Death in the Off-Season

by Francine Mathews

  “You didn’t go to Max,” Peter said.

  “Not then. I was searching for a way out that wouldn’t involve George or her father. I’d already sold the bulk of my assets to buy a co-op on Central Park South—we’d moved into it six months before, if you remember. A second mortgage on the place was possible, but that would mean telling George why I needed the money. I couldn’t ask my new father-in-law for funds so soon in my marriage. And as you know, my parents have very little.” He paused. “And then Rusty asked for the stock.”

  “George’s seven percent voting stock.”

  “Yes. He had a buyer, a source of funds to repay the loan. Hazlitt. I began to see why the loan had been made in the first place. And it was out of the question, of course. I could never sell George’s stock without giving her full knowledge of why it was necessary. But beyond that, it was unthinkable. Hazlitt was using extortion, with George’s birthright as his object. I think it was then that I ceased to be helpless and began to be angry.”

  “And so you went to Max.”

  “It was an interview the likes of which I hope I may never witness again the rest of my life. He was in a white rage. Cold, efficient, and absolutely deadly. He dealt with the matter at hand—my troubles, the loan—and advanced me the full sum so that I could repay Hazlitt. Then he went to the US attorney’s office and told them about his son. Me, he kept out of the whole affair. I owe the sanity of the past ten years to Max Mason. Not that I de­served it.”

  “It worked,” George said. “Even after Daddy died. Hale was trans­ferred to corporate finance—”

  “A department considered boring, but safe,” he said.

  “—and he did so well that they made him a direc­tor,” George finished.

  “Forgive me, Hale,” Peter said, “but what I don’t understand is why you accepted the loan in the first place. I can perfectly well see Rusty trading on inside information. But it’s completely unlike you.”

  Hale smiled, a trifle wistfully. “Not like safe, sober Hale, is it? Hale, who can always be trusted to do the right thing.” He looked at his wife. “Maybe I was caught up in the lure of the risk, Peter. Or maybe I wanted to impress George with my trading prowess. Maybe I just wanted to be more like Rusty. But I learned. The hard way.”

  George lifted the hand Hale still held tightly, and kissed his palm. “My darling,” she said. “Never, never do anything illegal for me again.”

  “Like murder, for instance?” Peter said quietly.

  At that moment the phone rang, and the three of them froze, Hale and George locked together in front of the fire, Peter on the sofa, until the ringing ended. The quiet murmur of Mrs. Shallit, the housekeeper, came to them through the closed study door, and then her footsteps crossed the hall.

  “For Mr. Peter, madam,” she said. “A Rafe da Silva.” She said the name suspiciously, its cadences strange to her, and waited for Peter. He stood up and followed her to the phone.

  George looked imploringly at Hale. “Does he think you killed him to protect me, or that I killed him to protect you?”

  “Probably that both of us killed him to protect everyone,” Hale said fondly. “Don’t worry about it, love. It didn’t happen.” He turned as Peter came back into the study, his face like death.

  “I’ve got to leave tonight.”

  “What is it?”

  “Will Starbuck. Someone’s tried to kill him.”

  Chapter 27

  Rafe turned his head at the sound in the doorway. Merry Folger stood there, an expression both solemn and awkward on her face. He knew that her presence meant Peter had returned, but he felt no relief. Even Peter Mason could not pierce the coma wrapping Will in silence. He glanced at his watch as he stood up to join Merry: three-thirty in the morning. Any other hospital would have kicked them out long ago.

  Tess had not looked up from Will’s motionless form. Her hand held his, maddeningly slack. How much more, her rigid neck seemed to ask, must I take? She did not allow herself to say anything—no word of reproach to Merry, no wail of despair to Rafe, not even a word of love to her boy lying prone and broken before her. The muscles of her face seemed likely to shatter if she attempted to speak.

  Rafe placed a hand lightly on each of her shoulders as he moved around the bed to the doorway. She seemed not to notice. He pulled the door shut behind him and heaved a deep sigh as he looked at Merry. “Man, that’s tough,” he said.

