“Busy,” I said, which was a total lie. Without the dinner restaurant to run in the off-season, I wasn’t busy enough.

  “What’ll you have?”

  For lunch, Gus serves Maine hot dogs, which are bright red for some reason, hamburgers, grilled cheese, BLTs, and PB&J. In other words, things you could make for yourself at home. He accompanies them with the world’s best French fries, and you can’t do that at home.

  “BLT,” I said.

  “Burger.” Jamie didn’t add rare, medium, or well-done. He was too experienced a diner to attempt to tell Gus how to cook a burger. You got ’em the way he made ’em, and you didn’t complain.

  When Gus left, I looked around to make sure we wouldn’t be heard. Then I leaned toward Jamie. “I don’t get it. I mean, you know how Mrs. Zelisko lived. Third floor walk-up, no car, five black dresses, and a couple of sweaters. There is no way she spent the money she’d been conning people out of all these years.”

  “For some thieves, the thrill is in the stealing,” he said. “Not in spending the money. Not in the money at all.”

  I shook my head. “What I don’t get is how it happened. She’d just gotten to town when Barry Walker hired her. Barry’s disorganized, but she was handling his money. Why didn’t he check her references?”

  “The Star of the Sea Catholic church,” Jamie answered. “She met people there, and they trusted her. Barry Walker was the perfect early mark. He was desperate for help. He didn’t ask a lot of questions. With each new client, it got easier to get the next one. These people all knew one another. Each of them expected that someone had done the due diligence regarding references and such. If no one actually had, how would they know? After a while, it was embarrassing to ask.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Yup. It’s called affinity fraud. The original Ponzi’s victims were Italian-Americans from his own community. Bernie Madoff devasted Jewish foundations and charities. It’s how con artists gain trust. We get notices at the station all the time. Scam going through the evangelical community. Someone pitching fraudulent investments at Elk’s clubs. It’s how it’s done.”

  Gus arrived with our food, and the conversation turned to more cheerful topics. Jamie was going to Florida to see his parents for Thanksgiving. We made a plan to maybe see a movie sometime.

  Gus came back, and we paid him in cash, the only tender he accepted as legal.

  “Headed upstairs?” Jamie asked as he rose to leave.

  “No. I’m going to Mom’s. Page is still there. But before I do, I have an errand to run.”

  Gus waved as we walked back through the front room. “Don’t be such a stranger.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  On my way to Mom’s, I stopped at our neighbors, the Goldsmiths. “Harley graduated from high school last year, right?” I asked June Goldsmith after we said hello. She’d been surprised to find me on her porch.

  “She did. You would have been invited to the party, but I knew you’d be working out on Morrow Island.”

  I swiped with my hand to let her know not to stress about it. “Was Harley at that big party here in town on Halloween?”

  “The one where Mrs. Zelisko was murdered? No, thank goodness. Harley’s at UMaine Portland. She decided to stay on campus for Halloween weekend.” June looked at me expectantly, wondering where the conversation was going.

  “Did Harley leave her yearbook home, do you know? Could I borrow it overnight?”

  Whatever June Goldsmith had expected me to say, that wasn’t it. “I’ll quickly check her room.”

  She returned within minutes with the book, bound in “Busman’s High blue” faux leather, and handed it to me.

  “I’ll get it right back to you,” I said.

  “No hurry. I don’t expect Harley home until Thanksgiving.”

  When I got to Mom’s house, Page was at the kitchen table, textbook open, worksheet in front of her. School again tomorrow.

  I sat down next to her. “Do you have a lot to do?”

  She bit the eraser on her pencil. “Almost done.” There was a sheet of math problems in front of her, and she appeared to have a couple left.

  “Great. When you’re finished, come find me.”

  Mom was in the sitting room off her bedroom, watching Sunday programming on PBS. “Julia, what are you doing here?”

  “How come you still have Page?”

