Stowed Away

Book 6: Maine Clambake Mystery

by Barbara Ross

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; General Fiction

Synopsis

It's June in Busman's Harbor, Maine, and Julia Snowden and her family are working hard to get their authentic Maine clambake business ready for summer. Preparations must be put on hold, however, when a mysterious yacht drops anchor in the harbor—and delivers an unexpected dose of murder . . .

When Julia's old prep school rival Wyatt Jayne invites her to dinner on board her billionaire fiancé's decked-out yacht, Julia arrives to find a sumptuous table set for two—and the yachtsman dead in his chair. Suspicion quickly falls on Wyatt, and Julia's quest to dredge up the truth leads her into the murky private world of a mega-rich recluse who may not have been all that he seemed . . .

Release date: December 26, 2017

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 190

Sample

“Dead weight is the worst.” I dropped my end of the picnic table on the flattest spot I could find.

My boyfriend, Chris, wiped his brow with a tan forearm. It was early June, but he’d been landscaping, one of his three jobs, whenever the weather cooperated. I was lucky to have snagged him, just for the day, to help on Morrow Island.

Opening day for the Snowden Family Clambake was one short week away. While I had Chris with me, one of our projects was to move half the picnic tables out of the dining pavilion where they’d been stored for the winter and place them around Morrow Island. The spots had been picked by my parents thirty years earlier, intended to maximize the glorious views across the Gulf of Maine, or provide a cozy spot surrounded by flowers where our guests could eat lobster and toast a special occasion. Moving the tables was hard physical work. I’d been laboring under the delusion that I’d stayed in great shape during the off-season, but every grumbling muscle told me I’d been fooling myself.

I stared at our dock and the navy blue North Atlantic beyond it. “What time do you think it is?”

“One fifteen.”

I pulled my phone from my pocket. Cell service didn’t reach the island, but the device was keeping time. “Amazing. One fourteen and thirty seconds.” Chris’s ability to tell the time within minutes, day or night, based on nothing more than his internal clock, never ceased to amaze me.

Chris grinned, crinkling the skin around his green eyes. “It’s a shame my only superpower, as you call it, can’t earn me a dime.”

I fell in step beside him as we walked back to the pavilion. “Still, it’s a pretty impressive trick.”

He smiled. “Glad it makes you laugh. When did Quentin say they’d be here?”

“Anytime now.”

As we grabbed another picnic table, Mom stepped out of the gift shop that was tucked in a corner of the building. She hadn’t worked on the island in six years—since the day my dad had been diagnosed with the cancer that killed him—but this season she’d already given notice at Linens and Pantries, the big box store where she worked, she’d be taking the summer off to run the Snowden Family Clambake gift shop. Seeing her petite, blond figure in the gift shop entryway, in a cardigan, cotton dress, and tennies brought a wave of nostalgia for the island summers of my childhood. People say I look like her, and they’re mostly right.

“What time are they coming?” she asked.

“Soon,” I answered. “Quentin’s usually right on time.”

“Be sure to call me as soon as they get here.” She gave us a smile and turned back toward the gift shop.

Quentin Tupper was a family friend, a mentor, and as a result of an investment made to rescue Morrow Island from foreclosure the previous summer, a partner in the Snowden Family Clambake Company. He was also a major proponent, perhaps the most vocal proponent, of fixing up, rather than tearing down, the old mansion that sat on the island’s highest peak. Windsholme had been built by my mother’s ancestors with money earned shipping ice from New England to warm places like Calcutta and Havana. It was a formidable house, architecturally significant, as Quentin kept reminding us, but it had been abandoned as a dwelling place in the 1920s and damaged in a fire last summer. I understood my mother’s love for and loyalty to the place, but I couldn’t think of a single, practical reason for repairing it.

It wasn’t about practical, Quentin hastened to add whenever the subject came up. It was about history, and architecture, and art. To move the discussion along he’d found an architect, an expert in early examples of Shingle-style homes in Maine, and today he was bringing her to Morrow Island to walk through Windsholme and offer her educated opinion.

