Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  “My son didn’t cheat.”

  “Then how do you explain the copy of Mr. Springer’s test answer sheet we found in his locker this afternoon?”

  “You’re saying he stole the answers and kept the evidence?”

  “He’s an incompetent thief. But that may be his saving grace. Perhaps he wanted to get caught. This may be a cry for help.”

  “Or a setup.”

  “So someone is framing your little boy? Come, come, Chief Kennis. This is hardly some nefarious intrigue among big city criminals. It’s a simple case of cheating, common as athlete’s foot. And with a similar cause—a lack of cleanliness, rigor, and discipline.”

  I felt a cramp of rage—this insufferable little prig had real power over my children. Why did the wrong people run everything? I had always wondered that. Maybe it was because only the wrong people wanted to. I tried to be an exception to that rule, but then again, I had never schemed and campaigned to become Nantucket’s police chief. The job became available at the perfect moment. I’d been fired by the LAPD for writing a tell-all true crime book. My wife had vacationed on Nantucket since she was a child and wanted to get her own children away from Los Angeles. Retreating to the East Coast felt like the right move, so I interviewed by Skype with the head of the Board of Selectman, Dan Taylor, and the departing chief. I was fighting a cold that day and I recall acting curt and dismissive of village life in general and the need for a strong resort town police presence, in particular.

  “There’s plenty of crime here, Detective Kennis,” I remember Dan Taylor snapping.

  “I’m sure I can handle it,” I said.

  “And how might you do that?” asked Ted McGrady. The retiring chief’s jowly face held a spark of shrewd, amused intelligence. Even on the computer screen I felt the pressure of those glacier blue eyes.

  I said, “By paying attention.”

  McGrady laughed and turned to Taylor. “I like this guy.”

  Taylor was off-screen but I could hear his snort of dismissal. “Yeah? Well, I don’t.”

  I got the job, and judging from our phone call, McGrady seemed to remember the whole interview verbatim, but things hadn’t changed much between me and Dan Taylor since my arrival—or between me and Bissell. We’d been locking antlers ever since I first arrived.

  “I want to see the paper,” I said now.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The answer sheet you found in Tim’s locker.”

  “And on what authority do you claim to make that demand?”

  “On what authority did you break into my son’s locker in the first place?”

  “I had reason to believe Tim had committed a serious infraction of school discipline. I have the right to investigate NHS property. It’s in the charter.”

  “Which you rewrote when you got here.”

  “The new rules passed on a Town Meeting warrant and had the full support of the Selectmen. The school was falling apart, discipline was a joke, the children had no respect for the instructors, and the instructors had no respect for the administration. It was chaos. That’s why I was hired in the first place! And I’ve made a difference, Chief. I run a tight ship. Everyone agrees.”

  Everyone hated him, but he was proud of that. “Are you going to show me the paper, Simon?”

  “Can you tell me any reason at all why I should, Henry?”

  “Apart from the fact that I might be able to find out who really stole it?”

  “Apart from that. Since we already know.”

  “In my job I assume people are innocent until proven guilty.”

  “I have proof.”

  “You have a piece of paper. And you’re going to give it to me.”

  “You still haven’t told me why.”

  I set my palms on his desk and leaned over it. “All right. You’re going to give it to me because you want to maintain a good relationship with the NPD. As a man with two DUIs on his record, a man who’s one sloppy lane-change away from losing his license and one scandal away from losing his job, I assume you can appreciate that.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m giving you a reality check. We both want the same thing. Let’s work together.” I pushed off from the desk.

  “Fine,” he said. “You can have the paper. But it won’t do you any good.” He touched his intercom. “Alice, can you bring in the Cross-Grade English midterm answer sheet for Chief Kennis, please?”

  She walked in a moment later, paper in hand. Alice was a slim, attractive Brazilian woman who always studiously overdressed for the job. Today she wore a knee-length hunter green dress set off by half a dozen bracelets, a jade necklace, and a silk scarf in her hair. She winked at me as she came in—she had the paper ready instantly because she knew Bissell was going to cave, and she knew I knew she knew. I turned away from Bissell and smiled at her.

  “Found it,” she said to him.

  “Just give it to the chief. I’d like to get some work done today.”

  I took the paper, silently cursing myself for not carrying an evidence bag. But I would have had to have folded the paper twice to fit the sheet inside, so maybe it was just as well.

  In front of the school, in the slant parking lane, Tim and Caroline were standing in front of my cruiser. Tim was trying to juggle with three hacky-sack bags he’d found in the take-it-or-leave-it pile at the dump. Caroline, shivering with annoyance at his clownish performance, stared down into her phone, swiping across the screen frantically.

  “What’s wrong?” I said to her.

  Tim answered. “The car is locked.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I thumbed the key and the locks popped with a quick bleat from the car horn. “Carrie?”

  She glanced up irritably. “What?”

  “Something wrong?”

  “I only got twenty likes on my last selfie,” she moaned.

  “Everyone hates her,” Tim added helpfully.

  “They do not!”

  “Twenty seems like a lot,” I said.

