“I’m the chief of thoracic surgery at Lenox Hill. I’ve donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital renovation and operated on most of the other donors. I get what I want.”
That jogged my memory. Mike Henderson had been complaining about his father-in-law’s raving God complex and his tyrannical behavior for years. Still, I’d never met the man myself.
“Wait a second,” I told him. “Nathan Parrish is dead?”
I had arrested Nathan in connection with my first Nantucket murder case. He had paid some local thugs—including Billy Delavane’s brother, Ed—to kill swindler and faux billionaire Preston Lomax before he could run out on a massive real estate deal that would have transformed a hundred acres of pristine island brambles and ponds into The Moorlands Mall. With Lomax dead, the deal reverted to his company’s control, and Parrish had an ironclad arrangement with the LoGran Corporation. Or so he thought. A murder conviction tends to be a deal breaker, even in today’s America.
“These people have long memories, Kennis.”
“Which people?”
“You tell me.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, Dr. Parrish, but I’ve had a long day and—”
“So you’ve decided it was just some random hit-and-run incident?”
“I haven’t really—I wasn’t even—”
“Some total stranger texting with his girlfriend happens to plow into a group of low-security work-release prisoners cleaning up the roadside. No one else is even injured, but one prisoner is killed. Pure happenstance! According to you.”
“I’m not saying that, but—”
“And on the very same day, his accomplice in crime miraculously escapes from prison. Coincidence?”
“Well…”
“I thought policemen didn’t believe in coincidence.”
“Wait a second. You’re saying Ed Delavane—”
“He’s gone! He was being taken into Boston for some kind of hearing. He overpowered the guards and took off. Both of the guards are in custody, which makes sense. I don’t see how he could have done it without their help!”
“I haven’t heard anything about this, Dr. Parrish.”
“Then you should start paying attention! I would say that was your job description. I would say that’s the minimum requirement.”
“I can talk to the people at Cedar Junction in the morning, Dr. Parrish. They may have some idea of what’s going on if the incidents are connected. But it’s not my jurisdiction, and—”
“Of course it’s not your ‘jurisdiction’! Don’t hide behind that bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. You have a moral responsibility here, Kennis. Nathan’s killing reeks of malice! It reeks of bitterness and rage and retribution—and all of that ripened and festered on your little island. Nantucket! The place makes me sick. So putrid and petty and ingrown. I’ve told Cindy this for years. All the little feuds and grudges. It’s like a fire without a screen, Kennis. Everything’s fine until a spark jumps the hearth and sets the rug ablaze. Then your cozy little hideout turns into a living hell.”
“I’ll look into it, Dr. Parrish.”
“You better! Or everything that happens will be on your head.”
“Wait a second. What are you trying to—?”
But he had already hung up.
“What’s going on?” Jane asked.
“Nathan Parrish was killed by a hit-and-run driver yesterday. He was on work release, picking up trash. And Ed Delavane broke out of prison.”
Mom looked up. “The doctor thinks the two incidents are related?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see how. They’re in different jails for the same crime, and if someone wanted to kill them both, busting Ed out of jail doesn’t seem like an ideal strategy.”
“Death by police?”
“I guess that’s possible. But a toothbrush shiv in the shower seems a lot less complicated.”
“And someone else from your past is stalking Jane now.”
“Yeah.”
“But not Ed Delavane,” Jane put in. “I never had that kind of problem with Ed. I mean, he was a bully and a psycho, but I was dating his brother, and he never seemed interested. He had no grudge against me, and I don’t see him carrying a grudge for twenty years, brooding, anyway. That’s not his style. I really like Dimo and Boiko, by the way. I thought I’d hate having them around, but Boiko is very polite and quiet, and Dimo…he found out I’m a writer, and now he wants me to put him in a book. ‘I am immigrant success story! With big funny adventures. We make big bestseller and share monies!’” She mimicked him perfectly.
“He might be onto something there,” I said.
“I just don’t see why I need them around.”
“You don’t know Roy Elkins. He’s a stone killer with scores to settle and nothing to lose. If Franny Tate is scared, you should be, too. Seriously. I posted a BOLO on Elkins, the FBI put out an APB on him from Maine to New Jersey, and every one of my people has his picture. He can’t board a plane or rent a car. He can’t use his credit cards. Which is all great, but it might not be enough. Hence, Dimo and Boiko. They’re your insurance policy.”
Jane studied the tabletop. “Okay, now I’m scared.”
Mom was frowning. “What about that crazy fan with Jane’s book—the one who killed that girl in Australia? That wasn’t Roy Elkins, Hanky.”
“I love it that she calls you Hanky,” Jane said.
“I’m not really worried about some Australian whack job,” I said. Clearly, Jane wasn’t either. “There’s crazy people all over the world, and you can’t get much farther from Nantucket than Sydney, Australia.” I was starting to regret telling Mom the Australian story.
She shook her head. “It is a long plane flight. But not that long. It’s actually a little bit shocking how quickly you can get places now. Remember that wonderful old movie Around the World in 80 Days?”
Jane smiled. “David Niven and Shirley MacLaine.”
