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I RECOGNIZED LACEY VARGAS by the back of her well-coiffed head. Also by the presence of her husband, Porter, as the two engaged in an argument near the cotton-candy machine. I didn’t know Porter well, but he was easy to recognize with his coal black hair—dusted with silver in all the right places—athletic physique, and patrician air. Porter glanced around and, apparently anxious to avoid a scene, pulled his wife off the street and into the nearest shadowed store doorway to continue their heated conversation.
I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I bought a blue cotton candy and took a lazy stroll. Sexy Beast liked cotton candy, as it turned out. The tacky spun sugar proved an elusive treat, dissolving on his tongue in seconds. But his disappointment was short-lived as he then got to lick and lick and lick his sticky-sweet snout.
Lacey seemed to be giving as good as she got with her husband, getting in his face and stabbing a finger at his chest. I wished I could hear what they were saying, but the fair was noisy and I couldn’t get closer to them without being obvious. Lacey swung her arm in a swift, angry gesture. My imagination filled in the blanks. Get away from me, I don’t ever want to see that smug face of yours again. Or: I’m going to throw all your stuff on the front lawn, so don’t bother coming home. Or less drastic: If your mother’s pot roast is so much better than mine, go have Sunday dinner with her.
On the other hand, what did I know about the Vargases’ relationship? I could be witnessing one of the minor tiffs all married couples experience. So go buy the damn burger and fries already. If you don’t care about your cholesterol, why should I?
Whatever she’d said, Porter’s response was to turn away and eat up the sidewalk with brisk strides while Lacey stalked back to the fair. Porter turned at the first corner and I kind of, well, followed him. Visually at first, just keeping him in my sights, before stepping onto the curb and trailing him at a distance. Anyone who noticed would no doubt assume I was simply taking my dog for another potty break.
The sidewalks were deserted. Most of the locals were at the fair. Sexy Beast lifted his leg and marked everything vertical between Main Street and Murray’s Pub a block and a half away, which is where Porter ended up.
I followed him inside a few minutes later. Murray’s was a small, pleasantly dark, unpretentious pub that had existed in this spot in Crystal Harbor since the end of the nineteenth century when the townsfolk made their living mainly in fishing and farming. The pub had survived Prohibition by serving something called “near beer,” a supposedly nonalcoholic libation that would have proved anything but, had the authorities not been bribed to look the other way.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim, beer-scented interior, I scanned the empty tables and booths before spying Porter sitting at the center of the bar. He nursed a neat double whiskey and watched silent baseball on the television. Closed captioning took the place of sound because the bartender, Maxine Baumgartner, preferred listening to bluegrass. Thankfully, she kept the volume low enough for customers to converse.
Which is what I intended to do with Porter Vargas. I passed him and took a stool at the far end. We exchanged polite nods and he went back to the game. “I have the dog with me, Max.” I directed Maxine’s attention to my canine companion, who turned a few circles and curled up on the scarred plank floor near my barstool. Our busy afternoon walking and eating had tuckered him. “Is that okay?”
“Let me check with the boss. Yeah, she says TV stars get to bring their little purse dogs into the joint.” Maxine owned the place. She was fifty-something, with a blond ponytail and a rusty smoker’s voice. “Beer?”
“I had beer at the fair. That looks good.” I indicated Porter’s drink. He glanced my way and this time his gaze lingered. I tracked the path of recognition in his eyes from I think I’ve met this woman to What do you know, it’s that nympho Death Diva from TV.
“Hi, Porter, we’ve met,” I told him. “Jane Delaney.”
“Right, I remember. How are you, Jane?”
“I’m okay, but SB and I have both had enough of that fair.”
“Tell me about it.” He gestured to Maxine to pour me the same thing he was having. “Put it on my tab.”
“Well, thank you.” I smiled and he left his barstool to take the one next to mine. Silently I pleaded with him not to come on to me. Not that Porter was of the same icky ilk as Kyle, Dean, and Ralph, but he was a married man, and that was pretty icky in itself. Not the being-married part but the cheating-on-your-spouse part.
“And some of those crinkle fries,” he added, then turned to me. “You like regular or spicy?”
“I’m a spicy girl.” Argh, did I just say that?
His chuckle sounded more agreeable than lecherous. “Good to know.”
Maxine placed my drink in front of me. “The fries’ll be a couple of minutes. Just me here today—I wasn’t expecting customers ’cause of the fair.”
She disappeared through a door and I took a tentative sip of the whiskey. It was good. Smooth. I hadn’t paid attention when she’d poured it. “What is it?” I asked Porter. “Not bourbon.”
