Murder With Puffins ml-2

by Donna Andrews

  "The garden shed?" Michael suggested.

  "We're going to check how the shutters are holding up," I told Rob. He barely looked up as Michael and I donned our slickers. On the way out, I grabbed my flashlight and, remembering the envelope I'd picked up outside Resnick's shed, my knapsack. We trooped out the door and over to the garden shed and managed to clear enough space to squeeze inside and close the door.

  "Alone at last!" Michael said, putting his arms around me.

  Chapter 15

  The Agony and the Puffin

  Okay, we allowed ourselves a brief distraction from the original purpose of our visit to the garden shed. But--call me unromantic if you like--there are limits to how successfully I can be overcome with passion when I'm sopping wet and shivering in an unheated shed that I'm half-convinced won't survive the next strong wind.

  "I hate to spoil the moment," I said, "but could you move a little to the left? There's a croquet mallet digging into my kidney."

  "If I move to the left, I'll probably drown; the leaks are much worse over there."

  "Sorry," I said.

  "So much for my hopes that we'd found a hideaway suitable for romantic trysts," Michael said, shoving aside several life jackets and a lobster pot to clear a space for us to sit on a stack of old magazines in the driest part of the shed. "You wanted to talk about something? Or was that just an excuse to get me alone?"

  "No, there was something. Here," I said, handing him the map as I perched beside him. He turned on his flashlight and peered down at the paper.

  "Your dad's map of the island," he said. "Does this mean you've got some idea where he is?"

  "Unfortunately, no."

  "Then what's the big deal?"

  I took a deep breath.

  "I found it down on the shore. Near where we found Resnick's body."

  "Damn," Michael said. He closed his eyes and leaned against the side of the shed. "The police will find this very suspicious."

  "The police!" I said, startled. "We can't give this to the police!"

  "Meg, we can't not give it to them," Michael said, sitting up again. "That would be concealing evidence."

  "Evidence that would make my dad the primary suspect in Resnick's murder. You saw how Jeb and Mamie reacted when they heard Dad had disappeared. For some stupid reason, everyone thinks Dad has some kind of grudge against Resnick because he used to date Mother fifty years ago, before she even met Dad. You heard them. The map will clinch it."

  "That doesn't give us the right to conceal evidence. You do realize that, don't you?"

  I sat staring at him. I felt betrayed. I'd trusted Michael with something that could hurt Dad, and here he was threatening to squeal to the authorities.

  "Meg," Michael said, gently taking my hand. "I don't believe he did it any more than you do. But you have to see that we can't help him by concealing evidence. I mean, for all we know, that map could be what the police need to find and convict the real killer."

  I sighed. I didn't like it. I didn't know the local police, wasn't sure I trusted them to find the real killer. But much as I hated the idea, I had to admit he was right.

  "Okay," I said. "We'll turn in the map. But to the police, when they get here. Not to Constable Jeb or Mayor Mamie or anyone else on the island when Resnick was killed."

  "That's sensible enough," he said.

  "Which gives us a day or two to find the real killer," I said.

  "You know, you're more like your dad than you want to admit," he said, grinning. "Never pass up a chance to play detective, right?"

  "Michael, this is serious," I said. "We've all heard about cases where the police find a likely suspect and don't look any further. We can't let that happen to Dad."

  "Of course not," he said. "Though I'm curious how we're going to find the killer in the middle of a hurricane. Not to mention--well, never mind."

  I suspected I knew what he hadn't said: that right now, finding Dad--alive--was more important than proving his innocence.

  "I'll keep this safe for now," Michael said, folding the map and taking out his wallet.

  "Don't trust me not to destroy it?" I said.

  "I wasn't thinking that at all," he said. "But you can't keep carrying it around in your pocket; it'll turn to mush. And we can't just leave it lying around where someone could get hold of it prematurely, and, unlike your purse, my wallet almost never leaves my body."

  "Well, that makes sense," I said, slightly mollified by his tone.

