A Case of Vineyard Poison

by Philip R. Craig

  “I’m taking him and his friend fishing. You want to come along?”

  “I don’t have time to fish. I have to work for a living. Besides, Quinn and I don’t hit it off too well.”

  “You barely know each other. It would be a good change for you to pursue the wily bluefish instead of the local perps.”

  “Quinn’s a perp as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You’re getting an awfully thin skin in your declining years.”

  The chief climbed into the cruiser that was parked across from the coffee shop.

  “It’s not a thin skin. It’s a Quinn skin,” he said. “I’ve got a thin skin for Quinn. Nobody else.”

  “Quinn just doesn’t trust people in authority. That’s why he’s a good reporter.”

  “Hell, I don’t trust them/myself. But then, I don’t trust reporters either.”

  “In that case, it sure makes me proud to know that you trust me.”

  “Stand back from the window,” said the chief. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  I stood back and the chief backed out of his parking place, arched a brow, and drove away.

  I walked over to the dock and watched the local fishing boats come in to unload their customers. From the looks of their catches, they were nailing the blues offshore. I went fishing offshore in the Shirley J. sometimes, but when I did it was a long day, since catboats are not famous for their speed. As far as I knew, I was the only offshore fisherman who still used a sailboat. I didn’t think the idea would catch on among the commercial guys.

  I walked back up past the Navigator Room, the restaurant with Edgartown’s best harbor view and some of its best food, hooked a left on South Water Street, and went back to Collins Beach.

  The cocktails were still flowing at the Reading Room, but I still hadn’t gotten my invitation to join in, so I climbed into the old Land Cruiser and headed home.

  The narrow streets of Edgartown were already mid-season busy. The white houses, and the gray-shingled houses, and the green lawns and bright flowers were elegant as always. The June People were on the sidewalks, happy to be in so lovely a place on such a fine, soft, summer evening.

  The A & P traffic jam was in full bloom, but I was in a good mood and survived it with barely a curse. I popped out on its far side and was pleased to see a long line, which I was not in, backed up in the opposite direction. It’s nice to not be in someone else’s line.

  I stopped at the head of my long, sandy driveway and got my mail, then drove on down toward my house. About two thirds of the way down, I saw the moped lying in front of me. I stopped and got out. Beyond the moped, there were footprints in the sand of the driveway. I followed them. They wandered down toward my house. After a hundred yards, the footprints veered off into the trees. I found the girl there. She had long brown hair, and I recognized her as being the moped rider I’d seen earlier on the highway. She smelled of vomit and diarrhea, and there were flecks of foam at her mouth. I could find no pulse at her neck or wrist. Her eyes were wide and staring. I left her there and jogged down to the house and called 911.

  Finding the girl was the very bad thing that happened.

  — 4 —

  I was back at the Land Cruiser when the first wailing patrol car arrived from Edgartown. Behind it was an ambulance with its flashing lights.

  Tony D’Agostine got out of the cruiser. “Can you move your truck?”

  “The girl’s about a hundred yards farther on,” I said. “I may be wrong, but I don’t think there’s any rush. I thought you’d want a look at this moped and the girl’s tracks before I changed anything.”

  “Okay,” said Tony. He looked over his shoulder at the medics getting out of the ambulance. “Bring your gear,” he called. “The victim’s down ahead.”

  “You might want to tell them to go down the side of the driveway so they don’t mess up the girl’s tracks any more than I already have.”

  “Go down the side of the driveway so you don’t mess up the girl’s tracks,” said Tony, as the first medics came by. “What about the tracks?” he said to me.

  “They wander around. Like the girl was staggering.”

  “Hurt when the moped fell over?”

  “I don’t think she was staggering because she was hurt. I think she was sick.” I told him about seeing her on the highway and about the smells and froth I’d noticed when I found her.

