“So will you come?”
“Who’s cooking?” I tried not to sound anxious, but my mother was a terrible cook. I was happy to spend the evening in comfortable companionship with the Snugg sisters if that’s what they needed, but I wasn’t sure it was worth the potential damage to my taste buds.
Fortunately, Mom took my question the right way. She laughed. “Don’t worry. Livvie and Page are on the way. Your sister’s helping me with dinner.”
“Well, in that case, I’m in. Let me call Chris and see what he’s up to.”
“Great,” Mom said. “Six o’clock? See you then.”
I called Chris right away. “Julia, if you’re going to your mom’s, do you mind if I stay here and do some more work on the cabin? I lost almost all of yesterday.” If he couldn’t rent out the cabin by summer, the whole underpinnings of his economic existence would be threatened.
“Sure. You stay there. See you later.”
“Yup. For sure.”
I arrived back at the restaurant with an hour or so to kill before I was due at Mom’s. Gus was gone for the day, the door locked, lights out. I flipped the lights on and was grateful to see the walk-in divested of its crime scene tape.
I locked the kitchen door behind me carefully, climbed the stairs to my place, and fetched my laptop. When I had moved into the apartment, I’d paid for cable and Internet. There’d been a big discussion with the cable company and with Gus. Chris and I wanted a TV in the bar, for Monday night football and Sunday evenings. Gus was already opposed to the bar; the idea of a TV gave him apoplexy. “I won’t turn my establishment into some doctor’s waiting room with talking heads blabbing on about the Cardonians.”
It took me a moment to figure out he meant the Kardashians. I was surprised he even got that close. Eventually, we negotiated a truce, whereby we got the TV and I promised to hide the remote in my apartment while Gus was in the building. Internet was even more of an issue. We needed it to run credit cards for our restaurant, and since cell service out at the end of the world was just too iffy, we needed Wi-Fi. Plus, I wanted it for my apartment. You can take a girl out of Manhattan, but only so far.
“No Internet!” Gus fumed. “Absolutely not. That’s the last thing I need, people sitting here all day checking their brokerage accounts and writing the great American novel. Never!”
Again, we reached a compromise. We would get Internet and Wi-Fi, but I wouldn’t tell anyone the password.
“No one,” Gus emphasized.
The cable company became convinced we were going to offer connectivity to all our patrons and wanted to charge us an exorbitant business rate. When the cable guy showed up, I let him spend five minutes on his own with Gus. He emerged shaking his head and said he’d be happy to tell the company to charge me the residential rate.
Sitting on my couch, my computer in my lap, I web-searched my way through the couples who’d been at the restaurant two nights before. I was sure someone had brought that group of people together deliberately, and if that was true, there had to be a connection.
I looked up Dr. Henry Caswell first. There were lots of websites ready to tell me his specialty (anesthesiology), but the sites didn’t offer the ratings from patients I’d become accustomed to seeing for doctors. Possibly because his patients were mostly unconscious. He’d worked for the previous twenty years at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Some of the websites noted his retirement, but most did not. I looked for, but couldn’t find, anything controversial—a news report about a malpractice suit, for example.
There was much less information online about his wife, Caroline. She was a stalwart of her garden club in their Maryland suburb and was active with the botanical garden in Busman’s Harbor. Perhaps that was her local substitute for having her own garden, something that wouldn’t be possible at the Baywater Community.