A Deadly Vineyard Holiday

by Philip R. Craig

  I drove away, wondering how long it would be before Acey realized that the Toyota’s keys were missing. “Forgotten” in my pocket, as a matter of fact. I didn’t want Acey to drive the Toyota anywhere. Too many people knew it belonged to me, and some of them might ask Acey why he was driving it and learn that I was now driving his Land Rover, which was exactly what I didn’t want either Shadow or anyone else to know. It was better that Acey stayed at home with his novel and lived the lonely artist’s life for a while.

  We hadn’t gotten too far when Debby suddenly said, “Stop!” I pulled over. “Look,” she said, pointing. There was a mailbox at the end of a driveway. On it was the name Freeman. “This must be where Allen lives!”

  Serendipity. A revised plan for the day sprang from my head, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Maybe . . .

  But I was cautious. “Allen’s probably still in bed,” I said. “Anyway, he’s got to go to work, most likely.”

  “No,” said Debby. “It’s his day off. He told me so when I called him on the phone.”

  Maybe there was a God, after all. I sat for a moment and thought things through again. Well, why not? If this worked, my own day would be a lot simpler. Of course, Karen and Debby would have to agree to it. I broached my plan.

  “Yes!” said Debby.

  “I don’t know,” said Karen.

  “You might have a good time,” I said. “It’s a perfect day for it.”

  “Well . . . ,” said Karen.

  “We’ll need a phone,” I said. “There’s one back at Acey’s house.”

  “Well . . . ,” said Karen.

  “Let’s do it!” said Debby.

  I turned the Land Rover around and drove back to Acey’s house. He came outside and brightened at the sight of Karen, who seemed to brighten back.

  “Acey,” I said. “I need a favor. Now, just say no if you can’t do it.”

  He looked at Karen, then back at me. “Okay. Name it.”

  “My cousins here don’t get to the seashore much. I was going to take them to the bathing beach at Wasque today, but something’s come up. I wonder if you can take time off from your writing to take them in my place. If you can, Debby wants to use your phone to call a friend of hers, to see if he can come along. Kid named Allen Freeman. Lives right up the road. You know him?”

  “The Freemans? Sure, I know them. I know Allen. A day at the beach, eh?” He looked at Karen and smiled his boyish smile. “You like the beach, eh?”

  “We don’t get there much,” said Karen, almost smiling back.

  “The phone’s right inside,” Acey said to Debby. “Sure, J.W., I’ll take your cousins to the beach. I could use a break from the typewriter.”

  There was no hint of sarcasm or insincerity in his voice. He really did think he could use a break from his writing. Part of his charm, I guessed, was his earnestness.

  Debby went into the house and came back out, smiling. “Allen can come, and he’s got a truck! He says I should come over and help him pack the two of us a lunch. He wants me to meet his parents!”

  “And you can stay here and help me pack the two of us a lunch,” said Acey to Karen.

  Karen wavered.

  “I’ll take Debby over to the Freeman place,” I said, “and she and Allen will pick you two up as soon as they get their act together. Then the four of you can head off for the day. It’ll be all right.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Good,” said Acey. “That’s settled, then. Come on in, Karen. Let’s toss some sandwiches together.”

  “Yeah!” said Debby. “But first, let’s get our beach gear out of the truck.”

  She and Karen did that. I waited while they changed into their bathing suits and beach robes, then I drove Debby, still wearing her big glasses and floppy hat, to the Freemans’ house.

  Allen Freeman, looking happy, met us at the door and introduced us to his parents, who seemed a bit surprised at having such early visitors and who looked curiously at Debby, as if they were trying to place where they might have seen her before.

  “I’ll pick you and Karen up about fiveish,” I said to Debby. “That should give you enough time in the sun. Don’t get burned.”

  “I won’t,” she said, exchanging glances with Allen.

