Feta Attraction (4 page)

“Oh, okay, but call me back when you find out who it is.”

“I'll do that.” I'd do no such thing. She'd find out soon enough since she and Rick's wife, Joanie, played bingo every Saturday at the American Legion and were thick as thieves.

I ended the call and turned back toward Keith. He'd managed to turn the body faceup, but I still couldn't see much.

“Keith, can I help? Is he still alive?” I didn't see how that was possible.

“No.” His face was grim. “He's dead. Been dead for a few hours, I'd say. And there's a dent in his skull.”

A thought struck me then, hard. My husband was missing. I stopped breathing. Just like the guy in the water.
Spiro
.

THREE

“It isn't . . .” I couldn't bring myself to finish the sentence. Spiro and I had our differences of opinion (like every hour of every day), but I wouldn't want to see him dead. Sophie would be devastated. Cal—my poor angel Callista—would be crushed. I guessed I'd miss him too.

“Honey,” Keith said. “It's not Spiro. It's Big Dom.”

“Big Dom?” I asked stupidly. A wave of relief washed over me even as my head began to spin.

Keith sloshed aside and I could see the body, black suit, black open-necked shirt, with enough wet gold around his neck, left wrist, and pinky that that might have been what sunk him.

“Georgie? Georgie! Did you hear me? It's Big Dom.” I shook my head as Keith waded over and put his arm around me, turning me away from the cave and toward the shore. “Don't look anymore, okay?”

I nodded and rested my head on his shoulder. I heard the whine of a motor and could see Chief Rick Moriarty and Deputy Tim Arquette taking this opportunity to run the BBPD police boat at full speed. Smiles dropped from their faces as they approached.

“Keith, whatcha got there?” Rick blustered, now on official police business.

“It's Big Dom. We were out for a ride and saw him floating out of the Oven. We came over to see if we could help. But I'm afraid it's too late.”

He held me a little closer. I let him do it, even though it felt . . . funny. Sort of okay, but almost wrong. Which was of course ridiculous, considering my marital situation.

“We'll handle it from here,” Rick said. “Timmy, call up Greta over at the hospital and tell her we've got a stiff coming in to the morgue. Then get over here and give me a hand getting him into the zipper bag. He's wet and he's gonna be slippery.”

“Rick, I'm taking Georgie over to the spa. If you need statements or anything, let me know.”

He waved us away dismissively. “You two go on, now. We've got this under control.” He pulled out his phone.

“Yes, Joanie, I called you as soon as I knew. Now, don't be that way or I won't tell you . . .”

We motored on up the river. Big Dom had been eighty-sixed.

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later Keith had delivered me like a FedEx package to my friend Liza Grant. I was nicely ensconced in a big, rose-colored velvet chair with my feet up and a Henry VIII–sized goblet of red wine in my hand. Liza sat in a matching chair next to me, serenely waiting for me to talk when I was ready. She was the most calm and centered person I knew, and her presence was so comforting, it took only a few sips of the gorgeous ruby liquid to bring back my voice.

“He was dead, Li, dead and floating on the water.” The scene repeated in my head like the skipping Shaun Cassidy LP I had for some reason saved from my junior high years and stored away in the back of my closet at the Bonaparte House.

“There was nothing you could have done. You need to focus on something else and let it go.”

“And Spiro is gone again—of course, it isn't the first time, but this time I'm worried. I don't know why. And I've got ghost hunters in my house. What if they find something?” I didn't believe in ghosts but my anxiety level was rising again. I took a big gulp of the wine. Yikes! What if they found the Shaun Cassidy record? Now, that would be embarrassing.

“There is energy at the Bonaparte House, but there are no earthbound human spirits.” Liza could be a little scary sometimes. What the heck did that mean?

“Well, that's comforting, I guess.”

“Here, have something to eat.” She passed me an antique silver platter loaded with plump green grapes, a soft goat cheese, and a warm, fragrant loaf of sliced French bread. Where had she gotten a fresh baguette at eight thirty at night on an island when I knew the cook had gone home hours ago? The sight of the luscious vittles reminded me that in my rush to leave the restaurant and get out of the way of the investigators, I had neglected to eat dinner. I spread some cheese onto a piece of bread with a mother-of-pearl-handled knife, scarfed it down, and ate another. I recognized the cheese as a local artisanal variety that was made by gray-bearded throwbacks over at the communal farm at Rossie (which we locals pronounced with the accent on the second syllable—“Raw-SEE”) a few miles away. They'd been there since the seventies and apparently weren't going anywhere.

“Have you heard from Cal? How is she doing in Greece?” Her attempt to distract me was obvious, and I appreciated it.

“I got an e-mail a couple of days ago. She says the archaeological dig is a lot of physical work, but she's having a wonderful time. She's dating a Greek boy Sophie's sister set her up with.”

“You must miss her.”

“I do. We e-mail and talk on the phone a few times a week, but it isn't the same as having her with me.” I sighed. “I know she's happy, so I try to be happy for her.”

“I had Keith over here today working in the boathouse. He's looking well.” Liza handed me a plate of rich-looking, dark chocolate truffles dusted in cocoa powder. I popped a whole one into my mouth and let it melt luxuriously on my tongue, savoring the creamy, sweet-bitter taste as long as I could before I swallowed.

“Yes, I guess so.” I didn't want to talk about Keith.

“Are you seeing much of him?”

I sucked in another truffle. At this rate the whole plate would be gone in ten minutes and I'd need a glucose meter and an insulin injection.