  "Shall we go back in?" Michael asked. "Much as I'd enjoy being alone with you under other circumstances, this shed's getting colder by the minute. And damper," he added as a large drop of water splattered his nose.

  "Hang on a second," I said, opening up my knapsack. "As long as I'm confessing to my crimes against humanity, I may as well make a clean breast of it. I found an envelope in Resnick's yard after we put his body in the shed--tripped over it, actually. It didn't seem wet enough to have been there long, and I wondered if it fell out of his jacket while we were moving him."

  "Let's have a look at it, then," Michael said.

  I pulled out the envelope and we both pointed our flashlights at it. It was an ordinary nine-by-twelve brown clasp envelope, with no markings on the outside. Inside we found an inch-thick sheaf of papers held together with a giant binder clip as well as a smaller Tyvek envelope.

  The top sheet of the papers held a title, centered, in all caps: VICTOR S. RESNICK: UNHERALDED GENIUS OF THE DOWN EAST COAST. A BIOGRAPHY. By James Jackson.

  "Wonder who James Jackson is," Michael said, flipping to the next page.

  "I don't know, but the Tyvek envelope is addressed to him," I said. "In care of General Delivery at the Rockport Post Office."

  "My God, listen to this," Michael said. " 'In this tome will be related the story of a great man whose genius has gone largely unappreciated in our century, a century in which the degradation of artistic taste has led to the exaltation of lesser artistic talents and those whose talents lie less in art than in publicity and the pursuit of notoriety, while alone, at the head of a small contingent of artists who still adhere to the tradition of representational art and the tenets of artistic quality that have prevailed, until now, since the Renaissance, Victor Resnick holds back the bulwark against the barbarians of popular culture and the deliberate obfuscations of an outworn academic community; unsung, unheralded, unappreciated, in recent years largely neglected, Victor Resnick nevertheless--' Arg!"

  "Was that really all one sentence?" I asked.

  "No, only about a third of one," Michael said. "I'm not sure which is worse, James's writing or his blatant toadying."

  "I'll give you odds this is the authorized biography," I said.

  "Definitely authorized," Michael said. "Our friend Victor has begun making some rather pungent comments on the first couple of pages. 'Small contingent of artists' used to be 'small contingent of artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.' Jamie boy might have crossed out the names himself, but only Resnick would scrawl 'Stupid! Don't mention those clowns!' Speaking of odds, I'll give you odds no one ever publishes it unless Jamie boy does a lot of rewrites."

  "Looks like he already has," I said. "We've got draft seven, according to the footer. Oh my God!"

  "What's wrong?"

  "Jackson's got a time/date stamp in the footer--he printed this yesterday at six p.m. The ferry had stopped running by that time. He's on the island!"

  "Lucky him, then; not every biographer gets a ringside seat at his subject's murder."

  "We've got to find him."

  "Why?" Michael asked. "To give him our editorial comments?"

  "He's Resnick's biographer; he must know everything about bis life," I said. "He'll know better than anyone who might have it in for Resnick."

  "We've already decided that's a long list."

  "Well, Jamie boy can tell us who's at the head of it. For that matter, we can probably get some ideas from the biography."

  "Of course to do th
at, we'll have to read it," Michael said.

  We both stared down at the manuscript in Michael's lap. I flipped over a page. Someone--Resnick, I suspected--had crossed out a paragraph with such violence that his red pen had torn the paper, and he had scrawled, "No, no, no!!!" in the margin.

  "My sentiments precisely," Michael said.

  "You know, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that James Jackson is a suspect, too," I said.

  "He's lucky he wasn't the victim," Michael grumbled. "Writing this badly ought to be a capital offense."

  "Maybe Resnick finally realized that the guy can't write and so decided to fire him, or unauthorize him, or whatever you'd call it when you stop cooperating with a biographer.

  And Jackson saw his years of hard work go down the drain, and he lashed out and killed Resnick."

  "We'll keep it in mind," Michael said. "Meanwhile, I guess we should start reading. I'm sure it's no worse than some of my students' papers."

