Murder at a Vineyard Mansion

by Philip R. Craig

  She did but got no skips. I gave her another donie and wrapped her hand around it. “Hook your trigger finger around the edge like this, and throw it so the flat side hits the water.”

  She flipped it and it skipped. “I did it!” She was happy.

  I looked up toward the top of the bluff. The woman was outlined against the sky, looking down. I waved and she moved back out of sight.

  As we walked back toward the fishermen’s stairway, Diana flung some more donies. Some of them skipped and some of them didn’t. Joshua and I flung some, too, and also had both successes and failures. So it goes in the donie-flinging game. Now and then I found a way to glance back at Ron Pierson’s palace, but I saw no more of the woman.

  “Flinging donies is fun, Pa!” Diana was very pleased.

  “Yes, it is. From now on you’ll always be able to skip them. It’s a good talent to have.”

  Back in Edgartown I stopped by the police station again. The Chief, no longer surrounded by other lawmen, was in his office doing paperwork, his least favorite professional activity. He would much have preferred to be out investigating his town’s two killings, but such is not the fate of police chiefs. He was, understandably, in a sour mood. I didn’t improve it any when I asked him to tell me who belonged to the license plate number of the station wagon.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just curious. But don’t tell me if it makes you grumpy. I can find out some other way.”

  “I’ll be grumpy if I feel like it.”

  “Okay, okay. Good-bye.”

  “Sit back down.”

  He went out and came back and handed me a scrap of paper. Even I recognized the name on it. It belonged to one of the Vineyard’s socially elite families, the Bradfords, whose members were often featured in both the island’s and Boston’s newspapers. The Bradfords lived in Chilmark, where people talk a lot about affordable housing but the town doesn’t have any. Chilmarkians are not, of course, the only Vineyarders to give lip service to the needs of the poor, as long as they live in some other neighborhood.

  “You’re involving yourself in lofty social circles,” said the Chief. “Why are you interested in Cheryl Bradford’s Volvo?”

  I had prepared my lie. “The kids and I were over on North Neck checking out the fishing. When we came back I saw the car headed into that driveway that leads out to Ron Pierson’s new place. I wondered who was going in there, that’s all. Is Cheryl Bradford a relative of Pierson’s or something?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “How do you know it was Pierson’s driveway?”

  “It’s the only new driveway leading off the North Neck road, and it heads in the direction of Pierson’s house. Why do you suppose Cheryl Bradford is interested in Ron Pierson’s house?”

  “Maybe for the same reason you’re interested in her car. Nosiness. Or maybe she just wanted to eyeball the scene of the crime. In any case, nobody else but workmen will be going in there from now on because Ron Pierson is shipping down some company security men for a twenty-four-hour palace guard. They’ll get here this afternoon, I’m told.”

  “Too bad he didn’t do that in the first place.”

  “Yeah. Now, unless you have something else for me to do, I’ll get back at this paperwork. Ever since we got computers I’ve had more paperwork than ever.” It was a familiar complaint, but one I didn’t make because I was the last person in the Western world without a computer.

  “Do the Bradfords and the Mayhews pal around?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the Bradfords and the Mayhews, but most of these old island families have known each other for generations.”

  “Do they get along with each other?”

  The Chief leaned back in his chair. “Most people get along most of the time. What’s gotten you interested in the local aristocrats?”

  I ticked off my points on my fingers. “Ron Pierson owns the house where Ollie Mattes got himself killed. Harold Hobbes trashed the windows of the house and Maud thought he’d be accused of killing Ollie. Now Harold’s dead and Cheryl Bradford appears on the scene. We’ve got a Mayhew, a Hobbes, a Pierson, and a Bradford. Those are the names of four richer-than-Croesus families who seem to have ties to at least one murder and maybe two.”