  “But they’re not sharing them, Dad! And the comments are bad. The comments are all like “so cute” and “pretty” and—and nothing personal. Nothing like…I mean, I got a haircut! Okay? And no one even…I knew I shouldn’t have taken that stupid part in your girlfriend’s play!”

  I was not following this at all. What did Jane’s Christmas play have to do with some classmates’ failure to notice Carrie’s new hairstyle on an Instagram feed?

  “I’m not sure…” I began.

  “I’ve missed every important social event for the last two weeks! I missed Patty’s party and the winter dance and the beach cleanup and a million yearbook meetings—”

  “So, if—”

  “And no one’s sharing my selfies! Don’t you get it?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I really—”

  “Abby Miller got fifty likes and tons of comments and everyone’s sharing her pictures. Abby Miller! And she’s new. I thought everyone hated her.”

  “Maybe she’s a novelty. Flavor of the month? It’ll pass.”

  “Not if I keep doing this stupid play. It’s six nights a week for three weeks, Dad. I’ll be a total pariah by the time it’s over.”

  “Yeah, but—you knew that when—”

  “Plus, I’m playing Santa’s daughter. Ugh.”

  “But she saves Christmas!”

  “Right.”

  “When her lazy brother won’t get off the Internet long enough to pitch in and help.”

  This extracted a hard-won smile. “I like that part.”

  “I’m off the Internet, now,” Tim said. “I’m learning to juggle.”

  Her look of stunned disgust and contempt ended the conversation. We got into the car and I ran down the schedule as we pulled into the traffic. “I want you guys to see the new house, then I�
��ll drop Carrie off at rehearsal before we go home.”

  “We were going to go driving,” Tim said, with a muscular whine of tween outrage. “Jane said we could borrow her truck.”

  Carrie shoved him. “Why don’t you leave Jane alone? What’s wrong with Dad’s car?”

  “It doesn’t have a stick shift! You can’t learn to drive on an automatic. Obviously. That’s not even driving. With an automatic, you’re just a monkey turning the steering wheel. That’s what Jane says.”

  “Well, if Jane says it, it has to be right.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You shut up.”

  “Both of you shut up!”

  We drove in a familiar seething silence to Darling Street, but the argument was forgotten once they got inside the house. They ran up and down the stairs, opened every door, even checked out the attic.

  Tim said, “This is great!”

  Carrie said “Can I have the big room?”

  And the deal was done.

  Ten minutes later, I was winding up the crooked cobblestone street that led to the Congregational Church parking lot. Caroline asked me to walk her inside. I thought that was a little unusual—she generally avoided being seen with me at all costs. Tim and I shared a quizzical glance, then I got out of the cruiser, leaving it parked next to the Theatre Workshop’s battered Ford Ranger.

  We walked down the steeply sloped parking area, around the corner of the church to the back doors. Piles of sawdust recorded the frenzied set-building of the last few weeks. I thought of my carpenter friend Billy Delavane. He would never have left a mess like that behind.

  Inside, Carrie took my arm to stop me. “I saw some weird stuff on HackAck this morning,” she said. HackAck was a gossip website some local geek had set up for his friends—one more way of keeping track of each other, organizing the high school hierarchies—like the Instagram rituals that were driving Caroline crazy. These kids were going to fit in very nicely to the surveillance society we were building. They liked it. When I rhapsodized about the pre-Internet privacy era they looked at me as if I’d been talking about cranking the car engine with a wooden handle.

  “What did you see?”

  “Lots of things. People were talking about rigging the Red Ticket Drawing.”

  “Really? Did they mention how they planned to do that?”

  “Dad.”

  “Hey, it was worth a shot. So there’s no information at all? None of the good stuff?”

  “It’s probably just kids trying to look cool. There was one thing, though. On one of the threads. Somebody wrote ‘It takes two.’ Whatever that means.”

  I nodded. “It makes sense. You’d need two people for a scam like that. It wouldn’t even be that hard. One person works at a store and palms a ticket instead of putting it in the store’s collection.”

  “But how does that make it the winning ticket?”

  Realistically, there was only one answer. “The second person has to be the one drawing the tickets.”

  Carrie squinted at me. “I think you deal with criminals too much, Dad. You’re starting to think like one. Besides, Alana Trikilis is home for the holidays. She’s drawing the tickets and she’d never cheat. Her dad is Town Crier.”

  The position of Town Crier had started in the early nineteenth century with an authentic purpose—public announcements and warnings needed to be shouted in public, accompanied by a handbell. Town Criers served as fire wardens and lookouts for arriving whaleships. They even declaimed the news headlines. But the job degraded over time, with local businesses using that bell-and-buffoon combo to announce sales and specials.

  These days, the Town Crier, dressed in Colonial garb, rang in a host of chamber of commerce-approved celebrations: Daffodil Day, Christmas Stroll, and the lighting of the Main Street Christmas trees, among others. He also served as master of ceremonies for the Red Ticket Raffle.

