Death on the Cape
It was on an August afternoon shortly after they arrived at their rented cottage in the village of Dennis on Cape Cod that Alvirah Meehan noticed that there was something very odd about their next-door neighbor, a painfully thin young woman who appeared to be in her late twenties.
After Alvirah and Willy looked around their cottage a bit, remarking favorably about the four-poster maple bed, the hooked rugs, the cheery kitchen and the fresh, sea-scented breeze, they unpacked their expensive new clothes from their matching Vuitton luggage. Willy then poured an icecold beer for each to enjoy on the deck of the house, which overlooked Cape Cod Bay.
Willy, his rotund body eased onto a padded wicker chaise lounge, remarked that it was going to be one heck of a sunset, and thank God for a little peace. Ever since they had won forty million dollars in the New York State lottery, it seemed to Willy, Alvirah had been a walking lightning rod. First she went to the famous Cypress Point Spa in California and nearly got murdered. Then they had gone on a cruise together and—wouldn’t you know—the man who sat next to them at the community table in the dining room ended up dead as a mackerel. Still, with the accumulated wisdom of his years, Willy was sure that in Cape Cod, at least, they’d have the quiet he’d been searching for. If Alvirah wrote an article for the New York Globe about this vacation, it would have to do with the weather and the fishing.
During his narration, Alvirah was sitting at the picnic table, a companionable few feet away from Willy’s stretched-out form. She wished she’d remembered to put on a sun hat. The beautician at Sassoon’s had warned her against getting sun on her hair. “It’s such a lovely rust shade now, Mrs. Meehan. We don’t want it to get those nasty yellow streaks, do we?”
Since recovering from the attempt on her life at the spa, Alvirah had regained all the weight she’d paid three thousand dollars to lose and was again a comfortable size somewhere between a 14 and a 16. But Willy constantly observed that when he put his arms around her, he knew he was holding a woman—not one of those half-starved zombies you see in the fashion ads Alvirah was so fond of studying.
Forty years of affectionately listening to Willy’s observations had left Alvirah with the ability to hear him with one ear and close him out with the other. Now as she gazed at the tranquil cottages perched atop the grass-and-sand embankment that served as a seawall, then down below at the sparkling bluegreen water and the stretch of rock-strewn beach, she had the troubled feeling that maybe Willy was right. Beautiful as the Cape was, and even though it was a place she had always longed to visit, she might not find a newsworthy story here for her editor, Charley Evans.
Two years ago Charley had sent a New York Globe reporter to interview the Meehans on how it felt to win forty million dollars. What would they do with it? Alvirah was a cleaning woman. Willy was a plumber. Would they continue in their jobs?
Alvirah had told the reporter in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t that dumb, that the next time she picked up a broom it would be when she was dressed as a witch for a Knights of Columbus costume party. Then she had made a list of all the things she wanted to do, and first was the visit to the Cypress Point Spa—where she planned to hobnob with the celebrities she’d been reading about all her life.
That had led Charley Evans to ask her to write an article for the Globe about her stay at the spa. He gave her a sunburst pin that contained a microphone so that she could record her impressions of the people she spoke with and play the tape back when she wrote the article.
The thought of her pin brought an unconscious smile to Alvirah’s face.
As Willy said, she’d gotten into hot water at Cypress Point. She’d picked up on what was really going on and was nearly murdered for her trouble. But it had been so exciting, and now she was great friends with everyone at the spa and could go there every year as a guest. And thanks to her help solving the murder on the ship last year, they had an invitation to take a free cruise to Alaska anytime they desired.
Cape Cod was beautiful, but Alvirah had a sneaking suspicion Willy might be right, that this might be an ordinary vacation that wouldn’t make good copy for the Globe.
Precisely at that moment she glanced over the row of hedges on the right perimeter of their property and observed a young woman with a somber expression standing at the railing of her porch next door and staring at the bay.
