Death and a Pot of Chowder Page 9

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Kissing don’t last: cookery do.”

  —The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by George Meredith

  Night passed, dawn came, and it didn’t bring the police.

  At five in the morning, Burt texted Dolan Martin and asked for help. “I haven’t been out since Saturday. My traps need checking. I should pull Carl’s, too, and I’m missing a sternman.”

  Dolan stopped in a few minutes later, dressed in the warm layered clothing he wore under the usual waterproof bib pants, jacket, and boots the men kept on their boats. Dolan was taller and wider than Burt. Despite his dark beard, he’d always reminded me a little of Santa Claus. “I was just heading for the wharf when I got your text, Burt.”

  “Thanks for stopping.” Burt pulled on his one of his oldest sweaters. “Hoped you’d be able to help. Circumstances aren’t good, and I could use an extra pair of hands.”

  “Sure thing. No problem. Alex Tompkins is sterning for me these days. He works afternoons at the hardware store over on the mainland. With the two of us working together, we can check most of my pots before noon. After that, be happy to help with Carl’s.” He hesitated. “Still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Burt nodded. “Wicked hard. But his traps got to be pulled, and I got no one to stern. Could really use your help.”

  “You have it. Heading down?”

  “Just that.” Burt turned and held me for a minute. “With Dolan’s help, I’ll be out for the day. If you hear of any developments, call me.” He turned to Dolan. “Let’s go. Tonight I’ll see if I can find someone to stern for me regular.”

  I hated to see Burt going out by himself, even just in the morning, when we didn’t know what had happened to Carl. But fishermen don’t take days off. I’d known that forever.

  Burt turned back just before he reached the door. “Send Jake on to school. Better than his sitting around here thinking about what happened. Life has to go on.” He and Dolan headed out.

  I poured myself another mug of coffee and fixed Jake’s lunch, adding three of the molasses cookies someone had brought yesterday. I didn’t even remember who’d brought what. The refrigerator and freezer were full of everything from baked beans to chicken. I hoped Izzie’d written down who’d brought food so I could send short notes, but I suspected she hadn’t. She didn’t know most of our neighbors. And anyway, I’d thanked everyone who’d been here. No one had come empty-handed.

  Had word already gotten around that Carl had been killed?

  And how could someone kill him when he’d been alone on the Fair Winds? Had someone in another boat come aboard, or alongside?

  No explanation I could imagine made sense.

  This wasn’t July, when folks from both the islands and the mainland were out on the waters in everything from kayaks and sailboats to the occasional yacht or cruise ship touring the coastline. In summer, keeping an eye out for recreational boaters, some of whom didn’t pay strict attention to boating regulations or didn’t know the currents or tidal patterns, was something all locals did. You never knew what crazy thing an amateur sailor might do.

  But this time of year everyone on the water knew everyone else, and recognized their boats.

  I shivered. Burt would be alone on the Anna this morning. Carl had been alone on his Fair Winds.

  I finished my coffee, fed Blue, ate two molasses cookies and then a piece of chocolate, and went to make sure Jake was up. He’d slept through his alarm too many mornings. Sometimes I suspected he did it intentionally, depending on me to wake him.

  I knocked on his door. “Jake? Time to get up. School bus in half an hour.”

  I waited to hear his usual groans and protests.

  No response.

  The joys of motherhood. “Jake, if you don’t get up this minute I’m going to come in and pull those covers off you! It’s Monday morning!” The threat of my entering his sanctuary usually brought him stumbling to the door on his way to the bathroom.

  Not this morning.

  At fourteen, he didn’t want Burt or me in his room. We’d decided to let him have his privacy, unless the room started smelling. “Boys will be boys,” Burt would say. “Carl and I hated when our mom came in and rearranged our room when we were in school. She sometimes threw out treasures or washed clothes we were intentionally messing up. As long as the kid doesn’t have rats in his room, or burn the place down, why not let him have it the way he wants it?” We kept his bedroom door closed.

  “Jake!” I called again. I was probably waking Izzie, but I couldn’t help that. “Last warning! I’m coming in!” Had he fallen asleep last night with his headphones on? Between his alarm and my yelling, he’d normally wake up anyway.

