CHAPTER TWENTY
When I got out onto the front porch, Ben stood in the parking area staring intently at my rear bumper. My tires were sunk deep in the mud. The bucketing rain had stopped as quickly as it had started. Big drops dripped from the buds on the trees.
“I think you’ve really done it this time,” he said when he heard the cottage door close behind me.
“It was fine when I parked. The thunderstorm did this.” I could feel the flush rising, heating my face. “I’m a good driver and very used to mud. I swear.”
He grinned. “I’m sorry our yard is such a mess.” He looked back at the car. “I could pull you out if I had a tow chain, but I don’t.”
I didn’t want to suggest he try pushing me again. Not after the mess it had created the last time. “I’ll call my brother-in-law to come pull me out.” I took out my phone, worried that Sonny wouldn’t be available.
“Tell you what,” Ben said. “I’ll drive you home. I have to be somewhere tonight, but tomorrow I’ll come to town, get some chains and pick you up. Then I can pull your car out. Can you live without it until then?”
“Sure. Thank you.” The truth was my car spent most of its time in Mom’s garage. There weren’t many places in Busman’s Harbor proper I couldn’t walk to. And Ben’s offer sounded way better than listening to what Sonny would have to say about me getting my car stuck in the mud. I pointed to my boots, which stood beside me on the porch. “I don’t want to get your car dirty.”
He came to the bottom of the steps. “It’s a rental. Aunt Alice and I flew into Boston where we picked it up. Besides, look at my boots.” He tipped his shoe to show me the muddy edge.
“Okay. Thanks,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Just let me stick my head in the house and let Aunt Alice know what’s going on.”
I stepped into my boots without tying them while Ben dodged around me and yelled into the house. “I’m driving Julia home then straight back!”
We trudged to the big car and got in. Ben turned the SUV around, backing up and edging forward to avoid my car. On the last swing he aimed for the long dirt road and we were on our way.
“It was nice of you to visit Aunt Alice,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what to say about that, and finally settled on the truth. “I’ve been looking into Phinney, trying to understand why someone would kill him.”
Ben took that in his stride. “And you thought Alice would know something? She told you last time. She was his landlord, but always at arm’s length.” He turned to look at me as we reached the bottom of the drive. “Wait, do you think the murder had something to do with the pedestrian mall?”
Alice had asked me to keep her secret and I would. “I don’t, but the detectives do.”
“How do you know that?” He seemed amused.
“I know those guys from other times they’ve been in town.” Ben may have figured out who Chris was, but he didn’t know my whole life story along with every move I’d made the last five years. It was kind of nice.
We rode in silence. Not an uncomfortable one. I thought about what Alice had said about how she captured her magnificent photographs. Sit. Listen. Don’t exploit. That was why Alice Rumsford was beloved by the town and Karl Kimbel hated. Alice sat with us patiently, shopped in our stores, ate in our restaurants, and patronized our institutions like the library and the Y. Her only desire was to make Busman’s Harbor a better and more beautiful place. Kimbel’s only interest was to exploit us for his own gain. He wanted to steal the town’s soul.
My mind turned to the caretakers. Phinney had returned to Busman’s Harbor to care for his mother. Alice’s family was worried about how long she could live in the cottage alone. For the first time I wondered if Gus’s son was really coming east for the summer because he had retired. Maybe Gus’s kids were worried about him and Mrs. Gus. I hoped Alice and Gus and Mrs. Gus would be able to go on as they were as long as they wished.
When I pulled myself back into the moment, we were speeding down the highway to the harbor. It felt like we were going too fast, especially for the wet road. I snuck a look at the speedometer on the dash. From my angle it looked like we were going close to seventy in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. I thought about saying something; maybe Ben didn’t know the speed limit, but nobody likes a backseat driver in any set of circumstances.
Immediately after I went through this thought process, I heard a siren coming up behind us.
“Shoot,” Ben said. “It’s a cop.” He slowed down gradually and pulled onto the shoulder.
“Shoot,” I said when I saw who it was.
