CHAPTER ELEVEN
I pictured Alice Rumsford at the public hearing the previous evening, commenting on the aesthetics of the concrete street barriers. Why couldn’t she be Zoey’s landlord? Alice’s family had been summer residents forever, they had money, and she was deeply invested in the town. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
The Rumsford cottage was a ways up the peninsula, beyond Busman’s Harbor Hospital, on the water. I didn’t call ahead. I thought if I talked to her face-to-face Miss Rumsford might be more likely to answer my questions.
The rain was falling in sheets as I turned off the highway. The Subaru’s defroster, turned to the highest setting, fought with the noise of the downpour to see which could be louder. I sat forward, my face as close to the windshield as I could get it, as if it would help me see.
I finally found the entrance to the private road that led up to Alice Rumsford’s house, marked by a small sign, LUPINE COTTAGE. Local people’s houses had numbers, summer people’s houses had names. Though when I looked hard, I did spot a simple stake with reflective numbers stuck on it, a concession to the county’s enhanced 911 system.
The road up to Lupine Cottage was steep and unpaved. My tires spun and the car shimmied. Subarus were the most popular cars in Maine, specifically because they ran so well on snow and mud, but even these cars had their limits. “C’mon, girl,” I urged, as if she were an uncooperative steed.
I wondered why the winding road had never been paved, or at least lined with gravel. I scanned the hillside as I drove, looking for the house. It had to be around the curve behind the stand of pines near the top.
At last, I passed through the trees and pulled into a car park just beyond them. There was another vehicle parked there as well, a big black SUV with tinted windows and an out-of-state license plate, its tire tracks still fresh. I tried to find a spot to park in that wasn’t inches deep in mud but didn’t succeed. I stepped out of the car and the wet, gooey stuff came up to the ankles of my boots.
It was a fair walk, uphill, in mud and rain, along a winding path that led through another gate to the cottage. On a clear day there would have been a spectacular view of the Gulf of Maine. Today, there was a wall of fog that made the cottage look like a stage set with a white scrim behind it, waiting for someone to paint the scenery.
Lupine Cottage wasn’t large, a couple of rooms wide at most. A single window winked out under the gable end of the second story. An old chimney poked up through the green roof shingles. There were porches on both sides, a glassed-in one on the left and a screened-in one on right that would expand the cottage living space considerably in warmer weather.
It wasn’t unusual for the homes of longtime summer people to be rustic. Not every wealthy visitor built an enormous mansion like the ones in Bar Harbor, or like Windsholme, my mother’s family’s summer home on Morrow Island. The earliest summer visitors were called “rusticators” and they came to Maine for a simple life and communion with nature. But when families held on to their houses, as Alice’s had, and held on to their money, as evidenced by Alice’s many enormous gifts to the town, they usually fixed up the old places, expanding and modernizing them until the original character was gone. Alice’s house looked exactly as it must have a hundred years earlier.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I squared my shoulders and walked up onto the small porch that sheltered the front door. There was no bell that I could see, so I knocked on the wood-and-glass storm door.
The front door opened and the man who had sat next to Alice Rumsford at the public meeting stood there. When he saw me, he flashed a warm smile. “We don’t get many visitors out here.” He looked at the sky. “Especially in this weather.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I wonder if I could talk to Miss Rumsford, or to both of you.”
At the public hearing, I’d registered that he was a good-looking guy, but up close the man was even better looking, handsome actually. He had large brown eyes, full lips, and a strong chin. His chestnut-brown hair was short on the sides and longer on the top, and flopped appealingly over his right eyebrow. He wore a heavy sweater in a gorgeous sea blue, jeans, and leather bedroom slippers.
“Of course,” he said. “You’ve traveled all the way out here.” He stuck out a hand. “Ben Barlow. Welcome to my Aunt Alice’s house. Come in.”
I used the toes of one boot to pull off the heel of the other and stepped out of it and then bent to remove the other one. I left them on the porch in the rain, because there was no possible way I was bringing them into the house. Inside, Ben took my soaked rain jacket and hung it on a peg in the narrow front hallway.
“Julia Snowden,” I said, trailing behind him through the dark corridor next to the stairs.
