Dead at Breakfast Read online

  “Of course you are,” Hope murmured. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  Cherry went on being buffeted by the storm of her own tears.

  “Do you know why they took you last night?” Hope asked. “Did they tell you?”

  Cherry managed to say, “They just kept asking me why I was there, watching the fire that night.”

  “You were there?”

  The girl nodded and wept.

  “You’d gone home, but then you came back?” Hope asked.

  Cherry nodded again. “My dad’s a fireman. So.”

  Hope and Maggie’s eyes met briefly.

  “Whenever there’s a fire, you go?”

  “If I’m home, and I hear the call go out.”

  There was a silence. Hope handed Cherry a packet of tissues from her knitting bag, as the sobs were finally subsiding. Being listened to instead of badgered was having a calming effect. Cherry mopped at what was left of last night’s mascara, mostly on her cheeks, and blew her nose.

  “How do you hear the call?”

  Cherry looked puzzled by the question.

  “On the scanner.”

  “You have a police scanner?”

  “My mom does. In the kitchen.” As if to say, don’t you?

  “Is she connected to the police in some way, your mother?”

  “No. You just have them to, you know. Know what’s going on.”

  “Does your mother go to fires too?”

  “Not unless it’s someone she knows. I go to see my dad. To see he’s all right. And, like, to see him.”

  “Ah,” said Hope. “I hope you explained that to the police last night.”

  Cherry shook her head dismissively. “They weren’t listening to me. They were just like ‘Why did you do it?’ Over and over.”

  Both women knew this wasn’t good. Everyone in the inn knew she’d resented Mr. Antippas, and had a blowup with Mr. Gurrell. Still, the police couldn’t really think that this scattered little thing could have . . . did they? Could she have?

  “Does your father know? That you come to watch him fight fires?”

  Cherry shrugged.

  “You never talked about it?” Hope asked.

  Cherry shook her head. “He’s real busy.”

  “Has anyone called him? Does he know what’s happened to you?”

  “He wasn’t home.”

  There was another silence. Cherry said resentfully, “They kept going, ‘You like fires, don’t you?’ and I’d go like ‘yeah, in fireplaces . . .’”

  “Dearie,” said Maggie, “have you ever been in trouble before?”

  Cherry looked at the puzzle. She said, “No,” crossly, as if this should be as obvious as having a police scanner in the kitchen, but Maggie knew instantly she wasn’t telling the truth. You get good at seeing the tells after forty years of dealing with schoolchildren. She wondered what was on Cherry’s record, and whether it would hurt her.

  Abruptly Shep Gordon was in the room, followed by two large square men in uniform from the state police. The quiet space, full of sunlight, was confusingly and all at once full of men and noise. Someone yanked Cherry to her feet and barked, “Hands behind your back!” Handcuffs were clicked into place. Shep Gordon blared, “Cherry Weaver, you are under arrest on suspicion of criminal arson, and homicide. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  Hope and Maggie watched, stunned, as Cherry was marched out of the room, with a burly uniform on each side holding her shackled arms. In a moment, they were all out in the parking lot, surrounded by shouting, flashing, clamoring reporters. Cherry had her chin tucked down to her chest and her eyes shut as she was dragged through to the waiting sheriff’s car.

  Buster had appeared beside his mother.

  “They wouldn’t let me warn you,” he said. He could see that both his mother and call-me-Maggie looked disoriented, as if a television show had suddenly come to life in the middle of their living room.

  “But was that necessary? Three big men? Handcuffs? She’s scared to death and as big as a minute!”

  “I guess that’s the way they do it,” said Buster. Clearly, he wasn’t happy. Shep was a big deal in his world. But there was Brianna. And the terrifying Beryl. And his own instincts. Cherry was a screwup, no question, but she wouldn’t do something like this. She wouldn’t know how.

  “What’s going to happen now?” asked his mother. “Does she have a lawyer?”

  Does she have a lawyer. What twenty-three-year-old has a lawyer? Oh, wait, yes, there were quite a few who did, probably. He’d had one himself, that time in Tucson when he was about Cherry’s age. But no, Cherry didn’t.

  “No.”

