Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

The scattered knot of men and women was silent, from apprehension and something like respect. This was a moment culled from television time: the snarling bursts of a police radio from one of the assembled cars or vans; the flashing red and blue lights; the tramp of strange feet across the barren lawns. As regular as a heartbeat, the powerful beam of the Sankaty Light swept them all like a scythe. They were mesmerized by the strange familiarity of what they saw, and felt themselves borne along by the cinematic drama, mere flotsam in the tide of official business.

  One of them paced alone, along a narrow strip of sandy roadbed a hundred yards from the scene. Even in the dark, his nervous tension should have screamed a warning to the police officers milling in and out of Margot St. John’s house. But their gaze was focused inward; and when they moved under the eyes of the curiosity-seekers, their majesterial bearing suggested that they were unconscious of observation. Like actors, Paul Winslow thought, who pretend they’re playing to an empty theater.

  He was shuddering like a leaf as he propelled himself up and down the sandy strip. His hands were clenched tightly in his pockets. His lips were bitten raw. Every now and again he glanced at the violated house, its windows blazing and its front door flung wide; and his eyes were like those of an animal glimpsed fleetingly in the headlights’ glare.

  Paul was terrified and wild.

  After the body was driven away, a woman he recognized from Saturday’s dredging at the Easy Street Basin—a lifetime ago, it now seemed—strode down the front path and tossed her purse in a gray Explorer. Then she began to move among the assembled crowd, extending her hand in greeting, a notepad at the ready. She wore half-glasses, and her face was white with exhaustion. She was asking them about Margot, Paul knew. Asking what had happened that night. Whether anyone had heard or seen anything at all.

  He stood, muttering, undecided whether to risk the encounter. In his present state, he couldn’t trust himself. He might break down and sob; he might plead for mercy and salvation. In any event, he would fall into a trap.

  The impulse to run overcame him. He fought it. If he ran, they would be after him like wolves.

  And silently, almost imperceptibly, he began to back away, down the length of Baxter Road, toward the enfolding darkness at the base of Sankaty Light.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Charles Moore’s house in Pocomo looked almost abandoned Monday morning when Peter pulled the Range Rover to a halt before the door. He sat in his car for a moment, staring through the rain at the peeling clapboard facade; then he pulled the keys from the ignition and got out. Hannah had done well for herself. He had always supposed that she would.

  He didn’t bother to mount the front steps or ring the bell. Instead, he followed his instincts toward the water. His first sight of the Quonset huts that housed the labs on the edge of the marsh slowed his progress a little. The love—or some more mercenary emotion—that Hannah had lavished upon them was immediately apparent, and stood in sharp contrast to the neglect endured by the rest of the property’s buildings. Peter concluded from this that Hannah suffered from diminishing resources. She was a fastidious creature, but her funds would go first to her work.

  His footsteps crunched on the gravel path, and to give Hannah warning, he coughed. Another man might have hallooed foolishly, and sent the marsh birds skyward with his antics; but Peter could not shed his breeding, even for the sake of a role.

  “Is someone there?” a low, impatient voice called from the middle hut.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Moore.”

  “Come in, then.”

  He pushed open the door and peered around the edge. A sea of glass-sided cases met his eyes, green water bubbling with plentiful gases, humidity clouding the fettered air. “Hannah?”

  When she thrust her swivel chair away from the lab table, and her long black hair raked across her shoulders, it was as though ten years had never passed.

  Or almost.

  The same taut frame, control screaming from every line of her body. High cheekbones, merciless gray eyes, the long, nervous fingers that were always moving. Even her feet, Peter thought as he glimpsed the strong toes she had shoved into black leather sandals, had changed very little. Only Hannah would wear Italian platforms in the dead of winter, in the middle of a marsh.

  Ten years, however, had pulled the skin more sharply over her bones and had turned her firmly adrift in the doldrums of thirty. She would never again be a luminous ingenue with a face like Paulina Borghese—if indeed she ever had been.

