Vineyard Shadows

by Philip R. Craig

  The phone rang. I answered, listened, said thanks for the call but no interviews, and hung up.

  After cleaning up the breakfast dishes I loaded the kids into the Land Cruiser and drove to the Edgartown police station, which not long before had been the envy of every other town on the island but which now was rivaled by the new Vineyard Haven station. Sic transit gloria mundi. I found the Chief in his office.

  “Didn't I see you on television the other night?” I asked, while Joshua and Diana wandered around, looking at pictures on the walls and trying out chairs.

  “I saw that myself, when I got home. I thought I looked very professional.”

  “And all you told them was that the circumstances were under investigation. You were very cool.”

  “Chief Cool, that's me. How's your wife doing?”

  “She went to work this morning. How's the investigation going? I know Zee talked with somebody from the D.A.'s office yesterday.”

  “If I were the D.A., I'd say it was self-defense and drop it, but I'm not the D.A. I'm only a simple small-town cop.”

  Small-town, yes; simple, no.

  “I'm trying to locate a fellow police officer of yours named Graham,” I said. “He's working up around Boston. I have a couple of other people looking for him, but I thought maybe you could help, too.”

  “I work in Edgartown, not Boston. Who's this Graham guy?”

  I told him what I'd been told. The Chief listened. When I was through, he said, “Haven't you had enough trouble with Sonny Whelen? My advice to you is to get shuck of this whole business. Where's Rimini right now?”

  Technically, I didn't know exactly where he was. Maybe he'd gone for a drive; maybe he was shopping at the A&P. “I don't know,” I said.

  The Chief studied me, then shook his head. “You just can't leave things alone, can you?”

  “Like I told you, Rimini is married to my ex-wife,” I said. “I'm only interested in him because of her. She's a good person and she and their kids don't deserve what's happening to them because of him.”

  “You're not her husband anymore.”

  “I know that.”

  “You've got a family of your own to worry about.”

  “I know that.”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at me. Then he shook his head. “You're a hopeless case, J.W. All right, I'll make a few calls and see if I can track down this Graham guy. But don't get your hopes up that I'll find him.” He reached into a drawer of his desk and brought out two lollipops. “Here, kids.”

  “Thank you,” said my well-brought-up children, accepting his offerings.

  We got back into the Land Cruiser and went home, where I opened some of the steamer clams Zee had stuck in the fridge, sliced up some onions, and deep-fat-fried an excellent high-calorie lunch for all three of us. Delish! I accompanied mine with two bottles of Sam Adams while the tads drank lemonade.

  By the time I'd gotten things cleaned up, I was feeling pretty good, the way you do when your belly's just full enough, but not too full, of tasty food and drink. I put the rest of the clams in the freezer for future reference and, it being a lovely warm day and the tide being right, informed Diana and Joshua that we were going to use the next couple of hours of the afternoon to get ourselves some mussels.

  This plan proved popular, so we got into our bathing suits and I loaded buckets and gloves and life jackets for the kids into the old Toyota, and we drove to the landing at Eel Pond, where the mussels thrive.

  When Joshua was only a babe, I'd built a floating kidholder for him out of inner tubes, so he could stay beside me, high and dry, while I went shellfishing. Later, when he was bigger and Diana was just a baby, I'd put her in this same kid-holder and had rigged up a single inner tube that would allow Josh to stand inside it but not fall through. Now both had graduated to regular kids' life jackets, which let them walk on the sand and mud and through the shallow water of the clam-flats, or float over the deep spots.

  We walked to the right until we came to the narrows where the little island appears when the tide goes down, and crossed to the far side, me wading, the kids floating and paddling until their feet could reach the mud and sand again.