  “She better get one, fast. Don’t you think? Does the family have any friends who practice?”

  In Hope’s world, everyone had a family lawyer, if only for drafting wills and trusts. Really, half the people you met at dinner were lawyers it seemed. Her son-in-law was a lawyer.

  “I don’t know how she can pay one,” said Buster. “I think her mom’s house is under water, since the crash, and anyway . . .” Buster saw a look pass between Maggie and his mother.

  Maggie said, “Will the court appoint someone?”

  “They will. I guess.” He didn’t look as if he thought this was going to be much of a bulwark between Cherry and the shit slide thundering toward her.

  “What’s the evidence against her?” Maggie asked him.

  “I don’t really know,” said Buster.

  “Well, can you find out?” asked Hope. They both looked at him with identical gazes, the looks of adults in authority waiting out a child who just claimed that his homework was torn from his hand by a mighty wind.

  He thought of Brianna. Brianna might have things to say about her family when she was alone with Buster, but faced with any threat from the outside world, you didn’t want to mess with her. She was the one who had really raised Cherry after their dad left. And let’s face it, if Shep Gordon and Carson Bailey thought they had enough to indict, Cherry was fucked, and so was he. He was going to have to risk pissing off somebody.

  Hope and Maggie had taken a table for two in a corner of the dining room for lunch. They had a lot to talk about.

  “You know I could pay for a lawyer,” Hope said. “She deserves a decent defense, no matter what she’s done.”

  “She hasn’t done anything criminal,” Maggie said.”Unless she’s a sociopath, and I don’t think she is.”

  “I read they’re more common than you think. One person in twenty-five, I think it was.”

  “I don’t actually doubt that, I just don’t think Cherry Weaver is one of them.”

  “But you don’t think I can offer to get her a lawyer?”

  “I do not. Brianna is Buster’s girlfriend, not his wife. If you treat her like a daughter-in-law, you’re getting between them in ways that won’t be good. You can’t offer. If they ask, that’s different.”

  They fell silent and looked up politely as their server put bowls of wild mushroom bisque before them.

  “But I don’t want to stand by and see her railroaded.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Because it isn’t nice and it isn’t fair, and if they do that, we’ll never find out what really happened.”

  “There you go,” said Maggie. “We’ll wait for Buster to get back to us, and until then, I’m going to call Jorge.”

  “And I’m going to call my old friend at the Boston Globe.”

  “I didn’t know you had a friend at the Globe.”

  “Before I knew you. Investigative reporter. He always said he could find out anything he needed to know with three phone calls.”

  The Memory Neighborhood at Ainsley Nursing was built, according to the most modern ideas, in the shape of a doughnut. The hole in the middle was an outdoor patio where the inmates could smoke and feel the sun on their faces when there was sun. The rest was a soothing circular loop, carpeted in a cheerful royal blue, designed to give comfort to the “wanderers,”
patients who felt a restless need to be going somewhere else, who would however be lost and terrified if they actually succeeded. Along this circle route, everything was familiar, all furniture and colors the same, with just enough variety to give a sense of process or progress if you were on your way along it. Here on the left was a space with seating and a television. Now on the left was a nook with a piano. Followed on the left by a crafts area, where confused people could pass the time by sticking buttons onto cards, or doing little projects with glue and sparkles, and here, on the left, was a door to the outside, except the outside was in the middle and not a route to somewhere else. You could go out this door, and cross the outdoors and go in that door on the other side, identical to this one, and be in a place very much like the place you just departed from. Along the outside of the doughnut were the patients’ bedrooms, and the necessary service areas, a little kitchen, the meds closet, the shift supervisor’s office. Also, of course, a door to the actual outside of the building that could only be opened with a code punched onto a keypad. The code was beyond the residents. It was 1234.

  The day nurse-supervisor at Ainsley Nursing, Hazel Littlehawk, had heard the news about Cherry’s arrest from her husband who worked with the K-9 unit for the state police. Cherry Weaver was being photographed and fingerprinted over at the Ainsley Jail, but Hazel kept the news to herself until Brianna Weaver finished giving lunch to the new resident, who had bitten the aide who tried to feed her oatmeal this morning. Brianna had discovered that the new resident liked to sing although she couldn’t talk, and was doing better with her. They were doing “You Are My Sunshine” for the eleventh time around spoonfuls of applesauce.

