Vineyard Chill

by Philip R. Craig

  Gordon Brown opened his front door to my knock, frowned, then brightened a bit as he recognized me, and said, “Mr. Jackson, isn’t it? You were here last week.”

  He glanced behind him, then stepped out and pulled the door almost shut, although it was too cold for him to be outside wearing only a sweater over his winter shirt. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Don’t want the chilly air to get into the house. My wife’s not well.”

  “So I’ve been told. Sorry. Is she bedridden?”

  He looked startled. “Bedridden? No, no, not really.” He tapped a forefinger alongside his head. “She’s just…she just doesn’t like to leave the house anymore.”

  “She was a large, lively woman when she was young, I’m told. Does she ever get outside anymore?”

  He rubbed his jaw. “I can’t remember the last time. It’s been a while.”

  “You must do all of the outside work, then. Shopping, going to the dump, mowing the lawn.”

  “I don’t mind, really. What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?” He glanced at his wristwatch and seemed to be listening to the inside of his house as much as to me.

  “It must be particularly hard for you to live with the woman you love when there’s nothing wrong with her physically, when she’s strong and looks perfectly normal but isn’t.”

  “I’m used to it. I really have to go back inside.” He crossed his arms and hugged his chest. “It’s cold out here.”

  “The morning after Nadine Gibson disappeared, you made a trip to the dump. Do you remember that?”

  His eyes grew worried and wary. “No, I don’t. Did I? I go every couple of weeks, whenever stuff begins to pile up. Maybe I went that day. I don’t remember.”

  “You went just a couple of days earlier, so you wouldn’t have had much rubbish that morning.” He stepped back toward the door, but I put a hand on his arm. “You put a rubbish bag into your van. What was in the bag?”

  He brushed weakly at my hand. “Rubbish, I guess. How can you expect me to remember? It was a year ago. Let go of me.”

  I let go, but before he could duck into the house I said, “If you go inside now, I’m going right to the police, so talk to me.”

  His face was touched with fear. “What do you want?”

  “You don’t have much of a social life anymore, do you? You and your wife used to go bird-watching and do other things that young couples do. But that’s all ended, hasn’t it?”

  “I guess so. But that’s because Gert is sick. She’s sick and she doesn’t want me to be away from her.”

  “That’s right. You get out of the house to do chores like mowing the grass where she can keep an eye on you, but the only times you get away from her is when you go to the store or the dump. And she doesn’t like that, does she?”

  “No. But that’s understandable. She’s sick.”

  “You’re a sociable guy, Gordy. The neighbors like you and you like being their friend, don’t you?”

  “Sure. Of course I do.” He was shivering.

  “You chat with them when you see them. You like it in the summertime when there are people around for you to talk to.”

  “Yes. It’s cold out here. Aren’t you cold?”

  “We can go inside if you prefer.”

  “No, no. This is fine.”

  “Gert doesn’t like it when you’re outside talking, does she?”

  “I guess not, but you can’t blame her. She’s—”

  “I know. She’s sick. She especially doesn’t like it when you talk with women. Isn’t that so?”

  “What are you trying to get me to say?”

  “She didn’t like Nadine Gibson, did she? You told me Gert thought the girl was a sinner, the way she lived with her boyfriend, and that she was glad when the boy left.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But a couple of nights later another man spent the night at Nadine’s house. How did Gert feel about that?”

  He looked past me and said in a small voice, “She called her a whore.”

  “How did she feel when she found out you weren’t charging Nadine full rent?”

  He turned visibly pale. “What!”

  “You heard me.”

  He pressed his fists hard against the sides of his face. I saw that his teeth were gritted. He made not a sound.

