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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Steven Axelrod
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by The BookDesigners
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Axelrod, Steven, author.
Title: Nantucket penny / Steven Axelrod.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series: A
Henry Kennis Nantucket Mystery ; book 6
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040150 (print) | LCCN 2020040151 (ebook) | (paperback) | (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3601.X45 N348 2017 (print) | LCC PS3601.X45 (ebook)
| DDC 813.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040150
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040151
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Whale on the Beach
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Interlude: Monica Terwilliger
Chapter Seven
Interlude: David Trezize
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Jim Berkley, who got me started on the road to this book when I was sixteen years old.
Thirty miles out is a world away
Of the many who go there, all long to stay
Toss a penny as your ship sails round the bend
All good wishes come true, in time, my friend
You’ll come back again
To that Faraway Island
—Lisa Wendelken
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.
—Heinrich Heine
The Whale on the Beach
For David Kennis and his grandson
Walking on another beach
On another ocean, in another time
You asked me what I meant
When I said
“The ocean has sea gull eyes.”
I wasn’t really sure.
But your undivided interest
Was a challenge and a dare.
“It’s not human,” I said. “It doesn’t care.”
You nodded.
“You have a spark,” you said.
And I felt the ember glowing
With your breath.
Feeling death in the dark water,
We stopped to stare into the moonlit Pacific
Standing together on the cold sand
Under the crust of stars
As the surf rumbled beyond us
In the dark
We walked the beach often that summer
Sand flicking from our toes
At the water’s edge,
Walking to the pier and back,
Cheating the tide.
One day we watched a stunt man
Parachute into the ocean
He was working on some movie
We found out that night he had died
Tangled in his nylon straps
Drowning before help could arrive
And I thought of Sarah
Loved across the tragic gulf of a decade
(She was in her twenties; I was fifteen)
Who had nearly drowned,
Swimming in the storm surf
A few weeks before—
Fighting the rip tides
Finally crawling onto the beach
On her hands and knees
Gasping
You went to help her
You held her in your arms
Battered but safe
I take my son’s hand, thirty years later
On the wide Atlantic shore
Just him and me
Without the glamour
Of a rare anointed moment:
Just another walk on the beach
The familiar small hand in mine.
Today we came to see the whale
That washed ashore to die last weekend
A hulking mystery
An Easter Island statue
Pecked at by the gulls,
Finally carted away
My son asks me, why did he do it?
I cannot say
But these shoals are famous for shipwrecks.
I tried to call you tonight
The number is still in my phone
As if you were still stalking the deck at dawn
Sipping the first drink of the day
As if the house had not been sold to strangers
Real estate brokers mingling with mourners
At the wake.
My mistake—
The number has been disconnected.
I dial it anyway, now and then,
As if you might pick up and say
“Dear boy, it’s after ten
No one civilized calls at this hour.”
And my son, calling me
Years from now
Just to chat,
“Are you keeping warm?
Did you lose power in the last big storm?
Did you hear Vampire Weekend’s new song?”
I’ll keep him on the phone too long.
Maybe he’ll remember that,
Some decades still further on
Hiking some other beach
Feeling a little boy clasping his hand
As if he’ll never let go,
Feeling his own h
eart lift and fall
Knowing there’s no one left he can call
To describe it.
—From The Whale on the Beach and Other Poems, Push-rake Press, 2020
Chapter One
The Whale on the Beach
The Nuremberg trials were officially referred to as an international military tribunal. They gathered evidence of Nazi war crimes and put the criminals to justice. The cruelties of a middle-class American adolescence, inflicted during the four-year ordeal of high school, are much more common, far less terrible, and hold no historical significance. But some incidents rise above the level of routine hazing and do profound damage. They ruin lives. They create psychic wounds that never heal. And they require their own tribunal.
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
For me, the fall wedding season on Nantucket, with its ostentatious celebration of the present and its sunny hopes for the future, began with a disturbing telephone call from my children’s school.