  “We don’t have any official evidence that there’s a link between the killings, and we won’t have until we get the ME’s report on Harold Hobbes. But, it may surprise you to learn that we small-town cops have already noticed that some island money seems to be involved in these cases. I’ll add Cheryl Bradford’s name to my list of people to talk to. Thanks for the information and good-bye. Unless you want to stay and do this paperwork. Interested?”

  “No.” I got up.

  “I can make you a special officer, so it’ll be legal.”

  “Not a chance. I’ve already been a cop once and I have no interest in being one again.” I went out the door and got into the Land Cruiser.

  “Pa.”

  “What, Joshua?”

  “You know how you won’t let us have a dog?”

  “That’s right. No dogs. I know all your friends have them, but we’re not going to get one. We already have Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, and two cats are all the animals we’re going to have.”

  “And you know how you won’t let us have a ferret, either?” asked Diana.

  “That’s right, too. No ferrets.”

  “Pa.”

  “What?”

  “Can we get a computer? All our friends have them.”

  5

  At supper the computer question was raised again.

  “They have computers at school, Pa. We use them there all the time.” The children traded looks and nods as they chewed.

  I frowned at Diana. “Do you really have them at preschool?”

  “Yes, Pa. We have several. I like the green one best.”

  I didn’t know they made green computers.

  “We have them at the hospital,” said Zee in her most reasonable voice.

  “I’ve lived all my life without a computer,” I said. “I don’t need one.”

  “The children could use it for their schoolwork.”

  “Yeah, Pa!”

  “You kids are doing just fine in school. Besides, I want you to read books, not look at a computer.”

  “We’d still read books, Pa.”

  “We don’t have an answering machine or a color TV either. I imagine you’ll want those too. What’ll be next?”

  “A color TV would be good, Pa!”

  I chewed my pork sate and had some wine.

  “This is the twenty-first century, you know,” said Zee, looking at me with her big dark bottomless eyes.

  “This is Martha’s Vineyard,” I said. “When the wind blows the wrong way the electricity goes out. What are you going to do with all your electrical gadgets when that happens? Your worlds will end.”

  “The electricity always comes back on again, Jefferson.”

  Zee’s voice was reasonable but firm. I chewed some more.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll think about it. Not about a color TV. Nobody needs a color TV. I’ll think about a computer. If you kids really need it for school.”

  “We do, Pa!”

  The children and their mother smiled at one another. As far as they were concerned, it was a done deal.

  “I’ll talk with the people at the Computer Lab,” I said. “I don’t know anything at all about computers.”

  “I’ll go with you when you do,” said Zee. “I know how to turn one on, at least.”

  “We’ll come too, Pa. We’ll show you how to use them. It’s not hard.” Joshua spoke as if to a child.

  Diana the huntress, ever pursuing food, ate her last bite of sate. “Pa, can I have some more, please?”

  “Certainly.” I handed her the serving dish and she took another skewer of pork. Someday she herself or someone else was going to have to feed a grown-up Diana. I didn’t envy that person’s grocery bil
l.

  When the children were in bed, Zee and I took over the living room sofa. For background music we played our tape of Beverly Sills and company singing arias from La Traviata. Beverly’s voice was like a flute, and I once again agreed with myself that she would be a member of the Jackson Quintet, which would consist of me, Emmylou Harris, Pavarotti, Beverly, and Willie Nelson. Emmylou, Willie, and I would play guitar and all of us would sing.

  “I think it’ll be good for Joshua and Diana to have a computer,” said Zee, lying down and putting her head in my lap. “On another subject, they tell me that you were all over on Chappy this morning and that you scaled a cliff while they skipped donies in the water. We never called them donies when I was a girl, by the way.”

  There are few secrets in a small family. I told her about my day.

  “Why are you so interested in all that Chappy business?” she asked.

  I gave her the only reason I could think of: irrational guilt.

  “Well,” she said, “you and absurdity are not unknown companions, so I can accept that. Since you’ve obviously been thinking about all the goings-on, what do you make of the Chappy news, aside from that it’s bad?”