It was the way her hands were gripping the railing: Tension, Alvirah thought. She’s stuffed with it. It was the way the young woman turned her head, looked straight into Alvirah’s eyes, then turned away again. She didn’t even see me, Alvirah decided. The fifty- to sixty-foot distance between them did not prevent her from realizing that waves of pain and despair were radiating from the young woman.
Clearly it was time to see if she could help. “I think I’ll just introduce myself to our neighbor,” she said to Willy. “There’s something up with her.” She walked down the steps and strolled over to the hedge. “Hello,” she said in her friendliest voice. “I saw you drive in. We’ve been here for two hours, so I guess that makes us the welcoming committee. I’m Alvirah Meehan.”
The young woman turned, and Alvirah felt instant compassion. She looked as though she had been ill. That ghostly pallor, the soft, unused muscles of her arms and legs. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I came here to be alone, not to be neighborly,” she said quietly. “Excuse me, please.” That probably would have been the end of it, as Alvirah later observed, except that as she spun on her heel the girl tripped over a footstool and fell heavily onto the porch. Alvirah rushed to help her up, refused to allow her to go into her cottage unaided and, feeling responsible for the accident, wrapped an ice pack around her rapidly swelling wrist. By the time she had satisfied herself that the wrist was only sprained and made her a cup of tea, Alvirah had learned that her name was Cynthia Rogers and that she was a schoolteacher from Illinois. That piece of information hit with a resounding thud on Alvirah’s ears because, as she told Willy when she returned to their place an hour later, within ten minutes she’d recognized their neighbor. “The poor girl may call herself Cynthia Rogers,” Alvirah confided to Willy, “but her real name is Cynthia Lathem. She was found guilty of murdering her stepfather twelve years ago. He had big bucks and was well known. All the papers carried the story. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“You remember everything like it was yesterday,” Willy commented.
“That’s the truth. And you know I always read about murders. Anyhow, this one happened here on Cape Cod. Cynthia swore she was innocent, and she always said there was a witness who could prove she’d been out of the house at the time of the murder, but the jury didn’t believe her story. I wonder why she came back. I’ll have to call the Globe and have Charley Evans send me the files on the case. She’s probably just been released from prison. Her complexion is pure gray. Maybe”—and now Alvirah’s eyes became thoughtful—“she’s up here because she really is innocent and is still looking for that missing witness to prove her story!”
To Willy’s dismay, Alvirah opened the top drawer of the dresser, took out her sunburst pin with the hidden microphone and began to dial her editor’s direct line in New York.
* * *
That night, Willy and Alvirah ate at the Red Pheasant Inn. Alvirah wore a beige-and-blue print dress she had bought at Bergdorf Goodman but which, as she remarked to Willy, somehow didn’t look much different on her than the print dress she’d bought in Alexander’s just before they won the lottery. “It’s my full figure,” she lamented as she spread butter on a warm cranberry muffin. “My, these muffins are good. And, Willy, I’m glad that you bought that yellow linen jacket. It shows up your blue eyes, and you still have a fine head of hair.”
“I feel like a two-hundred-pound canary,” Willy commented, “but as long as you like it.”
After dinner they went to the Cape Playhouse and thrilled to the performance of Debbie Reynolds in a new comedy being tried out for Broadway. At intermission, as
they sipped ginger ale on the grass outside the theater, Alvirah told Willy how she’d always enjoyed Debbie Reynolds from the time Debbie was a kid doing musicals with Mickey Rooney, and that it was a terrible thing Eddie Fisher ditched her when they had those two small babies. “And what good did it do him?” Alvirah philosophized as the warning came to return to their seats for the second act. “He never had much luck after that. People who don’t do the right thing usually don’t win in the end.” That comment led Alvirah to wonder whether Charley had sent the information on their neighbor by Express Mail. She was anxious to read it.
* * *
As Alvirah and Willy were enjoying Debbie Reynolds, Cynthia Lathem was at last beginning to realize that she was really free, that twelve years of prison were behind her. Twelve years ago . . . she’d been about to start her junior year at the Rhode Island School of Design when her stepfather, Stuart Richards, was found shot to death in the study of his mansion, a stately eighteenth-century captain’s house in Dennis.
