“He doesn’t appear to have a wallet on him,” Jamie said. “Or a phone. I don’t want to move him until the ME gets here. Maybe they’re in his back pants pocket.”
“He told me he was staying at the Snuggles,” I offered. The Snuggles Inn, a gingerbread-covered Victorian bed-and-breakfast, was across the street from my mother’s house and was run by Fiona and Viola Snugg, dear family friends and honorary great-aunts.
“Thanks. That’s helpful.”
“ME’s here,” Officer Howland called from the front door. “She’s parking.”
Jamie stood up. “Bring her down.”
Chapter 2
Gus moved from behind the counter to clear the way for the tidy figure of Dr. Joellen Simpson to enter the walk-in. Dr. Simpson was a family practitioner with a good reputation in Busman’s Harbor, and was also, apparently, our part-time medical examiner.
As soon as Howland and Jamie followed her into the walk-in, Gus stalked to a table on the far side of the dining room and motioned for Chris and me to join him.
“Now you’re going to tell me what the heck is going on.” He gave us the full Gus treatment—a squint that emphasized his great white eyebrows—to show he meant business. “How in heck did you leave a dead guy in my refrigerator?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“We didn’t.” Chris was more emphatic.
Chris and I had been running our restaurant, which we cleverly called Gus’s Too, for five weeks. The idea had been all Gus’s. He’d proposed that he serve breakfast and lunch and that Chris and I share the space and serve dinner, or as Gus called it, “suppah.”
The offer had seemed like a lifeline at the time, and I’d grabbed it like the flailing survivor I was. I’d returned to Busman’s Harbor in the spring after fifteen years away for school and then work, the last eight in a venture capital job in Manhattan. My goal had been to rescue my family’s clambake business from bankruptcy. With a lot of help from friends and family, and a few major calamities along the way, that mission had been accomplished. At least for this year.
But by the middle of October, the clambake was closed down for the season and I was at a crossroads. Return to my life and career in New York, or stay in Busman’s Harbor with the man I loved?
Then Gus had offered the restaurant as well as the studio apartment above it. Chris, I had discovered, was a brilliant home chef. I had experience running my family’s food business. The town, Gus felt strongly, needed a place to gather during the winter months. So win-win-win. Or so I’d thought.
The night before in the restaurant hadn’t been typical, that was for sure. For one thing, we’d had only four reservations, but for the Monday night after Thanksgiving that seemed reasonable. Lots of people were still out of town and others were presumably home gorging on leftovers. Most of our business was walk-in trade anyway. I wasn’t worried.
But then, as the sun went down, the fog rolled in. Fog in coastal Maine is like rain in Seattle. If we all stayed home because of it, we’d be home half the year. But this fog morphed into something more serious that our local weather people liked to call “frizzle.” As the temperature hit thirty-two degrees, the fog froze, leaving everything it touched—roads, cars, windows—coated in a thin, slippery veil of ice.
At 7:00 PM, Chris and I had stood looking at each other across the empty dining room. Perhaps no one would come at all.
“I’m going to put more sand on the walkway.” Chris wasn’t skilled at doing nothing. He’d done his kitchen prep. The pea soup was made, the stuffed chicken breasts prepared. The sweet and smoky aroma of slow-cooked braised short ribs wafted across the restaurant. It was the perfect do-ahead entree for our short-staffed kitchen.
“You just got back inside from the last time you sanded,” I had pointed out.
At that moment, we heard a car come to a stop. One car door slammed, followed by a second. Caroline and Henry Caswell descended the stairs into the restaurant.
“We’re so happy to see you!” I’d meant every word of it. I took their heavy wool coats and hung them up on the hooks that lined the wall outside the restrooms.
“You look lovely,” Caroline had said.
At night, I traded in my work boots and jeans for black slacks and a nice top. I pulled my hair back and put on a little makeup. The restaurant was supposed to be a casual gathering place but nice enough for a couple to have a “date night.” We had spruced it up with candles and checkered cloths over the linoleum tabletops. After New Year’s Eve, we’d be the only eat-in restaurant open in town, so we were trying to meet a lot of needs.