Murder in Merino (24 page)

W
hen Karen returned to the kitchen, Jules refreshed her coffee and passed around the plate of donuts.

“I’m getting the days mixed up,” Nell said. “What happened when. But I finally remembered where I had seen Jeffrey that week he died. It was like seeing a teacher out of school. Instead of being behind his bar, he was sitting on a bench near the harbor bridge in the middle of the day.” She looked at Karen. “Stan was there with him. And the conversation looked serious. Did Stan mention it?” Nell hesitated to say more, feeling a bit like she was revealing a private conversation she had no right to talk about.

Karen answered quickly. “I think maybe you’re mistaken, Nell. But if it was Jeffrey and Stan, Stan was probably asking Jeffrey for his support in the campaign. Or maybe he was confirming a speaking engagement at the Edge.”

In an out-of-the-way place, and with intense concentration that didn’t speak to luncheons or election promises? Nell nodded as Karen talked, but she knew instinctively Karen was the one who was mistaken. Jeffrey and Stan were talking about something personal and important. She was certain of it.

Mary was up and carrying her coffee cup to the sink. “This house looks like you, Jules,” she said. “It’s how I imagined it would look. You have a fine touch.”

Karen agreed, following Mary across the kitchen and signaling with her car keys that she needed to leave. “I’m speaking to a neighborhood women’s group on education issues,” she said. “They’d much prefer my husband. But I will do in a pinch.”

Jules stood on the steps and waved off Mary and Karen while Izzy and Nell gathered their bags.

“We’re off, too, Jules,” Nell said, following Izzy to the door.

She paused at the bottom step, looking back. It wasn’t only her days that were getting mixed up. Her thoughts, too, were piling on top of one another, coming in starts and stops. Pieces of a puzzle falling from the sky and landing topsy-turvy.

“Jules, you mentioned once that Jeffrey thought he had met you before. That he somehow knew you?”

She nodded. “It happened a couple times. He was trying hard to place me, but we had never met before. I’m sure of that.”

“But he wasn’t the only one in Sea Harbor. Didn’t you say there was someone else who had said the same thing?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was soon after I arrived here, over at the bed-and-breakfast. And once again, it was someone I know I had never met before. And it hasn’t come up again. Weird . . .”

“Who was it?”

When Nell heard the name, it was almost as if she had expected it. It was a piece still searching for its place in the puzzle—but an important place. And an impromptu morning coffee had oddly confirmed it.

•   •   •

Nell’s phone pinged as she headed toward Harbor Road. Izzy dug the phone out of her aunt’s purse and read the message out loud.

“‘Nell, give me a call.’

“It’s from Jane Brewster,” Izzy said. “Should I call her back?”

Nell nodded. Her mind was still mulling over the image of Stan and Jeffrey huddled on the bench at the water’s edge. What were they talking about?

“It’s not an emergency,” Izzy said a minute later, slipping the phone back into Nell’s bag. “Ham finished cleaning the years of dust and grime off the Penelope Ainsley paintings. They are lovely, Jane says. She talked to Jules, who told her she couldn’t leave the house today because of the repair guys she was waiting for. But she suggested that Jane call you—that you were anxious to see the paintings and maybe you could pick them up for her if you were in the area.”

Izzy was up for the detour. Mae had things under control at the shop and she didn’t have a class to teach for a couple of hours.

They drove along the narrow road to Canary Cove, alone with their thoughts and the quiet of the September day. It was that special time of year when Sea Harbor residents didn’t have to share their town with crowds of strangers and could relish its beauty all by themselves. The lull between summer vacationers and autumn’s leaf watchers.

Jane and Ham’s gallery was near the end of Canary Cove Road, on the same property they’d purchased nearly thirty years before, when they had fallen in love with this small town on the edge of the sea. Like Willow’s Fishtail Gallery next door, the Brewster property had the shop and studio in front, a small garden behind, and a house beyond that, where they’d lived happily, building Canary Cove into an artists’ colony, the little sister of the historic Rocky Neck Art Colony, not far away in Gloucester.

Jane waved as they walked in the side door. “Back here,” she said, and headed into Ham’s workroom.

He looked up from the workbench, his white beard flecked with donut crumbs. “Howdy, ladies. Have a seat.” He wiped off his hands on a damp rag and pulled over a stiff portfolio.

