W
hen the police had finished their questioning and left with their standard warning, “No one is to leave the area until this matter is cleared up,” Fenimore set about restoring the family's equilibrium.
“It's not enough to lose your daughter,” Edgar fumed, “but you also have to put up with the police.”
“Don't, dear.” Marie squeezed his hand.
“It's just routine, sir,” Fenimore soothed. “Until the real culprit is found.”
“I think it's dreadful,” Emily said. “Why, it was probably a simple case of food poisoning.”
“I'm sure everything I cooked was fresh, Emily,” Judith turned on her sister.
“Oh. I didn't meanâ” Emily bit her tongue.
“Have they determined what poison was used?” Adam asked.
Fenimore nodded. “But I'm not at liberty to divulgeâ”
“Sayâexactly what do
you
have to do with all this, anyway?”
Tom demanded. “Are you some kind of a private dick or something?”
Fenimore coughed. “Let's say I'm a family friend with experience in criminal investigations and a knowledge of police procedures. I thought I might be useful to you, but if you would prefer ⦔
“Oh no, Doctor.” Judith was aghast. “Please stay.”
“Yes. We're so grateful.” Emily cast Tom a withering look.
The others nodded in agreement. Tom left the room in a sulk.
“Perhaps she had some jealous colleague in the academic world who wanted to do her in,” suggested Adam. A member of the academic community himself, he knew the power of such emotions.
“So Professor what's-his-name crept in the back door with a spoonful of cyanide, carried it into the dining room where Pamela just happened to be, and said, âHere, dearie, have a taste,' and left the same way.” Mildred's voice had a hysterical edge.
“What about the dollhouse?” Marie reminded them. “Only a member of the family would think of disturbing that.”
Avoiding one another's eyes, they silently pondered her words.
“Anyone for a drink?” Tom stood in the doorway waving a bottle of brandy.
“Oh, Tom, you've been into the medicine cabinet!” Judith cried.
“I think we could all use a little medicine tonight.” He
splashed a large dose of the brown liquid into the tumbler that had recently held his sherry.
“Tom, I want to go home,” Mildred pleaded. “I promised the sitter we'd be home hours ago.”
“That's my wife for you. She's suspected of murder and worries about the sitter!” He wasn't about to give up his hard-won prize so easily.
“I think we should all go home,” Fenimore said quickly, “and give the aunts a rest.” For a moment his detective self gave way to his physician self; he had noticed that the two elderly women looked worn-out.
Everyone looked at the aunts and came to the same conclusion. Susanne and Adam started to move to the coat closet. The rest followed. Even Tom gulped his drink and accepted his coat from his wife.
Fenimore was the last to leave. “Could you give me Carrie's address? I'd like to drop by and have a word with her.”
Judith gave him her address and the directions to her house.
“If it's agreeable,” he said, “I'd like to do some unofficial snooping.”
“Oh, Doctor, thank you,” Emily said.
“We didn't dare hope ⦔ Judith's voice overflowed with gratitude. She knew the doctor only accepted the cases of very special friends.
“I'll be in touch.” He set off on foot in search of Carrie, whistling. Suddenly remembering the somber nature of the occasion, Fenimore stopped. But as soon as he was out of earshot, he took it up again even more vigorously.
C
arrie lived in a small cottage tucked behind the inn, on the wrong side of town. Fenimore decided to walk. He could always think better on foot. Carrie was sixteen, the oldest child in a family of six, Judith had told him. She served as a surrogate mother to her younger brothers and sisters because her mother was an alcoholic. Her father had left them years ago.
The house was a summer bungalow that someone had attempted, ineffectively, to winterize. Dirty sheets of plastic were tacked across the windows on the sea side of the house and tufts of pink insulation stuck out between the windows and their wooden frames. Tacked to the front door was a handwritten note: “Bell don't work. Knock loud.” When Fenimore knocked, a teenage girl answered the door. Two towheaded youngsters clung to her legs and an odor of cabbage and cats overwhelmed him.
“Are you Carrie?”
She nodded.
She looked tired and older than her years. He was sorry he had come without warning. He hastened to make amends. “Sorry to burst in on you like this. I'm Dr. Fenimore, a friend of the Pancoasts. I hear you were helping out there on Thanksgiving Day, when the unfortunate ⦠er ⦠accident occurred.”
“Oh yes. I came to wash up.” Two more towheads, of varying sizes, appeared behind their sister to stare owl-like at Fenimore.
“I wonder if we might talk?”
“Sure.” She shook herself free of the children. “Scat, now.”
