Dead at Breakfast (21 page)

When Manuela had brought in a tray with the coffee service and a plate of cookies, Prince said, “Detective Gordon, up there in Maine, asked me to come and talk to you. Would it be all right if I ask a couple of questions?” His voice was gentle. Lisa made a weary gesture of assent.

Prince took out a notebook and studied a page or two of scribbled handwriting.

“When you and your husband checked in at the hotel up there, a young lady was on the reservation desk. Do you remember her?”

“Yes.”

“There was some sort of problem with your reservation?”

“No, it was all fine.”

Prince flipped back a page in his notes and read, then moved on.

“My husband could be impatient. It never meant anything,” Lisa said, without animation.

“I see. I understand you were not sharing a room with your husband while you stayed at the hotel.”

“That's right.”

“Could you explain why not?”

The question seemed to annoy her. “We didn't always share a bedroom. My husband was a noisy sleeper. And he liked to smoke in bed, which I didn't allow.”

“I see. Did you have separate bedrooms here?”

“Sometimes. He has a bed in his dressing room.”

“So this wasn't unusual, your sleeping apart?”

“No.” After a pause she added, “In the great houses of Europe, husbands and wives always had separate bedrooms.” Her decorator had told her that.

Prince said, “I didn't know that.” He looked at his notes and
remarked, “So the hotel has bedrooms where smoking was allowed? So many don't, anymore.”

“It must have. He reeked of cigars the whole time we were there, I know that.”

Prince looked at her thoughtfully. He had of course seen the website, which specified that the inn was a no-smoking facility.

“I understood there was something about a dog,” he said. He looked around, as if just noting that no dog seemed to be on view here.

“Oh. Yes. My dog, Colette. Not all the rooms could have pets. My sister and I stayed in the wing where dogs were allowed.”

“The wing that did not catch fire.”

“Obviously.”

“Is the dog here?”

“Do you like dogs?”

“Well enough.”

“Colette . . . ,” called Lisa. She didn't think she'd seen her since before the Staples Center. She must be with Manuela or maybe the children.

“Colette,
chérie, viens ici
. . .” She raised her voice. Somewhere beyond the kitchen a door opened and closed, and a scrabble of toenails on bare floor could be heard. Then a mop of white fur rocketed into the great room, began yapping when the presence of a stranger was detected, fell trying to keep from braining itself on the massive glass coffee table, and finally broke clear and propelled itself onto the sofa, and into Lisa's lap.

The detective introduced himself to the dog, who smelled his hand and then licked it. Detective Prince wiped his hand on his little linen napkin and took a cookie.

“So . . . the hotel was welcoming to dogs?”

“They were fine. Very nice. But Colette's a good girl, she never causes trouble.”

Prince looked at his notes again. Lisa cuddled Colette and murmured to her in French-sounding baby talk.

“And the young lady on the front desk. Did you ask her to take treats upstairs to the dog at any point?”

“No. Why would I?”

“I don't know. I understood that the chef kept special scraps for the animals in the house.”

“She may have. I feed Colette myself.”

“Did you have any contact with her after you checked in?”

“Who? Oh the desk girl? She brought me the phone when my son called to say Jenny was . . .” Her voice suddenly went up an octave and her throat filled with tears.

Prince waited for her to compose herself. He ate another cookie.

“I'm told there was some kind of scene between Cherry Weaver—the desk girl—and the hotel manager on”—he looked at his notes—“Wednesday afternoon.”

“I don't know anything about that.”

“No? I had the impression it was pretty public.”

“My daughter was dead. I had just been in a car crash. I have no idea what was going on downstairs.”

Prince paged through his notes thoughtfully. “Well thank you very much for your time,” he said at last, and stood up. “May I call you again if I need to?”

Lisa had stood up as well, spilling the dog to the floor. “I suppose.”

“Is your sister here, by the way? I was told that she's staying here.”

“She is, but she's out. Why?”

“I wondered if she had any idea how snake equipment got into her suitcase.”

Lisa looked at him, trying to conceal her surprise. “I have no idea what you're talking about,” she said coldly, conveying that she thought it a mean trick to sandbag a person in her circumstances.

“They found your sister's suitcase. Someone buried it in the compost heap. It had a snake bag and tongs in it. Did your sister know how to handle snakes?”

After a beat, as he responded to the confusion and hostility she was suddenly radiating, Prince thought
Well there's a sore thumb I just hit with a hammer
. Lisa said eventually, “Why don't you ask her?”