  I drove back to the beach and went west to the pavement at Katama. There, I looked for the car that had followed me earlier in the morning, but didn’t see it. It was a curious feeling to be looking out through windows that people couldn’t see into, but it was one I liked, under the circumstances. I drove into town and across to Fuller Street, where Manny Fonseca had his woodworking shop. I parked in front and went inside. The place was rich with the scents of wood, oils, lacquers, and paint. Zee and Manny were there.

  “How’d the practice go?” I asked.

  “Annie Oakley,” said Manny. “In a couple of years, she’ll be giving me lessons.”

  “That’ll be the day.” Zee smiled. “See you later, coach.” She picked up a bag, gave me a kiss, and led me out the door. When we were inside the Land Rover, she said, “There are two phones in this sack. Where are your cousins?”

  I told her.

  “They’ll be all right?”

  “I think so. I’d rather have them there than with me right now. As a matter of fact, I’d rather have you there than with me right now.”

  She got her worried look. “Why? What are you up to?”

  “I plan to visit some people, and I don’t know how well I’ll be received.”

  “Who? What people?”

  “You ever hear of Kenneth Eppers, also known as Horrors?”

  “ ‘Horrors’? Like in ‘House of’?”

  “The very same.”

  “No. Who’s Horrors Eppers?”

  “Just another off-islander like ourselves, now trying to live the good life on this blessed isle.” I told her what Joe Begay had told me about Kenneth Eppers. Then I told her what he’d told me about Barbara Miller and her husband, Ben, the international banker whose work had given Barbara her IRS cover.

  Zee nodded. “I get it. You think Horrors or Barbara or maybe even both of them might be Shadow and his gang, if he has a gang.”

  “You get it, all right,” I said. “And then there’s Mike Qasim. He’s another possibility.” I told her my thoughts about Mike Mahmud ibn Qasim’s possible Middle East connections and possible anger about the girl with no face.

  Zee shook her head. “No. Not Mike Qasim. He’s not the type.”

  “He’s the type to blow his stack about Dora coming to our house. If he gets hot over that, he may get really hot over something like that explosion. Suppose he and the girl were related.”

  “You don’t have any reason to think they are!”

  “You’re right. But it’s a possibility.”

  “No, it’s not. Mike isn’t the type, I tell you.”

  “I think you’re probably right,” I said. But I didn’t take Mike off my list.

  “And another thing,” said Zee. “I suppose it’s occurred to you that if Joe Begay knows about Barbara and Horrors, and if you know about them, arid if even I know about them now, the Secret Service and the FBI and probably every other kind of cop knows about them, too.”

  “Indeed, it did cross my mind.”

  “So what do you think you can find out that they can’t?”

  “I don’t know, but I think I’ll ask. I do have one advantage.”

  “What advantage?”

  “Those other guys all have to obey the law. I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do!”

  “Now you know why I wish you were on the beach instead of here with me. You function on too high a moral level for this kind of work.”

  “I can’t be functioning on too high a moral level. I’m married to you, after all.”

  “A point well taken. But I may have to, how shall I say, pretend a little bit when I talk with Horrors and Barbara.”

  “I can do that, too. Wives have to pretend more than
you might think.”

  I looked at her. “You aren’t talking about that old notion that women fake orgasms because men fake foreplay, are you?”

  She lifted her nose a bit. “Maybe.” I let go of the steering wheel and grabbed at her. “Get away!” She laughed, pushing at my arms and sliding away across the seat.

  “If I need foreplay practice, I think I should get right at it,” I said, leering.

  Zee slapped at my busy hands and laughed again. “You’re too old to do this in a car anymore. I think we’d better go see Horrors and Barbara before you hurt yourself! Wheeee! Stop that!”

  “This is only a temporary ceasefire,” I said, sitting back. “It only lasts until sundown.”

  “A deal.” She grinned and straightened her clothes, and we drove out of town.

  — 20 —

  First, we drove back down to South Beach. It was only mid-morning, but already the August people were beginning to park, unpack their two-wheel-drive cars, and spread their beach gear and themselves out on the sand. Teenagers were playing in the gentle surf, and parents were keeping a sharp eye on little ones while they wrestled with umbrellas, canvas bags, and beach chairs. Some fathers were already working on their kites or getting out their footballs. Another Vineyard day was getting under way.

