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.
“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.”
Barney nodded weakly. “It was a dead body,” he finally gasped. “Lyle pointed it out to me.” Then he shook his head and fell into silence again.
The grisly discovery had turned Fiona’s husband so ghostly pale that the sparse patches of red hair on either side of his bald head were the only hint of color on the man’s waxy features.
I tugged at Seymour’s mailbag. “How did you find out?”
“I was walking up the drive to deliver the mail when I saw Chief Ciders fly past in his Chief-mobile. He wasn’t using his sirens, but he was in an awful hurry—which got me interested.”
“Did either of you see . . . the corpse?” I asked.
Seymour shook his head. “Apparently only Lyle and Barn actually saw it. Lyle called nine-one-one on his cell phone, and Ciders responded himself and roped off the scene first thing.”
“I wonder if the dead person is anyone we know?” I asked.
Seymour shrugged. “I tried to get a peep at the stiff, but Ciders shooed me away. All I saw was a blanket.”
Barney shook his head. “I didn’t look close enough to see the face.”
I stared down the trail, at the twin police cars. I was tempted to walk down there and find out the identity of the corpse for myself. Then I noticed one of the State Troopers, standing at the door of his cruiser. The man was talking on the radio, no doubt summoning reinforcements. I knew then that nobody without official clearance was going to get close to that scene for a long time.
“Come on, Barney,” Fiona said as she tugged on her husband’s arm. “You look like you have sunstroke. Let’s get you home and I’ll pour you a nice glass of iced tea.”
I watched as Fiona and Barney hobbled off, Barney leaning on his wife for support.
“I’d better go with them,” Sadie declared. She immediately hurried off to catch up to Mr. and Mrs. Finch. Seymour and I remained behind, watching the police secure the scene.
“Sunstroke my tired butt,” said Seymour. “Old Barney took this dead body thing a little too hard. Usually the guy’s a lot of laughs, but the floater really threw him. You’d think he’d have picked up one of his old lady’s true crime books once in a while. Most of those things have photo inserts.”
“You can’t blame Barney for being upset,” I replied. “A photo is one thing. A real corpse is another. And the thing turned up in his own backyard. I’m surprised you’re not at least a
Seymour waved his hand. “You forget. My route takes me along Pendleton Street—Quindicott’s very own Mold Coast. Hell, I found three stiffs in two years trying to deliver Social Security checks to retirement row. It got so bad my supervisor offered to send me to grief counseling. Maybe I should have taken him up on the offer, I could’ve claimed a disability.”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t be able to afford the mint-condition issues of
“You’re joking. When?”
“Don’t drool, Seymour. Sadie set them aside for you already.” Seymour’s only discernable passions—besides trivia, which had helped win him $25,000 on
“Fan-tastic!”
A siren, distant at first, then suddenly blaring, heralded the arrival of another official Rhode Island State Police vehicle, this one a Mobile Crime Investigation Unit. Seymour and I moved clear of the trail to let it pass.
“Geeze, Louise . . . Who’s in those woods? Hannibal Lecter?”
“It sure didn’t take Ciders long to call in the Staties,” I said sourly. My own experience with them hadn’t been pretty, considering last fall one Detective-Lieutenant Marsh had planned to arrest me on suspicion of murder. (Thank goodnesss, with the help of Jack, the friendly ghost, I delivered them the true perpetrator.)
“The Staties were a foregone conclusion, Pen, and you know it,” said Seymour. “Ciders is in over his head when it comes to anything beyond handing out speeding tickets, littering fines, and keeping the peace at high school football games. Besides, this town can’t afford more than three police cars. So how’s it supposed to pay for a murder investigation?”
“So you think it’s murder, too?”
His mouth snapped shut for a moment. “Well . . . when you put it that way. You’re right. It
“I don’t know” is what I finally told Seymour as I watched the forensics team emerge from the State vehicle and begin to speak to Ciders. “But for now I’m keeping my distance.”
Displaying too much curiosity might once again land me on a State Trooper’s suspect list.
