Patterns in the Sand Read online

  They crossed over to Jane and Ham’s gallery—right in the center of the row of artists’ shops. The location was second only to Aidan Peabody’s prime acreage. Behind the gallery, Jane and Ham had turned a cozy cabin into a clean white space, a lovely home, filled with paintings and prints collected from fellow artists. It hosted many dinner parties and late-night discussions.

  The door to the shop was open today and several children played on the wooden bench in front. Nell tousled the hair of a redheaded boy and peered into the cool interior.

  Ham stood in front of a display of Jane’s large pots, talking to a customer and absently fingering his bushy beard. Brendan was helping out and stood on the other side of the room, talking to another group of visitors and drawing their attention to a large watercolor painting of Ham’s that Nell knew would grace their own home if they had a wall big enough to hold it. It was a beach area north of town, craggy and dramatic, with enormous granite boulders reaching directly out to the sea. Ham had captured light on water and granite with an agility that reminded Nell of some of Fritz Lane’s paintings.

  Ham looked up and spotted Nell. “Looking for Janie, Nell? She had some association business but will be back shortly.”

  “We’ll circle around and be back,” Nell called and stepped back onto the road. Birdie stood straight, shielding her eyes against the glare of the noontime sun, and peering down the street.

  “Looks like there’s activity at the Fishtail Gallery.”

  Nell followed the point of Birdie’s finger and spotted the Delaney Construction truck sticking out of the small alley beside Aidan Peabody’s closed-up gallery. She fell in step as Birdie headed down the street.

  “It makes my stomach lurch to see police tape circling Aidan’s lovely shop this way,” Birdie said.

  “Ben said the police are about finished and will take the tape down today. They’ve scoured the place looking for clues but haven’t had much luck. With the number of people in and out of Aidan’s gallery—and his sculptures begging to be touched the way they do—I’d guess nearly half of Cape Ann has left fingerprints in that place.”

  “So no fingerprints. What are they thinking?” Birdie paused, then said, “Don’t answer that. I know what they are thinking. For a minute I was able to forget.”

  “Ben said they had hoped to find some note, someone who had heard something, seen something, that would put Willow in the right place at the right time.”

  “Or wrong is more like it.”

  Nell nodded. “She needs us. Right now we’re the only ones convinced she’s innocent. We need to prove our case.”

  As they neared the Fishtail’s front door, Nell heard voices coming from the small dirt alley next to the studio. The alley was more of a driveway that dead-ended beside Aidan’s lovely shade garden and the hilly, wooded land beyond.

  “D.J., what’s going on?” Nell asked. She pushed her sunglasses up into her salt-and-pepper hair.

  D. J. Delaney stood in front of his truck, dark sunglasses shielding his eyes and a yellow pad in his hands. Two men in muscle shirts and deep tans stood on opposite sides of the drive, extending a tape measure between them.

  “Hey, Nell, how ya doing?” D.J. said. Building condos and renovating Sea Harbor property had turned D.J.’s body into a solid mass of muscle. Today a knit shirt covered his chest and his thinning hair was hidden beneath a baseball cap. “We’re getting some stats on this place. I’m thinking the whole damn thing should maybe be torn down.”

  Nell’s hands knotted into balls and pressed into her hips. “And why are you thinking that, D.J.?”

  “See those woods, Nell? It’d be a perfect outdoor area for guests of the inn. Scoop out a clearing and lay flagstone, maybe a little pond. Make it completely private. Beautiful plantings, a place to have morning coffee or lunch. Art lovers from Boston would pay big bucks to have that kind of pampering in the fine little inn.”

  “Inn?” Birdie said. Her eyebrows lifted with her voice.

  “It’s just what Canary Cove needs, Miss Birdie. A sweet elegant inn, right smack in the middle of the artists’ colony. It will help everyone—the artists, the town—”

  “Not to mention your pocketbook.” Birdie frowned at him.

  D.J.’s laugh was deep and gravelly. “Have ta feed the wife and get the kids through college.”