  We drove to Chappy and went through the dunes until we came to the wooden walk that led from the parking lot to the bathing beach. There, we pulled off the main track and stopped. Zee stayed with the Land Rover, so she could move it in case some overzealous Trustees of Reservations employee came by and was affronted by its presence, and I took one of the phones and walked to the beach. There, on the still not too crowded sand, I found my southern cousins and their men. Karen wore a fairly sedate one-piece suit, but Debby, in addition to her big glasses and floppy hat, was sporting a two-piece outfit not much bigger than a couple of postage stamps. I thought they both looked quite smashing, which was clearly what Acey and Allen thought, too.

  I took Karen aside and gave her the telephone, along with the number for the phone we were keeping in the truck.

  “Call me anytime,” I said, “and I’ll call you if I need to. If you report to Walt Pomerlieu—”

  “When I report to Walt Pomerlieu.”

  “When you report to Walt Pomerlieu, it’ll be better if you use your radio. I don’t want him to know you’ve got a phone. I also don’t want him to know where you are, so tell him you’re on South Beach, if you have to, but don’t tell him the exact spot.”

  “I won’t lie to him.”

  “Don’t lie. Just don’t tell the whole truth.”

  “I could lose my job over this.”

  “Debby could lose more than that.”

  She frowned her now familiar frown and put the phone into her huge shoulder bag, where, no doubt, she kept her radio and pistol, along with all the normal equipment that women carry around with them.

  “I’ll see you this afternoon,” I said, and walked away before she could give me any of the good reasons why we should probably be doing something other than I planned.

  On the other side of the dunes, the Land Rover was waiting for me.

  “When this is over,” said Zee, “we should dedicate a couple of days to serious fishing. We’ll need a Vineyard vacation.”

  “Fishing and family planning,” I said. “Or at least the fun part of family planning.”

  “If you ever get by the foreplay practice.”

  “I do want to get that right.”

  We threw a U and went back to Katama, meeting other ORVs on their way to fishing and beaching spots that were inaccessible to folk without four-wheel drive. ORV drivers scorn the beaches that can be reached with ordinary cars, and rejoice in the relative seclusion their four-by-fours allow them, ignoring the often plain truth that the ORV beaches are sometimes almost as crowded as the others, thanks to an ever-increasing number of Jeeps on the island.

  Illusion, like image, is everything, some say.

  According to Joe Begay, Kenneth Eppers’s house was somewhere in Chilmark, on top of a hill, with a view of both the north and south shores of the island. That description eliminated a lot of houses, but left a fair number, so as we headed out of Edgartown on West Tisbury Road, I asked Zee to ring Joe for more precise directions to both Eppers’s house and Barbara Miller’s.

  It was the first time I’d ever been in a car where a cellular phone was used, and the experience made me feel that in spite of my many backward ways, I was at least entering the twentieth century before it ended.

  Joe Begay was at home. I drove while Zee spoke, listened, scribbled on a notepad, asked how Toni was doing, listened some more, thanked Joe, and hung up.

  “Kenneth Eppers lives off Middle Road,” she said. “Up toward the far end. There’s a white rock at the end of his driveway. How does Joe Begay know these things? He’s only been on the island for a year or two.”

  “Joe likes to be informed,” I said. “It’s a holdover from the work he used to do.”

  “Was he in the same business as Eppers and Barbara Miller?”

  “I think they may have had mutual acquaintances and interests.”

  She stared out the window, then said, “Joe doesn’t seem the type.”

  “You don’t think Mike Qasim is the type, either. I think the ones who don’t seem the type are the best types for certain lines of work.”

  She looked at me, then back at the road. We took a left at West Tisbury, passing by Alley’s Store on the right, and Tom Maley’s field of dancing statues on the left, then hooked a right onto Music Street and drove until we could take another left onto Middle Road. It was the same route we’d taken when Shadow had first followed us, but he wasn’t there today.

