Murder at Teatime (2 page)

She had once had a dog who died like this. He had been poisoned. She never found out by what, or by whom. She preferred to think he had accidentally gotten into some rat poison.

But she had always wondered if it had been deliberate.

2

Charlotte Awoke the next morning with a vague sense of disquietude. For a moment she wondered why, and then remembered the dog. His name was Jesse, and he had belonged to Dr. Thornhill. But he had been a friend of everyone on the island. He had made a habit of greeting everyone who landed at the Ledges landing, and had probably been on his way down to greet Charlotte when he got sick. Stan had broken the news to Dr. Thornhill shortly after Charlotte’s arrival. On his pre-bedtime walk later that night, Stan had run into Maurice, the Ledge House handyman, who told him that he’d buried Jesse in the rose garden outside of Dr. Thornhill’s library that afternoon. According to Maurice, Dr. Thornhill hadn’t left the library since, and as far as he knew was still sitting there, staring out at Jesse’s grave. Dr. Thornhill was a widower, and Jesse had been his constant companion. Last night. The back of her head ached, and the inside of her mouth felt like cotton batting. When was the last time she had stayed up until all hours reminiscing and drinking brandy? She couldn’t remember. Probably the last time she saw Stan and Kitty.

She lay in bed surveying her room, which was in the former hayloft of the barn. The Saunders had converted it into a cozy guest apartment, which was connected by a flight of stairs to the farmhouse kitchen. Plants hung in the floor-to-ceiling window, through which she could see a flat gray sky. From downstairs came the clatter of breakfast dishes and the boom of Stan’s voice summoning her to breakfast. She sat up on the edge of the bed, her brains sloshing around in her head. Once Stan had sounded his bugle, there was no quarter given to sluggards. Getting out of bed, she walked over to the window. Below her, a lawn led down to a gate in a white picket fence (Kitty’s dream come true). Beyond the fence lay a mist-shrouded cove surrounded by wild roses. In the middle of the cove stood a tiny spruce-covered island that looked as if it had floated in on the tide during the night. The spruces were tipped with gold: the rising sun was already beginning to shine through the fog. The island was one of many called Sheep Island, Kitty had said. She had explained that the early settlers had grazed their sheep on these little islands, where they were safe from predators and didn’t need to be fenced in. On the other side of the cove stood a farmhouse that could have been a “before” to Stan and Kitty’s “after”: unpainted, falling down, overlooking a ramshackle wharf. Lending the perfect note of rustic authenticity to the picturesque scene.

But picturesque wasn’t everything. How could they stand it? Charlotte wondered. It wasn’t as if they’d grown up in the country. They’d spent their entire lives in the Boston suburbs. Route 128 was the closest they’d ever come to country living. Perhaps it was the romance of living on an island: the idea of being master and mistress of a minute world of pure perfection. But they could have found a more populated one. As far as she could tell, there were only three other households on the island: Dr. Thornhill, who lived at Ledge House with his niece; his daughter, Marion Donahue, who lived with her husband and son in a cottage out on the east end; and a lobsterman named Wes Gilley who lived with his family in the ramshackle farmhouse. Of the three, the Gilleys were the only other year-round residents. Kitty liked to think their isolation was relieved by the gravel bar or “bridge” from which the town took its name, but since the bar was passable for only a few hours a day, Kitty’s sense of connectedness struck Charlotte as illusionary. If you dallied in town more than a couple of hours after low tide, you had to wait eight hours until the bar was again exposed by the receding tide to cross the channel—or cross it in a boat. Even the larger world to which the bar linked the island wasn’t all that large. With a population of five thousand—tripling to fifteen thousand in the summer—Bridge Harbor wasn’t exactly a metropolis.

As far as Charlotte was concerned, they could have it. She got nervous after more than a few days in any place that didn’t have sidewalks. She dressed quickly. It was none too warm in her unheated hayloft. After pinning her hair into a chignon, she descended the stairs to the kitchen.

The kitchen was a large, cozy room in the ell that linked the farmhouse to the barn. It was dominated by an old cast-iron cookstove that Stan was feeding with sticks of wood from a basket at his feet. The warmth of the stove was welcome. It was the kind of morning that gave rise to the saying that Maine has two seasons: winter, and August.