  “How do you propose to get your hands on this property?” Nell asked. “It’s not yours.”

  “Not yet,” D.J. answered with a wry smile. “You wait and see. The girl is guilty as sin. She won’t be needing this land where she’s going, but she’ll sure need the money for lawyers. Now excuse me, ladies. I’ve some numbers to write down.” He tipped his head, dismissing Nell and Birdie, and strode up the alley to his crew, listening and jotting down figures on the yellow pad.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Birdie said. “Okay, let’s get out our own yellow pad. And if we want suspects to deflect attention from Willow, D. J. Delaney is now at the top of my list.”

  Jane had just returned when Nell and Birdie walked back in the front door of the Brewster Gallery.

  “Ham said you stopped by,” Jane said, smiling a welcome. “I was over at the Association office.”

  “We walked right by there but didn’t spot you. Is everything okay? You look worried.”

  Jane waved off Nell’s remark. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ve been trying to stay on top of things that Aidan used to take care of for the art association, and am having a hard time. Just little things, a couple of overdue bills . . . and some numbers that don’t match up. I should probably mind my own business. The reports aren’t due for another month, but I want to be sure the summer arts program is okay and all the bills get paid on time.”

  “You mentioned the other day that the funds were low. Maybe we need another benefit.”

  “Maybe.” Jane leaned back against the glass counter. “Now what brings you two over here on a Friday? You look like you have more on your mind than strolling in and out of galleries.”

  “It’s about Willow,” Nell began.

  Jane’s smile disappeared. She nodded, pushing a lock of slightly graying hair back behind one ear.

  Jane looked the quintessential artist today, Nell thought, dressed in jeans and a colorful Art at Night T-shirt. Her voice, too, was flowing and clear, matching the lines of the smooth, unique pots she displayed in her gallery. She was aging with elegance.

  “That poor young woman. What a tragedy,” Jane said. “As close as I was to Aidan, I never imagined that he had a daughter. There was one night—he’d had a little too much to drink, and we were sitting out on the dock underneath that old roof. We were talking about the insane things Ham and I did when we were at Berkeley, and Aidan matched them with his antics at Wisconsin. He started talking about this thing that had happened to him there—that last semester of school when things get crazy, things happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some young gal came on to him, he said. She was everywhere he was, following him around campus, making him dinner, showing up at his house. She was very pretty, he said. Flirty. She told him she was a coed at Wisconsin. Then the night before he was to leave town—he was skipping the graduation ceremony because he couldn’t wait to get back to the coast—she showed up at his apartment. They’d not seen each other for a while because he thought there was something dishonest about her, something not quite right. And he suspected from the way she talked that she might be lying about her age and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

  “So that last night she showed up at his apartment and told him she was pregnant, that she was sixteen and had run away from home. But she loved him, she said, and she wanted to run away with him.”

  Two sides to every story, Nell thought, thinking of Willow’s grandmother, determined to save her daughter’s image.

  “Good grief,” Birdie said.

  “Aidan was flabbergasted, as you can imagine. They’d been together once, maybe twice. He didn’
t say much that night because he was so stunned, just that he needed a few hours and a little space to collect his thoughts. He’d talk to her the next day.”

  “He must have been scared silly he’d be accused of rape.”

  Jane nodded. “There was that, yes. But you know Aidan. He’d do the right thing, whatever that was. So he spent the whole night thinking about it. And the next day he went to the place where she worked, but they said she’d left suddenly. He went to her apartment, but she was gone—lock, stock, and barrel. She disappeared off the face of the earth.

  “Aidan said he’s thought about her over the years, tried to find her. Wondered what happened . . . if there really was a baby. And that was the last time he talked about it to us. He never mentioned it again after that night. Sometimes Ham and I wondered if we’d really heard the story right or if we’d imagined it. But that night, at least, Aidan had been haunted by the thought that he might have a child out there, someone he never had a chance to know or to hold or to love.”

  “Aidan rarely talked about himself.”

