Death in the Family Read online

  I cut my eyes at him again, unsure of what I’d see—the trace of a smile, maybe, or a smidgen of quiet glee. Tim was downplaying the situation. A murder, even a missing persons case, on one of the islands was unheard of. McIntyre made that clear when she hired me. So I guess I thought Tim would be excited. I know plenty of cops in the city who’d get a big thrill from a case like this, in a place where they happen every day. If Tim was pumped, he didn’t show it. His expression was solemn, his lips a neutral line.

  I turned the wheel, trading the easy swish of the highway for the hard crackle of gravel road, and there was the river. Damn, but the water was high. The summer had broken all kinds of records for flooding, the water level three feet higher than the norm. I’d read it hadn’t been like this since 1973. The damage was already bad, and now, with a nor’easter, it was going to get much worse.

  I pulled the car onto a patch of grass waterlogged with rain and peered dubiously at the sky through the windshield one last time. Tim’s eyes were on the boat. The folks at headquarters, Tim included, had been more excited about the police vessel’s arrival than about mine. We came at the same time: the new plaything courtesy of a special fund administered by the U.S. Coast Guard, me courtesy of a fiancé and a need to get the hell out of the city. I guess I couldn’t blame them. Even I could appreciate the boat’s tantalizing, new-toy shine. When Tim saw the size of the waves on the river, the loving look on his face was replaced with a frown.

  “Okay, then,” he said brightly while baring his teeth. “Ready?”

  “Now or never,” I replied, and we stepped outside. Puffs of breath lingered ghostlike in front of us as we splashed toward the reedy edge of the St. Lawrence River, where the waves smacked the boat against the dock. The thing was small and exposed with a flimsy navy canopy—Tim called it a T-Top—that snapped in the wind. I pulled the hood of my rain jacket over my hair, kinky from the humidity. Acres of naked fields lay to the south of us, endless water to the north. The isolation of the place was jarring.

  Upstate New York. I’d pictured it as nowheresville, a mishmash of farmers’ fields and dilapidated barns, and I wasn’t wrong. The towns are small, the people as down-to-earth as they come. It’s a patriotic part of the country, but every American flag looked as if it had been flying since the thirties, abandoned to the elements, bleached out and threadbare. Something about those flags seemed vulgar, like Lady Liberty’s been subjected to an upskirt. I keep that opinion to myself. Both Tim and my fiancé are locals, born and bred on the river, so I also don’t tell them it still comes as a shock when I wake up in the morning and find myself here. Instead of investigating homicides with the NYPD on the Lower East Side, I’m fighting crime for the New York State Park Police in a place where violent crime doesn’t exist. Until, one day, it does.

  “Weekend on the river’s what the caretaker said,” Tim called from on board the boat. “They’re cutting it real close.”

  Manhattan’s chilly in October, but I’d been told it could get arctic in the Thousand Islands. Even a weak fall system’s likely to be nasty. Past the boat the bay was the color of thunder, and rain ricocheted off the water’s surface with such fury I could barely make out Comfort Island a quarter mile away. It was the closest island to that part of the mainland, one of the few I knew by name. Comfort Island looked the opposite of comforting in the stormy morning light.

  “Guess you wish you’d taken that trip to see your parents,” Tim said, exposing the boat’s controls and seat cushions, tucking covers into storage bins. Now that I was living closer to my home state, I’d been driving to Vermont on a regular basis. If not for the storm, I’d be there now.

  “And miss all this?” I said as a gust of wind doused my face with cold rain.

  Tim dug into his pocket and came out with a key attached to a red float. “Flip you for it.”

  “Funny. The lines?” I knew what to do with those, at least. Tim started the engine as I waded across the dock, which was six inches underwater, and freed the boat from the cleats. I huddled inside the tiny console and stayed out of Tim’s way while he nudged us out of the slip. Only when we were off did I realize I’d left my gloves in the car. Rain hammered at the T-Top and stung my face as we lurched forward and sped across the water toward the island.