  More police cars arrived, stacking up behind the ambulance. Policemen came walking down the driveway. One of them had a camera. After he took pictures of the moped, several of us walked down the driveway looking at the girl’s tracks. When we got to the girl, a medic looked up and shook his head. He and the other medics kept working on her anyway. I was glad I didn’t have their job. The policeman with the camera took some more pictures. A medic got up.

  “We aren’t going to get her back.” He looked at me. “You the guy who found her?”

  “Yes. This is my driveway.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Then what was she doing down your driveway?”

  I didn’t like his tone. “Dying,” I said.

  He gave me a sour look. Tony D’Agostine took my arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s move that moped out of the way and then get your truck and some of these other vehicles on down to your house so we can get rid of this traffic jam.”

  When we got back to the moped, we took a look at it. It seemed all right to me. We pushed it off to one side of the driveway, and I led the caravan of cars down to my yard. There, most of the police cars turned around and went back to town, and the ambulance turned around and went back to the body.

  Tony got out his notebook and took down the little I could tell him, then we walked back up to the body.

  “We’re ready to take her in,” said the medic.

  “What do you think, Miles?” asked Tony.

  “Vomit, diarrhea, foam at the mouth. Something toxic. I imagine they’ll find the agent in her stomach, whatever it was,” said the medic. He looked at the body on the canvas. ‘Jesus, she was a pretty girl. What a way to go.” He looked at me. “Looks to me like she drove down here trying to get help. Too bad nobody was home. Or were you?”

  He was a big guy and he looked tired and angry.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t,” I said.

  “Why’d she come looking for you?” he asked. “Why did she think you’d be the one to help her?”

  “I think it was just the first driveway she came to,” I said, carefully. I realized that my right hand had become a fist, and I opened it into a hand again.

  Miles turned to Tony D’Agostine. “We found this stuff in her pockets.” He handed Tony a driver’s license, a college ID, and some mail. “Name’s Katherine Ellis. Lived in New Jersey. College kid. NYU.” He gave me a last look, then bent to the stretcher. “Okay, let’s go.” He and the other medics picked Katherine Ellis up and put her in the ambulance and drove away.

  “Miles is not a bad guy,” said Tony D’Agostine. “It’s just that he’s got a daughter not much older, and she’s hanging around with a guy he doesn’t like. I think he just transferred all that to you.”

  Transferred. Everybody’s a psychologist. “It’s okay,” I said.

  Tony leafed through Katherine’s mail. “Looks like she just came from the post office. Letter, postcard. Now I’ve got to find out where she’s been living, then contact her folks and give them the news. People think cops chase bad guys all the time, but this is what we really do. I hate this part of it. Enough to make you hang up the tin.”

  “I’m surprised you’re on duty. I thought you old pros were careful not to work the day shift.”

  “I’m herding our summer people till they get the hang of things.” He looked around one more time. “Well, I’d better get going. I have to make some phone calls.”

  We walked down to my house. “I’ll have that moped picked up,” he said, and he drove away.

  Across Sengekontacket Pond t
here were still a few cars parked beside the road. Their owners were salvaging the last of the evening sun, unaware that a half mile away a young woman had died miserably beside my driveway.

  I felt invaded, somehow. Young women didn’t die beside my driveway. I knew they died somewhere, but they did it someplace else. They fell off their mopeds on the highways or drove their cars into faraway trees or lost themselves in the city. But they didn’t die two hundred feet from my house.

  I went inside and fixed myself a vodka on the rocks. I put my tape of Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti into my machine and listened to Carreras sing “Federico’s Lament.” I don’t understand Italian, but the lament sounded like what I was feeling. Then the other voices sang and after a while my self-pity was carried away and buried in that place where music sets us free.

  That evening I phoned Zee and told her about Katherine Ellis. A half hour later her little Jeep pulled into my yard, and she stepped out, carrying an overnight case. It felt good to see her.

