Nantucket Sawbuck

by Steven Axelrod

  And he was going to bring a much-needed taste of the mainland here. As soon as jcpenney and K-Mart signed their leases he would be ready to start construction on his greatest project ever—the Moorlands Mall. Thirty great stores under one roof, with two acres of free parking. The idea of paving over all these deer-tick infested brambles and stunted pine trees made his heart light. They ought to pave this whole island. Why not? After all, Manhattan was just dirt and bushes once, too.

  He knew what his sister would say. He was “raping the island.”

  Well, maybe that was the approach to use with the HDC and the Board of Selectmen, once he had them under his thumb completely, give them the advice they used to give women about actual rape. When it becomes inevitable, just lie back and enjoy it.

  He barked a laugh into the wind. He couldn’t wait to see their overstuffed, pink proper New England faces when he told them that! He was still laughing about it when he got back to the car. Carla asked why he was laughing and he told her, but she didn’t think it was funny.

  Typical woman, he thought. No sense of humor at all.

  ***

  At that moment Nathan’s sister, Cindy Henderson, was sitting behind the counter of the Adnan Mevlana boutique on Centre Street, listening to rich women in fur coats who complained about the prices, thinking all the time, I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life. It was a chant, a mantra, the focus of her meditation as she studied her mistakes.

  Coming to Nantucket was the primary one. She had been a fool to imagine that her day-to-day life as an adult would relate in any way to the idyllic haven where she had spent her summers as a child. Her parents had been rich, so she had been rich. She had taken it for granted. But the big house on Cliff Road had been sold long ago. Her parents vacationed in Mexico now. And Cindy was in a different world. Her husband, Mike, liked to imagine they were middle-class, but it was hard to maintain that notion when the official poverty line income on the island was forty-two thousand dollars, and a painting contractor barely survived from customer to customer, never knowing where the next job was coming from.

  They would have lost their house months ago if not for the Lomax job. She stepped away from the counter to straighten some sweaters left in disarray by the last group of ladies. She was sick of thinking about Mr. Lomax, sick of thinking about Mike’s work, sick of her customers, sick of her job, sick of the wet cold weather and the northeast wind. Most of all, she was sick of thinking about what she had discovered this morning.

  She felt as if there was no one on Earth she could bear to see right now—any human contact would chafe against her like wool on a rash.

  Then Police Chief Henry Kennis walked in.

  Chief Kennis was tall and good looking, too good looking for his small town job. He still wore some residue of his years in California on his face. It was attractively weather-beaten, as if he had done a lot of smiling into the desert wind. He had never adjusted to his height; he moved with the lingering awkwardness of an adolescent. Cindy could easily imagine every woman in life, from his mother to his ex-wife Miranda, constantly badgering him to stand up straight. But Cindy found his slouch endearing. She was glad to see him, even today.

  “Hi, Cindy,” he said. “Feeling all right?”

  “Now I am. How are the kids?”

  “Well, it’s Christmas, so they’re happy. They’ve finally figured out that I’m Santa. We’re done with all that ‘Hey, you use the same wrapping paper as Santa Claus’ stuff. They busted me last year and now the pressure’s off.”

  “Bruno Bettelheim says it’s a huge part of growing up—solving that mystery.”

  “Yeah? Well, they’re growing up fast, then.”

  “They take after their dad.”

  “There aren’t too many mysteries to solve around here, Cindy. That’s what I like about it.”

  Henry was a small town cop, a single dad, and an unpublished poet. It seemed like a bleak existence to Cindy, but the chief was happy. One day the winter before, when the flu had decimated the police force, Henry was directing traffic around some road construction. She was first in line as the traffic cleared in the other direction, fretting about her bills and a new cold sore on her lip. Henry was standing in the windy sleet, whistling a Scott Joplin piano rag. She had rolled down her window and called out to him, “My dad says people who whistle just got money.”

  “Not me.”

  “Why are you so happy, then?”

  “Look up. Check out the sky,” he said.

  “The sky makes you happy?”

  “Have you looked at it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The sky, Cindy. It’s right up there—you can’t miss it.”

  So she had craned her neck out the car window, and stared up into a dramatic panorama of storm clouds rimmed with sun and pierced by great shafts of light in the east and those same clouds, torn to rags by the wind and revealing the blue sky behind them, in the west.

  She realized that she never actually looked at the sky in the course of a normal day, not this way. She’d check for rain clouds if she were heading to the beach. But that was all.

  “It’s like…art,” she said.

  “And it’s free. Grab a peek while you can. It’ll be different in an hour.”

  “But…what about gray days? Or when it’s just plain blue?”

  There was a note of disappointment in the chief’s voice: “It’s never just plain blue, Cindy.”

  Then it was her turn to drive and he waved her through.

  She had looked at the sky a lot since then, but she still didn’t understand.

  “I think I’d like some furry slippers for Fiona to wear around the house in the mornings,” Chief Kennis was saying now. “She’s always in her sock feet and those floors are cold.”

