“Jesus, huh?” I said, “Well, it makes sense. The guy’s never at home, he’s got issues with his father, like everyone else here tonight.”
“I can just hear her nagging him—‘Follow me, believe in me, heed my words—it’s all about you, isn’t it?”
I laughed, as much at the perfect shrewish squint on her face as for what she said.
She lifted up her little boy. “This is Sam.” Sam looked away. “He’s a little shy.”
I shrugged. “Me, too.”
“It runs in our family. I’m going to have to drink a lot of wine before I try to read anything tonight.”
“Are you embarrassed?”
“No, but I hate reading my stuff aloud. I get so self-conscious. If there’s one person yawning or looking bored or something I just feel, you know—what’s the point, they all hate it. Which is pretty distracting. I guess I get distracted too easily. A drink or two helps. When I’m drunk I don’t care what anyone thinks. I get sort of hostile, in fact. I think stuff like—oh, boy, they thought they were bored before! Wait until they hear this next part!”
“I bet no one is actually bored, though. You’re the only published writer here.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t think three poems in Mulch Magazine really count. That was their final issue, anyway. I think I may have killed it.”
“I’ll put my detective Maddy Clark on the case.”
“Uh, oh. I’m sure I left some telltale clues lying around.”
She laughed. “Gotta have those telltale clues.”
“Anyway—people yawn because they’re tired, not bored. Especially around here. Most of these people worked a ten-hour day today.”
“I shouldn’t let it bother me.”
“I’m thirsty, Mommy,” Sam said.
“We’ll get you some juice, honey.” She turned back to me. “I’m sorry—”
I held up my hands. “It’s okay. I’ll see you later.”
Sam led Jane off toward the kitchen, and I moved deeper into the house. I saw a few people I knew: Mike Henderson and his wife, Cindy, clutching a folded piece of paper tonight, but I could tell she wouldn’t have the nerve to read. I had seen her here before, with that same look of quiet panic on her face.
Alana Trikilis was sketching, sitting in a corner beside Jared Bromley. No sign of Mason Taylor.
Who else? David Trezize, of course, with another chapter from his divorce novel. He took the podium first, after Emily thanked everyone for coming and announced a “found art” show she would be presenting next month.
David’s story was grim. But fortunately, he couldn’t take it any more seriously in his writing than he did in my office. Staggering out of a catastrophically bad marriage and flirting ineptly with girls half his age, the narrator was “as horny as a fourteen-year-old boy, and about as likely to get laid.”
Chris Macy laughed at that one. Kathleen Lomax sat near the window at the back of the room, saving David’s place. I’m sure she was hoping that the next book would be a more cheerful one, detailing their new relationship. She laughed and applauded with everyone else, so David must have buried the incident with his ex-wife’s journal—at least until he turned it into Chapter Twelve.
I didn’t see Jane Stiles again until she was picking her way through the people sitting on Emily’s floor toward the antique lectern. Sam followed a step behind, clutching Jane’s thumb.
Jane’s pants, a torn old pair of blue jeans, were a little too big on her, so was the loose white long-sleeved tee-shirt. It was as if she’d recently lost a lot of weight and hadn’t bothered with a new wardrobe, though she told me at some point later that she’d worn the same sizes since high school. The clothes contrived to look as if they might just fall off her body at any moment. She slouched a little, as if she wanted to disappear into them. It was only when she stretched her back and squared her shoulders as she prepared to read that I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. The four buttons that descended from the crew neck were unbuttoned but once again, it seemed negligent rather than intentionally provocative; she was too busy and distracted to bother with them.
She knew how to wait for people’s attention. There was complete silence in the room when she finally began.
“This story is part of my new book, Poverty Point,” she said. “Spoilers: Don’t feel too happy for this girl. She gets murdered in the next chapter.”
Eleanor could see immediately that it was impossible. The box spring was not going to fit up the stairs. It was a queen size and it was just too big. She had an excellent sense of spatial relations, which generally annoyed people. She could fill grocery bags or moving vans with the same gratuitous perfection, fitting an end table or a box of pancake mix into the last little jigsaw gap that no one cared about but her. It was the same with parking. She had a trivial genius for it that made David crazy. Whenever she tried to help him, he would turn icy and polite. Finally he’d say, “You do it, then” and get out of the car. So she did it, but he never paid attention and he never improved. To learn something from her would be a defeat. Blaming her was better. Anything unpleasant made more sense to David if it was someone’s fault. She thought about those primitive tribes she had read about in Sociology class at college, where the king was celebrated if the crops were good, and killed when the crops were bad. That was David’s kind of world.
“I’m sure we can do this,” he was saying now, squinting up the stairs in the dim hallway light. It was a brilliant, sparkling early November afternoon outside. But not in here. The stuffy, overheated passageway felt like midnight in August. Eleanor yawned. The two moving men shifted from foot to foot awaiting orders.
“It’s not going to fit, David,” she said again.
