Cape Cod

by William Martin

  “I say what you only think. The privilege of money.”

  Doug hated to admit it, but Nance was right.

  “Now that we’re over the eminent-domain hurdle, you’re looking better.” Nance twirled the axe in his hands. “But it would be nice to have Rake Hilyard’s piece, too.”

  “We may not have much choice.”

  Nance spoke very softly and pointed the axe at Doug, “I didn’t save you from the banks to hear you say that.”

  Iron Axe Ventures was a major player, known for shopping malls in Maine, ski condos in Vermont, strip malls everywhere, money, limited partnerships, tax shelters, accelerated depreciations, smart lawyers, money, deals, deep pockets, more smart lawyers, more money, smart investors, smart advertisers, smart sales force, and even more money for all the smarts.

  Bigelow Development was small-time by comparison. To win the game on Cape Cod, they needed the backing of the big boys, especially now that the business cycle, rather than the tree-huggers, had cooled the development fervor on Cape Cod.

  Nance’s company had targeted Jack’s Island during the early eighties. Nance had proposed a joint development—ninety condo units, conference center, tennis courts. Dickerson Bigelow turned him down. After all, there was a… history between them.

  And Dickerson had never needed partners. He had developed only his own land, with short lines of credit and no interference, building a company with twenty million dollars in equity and a reputation to match. Then, as the Reagan recovery began, Dickerson had started listening to his son.

  Leverage. That was the word Douglas used. Leverage that turned twenty million into fifty or sixty or more. Big developers did it in Boston with every project. Big business did it on Wall Street every day. And they did it in Washington every fiscal year. The whole damn country was leveraged. So why not Bigelow Development?

  With Douglas making more decisions and Dickerson deferring to him, the Bigelows had built all over the Cape—big condos near the water, small subdivisions in the scrub pine, strip malls along Route 28. And they were not alone.

  For a while, builders couldn’t build fast enough, and environmentalists couldn’t stop them. The Cape population jumped—retirees, construction workers following the work, commuters who claimed they didn’t mind the two-hour drive to Boston, people who needed no more than a terminal and a fax to work anywhere. Somewhere along the line, Douglas had divorced and remarried. His father questioned his personal sense but not his business sense. After all, the banks were leveraged, the builders were leveraged, the buyers were leveraged, everybody was making money. And then it stopped.

  Massachusetts stopped booming. Money stopped flowing. Builders had satisfied the demand and then some. In two years, inflated property values dropped by twenty-five percent. The Bigelows were caught with too many houses and too many strip malls and too little cash.

  And because of leverage there was debt. And when the Bigelows couldn’t service their debt, the banks called the loans. And since the banks were in trouble, they weren’t offering new lines of credit to overextended builders. It happened to a lot of people.

  But what about twenty million in equity? Most of it was tied up in property, and as property values fell, twenty million was suddenly worth less than ten, with a cash position of less than two.

  It wasn’t surprising that Dickerson went down with a heart attack. And when his survival was in doubt, he signed power of attorney over to his son… for everything.

  Doug knew he needed two things—a loan and collateral. For collateral he had the 1904 subdivision. For the loan he took the 1904 plan to a man who had once tried to make a deal for Jack’s Island. After all, to Doug, deals were like weather systems, sometimes bringing big storms of money, sometimes fizzling into nothing. He couldn’t turn one away simply because there was a… history.

  “The clock is running, Doug. Acquisition should go to ten million, including utilities. With forty units of premium housing, we should still see ten million clear.” He turned the axe in his hands once more. “But we can’t let this old Rake Hilyard get in the way, or your hesitant brother-in-law.”

  “Don’t worry about them.”

  “And your father? Does he know who saved his ass yet?”

  “He’s still pretty weak. He hasn’t asked many questions. He’ll see the intelligence of this alliance.”

  “It’s no alliance. I’m taking back what your father took from me. You get a service fee.”

  Doug got up. “We’ve made a deal. That’s all.”

  “Nine months. Perked and permitted in nine months. The whole island.” Nance brought the axe down so that it cut through the blotter and into the mahogany desk. It was not the first time he had done it.

  ii.

