Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  Chapter Three

  It would have been nice, Merry thought callously, if Jay Santorski had died a day earlier. Then she could have gone straight back to Nantucket after her depositions in Boston, and never have known the depth of dislike it was possible to feel for Peter’s mother. It was hardly Julia Mason’s fault, of course, that a dead scalloper had divided Merry from Peter; but Julia exulted so much in the sudden constraint between them that Merry might almost have suspected her of murder.

  “How very unfortunate,” Julia said with grateful insincerity when Merry ventured downstairs to explain that she was leaving. “And must you go, too, Peter? It hardly seems necessary.”

  “No,” he said briefly, “I’m going on to New York. I’ve made too many commitments to cancel the trip now.”

  “Commitments?” Merry’s voice was cool and skeptical. “Or reservations?”

  “Then we’ll have you all to ourselves for a few days!” Julia exclaimed brightly. “Such fun! It will be like old times!”

  And which old times were those? Merry wondered. When Julia’s favorite son, Rusty, was destroying his father’s business and seducing Peter’s ex-fiancée, she of the hydrangeatubbed tent poles and angelic white organza? Or the time when Rusty had fled under indictment to Brazil? Or when he was finally murdered, and Peter suspected of the crime?

  But Julia seemed entirely free of unpleasant memories. The past had cast a golden haze over even the traitorous Alison Miller, who would never have passed up New York for the claims of duty. It was Alison this, and Alison that, for the entire hour remaining to Merry in the bosom of her future in-laws; and it was with very little regret that she shook off the elegant dust of Round Hill, and headed toward La Guardia.

  It was a little before noon, but the sky was so lowering it might have been dusk. Gusts of wind scattered handfuls of rain across the windshield. The rawness of the day had invaded the car’s interior, where a chill silence predominated, rife with uncomfortable thoughts. Merry kept her eyes fixed on the lower rim of the passenger side mirror, studying the red-painted flank of Peter’s Range Rover as though it were the latest Grisham thriller, while Peter scowled at the highway and doggedly tailgated carpooling housewives.

  Was she resisting marriage, as he claimed? Could she possibly prefer a life of dutiful service on the force, to a life with Peter Mason?

  Her mind shied away from that gulf, and attempted an easier leap.

  Was she thrilled to be free of Peter’s mother? Yes. Would she have left Greenwich if her father hadn’t called? No. Should she have argued the Chief out of ruining her vacation?

  Here she balked. There were only unpleasant answers, after all. Peter had touched bone when he said she was desperate for her father’s good opinion. It was true.

  She could never say how much John Folger respected or valued her. At most, Merry thought, she was a convenient substitute for the son her father had lost to Viet Nam. Billy was frozen forever in the amber of death, an eighteen-year-old flush with promise and sacrifice. She might step into her brother’s job, but never into his place in her father’s heart.

  Work, then, had become her touchstone. She had fought for the right to handle every one of her cases; and when she successfully closed them, she won something more than justice—she had proof of her father’s good opinion clutched tightly in her hands.

  John Folger had almost assigned her first homicide investigation to Matt Bailey. If he had, Merry might never have met Peter. It was his brother, Rusty, who had lain drowned in the Mason Farms cranberry bog four years ago, as much a burden in death as he had been in life. Then the following year, her childhood friend Del Duarte had been brutally murdered. The Chief actually assigned that one to Bailey, and put Merry on administrative leave. She had defied him and found the killer. It was only natural, Merry thought, that John Folger had asked her to investigate the death of Elizabeth Osborne last spring. She had spent years destroying her father’s prejudices and defenses, his fear of favoritism, and his desire to protect.

  And then her luck had run out.

  Afterward, when the brutal reckoning came fully home, and her sleep was riddled with nightmares, Merry had almost resigned from the force. Why she continued to report for work, and handle the endless stream of minor thefts, petty larcenies, and domestic disputes that made up the island’s caseload—the errand-running, as Peter put it—was a question she was afraid to ask. It might broach the subject of failure.