The chapter ended with Eleanor ducking out for a breath of fresh air, overhearing another crazy argument in the street between hopelessly at-odds family members—this one between a father and daughter. Eleanor sees her own life revealed with a shocking clarity, and makes a snap decision:
She turned and started walking, away from the cramped stairwell and the jammed box spring and her waiting fiancée, into the sharp autumn morning and the bright conspiratorial streets of Boston, never once looking back.
When Jane was done she lifted her son into a hug while she endured the applause. I was standing in the doorway to the front hall. She eased past me.
“I have to get Sam home,” she said. “It’s past his bedtime.”
“That was great.”
“It was awful. Everyone hated it. I knew they would.”
“I liked it, Mommy,” Sam said. “I thought it was funny.”
Jane replaced a stray hair behind her ear. “My fan club,” she said. Then she was into the hall and helping Sam with his coat.
“I’d like to hear more.”
“And I didn’t get to hear any of your poems.”
I was inspired. “Let’s have our own private salon. I could come out to your house, bring wine and dinner, and we could read our stuff.”
She touched my arm. “Sounds great. How about next Friday? Phil has Sam on Fridays.”
“Perfect. Any food I should avoid?”
She stood on tiptoes to kiss my cheek. “I eat everything.” She left me to ponder that comment while she took her son and slipped out the door.
I didn’t get much time to mull it over, though. Chris Macy stepped up to the lectern and started to read.
Chris looked like his father, the blue eyes set far apart, the wide nose, the thin-lipped mouth. He was even starting to lose his hair in the front the same way his father had, with the same high forehead that made him look like a college revolutionary taking over the science building, especially when he put on his wire-rimmed glasses.
The poem was short, and he chanted it in a soft, singsong monotone that made you feel he was infatuated with every word.
“Patricide”
Yeah, that was the title. It stuck in my mind.
I am all the brothers:
I live their lives,
They remain the same:
I am Alyosha who forgives
I am Dmitiri who takes the blame
It’s no use, I still bleed:
I am Ivan, who makes excuses
I am Smerdyakov who does the deed.
I am on fire,
I live the Oresteia
But it’s no accident:
I lure Jocasta with purpose
I slaughter Laius
With intent.
After the reading, I got a beer from Emily’s fridge and moved between the patches of conversation in the little apartment. Chris stood alone, leaning against a teetering bookshelf, drinking from a bottle of Bud light.
“Interesting poem,” I ventured. Plucking a bacon-wrapped scallop off a tray on the nearest table.
“It was the last thing I wrote before my father died.”
I bit, chewed, and swallowed. “Anything since?”
“Nope.”
“Writer’s block?”
“I was always writing for him, I guess. Now I don’t know who to write for.”
“So tell me—how did he feel about your patricide poems?”
“He understood metaphor and symbolism.”
“And that was metaphorical and symbolic, what you read tonight.”
“God, yes. I mean, I just lost my father, Chief Kennis. What are you trying to say?”
I took his arm and led him around the corner to the cramped alcove beside the bathroom door. Someone had pulled out a guitar and people were singing in the living room.
“It’s possible your father was murdered, Chris.”
“It was a hunting accident!”
“I found a sniper’s bullet at the scene. This is shotgun season. And Todd told me you argued about guns all the time. He didn’t think the second amendment applied to automatic weapons and stinger missiles. He was more of an organized militia-with-muskets type of guy. But you were hardcore NRA all the way down the line. He told me you had quite a gun collection. Any sniper rifles in there?”
He stared at me. The crowd in the next room applauded the first song. “Do I need a lawyer with me for the rest of this conversation?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Jesus Christ. I’m like a guy with a model train set, and you’re accusing me of hijacking the Acela! Not to mention the implication that I—that I could have…”
“Sorry. But that was not a friendly poem.”
“I loved my dad, whatever you may think. And I couldn’t have—it takes years to learn how to shoot one of those rifles. You need military training. I collect them! I’m no sniper. They wouldn’t even let me in the army because of my fucking asthma, all right? Why don’t you look for someone who hated my dad and knew how to shoot? That would be a good start. Like the Vietnam sniper with seventy-five verified kills who’s hated my dad’s guts and lived right here on the island and never wears short-sleeved shirts because of all his fucked-up military tattoos! Start with that guy. Not me. I write poems. That’s not a crime in this country, at least not yet.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“You figure it out. You’re the detective. Now unless you’re actually planning to arrest me tonight, I’d like to grab another beer and go have a nice sing-along with my friends.”
He pushed past me and rejoined the group in the living room. It was time for me to go.
I caught Emily’s eye as I pulled on my coat, and lifted an arm. She blew me a kiss. I stepped out of the heat and smoke into the frigid night air and took a deep, grateful breath. Apart from the faint rattle of conversation from inside Emily’s house, the town was silent. Orange Street was deserted. I stamped down the front stairs and headed uphill toward my car. The cold air clamped around my head. My ears were already stinging. But I stood still in the empty street anyway. I heard a distant car engine and the steady rush of the wind, studied the lighted windows in the old clapboard houses. It was the perfect metaphor. After six years, I still felt like an outsider so much of the time, sniffing at the margins, unable to penetrate the affable Yankee cordiality of the people around me.