  But she was looking at him now, and so he schooled himself to show nothing like calculation in his eyes. He refused to be taken at a disadvantage.

  “My God. Peter Mason.” She half-rose from her stool. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “Why not? It’s a small island.”

  “And you can avoid whomever you choose. I made certain you’d avoid me. You have for long enough. What brings you here?”

  He smiled, but didn’t move from his position by the doorway. “Several things, in fact. Belated congratulations on your marriage.”

  “Entirely unnecessary.” She dismissed the absent Charles Moore with one hand. “I’m not likely to be married for long. What else?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “About what? Not my marriage, I hope. I may be bored, but I’m not desperate.”

  Peter ignored the taunt, He gestured vaguely around the lab. “Curious about all this. I’d like to know what you’re doing, Hannah, with your brains and your money.”

  “Why?” she asked, suddenly wary. “Why now? You’ve never cared about scallop culture before. Or my brains, come to think of it.”

  “Untrue. I found both quite fascinating when we last knew each other. We each had our passion for growing things at the edge of the sea. You might call it our common ground.”

  “You just wanted to get inside my pants.”

  “Did I?” Peter sounded intrigued, as though the notion of Hannah’s pants, and all they lovingly caressed, had never entered his head. Hannah’s eyes hardened, and she stood, if possible, yet straighter.

  He reached inside his suede bomber jacket and pulled out an envelope. “I received this in the mail a few days ago. I thought you might be able to explain it.”

  She accepted the envelope without a word, and scanned the letter it contained. The faintest suggestion of a smile hovered about her lips. “I see they’ve even provided a thoughtful box at the bottom of the page, designating your contribution. How dreadfully gauche.” She handed the letter back to him.

  “They? I thought I saw your name on the letterhead.”

  “Old stationery.”

  Peter reached into his jacket again and withdrew a small postcard overlaid with slanting script. “Then I suppose you’re not responsible for this.”

  She took it between two fingers, as though it might carry disease. “‘Stop the destructive fertilization of your cranberry bog, Peter Mason, or suffer the consequences.’” She looked up at him, and amusement flooded her face.

  “What I would like to know is, destructive to whom?” Peter said. “Certainly not the cranberries. They’re flourishing. And I don’t even use chemicals. I’m entirely organic.”

  “Nitrogen is nitrogen. You must know that fertilizer runoff is killing the harbor.” Hannah returned the postcard indifferently. “And that, my friend, sounds like a threat.”

  He laughed. “What are you planning to do—chain yourselves to the bog at harvesttime? Slaughter my sheep?”

  “Eviscerate your dog, perhaps. But I told you I’m no longer a member of Save Our Harbor.”

  There was an edge of malice to her voice that Peter didn’t like. But he kept his demeanor purposefully light. “They probably drink cranapple juice at their committee meetings, too. And never consider the irony.”

  Hannah regarded him speculatively. “Are you laughing in the face of terrorism, Mr. Mason?”

  “I don’t take threats very seriously.”

  Her eyes met h
is, and after a moment, she nodded. “I remember. Threats were always useless where you were concerned. I must explain that to Owen Harley. He’s probably responsible.”

  “Owen? I can’t believe he’d write this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know him. He’s too sane.”

  She laughed harshly. “Sane? What a curious word to use. People are never sane about what they really love. Besides—that card could have been written by a pre-adolescent hooked on dime-store novels. That’s just about Owen’s mental age.”

  “You don’t like him. Is that why you quit the harbor group?”

  “I don’t like inefficiency,” Hannah said.

  “Ah.” Peter looked around the lab, saw the gleaming stainless steel, the unclouded glass. Efficiency took money to maintain. “It’s odd, Hannah. That they should pick me to harass. I disturb nobody. I live very quietly in the middle of my farm. I barely go out for a loaf of bread.”

  “Yes.” Hannah leaned against her lab table and folded her arms across her chest. Her gaze was intent, and cruel. “A housekeeper to buy your groceries, a Rafe to run your sheep. Even a policewoman, I understand, to provide companionship. Why should anyone like Owen Harley trouble so solitary and powerful a person as Peter Mason?”

