Murder in Merino Read online

  Even when it was challenged.

  Chapter 12

  By Saturday morning the rain had stopped, the wind had relaxed, and white clouds scuttled across a blue sky. It was as if the storm itself had provided a background for the horrible happenings at Izzy’s cottage. And then it was over.

  Today was a new day, a beautiful day.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Ben was already up and the coffee was brewing when Nell came down the back stairs. She had slept little, her dreams tangled up in a jumble of images—Jules Ainsley, a tearful Stella Palazola, Jeffrey Meara. So many lives shaken by a horrible act that had happened while the rest of them were going about their ordinary lives, making dinner, checking the weather, cleaning up the family room.

  Ben wasn’t alone in the kitchen, as often happened on Saturday mornings. Usually it was because he made blueberry or Scottish scones on weekends. Today it was simply for a cup of coffee, maybe a hug. Today it was for friendship.

  Birdie looked up as Nell walked into the room. Izzy sat across from her, poring over the Sea Harbor Gazette.

  The headline was big:

  STABBING DEATH ON RIDGE ROAD

  The article was short.

  “There isn’t much to say,” Ben said. “Not yet.”

  Nell nodded and leaned over Izzy’s shoulder, reading the article, which talked more about what a Sea Harbor legend Jeffrey Meara was than about the cruel way his life had ended.

  “Sam is meeting Jerry Thompson over at the Ridge Road house this morning,” Izzy said. “There’s yellow tape all over it right now and they’re pulling up Stella’s ‘For Sale’ sign.”

  “Poor Stella,” Nell said. “This must be absolutely awful for her.”

  “It’s awful for everyone. I saw Mary Pisano out walking this morning. She was clearly upset,” Birdie said. “Jeffrey was a longtime friend.”

  Izzy looked up from the paper. “Was Jules with her?”

  “No. She was out running. Mary said she left at the crack of dawn.”

  It was probably a panacea for Jules. Nell pictured her running into the breeze, hair flying, escaping from the haunting images. She was happy Jules had an outlet. She would surely need one to get through all this.

  “I wouldn’t blame her if she was running as far away from Sea Harbor as she can get,” Izzy said. “It must have been terrible for her, finding Jeffrey like that.”

  Ben poured Nell a cup of coffee. “No, she won’t be heading away from here—not soon anyway.”

  “I don’t mean literally,” Izzy said. “But imagine, being here on vacation and finding the dead body of someone you barely know at an open house?”

  “Not a pleasant thing, for sure, but Jules may have known Jeffrey better than we think. Apparently he had called her and insisted on meeting her at the Ridge Road house yesterday. That’s why he was there, she said. They were supposed to meet before the open house.”

  “Good grief. Why?” Nell asked.

  “That’s the question. Jules told the police she hadn’t the faintest idea. She had met Jeffrey, but only casually.”

  “That’s how it looked to me when I saw them talking at the Ocean’s Edge a couple times.” Nell thought about the previous Sunday night—which now seemed like a lifetime ago—when Danny had introduced Jules to Jeffrey. Or was it the Hansons he had introduced Jules to? It was all hazy, even though it had been only a few days before. Death seemed to squeeze time into a meaningless blur.

  “That’s what Jules said, too. That she’d met him at the Edge bar. He had seemed a little odd, she said.”

  “That isn’t a word any of us would use to describe Jeffrey,” Birdie said. “Odd? Why would anyone think sweet Jeffrey Meara was odd?”

  “She had the feeling he was staring at her, as if he’d met her before,” Ben said. “But in any case, Jerry Thompson has asked her not to leave town for a few days, not until they get their arms around all this.”

  “No wonder the poor girl was out running,” Nell said. “That’s awful, Ben. Surely they don’t think she had anything to do with it.” But even as she said the words, she knew the police would most certainly look at Jules.

  Ben spelled it out. “At this point they have to suspect everyone,” he said. “But Jules was right there at the scene. She was meeting him, according to phone records. Her fingerprints were all over the knife. And the fact that she’s a relative stranger here certainly won’t help.”

