“You heard of Elspeth Adams, haven’t you? She used to be lady golf camp and now she rolls around the world gettin’ mixed up with riots in India and Hitlerites1 in Germany. She’s a great woman!”
So this book’s Watson to Asey Mayo’s Sherlock hears herself described at the start of The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern. Later in the book, Asey casually mentions that she also got lost in the Sahara, played golf with the Prince of Wales, and swam the Helespont (known now as the Dardanelles).
But in this book, she is all Cool Aunt. On board the “Merantic” headed for Capri, she quickly disembarks when the “bon voyage” cable she receives from her favorite (and only) nephew, Mark, begging her to come to Cape Cod and rescue him. And he will need rescuing when his father catches him in Weesit instead of on the ship to Brazil where his father has sent him to learn the family coffee empire from the ground up2.
Elspeth postpones her sailing by a week, collects her bags and trunks, and hops on the last train to from Boston to Weesit. She meets Asey when he arrives at the station in his long, shiny custom-built sixteen-cylindered Porter extravagance to carry her to the Cape Cod Tavern where Mark has taken up residence for the summer. The tavern, which has been in the owner, Eve Pence’s, family for generations and generations. Eve is a writer, an adventurer, a muse, a thief, a patron of her friends who are writers, and a first class b*tch. She lives there with her sister, her local cook and handyman, and a collection of misfits that she has collected for the summer: a broke playwright and his temperamental, blind, barely adult, musical genius son; a children’s author, who is a single mother because of her husband’s murder, and her 10-year old hellion of a son; another writer who specializes in books that Boston bans for their language; and Mark, who has insisted on joining them because he wants to marry Eve’s sister.
Eve is 100% against Mark and her sister getting married. First, because having her sister around is useful because she does all the things that Eve is too bored or important to do.3 But mostly because Eve likes being the center of attention. Narcissist through and through, Eve wants the attention squarely on her. She wants women to be grateful to her and men to fall in love with her, all of them, all at the same time, and they put up with it because she is so compelling. Eve’s past is littered with ex-husbands, men who married her and then divorced or ran away from her because they were afraid they’d kill her if they stayed married to her.
Elspeth and Asey are greeted at the tavern by Eve’s announcement, from where she lies huddled at the bottom of the stairs, that someone is trying to murder her. Someone stretched a trip wire across the top of the stairs, sending her down a tumble that she has miraculously survived with only a sprained thumb. And yesterday, she claims, someone took a shot at her in the woods, missing her and hitting a tree (although, when Asey goes to find the bullet, someone has removed it). Eve says multiple times without being asked that it couldn’t be, no don’t even think it, it just couldn’t be her sister.
Asey and Elspeth – despite a suspicion that Eve is making a bigger deal of this than it really is, to get attention – agree to guard her until they can discover the would-be murderer. But the next morning, when Mark and Asey run an errand (to search for clews4), leaving Elspeth on guard and, as the day stretches on, Elspeth is commandeered by the playwright to listen to the latest revision of his work-in-progress which everyone else runs screaming from because they’ve heard it so often. While Elspeth is trapped, listening, Eve goes into the playwright’s son’s room to listen to the 3pm symphony from Berlin, and someone sneaks up behind her and stabs her through the back, dead.
Asey’s chore in finding the murderer is compounded by a recent local political problem: when prohibition ended, the Weesit bootleggers took over the Cape Cod police force and are using it to cover up their illegal activities. Under a lot of pressure now to do some – any – real police work, the crooked cops quickly arrest Eve’s sister and start doctoring the evidence to support their case, while leaving one thug at the tavern to make sure Asey doesn’t leave and begin investigating and make them look bad. Unfortunately, the thugs don’t realize that the tavern was once a smuggler’s haven and still has a convenient tunnel that leads underground to an outbuilding at the edge of the property.
Asey has plenty of suspects – all with crazy alibis that are quickly broken and replaced by even crazier stories – and a lot of local witnesses to add what he laughingly calls “old timey Cape Cod local color.” As the book progresses, Asey eliminates the suspects one by one until no one is left. Time is running out – the goons are going to start prosecuting Eve’s sister on Monday – and Elspeth is at wit’s end.
But then Asey reframes the problem. He had made certain assumptions based on the evidence that they had. But what if they looked at it in a different way?
Sometimes that’s all it takes to solve a problem. Instead of whining that it isn’t possible, ask yourself, “If this were possible, what would make it possible?” In project management, the answer is often More Money, More Time, or Less Scope. In management, the answer might include setting different priorities so the team can focus on the most important thing.
It is only when Asey asks himself, “What would need to change to make this possible?” that he is able to look at the problem differently and uncover the murderer. It’s not a happy solution, not happy for the murderer, not happy for the ex-bootlegger goons, not happy for Elspeth and Asey and the people close to the murderer.
But Justice must prevail.
- I’m guessing, based on other of Atwood’s books, that Elspeth was fighting the Hitlerites, not mixing with them at networking events – but there were some surprising American celebrities who supported Hitler including Lindbergh. ↩︎
- Or should that be “grounds up”? Ha. Ha ha. Ha hahahahahahaha. ↩︎
- Like killing chickens, and running errands. ↩︎
- Original spelling of clues. ↩︎
Change+Management 