Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  “Call me when you’re done.”

  “This better not be some Indian graveyard, like in that horror movie, with the tree breaking the window to grab that kid. All I could think about watching it was, they’re going to have to reframe that whole casing! Not to mention the landscaping work.”

  “You might not be the best audience for a horror movie involving real estate, Pat.”

  “Guess not. Move along, Chief. I’ll call you.”

  I drove back to the station, explained the case to my detectives and settled in to wait for the dental X-rays. The downtime was convenient, as it turned out. The next day I had a less significant, but much more urgent missing persons case on my hands.

  Santa Claus had disappeared.

  Chapter Three

  Finding Santa

  I was house-hunting when I got the missing persons call. I had been hoping for a day off.

  Christmas Stroll had begun—the first weekend in December, and traffic was as bad as July. The terrible drivers were out in force. “I want to arrest all of them,” I said to Jane Stiles.

  She had the driver’s side window open on her truck. The unseasonable air streaming in felt like late September or early May. “I’m not sure you can do that, Henry. Most of them aren’t even breaking the law.”

  We stopped at the five corners stop sign on York Street. Three cars caravanned through the intersection like a little train, gliding from Sparks Avenue along Pleasant Street, heading for town.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Piggybacking through the stop sign. That’s supposed to be one car at a time. You take turns. It’s worse at the rotary. I counted six of them just now. The last one—that BMW—he was probably out by Moors End Farm when the first car in line got there. And we just sat watching the parade go by. I bet that BMW guy pushes to the front of the line at Bartlett’s, too.”

  “At least he’s not texting.”

  “Like his kids.”

  “I bet it was them giving me the finger when I stopped for that old lady yesterday.”

  “And how about the parking lot people? They’re the worst. I can’t arrest them, like you say, because the law is unwritten. But everybody knows the deal—parking spaces are a lottery. If someone is loading their groceries into the back of their car as you’re driving by, you lose! Keep moving. You don’t force a line of cars behind you to wait five minutes so you can have the spot.”

  Jane nodded. “You could get out, flash your badge, and yell at them.”

  “I might just do that next time.”

  “You should.”

  “And look at these people.” Two bikers on ten-speed cycles veered in front of us. “We paid five million dollars for our bike paths on this island, your lordships—so use them! But you’re too good for that, with your spandex and your toe-clips, you’re so far above the three-speed plodders and the kids with the training wheels, so you deserve to share the road with the cars. Except, sorry, you don’t! You block traffic, you’re a danger to yourselves and others and your smug Tour-de-France attitude just makes you look like a bunch of clowns. Get over yourselves! Start using the bike path or we’ll start drug-testing you!”

  Jane laughed. “Go Chief!”

  She hit the brakes. “This is the worst,” I said. “Look at this.” Two women in yoga outfits were pushing a pair of baby carriages down the middle of Pleasant Street. “Use the sidewalk, Super Mom! Let’s parse that. Sidewalks are located on the side of the road for people walking! That would be you.”

  “I think the uneven pavement disturbs the babies.”

  “Right, we can’t have that. I saw one overgrown toddler being wheeled around using a cell phone. I’m serious.”

  “Well, those brick sidewalks make texting impossible.”

  “And we can’t have that.”

  “It’s all about the kids, Henry.”

  “Yeah, like the Christmas trees on Main Street—with all the paper decorations by the middle-schoolers. Then it rains once and you’ve got a disgusting soggy mess, like someone toilet-papered the trees. Every year it’s the same way.”

  “But the children get to express themselves.” Jane said sweetly.

  I love sarcasm. “You are a nasty, mean-spirited little Grinch! How did I ever find you?”

  She leaned across to kiss my cheek. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  We were driving into town to get a key from Killen Real Estate. Like so many people on Nantucket, our lives were ruled by the exigencies of the housing market. I knew divorced couples who still lived together because neither one of them could afford to move out, even if they could track down a year-round rental, which was almost impossible anyway. Jane’s situation was a common variation: her elderly landlord, who had leased her the cottage behind his house for almost twenty years, had died suddenly a few months ago and left the whole property to some right-wing think tank. They would sell it off to some dot-com millionaire who would no doubt bulldoze both structures, clear all the brush and scrub oak to the Land Bank property that edged the harbor, and build some sort of trophy compound. Jane would get booted as soon as the probate cleared. The old man had no immediate family left, and Jane had nursed the private fantasy that he might leave the place to her. They had grown close over the decades, but that wasn’t the Yankee way, and somehow Jane had always known it.

  Other Nantucket women, and some men, had forged temporary romances of convenience with elderly millionaires. Those people were set for life now, if quietly stigmatized for it, though perhaps they deserved their reward for the months, and sometimes years, of arduous caregiving that preceded the reading of the will.

  Jane could never have played that game. So she was looking for a new place to live, and it looked like she had found one.

  The house on Darling Street was never listed with a rental broker; no ad ever appeared in the Inquirer and Mirror. Nantucket locals had their own way of putting a roof over their heads. It was all done by word of mouth, friend to friend, family to family. State Police Captain Lonnie Fraker had grown up on the island with Jane, and their families had been close for more than a hundred years. Their grandfathers had fished together before World War II; their great grandfathers had run a thriving ice business on the old waterfront. Despite various falling-outs over the decades, the settled lawsuits and forgotten fist-fights, the island was finally too small to sustain any grudge into the next generation.