  Eel Pond is full of shellfish: steamers, mussels, quahogs, scallops sometimes, and even some oysters. It has houses on three sides and a beach and an opening to Nantucket Sound on the east. Its entrance is too shallow for any boat with much draft, but small sail- and powerboats are anchored there all summer long, and it's such a popular spot for shellfishing that toward the end of summer the steamers get pretty hard to find. On the other hand, for reasons that elude me but for which I offer thanks to the sea gods, very few people gather mussels from the pond's banks. The result of this policy is that I can get as many as I need anytime I need them, which is very fine since I hold mussels to be the sweetest and tastiest of all the Vineyard's shellfish.

  It's easy to get them. All you do is pull them out of the mud beneath the grass that grows on the banks of the pond. They're smaller than most of the mussels you can buy in the A&P, and their shells aren't smooth, but they taste as good as any mussels ever made, and you can get all you want in a half hour.

  Unless you have small helpers, in which case it takes longer because you have to keep an eye on them just in case they do any of the possibly dangerous things that you did when you were their age.

  Such as wandering around a corner out of sight; or deciding that the far side of the pond, across a couple of hundred yards of over-a-kid's-head water, looks more interesting than the part you're standing on, and is worthy of a visit; or trying to extract a broken beer bottle sticking out of the mud.

  These distractions turned a half hour's work into an hour's work, but I didn't really mind because my children's lives interested me, and the slowed-up mussel collecting gave me more time to think about what I was going to do with Tom Rimini's problem. What was increasingly clear to me was that what everyone—Zee, Joe Begay, the Chief, and even Sonny Whelen—had suspected was true: I wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for my feelings about Carla. I didn't know exactly what those feelings added up to, but there was no doubt that they existed and that it was because of them that I wanted to extricate Rimini from the hole he'd dug for himself.

  When we finished collecting our mess of mussels, we went for a walk on Little Beach. All the way down to the lighthouse and back, through June people on towels and under umbrellas, lolling in the summer sun and looking out at the boats leaving and entering the harbor. Diana and Joshua collected some valuable shells that looked to me a lot like many other shells they'd collected in the past, and we all looked for additions to the family beach glass collection, which we kept in jars at home.

  Then we went home so I could scrub the mussels clean and put them to soak in salt water overnight, then prepare supper.

  When Zee got home, I poured Luksusowa for both of us while she changed into shorts and a tee-shirt, and the two of us went up to the balcony.

  The last of the boats were coming in and the cars along the beach were heading home. The warm sun was slanting in from the west onto our backs.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I'll be better tomorrow,” she said.

  “I'm sorry you aren't today.”

  “It's okay. Today is just one day too soon, is all.”

  I must have had question marks all over my face, because she immediately went on.

  “When Toni and I talked yesterday, she told me about a custom they have out where Joe lived in Arizona. She said some of the people out there on the reservation have a tradition of mourning their dead for four days, then getting on with their own lives. This is the fourth day since I shot those men. I think I've been mourning the death of the person I thought I was before that happened. But even though that person is dead, I'm still alive and I've got to get on with it. Today was the last mourning day.”

  I looked at her, loving her bruised face and her bruised soul and her courage.

  “Goo
d,” I said, wishing I was as brave.

  — 15 —

  The next morning we woke to the drone of rain on the roof. It was a steady, gray rain, the kind that's great for gardens but not welcomed by tourists who want to spend their Vineyard vacations on the beach.

  “Don't go downtown today,” said Zee. “It'll be zoo time.”

  Too true. On rainy days when nobody can go to the beach, the Vineyard's summer people, bound and determined to waste not a moment of their vacation time, all go into the village centers to window-shop and wander around in their raincoats or under umbrellas. The narrow streets of the towns, filled with cars and pedestrians even on sunny summer days, become parking lots when it rains, and natives try their best to stay home until the sun comes out again.

  For breakfast, I poured juice for all, milk for the cubs, coffee for the big people, and baked the world's best bran muffins made from the dough we kept ready-mixed in the fridge. I served them with real butter, and I could feel my taste buds jumping up and down with joy.

  “Not bad, Pierre,” said Zee, wiping her lips. The split one was getting better, I could see, but it was still there, as were the bruises. If there was a hell, I hoped that Pat “The Pilot” Logan was in it. Vindictive me.

