And then he cried out, hands over his mouth to stifle his terror. He turned in panic and dashed back to his bike, scraped leg forgotten, screaming for somebody.
Rafe da silva surveyed the flock of merino sheep bunched up around the hay bale and counted them mentally. Fifty-three, ewes and lambs, with the ram fifty-four. Not a major concern, but not a shabby bunch, either. With this year’s shearing—and a good price from Nantucket Looms, their major customer—they might begin to pay for their keep. Not that Peter cared; Rafe knew the sheep would stay whether they made money or not. Peter raised the merinos for the same reason he did everything on the farm: for the love of it. The sight of sheep dotting the moors around the bog satisfied Peter’s sense of history, the way his life in the two-hundred-year-old saltbox seemed a direct link to Masons dead and gone. Rafe didn’t question it, and he didn’t waste much time thinking about it. He understood very little of Peter’s class of people, but everything about Peter’s way of life.
The dog Ney sauntered toward him, his tongue hanging out lazily now that his work was done and the sheep were busy eating. Part cattle dog, part bearded collie, Ney looked like pure mutt. Peter had picked him up in the parking lot of the South Street ferry in Hyannis, where the bewildered pup had been circling a crowd of embarking Nantucketers waiting patiently in the rain. Peter had watched as Ney herded the passengers into a tight knot next to the gangplank, and then he’d grinned. He had been on his way to the Boston Marathon. He hadn’t needed a dog. He’d thought about an animal shelter, and then he’d thought better of it. He could usually find a use for strays.
“You and me both, fella,” Rafe said to the dog. He dropped his hand to Ney’s snout and scratched either side of it, knowing the dog loved it. Ney thrust his nose deeper into the man’s hand and snorted deeply.
“Come on, pup.” Ney pivoted as though joined to Rafe’s body, then loped off ahead, disappearing into the fog.
Rafe strolled without hurry toward the barn where the bog equipment was stored. He and Peter had opened the shunts of the reservoir across ten of the farm’s fifty acres at sundown last night and flooded them with several feet of water. He glanced up at the gray weather. Not pretty, but not bad. There were worse things than a cool day of farming.
He stopped suddenly and cocked his head, listening. Since well before dawn he had been half conscious of the moan of foghorns, a sound he had known from birth; but now a long, thin note spiraled through the air. Ney was howling, a high-pitched keening Rafe had never heard in the three years of the dog’s life. It came from the driveway. He broke into a run.
“I think it’s Peter, Rafe,” Will said. He was bent over, staring at the bog, one hand on his knee and the other on Ney’s collar. Rafe glanced at the boy’s ashen face and then back at the body floating facedown in the water, seized by the same fear. The hair was Peter’s dark brown, the body long and muscled. The man was dressed in khaki shorts and a rugby shirt, black-and-orange, that looked vaguely familiar. The calves were discolored with what at first glance appeared to be splotches of grease, but as Rafe moved to the edge of the bog and put one foot up to his knee in water, reaching for the man’s hair, he realized the legs were badly bruised. He lifted the head. Wide and staring, the dead eyes looked toward the bank.
“It’s not Peter, Will,” he said gently, and let the corpse fall back into the water. “Let’s get back to the house.”
“You’re not going to leave him here, are you?”
“It’s better not to move anything until the police arrive. I shouldn’t even have touched him.” Rafe shook his wet hand and felt suddenly sick, not wanting to dry it on his own clothes. He shot a look at Will. The boy was watching him, his eyes filled with worry. And something else, Rafe thought—the memory of pain.
“I’d tell you if it were Pete, Will. Believe me. Come on, let’s get to the phone.”
Y
It was not unusual for Peter Mason to be out of the house early. He spent a good part of his nonworking hours on his bicycle or running through miles of Nantucket’s moors. A light sleeper, he’d been awakened at five today by the horns off the water. He’d stared at the beams running across the low ceiling of the upstairs bedroom, unable to doze. At six, abandoning all hope of sleep, he’d thrown on some clothes and headed out the back door for an easy run. An hour later he was making the turn for home at Altar Rock when he heard the sirens.