  I read over Michael's shoulder for the first twenty or thirty pages. Okay, I confess, I skimmed a lot. When you chucked out the excess verbiage--was the man paid by the word, or only by the adverb?--and untangled the convoluted sentences, Resnick's story was really pretty simple. He'd grown up in a small midwestern town, a sensitive, misunderstood child, the butt of every bully and jester in town, until the day he first picked up a pencil and began to draw. At which point, to judge from James Jackson's account, the earth trembled, comets were seen in the skies, three-headed calves were born, and wise men came from the east bearing gifts in the form of a scholarship to study art at the Boston Conservatory. By the time we reached the detailed description of the physical ailments that had kept him, despite his intense patriotism, from serving in World War II, my head was spinning.

  "I need a break," I said. "I think I'll see what's in Jamie boy's mail."

  "It's a federal offense to open mail!" Michael protested.

  "Well, I know that," I said, in exasperation. "It's already opened, and I've never heard it was a federal offense to read stuff that people leave lying around in their yards. So there."

  "Sorry," he said. "Must be the demoralizing effect of Jamie boy's prose. Carry on."

  I opened the envelope, to find another sheaf of papers--slimmer, fortunately, and not written by James Jackson. The first sheet was a cover letter to Jackson from a Boston private investigation firm, dated a few weeks earlier, stating that the information he had requested was enclosed and that if he required any other assistance, he should contact them.

  I turned to the next sheet. A list of names, all with birth dates and some with dates of death. Some of them were people I knew--Mary Ann ("Mamie") Dawes (Benton). Elspeth ("Binkie") Grayson (Burnham). Lucinda Hart Dickerman. Others sounded vaguely familiar. Old island names, many of them. All women, born between 1925 and 1940. Some were crossed out in bright red ink. Others had question marks or checks beside their names. No clue what the list was for.

  I finished scanning the first page and flipped to the second, shorter page. Along with the crossed-out, checked, and question-marked names, one was circled heavily in bright red pen: Margaret Hollingworth (Langslow).

  What the devil was this list, and why was Mother on it, so prominently singled out?

  I went on to the rest of the papers. A series of reports from the detective agency on the whereabouts of the women on the list during their teenage years.

  How odd.

  I scanned the reports, fascinated. Binkie had gone from a posh boarding school to an equally posh women's college, and from there to Harvard Law School. Not what James Jackson wanted, apparently; he'd crossed her name out on the main list. Several other names had similar histories--summer people, I noticed; their lives contrasted starkly with those of the year-round island residents, many of whom were married and had had several children by the time their wealthier counterparts graduated from whichever of the Seven Sisters they'd chosen.

  I came across Mother's sheet, finally, and double-checked it. The private investigator had his facts correct, as far as I knew. Right address, and the dates she'd stayed on Monhegan seemed consistent with what Mother always related of her vacations on the island. High school and college data correct. And in the center of the report, the beginning and end dates of the two years she'd spent in Paris, living with Aunt Amelia, attending a French school, taking art and music lessons, and achieving a level of poise and sophistication I knew, even as a toddler, I'd never match.

  I had sometimes wondered how different Mother's life (and mine) would be if when she was fifteen Grandfather hadn't finally given in to her pleas to see Paris. If instead he had, for instance, sent her to stay for a few months on Cousin Bathsheba's farm, learning to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That first trip to France was undoubtedly the watershed event in Mother's life.

  So why had the private detective circled it in red? And printed five little exclamation points after it?

  And why had the biographer clipped a Polaroid of Mother to the back of the page--the present-day Mother, stepping off the Monhegan ferry, wearing a scarf I'd given her three months ago?

  I had a bad feeling about this.

  "Michael," I said.

  "Mmm?" he replied absently. I glanced up. He was lost in the manuscript.

  "The biographer's style must be improving," I said.

  "What's that?" he said, looking up with obvious reluctance.

  "What's so fascinating? I thought it was a lousy book."

