A Deadly Vineyard Holiday

by Philip R. Craig

  Maybe they could. I looked at my watch. “Maybe this isn’t important anymore, but if we want to go clamming, we’ve got a low tide to catch.”

  She gave a little snort. “The world doesn’t stop turning, does it?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go clamming, then.”

  I got into my bathing suit and the pink Papa’s Pizza T-shirt that I wear when I go clamming, donned the cap with my shellfishing permit pinned to it, and went out to my shed and dug out four clamming baskets, two metal ones and two made out of plastic milk cartons. All had Styrofoam flotation laced to them, and lines you could use to tie them to yourself so the tide wouldn’t carry them off. I got out a clamming fork, a clam rake, and my combination toilet plunger and quahog rake: plunger on one end of the long handle, rake on the other. And I found a half-dozen pairs of rubber gloves.

  Some people like to dig clams with a clamming fork or clam rake, and others like to suck them up out of the mud with a toilet plunger and then gather them up with a quahog rake. Zee and I prefer to crawl around on our hands and knees and dig them up by hand, in sort of a mini-strip-mining operation, wearing rubber gloves to save wear and tear on our fingers.

  With all the gear I had collected, along with whatever the twins had brought from home, I figured we had enough stuff to accommodate whatever clamming style our gang would prefer. I tossed everything into the back of the Land Cruiser, added two five-gallon buckets, and when the women and the girls came out of the house in their bathing suits, we were ready to go. Over her suit, Karen wore a loose-fitting shirt. The better to hide her pistol, I suspected. She also carried her huge shoulder bag, which contained who knew what in addition to her radio.

  Eel Pond, on the northeastern side of Edgartown, is a rich depository for several kinds of shellfish: quahogs, soft-shell clams, and mussels. It is fished all summer long, but never seems to suffer too much from such use. In fact, its mussels are barely harvested at all, although they are perhaps the sweetest and best-tasting of all the shellfish. Unlike many of our fellow islanders, Zee and I are enthusiastic mussel collectors and eaters.

  Today, however, soft-shell clams were our intended prey, so we drove down to the town landing on the pond, unloaded our gear, and walked off to the right, over the slippery mud and through the grass and sea lavender, toward the place where a little island rises out of the water at low tide. We waded across the pond to the neck of land on the far side and came to our favorite shellfishing spot.

  Zee and I donned our gloves and went down on our knees. Karen and Debby, new at the job, paired off with the twins, with the clam rake, clamming fork, and plunger.

  East, beyond the beach grass on the spit of land beside which we were digging, and south toward the Edgartown lighthouse, Little Beach was filled with August people vacationing with all their might, as well they should, considering the prices they were paying for the privilege. We could hear laughter and voices floating on the wind, and could see the tops of sails outside of the lighthouse, moving in and out of Edgartown Harbor. In the opposite direction, near the landing, where we’d parked our cars, small sail- and powerboats were moored, including two eighteen-foot catboats much like our own Shirley J. There were other shellfishers working the shallows on the far side of the little island and enjoying the warm summer sun on their backs.

  Eden. Before the birth of Cain.

  By mid-August, Eel Pond had been seriously shellfished, and the clams that had been so abundant in June were now harder to find. Which meant that today it would take us maybe two hours, instead of one, to get our mess. No problem, though, since what could we be doing that was more enjoyable than what we were already doing?

  The girls were laughing over their clamming efforts, and Karen was trying to, but it was clear that she was also seriously and constantly looking everywhere around us: toward the houses to the west, the people and boats to the north, the beach to the east and south, back to the landing, where people occasionally came or went, carrying clamming baskets. She was ever the bodyguard, and never got far from the shoulder bag she’d laid on the beach grass by the edge of the water.

  “What a life she leads,” said Zee quietly, reading my mind, as she does more and more. “I don’t think I could stand a job that made me see everything as potentially threatening. Do you think there’s some vacation island somewhere where Secret Service people can go and relax without their radios and guns?”

