A Month at the Shore (39 page)

"I caught the last shooting star before we came in from the beach," he'd told her, and at the time it seemed like a lovely, plausible explanation.

But in the hour before dawn, when they awoke and made love again, he explained that the ring had belonged to his grandmother, and then to his mother, and that his mother had given it to him after his father had died.

"Because you never know when you might need it," she'd told him at the time. "You have to be ready to strike when the iron is hot. That's how it was with your father and me."

A simple, motherly remark. It gave Laura hope that someday, despite the obvious differences between them, she and Camille Barclay would be friends.

****

Over a breakfast of juice, toast, and eggs and no chocolate cake, the talk turned, as it had on and off all night, back to the ongoing investigation. Despite her euphoria—maybe because of it—Laura was more deeply concerned than ever about Snack.

"It's the knife that I'm worried about most," Laura said.

Ken had told her everything he knew about the investigation so far, and part of what he knew was the knife.

"Yeah," he conceded. "I was hoping it was your father's."

Laura shook her head morosely.

She said, "I'll have to tell them—won't I?—that I personally saved up to have it engraved for Snack's graduation present. He must have given it to Sylvia as a gift."

"Or lent it to her for the day. You don't know. You all use knives."

"Yes, but when I think back
... Snack really did have a fierce thing about her. There's no point in denying it. And the knife was a proud possession. You know? Kind of a little like—?" She held up her hand with the ring on it.

"I understand," Ken said, nodding.

"I
hate
this," Laura moaned. "I feel as if I possess all the testimony they need to string my brother up. I know who the knife belonged to. I know about the horrible fight Snack had with my father late that awful night—the same night that, earlier, Billy says my brother fought with Sylvia. I know that Snack ran away from home right after the beating my father gave him. And I remember, now, that I wondered if maybe he'd eloped with Sylvia. Which is
your
fault, by the way," she added glumly.

"Come again?"

"After last night
... after the beach
... all kinds of dams seemed to break," she said. "Things came flooding back that I haven't let myself think about in years and years. And one of them was the quaint idea that Snack had eloped with Sylvia after she said that she was thinking of quitting her job at Shore Gardens. Snack was only fifteen, then; but never mind. The point is, why would I even have had the thought if he hadn't been wild about her?"

Ken smiled and said,
"Maybe because you like happy-
ever-afters?"

She laughed. "Oh, yeah. Snack and Sylvia. There's a wedding-cake couple. Actually, do you know what kind of woman Snack really needs? Someone who'd be half girlfriend, half mother to him. That would work. But a bad boy and a bad girl
..." She snorted and said, "That's not generally a recipe for success."

"Have it all figured out, do you, Miss Lonelyhearts?" He reached over and gave the ring on her finger a tug. "As soon as we get ourselves properly wed, we'll find someone for your brother. It can be done. He's a good kid."

"With a rap sheet. Which is another thing."

Laura sighed and broke off a piece of toast, but each piece had been going down harder, and she was merely playing with her food now. She folded the bread onto itself over and over until it was a tight little ball of gluten, ready to string on a hook for fish bait.

"Add to that, Billy's account," she said, going down the list of damning circumstances. "Oh, and let's not forget Uncle Norbert's homicidal genes. A jury sure won't."

Ken said quickly, "Now, that's the kind of fact that would never be allowed into evidence."

"But it's a fact that everyone knows!"

"Some
people know it. In Chepaquit. You're much too puffed up over your notoriety, lady," he said, polishing a broken yolk with the last of his bread. "Few people know, and fewer care."

She smiled forlornly and said, "You're just saying we're nobodies to make me feel good."

"Ha. If I wanted to make you feel good," he said with a Groucho Marx jiggle of eyebrows, "I'd go a different route altogether." He pushed his chair back and went around to her side of the table to clear her plate, and then suddenly he stopped.

"It doesn't make sense," he said, frowning. "Miss Widdich claimed—and I believe it—that Sylvia wanted to get back at her. That Sylvia wanted to put
her
in a cardboard box. That money wasn't what Sylvia was after."

"So—?"

"So why would Sylvia say thank you very much, and then be content to pack her bag and start to walk away?"

"Interesting point," Laura said. Unexpectedly, she began to take heart again. "After all, Sylvia was planning to have a really fun time hanging around Chepaquit and sticking pins in Miss Widdich. So to speak. At the very least, she could have got more money out of her."

"Lots of it."

"But
... would Miss Widdich kill her own
daughter?"
asked Laura. The woman in her refused to believe it.

"She left her in a cardboard box. In the snow."

"But she hung around until Sylvia was found."

"True," Ken conceded. "And then there's the matter of how Miss Widdich would have killed her. You said yourself that Sylvia was tall and in her prime. Miss Widdich could not have been a match for her, physically. No matter how big a hole she can dig."

"But she does know everything about herbs," Laura admitted. "She easily could have poisoned Sylvia. She—no, no, what am I saying? We
all
know a lot about poisons," Laura blurted, distressed that that was true, because it was just one more thing to worry about. "I want to believe that Miss Widdich did it—but I can't. I can't believe that any woman would murder her own flesh and blood."

"Ever hear of a lady named Medea?" Ken said grimly. "You don't have to go back to the Greeks, either; just pick up a paper nowadays."

Laura nodded. "Still, in the myth, Medea was spurned by Jason. People kill from a jealous rage, I'll grant you that. But not from a fear of embarrassment."

"Point taken," said Ken. He took her mug and his over to the coffee machine for refills. "All right. Who, at the time, might have gone into a jealous rage over Sylvia?"