“How are you this morning, Charlotte?” boomed Stan as he lifted a lid off a burner to add another stick of wood to the fire. The inside of the firebox glowed red, and the stove made a contented thumping sound as it digested its meal of seasoned maple.

Charlotte poured herself a mug of coffee from the pot on a back burner. “A little rough around the edges,” she replied. Taking a seat at the long pine table in front of the sliding glass doors overlooking the cove, she found herself studying her host.

Stan had undergone a metamorphosis since moving to Maine to pursue his dream of becoming a full-time painter. The once cleanshaven face was covered by a bushy, reddish-gray beard, and the three-piece suit had been replaced by paint-spattered dungarees, an Irish sweater, and a Greek fisherman’s cap. He even moved differently, with the athletic grace of a man twenty years his junior. He was playing the role of the colorful marine painter to the hilt, thought Charlotte. And good for him—he’d waited long enough for the part.

“Retirement must agree with you, Stan,” she said. “You look terrific.”

“Thank you,” he replied, joining her at the table with a mug of coffee. “I owe it all to that witch doctor of a wife of mine. She’s had me on this health kick: no sugar, no alcohol, red meat only in moderation.” He gave her a sheepish look. “I cheat a little on that second one, as you know.”

“A little?” teased Charlotte.

“He doesn’t exactly look like he’s suffering, does he?” said Kitty, who had entered from the adjacent dining room.

“Not a bit,” agreed Charlotte.

Kitty stood at the counter with her hands on her hips, the picture of the well-preserved suburban matron. Her ash-blond hair was perfectly coifed, and her tall, slim figure was clad in matching pink slacks and monogrammed crewneck sweater. Her face barely showed her age, which was not surprising in light of the fact that she’d treated herself to a face-lift on her last birthday (Charlotte was one of the few in whom she’d confided, most of her friends having been told that she was vacationing in the Caribbean).

“I complain about it,” Stan continued, changing his tone. “But I do feel a hell of a lot better. The newest twist is that she’s using me as a guinea pig for one of her herbal remedies.” He looked over at his wife. “Probably trying to poison me off so that she can cash in my life insurance policy.”

Charlotte was glad to see that the change in Stan’s outward appearance hadn’t affected his personality: he was as curmudgeonly as always.

“Now darling,” said Kitty with a reproving look, “you
know
that herbal remedy has worked. The rheumatism in his shoulder was so bad he couldn’t even play golf,” she explained. “And that’s serious.”

“You’re damned right it’s serious,” barked Stan.

“We made the rounds of the Boston rheumatologists, but none of them could do a thing for him,” Kitty went on. “Then I read in one of Frank Thornhill’s books about an herbal remedy for rheumatism, and he’s been fine ever since.”

“It’s true,” Stan agreed. “The pain in my shoulder was so bad I could hardly lift a club, much less swing it. My game had gone all to hell. Now I’m shooting in the eighties again. I just rub on a little of the witch doctor’s secret remedy, and the pain disappears like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Charlotte looked skeptical.

“Really,” said Kitty, as she buttered a plate of English muffins, “herbs are very effective. Many of our most potent modern medicines were originally derived from herbs. Digitalis, from the foxglove; morphine, from the opium poppy; atropine, from the deadly nightshade …”

“I gather this is the latest enthusiasm?” asked Charlotte, arching an eyebrow at Stan.

Stan nodded. “At least she’s not on a redecorating kick,” he said. “For a while there I couldn’t keep the furniture down.”

“Fran Thornhill, Frank’s niece, has an absolutely glorious herb garden up at Ledge House,” continued Kitty, joining them at the table with the English muffins. “She has her own mail-order herb business, ‘Ledge House Herbs’—I’ve been working up there with her, helping her out.”

She spoke as if there were an exclamation point after every other word. Charlotte was amused by the fact that her affectedly stagy speech had become more pronounced with time, like the British expatriates whose Mayfair accents become more clipped the longer they spend on American soil.

“The locals call her a witch,” said Stan, reaching for a jar of marmalade. “Next thing you know they’ll be calling you a witch, too.”

“A white witch. Like Glenda, the good witch of the east.”

Charlotte smiled as Stan slathered a muffin with a quarter-inch of marmalade while Kitty looked on in mute disapproval. It looked as if Kitty’s prohibition against sugar, like that against alcohol, was honored more in the breach than in the observance.

