Murder Most Maine (12 page)

___

I’d barely hung up the phone and was feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach—repeatedly—when it rang a second time.

I picked it up and croaked out my standard greeting, praying it wouldn’t be Carmen Bosworth again.

Thankfully, it wasn’t. “Hey, Natalie, it’s Charlene.”

“Thank God you’re not the
Bangor Daily News
again.”

“Oh, no,” she breathed. “They called?”

“Yup. And they asked all kinds of interesting questions. Like if anyone had ever died or become sick after eating my food in the past, and whether the police were closing down my establishment pending investigation.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I were. That Carmen Bosworth person makes Gertrude Pickens look like my best friend.”

“I’m so sorry, Nat.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Now, what’s up with you?”

“I was calling because I have a bit of news of my own—but I don’t know if you’ll want to hear it.”

“Let me guess.
Good Morning America
is picking up the poisoning story,” I joked.

“No,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“That’s comforting.” I gazed out at the green field sloping down behind the inn, but the serene scene did nothing to calm my nerves.

“I was talking with Ernie, who has a friend on the force over on the mainland.”

“And?”

“First, the toxicology report had a really high concentration of some chemical. So he either overdosed in a big, big way, or was poisoned.”

“Wonderful. Maybe I should call Carmen back.”

“But there’s more,” she said.

“How can there be?” I stared morosely at the calendar. I had several rooms booked for June and July—but if a story appeared in the Bangor paper, would the cancellations start rolling in?

“Here’s the kicker,” she said. “John’s not allowed to have anything to do with the case.”

My eyes jerked up from the calendar, and I gripped the phone tightly. “Why not?” I asked. As the island deputy, he wasn’t overly involved in cases to begin with—but the mainland police had often included him as a source of inside information on local goings-on.

“Apparently, if it turns out to be murder—they’re looking at him as a suspect,” she said.

I closed my eyes,
still clutching the phone like it was a lifeline. Even though the only news I’d gotten through it was bad. John was a potential
suspect
?

“Why?”

“The cops found out about his old connection with Vanessa, years ago. And somebody saw him arguing with Dirk.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I’m just reporting what I heard.”

“Hardly conclusive evidence,” I said lightly, even though my stomach was churning.

“But enough to get him kicked off the case,” she said.

“Trust me—there are a lot more compelling options out there than John,” I said, trying to convince myself that it was true. Was it possible that my neighbor was a murderer?

Couldn’t be
, I told myself.

After Charlene promised not to pass any information on to her buddies at the store, I told her what I’d discovered upstairs in the rooms.

“I knew Dirk was too good to be true,” Charlene said, sighing. “And Vanessa was trying to get rid of him—at least as far as the business was concerned. Do you think they were … well, together?”

“It’s hard to tell,” I said. “She did seem really upset when he died.”

“Maybe her company ambitions overshadowed her romantic interests,” Charlene suggested. “And it sounds like Dirk was getting into trouble with his diet pills. What do you think is in those supplements, anyway?”

“I saw the list—most of it is stuff that lots of folks use, but there’s one thing I haven’t heard of. Elizabeth’s looking into it too, I think—I’m not sure what she’s working on, but I don’t think it’s a travel article.”

“Sounds more like an exposé on the weight-loss business, if you ask me.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

We fell silent for a moment, each lost in our thoughts. Then Charlene said, “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you.”

“What?”

“Matilda was in here all excited a few minutes ago. You know that skeleton?”

“The one at the lighthouse?” I asked. As if skeletons were thick on the ground. Which, lately, they kind of had been, now that I thought of it.

“Well, you know how they think it’s African-American, right?”

I gazed out the window at the lighthouse out on the rocky point. “Yeah.”

“Matilda took that on as a challenge; she spent all day yesterday at the library, going through old documents and newspapers.”

“Sounds thrilling,” I said, my eyes still on the distant white building, the little keeper’s house huddled up next to it. “Did she find anything?”

“That’s the thing. There
was
one African-American here during that time. His name was Otis Ball. And you’re never going to believe it, but he was a slave-catcher.”

“A
what
?”

