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  Murder at Teatime

  A Charlotte Graham Mystery

  Stefanie Matteson

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For My Father

  1

  Charlotte Graham stood on the landing and waved goodbye to her friend Stan Saunders. At her back was the base of a hillside on a spruce-covered island off the coast of Maine. In front of her was the channel that separated the island from the mainland, its swells crowned by whitecaps. With her white skin, black hair, and tailored white blouse and black suit, she looked as natural against the gray water and rocky shore as an elegant, long-legged sea bird. Now in her early sixties, she was still as regal as ever: the prominent jaw with its wide, generous mouth, the broad-shouldered figure that was so well-suited to the starkly tailored fashions that were her trademark—these were attributes that had borne the years lightly. The glossy black hair, once worn in a famous pageboy, was now pulled back in a tight chignon, but no one could have mistaken the brisk, stylish stride that was as much a part of her image as her clipped Yankee accent. One of the most famous movie stars of her day, she was revered by the American public not only for her talent but also for her courage. In an age when studio makeup men had turned starlets into look-alike glamor girls, she had forbidden them to tamper with her heavy black eyebrows; in an age when female stars could be either clotheshorses or sexpots, she had fought bitterly for substantial roles, and had gotten them; and in an age when a few wrinkles spelled the end of a Hollywood career, she had gone on to triumph on Broadway.

  Which is what had brought her to this rugged island. For the first time in years she had nothing to do. As of Memorial Day she had been replaced in The Trouble With Murder. She had asked to leave: for two years the show had been her life and the Morosco Theatre her home. But the longer a show runs, the more difficult it is to keep fresh, and she had had enough. For the moment. The critics had hailed her performance “the triumphant conclusion of a brilliant career.” Conclusion like hell. For the last twenty years the critics had been prophesying the twilight of her career. But she’d always proven them wrong. One had once cracked that her career had been recycled more times than a reusable soda bottle. The truth was, she needed to work. She didn’t know anything else; she wasn’t happy doing anything else. She would prove them wrong again. Meanwhile, she was treating herself to a much-needed vacation with her old friends Stan and Kitty Saunders.

  It was a desolate spot to pick for a retirement home, she thought as she watched Stan guide his boat around the flank of the island. But it was ideal for Stan, who in his retirement was making a name for himself as a seascape painter. She had been friends with the Saunders for more than forty years. They had met on Cape Cod, where she and Kitty had been playing in summer stock, and Stan had been playing bohemian artist. Kitty and Stan had later married and had a family, forcing Stan to trade in his brushes for a more lucrative career in public relations. But he had never given up his dream of becoming a full-time painter. Now he was back in the same place he had been forty years ago. For that matter, so was Charlotte, though she had been there many times before: trying to find work—it was the chronic plight of the actor.

  But she wasn’t going to think about it now. Something would turn up—it always did. She looked up: all she had to think about now was getting to the top of the hill. Stan and Kitty’s house was on the west end of the island, but Stan had dropped her off on the landing because she wanted to see the Ledges. The Ledges was the garden for which the island was famous. Not a garden exactly, but a network of winding stone-stepped paths and terraces sculpted out of the rocky hillside overlooking the channel. Rustic shelters and lookout benches were perched here and there for taking in the view of the harbor. Kitty had insisted that arriving via the Ledges was the only way to get the full flavor of the island. The Ledges was the life’s work of a man named J. Franklin Thornhill, a professor of economic botany and an amateur landscape architect, who spent his summers in a cottage called Ledge House at the top of the hill.