Jamie’s face appeared behind Ben’s tinted window. Ben pressed the button and down the window went.
“Do you have any idea why I stopped you?” Jamie’s dark eyebrows rose when he spotted me. He tilted his head in my direction. “Julia.”
“I might have been going a little fast.” Ben said it in a quiet voice, though he looked Jamie straight in the face.
“Nineteen miles an hour over the speed limit,” Jamie said. “License and registration.”
“It’s a rental.” Ben took off his seat belt and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “Julia, can you get the registration and rental agreement out of the glove compartment?”
I flipped the door open and retrieved the documents.
“So you two know each other,” Ben said into the uncomfortable silence.
“Yeah,” I answered.
Ben handed the documents to Jamie, who walked back toward his patrol car.
“Sorry about this,” Ben said to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t giving me a ride home.”
There was a knock on my window that made me jump in my seat. Jamie’s blurry face appeared behind the glass. After a little fumbling around to find the button, I opened the window. “Ms. Snowden, may I speak with you?”
“Go ahead.”
“Outside the vehicle, please.”
I opened the door and climbed out. Jamie walked me well off the shoulder, out of harm’s way. “Are you okay?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You’re in a car with out-of-state plates that looks like it belongs to a drug dealer. I have to ask. Are you okay? Did you get into the car voluntarily?”
“Are you kidding me?” My voice went up to screech level. Jamie cast a worried look in the direction of Ben’s car and I brought my volume down. “You don’t think if I was being held captive I wouldn’t have found a way to let you know? Is that why you stopped the poor guy?”
“I stopped him because he was going almost twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. Stupid tinted windows. I didn’t know you were in the car. You’re sure this guy’s all right?”
“He’s Alice Rumsford’s grandnephew, for goodness’ sake.”
My protest did nothing to calm Jamie down. “How could I have known that?”
“You saw him with me the other night at Crowley’s. Don’t pretend you didn’t. And you could have trusted that, as an adult, if I get into a car with someone, it’s someone I know and feel safe with. Seriously, Jamie, this is screwed up. Why do you care, anyway? You’re not my big brother.”
Jamie’s hands fell to his sides, Ben’s documents still in his hands. “Julia, if you don’t get it by now, you never will.”
Jamie strode to his patrol car, back hunched. I got into the SUV.
“What was that about?” Ben asked.
“Nothing.” My tone didn’t invite discussion.
A few minutes later Jamie returned and handed Ben his license and the car’s papers through the window. Then he took out his ticket pad and a pen. Ben looked at me and I figured I had to try.
“Officer Dawes”—I cleared my throat—“do you think maybe Mr. Barlow should get a warning? I’m feeling guilty. He’s giving me a lift to my house.”
“Is your house on fire?” Jamie sounded deadly serious.
I didn’t bother to answer. Jamie finished writing the ticket, ripped it off with a flourish, and handed it to Ben.
“Thank you, Officer.” Ben didn’t look up as he said it. He glanced at the ticket and then put his license back in his wallet. Jamie returned to his patrol car. Ben closed his window and handed the ticket, registration, and rental agreement to me. “Can you put these in the glove compartment?”
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
Ben waited until Jamie had pulled out and disappeared down the highway toward town before moving carefully off the shoulder. He drove exactly the speed limit all the way to town, speeding up and slowing down according to the signs. It was common wisdom around town that the speed limit changed so frequently along the highway in order to trick people with out-of-state license plates into speeding, making them easy pickings for the Busman’s Harbor P.D.
When we got to Mom’s house, I turned in my seat to face Ben. “I should pay the ticket.” I was angry at Jamie and imagined marching into the police station and making a big, loud show of paying it.
“It’s a hundred and ninety dollars. Besides, you didn’t tell me to speed. That was entirely my carelessness.” He smiled at me. “My mind was elsewhere.”
“At least let me contribute.”
“Tell you what. Agree to have dinner with me again before I leave town and we’ll be even.”
“When are you going back to Cincinnati?” I asked.