  The very first thing my fiancé told me about the Thousand Islands was that the label’s a lie. There are actually 1,864 rocky patches of land along the stretch of St. Lawrence that divides Ontario from New York State. A century ago the area was as posh as the Hamptons, the go-to summer getaway for millionaire titans of industry and the upper crust of New York. Many of them still own property on the river. According to Carson, the proprietor of the Waldorf Astoria once commissioned a hundred-and-twenty-room mansion for his wife only to watch her die before it was done. If the legend’s true, the man never returned to it again. What strikes me isn’t that he lost his bride, but that he didn’t see that outcome coming. He named the place Heart Island. Some ironies are too tempting for the universe to resist.

  It was rougher out than I expected, and I’d expected rough. Under the water, shoals lay in wait, their teeth big enough to tear through boats as if they were made of matchsticks. When we entered the channel I felt the current’s fierce pull. The channel was for freighters bringing Canadian wheat and iron ore from the Great Lakes over to Europe, but there were no tankers on the water today. No other boats at all.

  We were halfway there before Tim revealed our destination. Tern Island, on the U.S. side. This island wasn’t open to the public like Wellesley (American) or Wolfe (Canadian), but privately owned.

  “You told them to stay put, right? Not to disturb the scene?” I shouted over the shriek of the wind. In my old job, the scene of the crime was never more than ten minutes away. The fact that our cruiser could scream out of the parking lot and bully its way through the streets like a tank was a source of pride to me, but getting to an island isn’t something you can rush. Thinking about all the things the people on it could get up to before we arrived filled me with dread.

  Tim laughed. “They’ve only got one boat in the water, and it’s a skiff—a little motorboat for getting back and forth from shore. It’d take three trips to transport everyone to the mainland, and they’d be crazy to do it now. Don’t you feel it? The swell of the water?” he said. “The currents are insane. Anyway, it’s just up here, past Deer Island.”

  Deer Island. That was another one I’d heard about from Carson. It had once been a retreat for a Yale secret society called Skull and Bones; now its dense trees and derelict lodge made it look as sinister as a horror-movie set. A chill danced up my spine as we raced past it, but the landmass quickly disappeared, sucked back into the fog.

  I’d been bracing myself against the knocks and jolts of our boat in the choppy water, but wasn’t prepared when Tim shouted, “Shit! Hang on!” He jerked the wheel to dodge a near-invisible shoal, and I barely managed to avoid tumbling overboard as a wave breached the gunwale, dousing me with icy water. The skin on my thighs burned and my pulse pounded in my ears. Along with the storm, the sound was deafening.

  “Not a great place to take a life if you hope to keep your freedom.” I dug my fingernails into the back of Tim’s leather seat. “Why here? Why now, when it’s so hard to get away?”

  “You’re thinking suicide, then,” Tim said.

  Like me, he was remembering the caretaker’s report. How the missing man’s family was tucked in bed all night. Now, I’m not prone to churning out conjecture like assembly-line muffins. I like my theories fully baked before I share them with a partner. But this guy’s disappearance, and the caretaker’s call, and the timing of it all was strange, and I wanted to know what was going on inside Tim’s head. “Stabs himself next to his girlfriend and stumbles over a cliff? It could happen,” I said.

  “There are easier ways to kill yourself on an island.”

  “And why risk alerting
someone to your plan?”

  “Unless he wanted her to know,” said Tim. “Who’s to say what kind of relationship they had?”

  “Some people are messed up,” I agreed. “But the caretaker said murder.”

  “And if they aren’t suggesting suicide, there’s a reason for that.”

  “Eight people.” I rubbed my nose, numb now from the cold. “This is going to take some time.”

  “We’ll have help,” Tim reminded me as the boat arced left. “We’ll need it. Made it. Whew.”

  I didn’t know what Tern Island would look like. I wouldn’t have been able to find it on a map. When it finally emerged from the mist, it was like the peak of a mountain had busted through the water and rumbled skyward.

