by Doug Burgess
But none of that is what impresses Billy. On the wall closest to the shop, extending some thirty feet into the air, are the spoils of New England Wrecking and Salvage. Grandpa started the collection. He had a bit of book-learning, and named it the rostra after the broken ships’ prows that once made up the speaking pulpit of the Roman Senate. There are dozens of wheels, some teak with brass studs, others polished chrome; binnacles and compasses on buckling shelves, wound with bits of rope; yards of teak decking stacked like lumber; doors with glass beveled edges and portholes lined with nickel; buckets full of handles, knobs, cleats, davits of every possible size and age. One whole section has been given to totems, figureheads and other bits of maritime art. “Tourists love that crap,” I remember Constance saying dismissively. I look amongst them for Calliope, the bespectacled mermaid, but she is not there.
Billy joins me in the search. Yet once a ship has been scrapped and reduced down to her component parts, all identity falls away. There is nothing distinctive about any of this nautical detritus; it could have come from any trawler or yacht, freighter or catamaran. Stacked against the wall are dressers, bureaus, cabinets, television consoles, dining tables, and more chairs than I can count. They all could have come from Calliope, or any other boat.
“Okay assholes, the party’s over.”
The voice is familiar, the tone authoritative and confident. Aunt Constance is standing in the doorway, a shotgun in her hands. Irene and Grandma peer anxiously over her shoulder. I turn around, and they all gasp. “David?”
“Hi, Aunt Constance.”
“What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were robbing the place. And Billy Dyer? This your idea of a joke?”
From behind her, Irene titters. “They’re not burglars, Connie, they’re just looking for a little privacy.”
Constance considers this. “You guys sure picked a strange spot. Why couldn’t you have just gone back to your house?”
I open my mouth to correct her, but Billy gets in first. “I’m sorry,” he says, “It was my fault; I suggested it. How did you know we were here?”
“Silent alarm. Went off the moment you opened the door.”
Of course. I was a fool to think anyone as cautious as Constance would leave all her treasures to the protection of a single lock. Billy moves forward. “We didn’t mean to disturb. You can put the gun away now.”
“Yes, Connie,” Irene bleats, “I don’t like you waving that thing around.”
Constance lowers the rifle, but her expression is still puzzled. She looks back and forth between Billy and me. “Where were you all this time?”
“That,” Irene interjects, “is none of your business, Miss Constance.”
Chief Dyer is gone; Billy could be a bashful teenager again. He stares at the floor and scrubs his toe across it distractedly. “Sorry to disturb you ladies.” Clearly there is nothing here, and he is turning red with shame. Fortunately, the Aunts will never suspect the true source.
Aunt Constance finally softens. “Well, okay. This has been quite a night. Guess we’d all better get on home, then.”
“One moment,” I hear myself say. My eye has fallen on a strange object tucked inconspicuously behind one of the compasses. “This tiki,” I ask slowly, “where did you get it?”
Constance shrugs. “Picked it up in a flea market ages ago. Why? You want it?”
“No.”
No one would, really. It’s an ugly thing, with disdainful eyes and squat little arms and legs. It regards us all coldly. I take it in my hands. “They say it’s bad luck to take someone else’s tiki. Like stealing their spirit. You should have left this where you found it.”
Constance raises the gun unconsciously. “It isn’t polite to manhandle other people’s things….”
I fling the idol onto the floor between us. The motion is so sudden, so savage in its complete understanding, that Constance stops dead. Her face is gray. Suddenly, for the first time, she looks old. “You don’t understand. Let me explain.”
“You told me yourself, Constance. There are some things you can’t explain. Some things better left hidden. You should have hid it better.”
“What is all this?” Irene asks, looking from one us to the other. Then her gaze falls on the tiki and she draws in her breath with a sharp hiss. Billy hasn’t moved. The four of us are frozen in a tableau, and I think irrelevantly that it would make a great cover for one of those period murder mysteries, Death of a Tiki.
