Nantucket Penny

by Steven Axelrod

  It was the same with police work: one smart move, one foolish one.

  And it all added up to failure.

  She did the right thing, sending the FBI to the Delavane house on Tuckernuck, though she knew she was taking a terrible risk. If someone died on Coatue because she had diverted the Feds, it would be the end of her career. But she also knew, just as Chief Kennis did, that a massive law enforcement assault on the slim, scalloped barrier peninsula was even more likely to end in tragedy. And this wasn’t some archived news story from New Mexico or the Philippines or Waco, Texas.

  Those were her friends out there. Those were her people. Once the shooting started, it wouldn’t stop before some of them were dead.

  So—she made the right call, as it turned out. But she was rattled and upset, and when Lonnie Fraker came into the station and Kyle told her to take him down to holding, there was no explanation, and the chief’s phone went to voicemail.

  Lonnie explained it, calmly and logically, as they rode down in the elevator.

  “It’s just a miscommunication, Karen. Todd’s my brother. I thought he was still at the High Hopes halfway house. I guess he must have ditched the place and come here, but there was no way I could have known that. Then all hell breaks loose, and I guess I’m considered some kind of accessory, at least for the moment.”

  “I read Todd’s blog, Lonnie. I know you hold Mark Toland responsible for your stepmother’s death.”

  “Please. My stepmother was an addict. She did that to herself. No one forced her to gobble the Oxy. Mark Toland wasn’t some diabolical drug dealer who tricked her into an overdose…though I guess, at the time, I wanted to believe that. I wanted to blame him. Kids need to blame someone, Karen. I was angry and confused. But kids grow up. Sometimes they channel that anger and confusion in a good way, and they grow up to be policemen. Or women. Police officers. That’s us, Karen. This is our real family, and we have to stick together.”

  “I still have to arrest you.”

  “Which is fine. Everything will get sorted out. But I need a favor. I have to grab ten minutes face-to-face with Colton Hewes if he’s going to be taking command in my absence. There are papers and documents, warrants and subpoenas we have to go over, protocols he never learned, personnel problems I don’t want to discuss on the phone…it’s going to be a heavy load for the kid, and I don’t want the station to fall apart while I’m gone.”

  “I don’t know. Kyle told me—”

  “Kyle’s a by-the-book guy. That’s why he’ll still be a junior detective when you’re running this place. Handcuff me, that’s okay. Whatever makes you comfortable. We’ll be back here in half an hour, and my cop shop will be up and running for the duration of this craziness. It’s a win-win.”

  So, she had agreed.

  That was her first mistake.

  And then she had cuffed Lonnie’s hands in front of him, not behind his back—to minimize the embarrassing “perp walk” optics of his brief return to the state police headquarters on North Liberty Street. That was her second mistake.

  She never got the chance to make a third.

  It happened as they crossed West Chester Street, driving up North Liberty toward Cliff Road. They were alone—no other cars, no pedestrians. Karen sensed a movement beside her and then the impact of Lonnie’s elbow, just below her ear.

  She would never remember the attack, of course. The last thing she recalled was braking for a family on bikes at the corner of Main and Gardner streets. She woke up in the grass less than fifty feet from the State Police HQ, propped against someone’s fence, the handcuffs on the grass beside her.

  They found her cruiser in a Polpis Road driveway a few hours later, when the owners called in the theft of their Jeep. The SUV had its 2020 over-sand sticker, along with its required rope and shovel. The family had been planning a beach picnic at Great Point. The island suddenly seemed like a big place to the baffled summer person. “Our car could be anywhere!” he whined at Barnaby Toll, who picked up the call on the complaint line.

  Karen Gifford knew the exact location of the man’s Grand Cherokee, but all she could do about it was pray to the God who had often failed her.

  And trust her boss, who had never let her down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Calculated Risks

  In 1986 the New York Giants beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. Ed’s father purchased a commemorative pin as a memento. For Jane, football was the best way to spend time with her own father, and she wanted that Super Bowl pin for him. Ed knew she wanted it.

  He told me: “If you can find it in the barn, it’s yours.”

  The Delavane family storage barn was a cave of black mold, and he locked me in. He stood outside in the fresh air, holding the Super Bowl pin in his hand.

  “Guess I had it after all. And right in my pocket!”

  —From Sippy Bascomb’s deleted blog

  When Lonnie Fraker saw Cindy Henderson limping along the narrow sand track between Coskata Pond and the Atlantic, he thought everyone had escaped from Todd Fraker’s kangaroo court, and he felt a shameful gust of relief.

  Maybe it was all over.

  Then the chagrin, the bitter frustration rushed in, like a spike of cold water into a tooth cavity. Was Toland free also? Would Lonnie never get his revenge?

  He thought of the glib lies he had used on Karen Gifford. They sounded so reasonable. How much better his life would have been if he could have ever managed to believe them. Yes, his stepmother, the lovely, open-hearted, sad, funny, damaged Janice Mohler, the only adult in his young life who had truly cared about him, truly seen him, truly accepted him for what he was, had some clinical problem like an “addictive personality.” She was weak. That wasn’t her fault! But her weakness had drawn the predators like Mark Toland.