  Two more women came into the store while she was rummaging for the slippers. This was the busy season, but the Mevlana people would never let her hire an assistant. She glanced up at the new arrivals. “Hello,” she said.

  The taller one, with the knee length steel-gray down parka, the fake blonde hair, and the tight expensive face that must have been a cruel mockery of her original features, just stared at Cindy.

  “Don’t you mean—‘Can I help you?’”

  Cindy controlled the urge to slap the woman. “No, actually. You’re on your own.”

  She bagged the slippers. Henry paid for them and left. The women started grazing through the bins of sweaters and the racks of dresses.

  The chief was a comforting presence, but she always felt inadequate around him. There was some central current of life and he was drifting along with it. Cindy couldn’t find it with infrared satellite photography and a navigational chart. He was content, but she needed things, the things she’d given up when she came here—her music, her painting, her master’s thesis—all the things she didn’t have the time or the energy for now. She had occasionally consoled herself thinking it can’t get any worse, but things could always get worse. As her dad used to say, “You can’t win them all. But you actually can lose them all.”

  ***

  This morning’s news had confirmed that. She had taken the test twice, two days in a row, first thing in the morning, according to the instructions. She had seen the double blue line both times. There was no doubt anymore. Between the condoms, the birth control pills, the IUD, and the spermicidal creams, it should have been physically impossible. But after years of discarded scratch tickets and losing lottery numbers, she and Mike had finally beat the odds.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said to herself for the twentieth time that day.

  And then she started crying in front of two ladies from Short Hills with matching mink coats and American Express Gold Cards.

  Chapter Five

  Cop Shop Morning

  It was a quiet autumn on Nantucket. The show was clo
sed for the season and the audience had gone home. You could park downtown and the long lines of cars piling up at every stop sign had vanished like the beer cans on the beaches. The parties were finished for the winter along with the traffic jams. The Christmas trees were lined up along Main Street, and the Stroll had been a surprising success. The Chamber of Commerce was happy. House sales were up. Late autumn had always been the slow time on the island, with nothing on the docket but DUIs, domestic interventions, and disturbing the peace calls. We gave out warnings and calmed people down. The jail cells were empty and the court was taking Fridays off. The long weekends felt good. We were all grateful for the yearly respite. None of us expected it to end so soon.

  Then one bright cold Monday in December, I found a critical piece of evidence in a real crime, which turned out to be one part of a much bigger investigation. All of a sudden, I was a cop again and I had to admit it felt good.

  I spent the first part of the morning reviewing the night watch log. A loud party, some black ice fender-benders. The highlight was a carpenter pulled over for erratic driving twenty miles over the posted limit on the Milestone Road in an uninspected, unregistered F-150. He had an open bottle of peppermint schnapps wedged between his thighs, and a baggie full of marijuana in the glove compartment next to an illegal gun. He fled when Rory Burke hit the flashers and then took a swing at him when the kid tried to give him the Breathalyzer. Apparently the guy hadn’t registered his car because he had twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of outstanding parking tickets. His license had been suspended for multiple DUIs.

  I shook my head, amused in spite of myself. The only way this could be worse was if the guy had a dead body in the truck bed. And it turned out he did, in a way: a doe, shot out of season, bleeding out on a plastic tarp.

  I shoved the log aside. I had noticed the guy in one of the holding cells this morning. Joe something; he’d been involved in a bar fight a few weeks before. The stale alcohol billowed off him like the reek of fertilizer from a ploughed field. I felt bad; the guy was in serious trouble. But there was nothing anyone could do to help. I shrugged. Maybe hitting rock bottom would do the trick, and this arrest would certainly drop him a little closer. I hadn’t stopped smoking until I found myself coughing blood into a Kleenex.

  The intercom buzzed. I picked it up.

  “You got time to run out to ’Sconset? Donnelly and Boyce are out at the—hold on a second—the Lattimer house? On Main Street, I have the address. There was a burglary, no one knows when. The owners just showed up for the month like they always do and the stuff was gone. The guys didn’t find much. The Lattimers are old Nantucket and they’re not happy right now. They want to talk to you, nobody else.”

  I blew out a breath. What the hell—I had nothing else to do. “I’ll swing by. Have Donnelly and Boyce stay there.”

  The Lattimer house was set back from the road behind a tall hedge, looming bulky and forbidding through the dense swirl of snow. It had been a whaling captain’s mansion a hundred and fifty years ago. Four generations of crusty, ill-tempered Yankees had stubbornly refused to make the usual improvements. The place hadn’t even been painted in more than a decade. There were no shiny new appliances, no ostentatious additions with white bookshelves full of framed family photographs and Steuben glass. The cramped rooms and dark narrow corridors remained intact. No walls had been knocked down. No steel I-beams had been installed to prevent the old pile from sagging on its foundation. It had been sagging since before the Civil War. It was a sharp uphill walk from the pantry to the stove in the kitchen.

  I met Kyle Donnelly at the front door and followed him through the house, edging past the dark shelves full of bestsellers from the sixties (Bel Kaufman, Allen Drury, Louis Auchincloss) and dusty volumes of Nantucket history. Nicotine stained Cahoon mermaids and Jacobson ferry paintings crowded the lumpy plaster walls.