“A week from Monday, after the town meeting.”
Plenty of time. “Okay. My treat this time. I insist.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
Ben waited with the car idling until I opened the front door. I turned and waved to let him know I was in.
* * *
Mom was upstairs in her sitting room watching TV when I got home. “I’m back!” I called up the stairs.
“Good.”
The mushroom soup was still in the pot on the stove, so I ladled some out and stuck the bowl in the microwave. I broke off a heel of the crusty bread Mom had left on the cutting board and settled down to eat. The soup was everything mushroom soup should be. Earthy. Warm. Satisfying. My mother had made this wonderful meal. Six months ago, if you’d told me this could happen, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I called Livvie and put the phone on speaker.
“How are you?” I asked as soon as she picked up.
“Better.” Her voice sounded stronger. Almost back to normal. “Zoey called. Binder and Flynn are letting her move back to her apartment the day after tomorrow. She told us not to come into work. She wants some time to herself to figure out what’s what. We’ll go back to the studio next week.” I could hear Livvie moving around doing the dishes in the background. “Have you found anything that will help Zoey?”
“I have found zero things that will help Zoey or anyone else,” I answered. “Today I learned more about Phinney Hardison than I thought I would ever know. But nothing that will help solve his murder. Not why he was in that basement in the middle of the night. Not who was there with him. I can’t even figure out who he would have trusted enough to put himself in that situation. Unless Bud and Gus killed him, and I think that’s unlikely.” I stopped for a moment, wondering how to broach the next subject. “Honestly, it’s not clear to me Zoey needs or wants my help. She’s pretty chill about the whole situation.”
“Of course she needs your help.”
An unpleasant thought occurred to me. “Did you ask me to help Zoey because you believe she needs help or because you thought I needed a project?”
There was a long silence on the other end. “Yes,” Livvie offered tentatively.
“I’m not some kind of reclamation project,” I objected.
Livvie ignored my protest. “How are you doing? Really.”
“Really, I’m fine. I just got a ride home from Alice Rumsford’s cottage with her grandnephew Ben. My car’s stuck in the mud up there.”
“That’s too—wait—is he the good-looking one you had dinner with at Crowley’s the other night?”
“How did you—” But I was too smart to finish that question. A lot of people would have been eager to tell Livvie they’d seen me at Crowley’s with a handsome guy From Away. “He wants to have dinner again.”
“Interesting.”
“Why? Nothing can come of it. He lives in Cincinnati. He’s here supporting his aunt for a few weeks. Then he’ll be gone.”
“Julia.” Livvie used the voice she uses when she pretends that she’s the big sister. “I got married when I was eighteen to the only man I ever dated, but even I know that the next man after a big breakup is the transitional man. It’s not supposed to go anywhere. Stop your moping around and go out and have dinner with the man. Goodness.”
“I plan to. I kind of owe him. Jamie gave Ben a ticket when he was driving me home. A big one. He was a jerk about it if you want to know the truth.”
“Jamie saw you in the car with Ben and acted like a jerk?” Livvie clarified.
“He was rude and he could have given a warning. You’d think with me in the car Ben would have gotten a break.”
There was a long silence from the other end. “You never are going to get it, are you?” An exact echo of what Jamie had said. Clearly my lack of enlightenment had been discussed when I wasn’t around.
“He’s like my brother,” I protested.
“He is most definitely not your brother,” Livvie said. “I am your only sibling and I resent that.”
I sighed into the phone on purpose, loud enough for her to hear. “This whole conversation reeks of ‘He’s the only eligible guy in town.’ Be advised, the more you and Mom want it, the more I resist.”
“Well, sue us for wanting you to stay in town and be happy.” My sister hung up the phone.
When Livvie was gone, I thought about Jamie, his anger—and hurt?—when he’d seen me in the car with Ben. I’d believed our outings over the winter had been pity playdates. Could Jamie have wanted something more?
Could I ever feel differently about him? I didn’t know. It wasn’t something I’d ever considered.