“Does she sell herbal remedies too?” asked Charlotte. “I should think that would be against the law.”

“It is. Practicing medicine without a license. Besides, it’s dangerous—a lot of herbs are poisons. In small doses, they have therapeutic effects, but in large doses they can be deadly. ‘What can kill, can cure,’ goes the saying. For instance, the herb I’m using for Stan’s rheumatism …”

“See what I told you?” interrupted Stan. “Watch out, or she’ll be experimenting on you next.”

“Oh hush,” continued Kitty, unfazed. “I’ve learned a lot from Frank. He wrote the classic reference book on herbal remedies,
The Living Pharmacy
. He teaches economic botany at Harvard, or used to. He’s cut back on his course load a lot in recent years because of his health.”

“Pompous old fart if you ask me,” commented Stan.

“We didn’t ask you,” chided Kitty. She turned to Charlotte. “He’s dying to meet you. He says he’s a fan.”

“He sits all day in his library gloating over his rare books,” continued Stan. “Wears white gloves so he won’t get fingerprints on the pages.”

“For your information, Stanton Saunders, he has one of the finest collections of rare botanical books in the country. He’s very charming,” Kitty went on, ignoring her husband. “Fran would like to meet you too. They’ve invited us over for cocktails this evening. Fran and I have planned something special. I hope you’ll want to go.”

“Of course,” replied Charlotte. She didn’t want to disappoint Kitty. Besides, she could hardly pick and choose among the social activities on this little island. She was about to ask Kitty more about the Thornhills, when there was a knock on the kitchen door.

The visitor was Howard Tracey, the Bridge Harbor chief of police. Because the tide was up he’d taken the police launch over from town, and docked it at the Saunders’ wharf.

As a police chief, Charlotte thought, he wasn’t very convincing, but then Bridge Harbor wasn’t East Harlem. He had a round, boyish face that was shaded by the visor of a baseball cap. A badge was pinned to his windbreaker.

Although Stan didn’t introduce her—he had long ago learned that she preferred anonymity—she found Tracey studying her intently.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” he said tentatively, “I hope you won’t think me out of place if I say you’re the spitting image of the movie star Charlotte Graham.”

Charlotte smiled. She was used to being mistaken for herself by fans who couldn’t quite believe she was for real. She was about to explain, when she caught the twinkle in his mild blue eyes.

She threw back her head and laughed. “You’re putting me on,” she said delightedly in her famous voice, which was at once both soft and husky.

“We’ve been expecting you,” said Tracey. He removed his hat, and crossed the room to shake Charlotte’s hand. “The
Bridge Harbor Light
ran an item that you’d be staying with the Saunders.” He extended his hand and smiled broadly.

Leave it to Kitty to blab. But no harm done. She returned his handshake, smiling at him warmly with her large, pale gray eyes.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Chief?” asked Stan, inviting him to join them at the kitchen table. “We also have some of my wife’s herb tea,” he added with an expression of distaste.

“Coffee’s fine, thanks,” replied Tracey, taking a seat.

“What brings you over here?” asked Stan as he poured out another mug. “I don’t imagine you crossed the channel just for a cup of coffee.”

“Can’t say that I did,” replied Tracey. “It’s Jesse, Dr. Thornhill’s dog.” He looked over at Charlotte. “I heard about how you found him on the Ledges.”

Charlotte nodded.

“Dr. Thornhill called me about him last night,” Tracey continued. “He thinks he was poisoned.”

“Charlotte thought the same thing,” said Kitty. “Do you think it might have to do with the development?”

“What development?” asked Charlotte.

“The Chartwell Corporation’s planning to build a big resort out here,” explained Tracey. “Biggest on the New England coast. The Bridge Harbor Resort Hotel—hotel, condos, golf course, conference center, nightclub—you name it.” He spoke with a thick Maine accent in which “harbor” came out
haba
.

Charlotte was familiar with the name—the biggest builder of resort complexes and theme parks in the country. “Where?” she asked.

“The hotel would go on the site of Ledge House,” explained Stan. “The condos and golf course would go out on the east end, near the Donahues’ place.”

What would happen to the Ledges? Charlotte wondered. The image passed through her mind of armies of camera-toting tourists littering its beautiful terraces with cigarette butts and soda cans.