  They had been happy to destroy her.

  For money.

  Mark Toland wasn’t just spoiled and careless and corrupt. He embodied everything wrong with Nantucket and the country and the world. He was the face of evil, the smug, smiling face of the devil, and Lonnie had sworn long ago to have his day of reckoning with that glib destroyer.

  Nothing else mattered anymore except his half brother, but Todd was doomed now, too—that was obvious. Kennis was on to them, he had to be—the law was closing in, the trap was set. The intricate machine that Jim Bascomb had built was falling apart like all their other stupid, delusional schemes—Sippy’s quest for that useless Super Bowl pin, their plan to rob Ed Delavane, Todd’s attempt to burn down the school—all of it. Nothing worked, they never won, they always lost.

  They were losers.

  Had they lost again? That was Lonnie’s one hope now. Todd had waited too long, the executions hadn’t begun, the whole shaggy spectacle could be shut down like the fireworks on a foggy Fourth of July. His thoughts were a jumble. Maybe he should just run, refine the lies he had spun for Karen Gifford, leave Todd to his fate. Todd and his fate! But he couldn’t have meant this. No, no, no, Lonnie had to find him, warn him, stop him, cook up some explanation for the police, make it all right somehow.

  He jammed on the gas and almost spun out. That would be perfect! Stuck in a patch of sand he’d driven a thousand times, waiting for a tow while his world collapsed around him.

  Then Cindy saw the Jeep. She veered toward him, staggering through the dune grass, waving and shouting. Her hair was tangled, her face filthy and tear-streaked. But she looked so happy, so relieved. And where was Toland? No doubt he’d left her behind, scampering like a scared rodent to safety. Only a fool would think that coward would let an injured woman slow his escape.

  Cindy had stopped moving. She was staring at the car, and she finally realized it was Lonnie Fraker behind the wheel.

  The look of absolute horror and fear that contorted her face at that moment, like fingers mauling a lump of dough! It snapped him. He was the villai
n? He was the bad guy? God, he hated her, her and all the rest of them.

  His Glock was on the seat beside him, the passenger window open. He jammed the brakes, scooped up the gun, and aimed it at her running form. She was close enough to see it now, and she lurched to a stop.

  “No, please—please don’t—”

  It would be so easy to burst that squealing face into pulp! One shot! That’s all it would take. One shot. He shuddered. His hand was a frozen claw.

  In despair, hating himself, hating his weakness and his lack of will as much as he hated her, he turned the gun vertical and emptied it into the roof of the Jeep.

  BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM!

  The shots deafened him. Cindy’s mouth was moving—she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear her or even himself when he tore his throat calling out, “Run! Run back to town, run to your husband, get out of here!”

  She must have heard him, though, or read his lips, because she turned back toward Great Point and stumbled off through the sand.

  ***

  Jane Stiles had a sudden, vivid memory of an accidental free climb in a Williamstown quarry, the summer when she had just turned twenty. It was accidental because she had followed her fearless, brilliant younger sister, Lark, up from the steepening grass and shale-crumbled slope and into the first simple hand and footholds.

  The situation had changed so fast.

  She suddenly realized she was high enough on the wall for the fall to hurt her, with no way back down and her sister’s sneakers disappearing above her. Acrophobia, dizziness, shortness of breath grabbed her…and then vanished. Her mind rejected the panic. She went cold. Her world shrank to the next lip of rock for her fingers to grasp, the next seam where she could lodge her foot. She never looked down, and she never looked up beyond the next few inches of stone. The granite face reduced itself to an abstraction, a series of problems to solve, equations of balance and tensile strength, ridges and protrusions, weight and gravity, sight and breath.

  It was only when she pulled herself over the edge onto the weedy grass and safety that her body had started to shake. She had learned a vital fact that afternoon, discovered a hidden resource in her own steely composure.

  She was going to need that strength today.

  She stood with this madman on a deserted strip of sand next to the gallows he had built, and she knew that she had only her own mind, her own ingenuity, to save herself. Help was coming, Henry was on his way, she knew it, she could feel it.

  But she had to stay alive until he got there.

  “Up the stairs,” Todd said. “The good news is, I won’t handcuff you. You’ll be able to grab the rope and try to save yourself. The bad news is I greased it, so your hands will slip, and you can try to pull yourself up and feel the way I felt that day in gym class.”

  “No, wait—we have seven more throws left, and I still have my underwear on.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Toland and Cindy escaped. You freed the others already, so you have nothing left to play for.”

  “What about my freedom?”

  He laughed—an ugly little bark. “You think I’d throw all this away, do all this for nothing, let you walk just for…just to see you… No. No, this ends now.”

  She grabbed for the last thin ledge and pulled herself up. “What about fate?”

  “Fate?”

  “You said we were fated to be together. If you really believe that, you’ll flip the coin again. Because you know you’re going to win.”

  “You think fate is bullshit.”

