Read Online Clammed Up by Barbara Ross - Free Book Online

porch was high, so you had to stand on a ladder when you took the windows off, carrying them down one at a time. If that wasn’t bad enough, the windows were old, a little warped, and covered in layers of paint, so removing them always involved a lot of shoving and swearing, which is exactly what Sonny was doing as I came up the walk.
    “Hey!” I called softly, hoping not to startle him.
    “Hey, yourself.” Sonny paused on the ladder before starting on another window. He was red in the face and his dark green T-shirt was soaked with perspiration. “Man, I hate this job.”
    “Dad hated it, too.”
    When you think about men who’ve hauled lobster traps, chopped wood for towering bonfires, and disposed of the lobster shells, corn cobs, and clamshells left by four hundred people a day, it says a lot about the rottenness of the window job.
    “Times like this, I really miss him.”
    I nodded, thinking about how few the years had really been, between when Dad had accepted Sonny as a permanent fixture in Livvie’s life, and when he’d died. For those few years, Dad had help with the windows.
    “I checked the Internet reservations,” Sonny said. “We’re almost full up for tomorrow.”
    “Really?” I’d turned the reservation system off for today, but I’d left it on for tomorrow in the hope that we’d be cleared to open. Mondays were usually decent days in the clambake biz. Lots of people came to Maine for three-day weekends. But full, in June? “Ghouls,” I said.
    “Julia, you don’t know that. Maybe it’s people who wanted to go today, but couldn’t. That’s why we’re full.”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Well, it doesn’t matter why they’re coming. The position we’re in, we have to take their money.”
    And who put us in that position, Sonny? “We don’t even know yet if we can run.”
    “I heard the cops have Chris Durand back for a second round of questioning today. He’s been there at least a couple hours.”
    Why did I bristle at that? Was Sonny implying if the police were questioning Chris, they’d end up arresting him and our troubles would soon be over? If that was what he meant, he probably would have just said it. Sonny was not a subtle guy. I wasn’t surprised he knew Chris was at the police station. In Busman’s Harbor, at times it felt like everybody knew everything.
    “I think Chris is being interviewed because he was the last person in Busman’s Harbor to see Ray Wilson alive,” I said. “Turns out, Ray and Tony grew up in Bath.”
    “Really?” Sonny clearly understood what that meant. Maybe nobody from the harbor was involved.
    “Yup. Tony told me himself this morning.”
    Sonny climbed down off the ladder with the heavy window in his hands. “Still doesn’t answer the question why the body was left like that.”
    “I know. That bothers me, too.” Neither of us had the answer, so I said, “Let me go upstairs to my office and check the reservation system. Then I’ll come back and help carry these windows into the garage.”

    “Jul-ya!”
    I was still in my office, going through tomorrow’s reservations, adding up the money we’d flush down the drain if the cops didn’t let us open. I’d called Jamie at the station house on the hope he was back from Morrow Island. The woman at the desk told me he wasn’t around.
    “Jul-ya, state cops are here for you!” Sonny was still out on the front lawn and evidently felt no hesitation about announcing it to the whole harbor.
    “I’ll be right down.”
    Lieutenant Binder and Detective Flynn stood on my mother’s front porch. Sonny had finished taking the windows down and was humping them to the garage.
    I led Binder and Flynn to a corner of the porch and sat them on the wicker furniture. Binder looked more tired than yesterday. The creases around his deep-set brown eyes were more pronounced, and he sat down heavily on the settee. Flynn, though considerably younger, didn’t look much better. He was slightly stooped as