"Besides Snack, you mean," she said, forcing herself to think like Chief Mellon.

She said hesitantly, as if she were picking rubies out of a box of broken glass, "Billy claims that he heard Snack arguing with Sylvia. And that may be. But I heard my father blistering Snack late that night. It was my father, not Snack, who was the enraged one. Who was the violent one when he took Snack out to the shed. Who could easily have been acting out of jealousy. My father, not Snack."

Ken was deeply interested in what she had to say. "Snack didn't put up a fight?" he asked, setting her newly filled mug in front of her.

Laura shook her head. "I think he was so used to submitting to my father's fury that it never occurred to him. Snack would always just cover his head and hunker down. He was a boy. Whatever he felt for Sylvia, he was still a boy."

"And he never said what the beating he got was about?"

"Never," she said. "He's always refused to talk about
it."

Ken kissed the top of her hair and pulled her gently up from her chair. "It's time you asked him, then. Because the road to proving Snack's innocence may well lead back and not forward."

****

Even bankers worked once in a while, Laura learned: Ken actually had a meeting to go to that morning. He dropped Laura off at O'Doule's to get the pickup, and he continued on to work.

Laura headed straight back to the nursery to try to force her brother to confide in her. She was surprised to see that
Corinne was in the shop and that Snack was back at work on the Deere, moving trees to the site of the old compost pile.

"Great news!" Corinne informed her. She was madly running around, watering e
verything in sight with a wand-
end hose. "They're done, at least for now, and we have the garden center back."

Laura glanced at the parking lot outside and said, "Now all we need are our customers back."

"We have built it; they will come," said Corinne with serene optimism.

Her mood rubbed off on Laura like fairy dust. "Does this mean that they're done with us, too?"

Was it possible?

It was not. Corinne looked sheepish as she said, "They want to talk to Snack again. He's going down to the station in an hour or so. No pressure, though. Really, it's just routine. Chief Mellon said whenever it was convenient. I think that's a
very
good sign, don't you?"

"It certainly sounds that way," said Laura, fudging confidence.

"That's exactly what I told—Laura! What is
that
?"
Corinne said, grabbing her sister's hand for closer examination. "Ohmigod. It's a diamond ring. Ohmigod. Laura—you didn't. You aren't." She let out a squeal of joy. "You're engaged? To a guy from
Chepaquit
?
This means you're staying? You're staying here? Oh, my
God
!
"

"Well, Ken and I did talk about that," Laura said, laughing between life-threatening squeezes. "And we decided it was easier for me to move my computer than for Ken to move his bank."

"Oh, this is
... you don't know
... this is the best—" Tears began rolling freely. "I'm so
happy
for us."

Excited to be sharing her news, Laura said, "You know how I tend to mull over things until I'm exhausted. This time—no mulling! If Ken hadn't asked me last night, I'm pretty sure I would have asked him."

"It's so romantic, so
New York Times
!"

Laura had been clipping the "Vows" column from the Sunday
Times
for years and sending it to her sister. Corinne had always loved the whirlwind marriages best, so her reaction was no surprise. But Laura herself was still trying to come to terms with her blind leap into another commitment.

"This doesn't feel at all like with Max," she said, amazed at the difference. "Before he dumped me, I considered Max
... suitable. I don't have a clue if Ken is suitable. All I know is—oh, boy—all I know is that this feeling is big. This is huge."

"You're coming home! I can't believe it!" Corinne said, hugging her joyously again. "When you called to say that you wouldn't be home last night? I had a feeling. Call me psychic, but I just had a really good feeling."

"I definitely will
not
call you psychic," Laura said with a little shiver. She had no desire to ruin her sister's happy mood with a morbid account of Miss Widdich's confession, so she said, "I have to talk to Snack before he goes to town."

"Good. Maybe you can calm him down a little. He's on the jittery side."

"Gee, I wonder why. Don't tell me he's taking all this hounding personally," Laura said on her way out.

She flagged down her brother before he went off for another load of shrubs and trees, and they walked over to a rough-hewn picnic table that Snack had hammered together just so that customers could pause in their labors and enjoy the view.

The view itself was one of the best at Shore Gardens: Cape Cod in its natural state. The ground here was covered in long grass, shimmering and rippling in the early breeze as it sloped gently to the waterfront property below. Tucked on the land once owned by Laura's family sat a beautifully discreet house, built by someone with lots of money and no interest in flaunting it. It scarcely intruded on the expansive vista of blue ocean, already fluttering with distant sails. Somewhere out there crouched Nantucket in a bank of offshore fog, but immediately to their south, the low, flat profile of uninhabited Monomoy Island stretched like an eel in the shallows surrounding it.

It was a perfect place, a gift from the gods, and Laura had no intention of letting it slip through their fingers.

She turned to Snack, who was slugging water thirstily from a bottle he'd brought along. She hadn't really noticed how tan and fit and sinewy her brother had become in the last several weeks. Unlike Ken, Snack had never had to endure a painfully skinny, geeky phase as a kid, and now he was in his prime. Young, healthy, with a breadth of skills—what a catch he'd make, give or take a few issues.

"The life agrees with you," she said.

"Yeah," he muttered, wiping his beaded brow with the back of a bare arm. "If only they'd let me live it."

"I guess you're going to see Chief Mellon after you shower?"

She was sitting on the table, with her feet on the seat; Snack was sitting below her. He looked back over his shoulder at her with a wry smile. "Shower?"