They scattered like leaves to the four corners, but remained in the room. She led him to a decrepit couch in front of a cold fireplace. A pair of rusted andirons stood inside, but there were no logs in sight. Carrie unceremoniously dismissed a limp gray cat from the seat of a wooden rocker. The chair had obviously seen heavy useâone arm was missing and the brown paint was worn and chipped. A TV droned with a soap opera in another part of the house.
“There was something funny about Miss Pamela's death, wasn't there?” Carrie took her seat in the rocker. “She didn't choke like they said, did she?”
Modern telecommunications were no match for the village grapevine, Fenimore decided. “That's right,” he said.
She waited expectantly for more information, but none was forthcoming.
“What time did you arrive at the Pancoasts'?”
She frowned. “It was getting dark. It must have been nearly five. I told Miss Judith I couldn't come earlier because I had my own family to feed.”
“Of course. When you arrived, what was the first thing you did?”
“Well, I came in the back doorâthey always leave it open. The kitchen was a terrible mess. Pots and pans all over the place. Miss Judith is a wonderful cook, but sloppy!” She raised her eyebrows. “Then I decided to check the dining room and see if the table had been cleared. Of course it wasn't. The dessert dishes were still there. But things were even worse than usual. Chairs were turned upside down, dishes were on the floor. I remember thinking, it must have been some party!”
Fenimore waited.
“And then I noticed Miss Pamelaâher head was on the table. At first I thought she had fallen asleep or passed out. Sometimes folks take a bit too much on the holidays,” she confided knowingly.
Fenimore nodded encouragingly. “What did you do next?”
“Well, I was trying to decide whether to wake her. She's a bit of a crank at the best of timesâ” She placed a hand over her mouth, remembering she was speaking of the dead.
Fenimore smiled. “Go on.”
“I decided she'd take my head off if I woke her, so I quietly cleared the plates around her and went back to the kitchen.”
“And then?”
“I hadn't been there more than a minute when I heard someone scream. Then there was all this commotion. There's a little window in the top of the kitchen door. I peeked through that and saw Mr. Edgar shaking his daughter. Then he dragged her down on the floor and started breathing mouth to mouth. Miss
Judith almost knocked me over when she burst into the kitchen. She wanted to use the phone in the pantry to call the ambulance.”
“What did you do then?”
She shrugged. “I started to clean up the kitchen.”
“In spite of all the commotion?”
“Oh yes. You see, I'm used to commotion.” She nodded at the towheads around the room. Two had crept over to her while she was talking. One hung on the back of her chair. The other knelt beside her, his head in her lap. She had been stroking his hair absently as she talked. “Not a week goes by that we don't call the Emergency because one of them's fallen out of a tree or swallowed a button or something.” When Carrie smiled, her face lost its careworn expression and Fenimore was reminded how young she was.
“I see.” He smiled. “You do have your hands full.” He glanced around the room. “I'm sorry to have taken so much of your time.” He stood up.
“No trouble.” She gently removed her brother's head from her lap and rose too. “Wouldn't you like a cup of tea?” Belatedly, she remembered her manners.
“No thanks. I have to get back to Philadelphia.”
From Carrie's expression, he might have been returning to Mars.
He shook her hand. “You've been very helpful.” As he started out the door, he turned. “No one else came into the kitchen while you were there?”
“No, sir. Except Miss Judithâto tell me to go home. Before
I'd half finished the cleanup too. And the next day she came here to pay me my money. The full amount, although I told her it wasn't right.”
He thanked Carrie again and left her as he had found her, standing in the doorway, two children clinging to her. Confound it, where was the child's mother? It wasn't right shoving all that responsibility on a teenager. She should be at her studies. Or with friendsâhaving a good time. Absorbed in his anger, he almost forgot where he was going. Then he saw the lighted sign. SEACREST INN. It had grown dark while he was talking to Carrie. And colder. A sea breeze in November was no joke. Pulling his coat more closely about him, he headed for the glowing sign.
T
he bar wasn't crowded. But there were more people than Fenimore would have expected on an off-season evening. The decor was “fake seacoast.” Garish reproductions of sailing ships alternated with fishnets and lobster pots along the walls. A large ship's wheel hung behind the bar. Anchors decorated every available surfaceânapkins, glasses, ashtrays, and coasters. Fenimore supposed that the captain's cap that the bartender wore at such a rakish angle had once been white. He ordered Scotch.
At the other end of the bar a small group of locals were discussing something in subdued tones. Fenimore could barely hear them, but every now and then a voice would rise and he caught the name “Pancoast.” He knew the family had founded the village of Seacrest before the American Revolution. There was a Pancoast Street and a Pancoast Library. Any happening in the Pancoast familyâbirth, wedding, deathâwould be of major interest to the inhabitants of the village. If the
group at the end of the bar had access to the same grapevine as Carrieâthere could be no doubt about what topic they were discussing.
