Margaritas, Marzipan, and Murder Read online

  I locked up, and Matt and I started the walk home. We had gotten about halfway there when my stomach rumbled, and I realized I’d barely eaten all day.

  “I need a lobster roll,” I announced.

  “Right now?”

  “I’ve had a bowl of soup, some marzipan, and coffee today. I’m starving.”

  “Sandy’s?”

  “Yes.” I turned on my heel and headed toward Sandy’s Seafood Shack before Matt had a chance to react. After realizing I hadn’t eaten, I seemed to get hungrier with every step.

  “You really must be hungry.” Matt hurried along beside me.

  “I am.” I paused. “Are you?”

  “I could eat.”

  “That’s not exactly convincing.”

  “I’m always up for lobster.”

  Sandy’s was at the opposite end of the boardwalk, so it took us a little while to get there, but I wasn’t complaining because I knew the warm, buttery lobster would be totally worth it.

  When we got to Sandy’s, we sat at one of the picnic tables on the back deck. Through the window screens, we could hear the ocean waves crashing. I took a deep breath of the tangy salt air. Since Cape Bay was a seaside town, the salt air was evident almost everywhere in town, but Sandy’s deck literally hung out over the ocean, so the aroma was all encompassing. I loved it. It smelled like home.

  We both ordered a lobster roll and a beer, as well as an order of fried clams to split between us. It was the best food I could imagine eating on a Saturday night in New England. Nothing compares to fresh-caught seafood.

  Matt was in the restroom when the waitress brought the food to the table. I politely waited for him to return before digging into my lobster roll, but I went ahead and started popping the clams into my mouth. I told myself they were more like an appetizer than part of the actual meal, so it was okay to start without him.

  “You gonna save some of those for me?” Matt asked as he returned to the table.

  “If I have to.” I was practically inhaling the crispy, delicious bits of clam.

  He reached for one, and I swatted his hand.

  “Do I have to fight you for them or something?”

  “Or you could ask nicely.” I shoved another piece into my mouth.

  “May I please have some fried clams, Francesca, darling?” He batted the long lashes that encircled his warm brown eyes.

  I took the clam that was almost in my mouth and put it in his outstretched hand. “You may have one.”

  Matt placed it delicately in his mouth then chewed very slowly.

  I finally laughed. “Here, take them before I eat them all.” I pushed the paper bowl toward him.

  “I’ll be fine if you just want to eat them.”

  “No, we got them to share.”

  “But if you’re that hungry, I don’t mind. I have plenty of lobster here. Unless you’re planning to eat that, too.”

  “I’m not. I think I have enough on my own. But thanks for the offer.” I lifted my lobster roll to my mouth and ate. It was perfection.

  Despite my protests that I’d eaten more than half the food, Matt paid the bill when we finished, and we started the walk back to our street. Now that my stomach was full, the only thought on my mind was finding out just who Abraham Casey was.

  Chapter 10

  Back at my house, we set up camp at opposite ends of the couch. Matt turned on a football game I couldn’t have cared less about. I didn’t even know they played football on Saturdays until he turned it on, although I did remember Sammy mentioning something about it earlier in the day.

  When I asked Matt about the game, he launched into a lengthy explanation of the different types of football and their relative merits. I zoned out somewhere around “No, that’s the NFL. This is college,” which was almost immediately after he started talking.

  Latte lay on Matt’s lap because his hands were free for petting except when he used them to change the channel to a different game or for his beer-to-mouth weight-lifting exercises. Fortunately for Latte, Matt’s intermittent activities only required one hand. My hands were occupied with my laptop. I was searching for Abraham Casey.

  A surprising number of men had that name. I was glad his name wasn’t John Smith or Mike Jones. I scrolled through the pages of search results, trying to figure out which one he might be. I ruled out the one who was born in 1783 and died in 1817 as well as his son and grandson. Several results just happened to have the words Abraham and Casey on the same page, including an article by someone named Casey Johnson about the biblical Abraham.

  Another article featured an actress who played a character named Casey in a new movie, and someone with the last name Abraham had commented on it. I found it difficult to stay focused on my research because so many other things caught my attention.

  “How’s it going?” Matt asked when his game stopped for a studio-based segment with a bunch of brawny men and one busty blond woman wearing a dramatically low-cut shirt.

  “Not great. I found a bunch of people named Abraham Casey, but I don’t know how to narrow it down or figure out which one is the guy I’m looking for.”

  “Want me to help?”

  “No.” My stubbornness had kicked in, and I was determined not just to figure out who he was but to do it on my own. I felt as if I were so close, and if I just tried a little harder, there he would be. I tried my search again with Abraham Casey in quotes so it would only return results with both words next to each other.

  “Any luck?” Matt asked later when another pretty blonde in a revealing top was interviewing a large sweaty man in football pads.

  “No,” I groused.

  “Did you try social media?”

  I shoved the laptop toward Matt. He perched it on the arm of the couch to keep from disrupting Latte.

  “So what have you tried so far?”

  I scooted next to him and listed off the things I’d tried. I’d been at it for so long, I knew I was probably forgetting half of it.