  The next day, after Zee went to work, a pickup came down my driveway. It stopped in my yard where it could turn around. I was weeding in the garden. I went out to meet it. There was a young couple in the cab. The woman looked about Katherine Ellis’s age and was red-eyed. The man was a year or two older. His face was strained, and he seemed ill at ease, as people often are in the aftermath of death.

  “You must be Mr. Jackson,” said the woman, rolling down her window. “The police told me your name. I’m Beth Goodwin. I’m . . . was Kathy’s roommate. This is Peter Dennison. He’s . . . a friend.”

  “Kathy’s friend, too,” said Peter Dennison. He reached a thin arm across in front of the woman and shook my hand. He looked tall and lanky, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. “We came to get the moped. It belonged to Kathy. We’ll have to see what her family wants to do with it.” His eyes floated past me. “Nice garden.”

  “The police have the moped,” I said.

  My voice went right past Beth Goodwin. “Peter has a garden, too,” she said, in that awkward way that people have when they don’t know what they should be saying.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “Do they know yet what happened?”

  “No,” she said. “I just can’t imagine! She was never sick. Then to have this happen. It’s awful to have to tell people. We had to tell the Katama Caterers. That’s where she worked, you know. And think of her parents, and poor Gordy, and the others. How they must feel . . .”

  Peter Dennison shook his head. “She was the healthiest person I knew.”

  “I imagine they’ll do tests,” said the woman vaguely, her voice trailing off.

  Peter Dennison took a deep breath. “If the police already have the moped, we’d better get going,” he said apologetically.

  I stepped back. “I am sorry about your friend,” I said again. “And, yes, they will do tests, but I don’t know if they’ll do them here or on the mainland, so it may take some time before they know the results.”

  “I’ve told the police that I want to know,” said Beth Goodwin.

  “I’m sure they’ll tell you.”

  The pickup drove away. It had New Jersey plates, and there was an NYU sticker on the rear window. It looked as if the three of them had come up from school together to work on the island for the summer. But as someone said, life is what happens when you plan something else.

  Life is also what keeps going on for the rest of us after it’s stopped for the Katherine Ellises, so I went back and finished my morning’s work in the garden. I had flowers along the front and back fences, next to the house, and in hanging pots suspended from tree limbs beside some of the bird feeders. My veggies were in raised beds inside of old railroad ties that I’d had hauled down from America. A long time back, the Vineyard had its own railroad, but those ties had rotted long ago. The Depot gas station in Edgartown is a memory of the old railroad line, and occasionally people still come across rusty railroad spikes.

  I had a lot of fledgling weeds that were planning to seize control of my flowers and veggies. If you could find a commercial use for weeds, you could make a fortune. They grow when you want to grow other things and they grow when you don’t want to grow other things. When you fertilize your veggies and flowers, you fertilize your weeds, too. There is a moral in this weed lore, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was. I weeded until my weeding capacity was all used up, then had a beer.

  It was a beautiful day. Katherine Ellis would have loved it. I pushed her away from me. If I had never heard of her, or if I’d only read about her death, she’d be just as dead, but I wouldn’t feel this way. It was because I’d seen her and because she’d died on my land that she was on my mind.

  I put together a sandwich and washed it down with another beer while I listened to a tape of Ricky Scaggs singing about troubles with women. Ricky sang well, but he seemed to have even more problems than I did, so he didn’t cheer me up too much. When Ricky was done and the sandwich was gone, I was wishing that Zee was with me. But she wasn’t, and I had company coming, so I got my small basket and rubber gloves and went clamming.

  Normally, I like clamming whether I’m with company or alone. With company, I can clam and talk at the same time; alone, I can clam and think about whatever’s interesting. About Zee, for instance. Now, there was a good subject, one that would keep me from brooding about Katherine Ellis. I let my thoughts of Zee take over my mind while I drove to Eel Pond.