“Rye.” He pointed to an attractive bottle on the shelves behind the bar. “A small-batch distillery.” And probably über-expensive, but the owner of Vargas Sporting Goods could afford it.
“It’s so peaceful and quiet in here,” I said, and meant it.
Porter lifted his glass. “Silence is the mother of truth.”
“Who said that?” I asked. “And don’t say, ‘I just did.’”
He smiled and drained his glass. “Benjamin Disraeli.”
Rich, handsome, and educated. If he’d possessed his stepson Colin’s six-three or so height, we would have been talking masculine perfection, but Porter was of average height. I couldn’t help contrasting him with his wife. Lacey wasn’t much in the looks department and she certainly didn’t come from money. I’m guessing she’d never gone to college, or if she did, her education had been interrupted when she got pregnant by Tim Holbrook, lost him due to Ernie’s horrible prank, and married Porter Vargas shortly afterward.
Porter got up and went behind the bar. He plucked the bottle of rye off the shelf, refilled his glass, and resumed his seat, leaving the bottle on the bar. “So just to get it out of the way,” he said, “I saw you on that show. I mean, it happened in my wife’s shop. I figured I had to check it out.”
“You don’t need to make excuses,” I said. “Everyone in town has seen it, if the whispers and leers mean anything.”
“Your best bet?” He looked me in the eye. “Make it work to your advantage. Figure out how to spin it.”
“Spin it? Like turn it into a positive?” Right, like that could happen. “Your stepson Colin told me not to worry, that it would blow over.”
“Colin’s not a businessman. He chose to teach instead.” His tone was derisive.
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of working with me. Joining the family business and someday taking over as CEO.” He tossed back a healthy gulp of whiskey.
“He must be really devoted to teaching.”
Porter stared at his glass, at the play of light through the amber liquid as he turned it in his hand. “What he’s devoted to is the memory of his sainted father.” His speech wasn’t what I’d call slurred, but it was getting there. I assumed the booze had loosened his tongue. I wasn’t above taking advantage of his impaired state if it meant I could glean even a micron of information that could help Sophie become Suspect Numero Zero.
“His biological father, you mean?” I asked. “Tim Holbrook?”
His smile was not pleasant. “Of course you know his name. Everyone knows his name. My wife makes sure of that. Did she show you Tim’s picture on her phone? Before cell phones, she carried his snapshot around. You think she ever carried a picture of me?”
Colin had made it clear Porter was not his father. The animosity seemed to go both ways. “Was Tim a teacher?”
“He was going to be a teacher once he graduated. High school history, of course.”
“Were you and Colin ever close?” I asked.
“I tried, but Lacey never gave us a chance,” he said. “I wanted to raise him as my own and not tell him about Tim. You can imagine how that went over. From the moment he was born she was showing him photos and videos of his ‘real’ father, taking him to see Tim’s parents every weekend—his ‘real’ grandparents.”
“That couldn’t have been easy for you,” I said.
“All those things normal families do together? It was just the two of them. They took vacations, played tennis, went skiing, took my forty-foot yacht out for days at a time, all that family stuff. She cut me out of everything. Oh.” He raised a finger. “Not everything. I did get to pay for it all. The tennis lessons, Ivy League tuition, even the damn therapist she insisted he needed because he’d never gotten to know his real father.” He tossed back the rest of his drink and poured himself another. “And that lingerie store of hers. Who do you think bankrolled that?”
Talk about a cheap date. I couldn’t imagine a sober Porter Vargas sharing his personal problems with a near stranger. He wasn’t finished.
“I tried to get Colin interested in ocean kayaking,” he said. “That’s something Ernie and I used to do. Lacey was never into it and I thought, I don’t know, I thought maybe it was something special Colin and I could do together. Like a real father and son. I bought him the top-of-the-line ocean kayak, one Vargas Sporting Goods doesn’t even sell.”
Something in my chest squeezed. “He wasn’t interested?”
He shook his head and tried to top off my drink. I placed my palm over the rim of my glass. “Driving,” I said. He shrugged. His eyes looked a little glazed. I hoped for his sake he wasn’t planning to get behind the wheel. If Lacey didn’t track him down and drive him home, I could always offer him a lift.
“Colin got married last year,” Porter said. “I barely know his wife, Samantha. I mean, they sometimes come for Sunday dinner, but she’s like this polite stranger. God knows what he’s told her about me.”
“I heard how you and Lacey met,” I said. “It sounds romantic.”
“Meeting at a funeral? You have a funny definition of romantic.”
