Vineyard Chill

by Philip R. Craig

  “I thought there was snow on the ground.”

  He shook his head. “That didn’t come until the next day. There was a ring around the moon the night she left the bar. It was bright, but there was a ring around it, and the next day the storm came. March weather. You never know what to expect.”

  “Did Nadine ever mention any problems she was having with anyone? Anybody who was giving her grief? A would-be boyfriend, for example. A jealous woman. Somebody who thought she owed something and wasn’t paying. Anybody like that?”

  He gave me a confidential look. “You know, I’ve thought back a lot about that. Her and me had a lot of little talks and made jokes and like that, but you know what? She never mentioned anything.”

  “She broke up with a boyfriend. Did she mention that?”

  “Sure, but she never said he was threatening her or anything like that. She just said they’d grown apart. And I guess they had, because the next thing I knew was that he’d gone back to America and she was living alone.”

  “At least three customers of yours were dating her. Did she ever talk about any of them? Were any of them giving her a hard time or fighting over her?”

  He shook his head. “No. You’d think that at least one of the guys would get possessive or jealous, but she never let that happen. She was an independent girl who made up her own mind about who she dated, and she never let anybody get the idea that they could boss her around.” He thought back. “I liked her for that. All the regulars did.”

  “Somebody didn’t.”

  His brows drew together. “I know. I’d like to get my hands on that guy.”

  “It’ll be harder to find the killer now than it would have been a year ago,” I said. “If there’s still evidence, it won’t be fresh. But the police won’t stop looking, because murder cases are never closed until they’re solved.”

  “Good!”

  I thanked him for his time and left. I saw no point in telling him how many murder cases were never solved. There’s a popular slogan that crime doesn’t pay, but conviction rates in homicide cases suggest otherwise. When the Shadow noted that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit, he didn’t add that often the victims were the only ones who had to eat it.

  I went back to Oak Bluffs and drove through the winding streets of the Camp Meeting Grounds trying to guess what route Nadine had taken on her last walk home. Was she followed through the moonlight? Did another shadow overtake her shadow in the silver night and strike her down before she could cry out?

  Or did she get home only to encounter a waiting killer? And if so, did she wrongly deem him friend, or recognize him instantly as foe?

  I drove around Butler Avenue, went right on Victorian Park, fetched Clinton, and passed the houses of Loretta Aldrich and Gordon Brown and the now empty house where Nadine had lived. Brown’s old van, his business logo still painted on the side, stood in his driveway. He, like me, apparently didn’t mind driving an old truck.

  I pulled out onto Dukes County Avenue, thence to Wing and Old County, and finally to the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven road, which I followed to the side road that led to Ted Overhill’s driveway. There, I took a left and drove to Ted’s house. When I turned off my engine I heard no sound. It was a silence that felt heavy. I got out and, feeling spooky, walked into the barn, unsure of what I’d find.

  21

  At first I found nothing. The building seemed empty. Then, because I didn’t want to use Clay’s name in case Jack or Mickey were somehow, magically, waiting for me to make just such a mistake, I called, “Anybody home?”

  And someone was home. Clay peeked down at me from the hay-filled loft and said, “Only us chickens.” He climbed down and brushed a few stalks of alfalfa from his clothes. “I heard you coming but discovered too late that there’s no way for me to see the driveway from the boat, so I skedaddled up yonder and pretended to be a bale of hay. I can see that I’m going to have to figure out a way to identify visitors if I plan to work here.”

  I noticed for the first time that neither of the two windows on the driveway side of the barn was on a line between the schooner and the drive. Dumbness. Together, Clay and I studied the situation.

  “What we need is a fair-sized mirror,” I said. “We can set it up so when you’re in the boat you can see what’s happening outside.”

  He nodded. “That’ll work. You happen to have one on you?”

  “No, but we can probably find one at a thrift shop or the Dumptique.”

  I eased his small frown by explaining that the Dumptique was a shop at the entrance to the West Tisbury landfill. It was run by some fine women who glommed on to good stuff before people could throw it away, and made it available for recycling. The price was right, too. Everything was free and came with a money-back guarantee. The little shop was the last echo of the long island tradition of dump picking, when every dump served as a shopping center for whoever wanted to hunt there for what he needed.

  “The golden days of yesteryear,” said Clay.

  Golden, indeed. Whole houses were built and furnished with free materials. At the Edgartown dump there had been a lumber area where you could find just the boards you needed for a job, as well as doors and windows, a hardware area where whole bathroom sets were commonly available or you could get repair parts for stoves or refrigerators, and a furniture store where you could trade in your old sofa for a better one.

  Now, of course, thanks to environmental and public health zealots, only the Dumptique offered such treasures.

  “If you want to keep on working, I’ll go see if I can come up with a mirror,” I said. “Or you can come with me if you’re so inclined.”

  “I’ve never seen the Dumptique,” he said, “and I think it’s time I did.”

  “It’s not a popular tourist site,” I said, “but it should be.”

