The Wedding Shawl (37 page)

The image of someone who knew the Markham land well entered into their thoughts, lurking there, unwanted but refusing to leave. Someone who knew when the small cottage was vacant. Someone who wouldn’t have been afraid of Penelope Markham’s shotgun.

They were relieved to see that Sal was busy when they slipped out of the office. Neither Birdie nor Nell felt like chitchat.

“We need to check out the dates of that fire,” Birdie said as they climbed back in the car. But without actual dates and only a rumor to go on, newspaper reports would take time to find, so instead they made a detour to the fire station.

“So good to have friends in high places,” Birdie said as a young fireman directed them to the chief’s office. M.J.’s husband, Alex Arcado, was at his desk, only too willing to talk.

“Almost fifteen years go?”

“Somewhere around that time,” Nell said. “We think there was a fire at the old Markham Quarry.”

Alex turned to his computer and pulled up a page. “Sure. It was shortly after that girl died.”

Then he looked again. “Shortly after? That’s an understatement. The fire happened right after the girl went missing. The building that burned was in the woods, a short distance from the quarry. They suspected arson because it was contained, didn’t spread to the woods or anything. But we never found anything to go on. It wasn’t insured for much, so that wasn’t the motive—I don’t think the owner even claimed anything—so nothing much was made of it. But the place burned to the ground. The thinking was that some kids or vagrants were using it as a hangout and, for whatever reason, burned it down. Maybe an accident, smoking a cigarette, whatever.”

“Interesting timing,” Birdie said as they headed back to Nell’s car.

Izzy was helping someone in the knitting room when they stopped by the yarn studio a few hours later. It was past the lunch hour, but they felt sure she wouldn’t have had time to eat, and they asked Mae if they could steal her away.

“Be my guest. And make sure she gets her protein.”

“What would we do without you, Mae?” Birdie asked. “You will keep our dear Izzy fit as a fiddle for her wedding day.”

Mae laughed, her Ma Kettle laugh, Izzy called it, though Nell suspected Izzy had never seen a single scene of the old-time movie.

“Are you doing okay, Mae?” Nell asked. “Your day didn’t exactly get off on the right foot.”

“Just got my Irish up. ‘Damn fool,’ is what I say. Imagine anyone pulling something like this a week before our girl gets married. It’s criminal.”

Yes, Nell thought. That was exactly what it was.

“The window is fine. Your window washer did a good job,” Birdie said. “I may hire him to do my house.”

Izzy appeared with Purl in her arms. “I can’t seem to let her down. Somehow I know she saw who did this. I want to take her through town and have her point him out.”

They laughed at the thought of sweet Purl leading them on a hunt. The cat promptly jumped from Izzy’s arms, clearly rejecting the idea.

A table opened up near the back of Harry Garozzo’s deli, just as they walked in. With great ceremony, Harry ushered them through the restaurant.

Silently Nell begged him not to break out in a wedding song, but to no avail. Before they were halfway through the restaurant, the plump-faced baker broke out with “Vivo per Lei” in his best Andrea Bocelli imitation.

Izzy sat down, red-faced, and thanked him graciously. A handful of late diners clapped, and Birdie insisted he run off for four glasses of his amazing fruit tea—and BLTs would be fine.

“Now,” she said, her hands flat on the table, “where are we?”

The police had no idea who spray-painted the window, Izzy reported, and probably never would. “But it was an amateurish gesture, they said. Like the person didn’t really want to hurt us.”

Just scare us off,
Nell thought
. Like the tires. A warning.

“He doesn’t want to hurt us,” Birdie said out loud.

“But he may have killed Tiffany Ciccolo,” Nell reminded them. And the thought was almost unbearable.

Cass arrived just in time to hear Nell detail their trip to the Registrar of Deeds’ office.

She drummed her fingers on the table, then came out with some news of her own. “Remember George Hanson?”

“Our delightful schooner captain,” Nell said. The amazing day on the boat seemed like years ago instead of less than a week.

“I ran into him this morning at the dock. He’s a chatty guy and one of his passengers was late, so we got to talking about things.”

“Like where he went to college?” Nell asked.

