Besides, my son had some interesting evidence of his own to share. We had enrolled him in the NTL summer theater camp, a cunning racket whereby parents paid for their kids to rehearse and appear in a minor musical production (Newsies, in this case) for which the theater charged top dollar…to the same parents, along with assorted family members. With more than twenty parts for kids and none of the usual Actor’s Equity ringers from New York to pay, the summer show was both a juggernaut money machine and a genuine “Let’s put on our own show” community theater experience. It was hard to argue with that. And we didn’t. Both our kids, along with most of their friends, were involved, either on stage or behind the scenes. I liked it because it got them working together and off their phones for a few hours a day.
Tim had enlisted as a desperation move, so he could spend more time with his fickle girlfriend Debbie Garrison, and wound up working the light board under the tutelage of Jane’s ex-husband. That put him backstage and privy to some sinister-sounding private moments. For instance, that very morning he had witnessed another flare-up between Sebastian Cruz and Refn. Cruz had stopped by the church to pick up the copies of his play, Fundamental Attribution Error, which he had given to Refn when he thought NTL was going to produce it.
“That’s the title?” I asked.
“I guess.”
“It means assuming you’re special because you’re rich,” Carrie piped up.
“So…”
“Or thinking some inner city kid got bad grades because he’s dumb, not because his school is falling down and there’s no chalk and they stopped serving the one decent meal a day the kid ever got.”
“And Sebastian wrote a play about this?”
“He wrote a play about Nantucket! And all the entitled smug awful people here.”
“Like the ones who support NTL.”
“Totally!”
“And imagine them not wanting to put it on.”
“You have to speak truth to power, Dad.”
“Refn obviously didn’t feel that way. And speaking truth to money is a little more difficult, especially around here.”
“That’s basically what Hector’s dad said to Mr. Refn,” Tim said. “Along with how bad this Who Dun It show was, and then Mr. Refn said they’d probably be taking it to Broadway in the fall, or anyway off-Broadway. And Mr. Cruz said—” Tim laughed.
“What? “
“He said…‘How far “off-Broadway” can you be and still call it that? The basement of a homeless shelter on Staten Island?’ And then he said, ‘I’d kill you but no one would know the difference.’ And Refn said, ‘Talk, talk, talk—you’re all talk and no action, just like your plays.’ I guess they’ve been arguing a lot.”
“Wow. So what did—?” I stopped short, finally realizing the obvious.
“Dad? Hello?”
“Sorry.”
“You just thought of something.”
“No, I—”
“Was it about Hector’s dad?”
Think fast. “No, no…it was about—I was thinking I wanted to take a look at the play they actually are doing—Who Dun It. I saw a picture of the writer and Mark Toland on the cover of N Magazine last week. I should talk to them both.”
Since he had last been on-island, and briefly a person of interest in an arson case, Mark Toland had released what looked like was going to be the first of a “tent-pole” series of blockbuster summer movies. Based on a Young Adult trilogy titled Acid Reign and retitled Smog Mutants for international movie markets, the film, set in the required dystopian future, presented a segmented America where all industrial production and the requisite pollution were isolated under a giant dome that straddled several fly-over states. The work was done by slaves who had been genetically engineered, or perhaps simply evolved, to safely breathe tainted air and drink tainted water. The teenaged hero and heroine, Trall and Trayla, escape and find that they have superhuman physical abilities and exponentially increased mental acuity when they finally breathe fresh air. They become curiosities and briefly celebrities before going back home to organize the revolution that takes up the second installment.
The books were fun. Jane introduced me to them. I loved the evocative first sentence: “The sky was on fire again, all last night.” The movie was surprisingly good, too, and my kids were obsessed with it. Mark Toland, a youthful-looking fortyish clotheshorse, was clever and candid and good-looking enough to become a minor star in his own right.
That explained Carrie’s mouth-open, wide-eyed stare—a human shock emoji. “Oh, my God, you’re going to meet Mark Toland?”