  “They probably have a bar they go to in Washington,” I said. “Cops have bars like that, where they drink with other cops and know that whoever they’re with understands them.”

  “Did you go to that kind of a bar when you were a cop?”

  “Sometimes. I imagine that doctors and nurses have their own watering holes, too.”

  She nodded. “Booze and drugs are two of our problems. We take stuff to keep us going, then other stuff to bring us down so we can get some rest. I wonder if it’s the same for the Secret Service people. I mean, how does Karen ever get any sleep? She looks twice at every shadow and twitches at every sound.”

  I had just excavated a clam graveyard full of dead, mud-filled shells, but had now discovered a nearby suburb of their living relatives, and was capturing them at a goodly clip. There was life in the sea after all!

  One of the nice things about clamming is that while your hands are busy doing one thing, your eyes and mind can be doing something else. Happy with my discovery of the clam suburb, I looked up at Zee and ogled her cleavage. “Did I ever tell you that you have a dynamite bod?” I asked her.

  “I thought it was my mind that attracted you.”

  I ogled harder. “Is that where you keep your mind?”

  “Apparently it’s where you keep yours.”

  “Actually, mine roams here and there.”

  “I think,” she said, “that Karen has her eye on something.”

  I sat up on my heels, turned, and looked. Two tall men wearing shorts, shirts, and dark glasses were walking along the shore toward us from the direction of the landing. They seemed to be much interested in us. I glanced at Karen and saw her moving toward her shoulder bag, eyeing the men and loosening the buttons of her shirt as she went.

  I got up and walked out to where Debby and the twins were trying to plunge clams up to where they could rake them into their baskets.

  “How you doing?” I asked, stepping between Debby and the oncoming men.

  “We’ve got some,” said a twin.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Debby. “I don’t think anybody should complain about how much fried clams cost! It’s fun catching them, though. Are we going to get enough for everybody? Or should I tell Dad and Mom to bring some, too?”

  A twin looked at her. “Are your parents coming? That’s great!”

  Debby looked down at her plunger and worked it up and down.

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” I said. “Her folks will be in New England this weekend. They’re going to try to get to the clambake.”

  “That’s your uncle and aunt from Virginia,” replied a twin. “I never knew you had any uncles and aunts.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Every family has its secrets. My uncle and aunt probably don’t talk about me, either. Anyway, Debby, we should be able to get enough today. Your dad won’t have to bring any.”

  I was watching the two men come toward us. The shirts they wore were the loose kind, with tails long enough to come down over their belts.

  Their dark glasses hid their eyes, but as they approached along the western shore, beyond the water we had crossed, their heads turned toward us, and one of them took a hand from a pocket and waved. I raised a hand. The men smiled.

  “Beautiful day,” one called. “What are you after?”

  “Steamers,” I said.

  “How are you doing?”

  “We’re making progress.”

  “Good, good. Well, have a nice day.”

  They walked on south toward the beach.

  I turned and looked at Kar
en. She was standing in the water next to her shoulder bag, buttoning her shirt and looking after the retreating men.

  I thought Secret Service people probably had a high rate of suicide and heart attacks.

  — 11 —

  We worked the clam flats for two hours, until it seemed to me we had enough for invited guests and then some. For entertainment, I taught the girls the words of the Old Pioneer:

  No longer a slave to Ambition

  I laugh at the world and its shams,

  As I think of my happy condition

  Surrounded by acres of clams!

  Then we collected mussels from the mud bank. Since almost no one in Edgartown harvests them, they’re easy to find, so it didn’t take us long to get a lot. The two men in sunglasses never showed up again, nor did any other such people.

  “We’ll put all these guys, clams and mussels both, into buckets of saltwater overnight,” I said to Debby, as we waded back to the landing. “That’ll let them spit out any sand or mud they may have collected. Then tomorrow, we’ll rinse off the clams and we’ll scrub the mussels clean and put the whole lot in the fridge until clambake time. You are officially drafted to be a mussel scrubber, because it’s part of your island survival course.”

