Trafficking in Murder by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Chapter One

“Americans,” said my goddaughter, licking cheese and tomato sauce off her fingers, “eat twenty-three pounds of pizza every year.”

I looked at her suspiciously. There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that Lily is precocious for a seven-year-old, but she also sometimes falls prey to what in artificial intelligence is known as hallucinations, and makes things up if she believes they’ll create a better story. “I don’t eat twenty-three pounds of pizza,” I said, even though we were in fact sitting at the Provincetown House of Pizza and contributing to the statistic.

“Not every American,” Lily conceded. “It’s an average.” She brightened. “So that means, some people eat way more than that!”

“That’s a lot of pizza,” I agreed. The truth is, I do regard it as a treat of sorts. I am part-owner of the Race Point Inn in Provincetown’s East End, and pizza is never featured on our Michelin-starred restaurant’s menu.

Besides, I like spending time with my goddaughter. When my best friend Mirela brought Lily back from Plovdiv in Bulgaria—where her sister had regarded the baby as an inconvenience and readily signed adoption papers so Mirela could bring Lily to the States—I hadn’t been quite as enthused. (To be fair, neither had Mirela: if there were ever someone who manifested zero maternal instincts, it’s her. As a mother, she’s something of a work in progress. That had not, however, stopped her from once becoming the fiercest mother bear ever out in the dunes when the baby’s life was threatened.)

In my defense, there aren’t that many non-parents who can truly embrace the demands of a baby, which morphed into the demands of a toddler, which finally metamorphosed into the very smart conversations one could now have with the girl sitting at the table with me.

“Did you know,” she said, “that some indigenous people call the earth Turtle Island?”

“I did not,” I said. She knows the word indigenous. Of course she does. “Are you going to eat that piece?”

She shook her head, intent on her thought. “The way the turtle shell is curved works okay for half the earth,” she said. “That makes sense. But what about the bottom half? And where does the turtle sit, or stand, and how come people don’t fall off the turtle? And if we’re on Turtle Island, why don’t we just float away? But if we did, what would we be floating on top of?”

“Good questions,” I said. Somewhere in the back of my mind an expression flitted by, turtles all the way down, but I couldn’t remember who said it or what it meant, and didn’t want to further complicate the conversation. I picked up the last slice of pizza and took a bite. “You could look them up and see.”

“Aunt Sydney,” she said to me with dramatic excessive patience, “I already did. I know how to do research! But no one knows.”

When I was seven, I probably didn’t even know the word research. I sighed. Maybe she could make it her dissertation topic. At the rate she was going, that was probably going to happen sometime next year. “It’s their story,” I said. “Lots of cultures have stories to explain how things work.”

“But if everybody’s got a different story, how do we know which one is true?”

We’d gone from alimentation to geography to metaphysics in under four minutes, which had to be a record of some kind. I was rescued by the arrival of my husband. “I see you didn’t save me any pizza,” he said, sitting down at the table and reaching over to tousle Lily’s hair.

“Didn’t know you were coming,” I said.

“Uncle Ali,” said Lily, “How do we know whose story is true?”

“Story?” He raised his eyebrows, amused, and gave me a smile, which always—even after twelve years together—takes my breath away. Ali is Lebanese-American, and is the most beautiful man I have ever seen.

“Origin myths,” I told him. “Turtle Island.”

He said to Lily, “Truth can be different from facts, you know? Different stories are true for different people. In my religion, we don’t think the world started with a turtle. We think Allah created it, and did it in seven days.” He paused. “Does that sound like a fact to you?”

She shook her head. “My mom can’t even do a painting in seven days, sometimes,” she said.

“So they’re not facts, our stories, but even if we know they’re not factual, they tell us some truths about who we are,” he said.

“What truths does your story tell?”

He considered the question. Ali always treats Lily like a miniature adult. It works okay more often than not. “Well, it tells me that Allah is good, because the earth is good. It tells me Allah pays attention. It reminds me that he wants me to live in a way that I pay attention, too. And I think that people who tell the story of Turtle Island must be very close to the earth and nature, and the turtle reminds them of that.”

“Okay.” She was probably filing it all away to ask Mirela about later. “Are you going to order a pizza?”

