Hearse and Gardens Read Free Page B

a secret room. I’m not sure, but it looked like the room was used as a recording studio. It was windowless and even had padded walls.”
    â€œGracious me. It probably was. Back in the seventies, a lot of artists, musicians, and groupies flocked to Harrison Falks’s and Andy Warhol’s compounds, even the Rolling Stones.” She grinned. “Me included.” Georgia opened the small fridge under the counter, took out a slice of lemon, and plunked it in my tea. “Of course, Andy’s was much harder to get into, even though he barely came out here.”
    Everyone in the Hamptons knew the Rolling Stones’ song “Memory Motel” was written about the motel thatstill stood on Main Street in Montauk. Most were under the impression the Stones stayed at the tiny motel/bar that looked like it hadn’t changed in sixty years, but I’d learned from Georgia they didn’t. They just used it as a watering hole.
    â€œWow, can’t picture you as a rocker.”
    Georgia’s white hair was cropped short to keep the wind from slowing her down on her daily six-mile bike ride to the Montauk Point Lighthouse and back. She was my same height, five seven, but weighed about fifteen pounds less.
    I poured some water from a small carafe, graciously placed there to cool customers’ tea to drinkable status. “I don’t know how to gauge the time period it takes a body to morph from flesh to skeleton, but I’m assuming this guy or gal must’ve been there for a while. It’s funny, a corpse of bones is so much more palatable than one with flesh.”
    â€œYes, hilarious. I can’t think of anyone gone missing around here. Oh, wait. Liv Falks’s father, Pierce, disappeared about twenty years ago, along with Helen Morrison. And so did Pierce’s father’s Warhol painting of a can of Aqua Net hairspray valued in the upper millions. Warhol gifted the Aqua Net to Harrison Falks. Everyone assumed Pierce and his lover Helen ran off together and took the Warhol.”
    â€œAqua Net hairspray? You’re kidding, right? Iconic soup I understand, but hairspray?”
    â€œSupposedly, only the family ever saw the Warhol. The reason the public found out the picture was a can of hairspray was because Harrison thought his son and his lover had absconded with it. By broadcasting its theft, it wouldmake it harder to fence. I don’t think Harrison cared as much about the painting being returned as he did his black sheep of a son. Tragically, a few years after Pierce’s disappearance, Pierce’s wife drowned in a yachting accident off Montauk Point.”
    â€œSo, who is Helen Morrison?”
    â€œNathan Morrison’s wife. His family estate, Morrison Manor, lies next to Sandringham. When the majority of the family land was sold to pay taxes, Nathan and Helen were forced to take up residence in the Morrison Manor gatehouse.”
    I thought about the man I’d met the week before on the Falkses’ beach outside the bungalow. As my father would attest to, scorned love was the modus operandi in many a homicide. “Hmmm. That’s complicated. Pierce was married but having an affair with his next door neighbor?”
    â€œYes, and Pierce had a child, Liv. The child was the reason for the marriage.
    I set my cup on the table between the wing chairs, and my heart hiccupped when I spied a new book by Patrick Seaton.
    Georgia followed my eyes as they darted from her to the table. She went to the table and picked up the book,
Tales from a Dead Shore—A Biography of Tortured Poets
, and handed it to me
.
    Patrick Seaton was my recluse neighbor. He lived on the other side of the nature preserve, next to my rental, and occasionally left melancholy poetry in the sand on his beach. Patrick Seaton had moved to Montauk after his wife and child were killed in an automobile crash. We were kindred spirits. Not that I could compare my ex’s cheating,or