Trouble at High Tide (17 page)

“How’s your hand?” I’d asked during dinner.

He glanced down at his palm. “Healing.” He made a fist. “Aches a little, but it’ll be fine. Hasn’t gotten in the way. What about you Mrs. Fletcher? Have you had a chance to see much of the island since you arrived? I know it hasn’t been much of a vacation.” He gave a soft snort. “Getting involved with the Bettertons is always complicated.”

“It certainly isn’t the kind of week I’d planned for,” I said, “but Daisy Reynolds and I did get to visit St. George’s and happened to see your works at Richard Mann’s gallery.”

“Oh?”

“Actually,” I said, “Mrs. Reynolds and I hadn’t intended to go to the gallery, but ended up there when we bumped into each other, literally, while we were both escaping the rain.”

“You must be among the very few who’ve seen the show,” Stephen said. “What did you think of it, if I dare to ask?”

“I was very impressed with your talent, and was particularly taken with your portraits of Madeline and Alicia. I was sorry there weren’t more of them.”

“Mann has been after me for a while to give him enough pieces for a show,” he said. “It’s ironic in a way. He obviously thought that he could capitalize on our family’s name and that all the people we know on the island would bring in customers for him.”

“That didn’t happen?”

“I don’t think that all the gossip surrounding a murder is exactly what he had in mind. He changed his plans about taking an ad in the paper to announce the opening.”

“Then that was foolish on his part,” I said. “Art should be able to stand on its own and shouldn’t need to have a family name or long story behind it.”

“I agree with you, but Mann is a businessman as well as a gallery owner. No people coming in to see the show, no sales. Not good for him
or
the artist. What about my street scenes, Mrs. Fletcher? What did you think of them?”

“They certainly show your skill,” I said, “but you obviously put all your emotion into your portraits.”

“It’s that obvious, huh? A lot had to do with the model. Madeline is a good one. Alicia was…” He shrugged. “I couldn’t paint her.”

“Yet you did.”

“Only that once.”

“What made her a poor model?” I asked.

“She was too fidgety, couldn’t sit still. Her mind was always hopping from one thing to another, from one scheme to another.”

“Scheme?”

“Maybe the wrong word to use. Anyway, she never could hold one expression for any length of time.”

“But Madeline can?”

“Maddy’s a daydreamer. She’s easy to paint. Just give her a mental image to focus on and she can hold a pose for hours.”

“Is painting what you want to do with your life?” I asked. Richard Mann had indicated to me that art was Stephen’s hobby rather than his vocation, but perhaps Mann had been putting his own interpretation on Stephen’s intentions.

“At the moment, it’s the only thing I’m good at,” Stephen
said with a shrug. “Tom doesn’t think that being an artist is a manly profession. He’s told me that many times. He’d have preferred that I study law or medicine, something he could brag about.”

“But he seems proud of your artistic abilities,” I said. “He praised your drawings of the Jersey Devil the other evening.”

“To Tom, my artistic skill falls into the category of amusing talent, like juggling, or balancing a ball on my nose,” he said. “That’s why, even with all the trouble she caused him, Alicia was his favorite.”

“Why was that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because she argued about everything. She had one of those mouse-trap minds. She’d catch you in an inconsistency and throw it up in your face. Tom wanted her to study law and follow in his footsteps, and she even considered it for a while. But she lost patience with all the memorizing of minutiae it required.”

“So what did she end up studying?” I asked.

“She never really focused in on anything.”

“What did she do after boarding school?”

He shook his head. “Drifted, I guess you could say. I wouldn’t know how else to describe it.”

I didn’t press him, although I was interested in knowing more. His tone reflected that he was not particularly eager to delve into the question any further. Alicia’s whereabouts after boarding school remained a tantalizing mystery. When I’d asked Tom, he had sloughed me off, saying it wasn’t important. His ex-wife Claudia had avoided the question, too. Now Stephen would only define that time as “drifting.” All their evasion and obfuscation only increased my curiosity
as to why no one was willing to talk about that period of Alicia’s life. Not that it necessarily had a bearing on her death, but it was one of those loose strings I dearly wanted to tie up.