  The banality of the words struck him even as he said them, and he hung his head, hands groping over his brow.

  Merry nodded lamely. “Mason’s out in the emergency room, waiting. Guess they don’t want more than two people at a time in there,” she said, nodding in Will’s direction. Her words seemed overly loud, a sacrilege. “He’s pretty beat,” she finished, in a whisper.

  Peter stood up as they approached, the sockets of his eyes standing out sharply in his white face. It occurred to Rafe that he was probably still weakened from his own wound three days earlier.

  “How is he?” Peter asked.

  “The same. Tess won’t go home in case he wakes up. But the doctor says he probably won’t, for a while. Fractured skull. They’re flying him to the mainland soon as it’s light. Tess’ll go in the chopper. I’ll have to follow by plane.”

  Peter nodded and gripped Rafe’s shoulder in what passed between the two men for an embrace. “You found him last night?”

  “Pretty late. We didn’t call you until we knew the funeral was over.”

  “Tell me again what happened.”

  Rafe looked questioningly at Merry, and she nodded slightly and turned to Peter. “Will was deliberately thrown from his bike on the path leading from your house, Peter, through the moors near Altar Rock.”

  “Thrown?”

  “A length of wire was staked across the path, pretty hard to see, about waist-high. Designed to catch a bike across the throat and knock off the rider.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Ney,” Rafe said. “But not for a while after Will fell, we fig­ure. Dog was inside until about eight o’clock, with Rebecca. I was over in the barn, looking at some figures, and got a call from Tess. She’d just realized the kid hadn’t made it home—too busy before that, in the kitchen, you know. I guess she thought in the back of her mind he was still out at the farm, and then looked up from her dishes and saw it was dark. Anyway, I got in the Rover and started driving the roads; Re­becca let the dog out and he hightailed it down the path through the moors. She thought he’d found a cat when the howling started.” He paused. “Poor kid lost some blood.”

  “Rafe called the police after he called the ambulance,” Merry said.

  “I didn’t see the wire in the dark right off,” he said, “or the stakes. Thought it was just a regular fall.”

  “I didn’t show up until eleven,” Merry continued. “The ground was pretty useless by the time I got there—all those rescue squad footprints, and tire tracks. Not much you can tell except that the wire’s there, and it did what it was supposed to—”

  “Wait a minute,” Peter said. “Let’s back up a bit. Why would anyone want to hurt Will?”

  Rafe shot a look at Merry from under his eyebrows and said noth­ing.

  “That’s the ques­tion of the hour,” Merry replied. “Why would anyone want to hurt Will? You tell me.”

  Peter hesitated. “I don’t know. Any more than I know why some­one would kill Rusty, or shoot me. But I know the three are con­nected.”

  “There’s a chance somebody decided Will had seen or suspected something dangerous. We can’t know that until he wakes up.”

  The phrase If he wakes up hung unspoken among them.

  “Can I go in there now?”

  “I guess,” Merry said. “There’s the other aspect, of course, that we can’t forget.”

  Peter turned. “Meaning?”

&nbs
p; “That this has nothing to do with Will.” Merry’s voice had sharpened, and the anger was obvious now. “Haven’t you learned any­thing about anything? That wire was probably meant for you, Peter. It was at a height for tripping a bike like yours, and it was stretched across a path you take all the time. Just Will’s bad luck he rides a bike you once owned and knows the quickest way through the moors to the road.” She stopped and fixed him in an uncharacteristic glare. “All that education and no common sense. I’ll stop by the farm tomorrow morning and talk to you, okay? I want to hear about Greenwich.”

  “I’ll be up early,” he said.

  She hauled her purse higher on her shoulder and left without a backward glance. The two men followed her progress out the door in silence.

  “The Terror of Tattle Court,” Rafe said ruefully, and looked at Peter. “She thinks this is all her fault, and she’s taking it hard. I made a fool of myself last night and told her she wasn’t doing her job.”

  “She’s doing it quite well,” Peter said. “Let’s see Will.”

