First Light

by Philip R. Craig

  J.W. stuck out his hand and I shook it. “Nice fish, even so,” he said. “Go catch his grandmother, why don’t you?”

  “I’m gonna try,” I said.

  He shut off his light and sloshed away, leaving me alone again on the beach. I checked the point of my hook, then waded back out to where I’d been standing when that fish had hit. The tide was still coming in, and in the few minutes I’d been fighting that fish, the water had risen from my hips to my waist. I made a couple of casts, but the rock I was aiming at was just a little beyond my range. As I edged closer, I was aware of the current pushing against my hips and the undertow surging in the opposite direction around my ankles.

  I needed just a couple of more steps to reach that rock, and as I slid my foot forward, it came up against something hard. I stumbled, then lost my balance. I flailed around with my arms, but the undertow caught my legs and pulled them out from under me, and the surging tide pushed my upper body backward. I managed to gulp a breath of air before I went under, and for an instant I felt myself churning around underwater at the mercy of the tidal rip with no idea of which way was up.

  Okay, I thought. Relax. This has happened before. Remember. You float. Let yourself rise to the top… .

  And that’s what happened. I bobbed to the surface and floated there on my back, and the incoming tide carried me toward the beach until I was able to lower my legs and find sand under my feet.

  I had not let go of my rod. My line was tangled around my waist and legs and my fly had somehow gotten hooked in the seat of my waders.

  I staggered onto the beach. The tight-fitting neoprene waders had kept the bottom half of me fairly dry, but my top half was drenched, and I found myself shivering in the salty onshore breeze.

  I shucked off my waders, got my line and fly untangled by flashlight, and stood there hugging myself. I thought of telling J.W. that I’d nearly drowned, that I was wet and cold, and that I wanted to go home and swallow a warm shot or two of bourbon.

  Then I thought of that big striper I’d caught, and how the rush of adrenaline had heated me up instantly.

  Go catch another fish, I thought. That’s the ticket.

  So I pulled my waders back on and waded out. But this time I didn’t venture in over my hips. There were some rocks I couldn’t reach, but the hell with them. I knew I’d never win my bet with Billy if I drowned.

  * * *

  We’d agreed to quit at midnight. I had meetings set up for the next morning, and the lawyer needed to be sharp. Plus I had a date—I was getting used to that word—with Molly, and I wanted to be reasonably bright-eyed, if not thoroughly bushy-tailed, for her.

  J.W. and I had each landed a small bluefish, and I pretended to argue about keeping mine for his smoker. Actually, I had no philosophy against killing a fish now and then. But J.W. thought I did, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. In the end I gave it to him.

  When I told him about wading out too far and losing my footing and getting all tangled in my line and nearly drowning, he said, “Hell, they’re only fish.”

  As we drove back to the Fairchild house, I told him to tell Zee that I intended to borrow Sarah’s car for my, um, date with Molly, and that I’d drive over all ready to go fishing. Zee should expect me around nine.

  J.W. told me not to cut short my date. The later I was, the more fun Zee would assume we were probably having, and she would like that.

  “Look for me at nine o’clock,” I told him. But I was remembering Molly Wood’s last kiss, and I decided that I’d play it by ear.

  I wondered if Molly would tempt me to forfeit my bet with Billy. It was an intriguing thought.

  J.W. dropped me off at the Fairchild place a little after 1 A.M. Two cars were parked there—Eliza’s Saab and Sarah’s Range Rover, but Nate’s truck and Patrick’s BMW were both gone and, except for the porch light, the house was dark.

  A couple of golf bags rested against the rail on the front porch. One was a big masculine bag that would make any caddy sweat, and the other had pink knitted head covers. Eliza and her partner, I figured. A pair of empty highball glasses sat on the steps.

  Sarah was sleeping on the sunporch when I peeked in. Unless Eliza was asleep already, which would’ve been uncharacteristic, it looked like they’d all left the old woman alone for the night.

