by Doug Burgess
“That should’ve been the end of it. But then that prince of all assholes, Wally Turner, takes out his scrubby little boat to investigate. You know his wife put him up to it. She must have told him we were hoarding the Robie gold or some shit, so he comes right up to the island and starts nosing around. Sure enough, he finds the entrance. We were on deck that day, working. It was almost sunset. I didn’t see him come in at first; the sun was in my eyes. Irene had her back turned. But Marcus saw. He was right on the stern, drunk as a loon. Oh, yeah, I left that part out. He’d been hitting the bottle pretty heavily, partly out of boredom and partly from fear. He was on his fifth or sixth sundowner when he saw the My-T-Fine.
“Well, he just freaked out. There’s no other word for it. Maybe if it had been anyone other than Wally, we might’ve talked our way out, but that dumb son of a bitch stands up right on his fantail and screams, “I knew it! I knew it! You’ve got the Robie gold, Constance!”
“‘Wally,’ I called back, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re seeing right now, but there ain’t no Robie gold, and you’d best be getting on back to port and sober up.’
“‘Bullshit!’ he piped. ‘I’m gonna get Chief Dyer and the police and see what they have to say about it!’ And then, if you please, he turns the My-T-Fine around and starts making for home with all sails set.
“Just then, I heard it, a whole series of pops like champagne corks going off. Marcus was standing, legs spread, holding the pistol with both hands. The first two shots went wide; there were plumes of water where they hit. The third just vanished, but I saw Wally slump over.
“For a long minute we did nothing, just stood there watching Wally drift out into open sea. Marcus hadn’t moved; the gun was still in his hand. The Irene screamed. Or it might have been a sob, I can’t be sure. Whatever it was, it woke Marcus out his daze. ‘We’ve got to recover the body,’ he said.
“I asked him just what in the hell he was talking about, and he turned round to look at me. I think he forgot I was there until then. ‘We have to get the body,’ he repeated slowly, as though to a prize idiot, ‘and sink his boat so no one knows he came here.’
“Well ,this was just about enough. I’d listened to this man whine and carry on for a week, but this was the kicker. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘the only thing we, me and Irene, have to do is go get Chief Dyer and tell him Wally’s been murdered.’
‘“But what story are you going to give?’
‘“The truth,’ I told him, ‘always works pretty well, if no other options are available.’
‘“You’re going to turn me in?’ he said, shocked. ‘I could turn you in. We’re all in this together.’
“That’s where he was wrong. Irene and I might not be above taking a hush wrecking job, but this was murder. And the most incredible thing was that he naturally expected we would condone it, as though shooting poor Wally was just another unfortunate but necessary business decision. Well, that’s not how I do business. And I told him so.
“For a long time we just stared at each other. Then I saw his hand come up, almost casually, like he meant to scratch his temple and just forgot he was still holding the pistol. And I remember thinking, Well, Constance, old girl, you’ve cashed in your markers this time. Can you imagine after a lifetime spent staring down whatever dirty business the sea throws at you, getting knocked off by some two-bit fairy mobster? Oh, sorry, David. No offense meant, I’m sure.”
“None taken,” I say, watching the expression in her eyes closely. I strongly suspect that was not an accident, that we are once again being led gently astray.
Yet Billy, like a bloodhound, keeps his nose to the scent. “But how on Earth did you disarm him?” he asks. “Did you throw the fire extinguisher at his head? How could you have closed the distance before he fired?”
She shrugs. “We were standing pretty close. I just clocked him before he could think twice.”
Billy frowns a little. “But the wound was on the back of his head, just behind his right ear. How did you manage to…”
Constance turns anguished eyes to me. There is real pain there, and infinite sorrow.
“Oh, Billy,” I say gently, “can’t you see? It wasn’t Constance that had the fire extinguisher. It was Irene.”
None of us speaks. Constance stares down at her hands, folded on the aluminum desktop. Billy stares at me, open-mouthed. And I look over Constance’s shoulder at the green ledgers, testament to sixty years of friendship. The Laughing Sarahs, loyal to the last.