  When Mrs. Harker had been fed, washed, and toileted, and was quietly settled in the dayroom watching a Hollywood Squares rerun, Hazel took Brianna into the little closet that served her for an office.

  Brianna hadn’t realized how much she had hoped that somehow Cherry was going to be scolded for being a flake and a potty mouth and sent home, until she learned that any such possibility was extinguished. This was really happening; her sister would be indicted for criminal arson and homicide. She could be down at Windham for the rest of her life. She was probably in a cell somewhere right this minute, without her phone, or her own clothes or . . .

  “What am I going to do?” she asked Hazel.

  “You’re going to get her a lawyer, and you’re going to keep her spirits up,” said Hazel.

  Brianna didn’t know Hazel very well, but knew her reputation as a hard-ass, fierce about the time clock and a stickler for regulations. She looked at the woman’s broad flat face, her dark impassive eyes, and considered for the first time that Hazel’s path to her present position had probably not been strewn with rose petals.

  “How do I get a lawyer?”

  “Can anyone pay? Your mom? Your dad?”

  Brianna didn’t really have to answer. Hazel knew what Brianna got paid, and had a pretty good idea that no one in the background had won the lottery.

  “Your church?” Hazel asked. Brianna just shook her head. The only time they ever went was when they were little and all the children in the village got presents from the Baptists on Christmas eve if they could recite a Bible verse. Her mother had been raised Methodist, but the congregation had dwindled to such a tiny number that they couldn’t pay a minister or keep up their pretty nineteenth-century meetinghouse. The building had been sold to rich Episcopalians out on the coast and moved down there, with its steeple following the sanctuary on a flatbed truck. There was nothing left now but the graveyard with her grandmother in it, all by itself at the side of the road. It had an iron railing, and a tall pointy monument to the veterans of some war, but she didn’t know which one. Once in a long while one of the farmers with relatives there would trailer his mower over and cut the grass.

  “My sister-in-law just graduated law school,” said Hazel. “She passed the bar last month. She wants to do family law, but while she’s getting started, she has some time. Might take the case pro bono.”

  Brianna, still in her uniform, parked her Subaru in the parking lot of the Rite Aid, and found her way to the back door of a long, low concrete building across an alley that housed a pet supply store. Precious Paws fronted on the High Street. The room at the rear, with no proper address and no parking space, had not been designed to be rented out, but most likely was intended for a manager’s office for the front of the store. Evidently the dog raincoat and fish food business wasn’t booming, any more than anything else in this economy except liquor and lottery tickets. The only indication that Brianna was in the right place as she walked over the patch of weeds outside the steps was a cheaply printed business card that read CELIA LITTLE, ATTORNEY AT LAW, taped on the inside of the glass of the storm door that had been left in place since last winter. Or forever.

  Was this a good idea? With so much at stake?

  Standing on the concrete step, trying to make up her mind, Brianna finally decided that at the least, Celia Littlehawk had seen the inside of a criminal law textbook way more recently than the only other attorney she knew, the eldercare lawyer who served some of the clients at the nursing home. He was brash and creepy and had a broad Massachusetts accent. She could of course let the court appoint somebody, but she distrusted this notion instinctively. What would you get, some lazy hack who couldn’t get a better job in Portland or Augusta? She didn’t have a lot of faith in public servants.

  She knocked.

  Celia Little was expecting her. She was shorter, broader, and a good deal younger than Hazel, and her straight black hair was cut in a no-nonsense bob. The room was spare and paneled in the kind of fake wood wallboard you could buy at Home Depot by the sheet. Ms. Little had a metal desk with a laptop open on it, a rolling office chair, a wastebasket, a chipped wooden bookcase holding legal textbooks, and a small blue upholstered love seat that was all too clearly de-accessioned from the Memory Neighborhood of Ainsley Nursing. Brianna knew why, when she accepted Celia’s invitation to sit, and the foam of the seat greeted her weight by emitting a faint exhalation of urine. Brianna wished that before she had opened the door, Celia had exed out the screen on her laptop that was still displaying an ongoing game of solitaire.