  The morning after they buried Clara, Geoff went to see Rake, even though the old man had treated him like the red tide at the funeral.

  He called Rake’s name and let himself in. There might have been a time when Rake cleaned his house, but not in the last thirty years. The rooms were piled floor to ceiling with newspapers, and the dining room table was covered with magazines, pamphlets, letters, photocopies, coffee cups, Hostess cupcake wrappers, and in a foxhole in the middle of the mess, a typewriter with which Rake fought his battles.

  Geoff read the sheet on the platen: “Dear Miss Hallissey, I have considered letting you see some material that may aid in the search for—” There it ended. What was he giving her? And why was he putting his trust into the hands of a stranger?

  “Rake!” he called through the house, across the backyard, and into the barn. Then he went down to the water and called again.

  It was a close day, humid enough to rot sand, and a gray mist blanketed the bay.

  “Gone fishin’.” Emily was loping down the beach from the sailing camp. “Took off in his Boston Whaler as soon as he had enough water to get over the flats, fog be damned.”

  Emily was in her fifties and never much of a beauty. Her nose took care of that. And she had not been very lucky with men, either. Maybe it was the muscles from hauling sailboats or the no-nonsense way she wore her hair, or maybe it was that attitude that had intimidated suitors. Here was a woman who wouldn’t go to pieces if a man left her. She’d simply have another smoke and get on with things.

  Competent. That was Emily. Maybe that was why she had stood Arnie Burr all these years, and weathered her mother’s death without a tear.

  “Has Rake ever mentioned anything to you about the log of the Mayflower?” asked Geoff.

  She gave him one of her cigarette-cracked laughs. “Last night, after I told him we were selling. He wanted to go through Ma’s room.”

  “Why?”

  She set a cigarette between her lips. “To see if she’d left anything. Arnie said there’d be no snoopin’, so it got nasty—Rake doesn’t like Arnie much, you know—and Rake said his sister wouldn’t want us sellin’ the camp. He thought she might have put it in a will somewhere. Arnie threw him out.” A match hissed in Emily’s hand. “Arnie can be a bastard sometimes.”

  She sucked the flame into the tip of the cigarette. With the butt still between her lips, she blew a stream of smoke out the corner of her mouth and tossed the match in the sand. Nobody could smoke a cigarette better. “So then Rake started in about the log. He said he’d buy up the whole island with it, and if he couldn’t, it still had things in it to keep the island safe forever.”

  “Safe…” Geoff stared off into the fog.

  “What in hell is he talkin’ about? Do you know?”

  “I don’t even think he knows.”

  “Well, one thing I do know: when we clear probate, we’re sellin’.” She flicked an ash. “We’ve had enough. Pressin’ for deposits in May, hand-holdin’ the homesicks in July, watchin’ that no one’s caught in the August squalls, hopin’ none of the female counselors miss their periods in September.”

  “You and your mother brought a lot of happiness, Em.”

  “Now it’s time to get some
back.”

  Geoff looked at the island. “It’s getting harder for me to imagine houses from one end of this beach to the other.”

  She pointed him toward the Eastham shore, where the fog was beginning to lift. “Do you think that the first Englishmen who stood on this beach could have imagined houses from Rock Harbor all the way to P-town?”

  iii.

  Emily was right. Change was inevitable. The sailing camp didn’t make financial sense anymore, and the barracks along Nauseiput Creek were a worse eyesore than anything he would ever design.

  So why did he feel so bad about the chance of a lifetime? As the fog blew in and blew out and blew back in again, he tried to avoid the question a bit longer by keeping his appointment with Carolyn Hallissey.

  Old Comers Plantation was part museum, part library, part tourist attraction, a special genus of Cape Cod museum like the Heritage Plantation in Sandwich. It perched on the edge of Portanimicut Pond, which fed into Pleasant Bay, and had once been the estate of a Pilgrim descendant who had made a fortune in munitions during World War I.