“I almost arrested him last year. Jane’s known him since they were kids.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“It gets better. You could have met him last summer. He was right under your nose for weeks! But you had no idea who he was. The only movie he’d made at that point was a lost-love romance called Turns in the Wauwinet Road. He was here scouting locations for a sequel.” And thinking seriously about making his girl-who-got-away fantasy come true with Mike Henderson’s wife, Cindy. But that was nobody’s business—not even mine. A small-town cop keeps a lot of secrets.
I needed one more conversational pivot. “We have to hit Stop & Shop on the way home. Who’s up for a round of Grocery Gumshoes?”
The kids loved that game—studying the purchases of the customers ahead of and behind us and extrapolating the details of their lives by the food on the conveyor belt.
We pulled into the newly expanded (but still inadequate) parking lot of the big store (the most profitable one on the whole East Coast, supposedly), my ominous silence long forgotten. But the questions remained: according to Tim, Cruz had been squabbling with Refn while the cockfight was going on two miles away. An hour later Refn was dead. So who had we arrested at the cockfight? And, more importantly, where was Hector’s father when Refn was being killed?
As of this moment, Sebastian Cruz had no alibi for the crime.
Chapter Three
Misdemeanors
The case was stalking me—into the car with my kids, even into the grocery. I half expected someone to confess in the dairy aisle. In fact, I saw Charlie Boyce and his wife, Sandy, picking over the broccolini, but I gave him a warning squint when he started walking toward me. I shook my head; he nodded. No police business in the produce section. I had to enforce the same rule on myself when I saw Mike Henderson picking up a loaf of Pain D’Avignon bread from the bakery’s rack at the other side of the store. I noticed a couple of Theater Lab board members and visiting film director Mark Toland wandering the over-lit food lanes, chatting on cell phones, comparing pasta sauces. The Stop & Shop had always been an exhausting social club, but today I saw suspects everywhere and every one of them looked guilty.
I was glad for the distraction of our little detective game. There were three people ahead of us in the check-out line. The kids examined the first load—a guy buying hamburger and tofu, kale and frozen French fries. “A vegetarian!” Carrie said. “And he’s having a meat-eater over for dinner.”
“Not necessarily,” Tim said.
“A new container of ketchup? What are the odds?”
“Nice catch,’ I said.
The next shopper was a harried-looking woman with a pile of Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, diet soda, packaged greens, sugarless ice cream bars—and potato chips, sugar-frosted flakes, juice boxes, and lunch meat.
“Single mom,” Tim said. “On a diet. Looks like she has the kids tonight.”
The last customer before us was a middle-aged man wearing a gray suit a little too warm for the weather. He had a box of store-made fried chicken, a package of pre-cooked barbecued ribs, and a box of Entenmann’s chocolate donuts along with the usual staples of milk, bread, eggs, shell noodles and sauce, bananas, and bagged lettuce.
“Single guy?” Tim ventured.
Caroline studied the items as they moved toward the register. “Nope. Married guy. His wife is out of town for the week and he’s getting to eat all his favorite foods.” She turned to me. “It looks like the kind of shopping you used to do when Mom went away.”
The guy turned with a sheepish look. “Good guess, kid.”
“Be sure you clean up the fried chicken crumbs,” I said. “They were my downfall.”
Back in the car heading home, I asked Tim about his sometime girlfriend Debbie Garrison. I hadn’t heard much about her lately, despite their working on Newsies together.
He studied the oncoming traffic. “She’s okay.”
Carrie jumped in. “She thinks he’s a wimp because he’s afraid to go surfing.”
“Shut up.”
“He took a bad wipeout and now he’s scared of the ocean. Plus sharks.”
“There are sharks! There’s tons of sharks! There was one in Welfleet Harbor. I saw the video on YouTube.”
“And there’s this boy, Brandon-something—”
“Brandon Colter.”
