Cape Cod caper

by Margot Arnold

  TO JANE.

  FOR THE CRANBERRY BOG

  &

  THE 12 O'CLOCK. SCHOLARS

  The Cape Cod Caper

  Copyright 1980 by Petronelle Cook

  Cover illustration by Joe Isom: Copyright 1980 by PEI Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by an electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording means or otherwise without prior written permission of the author.

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada by Playboy Press Paperbacks. New York. New York. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-90922. First edition.

  Books are available at quantity discounts for promotional and industrial use. For further information, write our sales promotion agency: Ventura Associates, 40 East 49th Street, New York, New York 10017.

  ISBN: 0-872-16639-2 First printing April 1980.

  WHO'S WHO

  Glendower, Tobus Merlin, archaeologist, F.B.A., F.S.A., K.B.E.; b. S%vansea, Wales, Dec. 27, 1926; s. Thomas Owen and Myfanwy (Williams) G.; ed. Winchester Coll.; Magdalen Coll., Oxford, B.A., MA., Ph.D.; fellow Magdalen Coll., 1949-; prof. Near Eastern and European Prehistoric Archaeology Oxford U., 1964-; created Knight, 1977. Participated in more than 30 major archaeological expeditions. Author publications including: What Not to Do in Archaeology 1960; What to Do in Archaeolog>', 1970; also numerous excavation and field reports. Clubs: Old Wykehamists, Athenaeum, Wine-tasters, University.

  Sprino, Penelope Athene, anthropologist; b. Cambridge, Mass., May 16, 1928; d. Marcus and Muriel (Snow) Thayer; B.A., M.A., RadcMe Coll.; Ph.D., Columbia U.; m. Arthur Upton Spring, Jime 24, 1953 (dec); 1 son, Alexander Marcus. Lectr. anthropology Oxford U., 1958-68; Mathieson Reader in anthropolog}' Oxford U., 1969-; fellow St, Anne's Coll., Oxford, 1969-. Field work in the Marquesas, East and South Africa, Uzbekistan, India, and among the Pueblo, Apache, Crow and Fox Indians. Author: Sex in the South Pacific, 1957; The Position of Women in Pastoral Societies, 1962; And Must They Die? —A Study of the American Indian, 1965; Caste and Change, 1968; Moslem Women, 1970; Crafts and Culture, 1972; The American Indian in the Twentieth Century, 1974; Hunter vs. Farmer, 1976.

  CHAPTER 1

  Penny Spring was in a blue mood as she scuttled at an undignified pace across Boston Common. It was a mood not helped by the sharp northeast wind that cut through her coat and stirred up the leaves, already fallen and sere, that rustled under her scurrying feet. It was a wind of portent, a harbinger of winter among the fading colors of autumn, and since Penny was feeling very autumnal it brought her no cheer.

  The trip to Boston, she reflected, had been a definite mistake. The anthropological conference at Philadelphia had been fun, as had also been her visit with her son Alexander, now in his third year of medicine at Johns Hopkins, but this return to her native heath, and particularly to her alma mater at Radcliffe, had been a mistake, a grave mistake. Among the swarms of the hearty and the young in surroundings that were changed yet which held such tantalizing remembrances of things past, she had felt herself a dumpy and insignificant, middle-aged,'mouse-colored ghost.

  Seeing her old home in Cambridge with its memories of her delightfully vague archaeologist father and her (mercifully) practical mother had not helped either. She had never rid herself of twinges of guilt for not being the tall, willowy Grecian maiden of her romantic father's dreams—but there was not much to be done about that when one was five-foot-one, plumpish, and with a face like an intelligent monkey's. Though her success in the anthropological field would no doubt have delighted his expert's heart, she nonetheless felt that somehow she had failed him.

  After this visit to her publisher—which had become something of a ritual—she would be glad to get out of Boston with its reminders of far-fled youth, glad to get back to Oxford find her partner in crime, Toby.