Her name was Wyatt Jayne and I’d researched her on the Internet. She had both architecture and landscape design degrees from Harvard and a string of academic articles and stories in glossy magazines featuring breathtaking photos of homes she’d renovated. While I was against spending the money on Windsholme, I had to admit Quentin had found a highly qualified person. At least on paper.

“Ahoy!”

The Flittermouse, Quentin Tupper’s sailboat, motored into our dock. A slender woman stood on the deck behind Quentin. She wore large dark glasses and a scarf over her head, Jackie Kennedy style.

Chris ran to help them in. My mother came out of the gift shop and walked with me to the dock. Quentin threw Chris the lines and turned back to help his guest. Her dress, an elegantly cut shift in bright pastels, wasn’t built for stepping off a sailboat. As Quentin handed her off to Chris, she fell into his arms. He danced a two-step before setting her down carefully on the wide planks.

“Whoa, thank you!” She smiled her approval at Chris, who smiled back.

“No trouble.”

Quentin disembarked immediately behind her. He was a big man, sandy haired, and dressed as always in his uniform of khakis, tailored blue cotton shirt, and boat shoes, sans socks. Ten years older than me, he was forty-one to my thirty-one.

“Hullo,” he said, beginning the introductions. “Wyatt, this is Jacqueline Snowden, the owner of the island and its magnificent home, her daughter, Julia Snowden, and Chris Durand, a friend of the family.” The woman took off her sunglasses and kerchief as Quentin continued. “Snowdens, this is—”

“I know exactly who she is,” I cut him off.

“Julia Snowden!” the woman cried.

“Hello, Susan.”

“What a funny coincidence. I had no idea. All the paperwork Quentin sent me said ‘Jacqueline Snowden. ’ I never put two and two together,” she said.

“Neither did I. Especially because Quentin told me your name was Wyatt.”

“It’s Susan Wyatt Jayne. I use Wyatt professionally.”

“You two know each other?” Quentin couldn’t have looked more delighted.

I gave him a tight-lipped smile. “We went to school together.”

Wyatt nodded her agreement. “We were a pair, weren’t we? I was editor of the yearbook and Julia was editor of the newspaper. I was captain of the debate team and she was—” Susan looked around, suddenly out of parallels.

“On the debate team,” I filled in helpfully.

“An alternate on the debate team,” Wyatt corrected, once and apparently still a stickler for detail. “I heard you’d gone to business school. We all expected so much from you. We thought you’d be running Wall Street by now.”

“Yes, well.” I looked down at my jeans and work boots, covered in dirt from a day of hard physical labor. “It hasn’t turned out that way.”

“I can’t wait to hear all about it.” Wyatt grabbed me by the arm and then pivoted to my mother, extending her hand. “Jacqueline. May I call you Jacqueline? What an honor and a privilege it is to view this magnificent home.”

“We hope it will pique your interest sufficiently that you’ll do more than view it.” My mother gave Quentin a conspiratorial smile.

Wyatt turned to Chris. “And what is your role?”

Quentin jumped in. “Chris is a skilled home renovator who aided me in my initial assessment of the damage to Windsholme. He helped me believe it could be brought back to its former glory.” Quentin paused and cleared his throat. “And Chris is a particular friend of Julia’s.”

That last statement caused Wyatt to give Chris another look. I watched her take him in, from the tousled light brown hair, to the arresting green eyes, the dimpled chin, the broad shoulders, and the muscled chest barely disguised by the navy T-shirt.

“Indeed,” Wyatt said.

I was used to the reaction. Chris was, if anything, “too handsome for his own good,” in my mother’s early-on assessment. He’d won her over, eventually, and it didn’t look like he was going to have to work hard to capture Wyatt’s approval either. This despite his jeans and work boots, as dirty as my own. Or maybe because of them.

“Shall we see the house?” Quentin suggested.

