Christmas Carol Murder

Book 20: Lucy Stone Mystery

by Leslie Meier

Genres: Female Sleuths; Family Life

Synopsis

Lucy normally loves planning for the holidays, but this year, Tinker's Cove has fallen on hard times. With so many residents struggling, Christmas festivities are a luxury some can't afford. But the story's not so bleak at Downeast Mortgage, whose tightfisted owners, Jake Marlowe and Ben Scribner, are raking in profits from everyone's misfortune. Half the town is in their debt, so when the miserly Marlowe is murdered, the mourners are few and the suspects are many. Scribner believes Marlowe's ghost has come to warn him of his own demise, and when he starts receiving death threats, Lucy wonders if there's more to the omen than the ravings of a bitter old pinchpenny. Can Lucy solve the case and deck the halls before the killer strikes again?

Release date: January 23, 2014

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

When the first foreclosure sale of the Great Recession took place in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, Pennysaver reporter Lucy Stone expected a scene right out of a silent movie. The auctioneer would be a slimy sort of fellow who ran his fingers along his waxed and curled mustache and cackled evilly, the banker would be a chubby chap whose pocket watch dangled from a thick gold chain stretched across his round stomach, and a burly sheriff would be forcibly evicting a noticeably hungry and poorly clad family from their home while his deputies tossed furniture and personal belongings onto the lawn.

The reality, which she discovered when she joined a small group of people gathered in front of a modest three-bedroom ranch, was somewhat different. For one thing, the house was vacant. The home owners had left weeks ago, according to a neighbor. “When Jim lost his job at the car dealership they realized they couldn’t keep up the payments on Patty’s income—she was a home health aide—so they packed up their stuff and left. Patty’s mom has a B and B on Cape Cod, so she’s going to help out there, and Jim’s got himself enrolled in a nursing program at a community college.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Lucy said, feeling rather disappointed as she’d hoped to write an emotion-packed human interest story.

“They’re not getting off scot-free,” the neighbor said, a young mother with a toddler on her hip. “They’ll lose all the money they put in the house—bamboo floors, granite countertops, not to mention all the payments they made—and the foreclosure will be a blot on their credit rating for years. . . .” Her voice trailed off as the auctioneer called for attention and began reading a lot of legalese.

While he spoke, Lucy studied the individuals in the small group, who she assumed were planning to bid on the property in hopes of snagging a bargain. One or two were even holding white envelopes, most likely containing certified checks for the ten thousand dollars down specified in the ad announcing the sale.

But when the auctioneer called for bids, Ben Scribner, a partner in Downeast Mortgage, which held the note, opened with $185,000, the principal amount. That was more than the bargain hunters were prepared to offer, and they began to leave. Seeing no further offers, the auctioneer declared the sale over and the property now owned by the mortgage company.

Ben, who had thick white hair and ruddy cheeks, was dressed in the casual outfit of khaki pants and button-down oxford shirt topped by a barn coat favored by businessmen in the coastal Maine town. He was a prominent citizen who spoke out at town meetings, generally against any measure that would raise taxes. His company, Downeast Mortgage, provided financing for much of the region and there were few people in town who hadn’t done business with him and his partner, Jake Marlowe. Marlowe was well known as a cheapskate, living like a solitary razor clam in that ramshackle Victorian mansion, and he was a fixture on the town’s Finance Committee where he kept an eagle eye on the town budget.

Since that October day three years ago, there had been many more foreclosures in Tinker’s Cove as the economy ground to a standstill. People moved in with relatives, they rented, or they moved on. What they didn’t do was launch any sort of protest, at least not until now.

The fax announcing a Black Friday demonstration had come into the Pennysaver from a group at Winchester College calling itself the Social Action Committee, or SAC, which claimed to represent “the ninety-nine percent.” The group was calling for an immediate end to foreclosures and was planning a demonstration at the Downeast Mortgage office on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which Lucy had been assigned to cover.