  “Geesh,” Izzy said. She walked over and impulsively wrapped her arms around her uncle.

  Ben hugged her back, smiling down into her hair. “I love you, too, Izzy. And the chief is on this. Don’t worry.”

  But she was worried. They all were. Nell watched her niece and her heart ached. Izzy was a mother now, and the thought of evil lurking in their town was doubly awful with baby Abby to protect.

  Izzy finished her coffee and was off to the yarn shop to teach a beginning knitters’ class—a futile effort to make it an ordinary Saturday.

  Ben left to meet Sam at the Ridge Road house. “Moral support, if nothing else,” he told Nell, and kissed her, a little longer than usual.

  “Father Northcutt is over at Maeve’s,” Birdie said. “She’s in good hands.”

  Nell nodded. “Jeffrey told me about his love affair with Maeve the very first time I met him. ‘I fell in love with an older woman,’ he said. ‘And me just a bumbling kid.’ And by some miracle, he said, she had noticed him. Then, years later, after she went to college and lived for a while in the big city, she came back to Sea Harbor and she remembered him—still a bachelor, much to his mother’s dismay. And a few years after that . . . she married him. It was a long time in coming, Jeffrey said, but well worth the wait.”

  They seemed to be the perfect pair, balancing out each other’s personalities. The social bartender and his quiet wife. He had his restaurant; Maeve had her garden and her crossword puzzles. It worked for them.

  “I don’t think Jeffrey showed his face around Our Lady of Safe Seas much, but Maeve more than made up for his absence and knows Father Larry well,” Birdie said, getting up and slipping on her sweater. She looked out the kitchen window at the sun-splashed yard. A light breeze moved through pine trees. “He’ll take good care of her.”

  She turned back to Nell. “And you and I, Nell, we need to take care of us. Before the day gets away from us, let’s get in that walk you promised me. I’m in need of stretching these legs and cleaning out my head.”

  They went out the back way, across the deck and backyard and down the wooded path to the beach road. Several runners passed them, and an old man with his dog walked slowly along the narrow stretch of beach. Teenagers sat on the rocks, tapping messages into cell phones. But even on the beach, a feeling of sadness weighed down the air.

  It was the weight of death—for that’s how people would talk about it for a while. “Murder” was too harsh a word, too awful to comfortably weave into September days.

  “It doesn’t seem real,” Nell said. She watched the waves lap up against the smooth sand, then suck it back into the sea. Retreat. Return. Retreat. Nature’s simple rhythm usually brought quiet to her spirit, but today the waves seemed somehow menacing.

  Birdie nodded and quickened her pace, as if speed might put some time and distance between them and Jeffrey’s death.

  They walked up the winding road at the end of the cove and through a neighborhood of fine, elegant homes, then around a bend to another stretch of beach, where Izzy liked to push Abby in her stroller. Pete Halloran jogged by, arms pumping. When he noticed Birdie and Nell, he slowed to a walk, moving in step with the women.

  His face was somber. “Old man Meara gave me my first busboy job,” he said, wiping away the beads of perspiration dotting his forehead. “I sucked at it and he fired me. He said I needed to make better use of my time and suggested practicing the guitar. He was r
ight.”

  “There’ll be lots of Jeffrey Meara stories being told this week,” Birdie said, patting Pete’s arm. Cass’s lanky brother dwarfed the older woman by nearly two feet and he lowered his head to hear her, a band of sandy hair falling across his forehead.

  “Losing the Bartender is a sad thing. But having it happen the way it did . . . that’s . . . it’s . . .”

  Trying to grasp the horror of murder defied words. They’d try and try, but it was a reality that shunned adequate emotional descriptions. It happened. It was awful. And that was that. There was nothing they could do about it.

  Except find the person who did this, who ended a life so purposefully and cruelly. And then begin to piece their lives back together again.

  As the beach narrowed further, Pete waved them off and picked up his pace, running down to the water’s edge and around a mound of granite boulders.

