Haunting Jordan by P. J. Alderman

bass fiddle, a sax, and two horns. Apparently, they were to be treated to live jazz. Jordan decided she could easily become addicted to evenings spent here, even if it meant putting up with a few questions from the resident cop.
    “So what have the welcoming committees brought so far?” Darcy asked.
    “Chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and a salmon loaf,” Jordan answered, relieved by the change of subject.
    “Salmon loaf is classier than a tuna casserole. Let me guess—Betty from down the block?”
    “I think so—I had trouble keeping track.” Jordan remembered a question she wanted to ask. “What’s a colorist? She—Betty—mentioned one when we were standing outside this afternoon.”
    Darcy scooted around in her chair. “Yo, Tom?” A bearded, red-haired mountain of a man at the bar raised his eyebrows. “Jordan wants to know about colorists.” He nodded and headed toward their table, beer mug in hand.
    “Tom’s the great-grandson of one of Port Chatham’s most famous police chiefs,” Darcy said by way of introduction.
    “Really?” Jordan shook his hand. “What time frame?”
    “Late 1800s,” Tom rumbled, his soft voice at odds with his bulk. He pulled out the chair next to Darcy, settling in. “My great-granddaddy was smitten with Hattie Longren’s sister, Charlotte, for a while, according to the diaries he left behind. At least, until Charlotte turned to prostitution, which cooled his ardor a bit.”
    “I read about her this afternoon.” The doll the dog had found evidently belonged to Charlotte, not a daughter. “She became a prostitute at the Green Light after Hattie was killed, correct?”
    He nodded. “Bad luck ran in that family, that’s for sure. Charles Longren perished at sea, leaving Hattie in charge of his shipping empire, but then Hattie was murdered not too long after. Once Hattie was gone, Charlotte was too young to run the business and had no way to survive. She ended up dead on the waterfront not too many years later.”
    “Tom’s a history buff, like many of the descendants of the original families here in town,” Darcy explained. She eyed Jordan curiously. “You’ve already started researching?”
    “A couple of ladies brought me a stack of papers they thought I’d want to read. Newspaper accounts of the murder and so on.” Jordan shook her head. “From what I was able to glean, the man who hanged for Hattie’s murder was someone with whom she had a close relationship. Pretty sad.”
    Tom leaned back, balancing his mug on the arm of his chair. “That jibes with my great-granddaddy’s account.”
    “The man was a union representative, correct?”
    “I think so. Frank Lewis enjoyed a certain amount of fame—or notoriety, depending on your perspective—for writing about the sailors’ plight in the union magazine of the time, the Seacoast Journal . The union and the shanghaiers were always at odds—both vying for the sameberths with the shipping lines. And, of course, the shanghaiers had a lot to lose if the union got a toehold in the business.”
    “The opinion of the ladies who brought me the articles was that Frank Lewis might’ve been falsely accused,” Jordan said.
    Tom frowned, stroking his neatly trimmed beard. “I seem to remember some speculation that he’d been framed as a way to neutralize him because of his influence on the waterfront. The shanghaiers continually looked for a way to get rid of him, that’s for sure. He was highly educated—his columns in the Seacoast regularly documented the brutality and illegal practices of both the shipping masters and the shanghaiers. But as for whether he was ultimately wrongly convicted, I wouldn’t know about that.”
    Belatedly, Jordan realized she had suggested that his relative, the police chief, might’ve bungled the investigation. “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
    Tom shrugged. “None taken. People around here love to speculate about past events. Though it certainly seems like that old