“Good idea,” said Prince. “Before I go, could I see your husband's dressing room?”

Lisa stared at him. At last, she turned and started for the back of the house. Prince followed her.

Manuela had made up the king-size bed, put away her pill bottles, and picked up all the clothes and underwear Lisa had left on the floor. Lisa stood, wordless with resentment, letting Prince look at her bedroom. Then she led the way into Alex's dressing room, which was in fact a small bedroom, through which a huge closet could be accessed on one side, and on the other, a separate bathroom. Detective Prince opened each door, murmured something when he saw the yards of beautiful suits and jackets, the wall of shelves and drawers, and many board feet of custom-built cubbyholes for dozens of pairs of shoes, all polished and fitted with shoe trees. He went into the bathroom, where the walls and floor were lined with manly reddish-gray stone tiles, and noticed the special oversize rain forest shower stall with steam heads the decorator had been so proud of. He opened the medicine cabinets, studied the contents, closed them again, and said, “So your husband always slept in there?” Pointing to the “dressing room.”

“Not always, of course not,” said Lisa irritably.

After a beat, the detective said, “Well thank you very much for your time, Mrs. Antippas. I can see myself out.”

It had been a quiet afternoon at the Oquossoc Mountain Inn. Hope and Maggie had been to visit Brianna, and heard about the bail set
by Judge Hennebery. Brianna told them of her doubts about the lawyer she'd chosen. Should she start over? Find someone good in Augusta or Portland? Try the public defenders after all? On the way home, they stopped in at Just Barb's, where they found Buster on a stool, nursing a cup of coffee. They took the stools on either side of him and Hope ordered a piece of coconut layer cake and three forks.

“I love cake,” she said. “You never get it except at birthdays and weddings.”

“When I was a girl we always had coconut cake at Easter,” said Maggie. “I think it was in the shape of a bunny, but I may be making that up.”

Hope said to Buster, “You know, I could post Cherry's bail.” She and Maggie had been discussing this in the car.

“Did you tell Brianna that?” Buster asked at last.

“No, I wanted to ask you first.”

He looked relieved.

“Why? Don't you want Cherry out?”

“I'm not sure she'd be safe.”

“Not safe? Why?”

“Town's pretty hot about the inn closing.”

“But the inn's not closing!” cried Hope, suddenly wondering if it might be.

“You say,” said Buster. “But somebody slashed Beryl Weaver's tires last night anyway.”

Hope and Maggie stopped eating, giving Buster a chance he took, to eat a big piece of the outside of the cake slice, covered in icing and coconut flakes.

“So that's why she rode to work with Zeke this morning,” said Maggie.

Buster glanced at Mrs. Detweiler and thought it was scary, how much she seemed to know when you couldn't figure out how she
knew it. Even when he was in fourth grade, they all thought she had eyes in the back of her head.

“I thought that was her car at Lakeview Garage. I noticed as we drove by,” said his mother.

Jesus. Both of them.

He knew it would be like this. That if his mother found out he had a girlfriend, before you knew it she'd be in the middle of it. He didn't want her rescuing Brianna. Or Cherry. He wanted to do that himself.

On the other hand, he wasn't getting very far with that. His knees were jiggling and he wished he could go home and play
Grand Theft Auto
for about ten hours.

It was twilight at the Oquossoc Mountain Inn. Hope and Maggie were at the table by the bow window playing honeymoon bridge. The new girl on the desk trotted toward them in her too-tight skirt clutching the retro telephone. She put it down on their cards, then lowered herself to her knees to plug it into the phone jack in the baseboard.

“Phone for you, Mrs. Detweiler,” she said from under the table.

“Oh! I thought this would be Lauren, for you,” said Maggie as the new girl hauled herself to her feet. “Hello? . . . Oh hello, Bonnie!”

Hope folded her hand and gave the conversation her full attention. The call lasted ten long minutes.

“Bonnie McCue,” Maggie said when she had hung up, though Hope had long since figured this out. “She's out at Montauk teaching yoga. According to the local paper, Albie Clark has killed himself.”

Hope gave a scream. Then she covered her mouth, as if to take back the unseemly noise in a public place, although they were virtually alone in the room, and she hadn't disturbed anyone.

“
Killed
himself?”

“Yesterday.”

“Poor man, I'm so sorry. I thought he was doing better. Didn't you?”

Actually, Maggie hadn't.

“But I mean he got through the whole cooking course. He was taking an interest. I thought he was feeling a little bit of the color coming back into the world.”

