It’s one of those perfect days that you’d been thinking all spring would never arrive. Spring on Cape Cod is a tease: it comes in fits and starts, with brilliant sun on some days in early March. . . but you’re well advised to not put your winter coat away for good until the end of April.
Still, it’s June 1, and everything is perfect. The air has that spring-softness punctuated by the tang of salt, the sun is warm, and the town seems fully inhabited.
Provincetown comes back to life in fits and starts, too. There’s a core of us who live here year-round, but the population blossoms by late spring with second-home owners returning to set up for the summer, and the tourists arriving after that—the day-trippers, first, down from Boston, and then after that the ferries start running and on any day you hear the sound of wheelie-suitcases heading down Commercial Street.
The second-best thing about today is it’s my day off. I don’t have to spend all my time in the little cubbyhole I euphemistically call my office at the Race Point Inn, trying to please people by planning weddings and wrangling florists, officiants, and musicians. Instead, I’m blessedly free and ready for whatever the day might bring.
I start it the best way possibly, by bicycling down to the Portuguese Bakery for a treat or two. I pick up a custard tart and a travesseiro, fill my to-go cup with coffee, hot and steaming, and set off again. There is one place to eat breakfast in Ptown, in my humble opinion: the little walkway behind the MacMillan Pier parking lot, graced with trees and benches and a stunning view of the whale-watch boats and the rest of the busy harbor. These Portuguese treats are meant to be savored, and this is just the place to savor them.
One of the Dolphin Fleet whale boats is pulling out, the sun bright on the blue and white paint, the crowds on the deck chattering in anticipation. The toots on the horn that echo through town. Once upon a time, we were a whaling capital; now we’re at the front of the whale conservation movement. It feels right, like we’ve come full-circle.
Breakfast finished, I cycle slowly down Commercial Street, stopping every now and then—you can’t help but stop every now and then!—to check out a new painting in a gallery window (we’re the oldest continuously operating art colony in the United States) or to chat with a friend passing by. My best friend Mirela has something up in the window (she is a ridiculously talented visual artist) but I don’t stop; I’m meeting her later for a cocktail. The great weather’s infected everyone: we’re all smiling, all cheerful. It won’t last forever—everyone who lives or works in town gets Augustitis by the end of the season, when we all wish the visitors would just go home—but it’s what we have now, and it’s beyond lovely.
I decide on a whim to go up High Pole Hill to the Pilgrim Monument, a large tower erected to commemorate the signing of the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor back in 1620, before the Pilgrims found Cape Cod a little too inhospitable and headed up to Plymouth. There’s a charge to climb the tower, but I know everyone who works here, so up I go, long slanting ramps that allow me to eventually emerge into the sunshine again with a spectacular view of the tip of the Cape protectively turning in on itself and an immense stretch of deep blue ocean.
This tower isn’t without memories for me: it wasn’t that long ago I was here not as a sightseer but as a hostage, held at gunpoint by a group of white supremacists. Today it is cheerful, people pointing off to landmarks on the horizon, talking and laughing. Today it’s almost impossible to remember the danger I’d been in, how I had thought that perhaps this was where it would all end for me.
After that, I hurry back down the ramps and stairs. Maybe I’m not quite ready for the Pilgrim Monument yet.
I eat lunch at one of my favorite places, The Canteen, right in the center of town. Owners Rob Anderson and Loïc Rossignon have done so much for this community, I’d probably go to the Canteen even if the food wasn’t fabulous—but the fact is, it’s amazing. Absolutely the best lobster roll in town (and we’re a town that prides itself on its lobster rolls!), and the crispy Brussels sprouts in fish sauce or the falafel salad are both enough to bring tears to your eyes. I settle on just the lobster roll—I treat myself once a season, why not today?—and take it out back to the patio where I settle in to watch the harbor comings and goings while I demolish my lunch.
I’m heading out to meet the ferry now. The Bay State Cruise line runs three ferries a day from Boston to Ptown, and my boyfriend, Ali, who lives and works in Boston, is arriving on the afternoon ferry, coming down to spend a few days with me. He’s probably bracing himself for something untoward to happen—and he’s not wrong to think so: if there’s a dead body anywhere on the Outer Cape, I’m going to be the one to find it. Guaranteed. I must have some sort of morbid compass inside me, and Ali isn’t always happy with the results. As I tell him—and my mother—and Julie Agassi, the head of the detective unit in town—I really, truly don’t go looking for murder. But somehow it always seems to find me.
“Cara,” Ali says. He’s Lebanese-American, but he’s fluent in Italian, and somehow he thinks using that language for endearments is sexy. He’s right, of course. “Mirela’s waiting for cocktails,” I tell him.
“Where?” Over the years, Ali’s become an aficionado of most of Ptown’s bars.
“You’ll see,” I tease him, and after we’ve dropped his carryall off at my postage-stamp-sized apartment, we head down Commercial Street. Ali keeps guessing. “The Crown & Anchor?” We pass it. “The Boatslip?” We pass it. “The Red Inn?” Finally we arrive at the breakwater, extending out from the town’s west end and connecting access to two of our several lighthouses. Mirela’s there already, with a picnic basket and martini shakers.
By now the sun is doing its technicolor thing in the sky as it goes down, riotous oranges and pinks and blood-orange streaks, and I lean back against Ali. Provincetown. My two best friends. The perfect day.
And not a murder in sight.
The Matinée Murders is the sixth book in the “Provincetown” cozy mystery series, released May 29, 2020.
It’s time for the Provincetown International Film Festival, and wedding planner Sydney Riley has scored a coup: her inn is hosting the wedding of the year. Movie star Brett Falcone is to marry screenwriter Justin Braden, and even Sydney’s eternally critical mother is excited. The town is overflowing with filmmakers, film reviewers, film buffs, and it’s all the inn can do to keep up with the influx of glamorous celebrities and host their star-studded events.
But when Sydney opens a forbidden door in the mysterious Whaler’s Wharf, she discovers the body of a producer—and a legion of unanswered questions. Who strangled the innocuous Caroline Cooper? What dark force followed Brett and Justin from LA? Why is her boss Mike tense and double-checking every room at the inn? And is Mirela really leaving P’town forever? Sydney and her boyfriend Ali need to find the answers fast before another victim takes a final bow.
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Meet the author
Jeannette de Beauvoir didn’t set out to murder anyone—some things are just meant to be! Her mother introduced her to the Golden Age of mystery fiction when she was far too young to be reading it, and she’s kept reading those authors and many like them ever since.
She wrote historical and literary fiction and poetry for years before someone asked her what she read—and she realized mystery was where her heart was. Now working on the Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series, she bumps off a resident or visitor to her hometown on a regular basis.
Jeannette is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the Author’s Guild, and the National Writers Union. Find out more (and read her blog or sign up for her newsletter) at her website. You can also find her on Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Patreon, and Goodreads.
All comments are welcomed.