“I’m off to pick up supplies, and I’ll take the lock off the door downstairs to see if I can replace it or get parts. The seafood and produce trucks will be delivering this afternoon,” Chris said. “Can you be here as soon as Gus closes to help with prep?”
With all our do-ahead food gone, thrown out as a result of the police search, prep would be especially challenging.
“Sure.”
“Where’re you off to now?”
“The yacht club.”
Chris tilted his head. “A little off-season for that?”
“Something I want to look into.”
He grinned. “Be careful.”
“Always am. Gus said to thank you for locking the door.”
“Always do,” Chris said, and I knew enough to leave the subject alone.
*
The Busman’s Harbor Yacht Club sounded a lot more hoity-toity than it was. Not far from Gus’s on the working side of Busman’s Harbor, mostly it was a place to moor pleasure boats. Although some of the yachts there in the summer were pretty spectacular, most of the vessels were fairly modest sailboats and motorboats. The club also kept a small fleet of sailboats, and their school was where almost every kid in the community, summer and local, learned to sail. In the summer, I loved watching the parade of little yellow boats as the students followed each other around the harbor like ducklings.
The clubhouse itself was a ramshackle affair with a room full of wooden lockers for stowing boat-related gear at one end of a long hallway and a community room, which had all the charm of a drafty elementary school gym, at the other. The front door was locked, as I expected. Nothing worth stealing was stored over the winter, but the members didn’t want teenagers using their empty building as a hangout.
I went in search of Bud Barbour, who owned a small boat repair business just down from the yacht club and who picked up extra money as its caretaker.
Bud’s repair shop was locked up tight, riding out the quiet time until spring when boats were readied for the water. I climbed onto his deck and rapped on the back door. Morgan, his black lab, barked a noisy greeting from inside. In the background I heard explosions and gunfire. Old Bud was a dedicated video gamer.
“Coming!”
I waited in the cold while Bud killed off a few more bad guys and finally made his way to the door.
“Howdy, Julia. What brings you here on this dreary day?”
“I need the key to the yacht club.”
Bud pursed his lips behind his Santa Claus beard. “What fer?”
I’d learned in similar circumstances that when I was as specific and truthful as possible, people didn’t ask as many questions as you might expect. “I need to take a look at one of the photos in the hallway.”
If someone had said that to me, I certainly would have wanted to know why, but evidently my activities were not as interesting to Bud as I imagined.
“I’ll get the key for you.” He shuffled into the dark innards of the house and reappeared with a key chained to an enormous wooden tag that said YACHT CLUB. “You be sure to bring this back, Julia Snowden,” Bud said as he handed it to me. “I know where you live.”
Didn’t everybody?
I walked the key back to the yacht club and unlocked the outside door. The electricity had been turned off for the season, but in the first room, the locker room, there were plenty of windows to provide light, even on a gray day. The floor-to-ceiling wooden lockers were three feet wide and three feet deep to accommodate the oars, outboard motors, life vests, and other boating paraphernalia kept there. I admired the polished oak of the lockers. The yacht club might not be fancy or showy, but it was quality built.
The long hallway was reasonably light at each end due to the windows in the locker room and community room, but the middle was completely in shadow. The walls were lined with photographs, one after another, each at eye level. I realized too late I should have asked Fee for more details about the photo of Caroline she remembered.
The images of the yacht club dances were in chronological order up one side of the long hall and down the other. So the ones nearest the locker room door were way too old on one wall and too new on the opposite side to have Caroline in them. The yacht club dance was a right of passage for summer families, a special treat, only for the college-age kids. It was originally billed as a cotillion, a coming-of-age ritual. In the early years, by tradition, the girls wore white dresses, the boys dinner jackets.