So she said, "Yes, Faith" as meekly as she could muster and hung up with promises to stay in touch with everyone on the hour every hour if necessary. Sam had picked up the extension and both he and Tom were exhorting her along the same lines Faith had.
She hung up, drained her glass, and then remembered: She had total y forgotten to tel Faith that Seth hadn't done any work since Memorial Day.
It would just have to wait.
Three
No one claimed the body.
After the medical examiner finished the autopsy and established that the cause of death was most certainly due to multiple stab wounds, the state police let it be known that whoever wanted to was free to take Mitchel and hold whatever last rites deemed fitting and proper. The remains were transported to the back room of Durgen's Funeral Home in Granvil e, pending the wishes of the near and dear.
Those wishes were stil pending at the end of the week, by which time Donald Durgen had sensibly opted for cremation. Aside from the obvious reason, Donald told his brother and partner, Marvin, "We don't know how long we're going to have Mitch's company. Could be quite a while, and you know we need the space." He conscientiously labeled the cardboard box and placed it next to their tax receipts from 1980 to 1985. If someone wanted to come along and pay for an urn, why then they'd be only too happy, but for the moment, 'Mitch would stay filed.
That Mitchel Pierce had been stabbed to death with a hunting knife did not make the investigation any easier. On Sanpere, hunting was not merely a sport but a passion, and in many cases, a necessity. Finding a household without a hunting knife would be as surprising as the use to which this particular one had been put. Far in advance of opening day, knives and guns were honed and oiled, stories told and stretched. The winners of the state moose lottery, those fortunate individuals who got the chance to track a real y big creature, were targets of envy for weeks.
But the fact remained: No one seemed to be in a hurry to claim any kinship with Mitch. He seemed destined to remain at Durgen's, not even perched by the one window in the room where his spirit would have had an unobstructed bird's-eye view across the harbor to the old granite quarries on Crandal Island and straight out to Isle au Haut, rising from the sea in the distance—with its Mount Champlain resembling some sort of Down East version of Bali Hai.
Durgen's was one of the best vantage points in Granvil e.
Pix was expressing her surprise at Mitchel 's lack of earthly ties to Louise Frazier who had cal ed to remind the Mil ers about the Fraziers' annual Independence Day clambake on Sunday.
“The police have tried to track down a relative or even a close friend, but so far no luck. There's got to be somebody. It's real y very sad. I told Sam we ought to bury him and hold a smal service. There's plenty of room in the plot, and I don't imagine mother would mind. I can't stand thinking of him on some shelf at Durgen's for eternity, but Sam is sure someone wil turn up. He told me to wait.”
He'd also told her that there was no way Ursula was going to let a nonfamily member eavesdrop on their conversations in the next life, particularly when they had been careful to avoid revealing more than where to replace a two-by-four in this. Pix was sure her mother would be more accepting, but Sam convinced her to let things lie for the moment.
“It is odd," Louise agreed, "but Mitchel was a loner. He seemed to know everybody—and he certainly knew a lot about everybody; he was a wonderful gossip—but I can't ever remember his having a good friend. Nobody lived with him whenever he was on the island, although he lived with plenty of people.”
It sounded il ogical, but Pix knew what Louise meant.
“He was certainly adept at mooching a place to stay when he needed one, but when he was working on a house and living on the premises, you're right: He was always alone. He lived with other people only when he couldn't live in the house. The time he was restoring that barn in Little Harbor, he lived with one of the Prescotts"
“And didn't he board with John Eggleston once?"
“Very briefly. I don't think he was there a week before they quarreled and John threw him out. I'd forgotten that."
Pix made a mental note to talk to John. A former Episcopal priest, now a wood sculptor, he might have evoked some revelations of a confessional nature from Mitch before things went awry. It would be interesting to discover what had happened to cause the heave ho, although it would no doubt turn out to have been something like Mitch's using John's towel or drinking milk from the carton. In Pix's experience, this was usual y why roommates parted ways—
nothing dramatic, just irritating little everyday things that piled up to actionable proportions.
Pix continued: "Jil told me that Earl told her the state police have been trying to find out about Mitch's past from his tax returns and Social Security. It seems everybody has a paper trail. He was born in Rhode Island, but his parents are dead and there were no siblings. His permanent address was a post office box in Camden. They got al excited when they went over the court records—you know, he's been sued a number of times. They found a lawyer's name and got in touch with him, but he says Mitch never told him anything personal, just hired him by the case.
Never, apparently, made a wil , either—at least not with this guy. Now they're going over his bank records, seeing whom he may have written checks to and if he had a safety-deposit box anywhere. The last place he was living was a rented room in a house in Sul ivan, and there wasn't much in it except a few clothes and a whole lot of paperback mysteries."
“It does seem amazing to us. We're so embedded in our families, our relationships, and yes, our legal affairs"
Louise laughed. "What I'm saying is, people like us don't often think of people like Mitch—someone with no roots.”
Louise came from a large South Carolinian family, bringing with her to Maine softened speech, a penchant for drinking iced tea al year long, and an endless supply of stories about various family members. She had a tendency to talk of the living and the dead in the same tense, so Pix was never sure whether Aunt Sister, who dressed al in white and spent fifteen minutes every day of her life with slightly dampened bags—which she fashioned herself from silk and rose petals—on her closed eyes, was stil alive or had passed on. Surely, however, Cousin Fancy, who saved the sterling from the Yankees by burying it in the family plot, moving Grandaddy's stone to mark the spot—merely for the duration, you understand—was no longer rustling along the sidewalks of Charleston in her hoop skirts.
Pix accepted Louise's invitation, hoping that Sam would be able to be there with her. He liked to help El iot prepare the pit. It was an old-fashioned clambake always held in Sylvester Cove, with half the island in attendance.
She offered to bring her usual vat of fish chowder, her grandmother's cherished, but not particularly closely guarded, recipe—unlike some she could name, she told Louise, both women having tried unsuccessful y for years to get Adelaide Bainbridge's recipe for sherry-nutmeg cake.
Pix had tried not so much because she wanted to make it, but because of the principle of the thing, and besides, her mother would like it. Louise wanted it because it was a favorite of El iot's.
Pix always thought of the Fraziers as ospreys, the large fish hawks that were once more returning to the islands, building their enormous nests on rocky ledges, high atop spruce trees, and occasional y even balanced on a channel marker. Ospreys were birds who mated for life.
She'd told her theory to Sam, who agreed, commenting that El iot was actual y beginning to look a little beaky as he got older. Whatever the name or the comparison, the Fraziers were a devoted couple.