First Light

by Philip R. Craig

  Fishing in the ocean at night is an act of blind faith—or blind folly.

  Sometime after we’d been there for a few hours, the breeze shifted direction. It felt warmer on my face, and it tasted damper, and it became stronger.

  Within minutes after I first noticed the wind shift, I heard Zee grunt.

  “Fish?” I said.

  “Um. Good one.”

  I reeled in and fished out my flashlight in time to see Zee backing a very large striped bass up onto the beach.

  “Keeper?”

  She knelt beside it and measured it against some markings on her rod. “Oh, yeah,” she whispered. “Thirty-seven inches. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho. Derby winner, here we go.”

  She lugged the big fish up to her Jeep, and I returned to my casting with renewed enthusiasm.

  A few casts later, I felt a hard pull. But I failed to hook the fish.

  Zee returned.

  “I had a hit,” I said.

  “They’ve arrived,” she said. “Time to get serious.”

  And for the rest of the night—I had no idea how many hours passed—we caught fish. We landed eight or ten nice stripers apiece, though none of them matched Zee’s thirty-seven-incher and none of mine was a keeper, and we caught about as many bluefish. I kept a blue that Zee guessed would weigh ten pounds, and she kept all of hers, including one about the same size as mine.

  First light came so gradually it was barely noticeable. There was no burst of light on the horizon, because the horizon was packed with heavy clouds. It was, rather, a growing awareness that the sky was a bit less dark than the water, and that I could make out Zee’s silhouette beside me, and that on both sides of us up and down the beach there were other silhouettes casting into the sea.

  We quit a little after seven-thirty. My shoulder ached and my poor, sleep-deprived head felt like an overblown balloon, and as we drove to Derby headquarters to weigh in our fish, I realized that I’d spent the entire night without thinking a single thought of Molly Wood or Sarah Fairchild or my law practice. My mind had registered nothing except the sea and the sky and the air and the rhythms of fishing.

  Anyone who doesn’t fish could never understand.

  Chapter Seventeen

  J.W.

  Zee and Brady pulled into the yard just before nine-thirty the next morning. In the fish box, awash in the last melting remnants of the ice they’d packed there the night before, were eight or ten nice blues and a keeper bass.

  I examined the fish. “Not bad,” I said.

  “Not bad, but not great, either,” said Zee. “The guys right behind us at the weigh-in brought in better ones. You two both got daily thirds yesterday, though, so you outlasted most of the competition and at least made the board. Guess who’s leading the overall bass competition.”

  “Who?”

  “Nate Fairchild. Last night he brought in a fifty-six-pounder. From the ‘North Shore,’ he said, but I think we can be a little more precise than that.”

  “Fairchild Cove.” I looked at Brady. “The tides are getting about right. Let’s go up there tonight and give old Nate a run for his money.”

  “As you may recall, the last time I ran into Nate on the beach, he waved a shotgun in my face.” Brady rubbed a red eye and yawned. “He probably thinks that with Sarah in the hospital he can do what he pleases, such as keeping the cove to himself.”

  “There’s a law against waving shotguns at people, isn’t there?”

  “Maybe catching that bass will soothe his savage breast.”

  “Maybe it will. We should get there about five. The tide will be rising, and the sun comes up around six. Good time to hunt bass.”

  “Nate probably thinks the same thing.”

  “I doubt if Nate will have his shotgun with him that time of day. He probably thinks he’s scared you off for good.”

  “Pretty close to it,” said Brady.

  But I didn’t think he looked very frightened. If anything, he just looked tired, like a lot of other people doing serious Derby fishing. As if he’d read my thought, he looked at his watch. “I’m going to catch a couple hours’ sleep, then get back to work. See you at the fork in Sarah’s driveway at five?”

  “You’re on.” I thought of meeting Nate on the beach and felt cold and happy.

  After Brady drove away, I took the fish out back and filleted them. We were having a good Derby, fish-in-the-freezer-wise, even though we weren’t doing too well at getting on the board.

