The Crab Pot smells like old wood and fried fish and something deeper — the accumulated scent of a hundred years of people eating, drinking, arguing, laughing, and spilling their secrets across a bar that’s been sanded down and refinished so many times it’s practically part of the building.
I come here because I need to be somewhere that isn’t Hawthorn House. The B&B feels different now — the same rooms, the same furniture, the same orchids in the conservatory, but everything is overlaid with a thin film of wrongness, like a photograph with the colors slightly off. Agnes is coping the way Agnes copes — by ironing everything in the house that can be ironed and making soup that nobody asked for. I’ve spent the morning baking bread I don’t need to bake and cleaning things that are already clean.
I need air. I need noise. I need to sit at a bar and eat chowder and pretend, for an hour, that I’m just a woman in a town and not a person who found a dead man three rooms away from where she sleeps.
The Crab Pot is half full — fishermen at the bar, a couple in a booth, two women sharing a bottle of wine at a table by the window. The man behind the bar is big — six-two, maybe six-three, with shoulders like a dock piling and hands that could palm a basketball. He’s about sixty, with a weathered face and salt-and-pepper hair that looks like it’s been styled by ocean wind and indifference. He’s wiping down the bar with a cloth that’s seen better decades, and when I sit down, he looks at me with eyes that are surprisingly kind for a man his size.
“You’re the cook,” he says. “Hank Purcell. Welcome to the Crab Pot. Chowder’s on the house — you look like you need it.”
“Am I that obvious?”
“Honey, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Which, given the week you’ve had, isn’t far off.” He sets a bowl of chowder in front of me — thick, creamy, studded with clams and potatoes and a scattering of fresh dill. “Eat. Then we’ll talk.”
The chowder is excellent. Rich and briny and warming, with the kind of depth that comes from a recipe that’s been refined over decades. I eat half the bowl before I say another word.
“I’m sorry about Victor,” I say.
Hank’s face does something complicated. “Yeah. Well. Victor Crane was a man with a lot of questions. Sometimes questions are dangerous things.”
“Did you know him?”
“He came in here a few times. Had lunch, had a beer, asked me about the town. Friendly enough.” Hank picks up his cloth and starts wiping the same spot on the bar. “We had words on Tuesday. Nothing major. He got under my skin about something, and I got loud about it. That’s all.”
“What did he get under your skin about?”
Hank’s wiping slows. “Ancient history. Nothing to do with his death.”
“Someone said you argued.”
“Someone needs to mind their own business.” His voice is harder now. Not angry, exactly — defensive. The kind of voice a man uses when he’s protecting something he doesn’t want to talk about. “Look, Tess. Victor came in here asking about people who used to live in this town. Old names. Old stories. He was writing some kind of article about the coast, and he wanted local color. I gave him some. That’s it.”
“Hank.” The woman at the bar — gray-haired, mid-sixties, with the sharp eyes of someone who has been eavesdropping without apology — leans forward. “Don’t lie to the girl. You were shouting.”
“I was not shouting, Marge.”
“You were at least a seven on the volume scale, and the volume scale in this bar tops out at ten. I’ve been coming here thirty years. I know a seven when I hear one.”
Hank closes his eyes briefly. “Thank you, Marge.”
“What was the argument about?” I ask.
Hank sets down his cloth. He leans both hands on the bar and looks at me with an expression that’s half exhaustion and half something older — something that lives behind his eyes and has been living there for a long time.
“He asked me about a man named Thomas Marsh.”
The name means nothing to me. “Who’s that?”
“Thomas Marsh. Lived here almost thirty years ago. Carpenter, mostly. Good man. Handy. Built half the decks on the waterfront. He disappeared in October of ’96. Just… vanished. Left his tools, his truck, his dog. The police looked for him. They never found him.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nobody knows. That’s the point.” Hank’s jaw tightens. “Victor wanted to know what I remembered about Thomas. I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. He pushed. I pushed back. End of story.”
“Why didn’t you want to talk about it?”
The question hangs in the air between us. Hank’s hands are flat on the bar, and I can see the tendons standing out in his forearms, the way they do when a man is holding himself very still.
“Because Thomas was my friend,” he says quietly. “My best friend. And I was the last person to see him alive.”
The bar goes very quiet. Marge has stopped eavesdropping. The fishermen at the end of the bar have stopped talking. Even the couple in the booth has looked up.
“I went to the police when it happened,” Hank continues. “I told them everything I knew. They investigated. They found nothing. Thomas was gone, and there was no body, no evidence, no nothing. It was like he walked into the woods and the woods swallowed him.”
He picks up his cloth again. His hands are shaking slightly.
“Victor Crane came in here and stirred all that up again. Thirty years. I’ve spent thirty years trying to put that behind me, and some travel writer walks in off the street and wants to turn it into a magazine article.” He shakes his head. “I was angry. I’m not proud of it. But that’s what happened.”
“Did Victor say why he was so interested in Thomas Marsh?”
“He said it was a good story. Small-town mystery. Man vanishes. Community grieves. Decades pass with no answers. Good fodder for a feature piece.” Hank’s mouth twists. “I told him Thomas wasn’t ‘fodder.’ Thomas was a man. A good man. And his story wasn’t for sale.”
The bar is quiet. I finish my chowder. Hank refills my water glass without being asked, and for a moment we sit together in the kind of silence that only happens between people who are both carrying things they don’t know how to put down.
“Hank,” I say carefully. “Victor had a serious tree-nut allergy. The police are looking at his food. Did he ever discuss it here?”
Hank goes very still.
“Tree nuts,” he repeats.
“Yes.”
He stares at the bar. His face has gone pale under the weathered tan, and his mouth opens and closes once before he speaks.
“I don’t know about allergies,” he says. “I didn’t serve him anything with nuts. The Crab Pot doesn’t use tree nuts in anything. You’d have to ask Agnes what was on that tray.”
“I made the tray. There were no nuts.”
“Then someone put them there.” His voice is flat. “Someone put them there on purpose.”
He turns away and busies himself at the far end of the bar, and I can see his shoulders are rigid, the muscles in his jaw working. Marge watches him go and then looks at me with raised eyebrows.
“He’s been like this since Tuesday,” she says quietly. “Ever since Victor Crane started asking questions about Thomas. Hank’s been wound tighter than a fishing reel.”
A man at the end of the bar — weathered, late sixties, nursing a beer — leans over. “Hank and Thomas were like brothers. Grew up together, fished together, built decks together. When Thomas disappeared, it wrecked Hank. He’s never gotten over it.”
“And now Victor Crane comes along asking questions,” Marge says.
“And now someone’s dead,” the man says.
I leave the Crab Pot with the taste of chowder and something darker on my tongue — the sense that Victor Crane’s questions about Thomas Marsh didn’t just stir up old grief. They stirred up something that someone was willing to kill to keep buried.
On the walk back, I try to remember whether Victor mentioned Thomas at dinner. He didn’t. He let Agnes talk about the flowers and Dale talk about the festival. The questions that mattered came by telephone, behind a closed bedroom door.
Hank had called it ancient history. Victor evidently disagreed.
At the top of the hill, I look toward the conservatory before I go inside.