Important things were always happening just out of my sight, at another table in a restaurant, behind a closing door in the town building, in the swiftly silenced chat in Emily Grimshaw’s front hall. People stopped talking when they saw a cop. It was probably a smart move.
I had no way to unmask the military sniper Chris Macy described, but that didn’t matter, because I had Haden Krakauer. Haden had lived here his whole life. He had to know the guy. And yet…holding the lethal bullet in his hand, admiring the precision of the shooting, he had chosen to keep the shooter’s secret.
Why? What possible reason could he have for doing that?
I was going to find out, and I wasn’t going to wait for morning.
Chapter Eleven
The Sniper
“You shouldn’t have braced that kid at the party,” Haden said.
“It was a reading.”
Haden snorted a laugh. “Did you read him his rights?”
We were sitting in his messy living room in two old armchairs angled in front of the woodstove. The old yacht club race pictures, Audubon prints, burgees, and theater workshop posters from the 1980s (his father had been a prominent local actor) hadn’t been moved in decades. The small house in ’Sconset was a time capsule. The last time I was in here, it was a little more than a year ago—I’d been tossing the place for evidence that Haden was plotting a bomb attack on the Boston Pops concert. Haden didn’t hold a grudge, but I hadn’t been back since.
“I didn’t arrest the kid,” I said.
“You accused him.”
“I know.”
“And that was way out of line.”
“I know.”
“He could file a formal complaint.”
“I know.”
“But he won’t.”
“I know.”
“Which doesn’t change the facts.”
“I know.”
“Right. You know and I know you know I know. So what’ya know?”
“I know you know me, and you know why I did it.”
He took a sip. “You found something.”
I stood and pulled off my coat. It was warm in there, the dense, starchy heat that radiates from hot metal. “I found a sniper shell in the moors. We have an ex-Army sniper living on island who was apparently feuding with the victim, and you never mentioned it to me. Why?”
Haden let a silence pass. A log popped with a gunshot exclamation and a fan of sparks.
“It’s a dead end, Henry.”
“Why don’t you let me decide that?”
“Was that a real question? Because there’s a real answer. David Lattimer would never kill anyone. Even if he still could—and he hasn’t picked up a rifle in more than thirty years.”
“David Lattimer?”
He nodded.
“David Lattimer was an army sniper in Vietnam?”
Haden said nothing, just finished his drink and set the glass on the carpet next to his chair.
“Sorry, but that sounds like one of those crazy Nantucket rumors,” I ventured.
“Look it up. Google the guy. He has a pile of medals stashed away in that house. A Bronze Star, a couple of Silver Stars that I know about. An Army Commendation medal, maybe more.”
“But he wouldn’t shoot anyone?”
“He walked away from all that shit. He’s a pacifist. I mean, really a pacifist, an official one. He belongs to all these organizations—Peace Action, the War Resister’s League, Food not Bombs, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear W
ar.”
“He’s a doctor?”
“Thoracic surgeon, retired. Worked his whole career at Brigham and Women’s. He does a volunteer shift now and then at Cottage Hospital, when they’re jammed up in the summer. But that’s it. His wife was a nurse. That’s how they met.”
I finished my drink. I could feel the day catching up to me. “I still have to talk to him.”
“Okay, but play nice. Lattimer is beloved around here.”
“Why did I never hear all this before?”
“It’s New England, Chief. We don’t talk to strangers and we don’t brag.”
“Jesus Christ. So when do I stop being a stranger?”
He smiled. “Give it thirty years or so, you’ll be fine. Most of the old geezers at the Wharf Rats club will be dead by then.”
“Well, that’s comforting.”
“Just don’t ask Lattimer to bump them off for you. He patches people up now.”
“Very funny.” I yawned. It seemed like a week since I’d stood in the moors watching Andrew Thayer’s house burning. In fact it had been just twelve hours. And I had a feeling that the next twelve were going to feel even longer. The dog years of police work. At this rate I’d be dead before the old codgers at the Wharf Rats club.
***
Searching the moors the next morning, Kyle Donnelly found an iPod nano in the brambles near the sniper’s perch. He had also noticed some tire tracks in the mud nearby, photographed them with his iPhone and e-mailed the pictures to the State Police forensics lab.
“Because you never know,” he said.
“Nice work,” I told him. “Keep it up.”
He shrugged, embarrassed by the praise. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take one more look.”
“Exactly. We should cut that into a quarterboard, and make it our new motto.”
An hour later Haden Krakauer was standing in my office with the playlist printout from the little iPod. He had traced the iTunes account to David Lattimer’s computer.
I studied the playlist. “Talking Heads, Caetano Veloso, Kassav, Johnny Clegg and Savuka, Vampire Weekend, Pink Floyd, Mahotella Queens. The guy’s got interesting taste, anyway.”
Nantucket Grand Page 9