  Lonnie’s father was supposed to have had a long-running affair with Jane’s mother, but the liaison went extinct, the scandal was hushed up, both marriages survived, and the rumor eventually calcified into one more fragment of the town’s fossil record of ancient gossip.

  None of that had kept Jane and Lonnie from becoming friends, though she had her own problems with his half-brother, Todd. She had broken Todd’s heart, but she broke a lot of hearts in those days, and Lonnie had just laughed it off. He said Todd always needed to have his heart broken by somebody, and if it hadn’t been Jane it would have been somebody else. In fact it was somebody else quite a few times afterward, and Todd was probably still having his heart broken by willowy blondes, no matter what he was doing or where he wound up. No one had heard from him in years.

  Lonnie and Jane stayed close. They went to different colleges, but they both wound up back on the Rock. Nantucket had a gravitational pull on its natives; only the angriest, saddest, or most ambitious kids achieved escape velocity. Jane and Lonnie, like most of their friends (the odd math genius or movie director aside), hit the top of their parabolas and dropped back home: an easy fall and a soft landing.

  Lonnie enjoyed Jane’s Madeline Clark mystery novels. He helped her out with the factual details, and allowed her to tag along with the State Police whenever she wanted. He knew about her housing problem without being told because of a tangled string of hearsay. The estate was selling the old man’s sailboat, a twenty-four-foot Mystic A
lley Cat that hadn’t been in the water, or even out of its plastic shrink wrap, for the better part of a decade. A friend of a friend of Lonnie’s drove out to Polpis for a look, and soon the word got out. Lonnie knew what selling that boat meant for Jane: the whole estate was on the auction block, the eviction notice was in the mail—and he knew exactly what to do about it.

  His uncle’s old house on Darling Street was in limbo with six heirs fighting over it, trying to raise the money to buy each other out and going to war over various knickknacks and trinkets, as well as more valuable items like Tony Sarg paintings, Tiffany silver, and first editions. The scuffle could go on for years, and in the meantime, Lonnie talked them into renting it out for three thousand a month year-round. Even with the uncertainty of the arrangement, the house was a bargain. Still, Jane couldn’t afford it.

  That’s where I came in.

  I was living in a cramped apartment I referred to as a “lifeboat” after my divorce (“All it has to do is float,” I liked to say.), which had become more of an issue every year as my kids got older. I couldn’t afford to move any more than Jane could—but splitting the rent on Darling Street with her was a workable arrangement. Of course that meant moving in together. Was I ready for that? Was she? Was her little boy? Were my kids? The whole thing seemed rushed, risky, frantic, premature, potentially catastrophic.

  But the house was available, and Lonnie could only offer it as an exclusive for one day.

  Now or never. That’s how Nantucket real estate rules our lives.

  “What the hell,” Jane had said. “At least let’s take a look.”

  Of course she knew I’d love it. She’d spent half her childhood in that old saltbox. And it stood on one of the prettiest streets in New England, the modest crossbar of an “H” between two larger streets leading into town, shaded by ancient maple trees, the houses lined up even and straight, like books on a shelf.

  It was a slow day at the cop shop—no news from Rollins yet—only an odd DUI and family dispute; someone had stolen the food set out for the AA meeting at the Congregational Church; and two girls had shoplifted a pair of sweaters from Murray’s Toggery Shop. Nothing that needed my urgent attention.

  So we decided to take a look.

  Number 12 was the only house on the short straight street that hadn’t been renovated. If the Fraker kids ever got together, settled their differences, and sold the place, it would undoubtedly get the full treatment: lifted up on pilings so a new basement could replace the low ceilinged catacomb—barely more than a crawl space, that had sufficed since the 1850s. The new lower level would feature a couple of guest bedrooms, an entertainment center, a tiled climate-controlled wine cellar, maybe even a screening room—that was how the new money hijacked these old museum pieces into the twenty-first century.

  They’d replace the kitchen, too, no doubt, carting the olive green appliances and the ancient gas stove to the dump and leveling out the floor. The wide boards tilted drastically now, as we strolled uphill to the pantry closet.

  “People love houses like this or they hate them,” Jane said.

  I turned, taking in the heavy beams that crossed the lumpy ceiling, the wavy antique glass in the twelve-light sash of the big sunny windows, the deep-set sink whose enamel had mostly worn away, the Harbor Fuel tide calendar from 1987 tacked to the cracked plaster wall.

  I ended up facing her again. “Love it.”

  She hugged me. “Let’s look upstairs.”

  The second floor had three bedrooms, and a little office that we could convert into a fourth. From the back bedroom, you had to pass through the middle bedroom to reach the big square landing that formed a sitting room at the top of the stairs. That meant that the middle bedroom was also a sort of corridor, with much less privacy for its occupant. I saw a sibling battleground in the making. I mentioned it to Jane.