“These are very nice paintings,” he said, taking one out of the brown container. “I wish there were more. Penelope Ainsley could have made a fine career of her art.”

Coming from Ham, the words were more than a polite acknowledgment that someone’s relative did a nice job on a painting. Jules’s mother had been talented.

Ham handed the first one to Nell. He had placed it in a protective plastic sleeve. “I’d love to frame these for Jules when she’s ready. The paper is in remarkable condition, the deckled edge still intact.”

Nell took the painting over to the window and sat down with Izzy at her elbow. It was similar to the painting that now hung in Jules’s den—a view of the porch and swing, an enormous spray of bright red roses in the corner, and the bright green bush that reflected the light. The porch swing held a wash of color in the pillows, with a small kitten curled up next to one.

A happy painting.

“My guess of its age would match what Jane told me,” Ham said. “We’re thinking it was done about forty years ago.”

“You’ve done an amazing job with it.”

“The artist used good materials. Some of the pigments have become dull over the years, but it doesn’t take away its beauty. I’m glad Jules has these. I just hope she gets to keep looking at them.”

Izzy looked up from the painting. “She will—I am sure of that,” she said.

Nell looked at her niece. She felt it, too. And the feeling grew each day, with each new snippet of conversation, each new insight into the man who was Jeffrey Meara and the people who were in his present—and in his past. Jules Ainsley was not a murderer. And the whole town would know it soon. She looked at what Ham had done with the painting and it matched that same feeling—that they were dusting off years of grime and grit and would soon have a clear idea of who killed a kind bartender.

She handed the painting back to Ham, exchanging it for the second one. This one was more impressionistic than the first, but equally vibrant and filled with light. The elements were hazier, the shapes more amorphous, but it was clear where Penelope had sat or stood to paint it. She had set an easel on the sidewalk in the front of the house. The green shutters were there, the winding pathway between the garage and the house.

She squinted, then looked closer. At first she thought she was looking at an enormous smiley face painted on the garage door.

Izzy leaned over her shoulder for a closer look, then laughed when the image came into better focus.

A laugh . . . followed by Nell’s gasp.

It was a car. A British racing green car. A shiny Sprite, smiling at them with its round headlights and oval grille—exactly as it had done just days before.

•   •   •

Ham needed a little more time with the paintings, he said, to be sure they were protected.

Nell agreed to leave them, along with a quick explanation that the car had belonged to Jeffrey, an explanation that conjured up more questions than answers. Nell promised to clarify it all at dinner that night.

On the ride back to Izzy’s shop, Nell explained about the car she and Birdie had found a few days before in Jeffrey’s garage. At the time it had been little more than a curiosity and slight mystery. Where had Jeffrey gotten a Sprite? And why in heaven’s name—as Birdie was prone to say—didn’t the man drive it?

Izzy listened, trying to connect the dots as Nell talked. Some were still missing, the dots scattered around in the air. But an image was appearing—emerging slowly, like a knitting motif as row after row of the pattern was carefully knit into the whole.

Izzy climbed out of the car, then leaned back through the window. “Jules told me today that she’s beginning to understand what family means. She loved her mother greatly, she said, but there wasn’t much affection in their house when she was growing up. Her stepfather was a decent man, but never loving. How sad is that?”

“I wonder if it was difficult for him to raise a child someone else fathered. You’d hope not. Or maybe he sensed the love Penelope had once had for Jules’s father—I’m convinced she did love him. Those paintings don’t lie.” She thought of little Abby, and the copious amounts of love showered on her from all sides, blood relatives or not. It didn’t always matter where it came from. As long as it came.

Izzy hurried inside the shop and Nell sat there in her car for a minute, thinking through the events of the morning. And then she thought of Garrett Barros—still a bit of a loose dot, floating around aimlessly.

Garrett 
. . . Nell started the car, and then an impulse took over, and, hoping Tommy Porter wasn’t lurking around the corner, she made a quick U-turn and headed for the Ocean’s Edge.

•   •   •

Cass was coming out of the restaurant with Pete and Willow as Nell walked up the steps.

“What’s going on?” Nell asked. “Am I missing something?”

