“Was he in his forties, long dark hair, scar on his lower face?”
“That was him. I assumed he was the son. He said he wanted to find out who had left the cigarette. I told him he’d never be able to do it. Couldn’t do it back then. Can’t do it now. Besides, what good would it do?”
So Austin Lowe had been looking for information about his parents’ deaths. That had to figure into his murder somehow. I offered to pay for my copy, but Mr. Dudley waved me away. “This house contains thousands of stories, thousands of people’s lives, often the saddest, most difficult parts. I can’t bring myself to get rid of these files. I’m always glad when someone can use them.”
Chapter 24
Enid Lowe’s townhouse was ten miles in the opposite direction, so I decided to visit the other addresses first. According to my phone, the Lowes’ burned property was the one nearest Tom Dudley’s house. I put the address in the GPS and rode by. The house, near Mill Pond, had been torn down and replaced by a large, bland colonial. Staring at the newer house from inside the cab, comparing it to my memory of the photo in the paper, I couldn’t even figure out exactly how the Lowes’ antique home had fit on the lot. The scene of the fire told me nothing.
Not far from the address where the Lowes’ home had stood was the Hoopers’ house, where Enid Sparks had stolen the car. That was one of the craziest parts of this crazy story. Enid was a woman in her sixties, a registered nurse, a respectable person by all accounts. She had worked at the Hoopers’ house so many years before, they hadn’t remembered she had a key until Jamie had sent them her description. Why would she go to a relative stranger’s house, steal their car, and drive nearly five hours to Busman’s Harbor? Surely not to redeem a gift certificate.
The Hoopers’ house was big and solid. Based on lot size alone, I would have called it an estate. Three bays of an attached garage faced a hard-topped driveway that wound to the street. The yard was carefully laid out. Someone, not the Hoopers I was sure, had put burlap hoods over the smaller bushes to protect them from the rapidly approaching winter. The house was obviously empty, its occupants gone. I drove on.
The next house by distance was Austin Lowe’s. I assumed it was a house, because when I’d looked up the address at the library, it contained no identifying information beyond the street number—no apartment number or letter, no “R” to indicate it was a guesthouse or garage. My brief check on the web at the library held no indication of a wife or kids, but bachelors did live alone in houses in the suburbs. It wasn’t impossible.
My route took me to a neighborhood on Long Island Sound called Sachem’s Head. My plan was to drive by and get a sense of Austin Lowe’s life, and if I got lucky, to find an answer the question of whether he was missing. Mail piling up in the box, that sort of thing.
But when I turned the corner, five police vehicles—two Connecticut state police cars, a Connecticut state evidence van, a Maine state police car I recognized instantly, and a Busman’s Harbor cruiser—were parked on the lane, which dead-ended at the water just beyond.
As I stared at the house, the front door opened and Jamie stepped out onto the porch. When he spotted me in the cab, his mouth fell open. Mine did the same. What were they doing here? Even more baffling, how did they get here so quickly? I’d talked to Jamie in Gus’s parking lot less than half an hour before I left Busman’s Harbor.
He shouted something back into the house. As I started up the long path from the street, Binder and Flynn stepped through the open door.
“How did you end up here?” I asked when I reached the porch.
“You first,” Flynn commanded.
“I realized all the couples in the restaurant the night of the murder had a connection to Connecticut,” I explained. “I came to find out how the Lowes died. I had no idea they had a son until I read the local paper’s report on the fire. I decided to check Austin Lowe out to see if he could be the body in the walk-in.” I didn’t want to say that Jamie had told me Enid Sparks’s name. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to. “Your turn,” I said to Binder.
“So you know about the fire.” Binder paused, then apparently decided to go ahead and tell me what I pretty much already knew. “We found out the drowning victim was a woman named Enid Sparks. She had a nephew, and when Officer Dawes asked the local cops to do the death notification, they came over and found the mailbox overflowing. They reported to us, and we put two and two together.”
“See,” I said. “I’ve been right all along. Enid Sparks was the sister of Madeleine Lowe. The diners in the restaurant that night are all connected. And one of them was the killer.”