  “She’s upset. Sonny and Livvie both have work tomorrow. It’s hectic in their house in the mornings. They thought it might be better if Page had some quiet time here and a little space before she had to go to school and see all those kids. There’s bound to be a lot of chatter about the party and the murder. Livvie dropped clothes and her schoolwork off earlier. “

  I thought about mornings at Livvie’s house. Sonny would be long gone, off to help his father pull his lobster traps. Lobsters were scarce in November, and the weather would make work on the boat miserable, but the price the co-op paid was commensurately higher. Livvie would have her hands full getting Jack dressed and delivered to daycare before she went to her job at the pottery studio. She wouldn’t have time to give extra attention to Page.

  Livvie’s busy life contrasted starkly with my own. Empty apartment. No restaurant to run. Empty. Dark. Still. What was I doing with my life?

  “You didn’t answer my question.” Mom brought me back into the moment. “What are you doing here? You know you’re always welcome, but you weren’t expected.”

  There was never any point in trying to tiptoe around my mom. “The police still haven’t identified all the kids who were at the party. I got a yearbook from June Goldsmith. I want to go through it with Page to see if she recognizes any of the photos as people who were there.”

  My mother pursed her lips and squinted at me. “Is that a good idea? I’m supposed to be letting Page settle down and get ready for the week.”

  “I think it is!” I left the room before she could object further.

  Page and I met in her room, behind a closed door. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and Page seemed a whole lot happier about this activity than doing her homework, but I didn’t want my mother to feel the need to interrupt.

  I explained to Page that she hadn’t seen Howard Davies at the party. “But,” I said, “you did see someone. Someone dressed like they were older going up the stairs not long before you and Talia went to look for Mrs. Zelisko. I thought we could look through this yearbook to see if it was someone who’s already graduated. Did you see his face at all?”

  “I’m not sure. I may have seen it earlier, you know, before I saw his back going up the stairs.”

  We went slowly through the pages of the yearbook containing the senior photos. Page shook her head, no, no, no, with each turn of the page. It didn’t mean none of the kids had been at the party. It only meant she didn’t recognize them, but it didn’t represent progress. We looked at the rest of the book, including the photos of teams, clubs, performances. Page did recognize lots of those students and said some of them had been at the party. But in every case she’d already given the kid’s name to Binder and Flynn.

  When we closed the book, I sighed.

  “Don’t be sad, Aunt Julia,” Page said. “Even if the man I saw wasn’t Mr. Davies, he was a grown-up. He isn’t going to be in this yearbook.” Her face brightened, “Let’s see if we can find anyone on my Instagram.”

  “Do you have your phone?” I was surprised.

  “No.” She rolled her eyes. “But I can sign onto my account from yours.”

  “Didn’t Flynn ask you go through your social media on that first morning?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

  Page expertly signed onto her Instagram account from my phone and scrolled back in her feed to Friday night. The photos from her friends, taken in the thick of the action, were even more horrible than their leftover mess had caused me to imagine. Kids in gory, scary-looking costumes swilled from big liquor bottles, no doubt the ones stolen from the Davies. They danced in the dining room, made out in the corners, and threw up on the lawn.

  There were no photos of the actual moment Mrs. Zelisko fell from above. It must have happened too fast. The kids had been stunned, and then they’d run.

  Lots of the photos were pretty dark. It was hard to make out faces. Squeezed in next to Page, I squinted at the screen, looking for a man in a navy sweater and khakis.

  Then finally, she stopped scrolling. “Look!” She pointed to the edge of an image on her phone. “It’s him!”

  “How can you tell?” Only about a quarter of the figure was visible. The sliver of his face we could see was in profile. His hair was the same medium brown as Howard Davies’s. The man in the photo gestured into the frame with a hand and an arm covered in a navy-blue sweater. One long khaki pant leg ended in a blue sock and brown loafer. Definitely not a kid, unless he’d come in costume as his father. I peered at what I could see of the man’s face. He did look older, out of his teens. But it was hard to be sure with so little visible.