  She gained the upper edge of the Common and stood, puffing slightly, in front of the gold-domed State House before turning right and starting her walk along Beacon Street. I really must go on a diet, she thought; it was a promise she made to herself with great regularity and never did anything about. She crossed Treraont Street, firmly avoided the temptations of Goodspeed's antique windows, with their alluring display of old books and prints, and ducked into an equally old-fashioned doorway next door that bore, as it had done for a hundred years, a discreet sign in sober black and white, "Cosby & Son, Publishers." Once inside she relaxed a little; here was a warm familiar milieu, redolent of the smells of paper and ink, cluttered and old-fashioned, but with a warmth that went beyond the mechanical warmth of the steam heat. Cosby's had put out her first slim volume when she was still an undergraduate at RadcliflFe and had been her publishers ever since. Some of her books, like Sex in the South Pacific, had been smash successes; others, like The Position of Women in Pastoral Societies, unmitigated disasters, but throughout Cosby's had stuck solidly by her and to them she always thankfully returned as a familiar landmark in an everchanging world.

  The faces in the outer office were all strange to her, but when she gave her name a willowy young blonde leaped out of her chair and assured her, "Mr. Everett has been expecting you. Dr. Spring, and would you please go right in."

  John Everett came out from behind his large mahogany desk, hands outstretched to greet her. "Good to see you. Penny, my dear," he chirruped. "Come and sit down. How about a slug of something to keep the cold out? Sherry or brandy? My, you're looking down in the dumps! Anything I can do?" He had ever been a round, jovial little man, whom the years had made even rounder and more amiably philosophic, though he had never lost his youthful avid curiosity about life.

  Penny accepted a sherry gratefully. "Oh, it's nothing serious," she reassured him, "but who was it said, "Never go back'? I've just been to Radcliffe for a couple of days and that was a bad mistake. Now I'm just anxious to get back to Oxford and the old familiar faces, where the cult of Youth is not quite so pronounced."

  John Everett gave a gentle snort of disapproval. He had never liked her self-imposed exile, albeit it was an exile to one of the world's prestigious universities. He knew full well she had turned down many offers of full professorships at good American colleges, preferring instead the relatively humble lectureship she held in Oxford, and this had always irked him. He had never understood that it had given her the exact measure of security and freedom she wanted; security to bring up her fatherless son and freedom to go dashing off to do whatever fieldwork struck her soaring fancy. Since she had done it all well she was consequently better known in her small world than the majority, ranking right beside other greats like Margaret Mead. "Goodness me! With all the new kudos you got out of that Turkish affair, on top of all the rest of your honored activities, I should think you'd be sitting on top of the world," he chided. "It made quite a stir over here— was in all the Boston papers: 'Famed Boston Anthropologist Breaks Turkish Crime Ring, etc. etc' Did I send you the clippings? Good for your sales too—we had quite a lot of fan mail coming in for you, most of which I've sent on— oh, all except this"—he picked up a white envelope from his desk—"it only came yesterday and I knew you'd be in, so in view of what's on it I thought I'd better give it to you directly."

  Penny took the envelope which bore on it in rather shaky block capitals, URGENT & PERSONAL—DELIVER IMMEDIATELY. The handwriting of the address was unfamiliar to her. "Hmm, obviously someone in a hurry—looks as if I'd better read it now," she observed.

  "Go ahead!" John Everett's eyes were gleaming with curiosity.

  She opened the envelope and started to read the strange, spiky hand. "My dear Penny," it began: "In view of what we once meant to one another I implore you to help me in a very delicate
matter that has just come up..." Her eyebrows shot up and she skipped hastily to the signature— the name at the end meant absolutely nothing to her. Her eyebrows went even farther toward her hairline. "Good heavens!" she muttered, and went back to the text. "... I can turn to no one I can trust but you," it went on, "and knowing you have had some experience in these matters.

  having read of the affair at Pergama, I beg you to come down here as soon as possible. It is a matter of the utmost urgency and importance, so I implore you not to fail me. Directions on how to find me are enclosed on a separate sheet. Please, please, help me! Your devoted, Zebediah Grange. P.S. I know all about you."

  "Well, of all the extraordinary things!" Penny murmured in dazed disbelief as she reread it.

  "What is it?" John Everett was almost bouncing from one round buttock to another with curiosity.

  Numbly Penny handed the letter to him. "See what you make of it. It's a call for help from someone I don't even remember..." Suddenly, before her mind's eye, danced the vision of braided silk buttons on an old-fashioned tuxedo and the faint smell of mothballs. "No—wait a minute! Zebediah Grange—I do remember something! Good heavens! Him!"