“I’ll deny that until my dying breath,” Constance whispers.
“There’s no cameras here, Aunt Constance, no microphones. Whatever you choose to tell the police later, you can tell us the truth now.”
She thinks this over for a moment. “Irene didn’t mean to hurt him as bad as she did,” she says at last, her voice thick with emotion. “Just acted instinctively. She saw him raise the gun, knew I was a goner. I think she just wanted to knock him out. But, you know, she’s stronger than she looks. In her day she was Ladies’ Doubles Champion at the Newport Tennis Club three years’ running, with the meanest backhand in the business. So she backhanded him with the extinguisher, and he just fell right over the side. We heard the splash, looked down. But with the Calliope riding so high, the water was fifteen feet below us. Even if we had a grappling hook I doubt we could have reached. Anyway, there wasn’t time. After just a few seconds, Marcus Rhinegold disappeared. All we could do was hope we’d seen the last of him.” She draws a deep, ragged breath, sits a little straighter in her chair. “And if either of you ever repeats a word of that, I’ll throttle you myself. Irene Belcourt is the sweetest, kindest soul on this whole miserable Earth, and I’ll be God-fucking-damned if I’m going to let her spend the remaining years she’s got locked up in a cell.” Constance turns from one of us to the other, nostrils flared.
“What about your remaining years?” I ask.
She shrugs indifferently. “I don’t think I’ll mind prison. Uncle Warren always said you meet a better class of people there. Maybe I’ll get some reading done, finally. When you get down to it there’s not much difference between prison and an old folks’ home, except prison’s less depressing. Gotta be one or the other, right?”
Her voice is casual, but there are dark pools in her eyes. I know she’s thinking of Blue and Petie, her sons. And of the little pre-Revolutionary colonial on Westover Lane that she’s spent forty years restoring, finally excising every trace of three ex-husbands. “Oh, come on, Billy,” I cut in, “Surely there must be some alternative to prison? Home confinement, community service, or something?”
“That’s for shoplifting or peddling a dime bag. This is murder.”
The awful finality of the word makes even Constance cringe.
Billy sits back a bit and steeples his fingers, thinking hard. “When we saw the Calliope,” he says slowly, “she looked like you’d been doing a lot more than modifying. She’s about half-gone.”
“Well, of course,” Aunt Constance answers, surprised. “We couldn’t just leave her there. You can’t imagine what it was like that day, with Irene wailing and saying she was gonna turn herself in, and me trying to talk her down. We stayed out long past dark. In the end, I got her to see sense. Nobody was looking for Marcus Rhinegold anymore, not here anyway. People were moving on. And it was a helluva thing about Wally; I couldn’t be sure if, by hiding Marcus, we weren’t accomplices or accessories of something.”
Billy shrugs. “Actually, I’m not sure either.”
“So, there it was. Wally was gone. Marcus was gone. One corpse followed another out to sea. The only thing left was the Calliope.”
“So you decided to scrap her,” I offer.
“Sure. Not all the way down to the keel—you can’t do that without cranes and heavy equipment. But I figured to take off all the valuable stuff, everything we could carry, then open up the seacocks a
nd let nature do its work. Got a bit of dynamite to hurry things along. Those holes in the side are for when we sink her, so she goes down easy. Not that I’ll get the chance now, of course.” Aunt Constance flicks her eyes at Billy.
I look over at him too. “What do you think, Chief?”
He considers before replying. His face is still stern, coldly judicial. “I was just thinking how much fun I’d have telling the FBI that their golden snitch was knocked off by an eighty-year-old ex-Ladies Doubles Champion.”
“No,” Constance protests, half-rising out of her chair, “I told you, I don’t want…”
“You know what this means, right? I’ll have to bring them back in, and the Staties, too. It’ll be a frigging holiday. Shit, with the Calliope still out there I’ll prob’ly have to call in the Coast Guard. And all the camera crews. This’ll light up the networks for weeks.”
“You’ll be famous,” I say sardonically.
His mouth gets even thinner. “Yeah, cuz that’s just what I want.”