Maggie thought about it. “I was worried about what would happen if it turned out to make no difference.”

“What did Bonnie say, exactly?”

“The paper didn't give much detail and Bonnie's been doing her best, but so far all she knows is he was found on the beach.”

“And how did he do it?”

“Cut his own throat with a kitchen knife. Practically cut his own head off.”

“Holy mother of God.”

“Yes. That knife class he was so interested in. It's Bonnie's theory that he didn't want to make a mess in his wife's house.”

“Cut his own throat, is that even possible?”

“Oh yes. Especially with a really sharp knife.”

“How awful for whoever found him. Who did?”

“A woman out on the beach with her dog. At sunrise.” And off leash at that hour, she didn't have to say.

They both pictured the scene, and what the dog would have done with what was splattered all over the sand, and sat for a bit. One week earlier Albie had been with them at this very table.

“What a terrible way to end,” said Hope.

“How terrible he must have felt before it ended,” said Maggie.

They were quiet for a while. Finally Hope said, “Did Albie leave a note?”

Maggie's thoughts came back into her body. “Oh! Yes!
The Star
said that he had a note in his pocket but they wouldn't disclose the contents.”

“That's maddening.”

“But he left another kind of message.”

“Really?”

“Guess whose beach he chose to die on.”

“Whose beach? No, wait . . . no!”

“Yes. Right below the great big lawn of Alexander Antippas.”

“Between those seawalls he was so pissed off about.”

“Exactly.”

O
n Wednesday morning,
Jorge Carrera parked his car near Windmill Lane and walked to the Southampton Village Police Station. He had already cruised around the block twice, so he knew that there were two police cars in front of the station and all was quiet. He was wearing “I'm on vacation” clothes, a bomber jacket, khakis, and a shirt with an open collar. He walked up the stairs and into the station and stood for a minute, relishing the smell made up of floor polish, dead cardboard cups, and a dozen other things that you probably thought had no smells, the paper, the clipboards, the elderly office equipment.

The uniform manning the desk was a young guy with a mullet haircut, wearing big black shoes with soles that looked half an inch thick.

“Is Chief Rideout here? Detective Carrera. He knows me from the NYPD.” He knew from a phone call last night that Rideout was in Hartford at a conference, and felt that if the young officer chose to assume he was still with the NYPD, that was not his problem.

“He's out today. Can I help you?” The mullet didn't ask for credentials, and Jorge had counted on that. He'd worked in a backwater station too when he was this guy's age.

“Oh, that's too bad. No, I was out here on some personal business, and I wanted to say hello.”

“Are you staying in town? He'll be in by tomorrow lunchtime.”

“Damn. No, I'm just wrapping up what I came for.” He cracked his knuckles and looked around. “Quiet morning?”

“Like the grave.”

“A fine and quiet place,” said Jorge, and the kid looked at him uncertainly. “God, it's been a long time since I did your job. You grow up out here?”

“I did. My dad's a cop. Just retired.”

“So you've got the local knowledge, it's important. And you've got the standard-issue burnt coffee. Do you mind if I . . . ?”

“I don't
mind,
but if I were you, there's a Starbucks up the street.”

“Not my people,” said Jorge.

The kid smiled. “How do you take it?”

When he came back with a mug, Jorge had taken off his jacket and pulled a chair over beside the desk.

“My daughter was telling me at breakfast, you had a suicide on the beach yesterday.”

“Two days ago.”

“Must have been hard on the guy who took the call.”

“Yep.” He gestured with his head, and Jorge saw over his shoulder a young officer sitting at a desk, talking on the phone and doodling with some intensity.

“Could I talk to him? My daughter, Terry, knew the family.”

He was on his feet and moving around the barrier, carrying his coffee, before his young friend could figure out the answer to the question. “Hey, Dylan,” the kid called, as if to convey that he was on top of this, that he'd given Jorge permission to go back.

Dylan was getting off the phone and looking up at him, puzzled, as Jorge sat down on the aluminum chair beside his desk.

“Detective Carrera, visiting from New York. I heard you found the guy on the beach the other morning.”

He looked surprised and wary. Had he missed something? Done something wrong?

“Oh no, no, nothing official. I just stopped in to say hi to Harry Rideout. How are you doing? That must have been one rough wake-up call.”

Dylan's face softened slightly. Jorge did his best to appear avuncular, and his best was pretty good.

“I've been better,” Dylan allowed.

