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I’D NEVER PAID attention to the unassuming door next to Murray’s Pub, but now I found myself pressing the little doorbell button and waiting a few seconds to be buzzed in. The smell of fresh latex paint permeated the stairwell as I ascended the steps.
The door to the apartment stood open. Strolling inside, I saw paint cans and supplies scattered on a tarp covering the floor. Overhead, a ceiling fan turned lazily. The bare windows were wide open, except for the one housing a geriatric air conditioner, currently off.
Martin stood on a stepladder, painting the ceiling molding. He’d already done the ceiling itself—it was a snowy white. He wore jeans and a white undershirt, both paint-spattered. He’d tied a black bandana on his head, do-rag style.
“Grab a roller,” he said, ignoring the fact that I was wearing a pretty linen sundress and chic platform sandals. “You can start on the walls.”
“Sorry, I’m on my way somewhere,” I said. “Where can I put these?” I lifted the grocery sacks I’d carried up the stairs.
“What’s in them?” he asked.
“Your housewarming gift.” I tugged down the edge of a sack, revealing a box of Fruity Pebbles. “You got hooked on them staying at my place. Wouldn’t want you to go through withdrawal.”
That earned a grin. “How many of those did you buy?”
I shrugged. “Seven. At the rate you were eating mine, I figure these should last you about a week. Maybe less.”
“Kitchen’s through there.” He pointed.
It was a worn time capsule of a kitchen, barely large enough to turn around in, but scrubbed clean. I deposited the bags on the Formica countertop. Out of curiosity, I opened the door of the fridge, a relic at least twenty years old but spotless. Inside were two six-packs and a porterhouse. “The last people left this place really clean,” I called as I slid the cereal boxes into a cabinet.
He snorted at that. “It was a pigsty. The oven alone took me two hours and about a gallon of scary chemicals.”
The image refused to form: Martin on his knees, scrubbing the scarred linoleum. I gave myself the grand tour, which took all of twenty seconds. One dinky bathroom. One sun-washed bedroom, where a king-size mattress lay on the wooden floor, covered with taupe-on-taupe striped sheets. “Hey!” I said. “Those are my sheets.”
“They’re not your sheets, they’re Irene’s sheets.”
“Not since I inherited them.” I stalked back into the living room. “You have some nerve.”
“How can you be sure they’re yours?” he asked. “Maybe you should crawl in there and give them a good feel, make sure they’re the right thread count and everything. If you want—and I wouldn’t make this offer to just anyone—I’d even let you strip down first so you could get a really good feel.” He pressed his palm to his heart. “That's how much I admire and respect you.”
I gave him a flat stare. “Are you finished?”
There was that impish grin again. “You want me to be finished?”
If I thought his words were more than goofy teasing, I’d...
Well, I don’t know what I’d do, okay? So there. And anyway, he was just teasing. I’m kind of almost certain.
I asked, “What else did you steal from my house?”
“Towels, flatware, spices, cleaning supplies, canned soups and pasta, some pots and pans...” He paused, thinking. “And toilet paper. I like that expensive toilet paper you buy. Nice and soft but not linty. You want a beer?”
My crabby expression was answer enough. He shrugged and ambled into the kitchen. If I’d been at the house when he’d moved, I could have forestalled the pilfering, but he and Dom had cleared out at the same time two days earlier, when I was at the police department giving another statement to Detective Hernandez. It had been nine days since I’d beaned Dean with that tree limb and rifled his pockets to find his cell phone and call for help—a feat I’d accomplished only after managing to saw through the tape covering my mouth. My abductor was currently cooling his heels behind bars, having been denied bail.
“Admit it,” he said, returning with a frosty bottle. “You never even missed the stuff I took.”
Which said more about my powers of observation than his right to make off with said stuff, but I let it drop. “I’m surprised you didn’t move closer to your job,” I said. “This is even farther from Southampton than your mom’s house.”
“I’m working at Murray’s now, starting tonight,” he said. “Maxine rented me this place. You can’t get much closer to your job than a short walk upstairs.”
I thought of all those pretty padre groupies who were drawn to Martin like salt to a margarita glass, and wondered how often one of them would make the short trek upstairs with him. That thought left me a tad grumpy, so I cast about for a safer conversational topic. “Won’t you miss the huge tips from those rich Southampton summer people?”
“I’ll get by.” He swigged from the beer bottle.
But why Crystal Harbor? I wondered. What was the attraction for him here? Most people, given their druthers, would choose to live and work near family or good buddies. His mom was on the South Shore and his daughter, Lexie, and her husband lived in Manhattan. He wasn’t close to anyone in Crystal Harbor that I knew of. My face began to heat as I considered the obvious. Was that what he and I were? Good buddies? With the potential for... what?
I turned to hide my blush and scan the work in progress that was his living room. “So. What are you going to do for window treatments?”