  Silence.

  Suddenly, I felt a chill. Was something wrong? Was Jake sick? This wasn’t normal behavior.

  I pushed open the door. Piles of dirty and clean clothes were intermixed on the floor, empty bags of chips he must have bought for himself overflowed from the waste basket, stacks of papers had fallen from the desk I’d gotten for him at a yard sale. A few stuffed animals left over from his younger days still crowded the bookcase near his bureau, along with action figures and matchbox cars he’d collected years ago. His poster of Tom Brady hung askew over his rumpled bed.

  Which was empty.

  Jake was gone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Cut your sandwiches in half, each half in quarters, and each quarter diagonally. Trim off all protruding edges of filling. Cover the sandwiches with a cloth wet with a very weak solution of brandy and water and pack them in a tin box until ready for use.”

  —Mrs. Seely’s Cook-Book: A Manual of French and American Cookery, with Chapters on Domestic Servants, Their Rights and Duties, and Many Other Details of Household Management by Lida Seely. New York: 1902

  Where was Jake? My chest tightened. I looked around his room once more. Had I somehow missed seeing him? I pulled open his closet door and narrowly avoided being hit by his ice hockey stick falling from the shelf above where his clothes should have been hanging. Most were piled on the floor. An old Playboy centerfold hung inside the door. Maine Chance Books carried old magazines. He’d probably gotten it there. This morning, it wasn’t important.

  What was important was that Jake wasn’t here, at home, where he should be.

  Panicky, I pulled out my phone and called him. Maybe he was … I had no idea.

  No answer.

  Izzie appeared in the doorway. Her short black hair was sticking up in the back, and she was wearing a knee-length black tee shirt with “this IS my sexy nightgown” emblazoned in red on the front.

  “I heard you yelling. Is everything all right?” she asked, her voice muffled with sleep.

  “Jake’s missing,” I said. “I came to wake him up for school and he wasn’t in his bed.”

  I felt tears welling up in my eyes. Too much had happened in the past few days. I couldn’t deal with anything more.

  “In the shower? Gone for an early walk?”

  “Bathroom’s clear. And he’s never gotten up early for a walk alone in his life.”

  “Is all his stuff here? What he would take to school? His tablet?”

  I glanced over the room. “His backpack is gone. He has a laptop, not a tablet. The state gives them to all seventh and eighth graders.”

  “Nice, but…” Izzie pointed to the edge of something almost hidden by the rumpled blankets on Jake’s bed.

  I pulled the blankets back. She’d been right. It was a tablet. Where had that come from? Maybe borrowed from a friend? Did Matt have one?

  “Could he have gone to school early?”

  “His school’s on the other side of the island. He takes the school bus.” I glanced at his alarm clock. “I’ve been up for a couple of hours. I haven’t seen him.”

  Izzie frowned. “His friend Matt lives nearby, right?”

  “Next door.”

  “Then maybe he’s with Matt. At fourteen, friends are im
portant.”

  “Maybe,” I said. Jake and Matt had argued—fought—about something yesterday. He hadn’t said what. Could he have left late last night, after the rest of us were in bed, or before dawn this morning? Gone to see Matt, to patch up whatever they’d fought about? Boys might be boys, but those two were too old for fists. One of them could end up with more than a black eye.

  I was desperate. “Dolan’s out on his boat. I’ll call Lucy and see.”

  Before I had a chance to call, I heard the kitchen door open. “Mom! It’s me!” Jake’s voice from the kitchen. “I’m taking my lunch. See you this afternoon!”

  The door banged shut before I could reply. Izzie and I both stepped over the pile of blankets under Jake’s bedroom window and looked out. Jake was running toward the bus stop in front of the church. Almost immediately, the yellow Quarry Island school bus appeared. We watched him get in before it pulled away.

  “I have no idea where he was, or what he was doing,” I said.

  “But he’s okay,” said Izzie. “Burt’s out on his boat?”

  I nodded. “He left a while ago.”

