Fogged Inn (A Maine Clambake Mystery Book 4)
Barbara Ross
This book is dedicated to my mother-in-law, Olga Carito, the incredible proprietor of the Seafarer Inn and the person who introduced me to beautiful Boothbay Harbor, Maine.
Chapter 1
“Jule-YA! There’s a dead guy in the walk-in.”
My brain swam slowly out of a deep slumber. My boyfriend, Chris Durand, rolled over in my bed. “What was that?”
“Dunno. Gus. Something about the walk-in.” I knew, from unfortunately frequent experience, that my landlord, Gus Farnham, had opened the door that connected his restaurant downstairs to my studio apartment above and bellowed up the stairs.
“What is it now?” Chris mumbled. We’d been sharing the restaurant space for a little over a month. Gus served breakfast and lunch as he had for more than fifty years. Chris and I ran the restaurant for dinner. Gus was very particular about how he wanted things left, and as careful as Chris and I had been, we’d managed to annoy the old curmudgeon practically every day. Chris pulled the duvet around his shoulders. “Time is it?”
I grabbed my phone off the bedside table. “Five after five.”
Chris groaned. We’d finally gotten to bed after one in the morning—four scant hours before. “Can you handle it?” he asked. “He called you.”
“Jule-YA!” Gus bellowed again. “There’s a stiff in the refrigerator.”
I heard it that time. He definitely had my attention. I felt around for my red wool robe and slipped my feet into my lamb’s-wool-lined moccasins. “Coming!”
Gus stood at the bottom of the stairs, hands on hips. He’d flipped on the overhead lights in the restaurant, providing a warm, homey glow in contrast to the dark that crept in through the windows.
I blinked the sleep from my eyes. “What did you say?”
“There’s a dead guy in my walk-in refrigerator. You leave him there?”
I didn’t answer. It was a ridiculous question. I marched to the big refrigerator and swung open the heavy stainless steel door.
There was a dead guy in there. He was seated on the floor, his back resting against the lower two shelves, face upturned. His eyes were wide open, as if in surprise. He looked as if he were alive, but I could tell he wasn’t. I’d seen dead bodies before. Just to make sure, I took a big gulp of air to steady myself and felt the base of his throat for a pulse.
His skin was cold. Dead cold and refrigerator cold. I snatched my hand back, took another deep breath to tamp down the emotions swirling in my chest—repulsion, sadness, fear of an unknown future—and sprinted out of the walk-in Indiana Jones style, as if the floor were crumbling behind me.
“Think I didn’t check him already?” Gus groused from behind me. “You know how he got here?”
Deep breaths. “Nope.”
“So you never seen him before?”
“I didn’t say that.” I walked back to the bottom of the stairs and opened the door. “Chris! You need to get down here. Now!” Chris mumbled something I didn’t understand, but I heard his feet hit the floor. “You call the cops?” I asked Gus.
“Nine-one-one. As soon as I spotted him.” As if in response, I heard the sound of sirens approaching.
Gus, who had better ears than anyone his age had a right to, heard them too. “Don’t need to make all that racket. He’s dead.”
Chris came down the stairs, light brown hair tousled from sleep, still buttoning his flannel shirt over his bare, well-muscled chest. We’d been together for five rocky months, yet the sight of him still made my heart beat faster.
“You were in bed?” Gus asked him. Gus and his wife, Mrs. Gus, had risen at 4 AM every morning for decades. She, so she could bake the delicious pies Gus served at the restaurant, and he, so he could open early to feed the lobstermen and fishermen of Busman’s Harbor, Maine. As a result, Gus had trouble believing anyone was still sleeping at five o’clock. Chris and I had explained to him time and again that we were often up late closing the restaurant and then cleaning up to his exacting specifications, but he treated the information as if it were irrelevant. Last night, due to circumstances well beyond our control, we’d been up even later.
There was a loud banging on the restaurant’s front door. “Guess I forgot to unlock it,” Gus said, and went to answer.
“Take a look in the walk-in,” I whispered to Chris.
He did, backing out in a hurry, eyebrows raised, green eyes wide. Gus came clattering down the stairs that led from the restaurant’s street-side public entrance into its front room. My childhood friend Officer Jamie Dawes and his partner, Officer Pete Howland, were behind him. Two EMTs and half a dozen firemen brought up the rear.