Before leaving the dinner table and going our separate ways, Stephen told me that he was working on another portrait, this one from an old photograph he’d found. “You’re welcome to come tomorrow and take a look,” he said, to which I readily agreed. It would give me another opportunity to broach the topic of Alicia and hopefully get a more definitive answer.

The next morning, fortified with a cup of tea and a Bermudian doughnut—Norlene told me that it was called a
malasada
, a confection that had been brought to the island by its Portuguese-speaking population—I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Betterton house and walked softly to the end of the hall. I hadn’t seen anyone else downstairs and presumed they were still sleeping. The door was open and I knocked on the frame before entering what was obviously a bedroom that had been converted into an artist’s studio.

Stephen, who was barefoot, wore a pair of ripped and paint-dappled jeans, a similarly paint-adorned T-shirt, and a red bandanna tied over his hair. He stood on a rumpled tarp, anchored in place by his easel while mixing paints on a palette in his left hand.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hi,” he replied. “Have a look around. I just want to finish this little piece I’m working on.”

“Is that the painting you were telling me about last
night?” I asked, coming around behind so I could see over his shoulder.

“Yeah.”

A long narrow table next to the easel held his painting paraphernalia. He had propped a color photograph against a coffee can that held brushes in various sizes, their bristle ends poking up. The photo showed a pretty woman looking over her shoulder at the camera with a bemused expression, as though someone had unexpectedly called to her. The frame that once held the photo was in pieces on the table top. Stephen had transferred the outlines of the subject in the picture to his canvas and was filling in the large background area with color.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“My mother. For some reason, we don’t have many shots of her, and those that we do are these tiny prints where you can barely make out her face. She wasn’t alive when digital photography was invented, or at any rate popular. This is the only good-sized picture I could find. I would have preferred to paint her when she was a little older, but I guess by then she was usually the one behind the lens taking pictures of the rest of the family.”

I gazed around the studio and imagined what it would have looked like if it had been the bedroom it was intended to be. Large windows overlooked the water and sunlight streamed in from a skylight above. Instead of a bed, there were canvases, some finished, some blank, and a few empty frames leaned against the long wall. Charcoal and pencil sketches and pieces of paper that he’d torn from magazines—inspiration perhaps?—were pinned to a standing corkboard where I saw the perfect space for a double dresser. Appropriately,
a pair of battered upholstered armchairs faced each other under a window. I would have used that spot for seating, too. A pile of sketchbooks and drawing pads sat on the floor next to one of the chairs.

I wandered around examining Stephen’s paintings, and peered into a bathroom with a sink that had once been white, but was now a dingy gray from who knew how many years of paint being washed down its drain.

The bathroom reminded me of questions I wanted to ask him.

“That building Tom wants to put up, the one the Jamisons object to so much. I heard someone say that it’s supposed to be a new studio for you.”

“That’s right. Every time Tom sees that dirty sink, he gets upset. He wants me out of the house, but more than that, he wants this room back. I think it was originally the master suite, but it’ll take a bit of work to get it back again to what it was.”

“A new sink at the very least,” I said.

“That’ll make him happy. He offered me either of the cottages, but they don’t have good light, not for painting anyway.” He smirked. “I have to admit that he took me by surprise when he talked about building me a studio.”

“I’d say that Tom supports your painting more than you give him credit for.”

“And I’d say that he wants me out from underfoot, but if it results in my own studio, I’ll take it. Of course, if the Jamisons have their way, it won’t happen.”

“I’m told that they object to a new building because it would block their view of the ocean.”

“So they say. But even when Tom relocated the proposed site to the other side of the property, away from their house, they still made a fuss.”

“Why do you think that’s so?”

“There’s some bad blood between Tom and Dan Jamison, but I don’t know what’s behind it. Tom’s always trying to patch things up, but the fact is that they don’t like him.”