  "Who?" Everett squeaked, but further explanation was cut off by the sudden shrilling of the telephone. With a cluck of annoyance he took up the phone. "I told you not to disturb me while Dr. Spring was here," he barked into it, then listened. "Oh, I see. It's for you"—he turned to Penny—"your son calling from Baltimore."

  "Alexander? What on earth..." Penny took the phone. "Alex, are you all right?—You received what!—Read it then.—Good Lord!—Yes, I've got something here from the same man.—Yours says a matter of life and death? Well, I'll look into it, nothing to worry about. Good luck on the exam." She cradled the phone and looked blankly at Everett. "Curiouser and curiouser—he sent a telegram to me care of Alex saying the same thing. He must be desperate."

  "Yes but who..." Everett started to say when the phone shrilled again and he snatched it up in a fury, "Good God, what is it now! Oh, another call for Dr. Spring? Harvard this time..." He handed the phone to her, looking as if he might burst with frustration.

  "Joe?—Oh, an urgent telegram?—Yes, I see. Well, read it.—Yes, well I've got something here from the same man. —No, I don't know what it's about, but I'll tell you about it later. Thanks for letting me know." She handed the phone back to Everett, who carefully left it on his desk off the hook. "That was the professor of anthropology at Harvard," she explained, "he ..."

  "To heck with him," he fumed. "What about this Zebediah Grange?"

  "That's what is so extraordinary," Penny said with maddening slowness, "I haven't seen or heard of Zebediah for thirty years! Not since I was a student in fact. I scarcely remember him at all."

  " 'In view of all we meant to one another ... I know all about you...' " John Everett quoted. "Come on! You must remember him better than that!"

  Penny's monkeylike little face screwed up in an agony of thought. "I remember he was a student at MFT—engineering I think it was—a couple of years ahead of me. Very keen on archeology too. Very serious and intense— and shy. He did have a sort of crush on me, come to think of it, but we only dated a few times..." She trailed off lamely. "Honestly, it was all so long ago..." She pulled the sheet of instructions toward her. "Masuit? I don't even know where that is."

  "Cape Cod," Everett volunteered promptly.

  "We used to summer at Chatham on the Cape, but I don't recall Masuit at all ... I must be losing my mind." Her tone was worried.

  "It's the eighth village of Barnstable—the one no one ever remembers, mainly because it's so small and is almost all one privately owned estate," Everett informed her with a trace of smugness. "It's between Sandwich and West Barnstable. I have a summer place at Sandwich," he explained. Then, "Are you going to see him?"

  "It's all so odd," Penny fussed, "I mean he doesn't even give a phone number."

  "Probably hasn't got one."

  "In this day and age? And look how weird it is. He gives detailed instructions on how to get to Masuit and then says, 'Go to Chase's Variety Store on Kings Highway"— that's 6A isn't it?—'and tell them who you are. They will see that you find me.' Why doesn't he tell me how to get to his house?"

  "Maybe he's hiding out," Everett said with enthusiasm. "What do you think it is—murder or drug smuggling?"

  "Why should it be either? Heavens, John, you seem to be enjoying this!" Penny snapped. "He sounds like a first-class nut to me."

  "Well, I must confess I am rather enjoying it," John said with a sigh of satisfaction. "It's not every day in the dull life of a publisher that a mysterious cry for help comes across his desk. As to the nut part ... I wonder. I can see a nut sending one letter, but two telegrams as well? I mean he obviously is desperate to contact you no matter what the reason. You could take my car," he added craftily. "In fact I could come too to show you the way and see if it's on the up and up." He flipped over his desk calendar and his face fell. "Oh damn, no I can't either. I have a best-selling author coming in this morning—a regular gold mine, but she's such a bore, unfortunately a very important bore, so I can't get out of it."

  "I'm booked on tonight's TWA flight out of Logan," Penny said doubtfully, "and I've no intention of missing it." But the more she thought about the situation, the more intriguing it seemed.

  Everett looked at his watch. "It's still early—you'd have plenty of time to get to the Cape and back, and if it would help I could have someone here get your things from the hotel and take them out to the airport for you and you could leave my car there..."