  Celia took out a fresh legal pad and a ballpoint, and began taking down information. She was brisk and businesslike, and Brianna found herself wishing her well; it seemed to her that Celia was performing a role-playing exercise from her Business Practices course. She didn’t ask any of the questions Brianna expected, like how she was going to get paid. After a while, she took out her cell phone and called Shep Gordon’s office. She introduced herself as Cherry Weaver’s attorney, and said that she would like to see her client. There was some waiting, then some uh-huhs on Celia’s end, then she turned to Brianna and gave her a smile and a thumbs-up.

  “I don’t want her questioned without me there,” she said confidently into the phone, and hung up. “They’ll let us see her in half an hour,” she said to Brianna. “Why don’t you go buy her a toothbrush and anything else she might need before tomorrow, and I’ll meet you at the jail. You know where it is?”

  Brianna did.

  The Ainsley Jail was a relatively new structure serving the whole of Webster County. It had a large parking lot, fairly empty at the moment as these were not regular visiting hours. The building was wide and low, made of institutional yellow brick, generally designed to depress. Inside, the ceilings were low and covered in acoustic tile, the floors a nasty brown linoleum, and the walls were lined with putty-colored ceramic tiles. Brianna was told to hand over the toiletries she had brought and sit in the waiting area, while Celia was taken through a locked door to meet her client.

  Cherry looked like a whipped dog when she was brought out. She was wearing an olive-drab jumpsuit, and every line of her face and posture of her body conveyed fear and misery. The guard showed her to a small table with two chairs in a hallway. Nonplussed to be given no more privacy than this, Celia stared at the guard, s
till standing beside Cherry, until he walked to the end of the corridor and disappeared around the corner.

  Celia explained that Cherry should hold nothing back, that everything she told her lawyer was held in confidence, and that she would do her best for her.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  Cherry was staring around her, at the grim tiles on the walls, the streaky linoleum of the floor, and at her own bare goose-bumped arms. This wasn’t at all like TV. She asked, “Are you a real lawyer?”

  Celia said she was, and asked Cherry to explain the facts of the case. As Cherry talked, a halting, back-and-forth stream of details, self-justification, and outrage, Celia took notes in a fluent Palmer script that Cherry found impressive. In her school they didn’t learn cursive. The richer kids had computers and typed; the rest printed. When she had run out of questions, Celia asked, “Would you take a lie detector test?”

  Cherry looked up from her bitten nails, seeming startled. For a long moment, she didn’t say anything.

  “Are those like . . . legal?”

  “Legal, yes. They can be very helpful, although they are not usually admissible in court. Never mind, though. If you’d rather not, it’s better not to.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll take it.”

  “You don’t have to. It was just a question. Let’s leave it for now.” She put her legal pad back into her briefcase and rose. Cherry got up too, and immediately, the deputy reappeared from around the hall corner.

  “Stay here,” said Celia. “I’ll send your sister in.” Cherry sat back down, and watched Celia walk away down the hall, free as air.

  DAY SEVEN, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12

  The Citation the Poole sisters booked for their return flight to Los Angeles was a bigger plane than they needed, but it was fast, and they didn’t want to wait for the Embraer Lisa usually asked for. Mr. Gurrell had driven them to the private aviation terminal at the Bangor Airport, where the pilots, clear-eyed young men in crisp uniforms, greeted them kindly, took their luggage from Gabe’s car, and loaded it into the cargo bay. Glory’s clothes were packed in a Black Watch plaid canvas suitcase some guest had abandoned at the inn sometime in the 1970s. Mr. Gurrell stood on the tarmac at the foot of the steps onto the plane and shook first Lisa’s hand, then Glory’s. He couldn’t say, one more time, how sorry he was for their losses, so he didn’t. They said whatever they said to him from behind their large sunglasses, then turned and climbed aboard, Lisa moving painfully but carrying her dog, and Glory behind her with their hand luggage. As Gabe drove out of the terminal parking lot, he passed the hearse from Morrison’s arriving with Mr. Antippas’s casket. He didn’t wait to watch it being loaded into the cargo hold with the suitcases.