  We scrolled quickly after that, looking for better photos of the same man. We switched to the profile page of the girl who had taken the original photo. Nothing turned up anywhere.

  “We need to tell Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn about this,” I told Page. “Maybe this girl has more photos on her phone she didn’t upload.”

  “Okay.” Page was losing steam.

  “Text the photo to me along with the name of the girl who took the picture, and I’ll send the info along to the detectives. They’ll probably want to talk to you again.”

  “Sure.”

  Page did as I asked, but seemed deflated. Whether she was worried about about talking to the detectives again or school in the morning, I couldn’t tell. I forwarded the text with a brief explanation to Binder and Flynn.

  “I’m sorry all this happened,” I said.

  Page looked even more miserable. “It was our fault. If we hadn’t texted those other girls . . . If there hadn’t been a party . . .”

  “You didn’t murder Mrs. Zelisko.” I was firm.

  “But if we hadn’t—”

  “Aw, honey.” I hugged her. “I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Zelisko, but it’s clearer and clearer she wasn’t murdered by a kid at that party.”

  Page sniffled and nodded into my shoulder. I hoped Binder and Flynn would get back to me soon. We needed to get this case solved.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I didn’t hear back from the detectives that night, but they were at Gus’s restaurant when I came down from my apartment the next morning. For months, I’d been scuttling in and out through the back door, but in the spirit of desensitizing myself to the restaurant, I walked boldly through it.

  Gus, unusual for a restaurateur, was not a fan of out-of-towners. But the state-police detectives had eaten there frequently enough that they’d wormed their way into his good graces, such as they were.

  Binder called to me. “Julia, join us!” They already had their food in front of them, Binder, a western omelet, Flynn, as always, two soft-boiled eggs. Gus had also provided Flynn with two pieces of heavily buttered white toast. Flynn wouldn’t eat it, but it came with the order, and Gus duly brought it. Flynn’s abstemious ways bugged Gus as much as they bugged Vee Snugg. The detectives would probably be finished before I got served, but I sat down anyway.

  “Thanks for the photo,” Binder said. He pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and opened my text. He put on his reading glasses and squinted. “Not much to go on, but more than we had before.”

  Flynn also had his phone out. “Unknown victim, unknown suspect. This case gets better and better.”

  “We have an expert going through Mrs. Zelisko’s laptop, trying to figure out how much she stole, who she stole it from, and how she did it,” Binder said. “We sent the fabric we took from the chandelier to the lab. And we described what might have happened to the medical examiner. She’s going to let us know if the injuries to the body are consistent with that scenario. We’re making progress, but it feels like we’re not.”

  “Too many possibilities,” Flynn said. “Was it someone Zelisko stole from here in town, or maybe in her past life? But since we don’t know anything about her past life, we don’t know who that might have been. And then there’s this guy.” Flynn tapped the photo on his phone.

  “Page says she’s never seen him before, if that helps,” I offered.

  “It would have been more helpful if she had,” Flynn groused.

  * * *

  After breakfast, I went back upstairs to my apartment. Flynn was right. We didn’t know who Mrs. Zelisko was. And we didn’t know where she’d come from.

  Why had she stepped up the stealing four months ago? The answer had to be that the Davies had arrived in town and become her landlords. What about the Davies had scared her to the point that she started planning to run, if that was what she was doing? Howard worked at the oceanographic lab. Blair was an elementary school teacher. Talia was thirteen. They were the opposite of scary.

  The most logical answer was it had something to do not with who the Davies were, but where they came from.

  I got out my laptop and settled onto my couch for a good search. Luckily, Medview, Massachusetts, had a local paper, and the local paper had put ten years of its archives online. That seemed like a fruitful avenue. I paid a little money, and I was in.

  First, I tried searching for “Zelisko,” though that was almost certainly not her name. “Embezzled” got me an article about a local manufacturing company whose treasurer had disappeared with millions. A compelling story, but not the one I was looking for. “Bookkeeper” got me a lot of links to old help-wanted ads.