“Why, are they sick?”
“You have to put something up on them. You can’t just leave them bare. And I’m warning you right now, if I come home someday to find my drapes missing, you’ll be in deep doo-doo.”
“Relax,” he said. “I have zero interest in drapes. That’s one of those women’s things.”
“Spare me.”
“Have you ever noticed that women are obsessed with things that start with D?” He ticked them off on his fingers. “There’s diets, that’s a big one. Drapes, of course. Divorce. Depression.”
“I get depressed just thinking about diets and divorce.”
“And diamonds.” He leaned against the radiator and took a long pull on his beer. “Don’t tell me you get depressed thinking about those?”
Well, yes, I do, if the diamond in question is a particular four-karat specimen, one I’d spied two days earlier on Bonnie Hernandez’s dainty left ring finger. It was the same rock Dom had placed there last December and which she’d stopped wearing in April. Now here it was nearly August and that big old thing was once more on display, blindingly bright, Bonnie’s own personal lighthouse beacon. I’d been struck dumb, unable to conceal my hurt, acutely aware of the smug triumph lurking beneath the detective’s serene features.
A few weeks. Some time to think about Dom and me and the prospect of saying I do for the second time. That’s what I’d asked for. That’s what he’d agreed to.
Yet a mere seven days after that conversation, Bonnie was flaunting his ring. No wonder he’d slipped out of my house quietly, without so much as a text. Like a thief. Of course, the padre had done the same thing, but at least he was a thief. I think.
Martin’s expression was too knowing. “The guy’s a coward, Jane.”
It was my turn to shrug. “Whatever.”
“He should’ve talked to you first.”
Dom and I had yet to speak since he’d moved out. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. “Dirtbag exes,” I said. “There’s another D-word for you.”
“Dingos,” Martin said.
“Dingos?” I smirked. “Women talk about dingoes?”
“When they eat their babies, they do.”
He had me there. “Dangerous dudes,” I offered. I was thinking along the lines of sexy bad boys, don’t ask me why, but my words had a sobering effect on Martin.
He lifted my hand and ran his rough thumb over the scar still visible on my wrist, evidence of my frantic effort to hack my way through duct tape with a pottery shard.
I tried to keep the mood light. “On the plus side, my friend Suze has forgiven me for breaking her bowls. She promised to make me a ceramic AK-47 so I can shoot my way out next time.”
“You should have brought me with you,” he said.
“I didn’t know it would get dangerous,” I reminded him. We’d been over this. “All I did was go to the park to chat with Lacey. The rest of it...”
He managed a crooked smile. “Just don’t let it happen again.”
“Well, it won’t happen again with Dean Phillips, that’s for sure.” If I had to guess, I’d say the likelihood of Dean being set free during his lifetime was somewhere between You’ve Got to Be Kidding and Hell No. “Sophie told me they matched the DNA in Ernie’s teeth to the strands of hair they found under the cat statue.”
“I think Phillips deserves a nice, friendly reception committee, don’t you?”
“What, you mean in prison?”
“I know just the guys to make his stay in the joint extra special,” he said.
“Oh, please don’t do that.” I didn’t want to even imagine what he had in mind. “Life behind bars will be punishment enough.”
“The son of a bitch tried to kill you, Jane.” Martin’s features were hard, his tone lethal. I’d never seen him like this. He didn’t add that Dean had succeeded in committing murder, and getting away with it for three decades. Apparently his attempted elimination of me carried more weight.
Which was kind of sweet. I know, I know, it was wrong, the whole reception-committee thing. But it was, you know, kind of sweet too.
Martin drained his beer and set the bottle on the floor. He lifted his hand to my hair and sifted it through his fingers. “I like it.”
“Yeah? You didn’t see it right after. Pretty scary.” Tentatively I touched my new do: long, wavy, strawberry blond layers that reached my shoulder blades, with side-swept bangs. My hairdresser had blanched when she’d seen the mess I’d made of my hair in the woods, hacking at it with a chunk of broken pottery to remove the duct tape while waiting for the cavalry to arrive. In the end she’d worked a miracle. The result was charmingly messy.
“You’ve got a sexy bed-head thing going on here,” he said, tugging playfully. “Do people still use that term? ‘Bed-head’?”
Who cared? I could listen to this man talk about bed-anything all the livelong day.
He asked, “Still hooking up with losers on that doggie dating site?”
“For the record, I did not ‘hook up’ with any of them, and no, I suspended my membership.”
“No more Dom to moon over. No more dog-loving losers.” He gave a sad shake of the head. “If you get lonely, you can always swing by here for a shot of that añejo tequila you like so much.”
I gave him the stink eye. “Did you steal my tequila?”
“You mean that bottle of tequila I bought you? Nope, I purchased another one meant to lure you up here for my own nefarious purposes.”