When she arrived, a few minutes before the appointed time of nine a.m., there was no sign of any demonstration. But when the clock on the Community Church chimed the hour, a row of marchers suddenly issued from the municipal parking lot situated behind the stores that lined Main Street. They were mostly college students who for one reason or other hadn’t gone home for the holiday, as well as a few older people, professors and local residents Lucy recognized. They were bundled up against the November chill in colorful ski jackets, and they were carrying signs and marching to the beat of a Bruce Springsteen song issuing from a boom box. The leader, wearing a camo jacket and waving a megaphone, was a twenty-something guy with a shaved head.

“What do we want?” he yelled, his voice amplified and filling the street.

“Justice!” the crowd yelled back.

“When do we want it?” he cried.

“NOW!” roared the crowd.

Lucy immediately began snapping photos with her camera, and jogged along beside the group. When they stopped in front of Downeast Mortgage, and the leader got up on a milk crate to speak, she pulled out her notebook. “Who is that guy?” she asked the kid next to her.

“Seth Lesinski,” the girl replied.

“Do you know how he spells it?”

“I think it’s L-E-S-I-N-S-K-I.”

“Got it,” Lucy said, raising her eyes and noticing a girl who looked an awful lot like her daughter Sara. With blue eyes, blond hair, and a blue crocheted hat she’d seen her pull on that very morning, it was definitely Sara.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, confronting her college freshman daughter. “I thought you have a poli sci class now.”

Sara rolled her eyes. “Mo-om,” she growled. “Later, okay?”

“No. You’re supposed to be in class. Do you know how much that class costs? I figured it out. It’s over a hundred dollars per hour and you’re wasting it.”

“Well, if you’re so concerned about waste, why aren’t you worried about all the people losing their homes?” Sara countered. “Huh?”

“I am concerned,” Lucy said.

“Well, you haven’t shown it. There hasn’t been a word in the paper except for those legal ads announcing the sales.”

Lucy realized her daughter had a point. “Well, I’m covering it now,” she said.

“So why don’t you be quiet and listen to Seth,” Sara suggested, causing Lucy’s eyes to widen in shock. Sara had never spoken to her like that before, and she was definitely going to have a talk with her. But now, she realized, she was missing Seth’s speech.

“Downeast Mortgage is the primary lender in the county and they have foreclosed on dozens of properties, and more foreclosures are scheduled. . . .”

The crowd booed, until Seth held up his hand for silence.

“They’ll have you believe that people who miss their payments are deadbeats, failures, lazy, undeserving, irresponsible.... You’ve heard it all, right?”

There was general agreement, and people nodded.

“But the truth is different. These borrowers qualified for mortgages, had jobs that provided enough income to cover the payments, but then the recession came and the jobs were gone. Unemployment in this county is over fourteen percent. That’s why people are losing their homes.”

Lucy knew there was an element of truth in what Lesinski was saying. She knew that even the town government, until recently the region’s most dependable employer, had recently laid off a number of employees and cut the hours of several others. In fact, scanning the crowd, she recognized Lexie Cunningham, who was a clerk in the tax collector’s office. A big guy in a plaid jacket and navy blue watch cap was standing beside her, probably her husband. Lucy decided they might be good interview subjects and approached them.

“Hi, Lucy,” Lexie said, with a little smile. She looked as if she’d lost weight, thought Lucy, and her hair, which had been dyed blond, was now showing dark roots and was pulled back unattractively into a ponytail. “This is my husband, Zach.”

“I’m writing this up for the paper,” Lucy began. “Can you tell me why you’re here today?”

“’Cause we’re gonna lose our house, that’s why,” Zach growled. “Downeast sent us a notice last week.”

“My hours were cut, you know,” Lexie said. “Now I don’t work enough hours to get the health insurance benefit. Because of that we have to pay the entire premium—it’s almost two thousand dollars a month, which is actually more than I now make. We can’t pay both the mortgage and the health insurance and we can’t drop the health insurance because of Angie—she’s got juvenile kidney disease.”

“I didn’t know,” Lucy said, realizing they were faced with an impossible choice.