  John Folger had every reason to criticize her roundly for the Osborne fiasco; he might even have requested her badge. That he did neither, she thought, was a testament to his love for his daughter.

  It said nothing whatsoever about his professional opinion of her.

  Merry shifted her gaze from the mirror rim to Peter’s profile. His brows were knit and his jaw was clenched. A muscle twitched along his cheekbone like a second heartbeat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “I’m sorry, too.” His eyes never left the road. “But neither of us is sorry enough to back down. There are choices, Merry, and you’ve made one of them.”

  “Peter—”

  “You realize you’re never going to get over there this afternoon, don’t you?”

  “Christmas Stroll.” Merry uttered the words like an imprecation. She had completely forgotten what the holiday weekend would mean for travel. She had intended to catch the New York—Boston shuttle, and connect to a commuter flight for Nantucket—but the little prop planes seated only ten people. They would be booked solid for the Stroll.

  “Never mind that,” Peter said brutally. “There’s a nor’easter coming. I can barely keep the car on the road.”

  And indeed, the heavy recreational vehicle was shuddering in the crosswind sweeping the highway. As she watched, the steering wheel jumped in Peter’s hands.

  “If I can’t fly standby,” Merry attempted, “I can always rent a car at Logan and drive to Hyannis. Then I could catch the ferry.”

  “Good. You can sail by the scene of the crime. I know how you love to reenact these things.”

  “Don’t be petty, Peter. It doesn’t suit you.”

  He sighed, looked harassed, and then braked suddenly to avoid a crawling truck. “I can’t help it, Merry. I’ve been worried about you for months. And now you’re running away again.”

  “Let’s just… not talk about it, okay?” Her face ached with the effort of looking normal.

  “If I could move you forcibly off-island, I would. Maybe then you’d put your nightmares behind you.”

  “You would never leave Nantucket, Peter. It’s your home.”

  “You are my home, love. Everything else is just so much landscape.”

  It was almost a plea for peace between them.

  “I wish that I could have stayed,” she said, and felt the force of her lie like an inner violence. “But, Peter—whatever you think of my father—Dad would never have asked me to come back if it weren’t very serious. We could be talking about heroin.”

  “I can’t believe heroin has come to Nantucket.”

  “Why? Are we somehow immune?”

  “Heroin is just so—”

  “Deadly,” Merry supplied. “I know.”

  “So glamorous,” he countered. “It’s too urban, too New York. Supermodels and rock stars. It’s as though the dealers have confused Nantucket with the Vineyard.”

  “Or New Bedford.” She glanced sideways, and saw that the shot had gone home. They had driven through New Bedford only the day before. Merry’s trip down memory lane, on the way to Peter’s.

  It was the place where she had spent her first tour out of the police academy, a once-prosperous seaport brought low by factory closings and the scarcity offish. Merry had taken Peter to her old neighborhood, where both she and his foreman, Rafe da Silva, had once lived. It was a working-class street, filled with the families of Portuguese fishermen and newer immigrants from Southeast Asia, more derelict now than it had been eight years ago. On one corn
er was a Vietnamese restaurant; on the other stood Martha Ligueira’s Laundry. They’d had spring rolls at a dimly lit table and then crossed the street to look for Martha.

  The small, strained woman had remembered Merry, and her face lost some of its sadness when the detective walked through the door. Martha threw her arms wide and enveloped Merry in a rocking hug, with exclamations of surprise and joy. She wiped her hand on her cardigan before shaking Peter’s, and assessed him thoroughly from shrewd blue eyes. Merry inquired after her grandchildren. Martha asked after Rafe. And then they began to swap memories and names.

  Peter had listened at first, a polite smile on his face, but then the tide of reminiscence had cast him adrift. He wandered idly about the laundry room amid the vibration of the rolling dryers, the shuddering gait of an unbalanced washer. And came to rest before a bulletin board overflowing with newsprint.

  Merry joined him there, her hand sliding under his elbow. It was then she saw that every column was an obituary.