“You were at the public hearing last night.”
“Yes,” I admitted, surprised. I hadn’t said a word. There was no reason he would have noticed, much less remembered me.
We came out of the hallway into a large two-story room. A fire burned in a wood stove. Alice Rumsford sat in a big green velvet chair, swaddled in blankets. “You’ll pardon me, dear, if I don’t get up.”
“Of course. Thanks so much for seeing me. And without any notice. I apologize for bursting in like this.”
“It’s lovely to have company,” she said. “And so rare at this time of year. Ben, perhaps you could get us all tea and some of those delicious cookies you baked yesterday.”
Ben smiled and left the room.
“Welcome.” Alice’s reedy voice rose out of the pile of blankets. She wore at least two sweaters, a bright red one under a mustard-yellow one. Her hair was snow white, with a wave that rolled across the top of her head like a cresting sea.
“Miss Rumsford, I’m Julia Snowden.” I wasn’t sure if she would have heard me introduce myself in the hallway.
“I know who you are.” She seemed delighted to see me. “You’re Jacqueline and Jack’s daughter. Your mother and I worked as volunteers at the Busman’s Harbor Opera House for years. I’ve always admired her. She’s a brave woman. And your father, Jack, was a dear, dear man.”
“He was,” I agreed. I thought in the moment “brave” was perhaps a strange word to describe my mother, who was kind, supportive, smart, and on occasion, slyly funny, but I supposed it was true. After a long period of mourning after my father died, she’d pulled her life together and moved forward. It had taken conscious effort. And bravery.
“You must call me Alice. Everyone does.”
The inside of the house was as rustic as the outside. The walls were varnished beadboard nailed to scaffolding. The wooden dividing wall between this room and the kitchen stopped a foot short of the ceiling. Ben moved around behind it, getting the tea things together. An open wooden staircase climbed to a landing then reversed itself and continued to the second story over the kitchen. I’d been in enough of these kinds of cottages to be sure it led to a single large room, also clad in unfinished wood, filled with enough old cast-iron beds for an entire family. Which brought up an interesting question about Alice and Ben’s sleeping arrangements. With a quick glance around the living room, I spotted a pillow on top of a neatly folded blanket and sheets. One of them was sleeping down here. I guessed it was Alice, for the warmth of the stove, the proximity to the bathroom, and to avoid the stairs.
The walls in the great room held half a dozen poster-sized photographs in simple black frames. To my surprise the pictures weren’t Maine scenes of lupines, lighthouses, lakes, and mountains, but instead they were photos of children. The images were so arresting, so compelling, they drew me to them, each in turn.
I thought at first they might be travel posters, but quickly concluded that was wrong. There was no text, for one thing. And the images weren’t advertisements. They were art. There was a boy, caked in white clay, staring into the camera, his eyes great, dark pools. A curly-haired toddler in a ruffled dress danced on a table as her adoring, multi-generational family looked on. A blond boy sat on a rocky hill, dressed in a black tunic, a knife in his belt, embracing his dog. An exhausted young woman, barely out of her teens, dressed in blue coveralls, smoked a cigarette. A boy lay on a doctor’s examining table, the stump of his leg bandaged, a look of pain, both physical and existential, on his face. A girl, a bright scarf covering her head, stared at the camera, her knees flexed as if she wasn’t sure if she should run. Each photograph was breathtaking and arresting in its own way.
“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Alice said.
By wandering around her room, staring at the photographs uninvited, I already had. “These are beautiful.”
She smiled, acknowledging the compliment. “Taken by a good friend.”
I sat on the sofa opposite her. It looked as old as the house.
“So what brings you all the way out here today?” Her light blue eyes were alive with curiosity.
“You will have heard about Phinney Hardison.” Alice might not have many visitors, but there was a smartphone in a flowered case on the table by her chair, along with a box of tissues, a glass of water, and a mystery novel. The Busman’s Harbor grapevine would have kept her up on a story as big as Phinney’s murder.
“Yes, yes. A terrible shame.”