  “Actually,” said a twin, “it’s because scrubbing mussels takes a lot of time and is pretty boring.”

  “Why did I somehow guess that?” asked Debby, looking up at me as we sloshed along.

  “Just for being a smart mouth,” I said to the twin, “you and your good sister can show up after breakfast and help this poor little Virginia cousin of mine do the job. I know you’ll be glad to help out so you can prove people are wrong when they say that teenage girls are all lazy slobs who only want to hang around malls and never want to do any real work.”

  “I’m the evil twin,” said the twin. “I thrive on avoiding work. I’ll send my moral, clean-living, good sister over while I sleep late.”

  We came up onto the landing ramp and I put the clams and mussels into the Land Cruiser. Then I filled the two five-gallon buckets with saltwater and put them in, too.

  There were still people out on the sunny water, raking for quahogs or digging for clams. The boats continued to bob on their moorings. Debby looked around.

  “It’s really pretty here.”

  “Did you know there’s an official clamming song?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “ ‘My Darling Clammin’ Time.’ ”

  Zee sighed, and the others all sneered and groaned. Zee and I got into the Land Cruiser, and the others got into the Wagoneer, and we all drove back to our house.

  There, I put the shellfish into the buckets of water, and Karen got her receiver into her ear and reported our return to whoever was on the far end of the communication link.

  I had been thinking about the directional bugs on the cars. Karen’s car and Zee’s car had them, but my Land Cruiser didn’t. How come? I stared down at the buckets full of saltwater and shellfish, and it came to me.

  I went into the house, changed into shorts and my T-shirt that said FRANKLY, SCALLOP, I DON’T GIVE A CLAM on the front, and found the roll of film I’d taken out of Burt Phillips’s camera.

  “What’s that?” asked Zee. “Have you been taking pictures of something?”

  I am not famous for my photography, so it was a legit question. I told her where I’d gotten the film.

  “I think the police might call that theft,” said Zee, frowning. “Or at least removing evidence from a crime scene.”

  “When I removed this, it wasn’t a crime scene,” I said. “Nobody was dead yet.”

  “It’s still theft.”

  “Burt Phillips won’t press charges. I’m going to have this developed.”

  Zee was still not sure she approved of my career as a film thief. “What do you expect to find?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe I’ll find out who put those bugs on your car and Karen’s. I think that the reason those cars were bugged and the Land Cruiser wasn’t is because whoever bugged the cars did it while the cars were together but the Land Cruiser was someplace else. And the only time I can think of when the cars were together and the Land Cruiser was someplace else is when Karen and Debby were off to the beach with Jill and Jen in John Skye’s Wagoneer, and you and I were off quahogging with the Land Cruiser, and Karen’s car and your Jeep were here in the yard.”

  “And Burt Phillips was up at the end of the driveway,” said Zee, nodding. “He was there when we left and when we came back. So you figure he was there while we were gone, too.”

  It was my turn to nod. “With his trusty camera, taking pictures of whoever came in or out of the driveway. That’s why I took the film in the first place. So he couldn’t sell pictures of Debby J. and the rest of us to the National Planet. I didn’t think any of us aspired to be featured in that rag.”

  “So you really are a noble guy after all,” said Zee, “and not just a common crook.” She put her arms around me. “I should have known.”

  Her lips were sweet, and they stayed on mine for a while. When they left, she took a deep breath and said in a small voice, “It’s too bad we have company right now.”

  “Yes.” I held her against me, resenting the layers of clothing between us.

  “Oops,” said Debby’s voice from the doorway. “Sorry. Bye.”

  We looked toward her as she backed out of the room, and untangled ourselves.

  “It’s okay,” said Zee, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. “We were just necking a little.”

  “Mom and Dad do that sometimes, too,” said Debby, and my opinion of the presidential couple immediately went up a notch or two. It was good to have a president who still smooched with his lady now and then.

