Hallowed Out

Book 0: Maine Clambake Mystery

by Barbara Ross

Genres: Holiday books; General Fiction

Synopsis

For Julia Snowden of the Snowden Family Clambake, Halloween takes on a whole new meaning in the coastal town of Busman's Harbor, Maine, when a seasonal activity turns fatal . . .

With its history of hauntings and ghost sightings, Busman’s Harbor is the perfect setting for Halloween festivities. Despite her busy schedule, Julia agrees to help out with a haunted house tour to protect her mother from overwhelming herself. But when a reenactment of a Prohibition-era gangster’s murder ends with a literal bang and a dead actor from New Jersey, Julia Snowden must identify a killer before she ends up sleeping with the fishes.  

Praise for Shucked Apart
 
“An intelligent, well-plotted page-turner with likeable characters and a doozy of an ending. Highly recommended.”
—Suspense Magazine
 

Release date: July 26, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 150

Sample

“No, madam,” Harley Prendergast replied. “Over hers.” He pointed dramatically to a spot on the floor in my mother’s front hall near the archway that led to the living room. As far as I could tell from my vantage point on the porch watching the interaction through the open front door, there was nothing on the old oak floorboards except a few late-morning sunbeams.

Mom’s habitually perfect posture became even more perfect as she pulled herself up to her full height, which wasn’t much. “I’m not discussing this with you further, Harley. Go find someone else to bother.”

Harley reflexively stood taller, too. At six-four, broad-shouldered and paunchy, he loomed over her. But he seemed to grasp that he’d met his match. “I’ll be back,” he vowed. “You’ll come around.”

“You’ll certainly be welcome back.” Mom smiled and let her arms drop to her sides. “As long as it’s for another purpose.”

Despite his size, Harley pivoted neatly toward the open front door, nodded as he passed me on the porch, and exited down the steps.

“What was that about?” I asked as I came through the door.

Mom, who seemed to be studying the lines on the floor, looked up. “Harley’s shilling for stops for his Halloween Haunted House Tours and he claims we have a ghost.”

“Here? In town?” My family was widely known to have a ghost, two in fact. But legend had it they resided at Windsholme, the abandoned mansion on the island where our family ran our authentic Maine clambakes during the summer tourist season. But a ghost at the house in town, the old sea captain’s house on Main Street my parents had bought in the 1980s? I had never heard of such a thing.

“Come into the kitchen,” Mom said. “I have time for another cup of coffee before I leave.”

My mother was an assistant manager at Linens and Pantries, the big box store in Topsham, Maine. The store had put out its Halloween merchandise two weeks earlier, immediately after Labor Day, and was ramping up for the coming holiday season.

Mom poured each of us a cup from the coffeemaker on the counter while I fetched milk from the refrigerator. “Harley claims the story goes like this,” she said when we were seated at the kitchen table. “The captain who built this house, Samuel Merriman, was engaged in the China trade, taking kerosene to Canton and returning with loads of tea. The round trip usually took eight months, to make the crossing, leave the cargo in New York or Boston, and finally return here to Busman’s Harbor.”

Mom pushed a hank of blond hair, only recently tinged with gray, back behind an ear and took a sip of her coffee. People say I look like her. I can’t see it, except for the most obvious things, coloring and stature.

“One day,” Mom continued, “while Captain Merriman was at sea, a sailor came here to town telling the tale of a Busman’s schooner that had blown sky-high in Canton harbor when the kerosene it carried was somehow ignited. But the sailor had no details. He didn’t know the name of the captain or ship and was vague about the date when the accident had occurred.

“Samuel’s wife, Sarah, was worried sick when she heard this. As she calculated the dates, her husband and his ship would have been in Canton about when the sailor said the explosion happened.

“So she went up to the cupola.” My mother’s house had an enclosed cupola on its mansard roof. “And she stayed. She wouldn’t come down. The housekeeper begged her, and then her children did. The cook sent up food that returned only nibbled on. Friends, family, neighbors came, and finally the minister, but she ignored all entreaties.”

“Was it her husband’s ship that exploded?” Poor Sarah Merriman. I imagined her anxiety in those long-ago days when loved ones went to the other side of the world with scant opportunity to communicate. To think she had walked the same halls of the house I grew up in.

“At last, a mast was spotted on the horizon, headed to Busman’s Harbor,” Mom continued. “The news spread through town. Now, surely, Mrs. Merriman would come down. But she said no, she’d wait until she saw the ship with her own eyes.

“Finally, Captain Merriman’s ship sailed into the harbor. When she spotted it, Mrs. Merriman stood up and ran down the stairs, from the cupola to the third floor, from the third to the second, and then from the second to the first. But her legs were weak from disuse and she was running too fast. She tripped on the carpet at the top of the stairs and landed in the front hall, her neck broken. She never saw her husband.”

We were quiet for a moment. “That is an awful story,” I said.

“Such piffle,” Mom responded. “Harley needs more stops for the haunted house tour. I’m sure he’s across the street at the Snugg sisters right now telling them some made-up story about what happened at their house.”

“Probably.” I had to agree with Mom’s likely explanation. The town of Busman’s Harbor had struggled for years with Maine’s pitifully short summer season. Sure, we got leaf-peepers from the end of September until mid-October. And the nearby Maine Coast Botanical Gardens generated a fair amount of business for the town from Thanksgiving to New Year’s with their massive outdoor lighting display. But from the middle of October to Veteran’s Day, tourist dollars remained stubbornly out of reach.

Until this year, when the tourist bureau had the idea for a weeklong, town-wide Halloween celebration. Why should Salem, Massachusetts, 150 short miles to our south, get all the visitors? We didn’t have witches, that was true, but we did have ghosts, and we had Harley.

In a town where nearly everyone had to hustle to make a living during tourist season, Harley made the rest of us look like pikers. He and his wife, Myra, owned The Lobsterman’s Wharf Motel on the east side of the harbor, and Kimbel’s Souvenir Shoppe on the west side. All day long, seven days a week, from Memorial Day to Columbus Day, Harley drove his trolley back and forth, picking up passengers at each of the hotels on the east side, depositing them downtown, and then ferrying them back again when their feet hurt and their money was spent. That he happened to pick up and drop off in front of Kimbel’s, the shop he owned, was a mere coincidence. Or so he would have you believe. During the summer, at night, he met groups of tourists downtown who were willing to part with $19.99 apiece ($14.99 for seniors, $9.99 for children under fifteen) to take them on his haunted house tour. That most of the places they toured were not houses, and were also, in most peoples’ opinions, not haunted, was a detail. Everyone had a good time.

Now, in mid-September. . .