“A business meeting,” Cass said curtly.

“Pete and I thought Cass needed an intervention,” Willow said. She gave Cass a look that defied contradiction.

“It didn’t work. She’s as stubborn as Ma,” Pete said. “Damn that Irish gene.”

“They’re trying to take the lobster business away from me,” Cass said.

“Don’t be nuts,” Pete said to Cass. Then he turned to Nell. “What we’re trying to do is convince Cass that she needs a life besides work.

“I know she has you guys and knitting and all that wine you drink on Thursday nights—you’re great friends. But face it—for starters, she’s wicked bad at the knitting part. You should see the hats I get at Christmas. And you all have other lives, too. That’s what she needs. Balance. Cass needs to broaden her horizons. She needs to have more fun. She needs—”

“Enough, Halloran,” Willow said quickly, breaking off his sentence and hoping to avoid embarrassment.

“You don’t think Izzy, Birdie, and I are fun?” Nell teased, her affection for Pete and Willow growing by the second. They are crazy in love with each other, she thought, and they’re frustrated that Cass is messing up her life with Danny. At least in their opinion anyway. And, Nell had to admit with a twinge of guilt, she shared the sentiment.

Pete looped an arm around Willow’s waist, having to lean down slightly to do it. Birdie had once described the small black-haired woman as a waif, and the description wasn’t far off. Except when she had first come to Sea Harbor, she was pale and rarely smiled, more of a Dickensian waif. The Willow they knew today, the nearly twenty-six-year-old fiber artist with a thriving gallery and a tall, gangly lobsterman wrapped around her finger, the woman who had a Sea Harbor tan, a blush on her cheeks, and laughed often and loud, was more of an Audrey Hepburn–type waif—charming and irresistible.

“We’re off,” Pete said. “Oh, and we’ll miss dinner on the deck tonight. The Fractured Fish has a gig over at the Dog Bar in Gloucester. I’m hoping that Captain Joey guy will mention us on
Good Morning Gloucester
. Everyone on Cape Ann is reading that blog of his. It’d be great PR for the band. Maybe get us more Gloucester gigs. But anyway, save us some food?”

“Always.” Nell laughed as they walked off.

Pete didn’t turn around, just raised one fist in the air and bellowed a whoop.

Nell looped an arm through Cass’s and asked if she had a minute before she went back to work. Together they walked back into the restaurant and Nell filled her in on the morning’s events.

“Crazy,” she said, when Nell got around to the story of the Sprite. “So Jeffrey’s car has a connection to Jules’s house?”

“At least the car visited the house at some point when the Brogans owned it.”

“Didn’t Maeve also tell you he had found someone to give the car to?”

“Yes. Maybe Jules? But why? And what is his connection to all this? And to Jules’s mother? I keep imagining possible scenarios, then tossing them away. But then they come back . . .”

“The timing is right. Jeffrey was probably here in Sea Harbor that summer. And we know he wanted to talk to Jules about something.”

“Yes . . .”

“And Jules’s mother had a connection to that house,” Cass said. Then she took a deep breath. “Nell, you don’t think . . . Jules’s father . . . ?”

Nell didn’t answer. She wasn’t ready to go there. Instead she motioned toward the bar, where Don Wooten stood talking to the bartender. “There’s Don. Let’s say hello.”

Don didn’t seem especially happy to see Nell, and she knew it was a direct result of the last conversation she’d had with him at the yacht club. Ben thought she owed him an apology; perhaps he was right. But she had heard Don threaten Jeffrey just days before he died. And she was trying desperately to pull together anything and everything that would lessen Jules Ainsley’s burden.

“Nell,” he said with a nod. Then, “Hi, Cass.”

“Don, we’ve been friends for a long time—” Nell began.

“I think I reminded you of that just recently.”

“Yes, you did. And I’d like to apologize if I came down too hard on you. I know you couldn’t murder a flea, Don. I know that. But there are all these loose ends that are floating around, making it hard to get at the truth. I guess I was trying to tie off some of them. Friends?”

Don hesitated for a minute, then shook his head and laughed. “Sure. Rachel would divorce me if we didn’t end this thing with a hug. She’s says I’m stubborn, I said you were outta line.”

“Well, a hug eliminates all of the above.”