Harbour Falls (A Harbour Falls Mystery #1)(14)

I picked up a partial transcript from a witness, a male cousin on the Hannigan side. It read:

Police Officer: “So what did you observe at the dinner?”

Witness: “Adam didn’t touch his food, which I thought was crazy because that food was incredible.

Police Officer: “Was that it?”

Witness: “No no. He got up, said something to Chelsea that she didn’t look happy about, and sat down next to someone else.”

There was some more unrelated conversation, so I scanned the transcript to see if any names were mentioned. And what did I find? Who’d Adam ended up sitting with? His best man, Nate Jackson. I wished there was some way to find out what they had talked about that evening. But paging through the interviews, I concluded the police had never asked.

I put the transcript aside, and continued with the timeline…

The dinner ended at about ten o’clock that night, and around that same time, Chelsea was seen leaving the hotel—alone—in the late-model Jaguar her parents had bought her that summer.

Shortly after ten Adam was spotted at the hotel bar, drinking with Nate and Helena. All three stayed until the bar closed, at midnight that particular night. The waitress who’d served them stated in her interview that all three were courteous and nice. And though at points they’d gotten kind of boisterous and loud, they all seemed to be in good spirits. Further evidenced by the fact that they’d left her a huge tip.

The next section I read detailed Nate and Helena’s movements following their departure from the hotel bar.

They returned to their, at the time, Harbourtown apartment. As it turned out, the couple had a fairly ironclad alibi.

A water line of some sort had broken that night and flooded out their floor of the building. Nate and Helena, as well as a few other occupants from that part of the complex, were relegated to spend the night in a conference room located next to the rental office on the first floor. Interviews indicated the displaced residents spent most of the night talking with one another about what had happened, until everyone finally fell off to sleep.



Interestingly, though, one of the female residents reported waking up in the middle of the night and noticing that Helena was missing. When the police questioned Helena on this, she claimed she’d just gone down the hall to use the bathroom. The Harbourtown detectives were apparently satisfied since they eliminated Nate and Helena from their list of suspects.

So Nate had an ironclad alibi. And Helena had an almost ironclad alibi.



I paged to the next report…

Trina, Adam’s sister, and her boyfriend, a guy named Walker, were staying at the hotel where the dinner had been held. Both Trina and Walker gave statements that they’d gone up to their room after dinner, watched some television, and fallen asleep. Nobody could confirm this story.

Walker was pretty much off the hook, as he was from Boston and barely knew the missing Chelsea. Trina, however, became a suspect when one of the detectives received a lead—from an unnamed source—stating that Adam’s sister despised Chelsea and desperately did not want her brother to marry her.

Strange, there were no further details on the allegation. What reason could Trina have for hating Chelsea? Whatever it was, I planned on finding out.

Dr. and Mrs. Ward, though never really suspects, were still questioned. Their alibi was solid. Scratch them off the list of potential suspects. And much like Adam’s parents, all of Chelsea’s family had solid alibis. Scratch Chelsea’s family—which was rather small anyway—off the suspect list as well.



There was a side entry attached to this section stating that Mr. Hannigan, Chelsea’s father, following his dissatisfaction with the work of both police departments, had hired a private investigator in late July of that year. Notes from several months later, made by a Harbourtown detective, indicated the PI had run into so many dead ends and false leads that he resigned, publicly stating that Ms. Hannigan’s disappearance would probably never be solved. Mr. Hannigan never hired another detective.



I knew that, sadly, he’d fallen seriously ill the following year. When, months later, he passed away, Chelsea’s mother moved away from Maine. Not that I could blame her.

Reaching the final pages in this section of the files, I began to read about Chelsea’s last moves in Harbourtown, following her lone departure from the hotel.

Grainy surveillance footage showed her entering a seedy-looking bar named Billy’s. I’d heard of the place before; it was a rundown watering hole with a bad reputation, located somewhere down by the river docks in Harbourtown. The time stamp read 22:32. So she’d been there shortly after ten thirty. Only one photo had been lifted from the surveillance footage, as there was only one camera at Billy’s, and it recorded only the comings and goings of patrons as they passed through the entrance to the bar.

I studied this shot, and though in black and white, Chelsea’s flowery sundress and sky-high heels were clearly out of place with the hard atmosphere of the bar. Why was she there?



Detectives interviewed the bartender at the time, a man known simply as Old Carl. He hadn’t coughed up much information to the police, but he did confirm Chelsea had been a regular at the bar. He recalled that on that hot July night, Chelsea had consumed a couple of wine coolers and then asked Old Carl a rather odd question.

She wanted to know why he’d never gotten married. When he replied that he’d just “never met the right one,” Chelsea laughed and said something to the effect of “Neither have I, Old Carl, neither have I.” Even the bartender had to admit it was a bizarre response, especially since he knew Chelsea was getting married the very next day. But who knew why people sometimes said the things they said. Chelsea left the bar at 23:30, less than an hour following her arrival there.