  I went upstairs to get ready for bed, and I was just coming out of the bathroom when I heard car doors slam out front, then loud laughter. A minute later, the front door opened and shut. I heard Eliza’s throaty voice from downstairs, then the rumble of a male voice.

  That voice, if I wasn’t mistaken, belonged to Phil Fredrickson.

  After a minute or two, I didn’t hear anything.

  I went to bed.

  Maybe it was the memory of how I’d nearly drowned. Maybe it was the fishing adrenaline still zinging through my veins. Maybe it was the anticipation of tomorrow’s meeting with the golf-course developer’s lawyer.

  Molly Wood certainly had something to do with it. There was an intensity in the kiss through her car window that had surprised me.

  Whatever it was, and in spite of feeling thoroughly exhausted, I couldn’t get to sleep.

  At 2 A.M. I turned the light back on and read for a while. I’d brought my battered old copy of Moby-Dick with me. Usually, Melville put me right to sleep.

  At two-thirty I turned the light off.

  At three I turned it on again, read a few more pages, and realized I was wide-awake. So I slipped into some clothes and went outside. Maybe a cigarette and a few whiffs of sea air would do the job.

  A car I didn’t recognize was parked in the front turnaround. The two golf bags still rested against the porch railing.

  I wandered out onto the back lawn. Clouds were skidding across the moon, and the ocean was a sort of platinum color. So far, J.W. and I had not pulled an all-nighter. Nor had we fished at first light. We weren’t taking our competitive Derby responsibilities seriously enough.

  On the other hand, I figured if I could manage a few hours of sleep every night, I might not be tempted to wimp out. Billy would never let me forget it if I did.

  Chapter Seven

  J.W.

  The morning after the Squibnocket trip, I phoned Kathy Bannerman’s landlady. Her name was Elsie Cohen. I told her what I was doing and that I’d like to examine Kathy’s possessions.

  “I’m afraid you’re about a year too late, unless you want a bottle of men’s cologne,” said Elsie Cohen.

  “Come again?”

  “After those detectives came around looking for her last August, I waited a few weeks in case Kathy came back, then when she didn’t I got in touch with Mr. Bannerman and packed everything of hers up and shipped it to him. I’d gotten his address from the detectives. A little later I found the cologne in the closet. I guess I should have sent it, too, but it didn’t seem worth it, so I gave it to my husband. But Bill isn’t a big cologne user, so we still have most of the bottle. Do you favor Enchanté?”

  My ignorance of men’s cologne was quite profound. I had never even heard of Enchanté. I wondered if James Bannerman used it and, if not, who did.

  “Do you remember anything about her other possessions? Anything that might give me some idea where she was going or who she might be seeing?”

  “I didn’t read her letters or her other papers,” said Elsie Cohen in a voice that was suddenly a bit prim, “and there was nothing special about anything else she had. No snowshoes or scuba gear or ice axes, if that’s what you mean. Nothing exotic. Just ordinary things.”

  “Did she ever talk with you about her life here on the island? People she knew or things she did? That sort of thing.”

  “You mean like who wears Enchanté cologne? I’m sure I couldn’t say. I told those detectives everything I knew, but it didn’t seem to help them much. She worked with the local women’s service group and did some socializing with people I really didn’t know. Mostly down-island, I think.”

  Down-island meant Oa
k Bluffs, Vineyard Haven, and Edgartown. Chilmark, West Tisbury, and Aquinnah were up-island, where there are no dance halls, clubs, liquor stores, or bars. Up-island people have to dissipate in private rather than in public places. Some of them only go down-island to buy liquor at the Edgartown and Oak Bluffs package stores, after which they flee home again, to peace and quiet.

  Elsie Cohen didn’t know the names of any men Kathy Bannerman might have dated. I wondered if Bill Cohen and Kathy might have sneaked out a night or two, and, if so, if Elsie knew about it. You never know what goes on inside a marriage.