  I searched the edition for New Year’s Day, five years back. Everyone agreed Mrs. Zelisko had arrived in Busman’s Harbor around then. There was nothing of note in that day’s paper, so I scrolled one week back, to December 25.

  The format of the online paper immediately changed. Rather than a fully searchable online version, the archives from five years earlier and before were images of the actual paper that had been digitized and put online. This format, which I could skim, might be more useful.

  Even though the paper was weekly, that still left a lot of pages to go through. I figured if Mrs. Zelisko had disappeared from Busman’s Harbor, having stolen from a dozen town merchants, it would be a huge story in our Gazette. So I decided to read backward through the issues of the Medview paper, examining front pages only.

  By the time I finished looking at three years’ worth, 150 front pages, I began to wonder if I was crazy. But I couldn’t think of what else to do. Page was hurting, as were Vanessa and Talia. Barry, Mr. Gordon, and Al Gleason were angry, confused, and scared. And somewhere out there, there was probably a family, maybe a distant one, that deserved to know that Mrs. Zelisko, or whatever her name was, was dead.

  I stood and stretched, rolling my head around on my shoulders to release the tension in my neck. Downstairs, Gus’s was quiet, in the lull between breakfast and lunch. I got a glass of ice water from my kitchen and settled back onto the couch.

  I was nine years back when I found it. A Mrs. Irene Chumley, who worked as a bookkeeper for many small businesses in Medview, had disappeared into the night, taking with her money that belonged to her clients and leaving them with a mountain of debt. Several former clients were quoted in the article—the owners of an appliance store, a shoe repair shop, a small dry-cleaning chain, and a delicatessen. None of those interviewed knew anything about Mrs. Chumley, except that she spoke with an Irish accent and was a devoted member and enthusiastic volunteer at St. Theresa’s Catholic church in Medview.

  My heart hammered in my chest. Finally, progress. Irene Chumley and Helene Zelisko had to be the same woman. They had the same M.O.

  Now that I’d spotted the front-page article, I scrolled forward in time, examining the inside pages of the paper. There were follow-up stories about Mrs. Chumley. The local police had coordinated with the FBI. Tragically, several of the businesses she’d stolen from had failed, including the appliance store and the shoe repair shop.

  Hands shaking, I called Flynn.

  He didn’t bother to say hello. “We’re about to talk to the Davies about that photo you found. Do you want to come along? They’re still at the Snuggles.”

  “I’ll be right there. I have some information that may be helpful when you talk to them.”

  * * *

  Binder and Flynn were already inside when I arrived at the Snuggles Inn. The Davies’ bags, two carry-on-sized suitcases and a backpack, waited in the front hall. The family was packed and ready to go home.

  Everyone was in the inn’s formal living room. The Davies sat on the antique couch. The detectives were seated in straight-backed chairs across from them. Vee and Fee hovered in the background, dying to know what was happening. There was a fire going in the hearth. Mackie snoozed on the oriental carpet.

  Howard Davies held a photo in front of him, a blown-up version of the one I’d texted to the detectives. Blair and Talia sat on either side of him. All three squinted as he turned the photo from side to side.

  “I don’t recognize him,” Howard said. “I can certainly see why someone would think it was me. We were dressed almost identically.”

  Blair took the photo and brought it closer to her face. “He does look older. Too old to be at a teenage party, though I can’t really tell how old.”

  “Talia, did you see this man at the party?” Binder asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Page saw him going up the stairs fifteen minutes or so before you both went up to find Mrs. Zelisko,” Binder said. “Does that help you remember?”

  Talia shook her head. “No.”

  I cleared my throat. “I think I know something about Mrs. Zelisko. She worked in your old hometown of Medview as a bookkeeper.” Binder and Flynn whipped their heads around to stare at me, but they didn’t stop me, so I continued. “She called herself Mrs. Irene Chumley. She disappeared nine years ago, after stealing from her clients. Several businesses closed due to their losses. Does any of this sound familiar?”

 

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