  “Then we have some time on our own this morning,” she said. “Let me get some clothes on and then we can decide what to do.”

  She headed for the bathroom.

  I picked up the tablet. Jake’s room was his private place. He’d be furious that Izzie and I had gone into it. But a tablet was an expensive piece of equipment. I’d have to ask him about it.

  I felt as though I’d already survived a long day. I was tempted to head back to bed for a nap. Instead, I put the tablet on the kitchen counter, heated more coffee, and opened the kitchen door, inhaling the chilly April air and watching a murder of crows calling to each other between two spruce trees in the woods behind our home.

  When we’d been kids, Dolan had rescued a baby crow that had fallen out of his nest and fed him with an eyedropper. For years, that crow sat on Dolan’s shoulder and came when he called. Dolan swore he understood everything he was told. Once, Blackie—that’s what Dolan named him—had flown in the window of the schoolroom where Dolan was sitting and landed on his head.

  We’d all envied Dolan that crow, until one day he’d flown away and hadn’t returned.

  Dolan still talked about Blackie sometimes.

  Crows were smart. But if those crows in our woods knew what had happened to Carl, or why Jake hadn’t been in his room this morning, they weren’t telling me.

  I turned back to the kitchen, the room where I’d spent most of my time, alone, since the roofing business closed. This morning I wasn’t alone, I reminded myself. My sister was here.

  She’d pulled on jeans and the CIA sweatshirt she’d been wearing yesterday, and her hair was still wet from the shower. “I couldn’t get to sleep right away last night, so I read some of those old cookbooks,” she said a few minutes later, sipping the coffee I’d poured for her. “They’re amazing. I wish I’d had them when I was at CIA. I could have written papers on the sociology of nineteenth century household management. Or had fun trying out the recipes, maybe updating them.”

  “I don’t have any cookbooks that old,” I told her. “But I do have a couple of Maine cookbooks from the nineteen twenties and thirties I’ve bought a yard sales. The sort church women published as fundraisers. The recipes are for the same food we eat today—cakes and pies and pancakes and puddings and chowders. But it’s amazing how instructions and ingredients have changed over the years.”

  Izzie nodded. “And how exact we insist recipes be today. If you were baking bread in a fireplace bake oven or wood stove, cooking time depended on outside temperatures and humidity—even the kind of wood you were burning. Women put their hands in the heat, felt how hot the oven was, and estimated how long the bread would take to bake. Baking—all cooking—took more experience and creativity than it does today.”

  “Thank goodness for oven settings and thermometers,” I put in.

  “I’d still like to try some of the old recipes I found,” said Izzie. “We could do that together.”

  How long would Izzie stay?

  She kept talking about old recipes for home brews and remedies, but I didn’t pay close attention.

  What had happened to Carl? Would Burt be all right? Where had Jake been this morning? Would that homicide investigator—Preston—be back to ask more questions today? Who was he talking to now? What had they told him?

  “Have you had breakfast?” Izzie asked. Her question broke through my swirling thoughts.

  “Coffee. And molasses cookies,” I admitted.

  She hesitated. “We should have some protein, especially since you’re stressed out. A little cheese was left. What about cheese with crackers, or eggs?”

  I wasn’t hungry, but she was right. “A cheese omelet?” I suggested.

  “Coming up.” Izzie jumped up, gulped a little of her cold coffee, and selected a frying pan, eggs, and cheese. She’d already figured out where to find everything in my kitchen.

  “You don’t have an omelet pan,” she said, almost to herself. “But this pan’s the right size.”

  I got up and put two plates and forks on the table. “You don’t have to cook every meal,” I said.

  “Feeding people makes me feel I’m contributing a little. I’m a houseguest, and you have a lot on your mind. That can’t be easy.”

  I started to protest, when she gestured “time out.”

  “No arguments. We may be sisters, but we hardly know each other, and your family is coping with a nightmare. By all rights you should kick me out.” She glanced at me. “I’d understand if you did. But as long as I’m here I want to help any way I can. And I suspect you wouldn’t eat a healthy breakfast today if I didn’t cook one for you.”