  “Would you look at this place?” Tim said as we tipped back our heads to take it all in. Though he’d seen it a million times before, he was as awestruck as I was.

  Tern was all jagged gray rock crowned by a massive Victorian house with a jumble of stories pockmarked by windows of various shapes and sizes. A turret thrust into the sky like a fist. The siding was forest green, as if the house was trying to blend in with the thick trees that surrounded it. As if it could. There was a matching boathouse at the river’s edge, and the entire island was bordered by a high stone wall that might as well have been painted with the words Keep Out. A staircase so steep it was nearly vertical extended from the boathouse all the way to the island’s summit. The house’s foundation was stonework, too.

  A nor’easter was no match for this place. No storm was. Someone had invested a fortune in masonry work to make sure Tern Island could withstand anything. But from that house a man was missing, possibly dead. I wasn’t sure the island would withstand that.

  TWO

  There’s history here—real-life aristocracy. This is where America’s elite come to play.

  These words, Carson’s words, swam to the surface of my memory as Tim navigated the boat toward the island’s shore. My fiancé hoped the romance of the place and its extreme wealth would woo me. He wanted to make sure I was on board with the idea of moving here, so he kept trying to convince me, even as I rode next to him in the rental van that contained everything we owned. “It’s peaceful,” Carson said, squeezing my knee and flashing a smile. When I twined my fingers with his he added, “You’ll love it, Shay. People come here to leave their worries behind. We can do the same. You’ll see.”

  If only it was that easy. We’d been here a handful of months, he and I, and already I was causing Carson more consternation than I had throughout the whole of our relationship. If he knew what I was about to do, I thought as I craned my neck to see the house atop Tern Island, he might wonder if coming upstate was such a good idea after all.

  A voice reached us through the wind in increments and I spotted a man in a heavy rain poncho standing at the end of the island’s dock. This dock was underwater, too—the whole thing plunged below the surface of the river, and the sight of him on its slick, algae-coated planks so far out in the river made me feel ill. One big swell and he’s a goner, I thought, but the man seemed surprisingly steady. He opened his canvas-clad arms, and for an eyeblink he was Christ the Redeemer guiding us to port.

  “Looks like he wants us docked in the boathouse,” Tim said, wiping rain from his eyes with the back of his hand. “Should be plenty of room if there’s only the one other vessel.”

  I looked to the left in time to see the boathouse doors lift and expose a cavernous space. My parents’ whole house in Swanton would’ve fit inside, with room to spare. There was an empty slip next to the skiff Tim said they used to ferry guests to and from the island. The little vessel looked toylike, way too small for a boathouse of this size. On the building’s interior wall I spotted a wooden sign decorated with curly gold script. It was the kind of thing you’d affix to the back of a yacht or a sailboat, the equivalent of vanity plates for your car.

  “Loophole,” I read. “Either these people have a sense of humor or they found an awesome tax attorney.”

  “I wonder where Loophole is now,” Tim said as he glided our boat inside. “The owners of this place come from old money. They’re what the guides on tour boats call a family of the Gilded Age. It’s weird all they’ve got is this puny skiff.”

  Just as we were about to get out of the rain, one last manic gust of wind blasted me from behind. It was as violent as a shove. “What else do you know about them?” I lowered my voice before asking. In the shelter of the structure it was quieter, and the man in the poncho waited nearby.

  “Not much, but this island’s always been one of my favorites. The house was built in the late 1800s, I think. I’ve seen old photos of it in shambles, but it was bought and fixed up in the forties. Far as I know, it hasn’t changed hands since. Islands rarely go up for sale,” Tim added. “When they do, it’s a feeding frenzy. Can’t wait to see what the house is like inside.”

  I didn’t question Tim’s knowledge about an island he’d only ever seen from the water or the people he’d never met. Tim could tell you which Canadian newspaper mogul just embedded a man-made waterfall into his island’s cliff face, and which nineteenth-century tobacco tycoon’s family funded the expansion of the area’s most prestigious golf resort. Carson thought of himself as the authority on the region, but my colleague had him beat. Part of that’s because of Tim’s job: a small-town investigator gets around. The few times I mentioned Tim’s expertise to Carson, Carson got testy and changed the subject. Nobody likes being told they don’t know the lay of their own backyard.