“No, it’s that you were, well, you were doing a favor for a friend, right? Ernie? He couldn’t very well attend Tim’s funeral himself, no matter how guilty he felt. So you went in his place.” That’s what Sophie had implied.
“Yeah,” he said flatly. “I was doing a favor for a friend.”
“And Lacey was there, of course.”
His expression softened. “She was... she was heartbroken. Like her whole world just crashed in on her. Just this sweet, vulnerable girl.”
“Did you know she was pregnant when you met her? I mean, was she showing?”
He shook his head. “She was only a couple of months along, but she confided in me that very day. Her family didn’t know, of course. Very strict Italian Catholics. I mean, they figured it out later when she delivered this big, strapping baby five months after the wedding. And he didn’t look anything like me, that’s for sure. One look at that kid and there could be no doubt who the father was.”
“But by then she was a married woman, so...”
“Right. I’d made an honest woman of her, so there was a minimum of drama from her folks. They were thrilled to have a grandson. All they cared about was when we’d have more.”
“You didn’t have more children, though, did you?”
His bitterness was palpable. “Her choice, not mine.”
“It was... what’s the right word?” I said. “Noble of you. To marry this girl you barely knew who was carrying another man’s child.”
“Noble?” He chuckled. “Lacey’s family, once they realized she’d hidden a baby bump under her wedding gown, assumed she’d tricked me into marrying her—you know, that she’d kept the pregnancy from me and all that. When I set them straight, they called me a saint. Completely undeserved. The fact is, I was head over heels for her and still am. Tim’s baby wasn’t a deal-breaker by any means.”
“Tell me something,” I said. “Did you know Ernie was gay?”
“Honestly? No. And we’d known each other forever. Since kindergarten. But he didn’t give off those vibes.”
“So he was in the closet.” That’s how Rocky had described it.
Porter nodded. “I began to suspect, though. Until he took up with Sophie. But even then they weren’t, you know, all over each other the way some couples are. I just thought it was the way he was.”
Maxine returned with a gigundo pile of spicy crinkle fries, apologizing for the delay. Her sharp gaze moved from the half-empty bottle of rye to Porter’s bleary gaze. He tapped his empty glass, silently requesting a refill.
“No.” She recorked the bottle and replaced it on the shelf behind the bar.
He pulled himself up to object, and I got a peek at the powerful CEO unaccustomed to being told no. Maxine’s implacable expression said he’d be wasting his time. After a moment, Porter backed down.
“How many have you had?” she asked.
He held up three fingers, then hauled out his wallet. To me he said, “Sure you won’t have another?”
“I’m sure.” I picked up a hot crinkle fry. I’d pay for my overeating later, but it sure tasted good now. “Thanks, Porter.”
“Max lays in that rye just for me,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Max?”
“That’s how it started, but people see it up there, they want it.” She shoved the fries under his nose. “Eat. It’ll help soak up the booze.”
“I never understood that,” he said. “Even if the booze gets ‘soaked up’ by food, it’s still in your stomach. It’s still going to get into your system.”
“You’ve been making that same dumb observation for thirty-something years.” Maxine started cutting up limes. “Get some new material.”
“You two have known each other that long?” I said. “I thought you bought this place only about ten years ago, Max.”
“Yeah, but I managed the student-union coffeehouse at Peconic U,” she said, “when I was a senior. Porter worked the grill—whenever he decided to show up. You’ll never know how close I came to canning your ass,” she told him.
“My folks made me take an on-campus job senior year.” Porter leaned on his elbows, spinning his empty glass and not eating enough fries to soak up anything. “Thought it would aid my character development or something. Help prepare me for my future running the family business.” His expression told me what he thought of that high-minded idea.
“Ernie Waterfield worked the same shift.” Maxine scooped lime wedges into a bowl and started in on the lemons. “Eight p.m. to closing at midnight, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”
Porter looked up at her. “How do you remember all that?”
“I’ll tell you how I remember.” She wagged the paring knife at him. “When you have one short-order cook who shows up for every single one of his shifts, without fail and on time—that would be your pal Ernie—and one who shows up only when he feels like it—”
“When did I ever feel like it?” he asked.
“—and it’s your first job with any authority,” she continued, “and it’s your responsibility to schedule workers, and you find yourself scrambling for a last-minute replacement and more often than not can’t find one, you tend to remember the particulars. Like poor Ernie working twice as hard because his buddy decided to blow off work. He’s the only reason I kept you on. He kept persuading me to give you one more chance. And trust me, Porter.” Maxine offered a wicked grin. “You don’t want to know everything I remember from back then.”