At that moment, Ben returned carrying a tray holding three ceramic mugs and a plate of golden-brown cookies. He stood in front of me and bowed, lowering the tray so I could take a mug, a napkin, and a cookie. “Butterscotch,” he said. Then he went to his aunt, plucked a mug off the tray, and put it on her table along with two cookies. Finally he proceeded to the armchair next to his aunt and lowered the last mug and the cookie plate to his side table. He caught me staring when he turned to sit down.
“Julia has come to talk to us about Phinney,” Alice told him as we passed around the cream and sugar.
“Terrible.” Ben raised a quizzical eyebrow under the flop of brown hair. Why would I have come to them to talk about that?
“He was killed in the basement of his shop.” I figured they knew that but I needed a warmup. “And that got me wondering about who owned the property.” I looked directly at Alice. “I thought it might be you.”
Alice’s blue eyes returned my gaze, no averting, no blinking. “Whatever made you think that?”
I should have anticipated the question but I had to think quickly about what to say. I decided on the truth. “There was an incident at the shop yesterday. Someone broke into Lupine Design and smashed all the pottery in the showroom. And then the murder this morning. In neither case was there any sign of a break-in. That got me wondering about the keys. Zoey Butterfield can account for all her copies. She said she wasn’t sure who owned the building. She sent me to Oceanside Realty. The woman there sent me to the Town Enforcement Office. Mark Hayman gave me an address for a law firm in Cincinnati. My mother said your family is from Cincinnati . . .” I let the sentence trail off.
“My, you are a clever girl.” Alice spoke with apparently genuine admiration. “I do own the building. I own quite a few in town. Whenever I see a place that is in trouble or in danger of being torn down or becoming entirely derelict, I buy it. The agents know I’m often the buyer of last resort.”
This was news to me. “How many properties do you own?”
She drew her thin lips together. “I’m not sure. Twenty? Twenty-five.”
That was a lot of real estate in our little town.
“You must remember that building from when you were a child,” Alice said. “It could never keep its tenants. The previous owner was close to bankruptcy, ready to walk away. The folks at Oceanside Realty got wind of it—they always know everything that’s going on—and came to me.”
I took advantage of Alice’s explanation to devour Ben’s cookie. I love butterscotch in any form and the cookie was crunchy and buttery and perfection.
“At first I had trouble keeping the building rented,” Alice continued. “Every season brought a new shop, another person full of hopes and dreams that would be dashed. Finally, Stowaway Resortwear moved in and Claire Reagan made a success of it. When she moved her shop farther downtown, I rented to Lupine Design.”
“And Phinney?” I asked.
She paused, clasping her blue-veined hands in her lap. “After his mother died, Phinney needed a place to sell her things. She was a bit of a hoarder, as they call them now. In my day, we just called them Mainers.”
I smiled appreciatively. The front yards of rural Maine were often littered with things people, “might need later.”
“I rented him the other storefront,” Alice said. “It was almost fifteen years ago now.”
Ben sat, looking comfortable in his overstuffed chair, sipping his tea and moving his eyes from his aunt’s face to mine like he was watching a tennis match.
“When Zoey Butterfield came along, she wanted the whole building,” Alice said. “But I couldn’t do that to Phinney. I had the folks at Oceanside assure her that when Phinney left, she’d have first option in his space. I assumed his mother’s stuff would all be gone eventually.”
“I’m not sure if selling it was the point.” My memories of the times when I’d walked past Phinney’s display window and looked inside were mostly of him yakking it up with his cronies, not bargaining with tourists.
“You may be right,” Alice allowed. “Now I wish I’d made him leave. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been murdered.”
“You don’t know that,” Ben said.
“Well, he wouldn’t have been murdered there,” Alice shot back.
“Did you know Phinney?” I asked. “Is that why you rented to him?”
Alice shook her head. “It was all hands-off, through Oceanside. I’m not even sure he knew I was his landlady.”
“Do you have a key to the building?” I asked.
“Ben,” Alice said. “Open the second drawer in my desk.” She pointed to an old oak teacher’s desk on the wall behind me.
Ben walked over and pulled on the wooden handle of the second drawer down. It jingled and clanged when he opened it. “There’s like a hundred keys in here.”
