The Maine Massacre by Janwillem van de Wetering

cheap in plastic frames. He had seen the kitchen and looked at shelves filled with Dutch cans, jars, pots. She hadn't even changed her food, after that many years in another environment, in America, the land of plenty. An expensive household to run if everything has to be imported. He was surprised that Opdijk had allowed her to waste money like that. Perhaps the man hadn't been as tough as he had imagined him to be.
    She went with him to the garage and waited until the station wagon's engine caught, then opened the doors. He drove too fast at first and the wheels spun, but he shifted down and only one wheel sunk into the ditch at the side of the path and the car growled back again on firm ground. The mailbox was at the end of the road. He promised himself to drive around again in the morning to determine the layout of the land. It would be silly to face the realtor without any ideas at all. The man might be honest, but even an honest man gets tempted when faced by an idiot.
    When he got back Suzanne was sitting in front of the fireplace wringing her hands. Her original misery seemed to have acquired an additional twist. She seemed close to hysteria. He sat down next to her and held her hand.
    "What is it, dear?"
    "They all died, Jan, all of them. I must get away. They are all dead now. There's only me left, me."
    "All of them?"
    She told her story in bursts, trailing off every now and then until he patiently guided her back. He asked as little as possible, waiting for the information to fit. Gradually the pattern emerged, a definite report with a beginning and an end. The end was Opdijk's death. But the event seemed to relate to other events. When, two hours later, she had calmed down and they had drunk coffee he had made himself and he had seen her safely to her room, he went to his own and made some notes. The notes had six headings and each heading was a name. He read the notes to himself and lit a fresh cigar and puffed and underlined a word here and there. Then he wrote them again, slowly and meticulously.
    Six houses on one line, south shore of Cape Orca. That was the main clue of course, the connection, the thread. Only one house occupied now; the Opdijk house. The others empty and two of them burned down. Strange, wasn't it? Valuable property, left to rot, left for the storms to blow through, for vandals to desecrate and ultimately destroy, to burn. Burn, that was the limit; they wouldn't burn by themselves. Right. Now the former occupants.
    Case number one. A Mr. Jones. He couldn't put a face to the man. Suzanne had hardly known Jones, but Suzanne never knew anybody except herself, her poor suffering self. The commissaris wondered if Suzanne had known her husband. The bedrooms were separate; they might have been separate from the start. Why would Opdijk have put up with Suzanne? Did he want a housekeeper and no more? But Suzanne wasn't much of a housekeeper either. The house was clean of course, and fairly luxurious but otherwise—a hellhole of bad taste. Well, never mind. Mr. Jones was dead. An old man living by himself in a small, good bungalow set at the end of the Cape, overlooking the water like the other houses. A man who kept to himself. Found dead in his own woods, shot through the head. Two years ago. During the hunting season. Bullet came from a deer rifle. Accident, pity. According to Suzanne the house wasn't sold. Nobody else moved in, and eventually it burned down.
    Case number two. The death of Mary Brewer, a woman about sixty years old, also retired. Miss Brewer liked to sail and to take her eleven-foot boat out on the bay. The Coast Guard had warned her several times and she had been fined for not wearing a life jacket or taking proper precautions, but she kept on sailing for the horizon and one day she didn't come back. Her corpse turned up bashed by the waves and the rocks and partly eaten by sharks or raccoons. Raccoons, the commissaris said, and he remembered how Suzanne had pronounced the word.