“Are you gossiping about me again, Penelope?” said the Paris Hilton clone, her perfectly lined and expensively glossed lips forming the words with fashionably blasé haughtiness.
Meanwhile, my lips—coated with the current flavor of lip balm stocked by Koh’s grocery—refused to form a coherent word, let alone an entire sentence. I just stood there, dumb as a post.
“I’m surprised you don’t recognize me, cousin,” the woman continued, her eyes level with mine.
Desperately I searched my mind for a memory hook.
I got nothing.
Fiona attempted to break the Titanic-worthy glacial wall. “Oh, ah, Ms. Langdon,” she chirped. “How very nice to see you this afternoon. Did you enjoy your time on the sun porch?”
The freeze queen ignored Fiona’s query and fixed her shark-blue expression on me.
By now I’d recovered from my initial shock. First I greeted my sister-in-law, then I met Kiki Langdon’s disdainful gaze with a hard look of my own. “I’m sorry,” I said evenly. “Have we met before?”
Suddenly, Ashley cut loose.
“My God, Penelope,” she cried. “Don’t play innocent with me. Ever since you let—” She gritted her movie star teeth, a cool $50,000 in dental, according to my late husband. “Since Calvin died, I mean, you’ve done nothing but hurt my family.”
“What?!” I cried. The McClures cast as victims of my cruel and evil machinations was certainly a unique perspective. One I didn’t share.
“You poison Calvin’s only child against his relatives, you shun our offers of financial support. On top of that, you come back to this town—for what? To set up in some pathetic, barely break-even, small-time business!”
I was ready to protest, but Sadie leaped into the fray. “More honest than you lot of inside-traders.” Her veined hands clenched into fists as she moved menacingly toward Ashley.
You, go, Sadie, I thought, seeing Ashley step back, her sneer faltering. I wasn’t surprised. My elderly aunt’s temper had reached the level of local legend. There was that pick-pocket she’d spotted while reading on the Quindicott Commons and had beaned with a frontlist Anne Perry from two benches away. And, of course, everyone knew the story of the shoplifter whom she’d caught stuffing a Hammett first edition down his pants. She’d taken him out with a Patricia Cornwell to the head.
“I’m talking to Pen about a private family matter,” Ashley told Sadie, her disdainful tone turning almost whiny. “She deliberately hurt her own cousin on one of the most important weeks of her life.”
If this was a joke, I was waiting for the punchline. “Hurt my own cousin?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play innocent with me. It won’t work. You invited that Stark creature to speak at your bookstore, didn’t you? ’Nuf said.” With that, Ashley’s French-manicured fingers shoved the Journal into my hands, then she grabbed Kiki’s arm, pushed past us, and swept up the stairs.
Aunt Sadie, Fiona, and I stood in stunned silence for a moment.
“What just happened?” I asked as Sadie took the paper from my hands.
“Oh, dear,” she said, skimming the newsprint. “I understand now.”
“What?”
She held it up, her finger pointing to the big, bold letters of a society page headline:
Engagements Announced
EASTERBROOK-LANGDON
Donald Easterbrook, Jr. of New York and London to Katherine “Kiki” McClure Langdon of Greenwich. Newport wedding planned . . .
“Oh, hell.” For the life of me, I didn’t remember Kiki Langdon. I did vaguely recall pretty, little blonde “cousin Katherine” from McClure family functions long past. From Ashley’s perspective, however, the sin was understandable—and her outrage, for once, truly justified.
Bethany Banks’s murder had come and gone with the usual glaringly intense then fading press coverage—yet never once had the names of Bethany’s prominent friends been bandied about on a national scale.
With Angel Stark’s new book, all that had changed. Without knowing it, I’d rolled out the red carpet to a woman whose brand-new instant best-seller had dragged the name of my late husband’s cousin—and her new fiancé—through mud higher than an L.L. Bean boot.
CHAPTER 11
Grisly Discovery
Murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with soft graying hair.
—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay”
“FIONA! HEY, FIONA!”
We looked up from the paper to find Seymour Tarnish’s big, heavy shoes clomping across the wooden wraparound porch. He wore his summer post office attire, a bulky mail sack slung over his rounded shoulders, his tree-trunk legs protruding from the blue uniform shorts.
“Fiona, come with me! Quick!” Seymour called, sweat glistening below his receding brown hairline. “Pen, Sadie!” he added when he saw us. “You come, too.”
“Come where?” I asked. We’d all assumed he’d arrived to deliver the mail, as usual. Instead, his skin looked flush, his eyes excited. Then he was turning and moving off the porch again. “You won’t believe it if I tell you. Just follow me.”
Outside the Finch Inn, the wind had kicked up and the low-hanging branches of the surrounding willows hissed ominously. An errant cloud crossed the afternoon sun, casting a sudden pall over the Inn and the manicured grounds around it. On the nearby shore of the Quindicott Pond, the tide had receded and the air smelled faintly of drying seaweed and rotting flotsam.
As we stepped off the porch and onto the footpath leading to the lake, the bark of a siren sounded. Just a short burst, like the cry of a wounded animal. Then a Rhode Island State Police car raced up the drive, its roof lights flashing. But instead of pulling up to the Inn’s front door, the vehicle abruptly swerved off the roadway, across a swath of Barney’s carefully manicured grass, and onto the narrow birder’s trail that roughly paralleled the shore of the inlet. In a cloud of dust and a cascade of willow leaves, the squad car zoomed farther, past the wood frame and masonry foundation of the restaurant’s construction site.
Only then did I notice that far down the trail, just before the path was completely obscured by thick, wild greenery, a Quindicott Police cruiser was already on the trail, and its emergency lights were also flashing. Yellow tape emblazoned with the words POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS had already been strung across the path to keep out the public.
When the State Police car halted, the cloud it kicked up rolled over it, coating the black and white vehicle with a fine powder. Out of that same billowing dust a figure emerged. Fiona’s husband, Barney Finch. Tall and gangly, his bald pate shiny under a sheen of perspiration, the older man seemed agitated, and he was stumbling as he walked up the path.
Sadie and I hurriedly followed Seymour, meeting up with Barney just where the trail grass ended and the unpaved wilderness trail began. Fiona saw the stunned expression on her husband’s face.
“Barney! My God, what happened?”
Barney’s lips moved, as he gestured toward the police cars, but no words were forthcoming.
“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Fiona begged.
Seymour was the one who obliged. “There’s a corpse floating in the Pond. Old Lyle Talbot was angling up the trail there, and he saw something fishy in the shallows . . . only it wasn’t a fish.”