“Chief Kennis? This is Alan Bissell.”
I couldn’t imagine what news the superintendent had decided to bring me on this squalling September morning, but it couldn’t be good—Bissell sounded far too pleased with himself.
I set my take-out cup of Fast Forward coffee on my desk blotter, swiveled my chair to watch the milling gray sky and the rain lashing the big picture window. “Is there a problem?”
“I should certainly say so. A very serious problem. I need to see both you and your ex-wife in my office as soon as possible.”
“Okay—talk to Barnaby Toll. He can set up something for later in the week.”
“Not later in the week. Not later today. Now. Your ex-wife is on her way to the school as we speak, and this matter needs to be addressed by both parents…especially in a divorce situation, where a broken home is actively destabilizing the child’s mental state and behavior.”
“The child? Which child?”
“We can discuss the matter in detail when we meet.”
And then he hung up.
Bissell and my ex-wife, Miranda, were waiting for me when I got to the school. Alice Damaso, Bissell’s lovely and long-suffering secretary, gave me a small smile and a sympathetic lift of the eyebrows as I passed her desk.
Bissell looked up from a sheaf of papers as I stepped into the office. “Come in. Shut the door, and sit down.”
Miranda, in full real estate attire—black pantsuit with red ruffled blouse, matching red handbag and sandals—sat in one of a pair of armchairs angled toward the desk. She turned, glaring at me with a look I remembered all too well from my marriage. It said something terrible had happened, and it was all my fault.
I ignored her and took the other chair. “What’s going on?”
Bissell cleared his throat. “At the start of the new semester, our new creative writing instructor, Dylan Farrell, gave his students the assignment of writing a long story, between forty and eighty pages. This would be a first draft, composed quickly, with the students to spend the remainder of the unit revising their first drafts. I had no objection to this course of study, and it was duly implemented for Advanced Placement candidates. The manuscripts were turned in on Friday. This is what your son, Timothy, presented as an answer to the assignment.” He lifted the sheaf of papers on his desk and dropped them again as if they were contaminated. As if to verify my observation, he squirted some hand sanitizer onto his palm and rubbed his hands together.
“That stuff only kills the weak germs,” I couldn’t resist pointing out. “The hardy ones survive and multiply. It’s like a little course in evolutionary theory. The result is you’re creating a colony of supergerms. With the best intentions, of course.”
“Is that supposed to be some sort of veiled comment on Nantucket High School policy merit guidelines?”
I shrugged. “Just trying to be helpful.”
He pushed the plastic bottle away.
“Could you let the man talk, please, Henry?” Miranda said, her voice clipped and irritated. “I have a showing this morning.”
“Sorry.”
Bissell took a breath and squared his shoulders. “I have referred this matter to this institution’s BTAM—the Behavioral Threat and Management Team, which, as you know, is our multidisciplinary group that includes a trained psychiatric social worker; my assistant principal, Craig Rezendez; and, in extreme cases, a member of your own department.”
I sat forward. “What are you talking about? How does my son’s story constitute any kind of threat to anyone?”
A thin, smug smile. “Why don’t we let the material speak for itself, Chief Kennis? I think I’ve said enough.” He extracted several sheets from the pile on his blotter and sorted through them for a second or two. “Here’s how it begins. ‘Let there be no mistake. This is a confession. A confession before the fact, so to speak, but a confession nonetheless.’ A little later he writes, ‘I am a murderer. A murderer of seven men, by my hand seven men will die, seven men I haven’t laid eyes on for thirty-five years. My only consolation—and it is the reason for my actions, as well—is that these seven men deserve to die. But who am I to make such a judgment, you may ask. If you do, then it is you, whoever you may be, who are at fault. The entire history of the human race has been a story of one man, or a group of men, deciding that a different group of men should die, from the caves to Genghis Khan to Hitler, who exterminated six million Jews during the Second World War. But then came the Nuremberg trials. They tried war criminals there. And hung them.’”