  Birdie and Nell walked back toward the road, suddenly aware of how far they’d come. Birdie sighed. “Was it just a heartbeat ago we were standing in this same spot with Isabel and Abby, enjoying the breeze and the magic of a September day?”

  “A simple day,” Nell murmured. She looked down the road, toward the bushy hill that climbed up to the house on Ridge Road.

  “Birdie,” she said suddenly. “Look.”

  Birdie stopped and followed the point of Nell’s finger. “Good grief. Déjà vu.”

  Jules Ainsley stood at the foot of the incline, staring beyond the yellow tape that marked the property, up through the trees to the top of the hill. To the top of the house. The porch with the hanging swing. To the potting shed.

  “Come.” Birdie touched Nell on the arm and they walked briskly down the road. Jules seemed not to notice when they stopped beside her. Instead, she remained focused on the hill, as if waiting for something to happen. Maybe for time to turn back. For yesterday to be gone.

  Nell tried to imagine what she was seeing when she looked up at Izzy’s old house, tried to read what was going through her mind. But beyond the trees and bushes, all she could see was the scene Ben had described to them the night before. The awful scene of a man dead outside a potting shed, lying in a pool of blood. The same scene, she supposed, that was even more vivid in the memory of the woman standing beside her.

  Finally Jules turned toward them and managed a sad smile. “Who was he?” she asked. “Why was he wanting to be in my life? Why did . . . ?” Her words dropped off. She shook her head as if dismissing them, and then she looked back up at the house, her hands on her hips, as if somehow the answers she sought would be up there, hanging from a bush or the yellow tape that was visible through the trees.

  “He was a good and decent man,” Birdie said. “That’s who Jeffrey Meara was.”

  Jules was so quiet Nell wasn’t sure Birdie’s words had registered.

  Finally she asked, “When will the police take the tape down?” Her voice was neutral now. Almost businesslike, as if she were asking what time the bank opened or when the train left for Boston.

  “The police tape?” Nell asked. Her brows lifted in surprise. Somehow, the day after a terrible death, police tape seemed supremely unimportant.

  Jules turned away from the woods, the house, and Nell’s words. She climbed onto a bike that was leaning against an old post and said, more to herself than the others, “Maybe the Realtor will know.”

  “Why is it important?” Nell asked.

  Jules looked puzzled and taken aback, as if she had asked a most logical question, perhaps the question that needed to be asked at that precise moment, and Nell was somehow remiss in not having the answer.

  Then she said slowly and patiently, as if speaking to someone who might have difficulty understanding: “So I know when I can move in.”

  Chapter 13

  Later that morning, Nell and Birdie ordered an antipasto plate and a selection of Garozzo’s choice cold cuts and Italian bread to be sent over to Maeve Meara’s house. As an afterthought, they had Harry pack up a bag of sandwiches for themselves and headed down the road to the Seaside Knitting Studio.

  The encounter with Jules lingered with both women, her odd comments troubling. They had wanted to comfort her, to ease the awfulness of what she’d so recently seen.

  And Jules wanted to take down police tape and move into a house where a man’s blood still stained the potting shed floor and walkway.

  Perhaps Izzy would know more.

  Mae sent them immediately to the back room. “Stella Palazola just flew by me on her way to see Izzy. The poor girl looked awful,” Mae said. “White as a sheet. No young girl should be witness to such a horrible thing.” She turned back to the computer and a customer wanting to place a special order.

  Stella was sitting at the old wooden table, looking like she hadn’t slept in days.

  Izzy looked relieved when Birdie and Nell walked down the steps. She eyed the familiar white bag Birdie carried. “Harry’s sandwiches? You’re an angel, Birdie. Stella needs food.”

  Birdie set the bag down and gave Stella a hug. She noticed several sheets of paper on the table in front of her. “These look official,” she said.

  Stella fidgeted with one, curling back the corner. She nodded. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a makeshift ponytail, the scattering of freckles across her nose looking more prominent than usual. She had contacts in today, swimming in watery eyes.

  “Has Jules Ainsley contacted you?” Nell asked. She sat down on the other side of the table.