We walked up from the dock to the wide, grassy plateau that had been known as the great lawn when Windsholme was built, a place for genteel games of croquet and badminton. It still served some of those functions, with a volleyball net and a boccie court, but now it also housed the warren of connected buildings—dining pavilion, gift shop, bar, and kitchen—that formed the heart of the clambake operation. I’d seen photographs of Windsholme in its prime and I knew the impression it must have made on people as they gazed up from the lawn.

Now the view was a decidedly mixed bag. The old rose garden and its surrounding hedges were long gone. The part of the lawn that once stretched between Windsholme and the playhouse, a miniature version of the mansion, had gone to woods. Most disturbing was the house itself. For ninety years it had received the minimum of maintenance required to keep it standing. Then, last summer, fire had destroyed its central staircase and burned a hole in the roof. That hole, along with the huge window over the stairs, and the windows on either side, had been covered with boards to keep out the winter while my family decided what to do. The entire house was cordoned off with a bright orange hazard fence, designed to keep curious clambake guests from stumbling into the property and falling through the floor. Windsholme looked like an heiress whose photo had been snapped mid-kidnapping—disheveled, eyes and mouth taped shut, and bound at the ankles. I wanted to cry every time I looked at her. And not, as people supposed, because I’d been there when the fire started, but because the house looked so sad, so wounded.

At the bottom of the stone front steps, Wyatt paused and looked up. She didn’t move for a full minute, taking in Windsholme’s beautiful lines. “Hmm,” she said in a tone I couldn’t read. “Hmmm.”

We let ourselves in to the house through the French doors to the dining room, since the front door now led to a burned-out hole in the floor. We entered into the beautifully proportioned room. There was enough light to see the hand-painted mural, the oak wainscoting, and the stone fireplace, all damaged by soot and smelling of woodsmoke, but otherwise okay.

In the low light, Wyatt examined the mural intently. “Ridley?”

Quentin nodded. “Attributed. It’s unsigned.”

Wyatt pulled a smartphone from her big leather bag and turned on the flashlight, training the light along the chair rail. “Shame,” she said, when she’d walked the three walls the mural covered. “You’re right. No signature.”

“Wait until you get a load of this.” Quentin stepped through a small galley next to the fireplace and pushed open the swinging door that led to the balcony surrounding the two-story kitchen in the basement. The wooden cabinets lining the balcony on all four sides were intact. There were glass-fronted cabinets for china and crystal, drawers for silver, cupboards for table linens. The contents were long gone, dispersed along with the family fortune during the 1920s. The kitchen below was empty except for a soapstone sink, iron stove, and a wooden icebox. Wyatt snapped photos like crazy.

When she was done, Quentin led us back through the dining room. He opened the door to the center hall and pointed to the burned-out floor. “No way to get through,” he said. “If you want to see the rooms on the other side, we have to go outside and come in again.”

Wyatt stared at the charred hallway, lips pursed in a hard, straight line. “Is there any way to get upstairs?”

“Back stairs,” Chris said, turning around to lead us the other way, to the servants’ stairway off the kitchen.

“Interesting,” Wyatt said as we entered the narrow passageway. “Lots of these Maine island summer houses were considered to be rustic, casual retreats for the homeowners and a bit of a break for the staff. People mixed more freely. Not socially, but it wasn’t a big deal to see a maid on the front stairs. This house, on the other hand, is designed to keep interactions between staff and the family to a minimum. More like Newport or Bar Harbor than a wild island.”

It was the most she’d said since we’d been in the house, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. Was the house’s formality a good or bad thing?

We looked at the master bedroom, which ran from the front to the back of the house, with its two adjacent bathrooms.

“Original?” Wyatt asked.

Chris answered. “The house was built with indoor plumbing.”

“Unusual for the period,” Wyatt said. She pulled a leather-bound journal from her bag and made a note.

“Especially on an island,” Chris agreed.

“You say it’s attributed to Henry Gilbert?” Wyatt asked. I didn’t miss the “attributed.” She pointed to the large steam shower and leaned in to whisper something to Quentin, bringing her lips so close to his ear, he must have felt her breath.