  Chocolate was healthy, wasn’t it? I couldn’t help smiling. “Someday you’ll make a great mom,” I said.

  She looked startled. “Maybe. But not soon. I have a lot I want to do before that.” She added grated cheddar to the cooking eggs, and expertly flipped them. “When you were my age, what were your dreams? What did you want to do with your life?”

  That took me by surprise. I’d always lived day by day. Dreams? “How old are you?” She’d never said.

  “Twenty-three,” she said, cutting the omelet and putting half on my plate and half on hers.

  “I’m thirty-two. Nine years difference.” I took a bite. “This is delicious! What did you add besides the cheese?”

  “A touch of cayenne,” she said. “And a little salt and cracked black pepper. That’s all. That’s why I love omelets. You can add meats, veggies, herbs—whatever you have on hand. So—what were your dreams? What were you passionate about? Or, even better—what do you want now?”

  Izzie had been right. I needed to eat. “I don’t remember any big dreams or passions outside of being married and making a home for Burt and Jake,” I finally admitted. “When I was your age Burt and I had just bought this house. Jake wasn’t in school yet, so I was taking care of him, and painting and papering and making curtains.” I thought back. “After that I started working for Seth.”

  When I was a child, I’d wanted fancy dresses for my bride doll. Trips to the movie theater on the mainland, instead of waiting for the latest films to be on tapes or television. A shiny, new bicycle, instead of the dented one Seth had bought for me at a yard sale. But none of those things had been passions. My life might have sounded dull, but I’d been content. When I’d grown up I’d loved working for Seth, keeping the books, and being married and a mother, and I was proud of our little house.

  “But now your house is comfortable, and Jake’s in school, so you have more time,” Izzie continued. “Time to do something for yourself, not just for Burt and Jake.”

  “Right now, I’m what Mom calls ‘betwixt and between.’ I’ve been doing small quilting projects—you saw my materials in the room you’re using. I make pillows and baby quilts. There aren’t a lot of jobs on Quarry Island, especially in winter.”


  “But what do you dream of doing?” said Izzie, looking at me as though there were a crystal ball between us. “If you could do anything in the world, anywhere, what would it be?”

  Saturday, Burt and I had fantasized about buying new furniture, and visiting Boston. Those were dreams. But I suspected Izzie was thinking of bigger goals. “I’d love to have enough money so Jake could go to college. I’m hoping he’ll want to. And I’ve never traveled far from the island. That might be fun.” Life was as it was. Why dream of impossibilities? “What about you? What do want to do with your life?”

  “So many things,” Izzie said. “I want to visit South Korea and find my relatives there, and try scuba diving, and write a cookbook, and fall in love, and dance under the stars in Paris! Most of all, I want my own restaurant. Not a fancy place. A place where people feel comfortable meeting friends and eating delicious food.”

  “You’ve made a start. You learned all about cooking in school,” I encouraged.

  “Some, sure,” said Izzie. “It was a beginning. But I’d love to experiment. To invent my own recipes. My dream restaurant isn’t a place where people have never heard of what’s on the menu, or that serves tiny portions of exquisite tasting dishes that cost a fortune. Plenty of restaurants like that already exist. And I don’t want a place that serves one kind of food, like pizza, or Asian, or seafood. My restaurant will have a small, diverse menu.”

  Izzie was looking off into the air, seeing dreams I couldn’t imagine. What must it be like to have a passion, as she’d put it, for creating something?

  “What I love about cooking is seeing how flavors and textures and colors interact. I like playing with recipes, and making people happy about the food they’re eating. Creating something both spicy and soothing, or sweet and salty. Something memorable. Something people wouldn’t cook for themselves. Eating out should be a little exciting. A little different.”

  “Some restaurants in Maine serve lobster macaroni and cheese,” I said, trying to understand what she was getting at. Burt and I only ate out on special occasions. When we did, we chose a place Burt could order a huge cheeseburger and a draft, and I could indulge my periodic longing for scallops—a seafood Burt didn’t care for. Jake, Burt, and I sometimes went to a pizza place on the mainland with Carl and the Martins to celebrate a success, like the boys winning a Little League game.