  While Zee was sleeping, I loaded the kids in the car and drove down to the Chief’s office in Edgartown. He wasn’t there. He was downtown, according to Kit Goulart.

  “But,” she added, “he said if you came by I should give you this.” She handed me an envelope. Inside was a photograph of Molly Wood. “I think it came down from Dom Agganis.”

  Sergeant Dom Agganis was the head of the Massachusetts State Police force on Martha’s Vineyard. He and I were not bosom buddies, but I got along with him, which is more than I could say about his underling, Officer Olive Otero, who rubbed me as wrong as I rubbed her.

  I found the Chief at the four corners leaning on the side of a bank. He looked as happy as he ever does.

  “Thanks for the photo,” I said. “I see you’re admiring the traffic flow.” And indeed, the cars were moving smoothly, in marked contrast to the stops and stalls and creepy-crawling of summertime traffic.

  “Agganis got the pictures from somebody on the mainland and sent them to all the departments on the island. The traffic is nice, isn’t it? There are even parking places on Main.”

  “Have you heard anything more about Molly Wood’s car?” I said. “Did they find anything else?”

  “It’s none of your business, but no, they didn’t.”

  “What about Molly Wood’s medical bag?”

  For the first time, he looked at me seriously. “What bag?”

  “Visiting nurses all carry medical bags. According to Brady Coyne, it isn’t in her room and it isn’t at the offices of the Visiting Nurse Service. If it isn’t at either one of those places, it should be in her car.”

  His eyes roved up and down the street, the way cops’ eyes often do. But he wasn’t looking for perps. He was thinking. “I’ll get in touch with Dom Agganis,” he said. He turned and walked up the street.

  We went back to the Land Cruiser. It was early, but some people might already be up. I drove to Oak Bluffs and parked on Circuit Avenue, the main drag.

  The Atlantic Connection is a favorite Oak Bluffs nightspot, and one of the few places on the Vineyard where you can dance between drinks. It’s across the street and a few doors up from the Fireside. It offers a bar and a dance floor and is popular with couples who like to trip the light fantastic.

  The Connection wasn’t open, but I knew a bartender named Fred who should just about be getting up now, so the kids and I walked up into the campground, between rows of those lovely gingerbread houses, until we came to Fred’s tiny, brightly painted place. I banged on his door.

  He was, indeed, up, but just barely. He looked at me with red eyes over a cup of coffee. “J.W. ¿Que pasa? Hi, kids. Come in.”

  “No thanks. This will only take a minute.” I showed him Molly’s picture. “Do you remember seeing this woman at the club?”

  He peered and nodded. “Yeah. She’s been in a few times. Likes to dance.”

  “She come in alone or with somebody?”

  He returned my photo. “With somebody. A couple different somebodies, in fact. Who is she?”

  “Her name’s Molly Wood. You know any of the men she was with?”

  Fred shook his head. “The only one I remember was Shrink Williams. They were in together a time or two.”

  “I hear that if a woman breaks off from Shrink, he trails her around. You ever see that happen?”

  Bartenders who want to keep their jobs see more than they’ll talk about. Diplomatic Fred just shrugged.

  I tried another tack. “When were Molly and Shrink together?”


  He sipped his coffee and winced. Still pretty hot. “Maybe three weeks back.”

  “And after that they weren’t together? She came into the Connection with somebody else?”

  He shrugged again and nodded.

  “But not Shrink?”

  “No, not Shrink.”

  “But Shrink did come in.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he’d stay around until she and whoever she was with left and then he’d leave too, right?”

  “Maybe. I don’t keep track of what everybody does or when they do it.”

  “Maybe” was all I was going to get from Fred on that subject, so I showed him Kathy Bannerman’s photo. “This woman was on the island a year ago. Do you remember seeing her?”

  He studied the picture, then cocked his head to one side and studied it some more. “She looks familiar, but last year was a long time ago, and we get a lot of good-looking women coming in during the summers. I’m not sure.”