  The deaths they detailed had an eerie sameness—a man or woman in the mid-thirties, gone “suddenly,” or “after a long illness.” As she scanned the boardful of faces, Merry felt the hair rise slowly along the back of her neck. She had known at least half of these people.

  “It’s the needles,” Martha said quietly at her side. “There’s so many of them gone now, you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Those are the ‘sudden’ ones. ‘After a long illness’ means AIDS. But it’s the needle that gets them all, in the end.”

  Merry and Peter hadn’t lingered very long with Martha after that. She offered coffee, and they refused, pleading traffic and the hours of travel still ahead. There was little of comfort they could tell her, after all; Martha was fixed in the midst of a battle zone, with her grandchildren growing up beside her. Merry had uttered false promises of a longer visit, sometime soon, and offered her home if Martha ever came to the island—

  Peter touched her knee lightly now, the first sign of affection he had shown in hours. “Nantucket is hardly New Bedford. I can’t help thinking that drugs are a summer-people problem. Something to do with free time and boredom.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong. When we roll up a drug network—and the Nantucket force manages to bust somebody nearly every year—it’s the same sort of people over and over again. Islanders. The ones who have no choice but to stay, while the wealthy and privileged follow the sun.” She said this carefully—Peter himself was wealthy and privileged, and might hear her words as criticism. “The only difference between our economy and New Bedford’s, really, is tourism. It keeps us swimming in revenue for four months of the year. But the other eight, when jobs are scarce and money’s tight, people can give way to despair.”

  “You’ve never found a heroin ring on-island before,” he objected.

  “No. It’s usually pot or cocaine. This is ten times worse. Which is why I’m going home.”

  “Oh, is that why?” Peter downshifted for the off-ramp, his mouth set in a thin line. “What a relief. I thought it was to win your father’s good opinion. It’ll always mean more to you than mine.”

  One of the things Merry found most annoying about Peter, she realized as she battled her way down the rain-lashed belly of Route 6, was that his predictions had a nasty way of coming true. By the time she had caught the shuttle into Boston, learned she would have to wait five hours to fly standby to Nantucket, rented a car, and sped down Highway 93, it was well past three o’clock. The two forty-five Steamship Authority ferry was a distant memory. The nor’easter had settled in for the weekend over New England. Her rental car shook in the frigid gusts of rain, traffic crawled, and whole hours ticked by without a significant change in the view beyond her streaming windshield.

  It was now five P.M., and she was in danger of missing the high-speed Hy-Line boat at five-thirty. (These usually ran exclusively during the summer season, but had been pulled back into service for the Christmas Stroll weekend.) Merry screamed like a maniac at the sea of automobiles clogging the road before her, cut right onto the shoulder, and barreled toward the Hyannis exit. Just watch anybody try to stop her. She had her badge, and for once she was prepared to abuse it.

  She arrived at the Hyannis Airport with half an hour to spare—just time enough to return the rental car and grab a taxi for the Hy-Line ferry. But when her taxi pulled up to the Ocean Street dock, Merry discovered that the high-speed boat was canceled. So was every other type of surface conveyance between the mainland and Nantucket. Peter’s nor’easter buffeted the Cape and islands with such fury that thousands of hopeful Christmas Strollers were stranded on the docks. Captain Ted Moran’s M/V Eagle, the ferry that discovered Jay Santorski’s corpse, had been the last boat of the day.

  Merry did not even bother to tear her hair or curse aloud, kick stray dogs or mutter darkly at complete strangers. The day’s bad luck was so firmly entrenched that all form of protest seemed futile. She merely picked up her bag and stood in line with the hordes awaiting the next available taxi, intent upon the airport and a standby seat, keenly aware that somewhere Peter was probably laughing.

  There were times, John Folger thought, when he hated what he did for a living—when the necessity of simply going on, headfirst into the unpleasantness of other people’s lives, was too much for his soul to bear. Right now he wanted nothing more than to be strapped into the passenger seat of an airplane, headed into daylight, a magazine in his lap and someone else at the controls.