  “More, Pa?” Diana was a fan of all foods, which made us a lot better off than families with picky eaters.

  I gave her another muffin and looked at Zee. “How are you feeling today?”

  She smiled. “I may not be quite singin'in the rain, but I'm through wearing black. And now I've got to go to work.”

  “A working wife is a pearl beyond price.”

  “And don't you forget it.” She grabbed her topsider, kissed us all, and ducked out to her little Jeep.

  I watched her disappear up our wet, sandy driveway, and willed her to be past grief as well as past mourning.

  “Pa, can I have the last muffin?”

  “No, Pa, I want it!”

  “No fighting,” I said. “You've both had plenty.”

  “But I'm still hungry.”

  “Me, too, Pa.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “So we'll split it three ways. Diana gets first choice because she's the littlest, then you get the next choice, Josh, and I go last because the guy who does the dividing always goes last so he'll make an honest cut.”

  We ate the last muffin and I did the dishes while the rain droned on the roof. I love the sound of rain as long as I don't have to be out in it, and I approve of people who build skylights in their bedrooms just so they can hear the sound of the drops. The roof of our old house was so thin that no skylights were needed. In fact, it was often too thin, as attested to by my routine leak-stopping expeditions over the tar paper shingles.

  “Pa, can we go out and play?”

  “It's raining, Josh. You'll get wet and cold.”

  “We'll wear our raincoats and hats, Pa.”

  I could remember when playing in the rain had been a lot of fun.

  “Okay, but come in when you get cold. I don't need any kids with pneumonia.”

  I got them dressed and out they went. I watched their rain gear turn wet and shiny. They put out their tongues to catch the falling drops and kicked at puddles and ran around in circles. Happiness.

  I wasn't running around in circles; I was at a standstill. All I could do for Tom Rimini was try to keep people from knowing where he was until I could get a line on Graham and try to work out some sort of deal with him. Did vice guys give witness protection to small-time gamblers? I didn't know, but I wanted to find out.

  I got my first clue about Graham an hour later when the phone rang. It was Quinn, up at his Globe desk in Boston.

  “I don't know if this guy is the right Graham,” he said, “but he's the only Graham anybody seems to know about. This one was a Justice guy, first name Willard, who used to work out of Boston. I don't know what he's doing right now, but a few years back he was with the DEA. Maybe he still is, or maybe he's with some other Justice office or division now. And maybe he's not the same Graham at all.”

  “I'm looking for a Graham who's interested in gambling, not in drugs.”

  “They go together sometimes, don't they?”

  “Everything goes together sometimes. Ask around some more. See if you can find out what your Mr. Willard Graham is doing these days.”

  “Unlike you,” said Quinn, “I have a job. I can't spend all my time running around chasing ghosts.”

  “Did I tell you I'm thinking of giving up playing host to bums from Boston who come down here to sponge off me and get me to take them to spots where even they can catch bluefish?”

  “They just pretend to come down for the fish. They really come down so your poor wife can have the company of real men for a change. How is your better half, by the way?”

  “Better every day.”

  “Good. Tell her that whenever she comes to her senses and leaves you, I'll be waiting for her up here. She deserves some happiness after all she's been through with you. Meanwhile, I'll poke around Graham's trail a little more, but don't get your hopes up.”

  He rang off and I called Detective Gordon R. Sullivan, of the Boston PD, and told him what Quinn had told me.

  “Well, well,” said Sullivan. “Maybe I've been asking the wrong people. I thought Graham was in vice, working on gambling and loan-sharking and like that. I didn't talk with anybody in drug enforcement, but I will. Some of our guys work with the feds, so they might have met him if he's DEA. But if he is, why's he interested in your pal Rimini's gambling problems?”

  “You're the detective,” I said. “You tell me.”

  “I'll let you know what I find out. Unless doing that will compromise some operation, in which case you'll get nothing.”

  “Fair enough. If I hear from you there's no operation; if I don't, there is. Right?”