  Matt clicked around and did a few general web searches then searched a couple of different social networks. I rested my chin on his shoulder as I watched him work.

  “I can find a couple guys…” he murmured as he typed and clicked and scrolled and clicked and typed.

  “A couple of guys?” I repeated when he didn’t finish his sentence.

  “A couple of guys who are at least sort of local. I figure they’re the best ones to start with. There’s one in Boston and one down in Hartford.”

  “You think either of them’s him?”

  “I don’t know. The one in Boston’s a pharmacist. The one in Hartford’s a…” He scrolled and peered at the screen. “Mechanic.”

  “Mike and Mary Ellen both said the guy was dressed business casual. Can we check out the pharmacist first? Can we find out more about him?”

  “Hold on one second.” Matt typed in the search box again. He scrolled down the page and then back up. “You said Mary Ellen described him to you?”

  I nodded without moving off his shoulder.

  “Ouch! You have a pointy chin!” He pulled out from under my chin.

  “Yes, she described him.” I put my chin back where it was. He let me leave it there.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Brown hair, brown eyes, beard, glasses.”

  “That should narrow it down.” I was reasonably sure he was being sarcastic, especially since brown hair and eyes described the majority of the world’s population.

  “Let me know if you see anyone who looks right.” He pulled up a screen of people whose pictures were somehow associated online with the words “Abraham Casey.” I was slightly embarrassed I hadn’t thought to try that, but he didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either.

  I looked at the screen. The first image looked as though it was from the article about Abraham in the Bible by Casey Johnson because it was an image of an old man with a long, flowing beard, a long cloak, and a shepherd’s staff. The second picture was the act
ress who played Casey. The next few people were definitely not the man in the alley—too old, too young, too female. I let my eye wander down the page and gasped.

  Matt saw it a second after I did. “This one?” He pointed at the image of a friendly-looking man staring out at us from the middle of the screen.

  “Yup.” The man had short brown hair, brown eyes, a trim beard, and glasses. He looked as though he were about five or ten years older than me.

  Matt clicked on the picture, and we were taken to a social network we’d searched earlier to no avail. In the vast expanse of social media users, we hadn’t been able to find the Abraham Casey we were looking for. But now he was smiling at us like he’d just been sitting there, waiting for us to show up. Above him on the screen was another picture of him. In this picture, a woman and child smiled beside him. His wife and son, I assumed.

  “Wow,” Matt said.

  “What?”

  Matt clicked around on the screen, flipping between tabs that showed a variety of information about the elusive Mr. Abraham Casey. His birthday with the year, his hometown, his current employer, previous employers, his wife’s name, his son’s name and birthdate, his friends, his interests, places he’d been—almost everything you could want to know about him.

  “This guy is not concerned with privacy. Look.” He clicked to the Friends tab. “No mutual friends. If we can see this, that means everyone can see it. Every detail of his life out here for anyone to see.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Matt craned his neck to look at me since I was still leaning on his shoulder. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, Franny.” He navigated away from Abraham’s page and clicked on a menu. He scrolled down, clicking more menus here and there. “Well, yours aren’t as bad as his, but they could use some tightening up. Do you mind?” He hovered the mouse over one of the settings.

  “Go right ahead. Fix me up. As long as I can still see the pictures of all my friends’ vacations to exotic places, you can do whatever you want.”

  Matt clicked around for a couple of minutes. “There. Now you won’t have strangers looking at your profile because they came across your name on the Internet somewhere and wanted to know everything about you.”

  “Thanks.” Matt clicked back on Abraham’s profile page. I noticed the little link to his wife’s profile and pointed over his shoulder. “Can we go look at her page?”

  Matt clicked on the blue text, and we were taken to her profile. It was empty except for a picture of her smiling next to Abraham and holding their son. It looked like it was from a professional shoot.

  “At least someone in that family had some sense about privacy,” Matt muttered.

  “Can we go back to his page?” He clicked over, and I leaned in to get a better look at the screen. “Scroll down.”

  Abraham Casey’s entire life was laid out in front of us in pictures and short lines of text. Romantic dinners he’d had with his wife. Vacations they’d taken with their son. Funny bumper stickers he’d seen while stuck in traffic. The annoying thing the woman in front of him in the grocery store line had done.

  I was transfixed by the bits and pieces of a stranger’s life. A stranger I still wasn’t entirely sure was the man in the alley. I’d have to print out his picture and take it to Mary Ellen to see if she could confirm whether it was the man who had come into her store. Then something caught my eye as Matt scrolled down farther.

  “Stop!” I put my hand on his arm. “Go back. Up. Up. There!” I looked at the screen in shock.

  “Oh, Abraham,” Matt whispered.

  On the screen was a picture of Abraham Casey’s driver’s license with the caption, “Took 3 hours at the DMV, but I’m renewed!”

  Along with his picture, his address, height, weight, and all the other information on a driver’s license, Abraham’s signature was at the bottom.

  I looked around at the couch, the end table, the floor, and stuck my hand between the couch cushions.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for my phone.” I got up on my knees and felt my pocket. The hard rectangle was on the left. I pulled it out and unlocked it. I tapped furiously, trying to get to what I wanted.