Unless I was very much mistaken, she was wasting her efforts with Quentin. He lived alone in houses all over the world, including the modern marble and glass edifice across from Morrow Island on Westclaw Point that I called his Fortress of Solitude. He was disinclined to let anyone close, but if he had chosen a romantic partner, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be anyone of Wyatt’s gender.

“And the grounds are, uh, attributed to students of Frederick Law Olmsted.” I repeated to her rumors that had been repeated to me all my life. I’d never thought to question them, but now I did, as Wyatt furrowed her brow and wrote in her notebook. Perhaps things would go my way in the argument with Mom and Quentin. Perhaps Windsholme was not worth saving after all.

In the attic, Wyatt turned her charm on Chris. “Will you look at this?” She pointed to the place where the eaves were joined to the floor joists. “Pegs.”

Chris nodded. “The house was probably built by men who had more experience working on ships than houses. There wouldn’t have been enough construction back then for the trades to be separate.”

“Interesting.”

Did she have attic dust in her eyes or was she batting her eyelashes at Chris? Did women really do that? Unlike Quentin, Chris had been all too susceptible to pretty women’s charms, as the string of ex-girlfriends I constantly ran into in the harbor reminded me. Or at least he had been, until me. His devotion made me feel warm and loved. The women who constantly approached me to send him their greetings made me uneasy.

“This is it,” Quentin said. “If you want to see more of the upstairs, we have to get a ladder on the outside.”

Wyatt wasn’t dressed for ladders. “I’ve got enough. Why don’t you two men take me on a tour of the basement?”

“That puts us in our place,” I said a few minutes later as I sat on a porch step next to Mom. She hadn’t said a word during the tour.

“Really, Julia, what great insights could you have offered about the cellar?”

“None,” I admitted, but I didn’t like being excluded.

“What is up with you and Wyatt? You act funny around her.”

“Long story,” I answered.

“Long ago story,” my mother said, “if you’re referring to something that happened at school. I hope it isn’t going to be a problem.”

“Of course not. If she’s the right person for the job, she’s the right person.”

“She is,” my mother said confidently. “I can feel it.”

The merry band returned, appearing from around the corner of the stone foundation. Wyatt sat down on the porch step on the other side of my mother, smoothing the pastel shift.

“What do you think?” Mom asked. The spot over her nose creased with anticipation. The stakes were high for her.

Wyatt cleared her throat delicately and gave Mom a megawatt smile. “I think your project requires more research.” She spoke slowly, as if weighing her words. “I want to check some sources.”

“Will that take long? I know you’re based in New York.”

“I’m staying here in the harbor. My boyfriend is in town, waiting with his yacht for a refit at Herndon’s. Can we meet tomorrow?”

Mom perked up. “My house in the harbor? Ten AM?”

“Perfect. And you all should come for dinner aboard tonight.”

“Where’s his boat?” Chris asked.

“At Blount’s. It’s called the Garbo.”

Chris’s eyebrows shot up. There’d been a mega-yacht anchored in the marina at Blount’s Hotel for days. Even though we were used to seeing yachts in Busman’s Harbor, its size had everyone in town talking about it.

“We’d love to come,” Quentin said, apparently speaking for all of us.

“I’m sorry. I can’t make it.” Mom sounded regretful. “I’m babysitting.” My sister Livvie and her husband had a four-month-old, and a ten-year-old who wasn’t quite up to caring for her brother.

Wyatt must have been disappointed. My mom was the potential client, and therefore probably the person she most wanted to accept, but she didn’t show it. “The rest of you then?”

“Sure, Julia and I would love to,” Chris answered, without so much as a glance at me.

I smiled. Wyatt was attractive, but what Chris really wanted was to see that boat.

“Great!” Wyatt said with more enthusiasm than I thought the occasion required. “I’ll send a text and let him know there’ll be three guests for dinner. I’m sure he’ll be interested to meet you, Julia. He’s never met any of my school friends.”

He wasn’t going to tonight either.

As she pulled out her phone, Chris said, “You won’t get service out here. You’ll have to wait until you’re closer to the harbor.”

Her perfectly shaped eyebrows drew toge. . .