“You know what it is, Irene,” I say finally. “It belonged to a young man named Kevin Johnson, Aunt Emma’s grandson. He bought it on his travels. Only by then he was calling himself Marcus Rhinegold. It came with him on his yacht. And there’s only one way it could have ended up here.”
“We found Calliope at Scilly Island,” Billy adds. “What’s left of her, anyway. I persuaded David to search for the rest here. We both figured it was better this way than a police warrant.”
“Thank you,” says Constance ironically. “Anything else?”
I nod. “We found the gun that killed Wally, and the fire extinguisher you used to brain Rhinegold. Whichever of you, that is. Just like Clue, right? Aunt Constance on the deck with the pistol; Aunt Irene at the fantail with the fire extinguisher…”
“David!” Irene cries, scandalized. “That’s really enough!”
“Put the gun down, Constance,” Billy says calmly. “Put it on the floor.”
Constance looks irresolute, but keeps hold of the rifle. It’s still pointed, seemingly unconsciously, at my solar plexus.
“Going to shoot me, Aunt Constance?” I ask, my voice cracking.
There is a long, ugly pause. Finally, gently, she lays the shotgun on the concrete. “That was for burglars,” she says, seemingly irrelevantly. I’ve never heard that tone in her voice before. She sounds like a very small child.
“I understand,” Billy assures her.
“Murderers!” Grandma screams suddenly. She elbows herself into the space between us, pointing an accusing finger at Irene and Constance. A thin line of spittle drips down her chin. “What’s in here? It’s Teddy, isn’t it? You put his body in here and cemented it over. Tell the truth!”
Billy turns to me, completely bemused. I tap my temple meaningfully.
Irene looks exasperated. “For God’s sake, Maggie, Teddy’s been dead for fifty years! There’s nothing in the boathouse but old junk.”
“Let’s see it all, then!” Grandma has become an unexpected, and deranged, ally. “I know what you’re plotting, the two of you. You want to send me to the Funny Farm. You’ve been taking stuff out of my house and telling me it’s lost. But it’s not lost, is it? It’s in here. Everything. My books, my photographs. All my memories. But you don’t want me to remember. Cutting me off, telling everyone I’m losing my marbles. What have you been feeding me? Drugs, I bet. Stuff that makes me go funny in the head. I’ll never take another bite of your food again, not if I starve to death! Lying bitches. I remember now. Emma with her brains all smashed in. You said it was an accident, but I saw you cleaning up in there! You pulled the pans down to make it look like an accident. And the letter…the letter…”
There is a sudden sharp sound. Aunt Irene has slapped Grandma across the face. Grandma gasps, chokes. It would be hard to say which of them looks more shocked. “That’s enough, Maggie. You just calm down now.” Each word sounds like it’s been strained from a sieve.
But then Grandma sinks into a folding teak chair and begins to cry.
Irene is crying too. “Oh, Mags, I’m so sorry.” She rests herself on the chair arm and pats Grandma consolingly on the shoulder. Constance moves instinctively toward them. Her face is still ashen. “Irene, take Maggie back to her place and sit with her. Go on, right now.”
Aunt Irene turns up a tear-stained face. “But what about you?”
“I’ll be along in just a bit
.”
So might someone on the Titanic have said it, nonchalant yet with grim eyes. But I’m in no mood for pity. “That’s a good idea. I’ll be back to sit with Grandma if Constance…can’t.”
The finality of this makes Irene wince, but she takes Grandma by the hand and pulls her gently toward the door. “Come on, honey, I think there’s still some Brigham’s ice cream in the freezer.”
After they are gone, Constance turns back to us. She is standing on the sloping deck, the band is playing and all the lifeboats have gone. “Let’s go into the shop,” she growls.