The ambulance and police car came up behind him suddenly in the fog, driving him into the underbrush as they went by. He narrowed his eyes and slowed to a near-walk, assessing what the sirens meant as they diminished in the distance. Then he began to sprint.
Chapter 2
Detective meredith folger surveyed the trampled drive, the flooded bog, the bent backs of the two police sergeants, and Rafe da Silva standing silently in the distance; then she ran her fingers nervously through her blonde hair. Barely seven in the morning, and no evidence to speak of. Her first murder might have been kinder to her.
For a few moments after arriving with the crime scene unit, she had held out hope that the sodden body meant nothing more than a drunken slip and a drowning, or even an inglorious suicide. She had dismissed those options fairly quickly. The bruises on the dead man’s legs and the broken underbrush raised too many questions.
She fished in the depths of her shoulder bag and came up with the slim packet she was looking for: her half-glasses. Useful for detail work—and maybe they’d even lend an air of professionalism to her face. She perched them on the tip of her nose and walked in a half-crouch down the gravel drive to the livestock gate, stopping to study the spot where Will’s bike had met the mouse. Then she surveyed the unpaved road beyond that ran perpendicular to the Mason Farms entrance. Multiple car tracks—a heavy four-wheel-drive and several passenger cars of varying sizes—had crisscrossed its sandy surface. She walked back along the road several feet, following the intertwined treads closely, and veered left. Near the right-hand side of the gate a car had gone off the road, stopped abruptly—spraying gravel on the grass—and then executed a three-point turn in order to drive away.
Merry crouched motionlessly above the scattered gravel an instant, thinking, and then stood up. She removed her reading glasses and stuffed them into her coat pocket, staring abstractedly at the roadbed. Then, impatiently, she pulled out the glasses again and retraced her steps.
Bent double, she walked slowly along the bog’s edge from the turnoff to where the body still lay in the water twenty feet down the drive. It was obvious something heavy had recently been dragged through the gravel—the corpse? Or harvesting equipment? She paced back along the driveway more carefully, and was rewarded: a small wooden object, tossed haphazardly in the high grass by the bog’s edge, caught her eye. She dropped to the ground.
“Clarence!”
Clarence Strangerfield, head of the crime scene unit, was up to his knees in the bog, camera poised, taking multiple shots of the corpse from various angles. He glanced across the drive at Meredith. “Ayeh,” he said.
“C’mere. I found something.”
Clarence hitched up his trousers with one hand, balancing his camera in the other. “What is it?”
“Looks like—” Merry hesitated. “Looks like a small wooden rat. I need a shot of the way it’s lying. Make sure you get the pattern of the breakage in the underbrush all around here, too.”
Clarence was pushing sixty, and he enjoyed his wife Emmeline’s dinners; with a grunt of effort he pulled one bog-laden boot out of the water and heaved himself onto the bank. He took one last shot of the dead man from above, and then ambled down the drive toward the detective.
Her hands were on her hips, and her dark brows, always so startling in contrast to her tow-colored hair, were furrowed. “Looks like an oversized charm from a bracelet. Any ideas?”
Clarence eased his bulk down onto his work-worn knees and hovered over the scrap of w
ood. There was a pregnant pause. Then he cocked an eyebrow gravely at Merry. “Ayeh,” he said, “thaht’s a raht.”
“Never mind, Clare,” Merry said. “Just shoot the thing.” When he had finished, she reached into her purse for tweezers and a plastic bag, and lifted the rat from the grass.
“Okay,” she said. “We have a button. With a thread of yarn still stuck in the buttonhole—looks like it’s from a sweater. The wood’s smooth enough to dust for prints.” She slipped the button in the bag and handed it to Clarence for labeling. “You’ll probably want to vacuum the corpse for matching fibers, too.”