  “Maybe she was with the same guy you saw with Molly Wood.”

  He shook his head. “Could be, could not be.” He returned the photo. “Sorry. What’s going on, J.W.?”

  “We’re trying to find these women. We’re looking for anybody who knows anything about them.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help.”

  He went back to his coffee, and the kids and I walked back to the truck.

  “I like these houses,” said Diana. “They look like that picture in Hansel and Gretel. The witch’s house.”

  “A hundred and fifty years ago, there were tents here,” I said. “Then they replaced the tents with these houses and they’ve been here ever since. They made all those curlicue decorations with special saws.”

  “Can we have decorations like that on our tree house?”

  “Nope. I don’t have the right kind of saw or the right kind of skill. The tree house is going to be plain and simple.”

  They each put a hand into one of mine, and the three of us walked side by side among the pretty gingerbread houses. I was thinking about a woman I knew who worked at the Hot Tin Roof, the island’s major nightspot.

  I sighted a pay phone on Circuit Avenue, but as I moved toward it a state police cruiser pulled in against the curb. Sergeant Dom Agganis slid his big body out from behind the wheel and said, “Just the man I wanted to see.” He produced two lollipops. “Any objection to candy before lunch?”

  “No. Do you have one for me?”

  “No. Here, kids.”

  My polite children thanked him nicely.

  “You found the car, so that gets you the latest dope on that glove they found in it,” said Dom. “It was top of the line. Made by Mallet. It’s the kind of glove they make as gifts for special people who they do business with.”

  “So whose was it?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Well,” I said, “a couple guys named Philip Fredrickson and Luis Martinez work for the Mallet Corporation. Mallet is backing the Isle of Dreams outfit, and these guys are trying to help them get their hands on Sarah Fairchild’s place up in West Tisbury. Molly Wood is Sarah’s visiting nurse.”

  “Just what we need,” said Agganis. “Another golf course. Maybe these guys met the Wood woman up at the Fairchild place. Maybe they played golf together.”

  “Zee says that Molly doesn’t play golf.”

  He rubbed his chin. “One thing I don’t like about this is the Wood woman’s description.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He frowned. “She’s fortyish, blonde, and attractive. Over the last few years, several people have gone missing from the island. Most of them turned up safe and sound, but some didn’t.”

  “The Chief mentioned that.”

  He nodded. “A half dozen of our missing people have stayed missing even after people, including us, kept on looking for them. The ones I’m thinking about were good-looking blonde women in their forties. They were all from off-island, and they all dropped out of sight and haven’t been seen since. Just like Molly Wood.”

  “I’ve been looking for one of them,” I said, and told him about the job I’d taken searching for Katherine Bannerman.

  He worked his jaw. “Yeah, she’s one of them. And now there’s Molly Wood. You know anything about her and her friends that I don’t know?”

  “I don’t know what you know,” I said, “but I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.” And I did.

  When I was done, Dom gave me a hard look. “So the Bannerman woman’s husband was here last summer, eh?”

  “Just about the time she disappeared. He admits it and Bonzo saw him. Bonzo sees a lot. Could be he saw the guy Molly was with.”

  “I’ll talk to Bonzo and I’ll talk with Bannerman, too. The Chief called me earlier and told me about that bag Molly Wood carried, so we’ll put the squeeze on some of our local druggies, too. And I’ll talk with Martinez, Fredrickson, and Shrink Williams. Anybody else on your list of the usual suspects?”

  “I’m going to call a woman who works at the Hot Tin Roof and see if she can tell me anything about Molly Wood or Kathy Bannerman, or can corroborate the stories I’ve been hearing about Shrink. If she tells me anything new, I’ll let you know.”

  “You leave this investigation to the cops. Time for you to go home and be daddy to your kids.”

  “Pa’s helping us build a tree house,” said big-eared Joshua.

  “Good,” said Agganis. “Go build a tree house, J.W.”

  He opened the door of the cruiser and slid behind the wheel. I pushed the door shut and leaned on the roof.