“Billy Delavane met him last winter in Costa Rica and invited him to Nantucket for the summer. He wants to go pro. Like—travel around for all the contests and get sponsors and stuff.”
“He’s a moron,” Tim said.
“I think he’s cute.”
I remembered: “Billy mentioned him. Apparently the kid is disappointed in the waves. He should be gone soon. That’s what Billy told me. He may come back in the fall for hurricane season but he wore out his welcome with Billy pretty fast. Billy hates ‘wave snobs’—he’ll surf anything. And the kid was a rotten houseguest—lots of twenty-minute showers, wet laundry everywhere, bad music, skunk weed, fender-benders. And that kid can eat.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tim said. “They can still stay in touch. They Snapchat all the time. He even sexted her.”
Carrie bunched her mouth like she’d just bitten into a mealy peach. “Ugh, gross.”
“Really? Well, Hector sexted you.”
“He did not!”
“Somebody did.”
“It wasn’t Hector.”
“It came from his phone!”
“Somebody stole it.”
“Are you kidding?”
“It’s true! He told me.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Someone sexted you?”
“It was Snapchat—it’s gone.”
“That is so not true,” Tim said. “There’s a million ways to retrieve Snapchat pictures. Everyone knows that.”
I pulled over across from the old red brick mansion built by Jared Coffin in 1829, and abandoned for the Jared Coffin House, now a storied hotel at the top of Broad Street, supposedly because his wife hated the ten-minute walk into town.
I twisted around to face the kids in the backseat. “So you really believe Hector, that he didn’t do it?”
“I know he didn’t,” Carrie said. “It’s just not the kind of thing—he would never…”
“Maybe someone wants to break them up,” Tim offered. “I mean…Carrie’s like the biggest prude ever, she totally dropped Cathy Hannock when she started smoking weed, and everybody knows she’s the world’s biggest fancy-Nancy—”
“The world’s biggest what?”
“You know…she has to be better than everyone else, and—”
“I do not!”
“Fancy Nancy?”
“It’s just something kids say.”
“Yeah—in 1906.”
“They say it now, Dad. Sorry.”
“No, no I like it. Anyway…a sext would break up Carrie and Hector. So…you have to ask—who wants that to happen?”
Carrie sat forward. “You have to figure it out, Dad. You’re the detective.”
“You can do it,” Tim said. “You’re awesome.”
“But you can’t tell anyone about it or you’ll get Hector in trouble.”
“You could get in trouble, too,” I pointed out. “I’ll have to check, but I believe it’s illegal even to have the picture on your phone if you’re underage. The State of Massachusetts considers it child pornography.”
“But I’m a child! So is Hector!”
“I never thought I’d hear you make that claim. Usually, it’s ‘I’m not a child any more.’”
“Well…it’s—I’m not! I mean, in a lot of ways, but…I’m not some…some smut monger because I got a private picture on Snapchat!”
I started to laugh—smut monger? But I clamped it down. “I’ll check this out.”
“You promise?”
“Absolutely. We’ll get to the bottom of it—discreetly.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
I pulled out into the street and started the zigzag from Summer Street to Pine to Darling that took us home. I felt a craven parental relief that Carrie hadn’t offered the obvious defense—that she knew the picture was false from firsthand experience. She really was a fancy-Nancy, thank God—and she’d finally stopped being friends with that creep Cathy Hannock! So it wasn’t all bad news. Still, solving the mystery without making things worse for everyone was going to be a challenge.
And it would have to wait. Back at home, Jane had her own investigation going on, and it connected to my murder case, though you’d never have guessed that from the way it began.
Early in May, she had been cleaning up her grandmother’s grave in the Catholic cemetery. The small decorative juniper tree, planted twenty years before, had grown into an unruly dome of green, spreading beyond the Stiles plot, which itself was starting to sink because her family had been too cheap to lay a cement foundation for the grave. The work was mostly pruning and landscaping, with numerous trips to the dump, hauling branches. I had helped with some of the heavy lifting, regaled by stories of her family history on the island.