Merry turned toward the spot at the side of the driveway that she could no longer avoid: the corpse, floating gently on the water’s surface. She took a deep breath and forced herself to walk over to the broken underbrush and the lifeless body, wondering for an instant at the way the outflung arms seemed to embrace death. She had expected murder to look less thankful.
“You’ve triangulated the position of the body?” she asked Clarence.
“Used the gate and thaht tree ovah there,” he said, “and I’ve had young Coffin sketch the scene.” If he was aware of any irony in the surname of his chief assistant, Nathaniel Coffin, the crime scene chief did not betray it. “We’re ’bout ready for Doctah John, I should think. He’s already seen the cahpse in situ. Told me to bring it to the van when you wahr done. Guess he doesn’t want to get his trousahs wet.”
Dr. John Fairborn was the island’s medical examiner. Merry glanced over to the rescue squad’s white van, useless now to the man floating in the flooded cranberries, and caught the doctor in the act of discarding a cigarette as he lounged against the truck’s open back door. She made a mental note to pick up the butt—to prevent Clarence’s boys from cataloguing it as evidence—and wondered again how doctors could smoke after studying cancer in medical school. A God complex, probably. She turned back to Clarence. “We’ll need Coffin’s help,” she said.
Clarence motioned to his assistant, who came at a run, and the three of them stepped up to their knees in bog water and vines. “Let’s lift him out and over the bank, Clare, and carry him directly to Dr. John,” Merry said.
“Yah know he’ll look rathah bahd,” Clarence said carefully. “The blood’ll have pooled in his lowah tissues.”
Merry nodded impatiently. “Lividity. Let’s get it over with.”
She took hold of the man’s sodden rugby shirt just under his left armpit, while Clarence took his right; Coffin placed himself near the corpse’s pelvis and legs.
“On the count of three,” Merry said. “One, two . . .”
Protesting like a sleeper torn from his dreams, the body lifted free of its watery bed. They staggered, foot over stumbling foot, to where Dr. John lounged.
The medical examiner slapped his hands together in mock glee. “The iceman cometh,” he said. “I’ll let you know how long he’s been dead, give or take a few hours.”
Merry wiped her wet hands on her khakis and opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it and turned away. She had always liked Dr. John, and in the past she had taken his black humor as one of the survival techniques of police work. Today she felt differently. The dead man must have been loved by someone; perhaps even now a wife or a friend was dialing the station frantically, wondering why he hadn’t come home last night. He might be someone she’d bumped into exiting a shop, apologizing as he held open the door for her before moving on in his separate life. That life was over.
She forced herself to look at the purple face. “Any idea who he is, Clare?”
Clarence’s ample stomach rumbled. He had missed his breakfast, but Merry was crawling toward the end of the night shift at eight-fifteen. On a normal morning they’d have met over coffee and doughnuts at the Downyflake. “A-no, I don’t. You?”
She shook her head. “What a lousy way to die. He’s not much older than me, for Chrissake.” She paused, looking at the crime scene chief, her arms folded protectively across her chest, and then looked away. “Think about it, Clare. We’re supposed to help people. And while I was sitting in the station last night, killing time, this guy was out here dying in the dark. Violently.”
“Makes yah feel like yah lahst a contest yah didn’t know had stahted,” he agreed.
Merry stood still for a moment in her red slicker, the cheery color belying her weariness. Clarence, who had a streak of the mother hen in him, would want to throw an arm around her and send her home. To forestall him, she rolled her neck a bit to ease her muscles, and then moved past him toward the white van where the murdered man was lying. Clarence fell into step beside her. She could feel his worry nipping at their heels like a small dog. He was uneasy about this body. First of all, it was on Mason land—and though Clarence might consider them “summah people,” the Masons had been powerful islanders for more years than Merry could remember. Secondly, the corpse hadn’t died by itself, and that meant Merry had some difficult days ahead of her. Despite years on the Nantucket force, she had never investigated a violent death.
So what, she thought. I’m a Folger. That’s always stood for competence on this island.
