“Did she buy the ring?”
“No. She felt weird about it. She told him to put it back into one of Osona’s auctions. He didn’t like that much. “Everyone walks out of here in a huff,’ she told me. ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I said, ‘Nothing a sweatshop full of gold-basket-makers in the basement and a willingness to traffic in stolen jewelry wouldn’t fix.’ She gave me a hug, closed up the store and bought me a latte. But I just couldn’t let it end there.”
I smiled. “Of course not.”
“Maddie Clark wouldn’t.”
“She is fictional,” I pointed out.
“Maybe to you.”
“Okay, so you investigated it. What was your first step?”
“I checked with Rafael, went through all his records. He put everything onto a hard drive a few years ago, so it didn’t even take that long.”
“No record of the sale?”
“Nope. Plus he didn’t remember it and neither did Gail, and they remember everything. I saw him at a yard sale one time, he was holding a sterling silver butter knife, practically dancing in place, saying, ‘It’s the missing piece from the Jepson Tiffany service!’ He was talking about a lot he sold fifteen years ago. He’d had to let it go cheap because it was incomplete. Drove him crazy. So he bought the knife and sent it to the people as a gift—he remembered them, too. ”
I recalled the incident of a silver porringer a few years back. Jane was right. “So Otto’s a grave-robber.”
She nodded. “And Rafael did what Becky suggested. He put the ring up for sale at his last auction.”
I watched her attentively, my face studiously blank. I knew this part of the story. But I didn’t want Jane to find out, at least not yet. She went on: “The ring sold after a bidding war. My old pal Mark Toland bought it. But the ring found its way home anyway. He gave it back to the Tarrant sisters. Whoever he was proposing to must have said no. And I have a pretty good idea who that was.”
So did I. So did most of the island, I was willing to bet.
“The Tarrant sisters. I’ve heard of them. They live in a falling-down old house in Quaise. One’s a shut-in and the other walks around town all the time, talking to herself.”
“She should get a Bluetooth unit,’ Carrie offered. “She wouldn’t even have to hook it up. People would think she was on the phone like everyone else.”
Jane laughed. “That’s a pretty good idea. Anyway, they may sound crazy but they’re not. They’re just a little peculiar. I talked to Mark. When Otto showed up, Edith called Rafael and checked the provenance of the sale. She put two and two together, wanted to call the police and have Otto arrested. ‘He desecrated my grandmother’s grave!’ She was furious. But Paula talked her down. She was thrilled to have the ring back; she hated the fact that they buried it in the first place.
“The fact is, they’ve known Otto since he was a baby. ‘He’s never been right but he’s never been bad,’ that’s the way Paula put it. He helps out at the food pantry and coaches Little League, and reads to the old people at the Salt Marsh Center. But he’s always short of money and it turns out he’s hooked on some kind of painkiller. So they got him into a treatment program at the hospital, and all is forgiven.
“I see Paula’s point, by the way. It’s a gorgeous ring. It deserves to be out in the world, and part of someone’s life. It was a lovely gesture…Mark giving it back to them.”
“Yeah.”
“People can change. I never really believed that, but maybe it’s true.”
We were drifting a little, but I had a knack for grasping the thread of a conversation and returning hand over hand to the point, through all the tangles of digression. “So you went back to Prospect Hill? The condom meant someone had seen Otto at work.”
“Right.”
“So did you fingerprint it?”
“Dad!” Carrie said.
“Ugh, no. How would I do that anyway?”
“Haden would have helped you out.”
“Maybe, but it was gone when I got back.”
I pounced: “So you looked for it.”
She shrugged. “Kind of.”
Carrie said “This is gross.”
Tim piped up: “I think it’s cool. Can you get fingerprints off rubber?”
“With the right equipment. But we’re getting off topic here.” I turned back to Jane. “So what was your next move?”
“I canvassed the neighborhood, just like a good cop.”
“And nobody saw anything or heard anything, most of them didn’t want to talk to you, and a good percent took off out the back door when they saw you pull up. Plus dog bites.”
“Speaking from experience there, Chief?”
“I advise plainclothes and a can of mace.”
“Well, I don’t live in a big dangerous city like Los Angeles and neither does Maddie Clark. So the whole tone of the investigation was completely different. For one thing, I know most of the people who live out on Milk Street Extension, Hummock Pond Road and Mt. Vernon Street. The Praegers are off-island, Louise Crawford is in bed by ten every night, and old Bob Barnett has arthritis in both knees. He wouldn’t be poking around the Prospect Hill Cemetery at night.”
“Sounds like you were done before you started.”
“Except for Frieda Bissinger. She was one of my mom’s best friends. She looks right over the graveyard and calls her house ‘High Spirits.’ She’s an insomniac and her old lab has bladder problems. She walks him a couple of times a night.”
I frowned. “If she heard something, wouldn’t she call the police?”
“She doesn’t like the police. She grows a little weed in her backyard.” She put her hand to her mouth. “You didn’t hear that.”
“Didn’t hear what?”
“Thanks.”