  Inside, the boathouse smelled of wet wood with an undercurrent of rotting fish. The thump of our fenders as Tim flipped them over the side of the boat, the slap of water against the interior walls . . . noises fell in a way that made me uneasy. The place was too empty, too quiet. Quickly, I disembarked.

  “Thank God you’re here, I was worried you wouldn’t make it. Philip Norton,” the man said as he tied up our vessel, yanking the lines tight with ease. “I’m the one who called.”

  “You’re the caretaker?” I asked.

  “Caretaker, cook, housekeeping staff. I do it all.”

  “I’m Investigator Tim Wellington,” Tim said, his eyes lingering on Norton’s face. “And this is Senior Investigator Shana Merchant.”

  Even with his hood up, I could see Norton’s bald head and neck blended seamlessly. I suspected that underneath the poncho his body was similarly bare and square. Eyebrows and lashes so blond they were almost white disappeared against his skin. His cheeks were pudgy and his eyes too small, like raisins in an underbaked bun, but the effect was endearing. “No remote,” Norton explained as he hit a button on the wall to close the boathouse door. Then he grimaced in my direction and said, “Please excuse the smell.”

  I came across men like this sometimes, older guys who couldn’t fathom how a woman could be a cop, or that I’d come to this work willingly and was better at it than most. I got the sense it was my femaleness that brought the color to Norton’s cheeks, but it could just as easily have been my scar. “Mink trouble,” the man said apologetically, and it took me a second to catch up. He meant the smell, but when I heard mink trouble all I could think of was a rich lady’s fur coat, a stain the cleaners couldn’t get out.

  “Ah,” Tim said. “Those buggers can make a real mess. As long as they’re leaving their leftovers down here and staying clear of the house, though.”

  “Isn’t that the truth. We had a trapper up here yesterday, just in case.”

  Tim said, “A trapper, huh?”

  A stranger on the island. So that’s what Norton was holding back when Tim asked him about intruders on the phone.

  “Local guy I found in town. Shifty fella, I didn’t like him,” Norton said. “He disturbed the nests—the ones made by the geese. Nothing in ’em now, of course, but the birds’ll be back in spring and they like the sunny side of the island. He should have k
nown that.”

  “How long was he out here?” Tim asked.

  “Oh, hours. Morning to midafternoon.”

  “Did he have any luck? I’m surprised the flooding didn’t chase the mink out of here.”

  “Maybe it did,” replied Norton. “He looked and looked, but he couldn’t find them.”

  “Mr. Norton,” I said, getting antsy. “What can you tell us about last night?”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Tim flinch. We were still trying to get a read on each other’s methods. I had a feeling he’d prefer to ease into it, keep the small talk going, knowing a relaxed witness is likely to let something slip. But a man was missing, and there was a crime scene inside that might be getting more contaminated by the second. The trapper would stay on my radar, but we needed to move on, and questioning Norton right there on the dock was about simple math. Up in that house there were seven other people, all of whom would need to be interviewed. I saw my chance to get a head start, and I took it.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Norton said. “I’ve known Jasper since he was six years old. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Murder rarely does. “This must be tough, then,” I said. “Try to think back. Anything out of the ordinary happen yesterday?”

  “Well, the family did their own thing until cocktail hour. Everyone was together for that, I know. After dinner they had some more drinks. A couple of ’em went to bed on the early side—Miss Beaudry was one of those. Jasper stayed up, I’m not sure how long. I turned in pretty early myself. It was a long day for me, prepping to welcome Miss Beaudry and the others, and I slept like the dead. Like a log,” he said quickly, mortified. “Next thing I know, it’s morning and she’s screaming her head off.” He scrubbed his temples as if trying to dislodge the memory from his mind.