  “Pa, can we work on the tree house?”

  They’d been waiting patiently. “Sure.”

  So we did that until noon, because life does not stop for major events, let alone small ones such as my search for Katherine Bannerman. We’re gonna stay and we’re gonna go, as Sweeney observed, and somebody’s gotta pay the rent, but that’s nothing to me and nothing to you.

  After lunch, I got the kids into the Land Cruiser and headed for Edgartown, running various possibilities through my head as I drove.

  When children or infirm adults go missing, it’s cause for concern because they’re often not mature or healthy enough to fend for themselves. Usually when healthy adults like Katherine Bannerman drop out of sight, they show up again and act surprised that anybody was worried. When that doesn’t happen, it’s often because they don’t want to be found. They’re fleeing debts or unwanted lovers or enemies or the cops, or they just want to leave their old lives behind and start again, and they’re willing to abandon their houses and families and friends to do it. Sam Spade once dealt with that sort of missing person. The irony was that the guy abandoned one family and lifestyle, then moved up the coast and created a new one exactly like his old one. Sam was both amused and bemused by the case.

  Katherine Bannerman’s only motive, as near as I could tell, was boredom with her husband and her life.

  Of course not all missing people disappear intentionally. In some cases some hunter’s dog, years later, brings his master a bone that the hunter recognizes as human and which, after the authorities finish their investigations, finally answers the question of what happened to so-and-so.

  Martha’s Vineyard, with its wealthy and famous Summer People, has the same percentage of criminals as any other place, as the local cops, nurses, social workers, and lawyers can tell you. If you doubt it, just show up at the courthouse in Edgartown on a Thursday. Yeah, slimy things do crawl with legs on the Blessed Isle as well as upon the slimy sea.

  The existence of snakes in Eden notwithstanding, murder is rare on the island, so it seemed unlikely to me that Katherine Bannerman had met with foul play. An accident, possibly, or some unexpected call back to the mainland that left her no time to inform friends or fellow workers, or some combination of both. Kathy hadn’t been brought to the hospital, and if she’d been killed in an accident, her body would probably have been discovered long since. There are a hundred thousand people on the island during the summer, and it was hard to imagine all of them failing to see a body if there was one to be seen. Still, you never know. I once talked to a guy who’d been to Africa, and he’d said you could be ten feet from a pride of lions and never see them.

  I drove to the police station, once the finest on the island but recently challenged for that honor by the new station in Vineyard Haven. The Chief was in his office.

  He looked relaxed for a change, another sign that most of the tourists had gone home for the winter. As soon as he saw Joshua and Diana, he opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a package of Farley’s gummy worms, the world’s finest. He had grandchildren about the same age as my children, and he knew how to be a kid’s best friend.

  Joshua and Diana both accepted his offer and said thank you.

  “How about me?” I asked.

  “Oh, all right.” He held out the package and I took a half dozen lovely, bright-colored gummies.

  “Easy there!” The Chief yanked his gummies back, took a handful, and put the rest back in the drawer.

  “Thank you, Chief.”

  “You’re welcome. What do you want? I know you want something, because you always do when you come in here. Say, would you kids like to have a tour of the building? Kit! Come in here a second.”

  Kit Goulart, all six feet and 275 pounds of her, came in from the front desk. Kit and her husband were about the same size and looked like matched Percherons when they walked down the street together.

  “What is it, Chief?”

  “How’d you like to take these two tykes for a tour of the premises while I fend off their father, here.”

  “Sounds like a deal.” She looked down at them and smiled a smile that would melt a tax collector’s heart. “I’m Kit. I work here. Do you want to see the police station?”

  They did, and the three of them went off. The Chief looked at me. “Well?”

  “A woman named Katherine Bannerman disappeared from the island last year about this time. Her husband has hired me to try to find her. I wonder if you remember the case.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Some agents from some big PI outfit in Boston were down here looking for her. As far as I know they never found her. You should be talking with the Chilmark PD, because she lived up there.”