Cass nodded. “Greek life, all those things. Guess who was in his pledge class?”

Nell sighed. She knew what was coming next, and she wanted to block her ears. Another piece of the puzzle was about to fall to the table with a crash that was almost more than she could bear. And if all their suspicions were right, Harmony’s necklace didn’t come from Andy or a relative or a flea market.

They wrapped up their sandwiches, much to Harry’s dismay, and headed for Nell’s home and the photos of Harmony Farrow’s basketball team.

Izzy called Sam on the way over.

“Are you supposed to meet him, sweetie?” Nell asked.

“No,” Izzy answered. “I just needed to hear his voice.

Ben had left the computer on as he’d promised. He had scanned in all the photos and opened them in a photo-editing program.

Izzy sat down in his chair. “I’ve used this program before,” she said and immediately began pushing keys and dragging duplicates of the photos to the fore.

They were much easier to see on the computer. Most of the informal shots focused on Laura, sometimes making a face at her dad as she sat on the bench, sometimes making a basket. Izzy flipped through thumbnails. “Here’s a couple off-the-court photos. I think it’s a picnic. Probably one of those end-of-the-season events.”

She enlarged it.

“It’s at Stage Fort Park in Gloucester,” Nell said, noticing the ocean in the background and a tiny glimpse of playground to the side. The teenagers sat at picnic tables and hung around a grill, and a few stood over near the stone building on the side.

They looked for Harmony among the smiley group at the picnic tables, but she wasn’t there.

“What about back there?” Cass said, pointing to several figures in the distance.

Izzy zoomed in, enlarging the figures.

They were standing under an eave, but even with half her face shadowed, the look on Harmony’s face was clear. It was glorious. The look of a woman in love. Her head was tilted upward, her eyes focused on the tall, handsome man standing next to her. His dark head was lowered, listening attentively to one of the young coaches.

The team’s formal photo told the same story. There was Harmony. A gold chain with a medallion just visible above her uniform top. On one side was Tiffany. And on the other, her body barely touching his, was the man who, if their suppositions were correct, had stolen her heart—and may have walked away as she slipped beneath the quarry waters.

Ben called a short while later. He was with Sam at the police station.

“We had drinks at the club with Laura’s father,” Ben began.

And the story that unraveled was like pouring mud in the spaces of a flagstone walk. It filled in cracks—and held the path together.

Laura’s father had remembered more than they’d expected from those long-ago basketball games, Ben said. He got to know the coaches and assistants pretty well. Nice guys. Great with the girls. He knew the girls, too, especially Laura’s friends.

He remembered Harmony Farrow for other reasons. Her striking good looks for one thing. But she was kind of a loner, he said, except for her sidekick, Tiffany. But sometimes he’d watch her from across the gym when she was on the bench. And he’d see the look she’d try to hold back. The look of a young woman brimming with love and trying her darnedest to hide it.

“It was almost as if she’d just become aware of her sexuality,” Dave had said. “She was blossoming, basking in it. Not in a promiscuous way, but it was there in the way she walked, the way she moved.”

No one imagined that it was ever reciprocated. There was absolutely no sign of that. No favoritism. Dave would have personally jumped off the bench and strangled the guy if there’d been any hint of that. It seemed to be all Harmony, caught up in this raw crush of love. The thing you read about as young girls become women. That was what he thought.

Chief Thompson wanted the photos, Ben told Nell. The necklace and lab report, too. The police had been doing their own investigation for a couple of weeks, Ben said. But they were missing some important pieces. Now they had them.

“One more thing,” Ben said before hanging up, “After you talked to Alex Arcado today, he went back to the archives and found a few objects they had found when they put out the fire at the quarry fifteen years ago. Interesting items that at the time didn’t mean much. They figured they belonged to Mrs. Markham—some singed underwear, a ring.” The ring, it turned out—on more careful examination and using some new cleaning solutions—was a woman’s class ring. Sea Harbor High, 1995.

And the police had verified something else—that Penelope Markham had hired her nephew to keep an eye out on the land once she broke her hip the winter of 1994 and became too frail to do it herself.

They piled in Nell’s car, leaving before Ben arrived to pick up the photos.

