And One to Die On(15)

She pulled the boat into the tiny dock set off for it at Hunter’s Pier and threw the rope around the wet and rotting dock post. Then she anchored her purse firmly onto her right shoulder and climbed up onto the pier. The pier was wet and slippery. The air was wet and much colder than it should have been for this time of year. As always when she brought the boat in by herself, she wished she had the courage to buy herself a pair of jeans. Then she reminded herself of how ridiculous she would look in them, and put the whole thing out of her mind.

Geraldine had reached the end of the pier and the start of the boardwalk when she heard her name called—or a version of her name, which on the pier came to the same thing. She stopped and looked right and left for Jason Rand.

“Gerry,” he was calling. “Gerry. Wait up a minute.”

Jason Rand was the only person who had ever called Geraldine anything but “Geraldine” in her life, or “Miss Dart,” which was worse. He was a tall, bulky man in his late thirties or early forties, with thick black hair that was going to gray and skin that had seen too much wind. He was also the man who owned this pier and rented out the spaces on it. If Hunter’s Pier had been a fancier kind of place, Jason might have called what he owned a marina.

Jason was climbing out of the small shack he used as an office, tripping over nets waiting on the boardwalk to be repaired and anchors left to turn to rust by boatmen who didn’t take care of them. Jason was always complaining about how many of the men who rented his pier spaces didn’t care about the boats they used to make their livings. He said too damn many of them only cared about the booze they drank and the pot they smoked. Geraldine had lived around clammers and boatmen long enough to know that he was right.

Geraldine waited where she was and let him catch up to her. He was wearing a thick down vest over a worn plaid flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His jeans had chalk marks all around the knees.

“I’m glad I caught you,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you. It’s only Wednesday.”

“Big weekend up at the house,” Geraldine told him. She didn’t elaborate, because he had heard it all already. “You look like you’ve been knee-deep in muck all morning.”

“I’ve been doing some caulking in the bathroom in the office. You in a hurry? You want to come over and have some coffee?”

Geraldine agreed.

They went down the boardwalk together, Geraldine stepping carefully in her wedge-heeled rubber-soled shoes, Jason swinging along heedlessly, used to the terrain. When they got to the shack, he opened the door for her. Geraldine stepped down into the large main room and took a seat on one of the benches. The room was dirty, as rooms of this kind usually were, but not as dirty as it could have been. Jason was a neat man, and his coffee pot was shined and spotless and his white porcelain coffee mugs were spotless, too. Geraldine didn’t know any other man who was orderly like that. She found it attractive.

Jason poured her a mug of coffee and handed it over. Then he handed over the milk and the sugar and a spoon.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Neither of the two old folks can get their act together, and they’ve got you running around at the last minute like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“Not exactly,” Geraldine said slowly. She stirred milk and sugar into her coffee and frowned. “You want to know the truth, I’ve been lying to people all day. I’ve been saying I had to come into town and do some errands, but I didn’t really. That’s not it.”

“What is it?”

Geraldine had put her purse down beside her on the bench. She picked it up and rummaged around in it until she found a piece of photocopy paper, folded in quarters. She handed it over to Jason Rand.

“Look at that,” she said. “That’s the guest list for this weekend. Look at the names.”

“Is there supposed to be someone on here I recognize?”

“Look at the name on the bottom.”

“Bennis Hannaford,” Jason read. “Isn’t that that guy that writes the books about the knights and the unicorns that they’ve always got all over the front of the B. Dalton’s down in Portland?”

“It’s a woman, actually,” Geraldine told him. “But that’s the same one. Look at the name next to hers. In the parentheses.”

“Gregor Demarkian.” Jason blinked. “That’s familiar, isn’t it? I wonder why.”

“Why is because of all that fuss that happened in Bethlehem, Vermont, a while ago. Don’t you remember that? Somebody was running around knocking people off with shotguns and this Gregor Demarkian came in and found out who. That’s what he does. He specializes in murder investigations.”