A Fatal Fleece (2 page)

“It’s such a small stretch of land,” Nell Endicott had said to her husband as they drove the short distance from their house to city hall.

“But positioned perfectly between Canary Cove Road and the sea,” Ben replied. “A diamond in the rough. Everyone wants a piece of it.”

The energetic crowd of Sea Harbor residents had concurred as they sat shoulder to shoulder in the heated room, many with their own imagined plans for how it would be used—once they wrested it away from the crazy old man who lived there, that was.

A developer’s dream.

Revenue for the town.

A fancy strip of shops? A small inn, perhaps?

Expensive summer condos.

Or a park with play equipment, a wading pool, and a skating rink in winter.

“I’ve offered the guy everything but my firstborn,” D.J. continued, his eyes blazing. The developer sat near the front of the crowd, his wife, Maeve, at his side. “He won’t listen to reason. People would kill for that land.”

“Well, let’s hope not,” Ben Endicott said. His voice was a fan cooling the room’s heated air. The voice of reason in the tempest the land debate had churned up.

“I say we concentrate on the new community garden,” Ben continued. “Get everyone involved. Make it spectacular. It will butt right up to Finnegan’s place, and once he sees those juicy Big Boys bending the vines, he’ll come around and clean up his place—I’ll bet on it. After all, that’s what we all really want. Right?”

Nell held back a smile. No, that wasn’t what they really wanted, and Ben knew it as well as anyone. No one would object to the unsightly acres being cleaned up, true. But what many really wanted was what they saw when they looked at the land: dollar signs. Lots of them.

“Maybe Finnegan would help with the garden,” Willow Adams said hopefully. The young fiber artist liked the old man, and the complaints against him offended her. But even Willow had to admit that the land was an eyesore.

Next to her, Beverly Walden was still. Although the artist kept her opinions to herself, her face was as graphic as her contemporary paintings: bright, bold, and expressive. And from what Nell Endicott could tell from across the room, her expression confirmed the rumors that rumbled up and down the winding, narrow streets of Canary Cove: Beverly Walden didn’t like Finnegan. And from all reports, the feeling was mutual.

A possible Greek tragedy in the making, because Beverly Walden was Finnegan and his late wife, Moira’s, only child.

“I know the land’s a problem,” the police chief, Jerry Thompson, said from his chair near the front of the room. His calm voice brought everyone to attention. “It’s not looking so great, sure, but Finn will come around.”

“That land used to be so fine, just like the other places down
there—neat little offices with flower boxes in front,” Archie Brandley, the Sea Harbor Bookstore owner, said, rising from his chair. His head nodded with each word, and he looked down at his wife, Harriet. “Remember? Finn had that little bait shop, and Moira handed out hot dogs to fishermen, right along with the worms. She never took a dime for the dogs, only the bait.”

Murmurs of agreement mixed with some chuckles rippled through the crowd from those who remembered the days when life moved a little slower—and later ones, too, when it was cheaper to buy bait from the bigger places in town and Finnegan finally closed the shop and decided to fish full-time. But Moira declared that very spot her favorite place on God’s earth. So Finnegan renovated the building. He fixed up the first floor with a couple of offices for rent, and moved Moira from a small cottage above the Canary Cove Art Colony to the spacious top floor with the million-dollar view. Nothing but miles of blue and squabbles of gulls overhead. Fishing boats moving back and forth. And around the building, lots of green space and rosebushes, which Moira tended.

“It was after his Moira died that things got bad,” Harry Garozzo, owner of the deli on Harbor Road, said. “Damn cancer took her and might as well have taken Finn, too—for a while, anyway.”

Nell remembered hearing the stories. Moira’s death was the beginning. And soon the land became a jungle of sea grass and broken bottles—a place for kids to hide a six-pack late at night or drifters to seek shelter, until driven away by Finnegan’s BB gun. Eventually ocean winds ripped the paint from the cottage by the sea, and it decayed into a shack where drifters sometimes slept when the ocean’s freezing gusts drove them inside and the owner was absent.

And old man Finnegan refused to clean it up.

He also refused to give it up, though the offers to buy the land would have made him a rich man.