Ali smiled. “I think not,” he said. “I was just passing and saw your Aunt Sydney’s car here so thought I’d stop in to say hello, because I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“It hasn’t been forever, Uncle Ali,” Lily said seriously. “It was last week.”

“Well, it feels like forever,” he said. “What are you ladies doing after lunch?”

“I don’t know about Lily,” I said, “but this lady has work to do.”

“You have to take me home first,” Lily said.

“I know.”

“My mom gave me the key,” Lily said.

“I know. She told me. And you haven’t lost it?”

She made a face. “Of course not, Aunt Sydney. I’m responsible.”

“You certainly are,” I said, smiling. I stood up and began clearing the table. “Want to help me with this? What time’s your mom coming home?”

She finished her soda, sucking noisily on the straw. “When she’s done at the gallery.”

That could be anytime. Mirela isn’t just any artist; even in Provincetown—itself an important art colony, the oldest continuous one in North America—she’s one of the town’s hottest artists. She came to P’town from Bulgaria one summer to work, back when Bulgarian students came here in droves; they still come, but in somewhat smaller numbers; Provincetown is changing. She spent that first summer waiting tables at Joon Bar and The Mews, driving a pedicab, and painting seascapes, mostly of the harbor. The paintings sold, and she stayed on, eventually becoming a US citizen; but over those years her style changed. Now she creates abstract works that sell for tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. She’s also marginally psychic, and some of her paintings carry eerie messages that scare the hell out of me.

Lily is, of course, her loudest critic, and often complains that her work doesn’t look like anything in particular; I privately agree with that assessment.

Very privately.

Ali stood up and opened his arms for a hug. “I’ll see you soon, habibi,” he said. It’s an Arabic endearment he reserves for Lily. He generally uses Italian ones with me. He thinks they make him sound sexy.

He’s right.

Lily duly deposited at Mirela’s house in the West End, Ali and I returned to the Race Point Inn, which was doing its usual brisk business. It was late June, the start of the tourist season, when Provincetown’s population makes the switch from three thousand residents in the winter to eighty thousand in the summer. The inn’s open year-round, and we’re generally booked up completely from April to December. I’ve been part of the inn now, one way or another, for over fourteen years, and yet am still absorbing what that entails: people, people, and more people.

Ali disappeared into our residence, which is the penthouse on the top floor of the inn, and I went in search of Wendy, the inn’s manager and—I could swear—magician. She soothed ruffled feathers, dealt with crises, handled difficult people, all the things I’m not terribly good at. We all have our areas of specialty.

Mine is murder.

***

That’s not really true, of course; I haven’t actually killed anybody yet, though I’ve come close a few times. In my fantasies, anyway. No; as Julie Agassi, the head of the Provincetown Police detective unit, tells it, if there’s a dead body anywhere in town, I’m going to be the one to have found it. Or known about it. Or been somehow involved with it. And it’s true that I seem to have a Jessica Fletcher/Miss Marple-level of amateur connection to crime.

It started one summer morning when I went to take an early dip in the Race Point’s pool—at the time, I was employed as the inn’s wedding coordinator—and found the body of my boss floating in the water with me. A thousand times ick, as well as a sorrow I’ve never really gotten over: Barry had been the kindest, gentlest man I’d ever known.

So of course I wanted to be part of bringing his killer to justice.

After that, it felt somehow natural for me to be on the scene of other crimes. Provincetown isn’t very big, and my work brings me into contact with a tremendous number of people, so it’s logical, really, that I’d have more success in figuring things out than would the State Police, dispatched from up-Cape to investigate homicides and not necessarily all that familiar with our little quirks down here.

And quirky doesn’t even begin to describe Provincetown. The town is a vibrant art colony. It’s also a gay-resort destination. And an old fishing village that still retains the remnants of the commercial fleet, along with the Portuguese families who worked it. Once upon a time, one of the whaling capitals of the world. And before that, the summer home of an indigenous population. All that history, all that mix makes for people who most decidedly do not do things by the book. Some outsiders find that disconcerting.

I find it… home.

Wendy was sitting in the empty restaurant drinking coffee and going over the evening’s menu with Martin, the maître d’. “It doesn’t matter; she says we have to take it off,” he was saying.