“Matilda told us that back in the time of slavery—about the time Old Harry disappeared, actually—escaped slaves would come north on their way to Canada, but their owners hired slave-catchers to follow and hunt them down. Otis Ball was one of them—and apparently he thought the Underground Railroad had a way station right here on Cranberry Island.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “That’s crazy. Why would anyone try to force their own people back into slavery?”

“That’s what a lot of folks wondered, I’m guessing. And Matilda says it was pretty unusual—most of the slave-catchers were white. But the money was pretty good, so I guess he put his qualms aside.”

“Did he ever find what he was looking for?” I asked.

“That’s the thing; nobody knows. There was an article that said he was coming to town looking for some escaped slaves, but there’s no other mention of him.”

“Weird. He just vanished?”

“Who knows? Maybe he found the slaves and went home. Matilda’s going over to the Somesville library to see if she can find anything else on him.”

I shook my head. “The Underground Railroad—in Maine.”

“Last stop on the way to Canada, I guess. And a coastal location was probably a pretty good thing, since you could travel by boat.”

It made sense. “That hidden room in the lighthouse—do you think that might have been it? Do you think maybe Harry might have been hiding runaways there?”

“Could be,” Charlene said. “If he was, and the skeleton
is
African-American, the question is, who was murdered? The slave-catcher? Or somebody he was looking for?”

“And we still don’t know what happened to Harry,” I said.

“It just gives you goosebumps thinking about it, doesn’t it?”

Yes, it did. But as fascinating as it was, I had a much more recent mystery to worry about. “I’ve got to go, Charlene. But keep me posted, okay?”

“On the skeleton?”

“Well, that too, of course. But if you hear anything else about Dirk …”

“Will do,” she said. As I hung up, I heard voices coming from outside. I peeked out the window; the retreat participants were coming down the hill. John had tagged along again this morning, walking very close to Vanessa, smiling. Two days ago the sight of John coming down the road would have made my heart feel light; now, seeing him so close to Vanessa, I wished he’d just disappear. Were the police justified in keeping him out of the case? I wondered, watching John’s easy lope, and the way the sun gleamed on his sandy hair.

Had I been dating a murderer?

It’s all speculation, Nat
, I told myself, ripping my eyes from John—and Vanessa, who was inches away from him—and surveying the other guests.

A few yards back, Megan and Greg were practically holding hands while Carissa glowered a few feet behind them, her plump lips pushed into a pout. Cat, Boots, and Sarah were together, as always, and Bethany trailed the group. They all looked bright red with exertion—except Vanessa and John, I noticed. And Elizabeth, who was a few steps to the left of Vanessa, looking like the cat who’d caught the canary. Why? I wondered. Had she gotten another juicy tidbit to tuck into her article?

As I watched them approach the inn, my eyes riveted again on John and Vanessa, I suddenly realized that people who exercised are frequently hungry. I glanced at my watch; lunch was less than an hour away, and I’d been so wrapped up in my snooping—I mean,
cleaning
—I hadn’t even thought about preparing food.

With one last look at the group coming down the road, I grabbed my supplies and hurried to the kitchen. I struggled to banish thoughts of John’s potential suspecthood and the upcoming article in the Bangor paper from my mind—and breathed a sigh of relief that today’s lunch was just a simple shrimp salad followed by the custards that were already made.

___

When I toted a tray of shrimp salads into the dining room less than an hour later—field greens, julienned veggies, and fresh shrimp drizzled with a yogurt-lime-chipotle dressing (I’d had to order the chipotles from Texas)—the mood of the guests was once again subdued. I wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion from the morning excursion, though, or a reverberation from the trainer’s death. John was nowhere in evidence; he had managed to pry himself away from Vanessa, at least for a few minutes, anyway. What exactly had John and Tom been arguing about last night? Maybe once the retreat had moved onto the afternoon’s “nutritional education” session, I’d steel myself to walk down to the carriage house and have a chat with my neighbor, who’d practically disappeared from my life the moment the retreat hit the island. Before I passed judgment, I should hear his side of the story, after all.