“Why would they accept his invitation to a party if they don’t like him?”

Stephen put down his palette and wiped his hands on a piece of toweling. “Tom knows all the influential people on the island. I guess they don’t want him to get ahead of them, socially that is. Excuse me.”

He took his brushes into the bathroom and turned on the faucet.

I sat in one of Stephen’s old armchairs, idly picked up a sketchbook, and lifted the cover. The first image surprised me. I turned to the next and then the next, my attention now totally captured. Page after page were drawings of Alicia—Alicia reading in a chair. Alicia peering into the telescope. Alicia smiling. Alicia frowning. Alicia sleeping. I closed the sketchbook and pulled out another one. It was more of the same.

“Did you get any breakfast?” Stephen called out from the bathroom. “Don’t answer that. I won’t be able to hear you with the water running.”

He turned off the tap and reentered the studio. The second sketchbook was still open on my lap.

“Norlene made
malasadas
this morning. Did you get one?” he asked. “She…” He stopped when he saw what I was examining.

“I thought you said she was a poor model,” I said, looking up from a drawing of Alicia with her head cocked to the side.

Stephen lay his brushes down on the table, took the chair across from mine, and gently pulled the sketchbook out of my lap, turning it so he could see the picture I was referring to. “No,” he said as he slowly turned the pages. “
You
said she was a poor model. I just didn’t correct you.”

“Why not?”

“How can I put it? The truth is that I couldn’t
paint
her. As I said, she didn’t have the patience to sit still for a painting, but she was a perfect subject for the quick sketch, the kind when I want my impressions to be loose and spontaneous. I used charcoal, sometimes pastel, even crayon. I tried to capture that effervescence, that quixotic nature of hers. I never knew when she would run off.” He sighed.

“You were in love with her,” I said gently.

His laugh was rueful. “It shows that much?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so,” I replied, smiling.

He exhaled, sat back and shook his head. “She was practically my sister,” he said, slapping the book closed and tossing it on the pile of other pads. “There was no way we could ever be together in that way.”

“But she wasn’t a blood relative,” I said. “You’re Tom’s stepson. She was his niece.”

“Yeah, I know. I think a lot about whether Alicia would accept the fact that I had certain feelings for her. But even if she did—and I was never sure—Tom would never have stood for it. He’d think it would have made
him
look bad.”

“How so?”

“Even though we weren’t related by blood, she was still family, and to Tom, having members of the family marry each other wouldn’t look
proper
. A proper appearance is everything to him. His reputation stands on it. But it’s all just conjecture now. Alicia’s gone.” His eyes filled with tears, but he willed them away and stood abruptly. “I’m going to take a walk,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“May I come with you?” I asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

I followed him down a back staircase I hadn’t seen before that led to the kitchen. We left the house by a side door and took a different path to the beach than the one I was familiar with. This one was steeper, winding in and out of patches of sage and palmetto, with no gravel to prevent one from slipping on the sandy soil. Stephen sprinted down it like a mountain goat, sure of his footing. I trailed him more slowly.

Could this have been the route Alicia had taken to the beach? If so, it was not surprising that I hadn’t awakened to the sound of footsteps on the gravel, or that Godfrey Reynolds hadn’t heard anyone passing by his cottage. Of course, he hadn’t heard me either when I’d walked down to the beach and run back. It was something to ask him about at another time.

The sandy soil gave way to beach and my feet sank down into the sand, the warm silky grains filling my sneakers. I half-trotted, half-trudged over to where Stephen was throwing shells into the surf like miniature Frisbees, the bottom of his jeans wet to the knees. I picked up a broken scallop shell, flipped it into the water, and watched a rolling wave return it to the sand.

Stephen took a deep breath and stretched his arms wide above him before heading along the water’s edge in the opposite direction from where I’d found Alicia’s body. I joined him and he slowed his pace.

“Stephen, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” I said.

“You can ask,” he replied.

“I saw you and Madeline arguing with Alicia at the party. Would you care to tell me what that was about?”