I pulled up a chair. “Take what off?”

“The salmon en croute,” said Martin. “She is not pleased with the quality of today’s delivery.”

Wendy was shaking her head. “Seriously? I don’t get it. Everybody likes salmon,” she objected. “Even people who don’t like fish, like salmon. She’s got it; for heaven’s sake, what else does she want to do with it?”

Martin made a face; I could only imagine what “she” had said to do with it. She was, of course, Adrienne the diva chef, by whose graces we had earned and kept our Michelin rating. She also had absolutely no care for anybody’s feelings; staff had been known to quit their first night of service because she’d completely terrorized them. My co-owner, Mike, seemed to be the only person who took her tantrums in stride. “It is not a local fish,” Martin was saying, his French accent somehow making the remark more persuasive. “And she has two other piscatory dishes on the menu…”

Wendy snorted. “For heaven’s sake,” she said again, but she said it with resignation. We all knew the truth: what Adrienne the diva chef wanted, Adrienne the diva chef got. “I’m going to have to reprint the menus.”

“Such is the nature of our curious enterprise,” said Martin, shrugging; he knows which battles to fight. He turned to me. “Sydney? Was there something you needed?”

“I wanted to check in with Wendy about the TV crew,” I said. We were being featured on one of the local-things-to-do, early-evening programs out of Boston, which was both a Good Thing—it helps to be known as a Weekend Waypoints destination—and also was going to be disruptive of staff and guests alike.

“Arriving tomorrow morning,” she said, changing gears briskly and seemingly effortlessly. “Mike wants you to do the interview, did he tell you?”

“He did.” Mike and I had become co-owners of the inn when its former owner gave up Provincetown for Amsterdam and his new love. Mike had been the manager, so he slipped easily into the role of keeping on top of the practical side of things, whereas once I gave up coordinating weddings, I tended more toward the public-relations side of ownership, attended business guild meetings, helped organize events, went off-Cape to conferences… and, apparently, did interviews for Boston television stations.

I also valued Wendy’s impressive organizational skills. “Where do you suggest it will disrupt people the least? The interview, I mean? The part I’m doing?”

“You’re doing the whole part,” she corrected me. “You’re going to have to stick with them, and take the producers to lunch here, I have a table for you at one o’clock.” She pulled out her smartphone and started scrolling. “Juliet Mills and Bruce Peterson,” she read. “And rooms thirty-four and eighteen will be empty and prepared for the cameras, but you have to be out of eighteen by lunchtime because we have an early arrival for it.”

I raised my eyebrows ever so slightly. “Thirty-four? Do you think that’s a good idea? You know they’ll have done their homework.” I could still hear Lily’s voice saying she knew how to do research; there was absolutely no way television producers didn’t.

It wasn’t that thirty-four is a bad room—it’s actually quite nice, with antique furnishings and a window overlooking the largest of our patios, the one with the arbor. It had been two years since Ali and I had stood on that patio exchanging wedding vows when we were interrupted by a man’s body falling very nearly on top of us.

From room thirty-four.

“They requested it,” said Wendy. “It adds a little pizzazz, knowing a murder happened here.”

Two murders, in fact, if you counted the body in the pool years before that. My instinct was to downplay that particular facet of the Race Point’s claims to fame. But Wendy leaned into it, and her decision had proved successful. There was even talk, sometimes, of a possible haunting. And people liked that. “Your call,” I said, making a face.

“I’ve put together a schedule,” Wendy went on, her voice brisk. Potential ghosts weren’t playing into her agenda—for the day, at least. “They’ll spend the morning shooting the inn, then after lunch they’ll go down Commercial Street, do shots of the town. They call it B-roll. Back here for a wrap-up before dinner service starts. Nine of them in all: producers, director, the on-air talent, and cameras and sound.”

“Okay.” I knew better than to argue: Wendy knew what she was doing. Nothing could go wrong.

Which just goes to show how little I understand about fate, or life, or anything.

***

Excerpt from Trafficking in Murder by Jeannette de Beauvoir. Copyright 2026 by Jeannette de Beauvoir. Reproduced with permission from Jeannette de Beauvoir. All rights reserved.