lamb. The boys were directed to the kids table, and Diogi settled at their feet on the not unwise assumption that the little humans were more likely to share. The others found their way around the kitchen table with a lot of jostling and joking.

  Miles poured the wine and offered the first glass to Helene.

  “To my favorite librarian,” he said with a little mock bow, “to whom I will always be indebted for agreeing to stock that terrific series of gay romances.” Okay, so I was wrong. Here was a man who loved himself a romantic novel.

  “I didn’t order them because they were gay,” Helene pointed out, but accepting the wine nonetheless. “I ordered them because they were remarkably well written. My criteria was literary merit.”

  “Well, that’s what you told the library board anyway,” Miles said, and Helene grinned at him conspiratorially.

  As my guests passed the platters of food around the table, Krista and Miles and Jenny regaled the others with stories about our high school days, which, awful as they had seemed at the time, were actually pretty funny in retrospect.

  Maybe someday, I thought to myself, I’ll be able to tell my finger-chopping story and find it as amusing as everyone else seems to.


  Jason, seated between Sebastian and Jenny, seemed relaxed and happy, and I wished that I could say the same for myself. In spite of my best efforts, as the conversation around the table moved to the ever-fascinating topic of environmental regulations (Really? You need a permit to spray poison ivy?), I found my mind wandering back to the shocking conclusion that Estelle had been murdered. My distracted state of mind was later to work against me. If I’d paid just a little more attention when my guests moved off the poison ivy debate and onto bigger issues, I could have saved myself a world of pain.

  THIRTEEN

  I might have been listening with only half an ear, but the others were completely absorbed in their conversation.

  “You’re coming to the town meeting tomorrow night, right?” Jenny demanded more than asked, pointing a forkful of roasted potato at Krista.

  “Um, yeah,” said Krista, pointing a forkful of salad right back at her. “On account of because it’s my job to cover the town hall meeting.”

  “No,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “Not as a journalist but as a concerned citizen.”

  “What should I be concerned about?” Krista asked, suddenly interested. “I haven’t actually looked at the agenda yet.”

  “We’re voting on Trey Gorman’s big plans for that ‘gated community’ he wants to build on the old Skaket sailing camp.”

  This was news to me. Of course, pretty much everything that had been happening in Fair Harbor for the past ten years was news to me.

  “Someone bought Skaket Point?” I asked. “I thought the Sloanes wanted that land to go to Conservation as preserved space?”

  “They did,” Krista said. “But when old Mrs. Sloane finally died last year, it turned out she’d never actually set the trust up.”

  That got my attention.

  “And her kids decided to sell instead?” I was surprised. I didn’t know the Sloanes’ grown-up children very well, but this kind of disregard for a matriarch’s wishes was virtually unheard of in old Cape families.