  “We’re closed today,” Stella began, as if the answer to Nell’s questions required some background information. “Uncle Mario was a friend of Jeffrey’s and he didn’t want us opening the office. Mostly, I think he wanted me to get some sleep if I could. Wishful thinking, I guess.”

  Birdie patted her hand. “It wasn’t a good night for sleep. Tonight will be better.”

  Stella managed a half smile and then went on. “I was in the shower when she knocked on my door. Jules, I mean.”

  “She came to your apartment?” Izzy asked.

  “Yes. She went to the office first, and when it was closed she somehow found out where I lived.”

  Izzy picked up one of the papers and looked at the PALAZOLA REAL ESTATE heading at the top. She scanned the text, her eyebrows pulled together. “This is an offer on my house.”

  “She wants it, Izzy. Real bad.”

  “She wants that house. Now? Today? Even after—?”

  “That doesn’t seem to matter to her,” Stella said. “She doesn’t want to wait. She even offered more money than you and Sam are asking, just so you wouldn’t have to wait for other offers and would feel okay about it. She wants it now—like right now.”

  “Other offers?” Izzy said. She looked up at Stella, then stared again at the formal offer. “She wanted you to bring this to me today? What was she thinking?”

  Nell told Izzy about their morning walk. “It was just like the other day, when we saw her staring up at the house from the street below. But this time, we thought she was there because of the murder, that maybe she was in shock, or trying to make some sense out of what she’d seen, or maybe she’d gone back to see if it was real or simply a bad dream.”

  “But we were wrong. It wasn’t any of those things,” Birdie said. “She was wondering when she’d be able to move in.”

  Stella shook her head, her ponytail swinging back and forth. “It’s nuts. Uncle Mario says houses where someone has died in such an awful way are hard to sell. Sometimes they never sell, and the house is taken down and something else built in its place. Or maybe they put in a park on the land. Like with a memorial. You know—like Cass did with old Finnegan’s house over near the water. Jules told me that was her fear, that someone would tear the house down. Maybe even you, Izzy. She said that we can’t let that happen.”

  Izzy ran her fingers through her hair, trying to make se
nse of what she was hearing. “Sam and I haven’t even talked about what we want to do with the house. It seems so unimportant in the light of what’s happened, especially while everyone in town is trying to come to grips with the awfulness of Jeffrey’s death and to help Maeve deal with the tragedy. The man isn’t even buried yet.”

  Her words matched Birdie’s and Nell’s thoughts perfectly.

  Nell pulled out the sandwiches and passed the wrapped parcels around. Stella opened hers immediately and bit into a juicy Reuben on Harry’s homemade rye bread. Thousand Island dressing oozed out the sides. Izzy was right—Stella hadn’t eaten in a while.

  “I’m mystified about something, Stella,” Birdie said. “Maybe you know the answer. What does Jules find so unique and special—not to mention urgent—about that particular house? What does she love so much about it?”

  Stella shifted in the chair and looked at Birdie sadly, as if regretting her whole decision to become a Realtor. Her buoyant enthusiasm of a week earlier was buried somewhere deep beneath the tragedy that should have been her first open house.

  “She hasn’t even seen the inside the house, Miz Favazza. All she’s seen of the property is a dead body on a stone floor. What is there to love?”

  • • •

  Izzy tucked the papers into her purse and brought them with her to dinner that night. Cass and Jane Brewster had gone early and saved a large table in the corner of Gracie’s Lazy Lobster Café. The unpretentious restaurant was out on the pier and Pete’s band often performed on the deck, a wide structure that hung directly over the water. No one was in the mood for a night of fun, but Gracie needed the business, and Pete, Andy, and Merry—the Fractured Fish threesome—needed the moral support. Playing in the shadow of the Bartender’s death would be difficult.

  Merry Jackson, singer and keyboard player in the band, came over to the table and hugged everyone. “The loss of someone we all knew and liked is awful enough,” she said, repeating aloud what all of them were thinking, “but beneath all that, beneath the sadness of Jeffrey’s passing, is the scary and horrifying fact that someone murdered him.”