  I drove to Vineyard Haven and took a left at the intersection with State Road, the site of one of the island’s three worst traffic jams in the summer but no problem in March. While I drove west on State Road I told him about my day. When I was through he said, “I didn’t hear anything that gives me a clue about who might have killed the girl. Did I miss something?”

  “No. Everybody I’ve talked with so far has told me the same sort of thing. She was beautiful and a lot of men were chasing after her. A couple of them may have scored a night in her bed, but no one replaced the architect boyfriend after he left. I never heard one bad word said about her by anybody.”

  “But somebody killed her with a blunt instrument.”

  “With a lead pipe in the conservatory. Yes.”

  “I wonder if she did anything to deserve it.”

  “Deserve has nothing to do with it.”

  “I remember that line. You’re probably right, but somebody thought she deserved it. Your cop friend said the guy didn’t hit her just once. He hit her over and over. He wanted to make sure.”

  I thought that, too. There had been nothing sophisticated or professional about the killing. It had the earmarks of a lot of amateur homicides, when the instrument is whatever is handy and the act occurs in a moment of intense passion that the killer may regret an instant too late.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the pot had simmered for a long time before boiling over. Maybe the beating was methodical and cold, like the doom of Fortunato after the thousand injuries and final insult.

  We came to North Tisbury and I explained to Clay how West Tisbury was actually southwest of Tisbury, and how North Tisbury was north of West Tisbury but west of Tisbury.

  “It there a South Tisbury or an East Tisbury?”

  “No, and it’s probably a good thing.”

  At the Dumptique, off North Road, the fates smiled. There was a large mirror that had some missing silver behind the glass but was plenty good for our purposes. We loaded it into the back of the Land Cruiser and headed back down-island.

  There was no one ahead of us at Ted Overhill’s barn and it didn’t take us long to rig the mirror so it would reveal t
he driveway to anyone in the cockpit of the schooner.

  “Nifty,” said Clay. “When I was in Egypt I went down in some tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and way down inside there were walls covered with pictures and writing. The guide said they lighted the shafts with a series of mirrors that caught the sunlight and bounced it from mirror to mirror all the way down. I was impressed. You ever been to Egypt?”

  “No. The farthest east I’ve ever been is Nantucket.”

  “You’ll go someday. You’ll like it.”

  “What were you doing over there?”

  He made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, it was just a job. A guy in Cairo needed a pilot and I needed work, so we got together for a while. I did some low-level flying across borders and saw some interesting things, including a couple of tank carcasses left over from World War Two. Would you believe that? Still there after all these years. When I wasn’t flying I went sightseeing. I’d go back to Egypt in a minute if it wasn’t for a few people there who are mad at me.”

  “What were you carrying?”

  He spread his hands. “Crates and boxes. The usual. I never opened one.”

  “Who’s mad at you?”

  “I don’t know, but somebody killed the guy who hired me, and my landlord told me that some people came to my room looking for me while I was out, so I decided it was time to leave. I got to Alexandria and went from there to Italy and kept going until I was back in the States. Egypt’s ruins are amazing. You could hide the Parthenon in the Temple of Karnak. Well, I guess I’ll get back to work, now that I can see who’s coming for a visit.”

  “You have much more to do?”

  “There’s always more to do on a boat, but you could launch this girl right now, and if she was ballasted and rigged, you could sail her away. I’m doing mostly finish work. It’ll make her look a lot better and it’ll make things easier for whoever sails her, but it doesn’t have anything to do with her seaworthiness. I think Ted will have her in the water earlier than he thinks.”

  I left him there and drove back to the house, running things through my mind and wondering if I’d heard anything that didn’t seem important but was. Some little tidbit of data was fluttering around in the distant recesses of my consciousness like a tiny bird angry about being in a cage, but I couldn’t make it out other than that it was annoyed at not being recognized and freed. If, previously in my life, all such fuzzy mental disturbances of mine had eventually turned out to be significant, I might have treated this one more seriously. But such was not the case; my past experience showed that often my tiny irritating ill-defined thoughts, when finally brought forth for examination, turned out to be of no importance whatsoever.

  I wondered if Joe Begay had learned anything useful about Clay’s situation and when I’d hear from him. Soon, I hoped. I hoped, too, that somber Bonzo and his mother weren’t too worried about the investigation into Nadine Gibson’s death. I didn’t think they should be, but I wasn’t sure they weren’t. In their place I would probably have been worried, too, since the law, like rain, falls on both the just and the unjust.

  At home I discussed these issues with Oliver Underfoot and Velcro and in reply got their usual feline wisdom: This too shall pass. How about something to eat?

  There are dumber creatures than cats.

  I doled out cat snacks, then checked the leftovers in the fridge. There weren’t enough for all of the Jacksons so I thawed out some of last fall’s scallops and put together a Coquille St. Jacques for supper. It’s a meal that takes some prep time, but I had that time and I knew the results would be worth it. By the time the kids got home from school, it was ready for the oven.

  Joshua came in with downcast eyes and a discolored cheekbone. Uh-oh.

  I said nothing but hello and he mumbled a reply as he went on into his room. Diana lingered.