I knew he was kidding, but the mere idea of being the object of the padre’s nefarious purposes made my tongue trip over itself. I responded with a witty riposte, but it might have sounded more like Sexy Beast hacking up part of a chew toy.
I heard the ding! of a text coming in and pulled my new phone out of my purse. “Sophie’s getting antsy. I was supposed to pick her up three minutes ago.”
“Antsy?” he said. “That doesn’t sound like the Sophie I know.”
I shoved the phone into my purse and headed for the stairwell. “If this doesn’t go well, I’ll be back later for some of that tequila.”
Sophie was standing in front of her house when I pulled up a few minutes later. She refused to place her plastic cake carrier on the backseat and instead clutched it tightly on her lap. She was as dressed up as I ever saw her, in a flowing, summery tunic and loose trousers. Clearly she’d been to her hairdresser and even sported a touch of lipstick.
I tried to defuse her nervousness. “So remember I told you about Kyle Kenneally and his dead tortoise, Romeo?”
“Yeah.”
“I just heard from the Smithsonian. They’re taking him.”
She looked at me. “No kidding.”
“Brass plaque and all. Five grand in my pocket.” I punctuated the news with a fist pump.
“Get cash,” she advised. “Don’t take a check from that guy.”
“I’m way ahead of you. So,” I said, “did you hear that Lacey and Porter are going to be grandparents?”
She snorted. “Bet I knew about it before you did. Colin and Samantha are good kids. Always liked them. They want to get out of their little rented apartment and into a house now that the baby’s coming. I’m selling them that one over on Iris Street.”
It took me a moment to make the connection. “You mean Dean’s house?”
“The one I let him live in all these years, yeah. He won’t be needing it anymore.”
“I’m surprised Colin can afford Crystal Harbor on a teacher’s salary,” I said. “I mean, I know it’s not the nicest part of town, but still. Are his parents helping out?”
“He wouldn’t let them if they tried. It all worked out,” she said. “I recouped my investment.”
“Your invest... You charged them what you paid for the place?” I gaped at her. “Thirty years ago? In this part of Long Island? That had to be a fifth of what it’s worth now. Maybe less.”
“The kids aren’t getting off so easy,” she said. “You should see how Dean kept the place. Even the walls. Who knows how many coats of paint it’ll take to cover up the nicotine stains.”
Colin and Samantha were young. They’d have the place in baby-friendly shape in no time. I couldn’t repress a grin. “You’re a good person, Mayor Halperin.”
She waved away the compliment. “Way I see it, it’s an investment in Crystal Harbor. We need productive young people like those two raising families here. Good for everyone.”
“I hope Porter’s not in prison when his grandchild arrives.” At her quizzical look, I added, “Moving Ernie’s body? Faking his suicide? That’s a lot of evidence tampering.”
“Statute of limitations long ago expired on that. He won’t be prosecuted.”
I was relieved, for his sake and his family’s. “Porter and Lacey took a trip to Jersey last weekend,” I told her. “They visited Tim Holbrook’s grave. Together.”
She nodded in approval. “Speaking of graves, Ernie’s being laid to rest Sunday. In the proper part of the cemetery this time.”
“Just tell me when.” I reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’ll be there.”
She gave a ragged sigh. “I’m supposed to know everything that goes on in this damn town, Jane. How could I not have known... not even have suspected, what Dean did to Ernie?”
“It was made to look like suicide,” I said. You had no reason to think—”
“I should have known!”
I gave her hand another squeeze and turned onto Wallings Drive. I pulled up in front of a house Sophie hadn’t set eyes on in thirty-two years. She sat unmoving in the passenger seat.
I nodded toward the cake carrier in her lap. “What did you bring?”
“Hummingbird cake. Got the recipe out of a magazine back when I was in college. Not hard. One bowl and a spoon. Three layers. Cream-cheese frosting. Pecans. Teddy used to love it.” She took a deep breath. “She still like sweets, you think?”
I recalled the cloying lemonade and cookies Teddy had served me, and chewed back a grin. “I think so.”
“How do I look?”
“You look perfect, Sophie.” I glanced at the house and saw a window curtain twitch. “Come on.”
She kept a death grip on the cake carrier as we shuffled up the walkway. The instant we stepped onto the porch, the front door swung open. Teddy Waterfield stood on the threshold. No apron and slippers today. She looked neat and ladylike in a white skirt and a pink-and-white striped blouse. And, yes, lipstick.
“Why, it’s Sophie and Jane!” Teddy announced, as if she hadn’t been preparing for our visit all morning. As if thirty-two years hadn’t passed since she’d last set eyes on her daughter-in-law. She held the door wide. “Come in, come in, the air conditioning’s on. I usually keep it off, but it’s beastly out today, don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s beastly out? My word, is that hummingbird cake?”
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