  “I met Molly Wood, and I liked her,” I said, “and I’ve been hired to find Kathy Bannerman. So I’ll build the tree house, but I’m also going to nose around and try to get a line on what happened to those women. I’ll get in touch with you or the Chief if I find out anything interesting.”

  “Don’t interfere with the investigation, J.W.”

  “Does that mean that there really is an investigation?”

  “As of right now.”

  I stepped back. “I’m just a citizen asking questions. No law against that.”

  “A judge might think differently if you get in our way. So long, kids.” He eased out of the parking place and drove away.

  “Wait here,” I said to the children as I dug out money for the phone. They looked into a store window while I made my call.

  I didn’t hang out in clubs very much, even before I met Zee. But a fisherman I knew had a wife who worked at the Tin Roof. She was home, and I broached my thesis of Shrink Williams as stalker.

  “Hell, J.W.,” she said with a laugh, “every woman Shrink ever dated knows he does that. He’s not dangerous. He just can’t imagine that a woman would leave him for somebody else, so he has to check up just to be sure.”

  “Have you noticed Shrink lately watching a fortyish blonde woman named Molly Wood?”

  “I don’t know her name, but it seems to me that he was eyeballing a woman like that recently. She was with a really good-looking guy. Shrink looked green, I thought.”

  “The man she was with anybody you know?”

  “I think I’d remember a guy who looked that good.”

  “I thought you had eyes only for me.”

  “Ha!”

  “So what’d he look like?”

  “Sorry, J.W. I just remember thinking he was good-looking.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember seeing the same guy a year ago, with another good-looking fortyish blonde?”

  She made a thoughtful, humming sound. “Maybe. I can’t really be sure.”

  “Does this mean that next time you won’t remember me, either?”

  “Of course not. What was your name again?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Brady

  I was exhausted after fishing all night with Zee. But I’d caught some fish, and more important, I was winning my bet with Billy. I felt good about that.

  As I drove from the Jackson residence to West Tisbury, m
y thoughts slowly began to turn from fishing to Sarah, in the hospital, and Molly Wood, wherever she was, and my actual job, which was to arrange the sale of the Fairchild property. Given Sarah’s condition, I wanted to get that settled quickly. The problem was, I had gone about twenty-four hours without sleep, so the thoughts came at me jumbled and fuzzy. I had strategies to devise and decisions to make, but the last rational corner of my poor old brain told me not to devise a single strategy or make any decisions until I’d gotten a few hours of sleep.

  I parked in the turnaround out front and went inside. I heard the whine of a vacuum cleaner and followed the sound to the living room, where I found Patrick pushing the Hoover over the carpet. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and tennis shorts and his feet were bare. No apron.

  He hadn’t heard me over the noise of the machine, so I went up behind him and yelled, “Hey!”

  He whirled around, wide-eyed, stared at me for a moment, then turned off the vacuum cleaner. He fluttered his hand over his heart. “Jeez, Brady,” he said. “You scared me.”

  “Maid’s day off?” I said.

  “The maid comes in once a week,” he said. “The place gets messy after about a day. My darling mother and all her little friends track in sand and leave their empty bottles and dirty glasses and ashtrays all over the house, and Nate splashes fish blood all over the kitchen floor and counters, and …” He rolled his eyes. “Somebody’s got to take care of the place.”

  “Well, good for you,” I said. “But I have a request.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Cease with the noisy machine for a few hours. I’ve been fishing all night, and I’ve got to sleep.”

  “Sure,” he said. “How’d they bite?”

  “We had pretty good fishing,” I said. “But your uncle Nate brought in a fifty-six-pounder this morning. So far he’s winning the Derby.”

  “That explains it,” said Patrick. “He buzzed through a little while ago, and I thought he must be drunk. He was actually singing. Nate never sings. Mostly, he swears. Especially at me. He didn’t even make a nasty comment about my masculinity when he saw me vacuuming. That’s totally unlike him.”