“We don’t qualify for assistance. Zach makes too much and we’re over the income limit by a couple hundred dollars. But the health insurance is expensive, more than our mortgage. We were just getting by but then Angie had a crisis and the bills started coming. . . .”

“But you do have health insurance,” Lucy said.

“It doesn’t cover everything. There are copays and coinsurance and exclusions. . . .”

“Downeast is a local company—have you talked to Marlowe and Scribner? I bet they’d understand. . . .”

Zach started laughing, revealing a missing rear molar. “Understand? All those guys understand is that I agreed to pay them nine hundred and forty-five dollars every month. That’s my problem, is what they told me.”

“So that’s why we’re out here, demonstrating,” Lexie said, as a sudden huge boom shook the ground under their feet.

“What the . . . ?” Everyone was suddenly silent, shocked by the loud noise and the reverberations.

“Gas?” somebody asked. They could hear a dog barking.

“Fire,” said a kid in a North Face jacket, pointing to the column of black smoke that was rising into the sky.

“Parallel Street,” Zach said, as sirens wailed and bright red fire trucks went roaring down the street, lights flashing.

A couple of guys immediately took off down the street, running after the fire trucks, and soon the crowd followed. Lucy always felt a little uncomfortably ghoulish at times like this, but she knew it was simply human nature to want to see what was going on. She knew it was the same impulse that caused people to watch CNN and listen to the car radio and even read the Pennysaver .

So she joined the crowd, hurrying along beside Sara and her friend Amy, rounding the corner onto Maple Street, where the smell of burning was stronger, and on to Parallel Street, which, as its name suggested, ran parallel to Main Street. Unlike Main Street, which was the town’s commercial center, Parallel was a residential street filled with big old houses set on large properties. Most had been built in the nineteenth century by prosperous sea captains, eager to showcase their success. Nowadays, a few were still single family homes owned by members of the town’s professional elite, but others had been subdivided into apartments and B and Bs. It was a pleasant street, lined with trees, and the houses were generally well maintained. In the summer, geraniums bloomed in window boxes and the sound of lawn mowers was frequently heard. Now, some houses still displayed pumpkin and gourd decorations for Thanksgiving while others were trimmed for Christmas, with window boxes filled with evergreen boughs and red-ribboned wreaths hung on the front doors. All except for one house, a huge Victorian owned by Jake Marlowe that was generally considered a blight on the neighborhood.

The old house was a marvel of Victorian design, boasting a three-story tower, numerous chimneys, bay windows, a sunroom, and a wraparound porch. Passing it, observing the graying siding that had long since lost its paint and the sagging porch, Lucy always imagined the house as it had once been. Then, she thought, the mansion would have sported a colorful paint job and the porch would have been filled with wicker furniture, where long-skirted ladies once sat and sipped lemonade while they observed the passing scene.

It had always seemed odd to her that a man whose business was financing property would take such poor care of his own, but when she’d interviewed a psychiatrist for a feature story about hoarders she began to understand that Jake Marlowe’s cheapness was a sort of pathology. “Hoarders can’t let anything go; it makes them unbearably anxious to part with anything,” the psychiatrist had explained to her.

Now, standing in front of the burning house, Lucy saw that Jake Marlowe was going to lose everything.

“Wow,” she said, turning to Sara and noticing how her daughter’s face was glowing, bathed in rosy light from the fire. Everyone’s face was like that, she saw, as they watched the orange flames leaping from the windows, running across the tired old porch, and even erupting from the top of the tower. No one could survive such a fire, she thought. It was fortunate it started in the morning, when she assumed Marlowe would be at his Main Street office.

“Back, everybody back,” the firemen were saying, pushing the crowd to the opposite side of the street.

They were making no attempt to stop the fire but instead were pouring water on the roofs of neighboring houses, fearing that sparks from the fire would set them alight. More sirens were heard and Lucy realized the call had gone out to neighboring towns for mutual aid.

“What a shame,” Lucy said, to nobody in particular, and a few others murmured in agreement.

Not everyone was sympathetic, however. “Serves the mean old bastard right,” Zach Cunningham said.

“It’s not like he took care of the place,” Sara observed.