  The lawns were clipped like putting greens. The daylilies bloomed in a fugue of colors that promised to play all summer. The pines and hardwoods were groomed like bonsai. And if you kept an eye closed, you hardly noticed the “Kiss Me, I’m on Vacation” T-shirts or the kids complaining to their parents that there was nothing here that was fun, not the antique windmill or the replica of a Nauset lifesaving station or the reproduction of a Wampanoag longhouse or the library that was the center of the collection.

  Carolyn’s office was on the second floor of the main house, in what had been the master bedroom.

  Alone in a bedroom with Carolyn Hallissey… Geoff settled into a wing chair opposite her desk and watched the fog drift up the inlet from Pleasant Bay and tried to act cool.

  Carolyn called for coffee. “I’m sorry to hear about your aunt. I never got to talk to her.”

  “Why?” Be a bit aggressive. Don’t go giving her the advantage by letting her know you think she’s gorgeous.

  “Well, whenever one of her generation passes on, we lose another little fiber of the fabric.”

  “Is that why you went to my uncle?”

  “Am I missing something here? Are you mad that I outbid you for that painting or something?”

  Too aggressive, he thought, so he smiled. “It’s just that you seem to have an inordinate interest in my family.”

  “Your family has had an inordinately long presence on Cape Cod. And I have a grant to do oral histories on old Cape Codders. That’s simple enough.”

  “All right, I’ll ask you a simple one. When you visited my uncle, did you talk about the Mayflower log?”

  She put on a pair of glasses and raised her chin, as though studying him through bifocals. He guessed the glasses were a prop. “I may have.” She pressed the intercom and told her secretary to bring the Hilyard folder with the coffee. “We’ll read the transcript.”

  Very cool, he thought. And now she was letting the silence sit between them, to see what might flow from it. She hadn’t gotten to be the director of this well-endowed little place at—what? thirty-one?—without learning how to look bulletproof.

  But Geoff had sat through enough sessions with critical clients and stubborn bosses to know that there came a time when the best thing to do was shut up. Make the other guy feel nervous, force him (or her) to ask a few questions, get to know her (or his) mind before you said anything else.

  The staring ended with the coffee, brought by a young man who couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. He had one of those haircuts that took everything off the sides and left the curls on top, and he wore fashion’s latest attempt to usher the business suit into the twenty-first century—a sort of brown Eisenhower jacket and trousers that made him look more like a bellhop who’d forgotten his hat than the avatar of the sartorial age.

  “How’s his dictation?” cracked Geoff when he left.

  “David’s excellent at what he does. At night he goes home… to Provincetown.” This last came with a significant little nod about certain young men from P-town. Then she started the tape recorder on her desk. “Where were we?”

  “Are you now taking my oral history?”

  “Are you giving it?”

  “I need to be romanced before I do something so… intimate.”

  She slipped off the glasses. They absolutely were a prop. “In the present line of conversation what would you consider… romantic?”

  “More on the Mayflower log. Since he talked to you, my uncle has decided that all he has to do is dig into the right dune and he’ll find it. I’d like to know what gives, so that I can disillusion him.”

  “You shouldn’t disillusion old men. Illusions are all they have left.”

  “My wife thinks she knows a younger man with a few illusions of his own.” That, he thought, sounded as bad as “My wife doesn’t understand me.”

  But Carolyn acted as though she hadn’t noticed the lame pass. “You understand how important illusions are. Your uncle showed me his barn, and I saw a doorstop—”

  “The Mayflower log. Would you bid on it if you found it?”

  She gave him a deep, sexy laugh that suggested a lot more than it said. “So it’s the talk of money that turns you on. Of course I’d bid on it. We’re talking about one of the most significant finds since the invention of the stitched binding.” A note of awe crept into her voice. “The Bradford diary has its own perspective, and Mourt’s Relation was written by apologists, promoters trying to tell their friends in England how great it was here. Christopher Jones was just a shipmaster, probably very practical and uncultured. His log might tell us no more than the way the wind was blowing, or… it might show history with all its blemishes.”

  “Blemishes make it more valuable?”