“I remember my first time. Homicide in Patchogue, a guy took his baby by the heels and swung her against the wall, because she wouldn't stop crying.” He'd never been in Patchogue, but he knew how to pronounce it. “Suppose there's no doubt that he did it himself?”

Dylan shook his head, his lips pressed together, as if sickened by the image in his mind. “Weapon still in his right hand. Angle of wound exactly what you'd expect. Blood pattern consistent. No other footprints on the sand.”

“And we know he was right-handed?”

Dylan nodded. They talked about shock, and grief, and how you handled it if you were in blue. Jorge told Dylan his daughter knew the victim, used to help take care of the wife, Mrs. Clark. She was a painter, he understood. It turned out Dylan had responded to that call too, when the wife died.

“You have really been through it,” Jorge said sympathetically. Dylan nodded.

Jorge let him sit with this. Then he said “Are you the one who found the note?”

Dylan nodded again.

“Why did he do it?”

The younger officer looked torn. Jorge was a cop; he should have known Dylan couldn't tell him. It belonged to the family. On the other hand, he was a cop, what was the harm? The rest of the guys here had read it.

“Terry, my daughter—she asked me that,” Jorge added, “and I didn't know what to tell her. She felt so close to the family. It's eating at her. You ever lose someone like that?”

Jorge waited, thinking of how he could get the properties clerk to hand over the personal effects, if Dylan wouldn't open.

But he did. He looked up at Jorge and said, “I'm not sorry for what I did. I'd do it again. But neither can I live with it.” At first Jorge thought Dylan was speaking for himself, but when he got to the “neither” he realized he was quoting.

“That was the note?”

Dylan nodded.

“And what did it mean?”

“Wish I knew.”

“Do his children know?”

Dylan shook his head. “They haven't seen it yet. The son said he'd come out here to get the effects on the weekend. Didn't seem to be in a hurry. We still have the body. They haven't bothered to choose a funeral home.”

“That's cold,” said Jorge.

“Yes,” said Dylan.

Maggie was in her room reading
Middlemarch
when Jorge called. It was just before lunch.

“‘I'm not sorry for what I did. I'd do it again. But neither can I live with it,'” Maggie repeated.

“That's it,” said Jorge.

“You didn't see it yourself?”

“No. But I promise you, young Dylan knew it word for word.”

“You got his name in case we need him?”

“Badge number, everything.”

“Did he have anything else that struck you?”

He told her that the family hadn't bothered yet to collect Albie's effects or make arrangements for the body. Maggie was thoughtful.

“He had a son and a daughter. The son is called Al and lives somewhere on the island—Oyster Bay, somewhere like that. I think the daughter lives in the city.”

“Name?”

Maggie thought. “Serena . . . Selena.”

“Married?” Jorge asked.

“Yes. With children. I'll find her and call you back.”

She sat for a bit, watching out the window as a pair of Canada geese waddled down the lawn and glided onto the lake. She thought about the evening Albie had talked about Ruth's death and his estrangement from his children, and also about whether geese really do mate for life. How to learn the truth about either? If she were at school, she could have found what she wanted to know about Albie's children in a heartbeat. And Maggie would be welcome if she showed up at Winthrop—too welcome, maybe, which was why she had resolved to stay well away from the whole community in order to let her successor get his legs under him. But she'd already broken the promise by contacting Jorge. One tiny call to the development office wasn't going to hurt.

“Good morning, Adrianna, it's . . .”

But Adrianna was already greeting her with glad cries. After they'd exchanged personal news, Maggie said, “Could you look something up in the stud book for me?” The development office had a shelf full of Social Registers, for obvious reasons. “See if there's an Albert Clark of Manhattan and Southampton, wife named Ruth.”

Adrianna was with her in a moment. “Got it. Albert M. Clark, Yale class of '72, wife Ruth Borden. Quite a string of clubs, do you want to know those?”

“Not at the moment. Is there an Albert M. junior?”

“One in St. Helena, California, one in Oyster Bay.”

“The second one, please.”

Adrianna read her the information, and they spent a little time gossiping about the hubbub of school. The new head was locked in a struggle with the school cook, who wanted an expensive restaurant bagel toaster for the lunch room, and also wanted to grow her own herbs and salad greens on the school's roof, which the athletic department needed for recess. Maggie, dying to question and comment, said instead, “Well I'm sure he'll work it out,” and sent her love to Adrianna's husband.

Then she dialed another number.

“Good afternoon,” she said into the handset, “this is Mrs. Detweiler from the Social Register. Have I reached the Albert Clark Junior residence?”