  “I’m headed for town,” I said. “You want to come along? You can hang out with Jen and Jill and your sister, Karen, and watch the tourists. It’s a popular sport in the summertime. You get to see some odd sights.”

  “Yes,” said Debby. “We’ll be ready as soon as I can get dressed.” She disappeared, and a moment later I heard the Wagoneer going out the driveway, taking the twins home to change into downtown clothes.

  “So you figure that maybe Burt Phillips might have gotten a picture of whoever it was who went down our driveway and bugged the cars there,” said Zee.

  “You got it, kid.”

  A half-hour later, the Wagoneer returned and disgorged Jill and Jen. Karen came into the living room. She was wearing clothes that made her look barely older than Debby. “I hear we’re going, downtown. I’m not sure that’s wise. There are a lot of media people on this island, and they’ve got sharp eyes.”

  “Remember the purloined letter,” I said. “Hiding in plain sight can be a pretty good plan. The four of you look a lot like a normal teenage quartet. Your only problem is that you’re all too good-looking. Guys will probably be all over you.”

  “That sounds good to me!” said Debby, coming into the room followed by Jill and Jen.

  “We could use some men in our lives,” agreed a twin.

  “Good grief,” said Karen. “That’s all we need. Boys chasing us.”

  “I didn’t say boys” said the twin. “I said men!”

  “Let’s go in Dad’s Jeep,” said the other twin. “It’s big enough for all of us.”

  “I get to drive,” said her sister. “It’s my turn.”

  “Well, I’ve got to get ready for work,” said Zee. She pulled my head down and gave me another long kiss, then headed for our bedroom to change. “Have fun downtown,” she said as she went.

  “I think she likes you,” said a twin approvingly. I was pretty sure it was Jill, but I was never absolutely sure which twin was which.

  Karen ran her tongue over her lips and looked at me.

  “We’d better get going,” I said.

  The five of us climbed into the Wagoneer and set off. There was no one out at the end of the driveway watching. Jen, maybe, took a right and we headed int
o Edgartown. “The Dairy Queen is the first stop,” she said.

  “Oh, good!”

  We crawled through the A & P traffic jam and pulled into the Dairy Queen, where, to my surprise, we found a parking space. The Dairy Queen is one of Edgartown’s gold mines, along with the On Time Ferry, which runs the hundred yards between Edgartown and Chappaquiddick. Neither owner has lost any money lately.

  “I’ll leave you four to fatten up here,” I said, “and I’ll meet you downtown in, say, an hour in front of the yacht club. That’ll give you time to cruise Main after you pig out here.”

  “Aren’t you staying with us?” asked Karen.

  “I have places to go, things to do, and people to see,” I said. “I’m a busy man. I’ll see you all later.”

  “Places to go, things to do, and people to see,” said a mocking twin.

  “The younger generation is going to the dogs,” I said. “No respect for their elders.”

  I walked down past Cannonball Park, on along beside the graveyard, took a right on Pease’s Point Way, and fetched the police station. Naturally, the chief was not there.

  “Downtown someplace,” said Kit Goulart, who was behind the front desk.

  Kit and her husband, Joe, were about the size of a matched team of plow horses. I widened my eyes and stared at her massive bosom. “Nice badge you have there, officer.”

  She laughed. “You already have all the woman you can handle, buddy boy.”

  True.

  “How’s the Secret Service biz these days?” I asked.

  “The president will be headed back to Washington on Monday,” said Kit. “Then we’ll return to normalcy, as Harding used to say.”

  “Any secret scuttlebutt you’d like to pass along?”

  “Not a bit. Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  One reason Kit had lasted so long at her job was precisely because she never gossiped about her work.

  “I hear that when Joe Callahan is done being president, he’s going to come back to Edgartown and try to get your job.”

  “He’s welcome to it,” said Kit. “When he does that, I’ll run for president. I like the retirement plan.”