  One summer, before I met Zee, I’d taken it upon myself to walk every paved road on Martha’s Vineyard. The first morning after this decision, I’d walked to the Edgartown A & P and back. The next morning I’d driven to the A & P, parked the Land Cruiser, and walked up the beach road to the Big Bridge and back. The next morning, I’d parked at the Big Bridge and walked to Oak Bluffs and back. In this fashion, I walked twice, there and back, over all of the island’s paved roads, and many of its unpaved ones. Of all the roads I’d walked, Middle Road was one of the loveliest, winding, as it does, between stone walls, past open fields and lovely houses, under trees, and over hills.

  When wondering who owed some of the fine houses I’d passed then and since, it hadn’t occurred to me that one of the owners might be a government agent so famous for his violent foreign plans that even his own people nicknamed him Horrors, and who now might be planning an attack on the daughter of the president of the United States.

  Not all snakes live under rocks.

  We passed the field that held the long-horned cattle, which always caught my eye, and went on.

  “Do we have a master plan?” asked Zee.

  “ ‘Make sure you’re right, then go straight ahead,’ as Davy Crockett used to say. Or was that Jim Bowie? Or maybe Fess Parker.”

  “But are you sure you’re right?”

  “No, but I might be.”

  Up toward the Beetlebung Corner end of Middle Road was a driveway adorned on one side by a foot-stool-size rock painted white and a mailbox with a number on it. No name, Eppers or otherwise, was on the box. The sandy driveway led up through the trees toward a hill. I drove past, found a spot where I could pull off the road and park, and did that.

  “Why don’t you drive up to his house?” asked Zee, as I got out.

  “Because if he is Shadow, he’ll learn what car I’m driving. I’ll walk up. You stay here, in case.”

  “No, I’m going with you.” But she hesitated. “In case of what?”

  “In case some cop stops and wants you to move the truck. In case Eppers chases me with a shotgun and I have to get out of there in a hurry. Why don’t you get over behind the wheel?”

  “He may not even be home. And what are you going to do up there if he is?”
r />   “I’m going to talk to him, that’s all. I won’t be long.”

  “How long?”

  I didn’t know. “An hour at the most.” “If you’re not here by then, I’ll call the cops and then drive right up there, looking for you.”

  “You won’t have to do that.”

  “I love you!”

  “I love you, too.”

  I walked back to the driveway and followed it up through the trees and scrub. The higher I got, the more I could see, until, finally, looking north, I could see the Elizabeth Islands, and looking a bit west of south, I could see Nomans Land lying just off the Gay Head coast. Another turn of the driveway brought me to Kenneth Eppers’s house.

  It was a classic old New England farmhouse not unlike that belonging to my friend John Skye, who summered on the island and wintered in Weststock, Massachusetts, where he taught things medieval at the college there. Eppers’s house was two stories high, partially encircled by a porch, sided with white clapboard, topped with wooden shingles, and sporting a large center chimney, which spoke of many fireplaces.

  Beyond it was a neat white outbuilding that struck me as a combined storehouse and garage. A well-trimmed lawn fell away from the house on all sides, and beyond the outbuilding, in the lee of the island’s prevailing southwest winds, I could see a vegetable garden. There were flowered boxes under the windows of the house, and a flower-bordered walk leading to the front door from the parking area in front of the outbuilding.

  Was this the sort of house owned by an ex-IRS director? There wasn’t a single barred window or TV camera scanning the grounds, or a guy with dark glasses and a hand under his jacket giving me the once-over.

  I walked up to the door and rang the bell.

  A woman opened the door. She looked about fifty or so, and was wearing one of those casual, pastel-colored shirt-and-shorts combinations that I call rich-girl clothes. Her hair was gray and neat. She wore a gold wristwatch, a gold bracelet decorated with little bunches of grapes, and a simple gold necklace from which hung a golden image of the Vineyard. A pair of glasses swung from a cord around her neck.

  She smiled at me. “Yes?”

  “I’m J. W. Jackson,” I said. “I’m looking for Kenneth Eppers.”