Bissell set the papers down and pushed them aside, nudging the sanitizer bottle. “The title of the story is ‘Nuremberg II.’ The narrator proceeds to assemble these ‘war criminals’ of his youth, those who tormented him in high school. The means he uses are contrived and preposterous. The whole tone reeks of adolescent bombast, the desperate effort to seem worldly and sophisticated. The glimpses he offers into the adult lives of his malefactors are predictably puerile and naive. But none of that concerns us here. It is the events themselves that provoked this intervention. The narrator indeed puts his old schoolmates on trial. He finds them all guilty, and he hangs them. Then he hangs himself.”
“Oh, my God,” said Miranda.
“It’s just a story,” I said.
“It is the product of a troubled, even deeply disturbed, mind.”
“Or a creative one.”
“Your son has been bullied.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“These wounds heal slowly.”
“He’s healing his wounds. That’s a good thing. Writing well is the best revenge.”
Miranda sat up straight suddenly. “It’s that book! Beyond Brant Point Light! By your girlfriend.”
“My fiancée.”
“The mistreated girl comes back to the island for revenge! Jesus Christ, Henry. Tim is sitting around reading that trash all day. And listening to your True Crime anecdotes every night at dinner. No wonder he’s writing these creepy stories. The sick atmosphere in that house! It’s perverse. I’ve said it a thousand times. I’ve begged you to change. You are warping his mind. You and that hack writer with her sick imagination and her murder porn.”
“They’re cozy mysteries, Miranda. No sex allowed. And the crimes happen off-stage.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I really don’t.”
“The question is, how do we proceed from here?” Bissell broke in, obviously irked and embarrassed by our family quarrel. “Mr. Rezendez suggested a two-week suspension.”
“For writing a story? What is this, North Korea?”
“No, for confessing in advance, as he clearly states on page one.”
That struck me speechless for a moment, but Miranda leapt into the fray, proving once again that whatever our disagreements, and however absurd and annoying she could be, as a mother she was a peerless
defender of her young, roughly on par with the polar bear or the African elephant. Forget the mother tiger cliché. She made tigers look tame.
Her voice was soft and level when she spoke.
“If you take any action against our son because of a creative work of fiction he composed as an assignment for one of the classes at this high school, we will contact the school board, file an administrative complaint with the district, and sue you and Rezendez and the teacher involved for harassment, unconstitutional conduct, violation of First Amendment free speech protections, and failure to properly address negligent supervision of student activities. I will personally make sure that the story is the front-page lead on both Nantucket newspapers every week until you lose the five-million-dollar judgment and are fired and blackballed from your chosen profession for life. If you hurt my son, I will come for you, Mr. Bissell. I will hurt you every way I can think of and some ways that I haven’t thought of yet. And, rest assured, I’ll be thinking hard.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a fact. It’s a hurricane warning. Board up your windows and evacuate if you start this storm.”
“Did you hear that, Kennis? She threatened me! I know the assault and battery laws in this state. Threats constitute assault!”
I stared him down. “I heard no threat. I heard one party to a lawsuit giving due notice of pending litigation to another. And speculating on the outcome.”
The silence sizzled and shrieked between us for a few seconds. Finally, Bissell pressed a knuckle to his mouth. “Fine. But this school has been on high alert for violence and dangerous behavior for more than a year. If your son acts out because proper school intervention was blocked by his parents, you will become pariahs on this island. You will be shunned and despised, and you will have no one to blame but yourselves. You will have to live with that horrific failure of judgment for the rest of your lives.”
“Fair enough,” I said, standing up. “Because that’s never going to happen.” I turned to Miranda. “Let’s go.”
Outside in the windy drizzle, she gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Henry.”
“You were great in there.”
She pulled away a little to show me her smile. “We make a pretty good team. Now grab Tim and find out what the hell is going on with that crazy story.”
Nantucket Penny Page 1