That afternoon Cynthia had driven past the house on her way to the cottage and pulled off the road to study it. Who was there now? she wondered. Had her stepsister Lillian sold it or had she kept it? It had been in the Richards family for three generations, but Lillian had never been sentimental. And then Cynthia had pressed her foot on the accelerator, chilled at the rush of memories of that awful night and the days that followed. The accusation. The arrest, arraignment, trial. Her early confidence. “I can absolutely prove that I left the house at eight o’clock and didn’t get home till past midnight. I was on a date.”
Now Cynthia shivered and wrapped the light-blue woolen robe more tightly around her slender body. She’d weighed 125 pounds when she went to prison. Her present weight, 110, was not enough for her five-foot eight-inch height. Her hair, once a dark blond, had changed in those years to a mediumbrown. Drab, she thought as she brushed it. Her eyes, the same shade of hazel as her mother’s, were listless and vacant. At lunch that last day, Stuart Richards had said, “You look more like your mother all the time. I should have had the brains to hang on to her.”
Her mother had been married to Stuart from the time Cynthia was eight until she was twelve, the longer of his two marriages. Lillian, his only birth child, ten years older than Cynthia, had lived with her mother in New York and seldom visited the Cape.
Cynthia laid the brush on the dresser. Had it been a crazy impulse to come here? Two weeks out of prison, barely enough money to live on for six months, not knowing what she could do or would do with her life. Should she have spent so much to rent this cottage, to rent a car? Was there any point to it? What did she hope to accomplish?
A needle in a haystack, she thought. Walking into the small parlor, she reflected that compared to Stuart’s mansion, this house was tiny, but after years of confinement it seemed palatial. Outside, the sea breeze was blowing the bay into churning waves. Cynthia walked out on the porch, only vaguely aware of her throbbing wrist, hugging her arms against the chill. But, oh God, to breathe fresh, clean air, to know that if she wanted to get up at dawn and walk the beach the way she had as a child, no one could stop her. The moon, three-quarters full, looking as though a wedge had been neatly sliced from it, made the bay glisten, a silvery midnight blue. But where the moon did not reach it, the water appeared dark and impenetrable.
Cynthia stared unseeingly as her mind wrenched her back to the terrible night when Stuart was murdered. Then she shook her head. No, she would not allow herself to think about that now. Not tonight. This was a time to let the peace of this place fill her soul. She would go to bed, and she’d leave the windows wide open so that the cool night wind would pour into her room, making her pull the covers closer around her, deepening her sleep.
Tomorrow morning she would wake up early and walk on the beach. She’d feel the wet sand under her feet, and she’d look for shells, just as she had when she was a child. Tomorrow. Yes, she’d give herself the morning to help bridge her reentry into the world, to regain her sense of equilibrium. And then she would begin the quest, probably hopeless, for the one person who would know that she had told the truth.
* * *
The next morning, as Alvirah prepared breakfast, Willy drove to get the morning papers. When he returned he was also carrying a bag of still-hot blueberry muffins. “I asked around,” he told a delighted Alvirah. “Everyone said to go to the Mercantile behind the post office for the best muffins on the Cape.”
They ate at the picnic table on the deck. As she nibbled on her second blueberry muffin, Alvirah studied the early-morning joggers on the beach. “Look, there she is!”
“There who is?”
“Cynthia Lathem. She’s been gone at least an hour and a half. I bet she’s starving.”
When Cynthia ascended the steps from the beach to her deck, she was met by a beaming Alvirah, who linked her arm in Cynthia’s. “I make the best coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. And wait till you taste the blueberry muffins.”
“I really don’t want—” Cynthia tried to pull back but was propelled across the lawn. Willy jumped up to pull out a bench for her.
“How’s your wrist?” he asked. “Alvirah’s been real upset that you sprained it when she went over to visit.”
Cynthia realized that her mounting irritation was being overcome by the genuine warmth she saw on both their faces. Willy—with his rounded cheeks, strong pleasant expression and thick mane of white hair—reminded her of Tip O’Neill. She told him that.