  “More or less.”

  We hung up and I called Joe Begay. I was having a lucky streak; he was there. I told him what Quinn and Sullivan had told me.

  “Willard Graham, eh? I haven't gotten to Willard, yet. I'm working on some other Grahams. Mostly a process of elimination. I need a Graham who's on the job around Boston, and I'm weeding out the ones who don't fit the description. I'll take a shortcut now, and home in on Willard, just in case he's the Graham we're after. I wonder what the DEA finds interesting in a schoolteacher with a gambling habit.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I'll call back.”

  I went out on the porch and watched my now muddy children racing around trying to get as wet as they could. They put their faces up into the rain, they jumped in puddles, they fell down and rolled on the wet grass. The rain fell. They laughed and screamed. Fun!

  I went into their rooms and got out dry clothes for them, then poured myself a cup of tea and went back onto the porch. Fun was still happening. Diana got up from the middle of a puddle and came to the bottom of the steps. Her face was white and she was shivering, but she wasn't ready to come in. She and a million other kids were the same way about coming out of the water when their parents can see the goose bumps. So I'm shivering, so I'm freezing, so what?

  “Come out, Pa! It's lots of fun!”

  “Your teeth are chattering. Time to come in and take a warm shower.”

  “No!” (Chatter, chatter, shiver, shiver.) “I'm not c-c-cold.”

  I opened the door. “Come in anyway.”

  She was shivering too hard to put on her crying face. I put out a hand and helped her up the steps and through the porch door. She was soaked. I undressed her there, dropping her sopping clothing onto the porch floor, then picked her up and looked for her brother. He was on his knees watching the rain hitting the water in the puddle his sister had just vacated. A future aquatic engineer.

  I called to him: “I'm giving your sister a warm shower. You're next. Come onto the porch and take off all of your wet things.”

  “Aw, P-P-P-Pa!”

  I carried white and shivering Diana into the bathroom, stood her unde
r a warm shower until her skin had some color and her teeth had stopped chattering, then dried and dressed her and gave her a cup of cocoa, and went out and helped freezing but reluctant Joshua to strip before he slouched into the bathroom and took his own shower.

  By the time he had warmed up and gotten dressed, I had all of the wet clothes in the washing machine, had hung the soaked raincoats and hats where they could eventually drip dry, and had emptied the rain boots of their water and stood them upside down to drain.

  Being islanders, we naturally had other sets of rain gear, in case we needed them. And as it turned out, we did. Joshua and Diana had just finished second cups of cocoa when Joe Begay called.

  “An interesting bit of news,” he said. “A guy named Willard Graham used to work for the DEA up around Boston. But a couple of years back he got himself canned, along with some other feds. Some serious questions about missing money. There was a bust and the dealers said they'd had money that Graham and his crew never mentioned in their reports.”

  “Maybe the dealers were lying to get back at them.”

  “Could be, but the scuttlebutt is that in the last few years other dealers who got themselves busted by Graham's crew had said the same thing. Nobody could ever prove anything, but Graham's bosses finally decided that two and two didn't equal five. Anyway, the upshot is that Agent Willard Graham is now ex-agent Willard Graham. What do you think of that?”

  “Did you get a description of Mr. Graham?”

  “I did.” He gave it to me. “I can probably get a picture, if you want it.”

  “I want it.”

  “I'll have them fax it to you.”

  “No, you won't. Remember me? The last man in America without a computer or a fax or an answering machine?”

  He sighed. “Even us savage redskins have faxes these days. All right, I'll have it sent to me and you can get it here. Come up in a couple of hours.”

  I went to a window and looked at the rain. Dreary. I wondered why an ex–DEA agent was pretending to be a cop and was hassling Tom Rimini over a gambling problem. One thing was pretty clear: Tom Rimini should be told that Willard Graham was not a cop any longer. I wished I'd gotten a description of Graham from either Tom or Carla, but I hadn't. I went back to the phone and called John Skye's house. No answer. I felt a flicker of worry.