“Well, I've been to his shop to look at his chairs, and we have coffee down at the Express-o Bean every once in a while, if that's what you mean.” The name wasn't a clever sobriquet indicating a place where you could get a quick cup of strong coffee. North Country business owners were often rather bad spellers and even worse pronouncers.

“Mm-hmm.” Her expertly tweezed eyebrows rose.

“Cindy is going to call everyone in town tomorrow morning about me being out in a boat with him tonight.”

“I don't think so.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because it's all over town tonight. Cindy called Midge at the T-Shirt Emporium and Midge called me before you got here. She told me that you and Keith had been doing it in his boat inside the Devil's Oven when you discovered the body. By the way, if you're looking for your black lace thong, it fell overboard, floated away, and got tangled up in Dom's gold chains.”

I felt my face heat up with either embarrassment or anger; I wasn't sure which. Like I would ever intentionally wear a piece of underwear in my butt crack! The thought was horrifying . . . wasn't it? I'd have to figure out a way to do some damage control. Sophie was going to have a bird. She might believe me that I had not been having semipublic sex with Keith, but she would be in a state over the insult to “her” reputation that the gossip would cause. Spiro, of course, could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, with anyone he wanted. She could ignore his little dalliances with equanimity, but the rules were quite different for me. A little swell of defiance rose in my chest.
So what? I'm a grown woman.
I reached for another truffle.

“Georgie, I've wanted to talk to you about something for a while. Now seems like a good time.”

“Is this something I want to know?”

“You tell me.”

“Okay, hit me.” I took a deep breath—not much else could go wrong today. Maybe she
would
hit me, I thought, knock me out, and when I came to, it would become clear that this had all been a dream. Zeke, Hunk, and Hickory would be huddled around my bed, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry each holding a hand, Toto leaping up beside me.

“When was the last time you had an affair?”

I aspirated a little of my wine and began to cough. The question caught me off guard. I sighed. “You know I've never had an affair. Don't make me talk about this now.” I hated the whiny tone in my voice.

Liza pulled her bare feet up into her chair, the pale pink of her perfectly pedicured toes shining softly in the low light. “Then it's definitely time for one.”

I wasn't so sure about that. Love had always pretty much stunk for me. The thought of diving in again held little appeal, and yet, I couldn't deny that there was a tiny, deeply buried longing somewhere inside me.

Liza broke the silence. “Keith's in love with you. Has been for years.”

“He's not in love with me. I'm a married woman,” I said, although I knew how ridiculous that sounded.

“You are not a married woman. You are a woman with a piece of paper loosely binding you to a man who doesn't love you, cannot love you, will never love you in the way you should be loved.”

“We have a daughter.”

“A wonderful daughter, yes, a well-adjusted, grown-up-and-moved-away daughter. Having a child together doesn't make a marriage.”

“I made my choice to stay with him years ago. It seemed like the right decision at the time, to keep the family intact for Cal.” I fingered the stem of the wineglass. “I don't have to tell you that I know all about Spiro.”

“I doubt you know all about Spiro.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Silence. “All right, Li, spill it. What do you know? Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don't know where he is.”

Ugh. “Again, what
do
you know?”

She sighed. “Take this for what it's worth, but there are rumors around the Bay that Spiro is in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” I couldn't believe she was giving any credit to whatever this was. Rumors around the Bay were virtually always just that—rumors. They rarely turned out to be true. I had the phantom thong to prove it.

“You know he's been having an affair with Inky.”

Inky LaFontaine? He owned Tat-L-Tails, the tattoo parlor on Thompson Street, and had enough body art to open a gallery and enough piercings that he jingled when he walked. I hadn't known about Inky, but I was often out of that particular loop. Fastidious as Spiro was about personal hygiene and grooming, and given his almost pathological fear of needles, this was a surprising relationship.

“Inky's apparently the type to kiss and tell. He's been spreading it around that Spiro thinks he's found the fortune his father was always talking about being hidden in the Bonaparte House.”

I rolled my eyes involuntarily. That old chestnut had been kicked around and bounced off the curbs of the Bay for the last hundred and fifty years. Everyone in town knew the legend that valuables had been hidden in the house for the use of Napoleon when he escaped and took up residence there. It was beyond comprehension that in all that time nobody had ever found anything. The treasure was of some undetermined makeup—some said it was gold bars; some said it was jewelry; others said it was a Stradivarius violin. For fun, I'd been through every inch of the place with Cal when she was little, and I know Spiro had done so more than once, and we'd never found anything more than some dust, cobwebs, and a few resident arachnids up in the oversized cupola. That Liza was giving this story any credence at all was confounding.

“There's no treasure in that house. It's ridiculous.”

“Maybe, maybe not, but I'm just telling you that the story is out there.”

“The story is always out there. Why is it surfacing now? Spiro hasn't said a word to me about it.”

“I don't know, love. I'm just telling you what I heard.”

“So what does this have to do with Spiro being in trouble?”

She set her glass on the side table and leaned back in her chair. “The word is that Spiro has gotten himself involved with the SODs.”

“The what?” I scanned my brain but couldn't come up with an association.

“The Sons of Demeter. It's a group of farmers who've banded together to try to preserve their agricultural way of life. Mostly it's just a bunch of old guys watching each other's backs so they can grow their pot without legal interference. Lately, though, I hear that some of the members have gotten more aggressive and have been making loans at double-digit rates to people who are in danger of losing their farms, and it looks like they've branched out into offers to the general public.”