“You’ll damn well tell them I did it,” Constance insists, throwing herself into the cannon’s mouth. “That’s the deal. It was me with that fire extinguisher.”
“And you that single-handedly scrapped the Calliope?”
“It wouldn’t be hard to believe,” I mutter. “Honestly, Billy, what would you even charge them with? Aiding a fugitive? He wasn’t a fugitive from justice, just his wife and the Molinaris. Murder? That was acting in defense of another; no court in the world would convict.”
Billy shrugs. “Seems kinda weird there could be two dead bodies and a half-sunk yacht, and nobody’s responsible for anything.”
“Sure they are,” I answer back. “One man, anyway. The same man who brought all this trouble from the beginning: Marcus Rhinegold. It was him, Billy. Nothing ever happened in Little Compton, not until he showed up. Now look. He was the one that killed Wally, and I say he got the end that he deserved. Let the dead bury the dead.”
He considers this for a long time. For the life of me, I don’t know whether I’m talking to Billy or Chief of Police Dyer. “Come on,” I press, “it’s Christmas morning. I’ll buy you a coffee and a Boston Crème donut and you can come crash at Grandma’s place. We can decide whether to put my aunts in jail after breakfast.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake…” Against his will, he starts laughing. The tension breaks; even Constance settles a bit more easily in her chair. “Okay, okay,” he says, throwing his hands in the air, “I’m too frigging tired, I don’t want to write all this up, and I wouldn’t know where to begin.” He turns to Constance. “Can you have that boat gone by New Year’s?”
“It’ll be fish food before the week is out,” she promises eagerly.
“Okay.” He heaves himself up. “I guess that’s it, then.”
Not very dramatic, perhaps. Not how Hercule Poirot would have done it. ‘Mesdames et messieurs, I have the honor to retire from this case...’ But this is Little Compton, not the Orient Express. It gets the job done.
“Thanks,” Constance says dryly, but I can tell she means it.
We leave her still sitting at her desk, staring with a slight frown at the pictures of Irene, Maggie, Emma, and herself. She seems lost in thought, and very far away. I have a feeling she’ll be there for some time.
Billy’s truck is where we left it, blissfully unaware of the momentous happenings since we saw it last. I hug my knees in front of the heating vent, marveling that so much could have gone down in just a few hours. Sometimes the Earth moves slowly, other times fast, and once in a while it jolts right out from under your feet and lands you on your ass. Billy is thinking the same. “This is not where I expected the day to go,” he says quietly.
“It might end better than you think.”
He gives me a look that is at the same time hopeful and a little nervous. “Really?”
“Wait and see. It’s Christmas, after all.”
We drive for a long time in silence. I’m trying to imagine the thoughts going through his head. Some of them probably involve Debbie, an empty house covered in her Christmas decorations. Most, though, will be back on the deck of the Calliope, endlessly replaying the scene where Marcus shoots, turns, raises his gun, and is swatted by Aunt Irene. Billy will be wondering if he just made the greatest mistake of his career, throwing away the chance to humiliate the FBI and make his reputation among his brother officers. There aren’t many opportunities like this one—certainly not in Little Compton. He knows he has just consigned himself to a lifetime of writing parking tickets and carrying drunks back home from the Boy and Lobster. Maybe, too, he’s wondering what it means to be attracted to me, and whether he can go where that question leads. Maybe he’s already decided this is more than he can handle, and just doesn’t know how to tell me yet. If so, I can’t blame him. He’s given me back my aunts; that’s a fair trade.
While he’s putting all this together, on the passenger side I’m readying my armor, my all-forgiving smile when he says this just isn’t going to work, my sympathetic notes of understanding for the enormity of what he is being asked—told—to face. “Of course,” I’ll say, “this was never fair to you, Billy. I still want to be friends. Please believe that.” I turn my face toward the window as if I’m staring at the Christmas lights. Never letting him see that losing him this time will be infinitely harder than the last.
Finally, it is Billy who breaks the silence, and the suddenness of his voice in the truck cabin almost makes me cringe. “Hey,” he says, very seriously, “are you sure that Dunkin Donuts is open on Christmas?”