  Penny was weakening fast. The trip to the Cape for a mysterious rendezvous with an old beau—no matter how ill-remembered—somehow seemed a far more alluring prospect than her plan of an early lunch and a trip to the familiar wonders of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which was how she had proposed to kill the hours until plane time. "Well, I don't know..." she began doubtfully.

  John Everett cinched the matter. "I don't know how you can resist it," he said stoutly. "When you came in here you were down in the mouth and dragging. Now look at you! There's the old gleam of battle in your eye and, by the looks of it, a brand-new mystery on your hands. Why not look into it? What have you got to lose?"

  "All right," she said with a sudden grin, "you talked roe into it—and be it on your head! Even if it's a wild-goose chase I guess it beats getting fallen arches in the MFA."

  Penny was anticipating something sober and impressive like a Lincoln or a Mercedes from John Everett for her foray to the Cape, but she should have known better than to expect the obvious from a Boston Brahmin. She was consequently totally unprepared and somewhat shocked by the jaunty little bright green Triumph Spitfire that stood puffing gently to itself outside the sober doorway of Cosby & Son. With some difficulty John Everett extricated his roundness from the driver's seat. "She's all yours," he announced with the pride of a new father, then with a hint of anxiety, "I suppose you can still manage a clutch drive?"

  "Of course." Penny's loftiness of tone masked her raging inward doubts as she crawled into the low front seat. She found she was gazing straight up at a patch of gray sky and the dome of the State House. "It's like driving lying on one's back," she said peevishly.

  "I'll adjust the seat," Everett said in a comforting tone. She crawled out again and he fiddled around with levers. "Now try it." This time she could at least see the road. "I'd forgotten you were so small," he said reproachfully. "Wait, I'll get you a cushion." He rushed back in and emerging with one from an office chair managed to insert it under her. "Better?" he encouraged.

  Penny nodded and, perched rather insecurely on her new eminence, waved him farewell and edged timorously out into the Boston traffic. John Everett watched her out of sight with the forlorn air of a small boy kept in after school.

  Getting the hang of the gears and avoiding being mashed by Boston's madder drivers kept Penny fully occupied until she was on Route 3 heading toward the Cape. The gaily pa
inted storage tanks of Boston Gas signaled the end of anything interesting to look at. The traffic thinned after the Quincy turn off and, as Route 3 began its unending monotony of scrub pine and swamp, she relaxed a little and got down to the business at hand: what did she remember of Zebediah Grange?

  He was tall—that she vividly recalled, for he had squired her to some college dances and her nose had reached his middle vest button. Tall and gangly, raw-boned, big-handed, with a sort of raw and craggy face to match the body; the face floated in at the edge of her mind and out again—it had a shock of black wiry hair trimmed into a severe crew cut. The main thing she could remember was his intensity; he had been so intense about archeology and about her, but now she could no longer bring to mind whether he had been intense about archeology because of her or intense about her because she was his only link with the strange world of archeology. She did recall with a faint twinge of guilt that the urbane Arthur Spring—who had ultimately become her husband—had swum into her ken about this time and that she had dumped Zebediah, albeit as gently as possible, for the young anthropologist. Zebediah had hung on for some time after that, though, like a gawky ghost unwilling to accept his dismissal; and it was only with his graduation that she had been finally freed of the haunting reproach of his presence. Basically unlovable as the poor lad had been, what would he be like now, she wondered.

  The graceful span of the Sagamore Bridge soared before her, and she was up and over it and zooming on to the mid-Cape highway before her punctual stomach reminded her that it was high time for lunch. "Damn!" she muttered, "I should have stopped for a bite at the circle. I don't suppose they've built any restaurants yet on the mid-Cape." She looked hopefully around, but only the serried ranks of scrub oak and pine raced by her on both sides. The coziness of the Cape closed around her, and she felt the odd sense of security well known to all dwellers on this man-made island. It was not the only thing that closed around her, for, rolling in from the Massachusetts Bay side, came a sea fog, obliterating all but the nearest rank of trees and settling in the hollows of the road like strands of white cotton wool. She restrained the pace of the eager little car and began to peer through the thickening mist; her stomach growled at her warningly. "Oh, dear!" she lamented, "I really could have done without this. I wonder if there's a restaurant in Masuit. I wonder if I'll even find Masuit."