“So, what did she say?”
“Well, that’s where it gets interesting. She didn’t see anyone digging up Dot’s grave—Dorothy Tarrant, sorry…But she heard the lovers going at it, loud and clear. The woman called out a name—several times.”
I grinned. “Horst!”
“You’re pretty good at this. You could even do it for a living.”
“Horst Refn.”
“I hear he’s quite the ladies’ man.”
I put the rest of it together. “No one said a word to the police, which means Refn turned down the chance to be a town hero. Why? He had to be blackmailing Otto Didrickson, too.”
“Otto had to sell the ring to pay off Refn. He’d burned his savings on Vicodin. He was desperate. Little did he know he’d be off the hook in a week.”
“He should have waited.”
Jane narrowed her eyes. “Maybe he didn’t.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“I’m just trying to find the truth, Chief.”
Carrie stood and delivered her verdict. “You both have extremely devious minds. But luckily you found jobs where that’s a good thing.”
We dropped the subject after that. I had other concerns.
Perhaps it was my devious nature, or a peerless attention to detail and a cold, insectile thoroughness—my own explanation…but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d all missed something at the murder scene. My eye had snagged on some irksome little detail, caught like a blackberry thorn in my sock. It hadn’t even started to bother me until the middle of the night, and when I stopped by Refn’s house on my way to the station the next morning I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
I didn’t try to figure it out in advance—the mind plays tricks that way. I just slipped under the yellow police tape, let myself in the front door and stood still, looking around.
A short hallway leading into an open plan living room/kitchen, stairs mounting to the second floor on the left. Two spindles per tread, lathe-turned, stained to match the oak railing, ugly re
d-and-brown floral runner flowing down the middle of the steps, tacked to the risers with a series of brass clips. No dents, chips, smudges. No sign of struggle. Everything looked freshly painted, in the same earth tones, coffee-colored walls showing a faint sheen and on the trim, “cottage red,” an HDC-approved color, usually seen on house exteriors. The effect was dark and funereal.
I remembered that Mike Henderson had painted the place a few months ago, through Cindy’s theater connections. He had laughed about the ugly colors when I ran into him at Fast Forward, sipping coffee in the parking lot: “It’s hilarious. How to knock a hundred thousand dollars off the price of a house with a five thousand-dollar paint job.”
I stood, barely breathing, as if I expected some visitation from the spirit world. The shade of Horst Refn, perhaps, touching my shoulder. Otto would have been pleased. But I wasn’t interested in ghosts. I was looking for pattern-disruption. Crime took a physical toll on the environment, beyond the evidence you can pick up from UV light or fluorescein, fingerprint analysis, or gunshot-residue testing. People managed to solve murders in the days before this technology, and even my forensics professor at the Academy had his misgivings about our brave new world of scientific crime scene investigation: “All these gadgets make people lazy.” It was true across the board. How many people remembered a phone number anymore? Everything’s stored in your phone, and God help you if you lose it.
So I was probing for the signs an observant eye could catch unaided. In fact I had noticed something the day before—that little bramble spike—but what was it? Something about the runner? The carpet leading deeper into the house showed the same pattern, burgundy and russet buds and leaves tangled in dark olive vines. I went down on my knees, pushed my fingers through the nap of the rug. Lonnie had said the intruder walked straight through the hall, into the kitchen, and down the basement stairs. His tech guys had ignored this part of the house.
I inched along the rug on my hands and knees, looking for what? Shell casings? A coin or receipt or loose key that might have fallen from a pocket when the perp pulled out a weapon? A footprint, a scuff on the baseboard? But the place had been trampled by the State Police and the floor was clean.
I pushed to my feet in the living room. Big French doors leading out to the flagstone patio flooded the dark-painted room with morning light. The high-ceilinged chamber was calm and tidy, revealing no sign of violence or even human habitation. It held me still, like one of the bubbles in the faux antique windowpanes. I listened to the muted racket of lawnmowers and leaf blowers from various houses around the neighborhood, music from someone’s radio. J. Feld again, telling us we’d just been listening to Mark Knopfler and EmmyLou Harris singing “Beachcombing,” off their All the Road Running album. Good song. Good station—97.7, “True Island Radio.” The slogan irked me. Where would mendacious island radio come from? Martha’s Vineyard, no doubt.
I breathed in. The only smell was sun-warmed fabric and furniture polish. I checked my watch—eight-fifty. I liked to be at work by eight-thirty and I had a meeting scheduled with my detectives for nine. I hated people who showed up late, and I was turning myself into one of them. What was I doing here?
I had given up, had actually turned to leave, when I finally saw it.
A bloodstain had altered the pattern on the armchair next to the couch. One of the muddy scarlet berries was fractionally larger than the others. At first I thought—wine, ink, cranberry juice? I kneeled down for a closer look. I had seen a lot of bloodstains in my career, and there was no mistaking this one. A struggle had taken place in this room. Someone had ending up bleeding. Refn or the killer? A blood test might not give the whole answer, but it would be a start, and I needed one badly that morning.