  “I’ve read the report that Thornberry Security gave to the husband. There wasn’t much in it that helps, but they seem to have done a pretty thorough job.”

  “I’m not big on private eyes nosing around, but you’re right. They seemed pretty good. The Chilmark PD put out a GBC, but nothing came of it.”

  I nodded. A General Broadcast Call would have alerted all of the island police forces to be on the lookout for the missing woman.

  “Later,” said the Chief, “they put out Kathy Bannerman’s physical description on NCIC, in case she was on the mainland. Another zero. It’s a big country, and if she wanted to disappear, she could be anywhere.” He tapped a finger on the papers he’d been working on when I’d come in. “You were a cop, so you know people go missing more often than most folks would think.”

  I did know that. In the United States, thousands of people disappear every year, for one reason or another.

  The Chief went on: “Usually the missing people turn up safe and sound, but we don’t always learn that. During the last few years we’ve had a half dozen or so disappear off the island into thin air about Labor Day. I imagine most of them just went home and didn’t tell whoever it was that got worried about them, and then we didn’t get told, either. Unless they’ve committed a crime or are suspected of being victims of a crime, the authorities don’t really have a lot of reason to look for missing people.”

  “And you don’t have any ideas about where I might look for this one?”

  He shrugged. “Try back home with her husband.”

  “He says she’s not there.”

  Kit and the kids reappeared.

  I got up. “Well, Chief, if you hear anything, let me know.”

  “I will. You do the same. And don’t do anything that might hamper an investigation.”

  “You can trust me, Chief.”

  “Sure I can.”

  After we left the station, the kids and I had ice cream cones, and as we walked back to the truck, we passed a shop that had expensive-looking soaps and lotions in its windows. Feeling serendipitous, I took the kids inside and asked the woman behind the counter if she had Enchanté.

  She not only had it, but she let me have a sniff. “Would you like to buy some?”

  “I don’t think it’s my fragrance. Do you sell much of this?”

  “Usually to women who are buying it for men.”

  “Do the men use it?”

  She smiled. “You’ll have to ask the women.”

  At home, filled to the brim, the tots were ready for naps. So was I, but I had a phone call to make first. So while they fell into those sweet swoons that the innocent enter so quickly, I got directory assistance for Storrs, Connecticut, and ask
ed for the number of Frances Bannerman. No problem, since it’s a rare college freshman who doesn’t have her own phone these days.

  A feminine voice answered on the second ring, and I asked for Frankie.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  I told her my name and that I was calling from Martha’s Vineyard. That got me a “just a minute” and, in less than that, another feminine voice. “This is Frankie Bannerman. Have you found my mother?”

  “No, but we’re looking. Maybe you can help.”

  “Me? How? I haven’t seen Mom for over a year.”

  “Your father told me that he hasn’t heard from her since she sent you a postcard from New York.”

  There was a hint of a pause before she said, “That’s right.”

  “No mail ever came from her to the house again?”

  “No.”

  It was not too great a “no.” In fact it was too small.

  “Here’s what I know,” I said. “Your mom was writing to somebody, because she bought stamps here on the island. And she was getting mail from somebody because she had letters among the possessions that her landlady sent back to your father last fall. I also know that she loved you even if she had stopped loving your father, because she talked about you all the time.”

  I paused and I heard her inhale sharply. But she didn’t say anything, so I went on. “And here’s what I think. I think she was writing to you last summer and that she probably sent the letters to you in care of your best friend. I don’t know who the friend is, but I can find out if I need to, so don’t deny anything if I’m right. I think you wrote back to her, and that those were the letters that were among her possessions when they were sent back to your father. I think that you were home when the package arrived and that you opened it and took out the letters before your father got home.”

  Her voice was faint. “How did you know that?”