  From her vantage point Charlotte could see little more than the evergreen-studded hillside and the pink granite steps that marked the beginning of the path. Taking a deep breath of sweet sea air, pungent with the scent of rockweed, she set off toward the steps. After the pitch and roll of Stan’s boat, the rocks under her feet felt very comforting. Manhattan suddenly seemed far, far away. Beyond the first few steps, the path took on the character of a wild rock garden. Lichens and mosses in various shades of green and gray clothed the rocks and tree trunks. Sheep laurel and low-bush blueberries, whose greenish fruits were already beginning to turn, nestled among the ledges. The woodsy scent of the blueberries, overlaid by the resiny scent of the balsam firs that blanketed the hillside, hung heavy in the warm afternoon air. Smell was said to be the most evocative of the senses, and surely no other sense could more keenly call to mind a time in which one was something else, maybe something better. For Charlotte, the smell of blueberries evoked memories of picking blueberries on Cape Cod with Stan and Kitty years ago. She remembered their innocence, but oddly enough had little recollection of her own.

  Perhaps she’d always been cynical. Kitty’s dream had always been to live with her family in a little white cottage surrounded by pink roses and a white picket fence, to greet her husband at the door at six with a martini in her hand and two charming children clinging to her skirts. If Charlotte had ever dreamed of a little white cottage, the dream had long ago been sacrificed to her career. Along with a few other things, like children. She had no regrets, but she sometimes envied Kitty the neatness of her life. Everything at the right time, in the right order. Smooth sailing all the way. How harmonious (if maybe a bit boring) to have had only one husband instead of four. Even though she’d had plenty of time to get used to it, the number—four—still offended her sense of order. She blamed her marital history on her Yankee heritage: her Yankee sense of propriety kept driving her back to the altar, and her Yankee sense of independence kept driving her away.

  As the path ascended the hillside it became more shady. Ferns sprang from crevices in the granite slabs. Rustic cedar-log bridges crossed mossy rivulets that cascaded down the hillside. Pitch pines clung to weathered crags, their trunks dwarfed and gnarled like bonsai by the wind. Through the branches she occasionally caught a glimpse of the harbor. She could hear the rumble of engines as the boats came and went. Just as she was beginning to get winded, she saw a path leading off to the first of the shelters, a cedar pavilion built into the face of a huge granite bluff, like the shelter in a Japanese landscape painting. A few minutes later she was sitting in a wooden chair, her chest heaving. She was in good shape for a woman of her age, but she wasn’t used to climbing cliffs. The view was every bit as spectacular as Kitty had led her to believe. The shelter seemed to be suspended in the air above the channel, the sides and roof forming a frame in which the harbor and the town of Bridge Harbor hovered between sea and sky in a nest of green hills. To the west lay the mansion-dotted shoreline that had once made Bridge Harbor the queen of summer resorts. To the east lay the bay, stretching away toward the horizon, its low-lying islands blending into a mass of soft, slate blue. Beyond the bay lay the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, and beyond that, the shores of Spain. She was reminded of the opening lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay: “All I could see from where I stood/Was three long mountains and a wood/I turned and looked the other way/And saw three islands in a bay.”

  After resting for a moment, she headed back to the main path. Stopping for a moment on a little bridge, she looked out at the streamlet that flowed between th
e walls of a fissure in a granite outcropping. At the foot of the outcropping, she could see the slipperlike sac of a pink lady-slipper growing under a huckleberry bush. Then she noticed another, and another. They were all over the place. They were now so rare it was unusual to see one, let alone dozens. She loved the sac with its delicate veins and its deep cleft. Stepping off the path for a closer look, she noticed a glint of blond out of the corner of her eye. She caught her breath. Pushing back the undergrowth, she felt her stomach contract. Hidden beneath the boughs of a juniper bush overhanging the streamlet lay the dead body of a golden retriever. The dog’s head rested in a pool of vomit. The soft reddish-gold tendrils of fur were already beginning to dry into a stiff, brown mat. His lips were lined by white froth, and his protruding eyes were ringed by a circle of red. “The poor thing,” she said to herself. Kneeling down, she felt the dog’s stomach, which was already beginning to swell. He’d been dead for only fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she guessed. Gently, she ran her hands over the body. No wounds. Maybe he had died of some disease, but she doubted it; it looked as if he’d suddenly been taken ill. Maybe he had come to the streamlet for water.

  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 ca
sh 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.”