“You’ve done this scene before,” I said. “Saw it at your last showing.”
She turned, started. “Hey!” she said, reaching out a warm hand. About my age, she was a broad-shouldered Scandinavian woman, with a wind-coarsened face, blue eyes, and blond eyebrows. A sailor’s knit cap held her hair down.
She dropped a brush into a coffee can, swished it back and forth, wiped it on a stained kitchen towel. “Still trying to capture it,” she said, sitting back, taking a breather. “So what brings you down here?”
I found a boulder to sit on, glanced for a moment at the open sea, and caught a whiff of turpentine before the wind blew it off. Raising my voice over the sound of waves crashing the rocks, I said, “Was your friend Nora Murphy ever a friend of a guy named Dixie Hardaway?”
“Wow! That’s a name out of the past.”
“You and Nora still friends?”
“Sure, but I never knew Dixie Hardaway, only what Nora told me — some rich man’s son she fell in love with. What’s going on?”
“What can you tell me about Nora?”
“A high school teacher. Lives with her mother. Why are you asking?”
A sudden gust tilted her easel. She made a grab for it, almost falling off her stool. I helped her wedge its legs into a cleft in the rocks.
“The summer my father was killed, would you remember if the police questioned her?”
“Ahh...” Her eyes brightened. “You’re still doing that. No, never heard that they did. Why would they?”
“You remember, don’t you, that Nora was shacked up with Dixie Hardaway that summer?”
She laughed. “Where’d you get that expression? People don’t say ‘shacked up’ anymore. ‘Shacked up’ makes it sound dirty. It wasn’t dirty. They were in love. At least, she was.”
We stared at each other a few seconds. A little smile was in her eyes, waiting for the next question.
“Ran into a lawyer yesterday in Steep Falls,” I said, “an old friend of my father’s. He said he’d rented a cottage down Cape Porpoise next to one rented by Dixie Hardaway and a woman named Nora Murphy. Thought it might be your friend.”
“It was. Yeah, that was a big summer for Nora. In love for the first time. I never saw her happier. But it all came crashing down, poor woman.”
“How?”
“Well, for openers, her mother lost a leg to diabetes, then was paralyzed by a stroke. Nora had to take a year off from teaching. With all due respect to you, Duff, I doubt she paid much attention to news about a murder.”
“What was never in the news,” I said, “is that Dixie was one of several people questioned by the police. He was a suspected drug user. What bothered this lawyer and now bothers me is that Dixie claimed he’d gone to Florida the weekend my father was killed. The lawyer thinks he lied.”
“That summer — what was it, eight years ago? — if Nora had missed a weekend with that man, she’d’ve come sobbing to me. And she never did.”
“You sure?”
“She lived for those weekends. She was in love.”
“This guy said she was on a blanket with Dixie every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday right in front of his place. Drove his wife nuts with his children out there giggling at them.”
“So why’s this important now?”
“Because he lied. He didn’t deny being with a woman. It wasn’t to protect her. He just told them he went to Florida that very weekend. Why would he say that if he wasn’t hiding something?”
“You might find out from Nora. But she might not want to talk about it. That summer’s a bitter memory for her.”
“You have her address?”
I found Nora’s mother in the small backyard of a two-story house that had to be, like most houses on Munjoy Hill, at least a hundred years old. Paint blisters on the clapboards, red begonias in faded green boxes under street-level windows. She was in a wheelchair with only one foot protruding from a quilted robe that covered her legs. I guessed she was in her seventies. She looked like a spent old lady with sallow cheeks and thinning gray hair and sagging jowls. She looked up from a magazine as I walked toward her. I watched her lift a Perrier bottle off the grass and drink from it while squinting at me over metal-rimmed reading glasses.
“Mrs. Murphy?”
“Why, yes, young man,” she said, her face brightening. I guessed she didn’t get many visitors.
“I’m Duff Kerrigan.” I handed her my National Assurance card. (I don’t carry one identifying me as a private investigator — too intimidating.)
She put the bottle down and pushed her glasses higher on her nose and read every word on the card. She seemed disappointed to find nothing printed on the back.
“My husband sold insurance,” she said, handing the card back. “Everything on the hill this side of Congress Street was what he called his debit, all the way down past Longfellow’s house. Everybody on the hill knew him and loved him.”
I found out later that her husband had been dead for more than ten years.
“Nora should be home anytime now. She probably stopped to get some groceries. I told her we were low on coffee.” Looking across the table at a chair laden with potting soil, plant pots, and a bag of fertilizer, she said, “You can bring a chair out from the kitchen if you’d like. Nora sometimes does that although she’s not one for sitting around much. She likes to putter in the garden or stay in her room. She has a computer up there. I think she’s writing a book, although I don’t know what she has to write about. She doesn’t have any social life. She’s always been fearful of boys...”
I heard a car stop at the curb behind my Jeep and went out to see a slender woman, maybe five four, set a stack of papers on the hood of her car. She opened the trunk and lifted out a bag of groceries.
“Can I help you with that?” I said, crossing the street.
A puzzled “What?” came to her face.
“You’re Nora Murphy?” giving her a big smile. “I’m Duff Kerrigan.”
That got a so-what look as she lowered the lid of the trunk and gathered the papers off the hood.
A few papers slid from her hand to the pavement. I helped pick them up. They were pages with ragged edges torn out of spiral notebooks, student essays.
As she took them from me, she said, “You want to see me?”
“I’m a friend of Eloise Hoagy,” I said.
That brought another so-what look, but one that was tinged with curiosity.
I followed her up steps to the lawn, watching her pink heels slide in and out of black flat shoes under the low hem of a dark blue dress. She said something to her mother and went to the back door. “I’ll be right out,” as though telling me to stay put.
While waiting, I learned a lot about Mrs. Murphy’s husband the insurance salesman and about the four-masted schooners that were still coming into the harbor when Mrs. Murphy was a child, “long past their most useful time, of course. They took the masts down and used the hulls to carry pulpwood down from the rivers. This was once a very important seaport.” She glanced at the back door when Nora came out. “Sometimes at night I watched my husband standing at the window. I always thought he was dreaming about going to sea.” She started to laugh. “Maybe to get away from me. He always said I talked too much.”
“How can I help you?” Nora said, coming onto the grass, brushing a lock of hair off her forehead. She was every high school English teacher you ever knew, strong willed and forthright. Maybe she had little social life, but she was not mousy. Her face glowed with the radiance of a disciplined mind.
“Are you a lawyer?”
“A private investigator.”
Her expression grew thoughtful. “And this is about Eloise?”
“I guess the two of you are friends.”
She glanced at her mother, probably to determine whether she was listening, then led me down the walk toward the street. She was suspicious and annoyed but curious.