A Dark and Snowy Night Read online

  Books by Sally Goldenbaum

  The Seaside Knitters mysteries:

  Murder Wears Mittens

  How to Knit a Murder

  A Murderous Tangle

  A Crime of a Different Stripe

  A Dark and Snowy Night

  The Queen Bees Quilt Shop mysteries:

  A Patchwork of Clues

  A Thread of Darkness

  A Bias for Murder

  A Dark and Snowy Night

  Sally Goldenbaum

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Cast for A Dark and Snowy Night

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Acknowledgments

  MARBLEHEAD COWL

  CHRISTMAS MORNING SOUFFLÉ

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2022 by Sally Goldenbaum

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  The K and Teapot logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2022938418

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2940-8

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: October 2022

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2942-2 (ebook)

  For my shining hopes for the future—

  Luke, Ruby, and Dax McElhenny

  Atticus, Julian, and Sebastian Goldenbaum

  Cast for A Dark and Snowy Night

  Birdie Favazza (Bernadette): Sea Harbor’s wealthy and wise octogenarian, widow of Sonny Favazza

  Cass Halloran Brandley (Catherine Mary Theresa): Co-owner of the Halloran Lobster Company; married to Danny Brandley; baby son, Joey

  Izzy Perry (Isabel Chambers Perry): Former attorney, owner of the Sea Harbor Yarn Studio, married to Sam, award-winning photographer; toddler daughter, Abigail (Abby)

  Nell Endicott: Retired nonprofit director; Izzy Chambers Perry’s aunt; married to Ben Endicott, retired lawyer and family business owner

  Friends and Townsfolk

  Archie and Harriet Brandley: Owners of the Sea Harbor Bookstore; Danny Brandley’s parents

  Beatrice Scaglia: Mayor of Sea Harbor

  Darci Lou Fox: Member of the catering team

  Dirk Evans: Member of the catering team

  Don and Rachel Wooten: Owner of the Ocean’s Edge Restaurant (Don) and city attorney (Rachel)

  Ella and Harold Sampson: Birdie’s housekeeper and groundskeeper

  Elliott Danvers: Owner of a Sea Harbor investment bank

  Gus McGlucken: Owner of McGlucken’s Hardware Store

  Harry and Margaret Garozzo: Owners of Garozzo’s deli

  Jake Risso: Owner of the Gull Tavern

  Jerry Thompson: Police chief

  Lidia Carson: Celebrity chef and entrepreneur; married to Oliver Bishop

  Liz Santos: Manager of the Sea Harbor Yacht Club

  Luna Risso: Cass’s next-door neighbor

  Mae Anderson: Izzy’s Sea Harbor Yarn Studio manager

  Mary Halloran: Cass and Pete’s mother

  Mary Pisano: Newspaper columnist; owner of Ravenswood-by-the-Sea B and B

  Molly Flanigan: Cass and Danny Brandley’s nanny

  Oliver Bishop: Nell’s college friend

  Pete Halloran: Cass’s brother; co-owner of the Halloran Lobster Company

  Shannon Platt: Waitress and childhood friend of Molly Flanigan’s

  Tommy Porter: Police detective

  Chapter 1

  Nell Endicott and Oliver Bishop’s college romance had lasted approximately seventy-two hours, two sessions of Lit 201, and one dinner at a noisy college bar. It ended by mutual consent and relief, and was happily replaced by a friendship that deepened through college courses, graduations, marriages, careers, and life changes.

  And one devastating death.

  When they met at the front door of the Ocean’s Edge Restaurant that night, Nell’s first thought as she looked into Ollie’s eyes was of Maddie. Oliver’s late wife. Nell’s forever best friend.

  Neither Nell nor her husband, Ben, had seen Ollie since Maddie’s funeral a dozen years ago, and this reunion made her happy and sad at once. They’d invited Ollie and Maddie to come visit many times, and for one reason or another, it had never worked out for both couples at the same time. And now here Ollie was, finally.

  But without Maddie.

  “You look wonderful, Nell,” Ollie said. They hugged, arms wrapped around their puffy winter coats.

  Nell finally pulled away and looked into Ollie’s face. “I’m so glad to see you, old friend,” she said.

  Ollie reached out and held her shoulders, tilting his head and looking at her as if he were afraid she would disappear if he stopped.

  Finally he said, with meaning that spoke of years of friendship, “The years slid right by us, Nellie. Gone in a heartbeat. How did that happen? How did we lose touch?”

  “We haven’t lost touch, not completely. Or if we did, we found it. And I’m happy for that, even though surprised. This event is a little beneath the world you live in, Ollie. Are you helping your wife? Doing any of the cooking, I hope?”