Gradually Fenimore began to grow warmer. He shed his coat, folded it, and placed it on the barstool next to him.
“Remember old Caleb Pancoast?” A voice rumbled down the bar. “There was a seaman for you.” The voice went on to relate a sea story of which Fenimore caught only snatches.
“Eighty-mile-an-hour winds ⦔
“Torn sail ⦔
“Busted rudder ⦔
Now and then the men would send wary glances down the bar and lower their voices. A stranger in a small town was always suspect.
Fenimore kept his eyes focused on himself in the mirror behind the bar (something he rarely did; he did not consider his face one of his fine points). He ordered another Scotch. When the bartender set it down, Fenimore asked, “Do the Pancoasts ever come in here?”
The bartender pushed back his cap and grinned. “Sure, Doc. Miss Judith and Miss Emily come waltzing in here every afternoon for a snort.”
Fenimore wasn't surprised that the man knew he was a doctor. Just another example of the village grapevine at work. He laughed. “I meant the younger generation.”
“Only Tom. He's a booze hound.”
Fenimore didn't contradict him.
“But then, you can hardly blame himâwith that wife of his. Doesn't make a move without reading her horoscope first. Uses
a cell phone to check in with her astrologer twenty-four hours a day. Spends as much money on fortune-tellers as most women spend on hairdressers.” He took a swipe at the bar with his cloth. “A real nut. If she were mine, I'd drink too. As a matter of fact, Tom was in here on Thanksgiving.”
“You were open Thanksgiving?”
“Oh, yeah. Hafta keep the dining room open for the lazy broads who don't want to cookâor have forgotten how. Of course we're open.”
“Yo, Frank!” Someone signaled for his services at the other end of the bar.
Fenimore put down a generous tip and started to leave. When the first blast of cold air hit him, he remembered his coat and turned back. As he reentered the bar, he was met with raucous laughter. It stopped when they saw him.
“Hey, mister!” The loudest member of the group sidled up to him. He wasn't a tall man, but he was solidly built. When he was face to face with Fenimore, he said, “You a friend of the Pancoasts?”
Fenimore nodded.
The man shared a wink with his friends and turned back to him. “Maybe you can help us settle something.” He thrust his face nearer.
Fenimore waited. He wasn't interested in a barroom brawl. Not that he couldn't handle it, but he had more important things to do.
“We have a wager going here. Some of us think the Pancoast girl died natural. Others don't. What's your opinion?”
“What makes you think I have one?”
His eyes narrowed. “The Pancoast place was swarming with police tonight. Now, that ain't natural.” He was so close Fenimore could smell the beer and peanuts on his breath. “You was up there, weren't you?”
It was as if the fella were accusing
him
of Pamela's death. But Fenimore understood. The man was proud of the Pancoast family, as were most of the villagers. If there was something fishy going on, he would rather blame an outsider than a member of the familyâor the town.
He hesitated. But, he told himself, you can never hide the truth for long. And certainly not in a village of three hundred odd. It would probably be in all the newspapers tomorrow. He looked the man straight in the eye and said, “She may have been poisoned.”
The man's belligerence evaporated. He wilted like a sail that's been suddenly lowered.
His friends had heard Fenimore too. “I told ya, Louie,” one of them yelled. “You owe me a fiver.”
Fenimore took his coat from the bar stool and left them to settle their wager.
Â
A freezing rain had begun to fall. The street was slick and deserted. Fenimore regretted not bringing his car. As he moved up the street, he remembered how it looked in summer, overflowing with vacationersâbrowsing in the shops, balancing ice cream cones, and oozing with suntan lotion. He quickened his steps.
The Pancoast house was dark except for one light on the second floor. Probably the bathroom. The shade was drawn.
He was glad the aunts had taken his advice and retired early. As Fenimore watched, a distinct shadow moved across the yellow window shade. It passed quickly, but not before he noticed that the silhouette was not Judith'sâwith her fuzzy head of curls. And not Emily'sâwith her neat bun at the back of the neck. The silhouette was smoothâlike an egg. Or a bald man. Fenimore hesitated before getting into his car. Should he wake the aunts and ask who was using their bathroom? There must be some simple explanation. Edgar or Tom? (Both father and son were balding.) One of them had probably dropped back after Fenimore had left and decided to spend the night. When he glanced at the window again, the light was out. All was dark and serene. Even the rain had stopped. Fenimore turned on the ignition and began the long trip back to Philadelphia.