  "Oh, it is! The writing anyway; but the contents--You've got to hear this. Wait a second; let me get back to the beginning of this chapter."

  He flipped back several pages and began reading.

  "'It was at this formative stage of his life that young Victor Resnick underwent an experience, the impact of which would last for the rest of his life, an experience that, while producing no outward change in his demeanor or his countenance, would nevertheless affect the sensitive young artist in the most profound and permanent fashion imaginable. Who could have predicted this event, at once so joyous and so tragic? Who can calculate the import this occurrence would present upon his life and art? Who can possibly discern…' Well, you get the idea. It goes on like that for about another page and then Jamie boy finally gets around to dropping a few actual facts. Apparently, young Victor fell in love."

  "Don't tell me; I know what's coming. She told him to get lost."

  "No, apparently the attraction was mutual."

  "That's a little hard to buy."

  "According to this, young Victor was quite a hunk and a rising star of the art world to boot."

  "According to the biographer, who we already decided was telling Resnick's decidedly one-sided version of events."

  "Well, I suppose," Michael said, running his finger down the page. "Here we go: 'She saw beneath his gruff exterior the sensitive artist whose soul had been blighted by calumny and neglect; she alone appreciated not only the force of his artistic genius but also the inner light that he had previously shown only through his brushes, and, bravely scorning the rigid strictures of her upbringing, daringly risking the calumnies and slings and arrows of outraged society that would be flung at her if discovered, she at last surrendered to their mutual passion.'"

  "Ick," I said. "So she slept with him. I suppose there's someone for everyone, even Victor Resnick."

  "And no matter what the boomers may think, sex wasn't invented with the pill. Anyway, we now have several pages about the progress of the affair, a little light on concrete details, but heavy with descriptions of things heaving and throbbing--the sort of stuff that might be mildly titillating if better written."

  "Let me see that," I said, looking over his shoulder.

  "Be my guest," Michael said. "And if you should find any of it inspirational…"

  "You can forget the rerun of the From Here to Eternity surf scene," I said as I scanned the text. "It's vastly overrated, even on a tropical beach."

  "You know this from experience?"

&nbs
p; "I know this from common sense," I said. "And do you have any idea how rocky the Monhegan beach is, not to mention the subarctic temperature of the water?"

  "So we won't be doing Burt and Debbie this trip?"

  "More to the point, I doubt Victor Resnick and his lady love ever did."

  "We take this passage with a grain of salt, then. Want to bet the writer learned his--or, more likely, her--trade writing romances?"

  "No--most romances are far better written. And most romance writers have a better grasp of reality; that, for example, is anatomically impossible," I said, pointing to one particularly florid paragraph.

  "Are you sure?" Michael said, quirking one eyebrow.

  "Positive, as I'll happily demonstrate later. He's obviously unreliable about the details--probably embroidered them over the years. This only tells us that some poor woman had the bad taste to sleep with Resnick, and he remembers her fondly, perhaps because that kind of thing was a rare event in his life. And then she came to her senses and broke his heart, or, more likely, dented his ego."

  "It's a bit more than that," Michael said. "According to this, she was underage."

  "Well, I'm not surprised," I said, fishing out my Gatorade and opening the bottle. "No woman old enough to have any sense could possibly fall for him. How underage?"

  "Fifteen. Just barely."

  "He's scum."

  "Resnick was twenty-five," Michael added.

  "Pond scum."

  "And her parents forced them to part, then packed her off to Paris to get over her broken heart. And then--Meg, are you all right?"

  "I'm fine; you can stop pounding my back," I said, wheezing, once I'd finally cleared enough Gatorade from my windpipe to speak.

  "You're not fine; I can tell," Michael said. "What's wrong?"

  I handed him the detective's reports and sat back to cough a little more while he scanned them.

  "Oh, damn," he said when he got to Mother's sheaf.

  "He thinks Mother was Victor Resnick's secret love."

  "Obviously," Michael murmured. He picked up the biography again and nipped over a few pages, frowning.