She leads the way. This room, so familiar and comfortable, now seems utterly alien. Every object—the leather chairs, old squashy sofa, faded photographs of the Aunts and of the Hurricane of ’54 in their flyspecked frames—seems to have betrayed me. Or did I betray them? Constance seats herself behind the big aluminum desk she salvaged from a purser’s office on the Queen Frederica. The glass case with Grandma’s green ledgers is behind her head. She opens the drawer, takes out a cigarette, lights it. The pack are Tareytons, which haven’t been made since the 1980s, around the same time Constance quit. She takes a deep drag and leans back in her chair. “Sit.”
Until then I didn’t realize we were still standing. Billy and I sit awkwardly. Constance takes the lid off a tin of Danish shortbread and pushes it toward us. “Have a cookie.”
Since there is no proper etiquette for refusing shortbread from a murderess, we each take one. It grates on my dry throat like cardboard.
“Okay,” Constance says, blowing a blue cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, “what do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I say at once.
“I should warn you,” Billy adds, “that you still have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be taken down in evidence…”
I realize with something close to an electric shock that my boyfriend is reading Aunt Constance her Miranda rights. This is actually happening. “Billy!” I cut him off. “Stop that! This isn’t the police station.”
“I’m a police officer.”
“You want to play it that way? Fine. I’m the only other witness, and I’ll deny everything you say till I’m blue. And by the time you get your boys back to Scilly Island, there won’t be anything left but rocks.”
Billy looks stunned, like he’s never really seen me before. “But that’s obstruction of justice!” he protests. “You could go to jail! You could…”
“Kids,” Constance interrupts, bringing the flat of her hand down on the desk. “Don’t fight. I’ll say all I have to say now, and later, if Billy wants, I’ll say it again under oath.”
This silences us both. Constance continues to regard us calmly. But her skin looks pale and mottled under the fluorescent lights. “Where do you want me to begin?”
Suddenly, madly, I think of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. Constance read me the story many times. “Begin at the beginning,” I tell her, “and when you get to the end, stop.”
She chuckles. “Well, okay then. In the beginning, Marcus Rhinegold came to Little Compton.
“We didn’t know who he was, of course. I had no idea he was Kevin Johnson, Emma’s grandson, or any of that. I’m sure Emma didn’t either. If he had any plans of making himself known to her, it’s certain he never had the chance. Even now I don’t really know what he intended. Maybe just to see her again, to have that connection with the family he lost. Who knows?
“But that’s how things were. He hired us to take down the old Armstrong place. We started laying out plastic sheeting, got the caterpillar in. I don’t think I exchanged more than fifty words with him that whole time, and all of it about the house. He never mentioned Emma, or anything else. So you can imagine how surprised we all were when he showed up at the funeral.”
“I was pretty surprised myself,” I admit.
“Well, it makes sense, now. So that’s how things stood.” She pauses, takes a drag from her cigarette. “Then one afternoon Marcus shows up at the shop. Oh, sometime near the end of October. He’s in an absolute sweating panic. It took Irene and me ten minutes just to get him to sit down and tell us what was wrong.
“Well, the long and short of it was that he found Alicia had been making plans of her own. She bought a truckload of fertilizer and was going to blow the Calliope higher than hell, or so Marcus claimed. She’d had enough of their fake marriage, enough of traipsing round the world after a fugitive. We asked a few pertinent questions, and the whole story came out: the Molinari family, Marcus’ snitching to the FBI, all of it. He didn’t tell us he was gay, of course. Didn’t need to. We’d both seen the way he looked at you. So in the end, Alicia got in touch with the Molinaris and they put the hit on Marcus Rhinegold. How did Marcus himself find out about it? Maybe he saw the fertilizer receipts, or caught something unwholesome in the way she looked at him. Either way, he knew his days were numbered. She was going to load the fertilizer into the cargo hold and set a timer—probably a firecracker looped through a cigarette, or some such—and be safely on her way to Miami by the time the show began. So Marcus had to act fast. Which is why he came to us.”
“Not quite,” Billy cuts in. Constance raises an eyebrow. “Oh, I’m sure that’s what he told you. But we spoke to Alicia right before the Molinaris took her. She claimed Marcus made her buy the fertilizer.”
“But…why?”
