Page 9 of Death at the Deep Dive

Mr. Starling ended up with the indignantly struggling Watson. He promptly handed the puppy—who was still loudly voicing his opinion of Tackle’s manners as well as Mr. Starling’s—to Kingston.

“Is there some reason Vera can’t use the telephone like normal folk?” Nora asked tartly.

“I guess you’d have to ask her,MizSweeny,” Tackle retorted.

“Never mind, I’m coming.” Ellery pointed at Nora. “Mind the store.”

Nora spread her arms as though to say,Need you ask?

Ellery followed Tackle out the door. The brass bell tolled a final farewell.

Chapter Four

If someone wanted to get technical, Vera Sutton-Shandy, the elderly matriarch of the Shandy family, was not, in fact, Tackle Shandy’s grandmother.

Ellery had trouble following the complicated familial relationships of the islanders in general, and the Shandys’ in particular, but according to Nora, Vera was actually Vernon Shandy’s sister. Which made her Tackle’s…second cousin? Second cousin removed? Something like that. It was moot, because all the Shandys referred to her as Gram.

At a guestimate, the tall, straight, rawboned woman who offered him coffee milk and cigarettes, was probably in her nineties. Her hair was snowy white, her blue eyes had faded to gray, but at one time she would have been striking. In fact, she was still striking, though in more of a don’t-cross-the-lady-in-the-leopard-print-leggings sort of way.

He accepted the coffee milk, declined the cigarettes, and seated himself, as directed, next to an old-fashioned birdcage containing a large, elderly parrot. The parrot appeared to be asleep. Or at least, the noise coming from the cage sounded like snoring.

“So you’re…Eudora’s…nephew,” Vera said between puffs of her cigarette.

Great-great-great-nephew, not that Ellery was going to argue the point with a woman everyone called Gram.

“Yep. I’m Ellery.”

“How do you like…our…island, Ellery?”

Was there an emphasis onourisland? He suspected there was.

“I like it. A lot.”

Vera cocked a skeptical eyebrow and tipped cigarette ash into a brass clipper ship ashtray. “Think you’ll stick around?” She returned to puffing her cigarette. “Or…will you sell out…to some crooked…land developer?”

“I don’t plan on selling. To anyone.”

She curled her lip, gazing unblinkingly at him and, to avoid what felt like the start of a peculiar staring contest, Ellery glanced around the room.

The house, like its owner, was not at all what he’d expected, but then, what had he expected? A refugee compound built of scrap metal and salvage like something out ofMad Max? The reality was a well-groomed aqua-blue Queen Anne Victorian with a white wraparound porch and small private garden in back. An American flag and a black and white MIA flag gallantly furled and unfurled from a small flag pole in the center of the tidy lawn.

The interior was much like the exterior. Antiquated but scrupulously clean and well-cared for. Vera Sutton-Shandy seemed to be a collector of silhouette portraits (or were all those sharp-featured cutouts Shandy ancestors?), porcelain shepherdesses, and—unless he was very much mistaken—scrimshaw.

“You…do have…the Page nose.”

Ellery resisted the temptation to touch his nose. What was the proper response? Judging by the appendage prominently displayed in the portrait of his esteemed ancestor, Captain Horatio Page:Thank you?

He settled for a neutral, “Ah.”

Vera continued to brood and puff. Perhaps he was supposed to get the message through smoke signals?

“They say…you’re making a go…of that bookstore.”

“I’m trying. Yes.”

The parrot suddenly woke up and shrieked, “Ahoy there! Ye scurvy swab!”

“Shut up, Mortimer,” Vera said without heat.

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