  You can dig for clams with your hands, or with a shovel or a clam digger, or with a toilet plunger on the end of a stick, or probably in a dozen other ways I don’t know about. Everybody has his favorite technique. Mine is to get down on my hands and knees and find the little devils by touch. I can get them that way about as fast as any other way, and I break fewer shells.

  For a while I found no clams, but I was patient, and in time I began to work my way into the clamming fields. I hummed, “Oh, My Darling Clamming Time,” the clammer’s song, and wondered who Quinn’s guest was. Whoever he was, Quinn would want to introduce him to the joys of Vineyard living, which included catching and eating lots of bluefish, clams, and quahogs. I figured that tomorrow night we could start this education with a clam boil to welcome the boys to the island, then on Saturday night we’d probably have a big bluefish blowout. It sounded like a good plan to me. I hoped that Quinn would bring plenty of beer. The pizza he’d promised could wait, or maybe serve as lunch. It was nice to think about food.

  I worked until I had enough clams for four people and a few more, then waded back across the water and walked to the truck. I got a five-gallon pail and filled it full of saltwater, put a lid on it so the water wouldn’t spill, and drove home. There, inside my outdoor shower, where the sun couldn’t get to it, I put the five-gallon pail down and dumped the clams into it. The clams would spit out the sand in their systems overnight, and by the time Quinn and his friend arrived would be clean and ready to eat.

  I phoned Zee at the hospital and invited her to tomorrow’s clam boil. She said yes. Then I got my quahog rake and the same clam basket I’d just emptied, and drove to the south end of Katama Bay, where I usually found littlenecks and cherrystones. I raked for a while until I began to come up with keepers instead of the small seed quahogs that were so thick there. Once I found the keepers, I did pretty well, and in an hour had all that I needed.

  I thought about going on over to Pocha to get some stuffers, but decided instead to use the ones I already had in my freezer. They would be good enough for the likes of me and my guests.

  The next day I thawed my frozen quahogs and made stuffers—ground cooked quahog meat, onion, garlic, linguiça, bread crumbs, and some hot pepper all mixed together, topped with a bit of bacon and put back in large half shells to be baked until hot. Then I opened my cherrystones and made a few dozen clams casino. Even people who say they don’t like clams like clams casino. I use Euell’s recipe, which is as good as any. Finally, I opened the littlenecks and put them in the fridge to
get cold with the other stuff.

  The clams out of the way, I washed off potatoes, peeled the top layer off some onions, and cut more linguiça into two-inch hunks. I got out my big stainless steel pot and my trusty gas grill. I had salvaged the grill from the Edgartown dump in the golden days of yesteryear, before the environmentalists seized control of it and ruined the priceless free recycling tradition that had once made a trip to the dump both an adventure and possibly a financial bonanza. In the old days, the dump was The Big D, the island’s best department store, with 100 percent guaranteed return policy if you weren’t completely satisfied with your purchase. Now it was just the dump.

  Zee drove in after work, gave me a kiss, took a quick shower, and climbed into shorts and a shirt whose tails she tied around her flat belly. She accepted the martini I gave her. I informed her that she looked smashing, which she did.

  Since we had some time before Quinn was due, we went up onto the balcony, accompanied by some crackers and cheese and a pitcher of martinis.

  Experience had shown that the two of us couldn’t hold hands as long as there was food and drink available, so we didn’t even try that. We looked across the pond and she told me about her day. We were still up there when Quinn’s car came down the driveway.

  Quinn pulled into the yard, stopped, and got out. Conscious of the seedy reputation a lot of reporters have, he always dressed well. He was still wearing his tie, in fact, which probably could have allowed him to pass as a lawyer down at the Dukes County Courthouse, since on Martha’s Vineyard only Lawyers wear ties in the summertime.

  He raised a hand. “Hail!”

  The passenger door opened and a man about Zee’s age got out. He was wearing a white shirt open at the neck, dark summer trousers, and sandals. He was dark-haired and good-looking. He smiled up at us and lifted a hand.