Chapter Sixteen
It won’t be that easy, naturally. Three times that morning I nearly have to wrench the steering wheel out of Billy’s hands to keep him from hot-footing to Tiverton and giving up the whole show. He’s worried about his job, of going to prison, but mostly of what would happen if some “damn fool”—as he put it—comes upon the Aunts while they are administering last rites to the Calliope. I tell him he’s absolutely right, and the only thing for it is to give them a police guard for the task. Billy doesn’t like that at all. But he comes to Grandma’s house anyway and helps me lay out the plates for Christmas breakfast.
What is the etiquette for a cop, a boat thief, and a murderess sitting down to flapjacks? We are in uncharted waters here. If this were a mystery novel of the old school, the problem would solve itself. I can see it now: Billy gathers us all into the parlor, Irene cries out “You can’t prove a thing!” whereupon Billy produces a damning note that Irene claims never to have seen but which, incredibly, is written in her own hand. Irene collapses, police stream through the doors, curtain falls.
Reality, I discover, is less dramatic and more surreal. The Aunts show up at nine precisely with Grandma in tow, exactly as if we hadn’t all met in the boathouse a few hours before. Irene has even put on her special evergreen jumper with light-up ornaments. Constance opts for somber dark blue trousers and a grey cardigan. “Merry Christmas!” they both cry, pecking me on the cheek. Billy gets a warm handshake from Constance and a hug from Irene. I should have known. Naturally, they’ll pretend nothing happened; it’s the New England way. Folks here go right on moving in their established grooves—knock them out and they may wobble for a bit, but they’ll fall back in as soon as they can.
The only sign of anything untoward is that both women are elaborately polite. Constance helps me in the kitchen, while Irene and Billy take turns trying to engage Grandma in something resembling normal conversation. Finally Irene switches on A Christmas Story marathon. Grandma sits happily in front of the television and tunes the rest of us out. She’ll watch the same movie loop again and again and be just as delighted each time. I feel a pang of guilt—shouldn’t let her watch so much TV, it’ll rot her brain—which on further consideration seems darkly funny.
Breakfast is a strange affair. While Grandma giggles in the front room, the rest of us pas
s around bundt cake and tell lame jokes, exchange stale gossip, and take turns going to “check on Maggie.” Constance asks Billy an intelligent question about inshore smuggling, and seems genuinely interested by the answer. Irene fusses over me and tells me I’m getting too thin. But they both cast furtive glances Billy’s way like small children afraid of being scolded. It’s a relief when Mariana arrives from Central Falls in the afternoon, clad in a red sweater with a sack full of presents like some belated gender-confused Santa Nicolá. Grandma gets a stack of coloring books and a five-pound brick of Hershey’s chocolate. “At that age, what’s the harm?” Mariana asks unanswerably. I receive a toolkit, which I’m sure is a regift from one of Mariana’s many cousins, but is much appreciated all the same. Both Aunts get a freshly baked Barbadian rum cake with enough moonshine to light itself. Billy helps me plow through the toolkit and explains each item. He is patient but not condescending. Constance’s gift to me is an electric razor, complete with attachments. “Get used to that first, and later on you can use a blade,” she says gruffly. She cuts off my thanks with a curt wave and suddenly becomes very interested in the portrait over the fireplace.
Irene pads over and presses something into my hand. “Meant to give this to you ages ago,” she tells me. I look down into my palm, and gasp. It’s a gold pocketwatch with a hinged lid and a long glittering chain. “Wow, Aunt Irene, it’s beautiful.”
“In good Rhode Island families,” she says with dignity, “it was customary for fathers to present their sons with a watch like that when they reached maturity. Your daddy should’ve done it, by rights but…well, anyway, if Maggie was herself, she’d want it done, too. But I can’t take credit. Look inside.”
I pry open the lid. The watch is a Waterbury, at least a century old, but the inscription is freshly cut. For David Hazard, it reads, from his loving Aunt Emma.
“Oh.” Traitorous tears well up in my eyes.