I see it, too. “A classic frame-up job,” I interject, placing us all in a Micky Spillane pot-boiler. “He wanted to be free of the Molinaris, and of her too. So he hatched this plan to make it appear that Alicia had set him up.”
“But we would know!” Constance objects.
“Sure. But you would have thought she was planning to kill him anyway. Knowing that, would either you or Irene have lifted a finger?”
Against her will, Constance smiles a fraction. “Irene might. I wouldn’t.”
“Clever Marcus,” Billy admits. “But please go on.”
“His request was simple. Could we help him escape before Alicia got him? I said we weren’t much good at smuggling fugitives. He said sure, but we were pretty good at tearing up old yachts. I admitted that was true. His plan was actually brilliant. He would sail the yacht into the middle of the harbor on a foggy night and set off an explosion of some kind, then creep back into port. Right into our boathouse, in fact. Then, while everyone was looking for the wreck, we would quietly and quickly alter the Calliope to the point that nobody looking at her would suspect what she was. Once we finished, Marcus would wait for nightfall and sneak out of the bay again, destination unknown. For all this, Irene and I would receive two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, each. Cash. He had a suitcase full of money, just like in the movies. Well, shit. That was the exact amount your Grandma, God love her, pissed away on the scammers. Things haven’t been too easy since then. So I said sure. After all, why not? It wasn’t illegal. And we were saving a life, in a roundabout sort of way. That was the line your Aunt Irene took.
“The plan went off without a hitch. You remember the fog that Halloween; it was perfect. Marcus picked a fight with Alicia and she went storming off in her Mercedes, just as he hoped. Then he quietly slipped anchor and sailed out into the bay. He waited until the patrol boat spotted him, then ducked into the fog and set off a whole case full of fireworks. Strapped ’em onto a zodiac boat and let it drift behind. Worked like a charm. The patrol heard the explosion, and Marcus turned off all his lights and tracking devices and crept back into port. We were waiting for him at the boathouse. Must’ve been about three in the morning. The boat came out of the fog like a phantom—hell, for a second it was like the old General Kearny had come back from the grave. Or maybe it was just Maggie’s story that night gave me the heebee-jeebies.
“The tricky part came later. You can’t just remake a yacht in a couple of hours, and we had to modify it enough to look convincing. Marcus was no help. He didn’t know
a head from a halyard. So Irene and me had to do it all, taking shifts so that it wouldn’t look too suspicious. Which meant one of us had to be in the shop while the other worked in the boathouse. Pretty soon we realized we couldn’t keep Calliope there. It was just too dangerous. We knew nobody would think to look there at first, not when everyone assumed he’d either gone under or to Cuba. But sooner or later somebody would come by, even you, David. That’s when I remembered about Scilly Island, where old Cousin Sylvanus used to wreck his ships. It was perfect: a sheltered cove inside an island nobody knew about. We could anchor the Calliope there for as long as it took.
“Marcus didn’t like it, not one bit. The idea of holing up in the middle of the bay spooked him, I guess. But I told him it was either that or take his chances on open sea, so he went along in the end. In the meantime, we had to keep stirring the pot. I knew they’d find out about Alicia sooner or later, but it did no harm to cook up a few other extravagant theories, just to distract everybody. That’s why I mentioned the Robie gold. Which, of course, is the goddamn-stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, since it made Mrs. Wally and the whole frigging town turn around and decide to go treasure-hunting. Oh, Irene was mad at me! You should’ve seen her. Neither of us had the heart to tell Marcus. He was already as nervous as a dog with ants up his ass, pacing back and forth in the Calliope. Whenever we came to work on her, he’d follow us around, peering over our shoulders. He was getting desperate. The good news was, we were almost finished. I took down the cabin and pilot house and was just about to rig up a spare jury mast, to make her look more like a sloop. It wouldn’t be pretty, but nobody would know she was the Calliope. By now the town was out looking for her. Well, you know about that. I sent them off in all the wrong directions, and just did slow turns around Scilly Island until it was over.