Instead, he put up a wire fence that held in the weeds, trash trees, and tall, wavy grass. At the gate he fastened a
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Outside the fence, passersby—joggers and strollers, vacationers headed toward the Canary Cove art galleries—caught glimpses
of Finnegan fiddling with rusted boat parts and lobster pots and bales of old fishing rope. Sometimes he’d be whistling, sometimes muttering to himself.

But no one ever saw him mowing the waist-high grass that offered him the privacy he coveted.

Sometimes at night, folks dining at the Ocean’s Edge harbor restaurant would look out over the water and see him silhouetted against the lights, a bent black shape sitting on the end of his weather-beaten dock, scanning the sky with an old pair of binoculars, searching the sky for new planets.

Or maybe for his Moira.

“Finnegan can be downright nasty,” Beatrice Scaglia said, not buying the love story that may have informed his land. She sat at the curved table in the front of the room, her red fingernails tapping on the wooden surface near the microphone. The councilwoman was impeccably dressed in a white linen suit, though the other council members sported knit shirts and khakis or cotton skirts and blouses. “We’ve had dozens of complaints and so have the police. And when Sergeant Tommy Porter, dressed in full uniform, stopped by to discuss them politely with him, he practically forced Tommy off his land.” Her hand flapped through the air in the direction of the young policeman.

“I wonda what he’s hiding out there.” This came from the owner of a pizzeria on the edge of town, who’d been trying to get a place near the water for years. “Maybe he’s, well, you know, growing somethin’. Maybe those weeds are hiding more than old lobsta traps. . . .” His words hung suggestively over the crowd.

What nonsense,
Nell thought. She removed a nearly finished lace scarf from the bag at her feet. Knitting brought a calmness to her spirit, and all this negative talk about a decent man who liked his privacy was beginning to rile her up.

Beatrice Scaglia pulled the microphone closer but waited for a few moments, allowing the pizzeria owner’s words to settle on anyone who might need further convincing that someone, somehow, needed to persuade Finnegan to vacate his land and allow it to be
used sensibly. Finally she said, “I think we may need to impose serious fines on Finnegan, ones that will convince him to sell the property and move on with his life.”

In the front row, an old man pushed himself up to a standing position, his white beard creating the illusion of Santa Claus himself. He leaned on a carved walking stick to keep his balance. Angus McPherran rarely showed up at public functions, and his presence caused a hush to fall over the room.

“Finn’s mad because the police took away his driver’s license,” Angus said. “Had to be done, but it made him wicked mad. So he doesn’t want any patrolman knocking on his door. He wonders what you’re gonna take away next.

“And then there’s the rest of you, pushing your way onto his property, trying to buy it out from under him to make yourselves rich. Shame on you.” He threw a pointed look at D. J. Delaney, the developer, then went on. “So he doesn’t want to pretty up the place. So what? That’s his God-given right. It’s his land, for chrissake.”

Those gathered in the council meeting room nodded at the mention of Finnegan’s driver’s license. Everyone had heard about the day Chief Jerry Thompson said, “That’s it, Finn,” and took his license away forever. The bent lamppost in front of Harry Garozzo’s deli was just a small reminder of Finnegan’s slow responses and careless driving, not to mention the fear that rippled up and down Harbor Road when he’d come around the corner in his beat-up Chevy pickup. The chief had bought him a ten-speed bicycle with his own money to soften the blow, but Finn would often sit up in the cab of his truck, now a fixture on the weed-encrusted land, as if it somehow gave him back his freedom.

“Just leave the old coot be,” Angus said. He gave another withering look toward D.J., then lowered his body back down onto the chair.

Subdued chuckles passed through the crowd when Angus called Finnegan old. Angus himself—the Old Man of the Sea, as the kids called him—was old enough that no one even tried to remember the exact year he was born. Angus had been around forever, was the
way people looked at it. And his generosity to the city made people not ask his age but defer to him instead.

“No disrespect to you, Angus,” Beatrice Scaglia said, “but the place has become an eyesore, plain and simple—and that
is
our business.” One long red fingernail tapped on the table.

“I suppose it’s not the best thing for Colony Cove,” Ham Brewster admitted. Ham spoke with reluctance. He liked Finn well enough, just as most of the Canary Cove artists did. Finnegan was their self-appointed watchdog and street cleaner, fixing shutters and cleaning up the paper cups and lobster roll wrappings that tourists sometimes tossed in the narrow streets of the art colony. Finnegan’s wife, Moira, had been an artist, he often told them—and it’s what she’d have wanted him to do.

