Clammed Up by Barbara Ross

Author:Barbara Ross [Ross, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781410461889
Google: c_gilgEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17239894
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

I woke up the next morning to a gray glow outside my windows. My bedroom usually offered great views of the harbor, but I could barely make out the Snuggles Inn across the street. I climbed back into bed. There was no clambake to run, anyway.

I was awakened a few hours later by my cell phone. “Ms. Snowden, Lieutenant Binder. You’re cleared to go ahead and take down the rest of that porch.”

“Does that mean we’re open for business?” I could barely contain my excitement.

“No. Let’s take this one step at a time. I said you could demolish the porch.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” There followed a series of calls between Sonny and me and radio calls between Sonny and Etienne. We decided Sonny would borrow his dad’s lobster boat—his dad hadn’t gone out in the fog— because the big plywood sheets we needed to close off the dining room’s French doors wouldn’t fit in our Boston Whaler. Etienne would bring the Whaler in, then would return to the island with Sonny and the supplies in his dad’s boat. I was responsible for returning the Whaler to the island.

After I hung up, I became aware of the sounds of voices and banging as well as a smell I remembered well from my childhood. Still in a T-shirt and pj bottoms, I descended the back stairs into the kitchen.

Livvie was there with Page, along with Sarah Halsey and her son Tyler. Mom had her back to me, facing the stove. They were all busily engaged in the process of making strawberry rhubarb jam. Rhubarb jam day was a family tradition, and judging by their jumpy, chattering ways, Page and Tyler were pretty excited about it.

“No school?” I asked.

“We got out yes-ter-day.” Page sang it rather than said it. Like a lot of Maine kids, she loved foods that turned other children green. She was brought up eating all manner of crustaceans and bi-valves, after all. I’d seen Page and Tyler fight over the last fiddlehead fern in a bowl. But nothing, in my opinion, was stranger than her love of rhubarb, the plant that grew like a weed and tasted, unless mixed with something sweet, like bitter celery.

Rhubarb grew all around our house, and my mother, combining her skinflint upper-class Yankee upbringing with her thrifty Maine housewife ways, couldn’t stand not to use every bit of it. So on a day she designated in June every year, all rhubarb not previously used in pie, cake, or compote was cut down and turned into strawberry rhubarb jam.

I helped myself to coffee and sat on the back stairs out of the way. I smiled hello to Sarah, remembering how uncomfortable she’d been when I last spoke to her at the clambake. She smiled back as she chopped rhubarb stalks.

Livvie and Sarah were close friends. They were about the same age and had been pregnant at the same time—too young, in my parents’ opinion, and in mine, truth be told. But while

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