“And Cantinflas! No one remembers Cantinflas anymore.”
“Such is fame,” I said. It was one of my mother’s pet phrases.
She shot me an irritated squint. “That was my world. Around the world in eighty days. Not in one day! That’s what it takes now—less than twenty-four hours.”
“Plus the jet lag,” Jane added. “That adds a day or two. Or ten, on the way back.”
“So the killer will be jet-lagged,” Mom said. “That’s a plus.”
“Mom! This is crazy.”
“I guess so, Hanky, but I keep thinking about the book they found in Australia, next to that poor girl’s body.”
“What about it?”
“Well, have you read Beyond Brant Point Light? It’s all about a local girl who was so horribly mistreated in high school that she comes back to ruin the mean girl’s wedding and winds up getting killed for her trouble.”
“Don’t mess with the mean girls,” Jane said. “Unless you’re Maddie Clark.”
“I read the book, Mom.”
“Well, there you go—it’s the same thing—the past coming back to get you. Like Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead—’”
“‘—it’s never even past,’” I finished for her. She was one of the few people I’d ever met who had actually read Requiem for a Nun. But then again, she thought Ulysses was a “page turner.” She could swallow one of Jane’s books whole in an afternoon like a shark gulping a guppy.
“So, this loony in Sydney is someone from Jane’s past?”
“Could be.”
“And what does that have to do with Roy Elkins?”
“I don’t know—maybe nothing. Sometimes events just kind of…harmonize, you know? Like that wonderful girl in the program, Lakeisha Taylor, who sang “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” so beautifully and then had a stroke, just like Roberta Flack. Or the way I
suddenly saw pregnant women everywhere when I was carrying your brother.”
My mom had run the Upward Bound program at Connecticut College for many years, with a short, wide, spiky, hilarious African American woman named Josephine White. They got hundreds of inner-city kids from New London into college, and my mom still corresponded with many of them. It didn’t surprise me that she remembered Lakeisha’s name. She remembered all their names. They all adored her, but they didn’t have to put up with her irritating habit of scraping and scraping across the grain of their thinking with her stubborn, half-baked theories and harebrained ideas.
The problem was, in my experience, the more she annoyed me, the more likely she was to be right.
That had been true since seventh grade. I still remember complaining about some annoying girl in my class and Mom saying, “I don’t think you dislike Abby. It’s just the opposite, sweetie. I think you like her too much.” God, that was infuriating! And she didn’t even say I-told-you-so when I came home dizzy from the group excursion at Wollman Rink in Central Park, where I kissed Abby, my first kiss ever, and knocked us both down, and she leaned over while we sat on the ice and kissed me back.
But this was different. This was serious. Speculating about mysteriously connected killers on different continents and conjuring twenty-year-old grudges out of obscure cozy mystery novels (sorry, Jane) was pointless and scary and rude.
It was annoying!
I should have paid more attention to that.
Interlude: David Trezize
Lonnie went out for some air and saw Mark Toland in the hospital parking lot talking to Dr. Field, otherwise known as Dr. Feelgood because of his easy hand with the prescription drugs. But this wasn’t just a few Tylenol -codeine or Percocets for a broken finger—Toland slipped him a wad of bills, and he gave Toland a big package wrapped in brown paper from the trunk of his Audi. That was when Lonnie understood. My mom died that afternoon, and Toland sold my mom the drugs that killed her.
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
On the afternoon David Trezize was taken, he was driving his new car, and no one recognized him. Four acquaintances passed him on the way up Milestone Road; two others saw the little car turn off onto the dirt road that led through the moors to Altar Rock.
None of them noticed.
The only person who had paid attention to the new vehicle was Chief Kennis, and in this claustrophobic small-town ant farm, that had seemed like an unexpected luxury and a relief, though David had known it wouldn’t last. Soon, people would see him with his new Honda Fit and start to identify him with it as they had identified him for years with his old VW bus. Then the drive-by socializing would resume. People would wave as their cars approached his on Milestone Road. If he failed to see them—and he often did, as he was in his own world when he drove, looking out for deer crossing in front of him or cops in his rearview mirror, but pretty much oblivious to the faces behind the oncoming windshields—he would inevitably have to explain the lapse a day or two later, in the canned soup aisle of the Stop & Shop, or the Fast Forward parking lot. People actually got insulted. It was like “cutting them dead” on the street in some nineteenth-century English village.
But that was only the most superficial level of the ritual. You adjusted your responses according to how you felt about the other driver. There was the full wave, lifting the arm and flopping it around. That was reserved for your real friends. Acquaintances got a descending scale of gestures: the raised arm, the partial raise, the fingers extended from the steering wheel, the nod, and, finally—the most minimal of all, reserved for people you really didn’t like but couldn’t afford to ignore—the chin lift. You could start a round of gossip just by stretching your neck a little when the wrong car was going by on the way into town. It was a finely calibrated machine.
“You having problems with Bob Liddell?” someone might ask. “He says you gave him the chin lift on Polpis Road last week.”