Nell watched Jane Brewster, a dear friend, cast her eyes to the floor. Jane agreed with what her husband said, but she didn’t like herself for it. She and Ham headed the Canary Cove Arts Association—housed in a very neat building on the other side of Finn’s land—and had worked hard to make the colony successful, safe, and beautiful. Finnegan’s land was becoming a deterrent to business and an eyesore to all of them.

“And it’s a hotbed for riffraff,” Jake Risso, owner of the Gull Tavern, spoke up. Again, with some reluctance. “Not Finn’s fault, but when I’m out in the boat I can see ’em, bums trying to hunker down over there. They think it’s abandoned—”

“And, therefore, theirs,” Beatrice said. “And it’s not good for Finn himself. Just two weeks ago someone showed up in that rotted building and Finn caused an awful ruckus.”

The crowd turned to look at Tommy Porter, the young policeman who had stopped the fight. If he hadn’t, he’d told the reporter who dutifully wrote it up for the newspaper, the guy might not have seen the light of a new day. Finn was fuming mad, and the bum had a broken nose to show for it.

Tommy nodded at the attention, but declined from adding to the discussion.

Nell settled back in the chair, lulled by the buzz of
conversation around her. She didn’t often come to council meetings, agreeing with Birdie’s evaluation, but Ben was chairing the new Parks and Open Spaces Committee, and his community garden idea was a brilliant one. She had come to support his plans, hoping it would overshadow the debate over Finnegan’s run-down property.

But it hadn’t, and now the comments in the room were less about assigning garden plots, building pathways, and bringing in mulch, and far more about ousting an old man from his rightful property.

Nell often jogged along the path that bordered the land in question. She understood clearly why people were upset. The whole area was seedy and unkempt. Beatrice Scaglia had hired teenagers to go in and mow the grass—a favor, Nell supposed, to townspeople who took their complaints to the councilwoman. Beatrice knew well that favors encouraged people to vote her way when election time came around.

But then, a while back, the fence went up and Beatrice’s mowing stopped.

Directly across the room from Nell, Cass Halloran stood with her back against the wall, next to Danny Brandley. She looked distant, as if she were there in body but not much else. Every now and then Danny would glance down at her as if her mood were passing from her body into his own. His expression carried worry. Worry for Cass, Nell suspected. The mystery writer’s affection for Nell’s favorite lobsterwoman had ripened right along with his own successful career, and what Cass worried about, he probably did, too.

The burden of keeping the Hallorans’ lobster business alive and thriving was a heavy one. Not an easy task in today’s world.

Izzy Perry, owner of the Seaside Knitting Studio, wasn’t at the meeting because her shop was still open and busy with vacationers getting started on knitting projects, but she’d promised to meet Nell and Cass and other friends for dinner. She sent her husband, Sam, to the meeting in her stead. Sam, as was his way, stood in the back, a camera hanging from a strap around his neck, just in case. Tonight Sam’s camera went unattended as he listened intently to the conversation.

Birdie was absent, too, though she said she was coming. But when Nell had called earlier to offer her a ride, Ella, the housekeeper, said Birdie had received a phone call that sent her upstairs to shower, and then she was gone. Off without a word of explanation.

And Miss Birdie rarely showered in the middle of the day, Ella had shared.

Nell smiled as she recalled the tone in Ella’s voice. Crisp and disapproving. Ella usually knew exactly where Birdie was, and that’s the way she—and her husband and groundskeeper, Harold—liked it.

But Birdie and Izzy were among the minority missing the meeting. Many of the Canary Cove artists were there, and one whole row was filled with longtime residents who lived in the neighborhood above Canary Cove—the old captains’ homes that had been redone and refurbished into coveted family homes—and a newer neighborhood just across the cove.

At the end of the row was Sal Scaglia, who with his wife had recently renovated one of those homes and turned it into a Sea Harbor showplace. He sat with a notebook on his lap, his dark-rimmed glasses in place, and his attention focused on his wife, Beatrice. He reminded Nell of a faithful pup, although she knew Sal wouldn’t find that flattering. But he was exactly that: always there at the meetings, always at Beatrice’s side during her campaigns and civic commitments. Appearing at cocktail parties and ribbon cuttings and store openings—the quiet, loyal man behind the successful and ambitious woman.