  “What I think happened,” I said, “is this: Your wife had never liked the attention you paid to the girl, and when she found out about the rent deal you’d been giving her and then saw another man spend the night with her, the combination of betrayals was too much for her. She left the house that night when she knew Nadine would be coming home from work and she met her out somewhere along the way, probably in the shadow of a house or a tree a block or more from here, out of the moonlight, and she beat her to death with a piece of pipe or a tool of some kind she probably got out of your truck. I don’t think you knew anything about it until she came back home. It that pretty close to what happened?”

  He said nothing, but only stood there with a silent howl of pain on his face. I went on.

  “I think she was wearing clothes covered with blood, because beatings spatter more blood than you’d think possible. I think you got her out of her clothes and into the shower, and that you made her go to bed while you put her bloody things into a rubbish bag. You didn’t take the bag with you because you were afraid the clothes might be found and identified so you left them there while you got a sheet and drove to where the body was. You wrapped the body so you wouldn’t get blood all over the inside of your truck. Then, because it was too cold to dig a grave and because you remembered the old Olmstead ruin, you took the body up there and buried it under the rubble in the cellar, where there was a good chance it wouldn’t be found for years. How am I doing so far?”

  He was staring into nothingness. “How do these things happen?” he asked the gods who live out there.

  I said, “The next morning you took the bag of bloody clothes to the landfill, where the chances were they’d never be found. And they never were found. Then you got even luckier: a snowstorm covered the place where the murder occurred, and the snow didn’t melt for a long time. For a year, the body wasn’t found and maybe you were beginning to think everything was going to work out after all. But then one day my friend Bonzo found a bird’s nest made in part from long red hair and that was the beginning of the end for you and Gertrude.”

  “She’s sick,” he said. “She has been for a long time.”

  “You need a lawyer,” I said. “I imagine there’s a good chance that your wife will get off with an insanity plea, but even if she doesn’t, there’s no death penalty in Massachusetts.”

  His eyes were watery and he was shivering. “Oh, poor Gertrude. Poor Nadine.”

  Poor you, I thought. Poor all of us.

  “I’m going to the police with this,” I said. “You go back inside and don’t upset your wife if you can help it. She saw me coming here and she’ll want to know what we talked about.”

  “What’ll I tell her?”

  I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I just said, “Wait for the police. Don’t do anything unusual. Make some tea. That might help.”

  As he opened the door I heard her voice. It reminded me of a crow’s cawing. “Gordon! What are you doing out there? Is that man trying to sell you something? I saw him come from Loretta Aldrich’s house. Get rid of him!”

  He shut the door and I walked back to my truck and drove to the state police station.

  Dom Agganis was at his desk sifting through the pile of papers that was always on his desk. Between the papers and the computer he didn’t have a lot of spare space.

  “I think you need a bigger file cabinet,” I said. “I suggest the trash barrel out behind the barracks. If anything there is really important they’ll send it to you again.”

  “I know you’re right,” he said, “but I never know when the governor might walk in and I wouldn’t want him to think I’m not working on something.”


  “Has he ever walked in?”

  “Not yet, but it could happen anytime. What brings you here? Nosing around in police business again?” He leaned back in his chair, stretched, and put his thick hands behind his neck.

  “’Tis better to give than to receive,” I said, sitting down. I’d felt tired before I’d even finished talking with Gordon Brown. I was more tired now, wearied the way we are by angry argument or depravity.

  “You look to be in a giving mood,” said Dom, eyeing me keenly. “If so, I’m in a mood to receive.”

  So I sat and told him of my day. My voice droned in my ears like the buzzing of a distant swarm of bees. There was no inflection in it, no tone, only words following other words until, after what seemed a long time, the words stopped abruptly and I was looking almost sleepily at Dom.

  I saw a tape recorder on his desk and wondered how long it had been there. From the beginning, I guessed. Now he leaned forward and turned it off.

  “We’ll need more than you got,” he said.

  I nodded. “I know, but it’s a start. Maybe you can still find the clothes he threw away.”

  “I doubt it. It’s been a year. We can look.”

  “I imagine he’s cleaned his truck, but there might be bloodstains that he missed.”