  “No cooking. Or helping for that matter. That’s Lidia’s department, and what she’s a master at—being the chef extraordinaire. I came to see you and Ben.”

  “You won’t even be sous chef?”

  “Would you trust me with a knife?” He held up his right hand so she could see the scar running across the width of his palm.

  Nell winced, then put a smile in place and took his arm. “Come, my dear friend. I asked them to save us chairs by the fireplace.”

  “Sounds perfect, and warm. The little lady running our B and B says we’re in for a lot of snow. I hope it doesn’t spoil the event, which I still don’t quite understand. It’s a Christmas party?”

  “Kind of, yes. It’s an annual holiday party for the town, but it’s slightly different this year. In addition to other changes, the mayor is using it to show off her new house.”

  Ollie laughed, more heartily than her pleasantry deserved, but still a welcome sound that eased Nell’s discomfort a bit. Although they’d been close those years ago, it had been a long time since they’d seen each other. What changes had the decades brought in both of them?

  She put the thought aside and steered him into the restaurant’s lounge to a granite fireplace, flanked by two leather armchairs. A reserved sign sat on a small table.

  Ollie looked at the sign. “So I’m guessing they know you here, you and Ben.”

  “It’s our favorite place to bring our favorite people.”

  The waitress appeared almost immediately and set a plate of garlic oysters on the table, a basket of cheese straws, and took their drink orders. “Compliments of the owner,” she explained with a smile.

  “Friends in high places,” Ollie said.

  “The owner is a good friend of ours. You’ll like Don Wooten, Ollie. I’ll introduce you.”

  Nell took the glass of wine Ollie handed her. Then he picked up the tumbler of Scotch the waitress had poured for him, leaving the bottle on their small table.

  Nell took a sip of wine and sat back, thinking of Ollie’s musing. How had all those years slipped by them?

  But she knew. It’s life, she thought, then almost immediately corrected her thought. It was Maddie’s death. That’s how it happened.

  She looked back at Ollie, his face still handsome, though lin
ed now with the years that life had etched there. His prominent cheekbones were flushed from the fire crackling beside them, or maybe the Scotch, Nell thought, and his chin was more chiseled, more set in place than she had remembered.

  “I like this place,” Ollie said, taking in the comfortable sitting areas and the bank of windows looking out to the sea. “I’m an expert critic for these sorts of places, you know.”

  Nell laughed. “Yes, you are, and yes it is. A Sea Harbor gem.”

  In daylight, the Ocean’s Edge lived up to its reputation with the most coveted panorama—and consequently the most coveted real estate—in all of Sea Harbor, and possibly of the entire northeastern seaboard. Nell was sorry not to get to show it off for Ollie, for him to see it through her eyes. For now, at cocktail hour, winter nighttime erased the Atlantic Ocean. It turned the view from the large windows black, with only the occasional flash of a faraway ship, harbor lights catching the white curl of a wave, and the regular, reassuring beams of the lighthouse.

  Where did they begin, attempting to fill in the years between them? Or did that matter, and should they just let them lie?

  As she loosened the hand-knit scarf around her neck, Nell thought about her niece Izzy’s yarn shop and considered telling Ollie about that part of her life, the part that lived here in Sea Harbor since she and Ben had retired and moved to his family’s vacation home. About Izzy, who left her Boston law firm and opened the local yarn store, and the two other women who had become her dearest friends, women she grieved with and laughed with and celebrated life’s mysteries with.

  She might tell him how the four of them had originally come together at Izzy’s store one Thursday night, each for her own reason: Nell to bring a meal to her niece, who was working late; Birdie to pick up a pair of needles she’d ordered; and dear Cass, knitting impaired back then, who came in because she had smelled the amazing aromas of Nell’s seafood casserole.

  And all of them had stayed.

  They’d bonded quickly in the way women sometimes do, and kept coming back every Thursday night, week after week, year after year, forming a circle of friendship that would last forever. And then some.

  But she decided not to, at least not now.

  Ollie was smiling at her now, seemingly pleased with the moment, comfortable with the silence.

  Across the room, a long-haired guitar player was singing mellow cover songs, as if the singer somehow knew that some of the customers that night were reliving the past. Ollie watched him for a minute, then tilted his head back and drained the glass, setting it down on the small table with a thud, and focusing again on Nell. “Being with you like this, it all comes back. Lots of years.”

  The noise level rose at the bar where a younger group was gathering to watch the final plays of a Celtics game.

  Nell leaned in toward Ollie to be heard. “We’ve known each other nearly half our lives, Ollie. That doesn’t go away easily.”

