Jordan continued to hesitate. No matter how friendly Darcy seemed, Jordan couldn’t trust that anything she confided would be kept confidential. “No,” she said finally, keeping it simple.
Darcy drank more beer, her gaze still assessing. “Whatever you aren’t telling me, you can bet the cops in L.A. picked up on as well.”
Jordan remained silent, striving to look unconcerned, and Darcy shook her head.
Jase ended his song with a glissando that ran the length of the keyboard, drifting away to enthusiastic applause, then rose from the piano. A group of men at a nearby table caught his nod, rising to carry their drinks and instruments up onstage, unpacking a bass fiddle, a sax, and two horns. Apparently, they were to be treated to live jazz. Jordan decided she could easily become addicted to evenings spent here, even if it meant putting up with a few questions from the resident cop.
“So what have the welcoming committees brought so far?” Darcy asked.
“Chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and a salmon loaf,” Jordan answered, relieved by the change of subject.
“Salmon loaf is classier than a tuna casserole. Let me guess—Betty from down the block?”
“I think so—I had trouble keeping track.” Jordan remembered a question she wanted to ask. “What’s a colorist? She—Betty—mentioned one when we were standing outside this afternoon.”
Darcy scooted around in her chair. “Yo, Tom?” A bearded, red-haired mountain of a man at the bar raised his eyebrows. “Jordan wants to know about colorists.” He nodded and headed toward their table, beer mug in hand.
“Tom’s the great-grandson of one of Port Chatham’s most famous police chiefs,” Darcy said by way of introduction.
“Really?” Jordan shook his hand. “What time frame?”
“Late 1800s,” Tom rumbled, his soft voice at odds with his bulk. He pulled out the chair next to Darcy, settling in. “My great-granddaddy was smitten with Hattie Longren’s sister, Charlotte, for a while, according to the diaries he left behind. At least, until Charlotte turned to prostitution, which cooled his ardor a bit.”
“I read about her this afternoon.” The doll the dog had found evidently belonged to Charlotte, not a daughter. “She became a prostitute at the Green Light after Hattie was killed, correct?”
He nodded. “Bad luck ran in that family, that’s for sure. Charles Longren perished at sea, leaving Hattie in charge of his shipping empire, but then Hattie was murdered not too long after. Once Hattie was gone, Charlotte was too young to run the business and had no way to survive. She ended up dead on the waterfront not too many years later.”
“Tom’s a history buff, like many of the descendants of the original families here in town,” Darcy explained. She eyed Jordan curiously. “You’ve already started researching?”
“A couple of ladies brought me a stack of papers they thought I’d want to read. Newspaper accounts of the murder and so on.” Jordan shook her head. “From what I was able to glean, the man who hanged for Hattie’s murder was someone with whom she had a close relationship. Pretty sad.”
Tom leaned back, balancing his mug on the arm of his chair. “That jibes with my great-granddaddy’s account.”
“The man was a union representative, correct?”
“I think so. Frank Lewis enjoyed a certain amount of fame—or notoriety, depending on your perspective—for writing about the sailors’ plight in the union magazine of the time, the Seacoast Journal. The union and the shanghaiers were always at odds—both vying for the same berths with the shipping lines. And, of course, the shanghaiers had a lot to lose if the union got a toehold in the business.”
“The opinion of the ladies who brought me the articles was that Frank Lewis might’ve been falsely accused,” Jordan said.
Tom frowned, stroking his neatly trimmed beard. “I seem to remember some speculation that he’d been framed as a way to neutralize him because of his influence on the waterfront. The shanghaiers continually looked for a way to get rid of him, that’s for sure. He was highly educated—his columns in the Seacoast regularly documented the brutality and illegal practices of both the shipping masters and the shanghaiers. But as for whether he was ultimately wrongly convicted, I wouldn’t know about that.”
Belatedly, Jordan realized she had suggested that his relative, the police chief, might’ve bungled the investigation. “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
Tom shrugged. “None taken. People around here love to speculate about past events. Though it certainly seems like that old murder affected the lives of a lot of people, and not in a good way. My great-granddaddy never really got over losing Charlotte, and not too long after the trial, he was killed in the line of duty. I’ve always wondered whether his grief had made him careless.” He sat in pensive silence for a moment, then took a long drink of his beer. “You asked about colorists.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve only got two in town who specialize in color schemes for the Painted Ladies.”
Jordan looked at him blankly, then the light dawned. “The Victorians?”
“Yeah. Colorists consult with you to design historically accurate colors by customizing modern paint. I’m one, and the other is Holt Stilwell, who’s standing over there at the end of the bar.”
She craned her neck to get a glimpse of a broad-shouldered man with a bleached buzz cut who was chatting up two young women. Aviator sunglasses hung from the neck of his muscle shirt, which exposed arms indicating that he bench-pressed somewhere around a gazillion pounds. Jordan had never been attracted to big, beefy types—her taste ran more to the lean, angular builds of men like … well, Jase. Dammit.
“Best to stick with Tom,” Darcy muttered. “Stilwell is one of the main reasons I contribute heavily each year to the National Organization for Women.”
Tom grinned behind his beer mug. “He’s a talented colorist, but he does have a certain reputation with the ladies.”
“And it’s all bad.” Darcy scowled. “I’d love to run that son of a bitch in for being a misogynist and a womanizer, but unfortunately there’s no law against treating women like shit. And he’s too clever to get caught physically abusing anyone he lures back to his rat-infested dump.”
“So tell us what you really think.” Jase had walked up while she was talking, and he rubbed her shoulder affectionately, smiling at her.
At some point during the day, he’d exchanged the cable-knit sweater for a midnight-blue Henley T-shirt that emphasized his shoulders and lean build. Pulling out the chair next to Jordan, he was careful not to hit the dog, who was sound asleep.
“Best not to encourage Darcy.” Tom winked. “Before you know it, she’ll have Stilwell facedown on the bar, handcuffed.”
“That would be police brutality,” Darcy said, her tone prim.
“Darlin’.” Tom grinned, placing a hand over his heart, and she rolled her eyes.
“Justice, perhaps, in Stilwell’s case,” Jase pointed out.
Jordan noted the easy camaraderie among the three and felt a moment of envy. In the past year, with her increasing isolation from friends and family, she’d lost any sense of comfort or intimacy she’d had with others. She missed it.
“What you really need, though, before you start thinking about painting, is a master plan for the renovation,” Tom said, bringing the conversation back on topic. “You should assess the damage to the house and come up with a prioritized list of the repairs. There could be structural or mechanical problems that should be addressed first, or possibly problems that’ll cause continued deterioration and need to be fixed immediately.”