  His worst days had followed hard on Anne Folger’s suicide, over twenty years ago. There had been months of remoteness, of self-loathing and recrimination. A turning away from the depth of his own pain. A denial of it, even, and of all that Anne had meant. What he felt now was nothing like the desperate wounding of his wife’s taking off; but the edge of something similar—a chill hard light just beyond the range of sight—sat heavily on his heart.

  Such times were few and far between, of course. John Folger was a fortunate man, and wise enough to recognize it. If he carried any scar from Anne’s death, it was perhaps a desire to run from what was terrible.

  He felt it aching now as he studied the mess on Matt Bailey’s desk.

  It was after five o’clock, and the stormy December dusk had already fallen around the town. It seeped into Bailey’s office like smoke. On the verge of lighting the desk lamp, John Folger lingered a moment in the rain-filled twilight, staring through the streaming station window. The nor’easter was lifting elm branches, brightly strung with lights, and flinging them to the cobblestones; Christmas trees bravely stationed along the length of Main Street were swaying in the gale. The brick sidewalks were unnaturally bereft of holiday crowds, and in the back of his mind, John wondered how much of a hit the shopkeepers were taking. The few Strollers who had arrived before the storm’s full fury were now huddled head-down against the sleet pelting the island. Their clothes threw bright splashes of red and green and blue against the dark canvas of the street. Despite the wind, John caught a burst of laughter. For these people, even the storm was festive. They knew they were proof against it, and that a roaring fire awaited them at bedtime. The morning would probably dawn a little brighter; and if it didn’t—well, rain was always an excuse to go shopping. They had no unanswered questions or nagging doubts, no difficult choices beyond the restaurant menu.

  The wind howled like a cat at the second-story windows. The old brick police station shuddered once and subsided.

  John snapped on the light. It fell, sharp and uncompromising, on the welter of papers. All our sins remembered, he thought. All our faults revealed. What business did he have throwing Merry into it? Why not leave his daughter comfortably in Peter Mason’s care, high and dry on the mainland? Cowardice. That denial, again. The weakness of running away.

  “I’m sorry, Anne,” he muttered, and began to sort through Bailey’s trash.

  Chapter Four

  At nine o’clock that evening, Merry’s Island Air fligh
t out of Hyannis finally touched down in Tom Nevers field. She crawled from the body of the plane, bruised and thankful, and sank in a heap on the wet tarmac. Her legs were completely nerveless, her entire body trembled. A fellow passenger kissed the ground; another stood over a garbage can and vomited.

  For Merry, the twenty-minute flight had been nothing short of an encounter with her God. The plane had bucked, plummeted, shuddered, and careened through the hurricane-force winds, a fragile bird blown wildly off course, and even seat belts had seemed futile. What Merry wanted was a full body harness.

  For once, she decided, Island Air’s lack of in-flight catering was not such a bad thing. Rather than dulling the tide of fear washing through the cabin, alcohol would only have inflamed hysteria—and tonight, hysteria had needed no help. The man directly behind Merry had burst into a frantic pleading somewhere over the Sound, promising never to cheat on his wife again; and his wife, one seat to the rear, had not been amused. All Merry could think was that Matt Bailey was somehow responsible for her imminent death, and that she would never forgive him; and that if she died, Peter would never forgive himself. The latter thought should have comforted her. Instead, it made her feel guilty.

  So she made a bargain with God. If she landed safely on Nantucket, she would never leave Peter without a backward glance or a kind word.

  In fact, she would never leave Peter again.

  “Jay’s mom says he didn’t use drugs.”

  Patrolman Howie Seitz had actually met Merry’s plane, and after dragging her to his car, had produced a thermos filled with hot buttered rum and ordered her to drink it. He was sitting now in her living room, a box of takeout balanced on one knee.

  “Jay?” Merry looked up from the case file Howie had brought over from the station, her black brows furrowing. “So we’re on a first-name basis with the deceased.”