“I fired him yesterday,” Frank had said, “but Barbara, one of the cleaning women, told me she saw him this morning, and he told her he’d come in for his last paycheck. Anyhoo, he did no such thing because we mail out all the paychecks, and Barbara, another Barbara, the one who works the bar, said that all the paper money was gone from the register.”
“Was the cash register locked?”
“Well, yeah. Except that the key to unlock it is hanging off a hook right below the back of the bar, so it wouldn’t take a genius to pull off this particular crime. Look, I’m friends with Ben’s mother and to tell the truth, I’m not sure I even want to press charges. I’m just worried that if he thinks he got away with it once he might try to get away with it again. Does that make sense to you?”
“It does,” Sam said. “Where do you think Ben is now?”
“Probably at Cooley’s. It’s a bar down the other end of the beach. He’ll be spending my money and badmouthing me all at the same time.”
Sam had gotten a pretty good description of Ben Gagnon, then gone down to Cooley’s and brought him back to the station for questioning, where the kid made a full and weepy confession. Frank hadn’t pressed charges, and Ben had returned the money. It had been Sam’s first case in Kennewick and that was probably the only reason he’d remembered it. But since then, Sam had regularly gone to the Windward for a scotch and soda on a Friday night. And occasionally, over the years, he went to Cooley’s for a beer, despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that it was the only place in his new town in which he’d experienced any kind of racism. A very drunk real estate developer from Wells, the next town over, had said to Sam, sometime during his first winter in Kennewick, “Anyone tell you you’re the wrong color for Maine?”
“What’s your name, son?” Sam had said, aware that he was letting a little of his Jamaican accent slip into the question.
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“No, you don’t. I’ll remember your face. And one of these days I’ll arrest you, probably for drunk and disorderly, and when that happens, you’ll be glad to know that I forgot you ever said what you just said to me.”
The man had looked confused. He’d looked confused, too, when Sam had, in fact, arrested him about two years later after he’d gotten drunk, this time at the Kennewick Harbor Hotel, and reached across the teak bar top to grab the breast of the college girl who’d been working behind the bar. True to his word, Detective Sam Hamilton acted as though he’d never met the real estate agent named Harvey Beach before. It had been the only time anyone had said anything racist to him in the state of Maine. In fact, most people he’d met had been perfectly friendly, despite the reputation New England had for unfriendliness. And that had included Frank Hopkins, ever-present owner of the Windward, who’d been murdered on his morning walk.
Sam thought back and was pretty sure that Frank had been married when he’d first met him. A dark-haired woman who worked at the post office. He thought her name might have been Sheila. She’d left town to move to Florida and had not invited Frank to go with her. That was years ago, and Frank was now a confirmed bachelor and a man of strict habit—the walk on the beach each and every morning unless the wind was just too much, then most likely a half-day spent working on the daunting task of keeping the Windward Resort profitable and running, then a long evening spent in the Windward lounge, quietly nursing a succession of Bud Lights—and as far as Sam knew, there was no room in that schedule for love affairs. Not only that, but Frank did not make enemies. He was an easygoing boss, friendly to everyone. Which meant that what happened to Frank on the beach felt like something else altogether, something, for lack of a better word, wrong. If it hadn’t been for the letter, Sam would have thought that Frank had been killed by accident, a mugging gone wrong maybe, or, who knows, maybe someone who just wanted to experience how it felt to kill a man, press his face into the sand. But what about the letter? That list of names?
Sam did a search of the other names online, to see if any of them had come up in a murder investigation, but there was nothing. Still, he was just searching through Google. The state police would be looking at their own database. Something—some connection between the names on the list—would come up.
2
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 12:30 P.M.
Jessica Winslow almost always went to Cece’s for lunch on Fridays, usually with Mary from the accounting department, but Mary was on vacation this week, and Jessica thought she’d try that new lunch place over on Congress Street, the one with the rotisserie chickens in the window.