“Yes.”

“Is Mr. or Mrs. Clark available?”

“This is Mrs. Clark,” said the woman.

“Oh good,” said Maggie. “Is this a bad time?”

“No, it's all right.” Neutral affect, neither annoyed, nor particularly polite.

“I'd just like to update your information,” said Maggie. “You are Melody, née Bothwell?” She was. Maggie went through the family's listing, recording Melody's new e-mail address and confirming the children's present ages, and learning in the process that the oldest boy was now at a junior boarding school in Massachusetts. She wondered what that was about, since Americans didn't usually send children away that young, unless there was a behavior or learning problem, or the family was breaking up. She just barely stopped herself from asking.

Then the tricky part. “Now I hope you can help me,” she said. “I'm told our computer files in one part of the alphabet have become corrupted—I'm so sorry, don't ask me to explain that, I just know
the words—and we have lost our entry for Mr. Clark's sister, Selena.” Please let it be Selena and not Serena, she chanted inwardly.

“None of her contact info has changed,” said Melody. “Mrs. Richard Sherrill.”

“In Manhattan?” said Maggie, pretending to flip pages. “Not the one in Hobe Sound?”

“Manhattan.”

“Thank you so much, could you give me that number?” Melody could and Maggie jotted.

“You're welcome. If you don't get her, you should probably know that their father just passed.”

“Oh my goodness, I am
so
sorry! I wish you'd told me, I could have called another time!”

“It's fine,” said Melody rather flatly.

Maggie sat for a while, thinking.

Hope had had a restless night and gone back to bed after breakfast. As noon approached, she was bathed and dressed for the second time, and feeling ready to greet her public. In the corridor, she knocked on Maggie's door, but got no answer. She tried her key card in Maggie's lock just out of curiosity, and was relieved when it didn't open the door. That at least narrowed things down a tiny bit.

It wasn't quite time for lunch and she knew the papers wouldn't be in for hours. She thought she'd probably find Maggie on the sunporch, struggling with the
Ship of Fools,
but decided to go downstairs the back way, following the route Clarence had shown them yesterday.

There seemed to be no one abroad in the hotel, and she wondered for a moment if something had happened while she was asleep. A neutron bomb or something. No one was watching television behind closed doors, or typing or singing in the shower; no one was rolling a housekeeping cart down the corridors. It wasn't Sunday so soon again, was it?

No. Wednesday. Well, then, just a quiet morning in the off-season. She crossed the small landing into the back wing, the oldest part of the hotel, and stopped again, thinking. This first room here had been Albie Clark's. Poor man. She knew it was a suite with an extra bay and bank of windows on account of the new wing having been set at an angle to the old one. She tried to remember if she had seen Albie in the hall the night of the fire. She was fairly sure she had; she had a dim memory of yellow pajamas, but again, her memories of the fire were a jumble, as things tend to be when one has been awakened from a sound sleep and frightened half to death.

Next, she thought, came the room that the Poole sisters had occupied, and next to them Mr. Rexroth and Clarence, and then the small room where Mr. Niner lived. There were two more rooms on the other side . . . who had been in those? The Kleinkramers, she was fairly sure, and Teddy Bledsoe. And then at the end of the hall, the turret suite where the Maynards had been. The turret was charming from the outside of the building. A drawing of it served as the inn's logo on the letter paper and promotional bumf, and photographs of it adorned the website's home page. They had spent some time with Martin and Nina in their sitting room, talking over D.C. schools. The sitting room was on the same level as the corridor, while the bed and bath were above, which probably explained why alone among the hall's occupants, the Maynards hadn't seemed to want to kill anyone in the Antippas family. For most of course, the corpse-elect would have been the dog.

How, she wondered, was an FBI agent affording the best digs in the house? Was that something to ponder? Perhaps Martin was a demon investor on the side. Or maybe Nina was an heiress. Or maybe civil service paid better than she'd been led to believe.

Hope heard a door open softly behind her, and turned to see Chef Sarah emerging from Mr. Niner's room.

“Oh, hello, Hope,” said Sarah.

“Good morning, Chef!” said Hope brightly. “Visiting Mr. Niner?”

“Visiting Walter, actually,” said Sarah. “He loves toast crusts. I bake them extra hard for him.”

“He probably got the remains of my breakfast,” said Hope. “I never eat the crusts.”

“I think perhaps he did,” said Sarah, who knew very well what leftovers came back to the kitchen. “I could make some soft rolls for you if you'd prefer that.”