  The Lattimers stood at the top of the kitchen, sipping tea and talking to Charlie Boyce. David Lattimer stood six-foot-three, with gangly disjointed arms and big hands, his posture bent slightly after a lifetime of stooping under doorway lintels. His eyes were deep set under bushy gray brows and his wide mouth curved up naturally as if he were perpetually amused by the follies of the people around him. He wore brown wide wale corduroy slacks and a J. Press Shetland pullover sweater. Philippa was almost as tall—six-foot-one maybe. She wore old blue jeans and a heather cable knit cardigan; no makeup, no jewelry. Thick gray hair fell to the line of her jaw, which was softening slightly without plastic surgery. She must have been a world-class beauty when she was young. Even in her late sixties she was striking. She and her husband were like emissaries from a race of giants. I felt small and poverty-stricken next to them, as if they were volunteering at a soup kitchen, ladling out my Christmas dinner.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” said Philippa. “Would you like some tea?”

  “No thank you. If you could show me the room where the theft took place?”

  David cleared his throat. “I was just telling this young man here, Detective Boyce? That these thieves were idiots. They took a Centennial Windsor chair. Those were made a century after the period. They’re just Colonial Revival pieces, really. And they left a comb-back Windsor in the study with the original paint that’s easily a hundred times more valuable. They take an Empire dresser…the shiny mahogany must have impressed them. And they leave a Queen Anne chest. Not that I’m complaining. It’s just typical of the new people here.”

  “David…” Philippa began.

  “No, I mean it, Darling. Even the thieves are ignorant and sloppy. And demanding. I’m sure they’ll be very annoyed with us for not labeling the more valuable pieces! I’m so tired of these people and their demands. Everyone has to have a fancy truck and a little tract house. It’s appalling. Anyone who can pick up a hammer thinks they deserve a home on Nantucket. And if they have to steal to pay for it, fine!”

  “Do you know we never even locked our house,” Philippa said, getting into the spirit of the conversation. “For years. All while the children were growing up. We never even had a key. I could leave my basket on the car seat downtown without a second thought. I’d never do that now.”

  David laughed. “You give them too much credit. We have Reyes lightship baskets all over this house. I’m sure they looked right at them and had absolutely no idea what they were seeing.”

  “If I could just take a look around,” I began again.

  “Of course,” Philippa said. “I’m so sorry. Of course you’re busy. Things were taken from the dining room and from David’s study. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Donnelly and Boyce had already been over the place. They were competent detectives. I didn’t expect to find anything useful. I was there more for public relations than police work. I followed Philippa into David’s study. David himself was just behind us. “I remember Chief McGrady,” he was saying. “It was different Nantucket in those days. Bunny ran his Jeepster into a lighting pole right on Main Street one night, drunk as a hoot owl. He tottered down to the station to report it. McGrady was working late. He said, “You’re a Lattimer, aren’t you? Just go on home and let me take care of this.” That was how things were in the old days. Chief McGrady would no more have arrested a Lattimer than sprouted wings and flown away.”

  “An extraordinary man,” Philippa said.

  “Big shoes to fill,” I agreed.

  They all hovered in the doorway for a moment.

  “Well, we’ll let you get to it,” David said.

  I walked into the cramped, book-lined study and turned on the desk light. There were two neat stacks of papers and an old IBM Selectric typewriter. A jar of pencils that needed sharpening, an ashtray that needed cleaning.

  “Nothing to see, Chief,” Donnelly said. “We dusted. No prints. So they were smart enough to wear gloves, at least. There’s no sign of a break-in. Mr. Lattimer says they’ve been locking the place up
for the last few years, but who knows? They don’t have an alarm system. No neighbors around except at Thanksgiving. Could have happened any time since Labor Day.”

  Something caught my eye. I kneeled down next to desk. It was a cigarette butt, burned almost down to the filter. Two small amber cones were visible: the top of some insignia printed on the paper. I recognized it instantly: a Camel. I picked it up with a pair of tweezers from my coat pocket and held it up to the two detectives. They weren’t impressed.

  “We saw it, Chief,” Boyce said.

  “Mr. Lattimer smokes Camels,” Donnelly added.

  “But he doesn’t usually leave them on the floor. Look at the ashtray on his desk.”

  There were two butts stumped out in the square cut-crystal.

  “So he dropped one and forgot about it. He’s old. Lucky the house didn’t burn down.”

  I nodded. “Sure. Makes sense. But look at the cigarette. Check it out.” I extended the tweezers under the desk lamp. The two detectives made a show of looking it over.

  “Nothing?”

  “Not that I can see,” said Donnelly.

  Boyce just shrugged.

  I smiled. “I have the advantage here. This used to be my brand. See the little gold band just above the filter? Camel Lights.”

  “So?”

  “So Lattimer smokes regulars.” I plucked a butt from the ashtray. “See? No gold band. These guys were dumb enough to leave a cigarette butt here. And now we know what brand they smoke.”