Excerpt
The Labor Day Murder
1
I have always been a child of summer. While others prefer to ski and ice skate, my pleasure is to swim and garden. The house I inherited from Aunt Meg is a stone’s throw from the Long Island Sound and since moving in, I’ve spent many wonderful hours on the little cove nearby, both in and out of the water. But even though we have a big backyard and a wonderful beach, we jumped at the invitation that dropped in our laps one fine spring day.
“Chris,” my friend and neighbor Melanie Gross said over the telephone that morning, “something’s come up and Hal and I can’t use my uncle’s house on Fire Island the end of August. Do you think you and Jack and little Eddie would like to go in our place?”
The first thing out of my mouth was, “Fire Island—that’s somewhere off Long Island, isn’t it?”
“It’s a barrier island a few miles off the southern shore of Long Island, a long, skinny strip of land with one village after another, a small state park at the western end, and a lot of park at the eastern end. There are no cars, Jack can leave his jackets and ties at home, it’s just a lot of fun and sun and leisure.”
“It sounds wonderful. Why aren’t you and Hal going?”
“One of his old buddies from law school is getting married in California and we decided to make a vacation out of it. We’re flying out a week or so before the wedding, which is Labor Day weekend. And my uncle’s going to Europe so he offered us the house. I already asked him if you guys could take it instead.”
“It sounds like a dream, Mel. Jack has that last week of August and first week of September off—he put in for it a long time ago—so I know we’re free.”
“Great. I’ll tell Uncle Max it’s a deal.”
I remember saying, “I should ask Jack first,” but Mel pooh-poohed that.
“He’ll say yes. I know him.”
And she was right. He loved the idea. He said he hadn’t been to Fire Island since his wild youth—since he’s only a little past thirty I wasn’t sure how long ago he was talking about and decided not to ask—and he thought it would be a great place to spend a vacation, especially now that we had Eddie, who would be about nine months old when we went.
For me it was more than a vacation; it was an opportunity to expand my world. Having spent fifteen years of my life in a convent, from the age of fifteen to the age of thirty, I had traveled very little and vacationed mostly with my aunt in the house Jack and I now owned. And although I’ve been a secular person for three years and married for two of them, I’ve never quite gotten over all the years of leaving home with fifty cents in my pocket, which meant that a vacation that cost little was very appealing.
So that was how we ended up on Fire Island at the end of August. It was everything Mel had promised, and a lot more. The vacation began on a hot, breezy day in August with the ferry trip from Bay Shore, Long Island out to the island. For about thirty wonderful minutes we crossed the bay out to Blue Harbor, a small community toward the western end of the thirty-two-mile strip of land that was Fire Island. We sat upstairs on the deck for a few minutes and then I took Eddie downstairs and inside, my worries about the bright sun overcoming my strong desire to feel both it and the breeze on my skin.
From the open window we could see the weathered dock and the little gray frame building with the words “Blue Harbor” painted on it. Off to the right, in a kind of breezeway, hung wagon after wagon, the transportation of choice on Fire Island, waiting for their owners to unlock them and load them with luggage. The slightly bumpy end to our voyage as the ferry hit the dock caused a few tears, but Eddie recovered quickly when we put him in his stroller and walked off the boat.
Mel had passed along a ring of necessary keys a few weeks earlier, along with several pages of instructions. We found the family wagon hanging among all the other family carts and wagons and unlocked the padlock with ease. Traveling with a baby meant carrying all sorts of necessities that didn’t quite fit in the wagon, but being resourceful people, we distributed things around the stroller and Jack managed to push a suitcase with one hand and pull the wagon with the other as we walked on the narrow lanes and streets to the Margulies house.
The sidewalks, if you could call them that, were all of four feet wide, and with the exception of one or two streets, were made of wood like a boardwalk. The first thing I noticed as we started our walk was that no one seemed to have stairs in this village. Every house we passed had a ramp up to a deck, and people on bicycles, ringing their handlebar bells to signal their approach, zipped up and down the ramps. It was no wonder there were no cars. I’ve never seen one narrow enough to fit on those streets.
The second thing that drew my attention was the many beautiful, gnarled pine trees that seemed to grow on every lawn, half hiding the houses behind them. And there were tall grasses, maybe as much as ten feet tall or more, that marked property boundaries. Although the houses were not far apart, I could see that looking into your neighbor’s yard would not be easy. In other words, there was lots of privacy.
“In walking to our vacation home we actually crossed the width of the island from the bay beach on the north to the sea beach on the south in a matter of minutes. About halfway there, we crossed Main Street, the widest street in the village at no more than six or eight feet. This, Mel had told me, was where the Labor Day Parade would go by, something we should not miss. I took a deep breath of the salt breeze and vowed not to miss it.
“Our” house, the one owned by Max Margulies, Mel’s paternal uncle, was a grander affair than I had expected. The last house on Park Street, made of wood that had weathered naturally, and mounted on stilts like most of the houses in the village, it sat high on the dune that led to the beach, giving a clear view of the beach and the ocean beyond it. It had two stories, with a wraparound deck on the first floor, and a kind of tower at the right-hand end as you faced it from the dune, a widow’s walk circling the tower on the second story. There was a door that I later learned led to the kitchen, and facing the ocean, a front door.
We pulled all our rolling vehicles up the ramp at the back and around to the front door. Inside, we were enchanted. The huge living room that overlooked the deck, the beach, and the Atlantic was furnished in comfortable, cotton-covered chairs and sofas of cane, and the floor, a gleaming affair of polished wood strips, was partly covered with sisal and cotton area rugs. Eddie could crawl to his heart’s content without destroying anybody’s fine furniture or carpets.
Upstairs there was actually a room with a crib, just as Mel had promised, and there were other bedrooms, including the one with the widow’s walk, which would accommodate Jack and me more than comfortably. We dropped our suitcases and went back downstairs to see the rest of the first floor.
The kitchen was a dream. It was the other half of the first floor after the living room, with a large butcher-block table at one end and everything you always wanted in a kitchen at the other end. A Peg-Board near the door to the deck had several hooks on it and I hung our spare house key on one of them. In case we went in different directions, we would each have a key.
“I thought Mel said people lived simply out here,” Jack said, as awed as I by the appliances and space.
“I guess Uncle Max thinks this is simplicity. I hope you’re still looking forward to cooking.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t miss it.”
We had carried along a plentiful supply of steaks, hamburgers, fish, and other easy-to-grill foods so we wouldn’t have to shop locally and pay high prices. On the bay side of the village, Mel had promised, there was a grocery store where we could replenish our resources if we had to, albeit for a price. But this was a great improvement over the situation twenty or more years ago, she had said, when all food had to be imported from the mainland.
We took everything out of the bags and cold box we had brought and filled the freezer and refrigerator while Eddie explored the kitchen floor and banged a pot noisily.
“I think I’m going to love it,” Jack said, as the last item went inside.
I scooped Eddie off the floor and gave him a hug. “I already do,” I said.