They had a friend who would need them.

Traffic was light, and they drove along the narrow road in silence, shadows falling around them. A lifetime in a day. That was what it felt like. But it was almost over. Finally.

The Artist’s Palate was noisy with early Friday night revelers when Nell pulled into the parking lot. People relaxing with one of Hank’s incredible beers.

The four women looked around the deck, then walked through the frosted door to the inside bar.

Nell realized with a start that she’d rarely been inside the Palate. The deck was the reason they usually came here.

A mahogany bar, long and polished, ran down one side of the room. Behind it, dozens of imported beers lined a mounted glass shelf. Above the shelf was a line of framed photographs of Boston Celtics players, from Ray Allen to Larry Bird. And high above that, on another shelf, were dozens of heavy mugs that patrons had brought in for display—some with basketball team names, others embossed with fraternity and college names. Harvard, Yale, BU, UMass.

Nell looked for the now-familiar symbols and found them on a large mug right in the middle of the grouping. Pi Kappa Alpha.

Hank’s new manager was moving quickly back and forth, taking orders and filling mugs. Birdie asked for directions, and he pointed to the closed door at the end of the bar.

They walked in without knocking and found Hank alone at the desk, writing on a legal pad.

Startled, he looked up. He frowned; then his eyes widened at their expressions. “Merry, is she all right? Is she hurt?”

“She will be fine, eventually,” Birdie said.

Hank stared at them. In the next minute a red flush crept up his neck to his face. Dots of sweat covered his forehead and his face registered impending danger and the realization of why they were there.

Several papers flew to the floor as Hank pushed his chair back and stood, his eyes wild and darting around the room. He looked at the high windows lining the office, then the door to the bar.

Nell could feel the quickening of his heartbeat and see in his eyes the frantic need to flee.

To rush out into the day. To escape from the airless room, the shrinking life.

But the sinking realization that there was nowhere to go held him still.

Finally Hank’s eyes moved back to the women filling the small space in his office.

For a moment no one spoke, but the silence spoke volumes.

He slumped down in the chair and for an eternity of seconds stared at the surface of his desk. “I’d never have hurt you ladies. I just wanted you to stop, to let things be.”

Nell brushed away his words. Slashed tires and a little paint were so trivial in light of what he’d done. “Tell us why, Hank,” she asked. “Why did you do it?”

The handsome bar owner seemed to diminish before their eyes, once tall and strapping, now sad and shrunken. His eyes showed a lack of sleep, and his face was pale against a frame of unkempt dark hair.

He tried to get up again, his eyes darting again to the wall of windows, the door, but the life seemed to have drained from his body and he sank back into the chair. “It was an accident. Everything. It was all an accident.”

“That Harmony fell in love with you?”

He grimaced painfully at the words, and his eyes focused on the desktop again. “We argued that night. She fell.”

“Argued about the baby?”

Hank’s voice was dull, unfamiliar. “She wanted to have it. Her father would have crucified us. I’d have been sent to jail. She was … she was …”

“She was practically a child,” Birdie finished.

The words cut through Hank, and he pressed his forehead into his palms as if in pain.

Nell saw him nod. Yes, she was a child.

And he was a fool.

“You took her to your aunt Penelope’s cottage. To her quarry. You loved her there, and then you let her drown.”

“I couldn’t swim.” The words were feeble, without meaning or conviction.

Izzy’s face was beet red with anger. She stepped toward the desk. “And all these years later, innocent Tiffany Ciccolo went to you for help. Her nice old Red Hots coach who always had a ready ear. He would help her, advise her—so she spilled her secret to you. She told you that Harmony had been pregnant with Andy’s baby—as she thought. And she even had the lab report to prove it. But Andy was being foolish, pushing her away.”

“She had kept it all from the police—the backpack, the lab report. She’d protected Andy for all these years,” Cass said.

Hank tried to regain control. “I warned Tiffany. Told her to forget it. To forget Risso. That’s what she should have done. It would all have been fine. But she called me the next night and wanted to talk more. Andy was breaking everything off. And maybe she should turn over what she had to the police and move on with her life. A clean slate. A clean conscience. She asked me to help.”