  “Now what are you doing?”

  “Looking for something.” I finally found it and held my phone up to the screen. The signature was the same on the driver’s license and the credit card receipt.

  “It really is him.” Matt sounded vaguely surprised. To be honest, I was, too. A part of me hadn’t thought we’d actually find him and that maybe Abraham Casey was a pseudonym, but there he was. If the name was a pseudonym, it was the one he used in his everyday life. This really was the Abraham Casey we were looking for.

  I sank back down onto the couch. “Okay, even I wouldn’t put my driver’s license online like that.”

  Matt laughed. “Well, at least you know that much.” We stared at the screen, stunned that we’d trapped our quarry. “Now what? Do we call Mike?”

  I shook my head. “Mary Ellen already called the police.”

  “She did? Then what did we do all this searching for if the police already know his name?”

  “I wanted to know who he was. Like, really. Who the man was and what got him killed.”

  “And did you find that?”

  “I think I know who he was,” I said slowly. “Or at least I will after I stay up half the night reading down through his page. But no, I don’t know why he was killed.”

  “And you’re sure now that he was murdered?”

  “Mary Ellen heard him yelling ‘no.’ He was either murdered or wanted someone to think he was.”

  “Maybe he had a life insurance policy that doesn’t pay out for suicide. He wanted to kill himself but wanted his wife and kid to get the money.”

  I thought about it for a few seconds. “I don’t know. It still doesn’t make sense to me. He bought a lot of stuff at Mary Ellen’s. If he just wanted to get souvenirs to make it look good, why buy so much stuff? If he bought things he actually wanted his family to have, why risk them getting messed up or his family not getting them at all? I still think murder makes more sense. I just have to figure out why.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  “Well, in New York, I would have said mugging gone wrong, but we don’t really have a lot of muggings in Cape Bay, so that’s probably out. Revenge? Vendetta?”

  “Lovers’ quarrel?” Matt suggested.

  “You think Mrs. Casey—what was her name? Leah?—you think Leah killed him?”

  “Or his lover. Or hers.”

  “Crime of passion. It’s a possibility.” I thought about it. If Leah had killed him, had she come to town with him? Or was he here to meet a lover and she’d caught them together? Or maybe Leah was the one in town for a tryst, and Abraham had interrupted them. But then why would he have bought souvenirs? What if it actually was random? A chill ran down my spine. A random murder was frightening to think about. “I need to find out why he was here and who he was with. That’s what I need to know before I can figure out the rest.”

  Matt nodded and scrolled quickly to the top of Abraham’s page. “Nothing since Tuesday.” He scrolled down slowly, then faster, slowed down, sped up, and slowed down again. “And that seems unusual for him. It looks like he usually posts every day. Sometimes two or three times a day even.”

  “He only died last night, though.”

  “So something happened before that to make him stop posting.”

  “What’s the last thing he put up?”

  Matt scrolled up. Abraham had posted a picture of himself with his wife Leah and their son, sitting at what looked like a restaurant table.

  “Dinner at Woodman’s,” I read off the screen.

  “They look happy.”

  I leaned against the back of the couch. Why did he stop posting? What had he been doing that he couldn’t—or didn’t want to—post? I stared at the screen, thinking through the possibilitie
s. I needed to find out what he had been doing in Cape Bay. He’d had dinner with his family in Boston on Tuesday and died in Cape Bay on Friday. I had to find out what happened between those days.

  “So what are you thinking?” Matt asked.

  “I’m going to find out why he was here.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “Well, we know he didn’t spend a whole week here, so he probably wasn’t staying in a rental house.”

  “So, the Surfside?”

  “That’s where I’ll start.”

  The Surfside Inn was the biggest and most popular lodging place in Cape Bay, although that wasn’t saying much. The inn had about twenty-five rooms, which was a lot compared with the next-largest places, a couple of six-room bed and breakfasts. In other words, it wasn’t hard to be the biggest.

  The inn was a nice enough place as far as I knew, although I’d never stayed there. I crossed my fingers that Abraham Casey had. I hoped the clerk remembered him and wasn’t feeling shy. If I couldn’t get any information, I would have to hit the ten or so bed and breakfasts in our town and the next.

  But first, I was going to the Surfside Inn.

  Chapter 11

  Late the next morning, I stood outside the Surfside Inn. True to its name, it was located right on the beach and boasted that each of its rooms had an ocean view. I was pretty sure the majority of the rooms only had an ocean view if you leaned over the edge of the balcony and tilted your head a certain way.

  The inn was a two-story, U-shaped building that looked as though it had been blue and white at some point but now was more grayish-blue and gray. All rooms opened to the exterior and shared a walkway that circled the building. A pool was located in the interior of the U, but that was on the ocean-facing side, and I was on the road-facing side. “Surfside Inn” was emblazoned across the marquee in large white letters with blue waves on either side. Predictably for Labor Day weekend, the “No” was lit up in the No Vacancy sign.

  I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, opened the front door, and walked inside. A bored-looking teenager slumped at the front desk, poking at his phone on the counter with one hand and resting his head in the other.