  “Because he enjoys harassing people?”

  “He wants funding, more likely. Owen is a child of the sixties. He has a great passion for community consciousness. Save Our Harbor was inevitable.”

  “But my bog isn’t on the harbor.”

  “It borders Gibbs Pond, however.”

  Peter shrugged.

  “You’re not an idiot, Peter, even if you did waste your time studying history at Princeton,” Hannah said impatiently. “Anything you put into your bog eventually drains into the groundwater that ends in the harbor.”

  “But at least my fertilizer goes to produce an island product. They should attack the owners of all those trophy homes in Shawkemo, who are tearing up the dunes to plant luxurious lawns.”

  “You operate on a much larger scale. Any commercial grower does. I’m sure Bartlett Farms got a similar message.”

  “Maybe they paid up.” Peter secured the letters within his coat. “I suppose I should make a hasty and improvident donation to the Save Our Harbor fund. Or should I call it the Save My Cranberries’ fund?”

  Hannah’s gaze sharpened. Her usual response to the hint of money. “Call it what you like,” she said. “It’ll still be a lost cause.”

  “Really? Is the harbor that bad?”

  “Of course not. Compared to the Chesapeake or even Long Island Sound, it’s in fairly good shape. I was talking about Owen Harley, and his desperate band of legislative revolutionaries. The things he’s advocating—low-cost loans for septic field renovation, voluntary limitations on fertilizer use, and dredging the head of the harbor—are incremental. They mean years of waiting before the harbor rebounds, much less the scallop population. I want a more immediate return on my money.”

  “So why do you bother with all this?” Peter looked perplexed and waved a hand at the bubbling tanks. “I thought you were under contract to provide scallop spawn to the shellfish board.”

  “Oh, them.” She dismissed the shellfish board with a flick of her black hair. “Hurricane Edouard relieved me of that obligation. Forget the spawn, Peter. Mere numbers mean very little if the harbor degradation continues. I’m on the brink of something much more exciting now. Something that could make me a fortune.”

  Her smoky voice was tremulous with passion, and for an instant, he remembered what it had been like, God forgive him, when he had wanted to get into Hannah Moore’s pants. A bare three weeks of exhilarated longing, of blinding desire, ten years ago when he had been rebounding wildly from a broken engagement. And then he had understood what she was.

  “Are you willing to talk about it, Hannah,” he asked her now, “or is it too much of a trade secret?”

  The passion faded, and she averted her eyes. Considered in silence for the space of a few heartbeats, and then looked at him searchingly. “What do you do with your money these days, Peter?”

  At last, he thought, they had come to it. He moved closer to her and caught a faint scent of hyacinth. “Besides throwing it away on lost causes, you mean?”

  Her gray eyes were difficult to read. They had grown hazy with hope and doubt, blunting her habitual calculation. “Let’s go down to the docks,” Hannah said abruptly. “No one will hear us there.”

  Having returned to bed at dawn, Merry overslept that Monday morning. Her rest was fragmented by an overpowering anxiety; fitful dreams, in which something vital and unknown had been left perennially undone, were punctuated by glimpses of Margot St. John’s pleading dead eyes. When at last Merry roused herself, and went groggily in search of coffee, it was already nine o’clock. She abandoned breakfast, and drove purposefully to the Water Street station. The only cure she knew for nightmares was a headlong plunge into work.

  Several reports sat waiting on her desk when she arrived around ten o’clock. She set down her purse and took up the first of these—from Nat Coffin, Clarence’s assistant. Paul Winslow, Merry read, had vanished without a word from his group house on Orange Street. Nat’s highly correct account of his morning acquired a querulous tone at this point; he had badly wanted to talk to Paul. It was Paul’s account number that Nat had found on an ATM slip in Margot St. John’s bedroom.