“Maybe he’s a tahrist,” Clarence said matter-of-factly.
Merry shook her head. “What tourist would be this far out of town, alone at night? Doesn’t make sense—”
“—and it’s too easy, in yahr opinion,” Clarence finished.
Merry smiled at him wanly. It’s too easy was her father’s favorite phrase, as Clarence well knew. “I’d like you to shoot the spot out on the road where the car went into the grass, Clare. There’s a faint set of footprints you might be able to lift. Also the drag marks in the gravel. Then, as soon as you can, get somebody on the Mason car, or cars—particularly the bumpers.”
Clarence’s face grew sober. “The bruises on the legs.”
Merry nodded. Her eyes drifted back to the dead man, and Clarence saw her blink rapidly. “When you’re done there we’ll deal with—”
“Baggin’ him,” Clarence said.
He had expected them to pull up in front of the house, and so he ran right into the official knot gathered behind the yellow police barrier.
“Peter!” It was Will’s voice, young and filled with relief. Peter looked for the boy and saw instead a blonde woman in a bright red raincoat, her booted feet firmly planted in his bog. Then he found Rafe, standing next to Will by the police car, and started toward him.
“What’s going on, Rafe?”
“That’s what we’d like to know, Mr. Mason.”
Peter turned. The woman ducked under the police barrier and walked toward him, fumbling in her pocket for a badge. She flashed it half-apologetically at him. “Detective Meredith Folger, Nantucket police.”
Peter held out his hand. “Peter Mason.”
She seemed to shake it for a fraction of a second longer than was necessary, as if she found his hand comforting and didn’t want to let go. He registered wide-set eyes the color of moss, heavy dark brows, and a high forehead. A face an artist would love, all bones and angles beneath a translucent skin. She was made for the forties, he thought, made for Cecil Beaton to photograph. She wore no makeup. Probably smart—if she did, the station house would explode.
“I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news, Mr. Mason,” she said. “Someone’s been killed in your cranberry field. Under the circumstances, I’ll have to ask you some questions.”
“Killed? Who?”
“He’s carrying no identification, and I’m afraid he’s a stranger to me and everyone present. Did you have any guests on your property last night?”
Peter started to brush past her, headed for the ambulance parked near the farm’s entrance. She laid a hand on his arm. “Answer the question, please.”
He stared at her a moment, considering whether she was worth obeying. The green eyes were ha
rd and steady. “No,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone, and nobody dropped by the house.” He turned to Rafe. “Any midnight callers?”
The foreman shook his head. “And I’ve never seen this guy before, Pete.” His voice held a note of uneasiness.
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “But what, Rafe?”
“The guy looks familiar. Maybe you know him.”
For an instant, Peter’s instinct was to run in any direction. Rafe was afraid for him. He glanced at Meredith Folger, then walked toward the black body bag laid on a stretcher. A lanky paramedic was in the act of zipping it shut.
“Wait a minute.” Peter pulled back the edge of the bag and looked hard at the dead face. The eyes had been closed. He was sharply aware of the smell of his own sweat, vividly alive, as he studied the blue lips.
“Finished, sir?” the paramedic asked.
Rafe was standing next to him suddenly, one hand on his back. “Who is it, Pete?”
“Rusty.”
Meredith Folger looked up sharply. “Rusty?”
Peter nodded. “My brother.”
Chapter 3
“Can you tell me what happened, Will?” Merry said. She was trudging with the boy and Rafe da Silva, a police summer intern in tow, up the quarter-mile of sand-and-gravel drive to Peter Mason’s saltbox on the moor. They had left Mason behind with the paramedic.
Will looked imploringly at Rafe, who seemed to have retreated into himself. He was striding purposefully toward the house, head down, lost in thought.
Merry had known Rafe all her life. She suspected that this routine walk over familiar territory allowed him to think without interruption. The careful lack of expression on his Portuguese features camouflaged a very active anxiety. He’s worried not about the body, but about what it implies, she thought.
Death in the Off-Season Page 2