“He’s foreclosed on a lot of people,” Lexie Cunningham said. “Now he’ll know what it’s like to lose his home.”

“You said it, man,” Seth said, clapping Zach on the shoulder. “What goes around comes around.” Realizing the crowd was with him, Seth got up on his milk crate. “Burn, baby, burn!” he yelled, raising his fist.

Lucy was shocked, but the crowd picked up the chant. “Burn, baby, burn!” they yelled back. “Burn, baby, burn.”

Disgusted, she tapped Sara on the shoulder, indicating they should leave. Sara, however, shrugged her off and joined the refrain, softly at first but gradually growing louder as she was caught in the excitement of the moment.

Lucy wanted to leave and she wanted Sara to leave, too, but the girl stubbornly ignored her urgings. Finally, realizing she was alone in her sentiments, she shouldered her way through the crowd and headed back to Main Street and the Pennysaver office. At the corner, she remembered her job and paused to take a few more pictures for the paper. This would be a front page story, no doubt about it. She was peering through the camera’s viewfinder when the tower fell in a shower of sparks and the crowd gave throat to a celebratory cheer.

You would have thought the football team scored a touchdown, she thought, stomping along the sidewalk that tilted this way and that from frost heaves. Nobody cared that a precious bit of the town’s heritage was going up in smoke. Nobody but her.

The Pennysaver office was empty when she arrived. Phyllis, the receptionist, and Ted, who was publisher, editor, and chief reporter, were most likely at the fire. Good, she thought, he could write the story. She took off her parka and hung it on the coatrack, filled the coffeepot and got it brewing, and then she booted up her computer. She was checking her e-mails when the little bell on the door jangled and Ted entered.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, unwrapping his scarf. “Don’t you know Jake Marlowe’s house is burning down?” He had removed his Bruins ski cap and was running his fingers through his short, salt and pepper hair.

“I was there. I left.”

“How come?” His face was squarish and clean-shaven, his brow furrowed in concern. “That’s not like you, leaving a big story.”

“The crowd freaked me out,” she said, wrapping her arms across her chest and hugging herself. “Sara was there—she was part of it, screaming along with the rest.”

“You know what they say about a mob. It’s only as smart as the dumbest member,” Ted said, pouring himself a mug of coffee. “Want a cup?”

“Sure,” Lucy replied. When he gave her the mug she wrapped her fingers around it for warmth. “I always liked that old house,” she said, taking a sip. “I sometimes imagined it the way it used to be. A painted lady, that’s what they call those fancy Victorians.”

“Marlowe didn’t take care of it. It was a firetrap. Truth be told, it should’ve been condemned and it would’ve been if Marlowe wasn’t such a big shot in town. But he was on the Finance Committee and the fire chief wasn’t about to mess with him, not with Marlowe constantly pushing the committee to cut the department’s budget.”

“I wonder where Marlowe was,” Lucy mused, setting her cup down. “I didn’t see him in the crowd. Did you?”

Ted tossed the wooden stirrer into the trash and carried his mug over to his desk, an old rolltop he’d inherited from his grandfather, who was a legendary New England newspaperman. “Nope, he wasn’t there.”

“Maybe he went away for the holiday,” Lucy speculated. “Probably for the best. It would be awful to watch your house burn down.”

“Yeah,” Ted said, clicking away on his keyboard. “I’ve got a meeting this afternoon over in Gilead. Do me a favor and follow up with the fire chief before you go home.”

Lunch was long past and Ted had gone to his meeting when Lucy noticed the rattling of the old wooden Venetian blinds that covered the plate glass windows, indicating the fire trucks were finally returning to the station down the street. A few minutes later Phyllis came in, wearing a faux leopard skin coat and sporting a streak of soot on her face. “Jake Marlowe’s house burned to the ground!” she exclaimed. “What a show. Too bad you missed it.”

“I was there for a while,” Lucy said. “Your face is dirty.”

“Oh, thanks.” Phyllis hung up her coat and went into the tiny bathroom, lifting the harlequin reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck a. . .