  A sensation of doom, lingering from her broken night, swept over Merry. Paul’s flight—however it had been occasioned—could only look like the desperate beating of a guilty bird against the bars of its cage. She set the report aside, called Nat at his desk downstairs, and told him to check the airport and ferry terminals for a passenger of Winslow’s description.

  The second report was from Howie Seitz, apologetic where Coffin had been self-righteous. He had yet to locate Matt Bailey’s car.

  Merry turned this news over in her mind, the single sheet of paper idle in her hands. Her late-night foray into the world of Bailey’s fiction had suggested a more novel escape route than his aged VW bug. Bailey’s hero, the trigger-happy Mike Prescott, was in love with a dangerous woman, whose husband had threatened to kill him. When things blew up in his face, Prescott stole an expensive yacht and fled through a storm to the Caribbean.

  She must ask Tim Potts whether Bailey knew how to sail. And send Howie down to the Town Pier, to inquire whether a boat of any description had gone missing. Few vessels were still in the water at this time of year, and a theft would be fairly obvious.

  But first, she owed her grandfather a visit. Somewhere along the moonlit length of Milestone Road, driving slowly behind the ambulance that had borne Margot St. John to the Cottage Hospital morgue, Merry had been visited by revelation. Like Paul—or was it Saul?—on the road to Damascus. Bailey, she was certain, had been involved in a drug sting. Her father, she was equally convinced, had known all about it. And neither would have conducted the operation without a legitimate paper trail. The disappearance of that trail from Bailey’s office and home hardly meant that it had been destroyed. John Folger might be many things at present—a prevaricator, a lone wolf, a coward dressed up in Authority’s clothing—but he remained a stickler for procedure. That was why he had called Merry home, and launched an investigation, when a man of less compunction would have declared Jay’s death an accident.

  If she was correct, then the paper trail still existed. And Tattle Court was the only place her father would trust with his more shameful secrets.

  As she slipped out of the station’s side door, and turned her steps toward her childhood home, Merry hoped against hope she was wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Meredith Abiah.” Her grandfather’s face emerged from the corner of the living room, dappled with shadows thrown out by his reading lamp. Despite the earliness of the hour, the house was dark; a mark of the gloomy weather and the declining year. He closed his book, one forefinger trapped carefully between its pag
es. He was reading Patrick O’Brian, Merry noticed inconsequentially, Fortune of War. Aubrey and Maturin held captive in Boston, and killing Frenchmen with abandon. He must have read it several times already. But what had he told her once? “A man my age has no time for new acquaintance. He’s too busy taking leave of his oldest friends.”

  Where would she be, she thought with heartache, when Ralph was truly gone? Left to make her own peace with a father she no longer knew?

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?” her grandfather asked. “A desire to play hooky?”

  “Oh, Ralph,” she burst out, “everything’s awful.”

  “This wouldn’t have to do with young Peter?”

  “Peter?”

  “Ran into him this morning over at Marine Home. Looking fit, but given to an unwonted taciturnity. Have you two traded words?”

  Peter was home. And he had never called her. Unsettling; worth consideration, at another moment; but perhaps there would be a message on her machine when she got back to her apartment tonight. He could have arrived late—and unlike Sue Morningstar, would be hesitant to wake her. When had the last boat from Hyannis docked?

  “What were you doing at Marine Home?” she asked Ralph.

  “Looking at gas grills.”

  “You prefer charcoal.”

  “But I cannot resist a sale. And everything, as you know, is marked scandalously low the week after Stroll.” He tossed the O’Brian on a table and, both hands braced against the arms of his chair, struggled to his feet. Merry extended a hand involuntarily—to shield herself from his pain, perhaps. “Now tell me why you are here, my dear, with that desolate expression on your face. Has Peter hurt you?”

  “No, Ralph—or at least, not in any way I can’t handle. But I need your help.”

  The white eyebrows furled acutely over his vivid blue eyes. “In what way?”

  “Has Dad brought home any files lately? Say … since Thursday or Friday?”

  “I don’t know. Files?”

  “Big green hanging ones. From the station.”