  “There’s a chance of that. Luminol should find it if it’s there.”

  “He probably put the weapon in with the clothes if she brought it home, but maybe not. I forgot to ask. He has a van probably loaded with pipes and plumbing tools. Gertrude might have used his favorite pipe wrench, and maybe he loved it too much to part with it.”

  “Not likely, but possible.”

  “There must have been a lot of blood where the killing took place. Brown couldn’t have cleaned it all up in the middle of the night, even with all that moonlight to help him find it, and he wouldn’t have wanted to stay on the scene very long for fear someone would come by.”

  “If you’re right, that spot is somewhere between the girl’s house and the Fireside, which is quite a stretch of territory. And a year’s gone by and God knows how many people, dogs, and kids have messed up the crime scene. Too bad about that snowstorm. If it hadn’t been for that, we might have figured this all out a year ago.”

  “Maybe you can use luminol in the likeliest spots. I figure it happened in the shadows. Maybe that’ll narrow the possibilities.”

  “Maybe we can get Gertrude to lead us to the spot.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There are a lot of maybes in this conversation. You got anything else for me to think about? No. Then thanks and good-bye.”

  I went out into the cool, clear March air. A wind was coming off the water and I could see a ferry coming around West Chop bringing cars and travelers to the Blessed Isle.

  I climbed into the Land Cruiser and drove home. It was the middle of the afternoon and I felt the way a writer friend had once described his feelings when he was “between books”: slightly ill at ease, existential, wondering if I had wasted my life and if I would ever do anything worthwhile. What I needed was company and a beer. Or maybe two or three beers.

  I stopped on Circuit Avenue and went down the stairs into the Vineyard Wine and Cheese Shop, the island’s only basement liquor store. I bought a six-pack of Sam Adams lager and, because neither my wife nor my children were yet at home, drove to Ted Overhill’s barn. There I found Clay Stockton whistling as he worked.

  The barn was warm and comfortable. I climbed up and sat in the schooner’s cockpit and invited Clay to join me in a Sam. He was glad to do it.

  “What’s up?” he asked as I handed him a bottle.

  “Oh, nothing much,” I said. “Cheers.”

  We touched bottles and drank. The clean, fresh, cold beer slid down my throat and I felt myself relax. God was a brewer. There was no doubt about it.

  28

  They launched the Horizon on the last day of May, just after Clay had finally gotten around to fixing the heater in the Land Cruiser. As he observed as he wiped his hands afterward, now that it worked, I didn’t need it. It was still fine with me, because I’d love having it next winter. The schooner had gotten her name because Ted Overhill had always hoped to do blue-water sailing and still did. Boat names fall into three general categories: great, awful, and commonplace. Horizon wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen.

  When you don’t have a regular job, which was my situation, you can make up your own mind about which work you’ll do today and which you’ll do later, if at all, so once the boat was in the water I took some time to help with her rigging and ballast. As in the old days Clay and I worked well together, and it was still June when the Horizon was ready for a sea trial.

  She was sweet but a bit tender, so we added and relocated ballast until she was up to having her lee rail in the water and flying as fast as you wanted to go. Clay and I took her out into the sound several times in a variety of weathers until we were persuaded that she was as strong and stable as she was swift, and that she could be handled by a two-man crew if necessary. Then we put her on her mooring outside the Vineyard Haven seawall and invited Zee, Joshua, Diana, and Eleanor to join us and Ted for an official First Sail.

  There was food and drink for all, and a nice fifteen-knot wind blowing from the southwest, making small whitecaps on gentle waves. Perfect. We put up the main and mizzen, dropped our mooring line, and eased out of the harbor, raising the foresails as we went. The Horizon cut smoothly through the water like one of the swans that we could see from our house, on Sengekontacket Pond.