Her grandmother had wanted to be buried in the Protestant cemetery across the road, and compromised with a plot close to the fenceline so she could look over and chat with her friends.
On this particular day Jane noticed something odd. The earth around the nearby Tarrant plot had been disturbed. At first she thought the ground crews had just roto-tilled the area before re-sodding it. But that work had to be paid for by the families, and the Tarrants were notoriously cheap, even for Nantucket. Also the earth was dense clay, not the loamy topsoil a roto-tiller would churn up. Someone had excavated Dorothy Tarrant’s grave. But why? Someone knew the answer, or rather two people did: she found a used condom near the Folger family burial plot, ten yards or so away and up a slight rise in the ground: ringside seats for the crime.
“Busy night at the Catholic cemetery,” I said.
Jane nodded. “I didn’t think anything about it until a couple of days later, when I stopped by Becky Harper’s store. Just browsing, I can’t afford her prices. But it was a slow afternoon. We were chatting about various things. Some rich guy had come in and ordered a hundred and twenty miniature gold lightship baskets for a wedding, but he wanted them in two weeks, so that was never going to happen. They sell for around two hundred dollars apiece, so it would have been a twenty-thousand-dollar sale and he offered to pay double. Forty thousand dollars for wedding favors! But she couldn’t make this man grasp the fact she actually had to make the things, one at a time, weaving little gold threads. He stalked out of the store. He was furious. Becky had to laugh—all in a day’s work on crazy island. Anyway…she also mentioned the ring.”
“A Tarrant family heirloom?” I guessed.
“Don’t wreck my story!”
“Yeah, Dad,” Carrie scolded. “Don’t wreck her story.”
“Sorry.”
“It had a lapis lazuli stone. Becky’s mother had worked on it years before, and Becky helped repair it as part of her apprenticeship. The prong had warped, the stone was coming loose and they replaced the whole se
tting with platinum. Twenty years later, Otto Didrickson comes in wanting to sell it.”
“Did she ask how he got it?”
“Yeah. He told her he bought it at one of Raphael Osona’s estate auctions, back in the nineties. He wanted it for an engagement ring but the woman dumped him. That was the story. He always hoped she might change her mind, but she finally died and he had to give up the dream.”
“Otto’s a good storyteller.”
“Well, it’s his job, when you think about it.”
For years Otto Didrikson had led “Ghost Tours” of Nantucket haunted houses, spinning yarns and inventing uncanny supernatural incidents as he led packs of tourists through the winding streets of the town. He had speakers set up in one abandoned pile where supposedly the “whistling carpenter” had lived, and he could key a suitably spooky recording from a remote in his pocket. He had shills he paid to faint at the sight of ghosts who only revealed themselves to “the chosen.”
In his most audacious coup Didrikson took the crowd into the kitchen of a crumbling mansion on Main Street and left them there to “feel the vibrations.” After a few minutes the lady of the house stormed downstairs, cursing and yelling, “Get out of my kitchen! This is trespassing. I’ve told Otto a million times! He can’t just bring people in here willy-nilly! This is my home! I’m calling the police! I’ll have you all arrested! Get out! Before I start swinging my rolling pin!”
When the cowed and humiliated tourists found Otto in the street and told him what happened, he blanched and said, “Oh, my God. You saw Mrs. Starbuck. She’s been dead for twenty years!” It gave the credulous an authentic chill down the spine until word got out and he had to change his act.
His explanation about the Tarrant family ring—unrequited passion foreclosed by death—sounded exactly like his kind of tall tale. Apparently the NSA can now identify anonymous bloggers without tracking servers, tracing URLs or struggling with elaborate encryptions. Instead, they analyze prose styles, and a writer’s habitual sentence construction and word choices give them away every time. I suspect the same is true of narrative, generally: Otto’s brand of morbid melodrama was as definitive as a fingerprint.
Nantucket Counterfeit Page 5