  “No, hardly ever. It was a rare night. Mostly, Aidan was all about his art. Even the women in his life never seemed to dominate his attention—they were more like peripheral distractions. At first Rebecca made an impression, I think. But that’s because everything Rebecca does makes an impression.”

  “Apparently Willow didn’t think she made an impression, either,” Nell said. “She never knew who her father was until recently. It must have been difficult, growing up like that.”

  “And living with a mother and relatives who colored her version of the kind of man he was,” Birdie added.

  “I’m not so sure it was her mother’s doing,” Nell said. “The grandparents seemed to be a strong force in her life, from the little she’s said.”

  “Jane, there’s a lot of talk around town. People seem to be targeting Willow, convinced that she is guilty of murdering her father,” Birdie said.

  “Almost wanting her to be guilty,” Nell added. “She’s a stranger here. If Willow did this awful thing, it could be tied up neatly and we could go on with our lives. But I don’t think Willow is guilty. Rebecca Marks is in the camp that thinks she did it, and according to Harry, she’s using you as an ally in convicting Willow. Do you know something that we don’t?”

  Jane turned to see who else was in the shop. A few customers, Ham, and Brendan. All involved in asking questions about art or listening to informed explanations of the intricacies of watercolor and pottery, plein air art or bronze sculpture. Jane moved a little closer to Birdie and Nell.

  “Once Aidan moved on, Rebecca turned on him. Being dropped was bad for her ego, I guess. But anyway, she happened to be in our shop when I was talking to the police—they questioned all of us, of course. We were talking quietly in the back room, but Rebecca must have overheard the conversation.”

  “I don’t want to put you on the spot. But if Rebecca is spreading rumors, I want to stop them. Would you mind telling us what you said?”

  Jane looked down at the floor for a minute, as if collecting her thoughts. Then she looked back at Nell. “I would trust you and Birdie with my life. I’m not sure what Rebecca is throwing out there, but here’s what happened. And what I reluctantly told the police.

  “I went into the Fishtail Gallery the day before Aidan died—last Saturday, I guess, though it seems a lifetime ago. I was borrowing some display fixtures from him for Sunday’s Art at Night. People were hovering around Aidan’s wooden pieces, like they always do, opening them up, looking for the secret drawers and compartments. But I didn’t see Aidan, so I headed for the back door, thinking maybe he’d taken a break in the garden. He did that sometimes—he loved that garden. He told me once it was his meditation spot.

  “So I walked out the door and discovered I was right—I heard Aidan’s voice right away. It was . . . I don’t know . . . kind of emotional. Stirring, almost. And then I heard another voice and glimpsed the back of a young woman with dark hair. Her voice was loud—angry and emotional, all at the same time.”

  “And you think it was Willow?”

  “At that moment I didn’t know who it was—I hadn’t met Willow yet. But I recognized her later and the backpack she carries around was distinctive. I started to back away because it was clearly a personal conversation. I turned back into the shadows of the shop, but I was an instant too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Birdie asked.

  “To avoid hearing the woman yell at Aidan. But even then, I thought it was just a disagreement. Maybe an old girlfriend, someone with a bone to pick. Even what she said didn’t seem that awful. Although once Aidan was murdered, the words took on new meaning.”

  “What did she say?” Nell ran her fingers through her hair, lifting it from her neck, an unconscious gesture when she needed to know something—but didn’t want to hear it. She looked at Jane and felt suddenly sad about what her friend would say.

  Jane paused for just a moment, then looked at Nell and Birdie. Her face mirrored Nell’s sadness. “Her voice was choked but her words were crystal clear. She said, ‘I wish you were dead.’ ”

  Chapter 15

  Nell was hoping that Willow would show up for Friday night supper. She’d left a note taped to the guesthouse door, assuring Willow that the gathering was casual and relaxing. Brendan could attest to that, too, Nell said in her note—an unspoken invitation to bring him along.

  Nell was sure that if Jane spent more time with Willow, she’d see immediately what she herself knew to be true—that Willow’s remarks to Aidan Peabody were uttered out of twenty-two years of pent-up emotion and were certainly not a murderous threat. She was a hurt young woman whose life had been shaped somehow by an absent father. And she needed to vent those feelings to plan the rest of her life. That was what this was all about. It was certainly not about murder.