  He had hated hospitals since Max’s death, hated the tubes and the clinical light and the soft whirr of machines that should have made him thankful but instead made him afraid. In hospitals, death was a glaring light shining full in his eyes, driving him to blink, to tear, and to avert his gaze.

  Tess turned as they entered the room. “They say he has to go to Mass Gen,” she said, her hand reaching blindly toward them. “I don’t know what it means. He’s supposed to play football this afternoon.”

  Rafe caught hold of the groping hand and covered it in his own. His touch seemed to calm Tess. She dropped her head and crumpled against his chest.

  Peter was studying Will’s face, the dark, luxuri­ous eyelashes trembling with unconscious dreams. Will was meant for better things than this. He was lying in a bed intended for Peter. “What’s the doctor’s name?”

  “Westfall.”

  Peter nodded and ducked out of the room, making for the nurse’s station.

  “Dr. Westfall,” he said. “Where might I find him?”

  The nurse looked up, her eyes smudged with dark underlying cir­cles. “Chief resident,” she said. “He’s on call tonight. I’ll page him.”

  Peter nodded and turned to look aimlessly around the waiting area. He was exhausted and restless at once, unable to sit down and read one of the helpful pamphlets on back injuries, venereal disease, and salmo­nella poisoning that lay scattered on tables. He drifted slowly around the room, hands in his pockets, dimly aware of the throbbing in his bandaged shoulder. He could not blot Will’s image from his mind.

  “How’s the bullet wound?”

  Peter turned. The chief resident was the same doc who had treated his left arm. “Not bad, actually. You do good work.”

  “You wanted to speak to me?”

  “The boy lying in there was injured on my property.”

  “I see,” Westfall said, and his tone hardened. “Two almost fatal attacks in a row. Unusual on this island.”

  “Very,” Peter said. “The police seem to think this one was in­tended, like the last, for me.”

  “I see,” Westfall said again. “Or rather, I don’t, but never mind. You’re a friend of the patient?”

  “Yes. His mother tells me you’d like to fly him to Boston. I wanted to ask you why.”

  “Because he has a fractured skull and he’s in a coma. I took a CT scan of his skull, and the Mass Gen neurologist on call looked at it on our joint computer system. She has requested Will’s transfer to her facility. It’s fairly simple.”

  “What’s the risk in moving him?”

  “Next to none. The risk if he stays, on the other hand . . .”

  “I understand. Doctor—” He paused. “Tess Starbuck is not well off. I doubt she has any kind of health insurance. I know that MedEvacking someone to the city is fairly expensive. I’d like to make arrangements for any bills to be sent to me.”

  “That’s already been taken care of, “ Westfall said. “Mr. da Silva has directed that the bills be sent to him.”

  Chapter 28

  Merry had reached what she thought of as the dry, bleached-white stage of her exhaustion, when nausea replaced sleepiness and her forehead held a permanent frown. Her body moved seconds after her mind conjured the impulse, her walk was a delicate balance between weaving and stumbling. She had never been so tired, she thought, and yet so beyond comprehending it; she progressed through the wee hours on will alone, unquestioningly. She had been awake for two full days, and still her bed hung like a mirage before the hood of her car, receding indefinitely.

  She pulled the Explorer to the sandy verge in front of Lucy Jacoby’s house and turned off the ignition. No lights behind the snug eaves. She checked her watch—only a little after four in the morning. Not surprising that Lucy was sound asleep. Still—for a woman in mortal terror of pursuit and the unnamed horrors wrought by Italian gray arms dealers, she was remark­ably comfortable in her isolation.

  Merry studied the houses on either side of Lucy’s. Both were dark. As she had thought on her last visit to Tom Nevers: Summer People, probably gone for the next eight months. Anybody in her right mind, who’d seen the sort of ghost Lucy had talked about, would have cleared out long ago.