  Nell watched the lines in her friend’s face deepen. She could see him touching on certain memories, lingering there too long.

  “I miss her, too, Ollie,” Nell finally said. “She was the closest friend I ever had. Maddie’s death hollowed out a part of me—but it also left something that will be there always.”

  “I know that. Sometimes I was jealous of whatever it was you two had. It was so . . . I don’t know, intimate, like the two of you wrapped yourself in a bubble and no one else could get in.”

  ” But I introduced you and Maddie, don’t forget that. I found you the most amazing wife. So our bubble wasn’t ironclad. Ben found a way in there, too.”

  Ollie settled back and stretched out his legs, a long swatch of graying hair falling over his forehead. He lifted his glass toward her. “We had some good times, the four of us.”

  They did have good times. And Ollie was right, too, about her friendship with Maddie. They were soul sisters, almost from the first moment they met that gray September day. Nell sat back in the chair, took a drink of her wine, and slipped back into time, remembering that day, climbing up the steps in the old dorm building, the musty smell in the old wood floors.

  She remembered walking down the narrow hallway until she found a closed door with a brass number nailed to it. She was here. Eighteen years old and excited and nervous in such huge waves she thought she might be sick. Harvard. This Kansas girl’s dream. She took a deep breath, released it slowly, and opened the door to her assigned room.

  There, tan legs folded into a pretzel, a girl in a torn sweatshirt and shorts sat on a narrow bed. Her hands were dotted with neon-green paint and hair pulled back into a ponytail. She looked up, her entire face opening in a smile. On her lap and bed were scattered the makings of a collage, a sort of WELCOME sign. Somewhere in the mess Nell spotted the letters of her name.

  A voice lifted from the bed.

  “You’re finally here. I’m Maddie. Welcome to our suite.”

  Nell stared as words tumbled out of the woman’s perfect mouth, her face spirited and happy and blotting out every bit of gray from the thick September sky.

  Madeline Solomon. Her first roommate. And her last.

  It took fifteen minutes, or maybe less, for the two young women to know they were destined to be together in one way or another through the arduous, thrilling, enormously life-changing roller-coaster ride of college. And life thereafter, no matter where they were.

  Nell shook herself free of the memories and brought her thoughts back to the man in front of her. The sadness in Ollie’s eyes, the grief etched into the lines of his face, were still fresh and new these years after Maddie’s death. Some things seemed to defy the passage of time.

  “Enough about the past,” Nell said lightly, trying to shift the mood. “Tell me about your New York restaurants. And your wife. Ben and I are looking forward to meeting her.”

  Ollie’s body seemed to relax as he shifted back into the present. “Lidia. Well, how much time do you have?” He laughed softly. “She’s talented. A fine chef. Not as good as I once was, but almost.”

  “No one will ever be as good as you. You were the sole reason for our ‘freshman fifteen.’ Amazing meals cooked up in that dingy Somerville place you lived in.”

  “I remember well. Anyway, Lidia would have come tonight, but had an interview or something in Boston. You’ll like her, Nell. Everyone likes her. Unless they don’t.” He took a long drink.

  Nell frowned, trying hard to read her friend’s face. “I read somewhere that she gives you credit for giving her a start.”

  “I suppose you could say that. Although Lidia isn’t the kind of person people actually give things to. She decides what she wants, and then she takes it. People think they’re offering her things, but that’s because Lidia makes them feel that way.”

  Ollie’s face and tone of voice gave Nell few clues as to whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “She came into the restaurant kitchen on a particularly bad day. Maddie was in hospice, I was distracted, the restaurant was suffering. And there she was at the alley door. She stepped inside, looking around, almost as if she’d cased the place first. I watched her from the glass window in my office, slightly wary, although I couldn’t tell you why. She walked around, waving steam from soup pots toward her face, checking out the combination of spices. I even saw her stick a finger in a pot of thick sauce and was about to charge out of the office and send her back out the door.

  “But then she spotted my office, headed over, and walked in, as if I had been waiting for her. She checked out the mess of papers on my desk, a couple of crates on the floor, a dirty coffee cup. The expression on her face as she looked around was pure disdain. But when she looked at me, it disappeared. It was business-like, I remember, not flirtatious. She announced that she was there to work. She could start right away.

  “I thought she was on something, but she went on, telling me she knew kitchens, and mine clearly needed her. It was a mess, she said, but she’d straighten it out. Prep chef, fry chef, expediter, on and on, naming a half-dozen positions. Then she added that it didn’t really matter. She’d do whatever needed to be done, and from what she could see, that was nearly everything.”