  “People love to know the dirt. Who’s screwing whom and so forth. Dirt brings history to life.”

  “So, how much for… blemishes?”

  “Recently a letter by Thomas Jefferson sold for three hundred thousand dollars. I’d guess something like the log would go on the block for millions.”

  “Could you afford it?”

  She ran her fingers through her long hair, a very casual gesture. Perhaps it was meant to be, which made it less casual but no less attractive. “We have some rich members on the board. Real estate fortunes from the mid-eighties. They support Old Comers Plantation so the world won’t think they’re Cape rapers. Their motives may be hypocritical, but their money’s green.”

  Now Geoff knew why she had charmed Rake. She could freeze you out with a cold smile or give you a friendly frown that pulled you so close to her prejudices that you thought the whole world was us against them.

  She took the folder from the coffee tray. It was about six inches thick, filled with Xerox copies, documents, clippings. “We’re trying to tighten the scholarly focus here by organizing files on the historic Cape families. We collect what’s been written about a family, photocopy everything from family letters to deeds, cross-reference them, and try to build a picture of how the Cape came to be what it is.”

  He went to the desk and looked over her shoulder. He tried to ignore the aroma of Shalimar coming off the back of her neck, but if he had really wanted to ignore it, he could have stayed on the other side of the desk. “Do you have anything for Jack’s Island?”

  “Most of the records were lost in the Barnstable County Courthouse fire in 1834, but we have this.” She flipped to a copy of an ancient ledger filled with tiny script. “From the records of Brewster Bigelow, son of one of the Old Comers, found in the attic of the family home in Barnstable. It dates to 1717.”

  “The year the Whydah sank,” mused Geoff.

  “Considering the myths I’ve heard about Black Bellamy—”

  “That he’s one of our ancestors?” Geoff laughed.

  “There may be some connection between his ship, the Whydah, and this.” She pointed to an entry. “ ‘Purchased of Je
remiah Hilyard, November 9, 1717, the certain property called Jack’s Island, bounded by Nauseiput Creek on the east, Jack’s Creek on the west, and all the marsh southward to the mainland, for the sum of one hundred pounds.’ ”

  “What makes you think this relates to the Whydah?”

  “That.” She pointed to a painting above the fireplace.

  Geoff had been so busy looking at Carolyn that he hadn’t noticed the distinctive style of Tom Hilyard’s narrative period. Five figures were jammed into the frame, two facing three. On one side, a comical-looking old man in nightshirt and cap held up a lantern while behind him his wife held a blunderbuss. On the other side, faces contorted absurdly in shock, were a young white woman and two Indians. The Arrest of Serenity.

  CHAPTER 18

  May 1716

  Serenity and the Pirate

  The boy who had survived through prayer the massacre at Clarkes’ garrison house grew with a straight spine and a firm faith and married a woman more devout than himself. He took her to the Eastham farm his father had bequeathed to him, and there they brought six children into the world, of whom two survived infancy. The boy they named Solemnity, and he grew so strong in the faith that they sent him to Harvard to study the Word of God. The girl they called Serenity, more in hope than in fulfillment.

  In the spring of 1716, there came to Cape Cod a handsome giant of a man whose beard was so black that it gave him his name. Black Bellamy he was called, and he wooed the young woman whose great-grandfather had come on the Mayflower, and he promised he would return a spring hence to marry her. Then he sailed for the Caribbean, while the belly of Serenity Hilyard grew large.

  There was talk of punishing her for unlawful carnal knowledge. Two days in the stocks was the proper sentence, one for the evidence beneath her apron, a second for refusing to identify the father. But Justice Doane said such punishment was too severe for a woman with child, and Serenity was too stubborn to give up the father’s name.

  Besides, everyone thought it was Sam Bellamy did the begetting. If he came back, he would be punished. If not, his absence would be punishment enough for Serenity. No scarlet letter would brand her. No elder would bar her or her child from meeting. There was mercy in Eastham, after all. And her stubbornness was seen by most as a virtue—not so lustrous as purity, perhaps, but enough to gain her the respect of those who damned her sin.