  An Italian count with a penchant for playing rough. I wonder where she came up with that one, Merry thought. She scowled to her­self as she thought of Peter Mason’s worry, the lines deepening around his eyes as he talked about Lucy, his all too chivalrous decency in the face of the all too obvious torch Lucy carried.

  “Men are such chumps,” Merry said out loud, and to her surprise, the words sounded vicious.

  She got out of the car and walked around the side of Lucy’s house, searching for the garbage. There it was. A stack of wine bot­tles next to it. Perfect. She crouched down and eyed them, then pulled the handkerchief she’d brought for this purpose out of her pocket. She lifted one of the bottles by its rim and carried it, willing herself to be careful and steady, back to the Explorer. Prints should show up all over this baby.

  She turned the key and shoved the car into gear, not caring whether a light came on in Lucy’s house or not. She needed coffee and a nap, and she needed to talk to the only guy on the island with any sense.

  Ralph waldo was wrapped in the faded blue seersucker bathrobe that Merry’s grandmother had bought in Hyannis twenty years ago. His mug of black coffee steamed on the wooden table, burning a heat mark into the scarred surface. He had not yet shaved at four-thirty a.m., and the white bristles on his chin made him look, Merry thought, like a cross between Santa and a drunken sailor.

  “This case means too much to you, Meredith Abiah. No surprise. The first one always does. So what we’ve got is Rusty Mason’s best friend killing him, or the best friend’s girlfriend, or his sister, or the sister’s husband,” Ralph said. “Or someone unknown. We’ll call him X.”

  “Right,” Merry said. Then, almost against her will, “Dad thinks Peter did it, Ralph.”

  Ralph Waldo snorted, all the answer he deemed necessary. He slathered some but­ter on a piece of toasted Portuguese bread and handed it to her. “Eat that. You look like walking death.” She did as she was told. He set about toasting another piece.

  “I’m stuck on Lucy Jacoby, Ralph.”

  “You’re stuck on something else, too. Motives for killing Peter Mason. And people to pull the trigger.”

  Merry wrinkled her brow. “They’re the same bunch, Ralph. Rafe da Silva and Tess Starbuck, the motive being money.”

  “How’s that coffee?”

  “Tastes like the inside of a trash can.”

  He nodded approvingly. “Good. Now let’s think systematically about what you’ve done. You’ve decided Rusty was the target of the murder. You’ve decided Peter’s attack was a fake. Now you’ve decided Will Starbuck was a mistake, too, and t
hat for some reason Peter was supposed to find the wire.”

  “That seems fairly clear.”

  “Why?”

  Merry hesitated.

  “The false attack on Peter should have been enough to confuse the police, in the killer’s mind,” he said. “Why try another one? You’ve already worked out that whoever shot Peter didn’t really intend to kill him—and I agree with you. So why try to kill him a day or so later?”

  “Because maybe I’m all wrong,” she said, in a very small voice.

  “Trust your intelligence, Meredith,” Ralph chided. “Peter wasn’t even on-island when Will was hit, and anybody who wanted him should know that.”

  “You think Will was meant to hit the wire?”

  “You shouldn’t rule it out. What might Will know?”

  “I haven’t the faintest. And it’s impossible to ask him. But what you say makes sense, Ralph. The guy chose a day Peter was out of town.”

  “Who knew he was gone?” Ralph asked.

  She sat down and bit into her toast. “Same set of suspects, basically. Peter Mason has a small group of friends, but it’s a tight network.”

  “Find out what Will might know. And find that man the Jacoby woman is afraid of.”

  Merry dropped her toast, startled as always by Ralph Waldo’s un­canny ability to read her mind. Her grandfather picked up the piece of bread and set it on her plate.

  “It’s just an idea. She says she ran into her ex-husband’s thug on the ferry Sunday night. But he hasn’t shown up at her door. Maybe he tried to get at Lucy Jacoby through Peter Mason. What could hurt her more than hurting the man she loves?”

  Merry sat very still, her mind working.

  “There’s a pattern of sorts,” Ralph continued. “Peter runs with the Jacoby woman every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And lo and behold, this week there’s blood shed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”