I stopped by Monica Terwilliger’s lab in the basement to drop off the pillow and took the stairs to the second-floor conference room two at a time. I was more than half an hour late, but no one seemed to care. They were all on their phones. Kyle Donelly was hunting for fantasy football “sleepers,” hoping to draft a backup who could become a regular starter and help get him to the play-offs. Charlie Boyce was burning data, watching YouTube surfing videos. Haden Krakauer was mooning over the Birdforum galleries, looking for photos of Tennessee warblers or Nankeen night herons, and Karen Gifford was catching up on her Instagram feeds.
I had a six-year-old Nokia flip-phone and I used it for phone calls. “Fun’s over.” I walked over to the Keurig. “Phones away.”
After some grumbling and rustling and shifting in the seats, largely covered by the hiss and grumble of the coffeemaker, everyone had their folders in front of them and their pens in hand.
I sat down at the table. “What have we got?”
Chapter Four
Suspects
After a quick recap of the day’s police business—a fender bender in the Stop & Shop parking lot, a kid saved from a fentanyl overdose by a shot of Narcan, and a break in at a retired judge’s house where nothing was stolen, Charlie cleared his throat and addressed the murder.
“You know those cases where there’s, like, two suspects and one of them has a great alibi and the other one signs a confession after fifteen minutes in the box?” Charlie asked.
I didn’t like where he was going. “Yeah…?”
“Well, this case is the opposite of those cases.”
“Okay.”
“Tons of suspects, everybody has a motive, Nobody talking, no one confessing, nobody has an alibi. Maybe they all did it. Like in that Agatha Christie movie.”
“It was a book first. Just for the record.”
He nodded. “Right. A book.”
“Nantucket’s a small town,” Haden said. “You piss off enough people, it complicates things for the constabulary.”
“You mean us.”
“Well—no. Just you, Chief. You’re the boss. We’re your minions. We do what we’re told.”
“I wish.” We sat staring at each other. I glanced around at the others. “Okay—who wants to start?”
“I think you should read the letter,” Kyle said. Nods of agreement around the table.
“It’s in your folder,” Haden added. “First sheet on the top.”
“We can wait,” Karen offered, with a helpful smile. She obviously wasn’t finished with her Instagram contacts.
I pulled out the letter—two typed pages:
Dear Horst:
So the battle is over, and you won. I knew the first moment I saw you that an enemy had come into my life, and the life of the theater I love. I could see the future in a flash. The bold, experimental company that Howard Anderwald founded was going to become cheap and tawdry. The people with talent and vision would be pushed out, as you pushed out Tag Reemer, Joe Stiles, Harry Bowman—and me. I could see you making a beloved institution over in your own image, and the theater that gave us Cabaret, Long Day’s Journey into Night and a new translation of The Lower Depths would eventually be reduced to Neil Simon revivals and cheeseball musicals like Jersey Boys and Good Vibrations.
I understand you, Horst. It wasn’t because you disliked my work that you strived so hard to undermine me behind my back. Just the reverse. Because I had ideas and you didn’t, because I was creative when you weren’t, because I could work hard and you couldn’t, my efforts made you feel bad. My talent proved your lack of it, my energy proved your sloth, my passion proved your indifference to everything but the trappings of success. I’ve kept an extensive record of the abusive way I was treated last season, which would make fascinating reading—in a boardroom or a courtroom, or the local newspaper.
Many more people than you can guess have said to me, “How can this self-important, lazy, inept two-faced huckster be running The Nantucket Theater Lab?” I think I know the answer. It started with Donald Harcourt and continued with Judith Barsch: the corporate take-over of our theater. I almost laughed when you mentioned a nascent HR department. Ou
r sometimes dysfunctional but always loving and caring family has become a soulless corporate entity.
Ironically, much of your despicable behavior would be considered unacceptable in today’s corporate culture, if it was made public. Sexually harassing the people you work for is frowned upon these days. Sticking your hand up an actress’ dress—in front of numerous witnesses? That’s the kind of mistake that could cost you that absurdly overpaid job. Lucky for you, the individual involved refused to press charges. She didn’t want to be connected to you by scandal. I liked the way she put it—“You don’t want to walk through a leper colony. You don’t know who’s going to brush up against you—or what will fall off later.”
Lepers are afflicted, tragic victims of circumstance. You have no one to blame but yourself. When I visited Howard at the Island Home last week, he said, sadly, “I wish I had died before I had to see this, what my island and my theater and the whole country have come to.” But Howard’s death would solve nothing. Yours is the death I pray for. May it be slow and painful and cold. I know you hate the cold. I like to think of you buried by an avalanche, suffocating and freezing in the icy dark.
That’s a comforting image.
I’ll take it with me when I leave.
Sincerely,
Marcia Stoddard
I looked up from the page. “Holy shit.”
Karen slipped her phone into her pocket. “I like the ‘sincerely’.”
“Freezing in the dark?” Haden added. “She came pretty close.”
Kyle socked Charlie on the shoulder. “And you said we had no confession.”
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