  “Pa.”

  “What, Diana?”

  “Joshua got in a fight.”

  Her tone was that of an honorable informant possibly in search of a reward.

  “Did you see it?”

  “No, but my friend did. Mr. Hobbs made Joshua go to the principal’s office.”

  Not just to Patagonia but to the principal’s office. “Who else was involved?”

  “Jim Duarte. He had to go to the principal’s office, too.”

  “Well, thank you, Diana. You can go change out of your school clothes now.”

  “He’s not supposed to fight, is he, Pa?”

  “It’s usually better not to fight. Now go change. Your mother and I will talk with him when she gets home.”

  “Pa?”

  “Yes?”

  “I never get in fights.”

  “That’s good. Now go change clothes.”

  She went and I remembered that Joshua and Jim had shoved each other around before and that Zee was teaching Joshua to box. He clearly hadn’t learned well enough to keep from getting hit, though. Maybe after Jim went home with a bloody nose his mother had decided to teach him the manly art.

  Joshua was still in his room when Zee came home. I waited until she was in her civvies before telling the war story.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Jim’s his best friend, too.”

  “Joshua is hiding out in his room,” I said, “but we should talk with him. He and Jim aren’t old enough to be fighting about some girl, are they?”

  “You tell me. You were a boy.”

  “I haven’t been that age for almost forty years. I don’t remember much about it.”

  “We’ll ask him. I don’t want people hitting him, but I don’t want him to be a bully, either.”

  We knocked politely on his bedroom door and heard his voice telling us to come in. Nurse Zee looked at his bruise and said it didn’t look too bad. I asked him to tell us how it happened.

  It had happened at the noon recess after lunch. He and Jim were kidding around with some other boys when somebody shoved somebody into Jim and Jim thought Joshua did it and shoved the other boy into Joshua, and before you knew it, the laughing stopped and Jim had hit Joshua in the face and Joshua had hit him back and the other kids were all watching, and then Mr. Hobbs was there between them. And then he took them to the principal’s office.

  “And what did the principal say?” asked Zee.

  “He said we were disruptive and on probation until the end of this week and if we did anything bad again we would be sent home. Here.” He pulled a note out of his backpack and gave it to us. It was from the principal and said, among other things, that Joshua was indeed on probation and that if we had any questions to come into his office.

  “I think we should do that,” said Zee. “I thought Jim was your best friend, Joshua.”

  Joshua nodded. “He is.”

  “Then why did you fight? This happened before, not long ago. You hit him on the nose.”

  Joshua shrugged unhappily. “I don’t know why.”

  I wondered if his hormones were acting up a little earlier than in most boys. In any case I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t know quite how the fight had started. Push had come to shove had come to hit. A lot of fights are like that. Afterward you don’t know how they happened.

  “How’s Jim?” I asked. “Is he okay?”

  He nodded and looked on the verge of tears.

  “Well,” I said. “You’ll have to serve out your probation, but the past is past. Nobody got hurt. That’s the important thing. From now on, though, you have to keep an eye on yourself so you don’t accidentally get into more fights. You know now that they can get started for no real reason, so you have to keep that from happening to you. Are you still taking boxing lessons from your mother?”

  He nodded and I glanced at Zee before putting my hand on his thin shoulder. “That’s good,” I said, “because knowing how to box may keep you out of trouble. Did I ever tell you the story about John L. Sullivan when he was in a bar and a little drunk man came up to him and challenged him to a fight?”

  He shook his head, eyes still down. “No.�
��

  “John L. Sullivan was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He was in a bar having a beer when a little drunk guy challenged him to a fight. Everybody in the bar thought that John L. would knock the little drunk flat with one punch, but instead John L. said, ‘No, I’m not going to fight you.’

  “The little drunk man was furious and called him all sorts of bad names, but John L. just ignored him and drank his beer until finally the little man gave up and left the bar. When the other people asked John L. why he hadn’t just flattened the guy, John L. said, ‘Because I didn’t have to.’”

  There was a silence for a long moment, then Joshua nodded. “I understand,” he said. “John L. didn’t have to prove anything so he didn’t get in a fight.”

  I rubbed his head. “That’s right. Supper’s in the oven. It’ll be ready in about half an hour. Do you have any homework?”

  “A little.”

  “You’d better get at it. I’ll call you when it’s time to eat.”

  Zee kissed her damp-eyed son and we went back to the kitchen.

  “Is that a true story?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I heard it a long time ago.”

  “Well, it’s a good one and I hope it helps.”

  After supper, as Zee was washing dishes, the phone rang. It was Joe Begay. “I have some information for you,” he said. “Some of it’s kind of interesting.”

  22

  The next morning I picked up Clay and we drove to Aquinnah. “Jeez,” said Clay, as we shivered our way up-island. “You need either a new truck or a new heater.”

  “I thought you were going to fix it. You’re the one with the magic hands.”

  “Icicle hands are more like it this morning.”

  “You’ve been spending too much time in warm climates,” I said. “Truly manly men are impervious to the cold.”