Willy beamed. “Fellow just remarked on that in the bakery. Only difference is that while Tip was speaker of the house, I was savior of the outhouse. I’m a retired plumber.”
As Cynthia sipped the fresh orange juice and the coffee and picked at the muffin, she listened with disbelief, then awe, as Alvirah told her about winning the lottery, going to Cypress Point Spa and helping to track down a murderer, then going on an Alaskan cruise and figuring out who killed the man who sat next to her at the community table.
She accepted a second cup of coffee. “You’ve told me all this for a reason, haven’t you?” Cynthia said. “You recognized me yesterday, didn’t you?”
Alvirah’s expression became serious. “Yes.”
Cynthia pushed back her bench. “You’ve been very kind, and I think you want to help me, but the best way you can do that is to leave me alone. I have a lot of things to work out, but I have to do them myself. Thank you for breakfast.”
Alvirah watched the slender young woman walk between the two cottages. “She got a little sun this morning,” she observed. “Very becoming. When she fills out a little, she’ll be a beautiful girl.”
“You may as well plan on getting the sun too,” Willy observed. “You heard her.”
“Oh, forget it. Once Charley sends the files on her case I’ll figure out a way to help her.”
“Oh my God,” Willy moaned. “I might have known. Here we go again.”
* * *
“I don’t know how Charley does it,” Alvirah sighed approvingly an hour later. The overnight Express Mail envelope had just arrived. “It looks as though he sent every word anyone ever wrote about the case.” She made a tsk-tsking sound. “Look at this picture of Cynthia at the trial. She was just a scared kid.”
Methodically, Alvirah began sorting the clippings on the table; then she got out her lined pad and pen and began to make notes.
Willy was reclining on the padded chaise he had claimed for his own, deeply immersed in the sports section of the Cape Cod Times. “I’m just about ready to give up on the Mets getting the pennant,” he commented sadly, shaking his head.
He looked up for reassurance, but it was clear that Alvirah had not heard him.
* * *
At one o’clock Willy went out again, returning this time with a quart of lobster bisque. Over lunch Alvirah filled him in on what she had learned. “In a nutshell, here are the facts: Cynthia’s mother was a widow when she married Stuart Richards. Cynthia was eight at the time. They div
orced four years later. Richards had one child by his first marriage, a daughter named Lillian. She was ten years older than Cynthia and lived with her mother in New York.”
“Why’d Cynthia’s mother divorce Richards?” Willy asked between sips of the bisque.
“From what Cynthia said on the witness stand, Richards was one of those men who always belittled women. Her mother would be dressed to go out, and he’d reduce her to tears by ridiculing what she was wearing—that kind of thing. Sounds like he just about gave her a nervous breakdown. Apparently, though, he had always been fond of Cynthia, always taking her out around her birthday and giving her presents.
“Then Cynthia’s mother died, and Richards invited the young girl to visit him here at Cape Cod. Actually she wasn’t so young by then—she was about to start her junior year at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her mother had been sick for a while, and there apparently wasn’t much money left; she said she was planning on dropping out of school and working for a year or two. She claimed that Stuart told her that he’d always planned to leave half his money to his daughter Lillian and the other half to Dartmouth College. But he stayed so angry after Dartmouth let women in as full-time students that he changed his will. She said he told her he was leaving her the Dartmouth portion of his estate, about ten million dollars. The prosecutor got Cynthia to admit that Richards also told her she’d have to wait for him to die to get it; that it was too bad about college, but that her mother should have provided for her education.”
Willy put down his spoon. “So there’s your motive, huh?”
“That’s what the prosecutor said, that Cynthia had wanted the money right away. Anyhow, a guy named Ned Creighton happened to drop in to visit Richards and overheard their conversation. He was a friend of Lillian’s, about her age. Cynthia apparently had known him slightly from when she and her mother had lived with Richards at the Cape. So Creighton invited Cynthia to have dinner with him, and Stuart urged her to go.