  “Sam can take the middle bedroom. He won’t care.”

  We ducked into the master under the low lintel designed for the height of a different century’s occupants: queen-sized bed, built-in bookshelves—and a fireplace.

  “Does it work?”

  “Totally.”

  “We may never go outside again.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She stood on her tiptoes for a kiss and for a minute or so we both forgot about the house. When we came up for air, the place felt like home.

  “So?” Jane asked.

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Move in together? That’s kind of big for a snap decision.”

  “Snap decisions are the best. Ask any detective. People who tell you not to trust your first idea should really think twice about that.”

  Jane exhaled on a grin and shook her head—the closest I was going to get to a laugh. I took it. She walked to the window, and looked down at Darling Street. “What will your kids say?”

  “We get our own rooms! That is literally all they care about. Getting away from each other.”

  “Then we’re going to do it?”

  “Call Lonnie.”

  Before she could grab her phone, my own cell rang: the dueling guitars that spark the opening of “Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard.”

  It was my assistant chief, Haden Krakauer: police business.

  I finger-swiped the screen. “What’s up?”

  “It’s Santa Claus,” Haden said. “He’s missing.”

  Homer Boyce had never shown up for rehearsal.

  “What does he need to rehearse?” I asked Haden as I walked into town to Jackson Blum’s sporting goods store on Main Street. Blum had been sponsoring the Santa show since long before I arrived on the island. “All Homer has to do is sit down and say yes when some kid asks for a new bike.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. He has his lines. He can’t just promise the moon to these kids. And he has to deal with the crazy parents and the photographs, and the kids who start crying, and the hostile ones, and the smart asses who want to know how he gets everything done in one night, and what he does for families with no fireplace or whatever. Last year he had kids on his lap texting. How do you deal with that? Some kid almost put his eye out with a selfie stick.”

  “So they coach him.”

  “Yeah. Blum is kind of a control freak and he wants everything to go just right.”

  Apart from the occasional chamber of commerce gala or Maria Mitchell fund-raiser, I had managed to avoid Jackson Blum since my arrival on the island six years ago. Snippets of overheard conversation at those parties made me glad to keep my distance. He had a “Greatest Hits” of abrasive quotations.

  To some poor sap he’d bought out and fired: “It’s the free enterprise system, Larry. I was freer and more enterprising than you were.” To a reporter from the Inquirer and Mirror, pleading for a brief interview: “You want five minutes of my time? Do you have any idea what one minute of my time is worth? You’re talking six figures.”

  I was surprised he was even hosting Santa in his store. His idea of Christmas decoration was a single wreath on the door and some green and red ski parkas in the display window. But apparently his wife insisted. She ran the Toys for Tots program and she ruled him with the threat of a Draconian divorce. She’d take half of everything if she left, and she always had one foot out the door. Or so the Nantucket rumor mill claimed.

  Blum was waiting for me by the bleached-oak counter that held the cash register and various high-end trinkets: Swiss Army knives, compasses, leather credit card holders. He was a big man, but he had that odd deflated look that fat people get when they lose a lot of weight. He looked insubstantial somehow, and also as if he might pop back to his old weight, fully inflated, fast as an airplane life jacket, if he so much as nibbled a candy bar. Late fifties, thick black hair, obviously a dye-job, and horn-rims that made him look like a professor who coached the wrestling team.

  “Well, it’s about
time,” he said, ready to grapple right now—sweep my feet out from under me and take me down to the pickled oak floor until I pounded it and gave him the win. I extended my hand to shake; he glanced down like it was an elephant’s trunk poking through the bars of a cage. “Sorry. I’m fanatic about germs.”

  “Maybe I should wear surgical gloves next time.”

  He stared at me. “Good idea.”

  Time to downshift. “So what’s going on, Mr. Blum?”

  “We have a missing person on our hands, as I explained to your assistant chief. And the toys are missing also. I wouldn’t be surprised if Homer stole them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Toys for Tots. My wife’s crusade. Only the best for the Box Car Willies who slither up here with their greedy little palms out. Lionel train sets, GUND and Steiff stuffed animals, Xbox systems, two handmade dollhouses with all the furniture, die-cast model trucks and sports cars, you name it. A bunch of classic Barbie dolls from the 1960s. Giant LEGO and playmobil sets. All gone.”

  “And you think Homer Boyce stole them?”

  “They’re gone and so is he. Does that sound like a coincidence?”

  “Well, Homer is a sixty-one-year-old gay man who works crossword puzzles for fun and spends his weekends restoring his 1969 Volkswagen bug. He has no children. He wouldn’t be my first-choice candidate for toy thief.”

  “Yes, but there’s a story going around town—you may have heard it. Homer certainly did.”

  “About the toys?”

  “Apparently the idea is that something valuable’s hidden among them somewhere. Taped to the bottom of something, or stitched inside or camouflaged somehow—I have no idea. But it’s turned the Toys for Tots into a nasty mercenary scavenger hunt. You try to give back to the community and something like this happens! No good deed goes unpunished.”

  That struck me as a danger Blum didn’t have to worry about much.

  “Does this story include a theory about who planted the hidden treasure?”