  The Christmas Eve drawing had begun in the 1980s as a Nantucket Chamber of Commerce scheme to lure Christmas shoppers back to the island, hoping that the chance to win five thousand dollars might offset the higher Nantucket prices and make the required two-and-half-hour boat ride to Hyannis—and Kmart and Marshalls and the Cape Cod Mall—seem less of a necessary ordeal and more of an gratuitous slog. The idea was that every participating merchant would hand out a Red Ticket when you spent twenty-five dollars. You collected the tickets as you did the rounds of local shops, and on Christmas Eve the whole town gathered on Main Street to hear the winning tickets announced by the Town Crier. The tactical venality of the event had mellowed over the years into a casual open-air party, more of a chance to see old friends and catch up on gossip than anything else—which was exactly the way Sam Trikilis liked it.

  And he loved to play his part, Pied Pipering the crowd behind him. bellowing “Hear Ye! Hear Ye!” Sam was almost comically honest. He hadn’t charged some of the hard-luck customers on his trash route for years. He was a snoop. If he noticed a couple of collection agency envelopes in your rubbish, he’d put you on the freebie list. If you asked about the bills you weren’t getting from him, you’d hear his favorite catch-phrase, “No trouble, you’re on my route.”

  He could no more conspire to rig the drawing than he could eat the garbage he hauled. Carrie knew it and so did everyone else. She tilted her chin and raised her eyebrows with the pursed lips that made her position clear: case closed. “It’s just stupid kids making things up.”

  “I guess. Still, I’m going to be keeping an eye on Alana Trikilis. In case something happens to her.”

  “Dad!”

  “It doesn’t have to be something terrible. A half a valium slipped into her soda at lunch. She’d still be asleep when they drew the tickets.”

  “This is sick.”

  “So the real person to look at is the next in line. There must be some kind of understudy lined up. Don’t they usually have the Junior Miss Pageant winner draw the tickets? She’s the one to watch, if something happens to Alana.”

  Carrie crossed her arms and shuddered. “This is horrible. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Nothing is going to happen to Alana! Besides, the person who stole the ticket couldn’t win—it would be too suspicious, having a winning ticket from her own store. And the person drawing the ticket couldn’t win, either. There’d have to be three people involved—not two. So that wrecks your two-person theory. ”

  “You’d make a pretty good detective yourself.” Two little kids—elves no doubt, like Jane’s little boy, Sam—pushed past us, accompanied by their parents.

  “I saw something else on the site,” Caroline said, when we were alone again. “I think it was about drugs.”

  “What about drugs?”

  “I don’t know, they never come right out and say it. Everything’s kind of in code, like they say ‘kibbles and bits’ for Ritalin and ‘smoothies’ for Oxy and…there’s tons of things. ‘Doing laundry’ means—not just drugs—it’s anything you don’t want your parents to know about.”

  I had to laugh. “That’s the code? Doing laundry? The one activity no kid is ever going to engage in voluntarily? That’s going to fool absolutely no one. Why not call it ‘summer reading’ or ‘cleaning my room’?”

  “No, but this is serious. Supposedly, there’s a ton of Oxy coming onto the island and this guy, Surfslider, wants to sell it all at once. Just kind of offload the whole shipment, and he’s looking for some kid or group of kids who can take it off his hands.”

  I pressed my hand to her shoulder. “How much are they talking about?”

  “I don’t know. It might not even be true.”

  “Surfslider? This guy is a surfer?” I had friends who surfed; Billy Delavane might have an idea about who “Surfslider” was.

  “I don’t know, that’s just what he calls himself, people never use their real names on HackAck unless they’re in a special chat ro
om. And this was, like—for everyone. Like taking an ad out in the newspaper—I mean, if anyone ever read the newspaper.”

  “Thanks, Carrie. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Can you do anything about it?”

  “I can try.” I thought of Frannie Tate, my old girlfriend, who was now high up in Homeland Security with a boyfriend at the NSA. They could probably root out this “Surfslider” during their morning coffee break, with or without an FISA warrant. But that was exactly the kind of law enforcement I hated the most. I preferred feet on the ground, person-to-person policing. The NPD had built up a good network of contacts in the community. I’d put the word out, see what happened.

  But as it turned out, I didn’t need to. I saw the drug deal going down less than half an hour later.

  Chapter Five

  At Tom Nevers Head

  We picked up Jane’s truck—a note told us she was inside writing and the keys were under the front mat—and headed out to the old Navy base. Tim was throwing one of his hacky-sack footbags up with his left hand and catching it with his right. “Look Dad! Polish juggling!”

  I laughed, but I couldn’t quite let it go by. “That’s actually kind of politically incorrect,” I told him.

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “No, seriously. You studied Madame Curie in science class, right?

  “Sure. She discovered radiation.”

  “Close enough. She won two Nobel prizes. Her maiden name was Sklodowska. There are just way too many brilliant Poles for those jokes to fly. There are lots of them you never study in school—like Joseph Rotblat—he’s the scientist who walked away from the Manhattan Project. For some reason he thought making a world-killing weapon and giving it to a bunch of politicians was a bad idea.”

  “Fine. Polish people are super smart. So who can we use for jokes?”

  “How about…generic stupid person?”