  We first sailed around East Chop and reached over to Cape Pogue before coming about and returning. Past West Chop we hauled in the sheets and beat up Vineyard Sound to Tarpaulin Cove, where we dropped anchor and had lunch and took turns jumping off the bow into the still-chilly water, swimming back to the ladder and climbing aboard and then jumping off again before coming aboard for a last time and lying in the warm sun to dry.

  Then we raised the sails again, hauled anchor, and slid in front of wind and tide back down the sound before rounding West Chop and tacking up to fetch our mooring as the long summer day slowly darkened.

  “Splendid,” said Ted, beaming. He was in love and his paramour was the Horizon. Looking at his happy face I thought that many a woman had lost her man to a ship.

  That evening, as we sat on the couch drinking a last glass of cognac in front of a June fire in the stove, I mentioned that thought to Zee.

  “A lot of women went to sea with their husbands during whaling days,” she said. “Maybe because they didn’t want that to happen. They didn’t want the seductress ships to have their husbands alone for three or four years. How about us, hunk? Do I need to be jealous of the Shirley J.?”

  “I’d much rather sleep with you,” I said. “I’m very fond of our catboat, but I prefer a live woman in my arms.”

  “Good, as long as I’m the woman.”

  She was and knew it, but just in case, I said, “You and only you, sweets,” and meant it.

  After a while, she said, “Love can surprise you. Gordon Brown loved his wife even after she murdered poor Nadine. Do you think she loved him back?”

  “She was jealous, but I don’t know if that’s really love. I think of love as wanting good things to happen to your lover. She was a very sick woman.”

  “I think there’s a dark side to it,” said Zee, “like there is to a lot of things. Look at all the killings that involve husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends. Passions can get very twisted.”

  “The poets and shrinks of the world would probably agree.”

  “What’s going to happen to the Browns?”

  I didn’t know, of course. “My guess is that she’ll end up in a hospital and he’ll do some jail time as an accessory. Something like that.” Whatever happened to the Browns was too late to save Nadine.

  “At least Bonzo isn’t worried about anything now.”

  “No. He has little memory of the dark side of things.”
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  “I know you don’t believe in an afterlife,” said Zee, “but if there is one, do you think that killers and their victims ever meet there?”

  “If there is such a thing, I think they probably do.”

  “Really? You don’t think there’d be a heaven and hell, one for the innocents and one for the brutalizers?”

  “It’s an old question,” I said, feeling lazy and comfortable sitting there beside her inside our house, shut away from the troubles of the world. “Somebody wrote that there are deer in the heaven of tigers but no tigers in the heaven of deer.”

  “But you think the killers and victims will meet. Why?”

  “Because I don’t think that good and evil exist. I think they’re both just products of our imagination. Things are or they aren’t. They don’t have any moral character. Events happen, but they aren’t moral either. They’re just events, like falling rain or the way sunshine feels on your skin.”

  “I think that last’s a sensation, not an event.”

  “I think we’ve both had just enough cognac.”

  “Do you think that Jack Blume and Mickey Monroe will come back?”

  “No. Why should they? There’s nothing here for them.”

  “There’s the money.”

  “They think Clay gave it to the Feds.”

  “But he didn’t. He still has it.”

  “He’s keeping it for Mark Briggs.”

  “But Mark Briggs is in Rio de Janeiro or somewhere down that way. Unless he comes back to the United States and gets in touch with Clay, Clay has the money. And since Clay doesn’t know how to get in touch with Mark Briggs and Mark Briggs doesn’t know how to get in touch with Clay, Clay will have the money forever.”

  “What do you think he should do with it?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s out there in California, so he should probably go get it and put it somewhere safer than it is.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then he should use part of it to buy Elly an engagement ring!”

  I looked at her. “Really? With his record with women? He’s never had a relationship last yet.”

  She had an expression on her face that was hard for me to decipher. “He’s just had bad luck. Now he’s ready to settle down and Elly is just the right woman to settle down with him. They love each other; she’s got a house for them to live in, and he’s got several million dollars. It’s perfect for both of them!”