David had actually lost an advertiser for The Shoals that way last winter. The guy had been truly offended. And on top of that, a few days later, David had failed to stop his car in the middle of Broad Street and have a brief chat with him while traffic piled up both ways. That was a serious lapse, almost as bad as refusing to flash your headlights when a cop was giving out speeding tickets. It was an exhaustingly complex web of automotive courtesies and protocols, and David was glad to be out of it for a while.
Anonymity was precious.
Or so it seemed. On this day, flying under the small-town radar toward his imminent death, he would have given up his newspaper to be recognized. He remembered griping about all the new development on the island one autumn evening several years before, even as he was getting lost in the moors and couldn’t see a house or a person in any direction. The island could trick you that way sometimes—turn its back on you, leave you out in the cold.
Today’s reversal had begun with an irresistible message on his voicemail. “People are disappearing. I know why. If you want the scoop, meet me at Altar Rock tomorrow at five.”
The message touched a nerve. David had noticed a couple of ominous wrong notes—Cindy Henderson, his friend and crush since high school, ghosting him. And Monica Terwilliger, with her perfect phone manners, refusing to return his calls. Coincidence? Maybe. But coincidences didn’t make good newspaper stories, and they cut across the grain of village life where narratives crossed and people’s lives tangled up with each other like the root systems of the elm trees on Main Street.
So David gathered up his pen and pad, set his phone to record, and set off with half an hour to spare. His girlfriend, Kathleen, was off-island, so there was no one who could establish a marker for his disappearance—“I haven’t seen him since he left the house—it must have been around four thirty? He had some top-secret appointment out in the moors.” He hadn’t even seen a neighbor. There was no one at Altar Rock, either, though he had to acknowledge that he was ten minutes early.
He never did see anyone.
And he thought the jab of the tranquilizer dart was a yellow-jacket sting, until he fainted.
Chapter Eight
Mousetrap City
Finally, Sippy grabbed my wrist. “Here’s what I’ve learned living my short crummy life on this fucking island,” he said. “When someone does something crazy, and you can’t understand why, the reason is money. Whenever you have a question about how fucked up things are, the answer is money. When you have a problem, the solution is money. And, most of all, when you want to hurt someone, the weapon is money.” Lonnie gave him a worried squint. “You—want to hurt someone?”
“Fucking right. And so do you.”
I figured it out. “You’re going to rob Mark Toland.”
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
Jane left to pick up Sam from Apex Academy when Mom finished detailing her conspiracy idea, and my kids tumbled in ten minutes later. I was glad they missed hearing her theory. Nantucket was one of the safest places in the world to raise children, and I didn’t want them absorbing any big-city paranoia and feeling scared to walk freely in their own hometown.
I needn’t have worried. Some spooky criminal lurking in the shadows was the last thing on their minds.
The school bus had let them off at the corner of Pleasant and Silver streets, and they had been haranguing each other, happily oblivious, for the length of the ten-minute walk home. They were still arguing, rabid as demonstrators on opposite sides of an NRA rally. Sam sulked by the window, clutching a social studies test with a prominent C at the top of the paper, and kept his distance.
“You are such a bitch!” Tim shouted, throwing his books down on the kitchen counter.
“I’m a bitch? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You and all your stupid bitch friends.”
“Kids—!” I broke in. “Watch the language! Please!”
Caroline
put her books down next to Sam’s. “Sorry, Dad. But this squinchy little puke puddle is trying to—”
“All I’m trying to do is get you to act like a regular, nice, basic human being!”
“Oh, sorry I can’t pretend to like some lame, pizza-faced tick-bite retard who doesn’t even—”
“That’s what I’m talking about! Did you hear that, Dad? She’s talking about a human being.”
Carrie sniffed. “Technically.”
“You suck. There’s nothing wrong with Judy Gobeler.”
“The lacrosse team coach agrees with you. I can’t believe they even let her on the team. Maybe she’ll win the participant trophy.”
“At least she was brave enough to try out.”
“I didn’t want to try out! Check out the paper this week! There’s a picture of the whole team on the front page. It’s a total losers gallery! The caption should have been ‘Too lame for the basketball squad.’”
“You have to be fit to play lacrosse. There’s lots of running.”
“And she can barely walk! Gobeler the gobbler. She walks like a turkey! The way she moves her head. It’s pathetic. Like those guinea hens crossing Polpis Road.”
“That’s just stupid!”
“If you love her so much, why don’t you marry her? Break up with Debbie and marry the gobbler!”
“Maybe I will!”
“Just don’t let her sit on you.”
“She’s not that fat.”
“Save the whales! They make us look thin!”
“I broke up with Debbie anyway. Today! After math class. Because of this. The way all of you are. You’re like—a pack of dogs. African wild dogs! I saw a video—they’re vicious. But they’re nice compared to you. They hunt to survive. You do it to feel good about yourself because you can’t feel good unless you make someone else feel shitty.”
“Oooh, that’s savage. I have homework to do.” Her parting shot: “Debbie’s interested in that new kid, anyway. Ricky Muller. He’s cute.”
She turned to go, but her grandmother stopped her with a word. “Carrie?”
Nantucket Penny Page 10