  “Nell, don’t worry about what I think,” Jane said later that evening. She stood at Nell’s wide butcher-block island, rinsing a handful of lettuce in the island sink. The kitchen windows were wide-open, the white shutters folded back, and the fading light of day filled the airy space.

  Nell pulled a knife from the drawer and put it on a chopping block. Overhead, a round rack anchored to the ceiling held copper and stainless-steel pots and pans in every shape and size, and glass cupboard doors displayed Nell’s collection of plates and glasses. It was her dream kitchen: a wide-open space where friends gathered and chopped and diced—and drank in the pleasure of being together. At the other end of the room, a smooth stone fireplace rose from floor to ceiling. The cherry floors were covered with sisal rugs and the light neutral palette of the sofas and chairs—soft greens and tans and whites—gave full play to the sky and pine trees, the sloping green lawn, and the ocean beyond, a piece of it visible from every window along the back of the house. It was a lived-in room, a room that welcomed people, invited them to sit down, to be safe and comfortable—exactly what Nell had envisioned when she and Ben added it onto his family’s vacation home and made the house their own.

  “I know you had to tell the police about the conversation, Jane. I would have done the same thing.” Nell washed off a bunch of green onions and began chopping them into tiny pieces. “I was asking how you feel about Willow.”

  “The bigger concern is what the police think,” Ben interjected. He stood with Ham and Sam Perry at a built-in bar in the living area, pulling bottles from beneath the cabinet and placing them on the polished top. “They aren’t going to care who likes or doesn’t like Willow. They want a strong motive and a way to wrap this up as quickly as possible. And unfortunately Willow is falling right into that category.”

  Nell scooped up a handful of the onions and tossed them into a wooden bowl. She had rubbed the inside of the bowl with garlic, mint, and lemon juice, and the pleasant combination of odors circulated around the cooking area. “But the police have absolutely nothing to connect her to Aidan’s murder. It’s all circumstantial.”

 
“Sometimes circumstantial can be a powerful thing,” Sam said.

  “Especially when the police don’t have anywhere else to turn.” Birdie walked over to the bar and set down a bowl of stuffed martini olives.

  “I didn’t tell the police about Willow and Aidan’s conversation to hurt Willow or to add to any kind of evidence.” Jane chopped a fresh tomato from Nell’s garden as she talked. The knife clicked rhythmically against the bamboo cutting board. She pulled her brows together and her fine-boned face registered distress. “Nor do I think that poor little thing killed her father. But I had to answer their questions. Besides, there were others around that day and I know they heard some of it—or at least they knew that someone was arguing with Aidan. But they were farther away than I was, and who knows how they would have repeated the conversation? Rebecca’s dramatic flair could have blown the story clear across the Cape. It could have been even worse for Willow—distorted and incriminating.”

  Nell held her silence, not mentioning that it was, indeed, Rebecca Marks who had passed the story along and embellished it here and there.

  “What it really comes down to,” Ben said from across the room, “is that wishing someone was dead is not the same thing as murdering him. And that’s all that Willow’s words really indicate.”

  “Darn right,” Cass said, coming in from the pantry and handing Nell a fresh bottle of sesame oil. Cass never pretended to be a cook, but she had finessed the role of chef’s helper, and could sometimes anticipate Nell’s needs before Nell herself did.

  “Is Willow coming tonight?” Birdie asked. She held the deck door open for Ben as he carried a platter of tuna out to the grill. Sam and Ham followed, carrying spices and grilling tools.

  “She knows she’s welcome. I haven’t seen her all day.”

  “She was in the shop for a while,” Izzy said. “She keeps the conversation neutral—doesn’t really tell me what’s going on inside her head. I think she thinks she poured out too much to us the other night and has pulled all of us into this awful web. She doesn’t want to make it worse for us.” Izzy plucked a bread stick from the basket and broke off a piece.