As I distributed the custards to my ravenous guests, including Vanessa, who had wolfed hers down almost before I’d handed out the rest of them, my eyes were drawn again to the lighthouse on the point. My thoughts turned to what Charlene had said about the Underground Railroad. Could it be that Cranberry Island had been a way station? If it was, how many refugees had taken up residence behind the white-painted façade?

I flashed back to the strange lights we’d seen the other night, and a shiver crept up my spine. The other question was, whose skeleton had the workers found hidden inside the lighthouse?

___

As Vanessa started droning on in the dining room about nutritional choices (not all carbs are bad, of course, but the less refined, the better), I tucked into my own shrimp salad at the kitchen table, eyeing the carriage house with trepidation. I knew I had to face John eventually. But it was going to be hard to control my emotions when I did it. Heck, I wasn’t even sure what my emotions were. Anger, for sure. And hurt—even though, as Charlene said, there was no hard evidence to show that John and Vanessa were anything but friends. After all, my ex-fiancé had swept into town last fall, and even though he’d kissed me, it hadn’t meant I was falling for him. If John had managed to overlook a kiss, I should be able to overlook him calling Vanessa
sweetheart
. And spending an hour behind closed doors in his carriage house with her. My blood pressure rose just thinking about it.

But there was another emotion I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with mixed in there. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might be fear.

As I finished my less-than-filling salad, my eyes strayed to the cookie jar. It was a good thing I’d taken those mint bars down to Charlene’s, or I’d have plowed through the whole pan.

Instead, I turned my back on the jar’s siren song and helped myself to the last remaining custard, which I’d tucked into the fridge next to a bag of lettuce. The smooth confection was missing some of the richness of the full-fat version, and the sweetener had a touch of aftertaste that wasn’t my favorite, but I needed something sweet right now, and it filled the bill.

Finally, when I’d licked the last bit of custard out of the bowl (one of the benefits of dining alone, in my opinion), I realized I couldn’t put it off any longer. With a tummy full of fat-free custard and fat-free shrimp, I checked my face for stray dressing, smiled into the mirror to make sure there was no salad stuck between my teeth, and headed out the door toward the carriage house.

I stepped out onto the porch off the kitchen, catching my breath at the gusts of wind off the water. Summer might be on the way, but the wind was still pretty darned chilly. And forceful enough to make my white-painted rockers rocket back and forth on the porch all by themselves. It was eerie, almost—as if they had invisible, highly agitated occupants. I glanced up at the lighthouse, white as bleached bones, in the distance. Then I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and forced myself to head down the path to John’s carriage house.

___

“I hear you’ve been asked to leave the case,” I blurted artlessly a few minutes later as I perched on the edge of John’s couch. He winced slightly, and I cursed my poor choice of words. The room around me smelled faintly of fresh wood, like John himself, who was enamored of working with the natural material. Although he supplemented his income with his deputy position and the toy boats he made for Island Artists, his first love was working with the weathered wood that washed up on the rocks. He would spend months at a time transforming chunks of weathered wood from gnarled hunks of twisted branches into graceful sea creatures, several of which graced the bookshelves at the end of the room. John’s first piece of driftwood art, a seal, still stood on the coffee table, its gray back smooth as silk. I reached out reflexively to touch it—it felt warm under my fingers.

I pulled my hand back and regarded the man on the other end of the couch, wondering at how quickly the intimacy of two days ago had dissipated. So far, our little meeting was not going as well as I had hoped. John had answered after the second knock; after a glancing kiss on the forehead, he’d invited me in, sitting down at the opposite end of the couch from me. Tension crackled in the air between us.

“Because I have a prior acquaintance with one of the people connected with the incident,” John said in answer to my artless question, “they have asked me to disassociate myself from the case.” He wore a flannel shirt and faded jeans, and the spray of yellow sawdust dusting his sleeve told me he’d spent some time in his workshop this afternoon.

“Do you mean Vanessa?” I asked, wondering if “prior association” was the only reason they’d asked him to step down.

He nodded, but I found myself unconvinced. Just because he knew her over a decade ago wasn’t enough to get him removed from the case. Was there more than he was telling me?