“They’re all labeled.” Alice was absolutely confident.
I admired her certainty. Ben pulled out the keys, singles and sets, big Yales, tiny padlock keys, and skinny skeleton keys. He read off each label as Alice shook her head. “No. No. Don’t own that property anymore. That was a neighbors’ house I used to look after. They’re both dead.” And so on.
Ben looked at me helplessly. “I’ll go through these and see if we have it. Then what?”
“Let the state police detectives know if you do have it. Or if you don’t. They might be more interested in that. I’m sure they’ll figure out who owns the building eventually. But you might want to call them before they call you.”
He nodded. “Will do.”
I gave him Flynn’s name and cell number.
“Thanks.” He put the number in his phone. “Why don’t you give me your number, too? I assume you want to know if I find the key.”
“Yes, please.” I rattled off my cell number.
Ben passed the cookie plate around again. He must have seen the longing in my eyes. I ate the second one as soon as I got it.
“These are delicious.” I meant it.
“Thanks.” Ben sat back down. “Enough murder. Other subjects, please. I’ve been to your clambake, you know. A few times. It used to be favorite stop when I stayed with Aunt Alice.”
“I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it. That’s our aim. This will be my fifth summer back running it.”
“Five years,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve been there during that span. I’m sure I would have noticed you.”
I blushed a little, then stood. “I need to get back to town, but thanks so much for seeing me. And for the tea . . . and the cookies.”
Ben rose as well.
“I won’t get up,” Alice said. “It’s been lovely to have company no matter how grim the subject. Ben will see you to the door.”
“How will you vote on the pedestrian mall?” I asked her before I turned to go.
“I haven’t made up my mind, dear.”
* * *
Ben let me out onto the front porch where I pulled on my wet boots. The rain had slowed but the day was still raw. Great puddles sat on top of the mud in the car park. I slogged back through them to my car, noticing that my tires were in about six inches deep. I stepped into the Subaru, trying to keep my muddy boots on the rubber mat, though it was hopeless, started her up, and put her in reverse.
The wheels spun. “No, no, no.” I put the car in drive and tried to move forward. I had a couple of feet available in front of me. But the wheels spun again and I knew from both mud season lore and bitter experience that I was only making things worse.
I was about to get out when Ben appeared on the porch. “Stay there!” he shouted. He sat on the wet steps, took off the leather slippers and pulled on his boots. He’d put on a navy windbreaker, which might, just might, protect the beautiful sweater. As he came toward the car, he craned his neck to look at my tires.
I opened my window. “This isn’t embarrassing at all.”
He shrugged. “Mud season. It happens.” He trudged toward the big SUV, opened the back and pulled out the enormous floor mat.
“Don’t,” I said when he returned. “It will get wrecked and you’ll get filthy.”
“No worries.”
“At least use my car mats.”
“It’s fine. Car mats are made for mud. I’ll hose it off tomorrow.” He bent and pushed the mat under the car behind my back wheels. I could tell from looking at the top of his head through my rear window that he was kneeling in the mud. My face was burning.
He came around to my side of the car. “Put it in reverse and back up slowly. If you can get up on the mat, we’ll use the traction to help you get a running start in reverse. When you get to the middle of this blasted parking area, turn around and head down the road. If we do get you going, whatever you do, don’t stop.”
He went to the front of the car and pushed, his face twisted with the effort. His instructions worked. I got the car onto the mat and then was able to turn.
Once I was in the firmer center of the parking area, I slowed down. “Thank you!” His jeans were caked in mud and his car mat was, too. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t stop!” He waved me on, laughing.
I pulled down the long dirt road, careful to stay in the center, until I got to the paved street at the bottom.
When I got home I took the longest, hottest shower our ancient water heater could sustain and then put on my sweats. Mom wasn’t there. I figured she’d gone to Livvie’s, like she’d said. I made a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of cocoa and built a fire in the fireplace.
Later, I got off the couch and looked out the living room window. The rain had stopped completely, though Main Street glistened in the streetlights. There was a light on the second floor of the Snuggles across the street. Zoey must be there. “Go to sleep,” I said aloud. “Get some rest. You’re going to need it.”