  “But you don’t! Prove me wrong. Faith is just talk if you’re not willing to test it. An astrologer friend of mine pestered me for months to get my birth time so she could do my chart. I got my birth certificate, but all it had was the date. She told me if I gave her three major life turning points she could calculate the exact hour and minute when I was born. Then I remembered my family’s OB was still alive, and he’d have the information in his notes. I told her I could check with him. It would be a great experiment—let her do her calculations and see how close she came. The look on her face at that moment was the perfect refutation of astrology forever. I could see she knew it was bullshit, too. That’s the look I’m seeing on your face right now.”

  “No!”

  “Then flip the coin.”

  The silence between them was a downed power line twisting in the road, spitting sparks. They stared at each other, a bizarre contest. Jane refused to even blink.

  Finally, Todd looked down. “One throw.”

  “For everything.”

  “Yes.”

  He flipped the coin, caught it, flattened it between his palm and his forearm. He held it there for five, ten, twenty seconds, then lifted his hand. His lopsided grin told her everything. She was going to die, struggling with a greased rope, naked.

  Or maybe not.

  She slipped her panties off with no more embarrassment than she might feel undressing in front of a dog. But Todd was mesmerized, stunned. This was her moment. She was never going to get another one. She had been studying tai chi for almost two years. Now was the time to use it.

  She leapt at Todd while windmilling her arms in the “cloud-hands” form and caught his arm while she slid her leg behind his and pushed. He toppled backward, the gun flew out of his hands, and she followed him down. Tactical mistake: now they were grappling, and she had given him the advantage. He outweighed her by fifty pounds, and his adrenalized rage would keep him from feeling any blow she might land. Not that she was going to be landing any blows—almost instantly he had rolled her over, with his knees pinning her arms.

  It was over almost before it began. His weight bit into her biceps.

  What had Chris Feeney told her? “Be careful. You’ve reached a very delicate stage with this martial art. You know just enough to get yourself killed.”

  But not enough to save herself.

  Then she heard the gunshots—six, seven, eight cracks carried on the wind. The police were finally coming! They must have taken out Lonnie Fraker.

  Todd seemed to sense what she was thinking. “Don’t get your hopes up. That was Lonnie, killing your two friends. Killing them good. Four shots apiece. Two in the chest and two in the head. How does that feel?” He leaned over to pluck his gun from the sand, lurched off her, and got to his feet, holding it steady with both hands. “Up the stairs. Now!”

  She stood and walked to the scaffold. The raw planking was rough and hot under her bare feet. Todd followed, four steps behind, out of kicking range. “Stand on the trap door.”

  She stepped to the square below the gibbet and felt it give queasily under her feet. Todd slipped the noose around her neck and tightened it. The raw hemp scraped her throat.

  “Any last words?”

  Did she hear a car engine, over toward Coskata? The police? Or Lonnie Fraker? Todd thought he knew the answer, and she might be able to dig out a last small advantage in that. She cleared her throat to cover the sound, thinking hard.

  Last words! He was giving her one more chance. Choosing the right words had always been her specialty, at least when she was sitting in front of her computer, when her detective heroine Maddie Clark was doing the talking. In real life, the perfect answer usually came hours or days or even years too late.

  Not today, though. Today she needed the perfect words now.

  No, not words.

  One word.

  “Are you a virgin, Todd?”

  “Am I—what?”

  “You are. You were a loner in high school—then they sent you to Bridgewater. You never had a chance to be with a woman. It’s not your fault. The opportunity passed you by. No—it was stolen from you. They took it away, along with everything else.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “We’re together, Todd. After all this time, in t
his crazy mixed-up way, but you proved your point. Your faith paid off, and not just with the coin toss. You got us together here. Don’t waste that!”

  He turned away from her.

  She looked over his shoulder. From this height she had a clear view of the beach and the harbor, all the way to Shimmo, Monomoy, and the spires of town. Three kayaks were gliding up to the beach—three men were easing over the sides, slipping quietly into the water, and pulling the little boats ashore.

  She couldn’t let him see. “Todd!” He turned back to her.

  “It wouldn’t be just sex. We could run away together. Lonnie built this gallows, we could blame this whole crazy thing on him—him and Sippy. You were just one more innocent victim. I’ll testify for you. So will the others! Monica is a police officer herself! That’s important. They’ll let you go, we can be together, we can travel. I have money. We could see the world. Not just sex in some Paris hotel, but coffee and the newspaper together in an outdoor café afterward in the spring air, not even needing to talk, with the whole morning ahead of us—”

  “No!” He seemed to yank himself out of the trance she was weaving. “How many times do you think you can trick me? How stupid do you think I am? You’re engaged to that cop! You liar! I would never run anywhere with you, nowhere, not in one million years. I hate you!”

  Before she could answer, he pulled the lever, and she was falling into space.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Endgame

  They said I almost died that day in Delavane’s barn. They’re wrong. I died, and I came back to life. The new Sippy understood that people were bad, and happy endings happened in the middle of the story because smart storytellers know when to shut up. Maybe that’s why I was in the hospital the day your mother overdosed. Maybe I was meant to be there. Our stories are connected. They’re one story. Don’t let it stop in the middle. You say it’s time for action. Let’s act together. There’s work to do! Let’s work together. You want a High School Military Tribunal?