  “I don’t know enough to have any opinions worth talking about, but if I were a betting man I’d put a week’s salary that there’s a link between the two killings.”

  “A pretty cheap bet, Jefferson, since you don’t work for a salary. What’s the link?”

  “I don’t know the real link, but they were both coshed with blunt instruments and both were killed in the early evening.”

  “That’s not much. Where is your hand going?”

  “No, it isn’t, but it’s been years since anybody got murdered on Chappy and now we’ve had two killings in less than a week. Seems quite a coincidence. And my hand isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Coincidences happen all the time. Yes, it is.”

  “If we were in a western I could say I just have a hunch. Hunches are what we manly men have instead of intuition. You women have all the intuition.”

  “We’re not in a western, Jeff. Do you have a hunch, anyway?” She slapped at my hand. “No tickling!”

  I took the offending hand away from her ribs and placed it on her right breast, one of my two favorites. She put her hand over mine. “Half a hunch, at least,” I said. “Another thing: the only way to drive to Pierson’s house is on that new driveway. That’s the way Cheryl Bradford got there and that’s the only way anybody else would get there unless they wanted to climb the bluff like I did or cut through the scrub oak and green brier on some neighbor’s land. I can’t imagine Harold Hobbes scaling the bluff or getting himself scratched up going through the woods, so I think he probably used the driveway. There wasn’t any guard there at the time, so after he did his work, he left the same way.”

  “You’re just guessing, of course.”

  “It isn’t good for a wife to be so skeptical of her husband’s thoughts,” I said. “You should remember that women are creatures of passion, not intellect. You ladies should leave the brain work to us guys.”

  “I’m sure you’ll pardon me while I laugh myself to death. You’re a real card, Jeff. You have busy fingers, too.”

  “Busy fingers indicate a busy mind. Anyway, I’m also guessing that whoever did in Ollie Mattes probably came in that way, too. Ollie got killed at dusk and climbing that bluff in bad light would have been tough for his killer. The same for going through the woods.”

  “Meaning that Ollie saw him in plenty of time and wasn’t taken by surprise.”

  “Exactly. I don’t know if Ollie put up a fight. If he did, the killing might have been unintentional. Maybe the other guy wouldn’t leave and they struggled and Ollie got his head bashed in in the general course of things.”

  “And when the guy saw that Ollie was dead, he panicked and pitched him over the bluff to make it look like Ollie’d killed himself in the fall.” Zee pursed her lips. “I wonder if Ollie had a cell phone. Seems like he should have, being all alone out there like that.”

  “I’ll have to ask.” There were a lot of things I didn’t know.

  “Because if he did and didn’t use it,” said Zee, “it could mean that whoever killed him was somebody he knew and wasn’t afraid of. Because if this other guy was a stranger or gave him trouble, it seems to me that he’d have called the cops.”

  That right breast was a good one, all right. I unbuttoned the top of her blouse and said, “He would have if he’d had time and didn’t think he could handle the situation himself. He might have thought he didn’t need any help.” I slipped my hand inside the blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breathing changed.

  “This talk is full of ifs and guesses,” she said, running her tongue over her lips.

  “There are a couple of things I’m pretty sure of,” I said, moving my fingers gently. “One is that Harold Hobbes didn’t trash all those windows alone. There were too many of them. He’d have had to be there for hours, and I don’t think he had the nerve to hang around that long.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “It’s that I’m getting very disinterested in the subject of this conversation. I have something else in mind.”

  “It’s not all in your mind, Jeff. My pillow is getting a lump.”

  “That’s where I keep my mind,” I said, running my hand south over her flat belly.

  She loosened her belt and reached for mine as we abandoned the couch for the rug on the floor. Chappy and its troubles disappeared from my consciousness.

  “I think that God must be bisexual,” said Zee a half hour later as we lay breathless and sweaty, wrapped in each other’s arms like the griefs of the ages.

  “This will come as bad news to the Southern Baptists,” I said when I finished running my tongue over that magic place just at the base of her throat. “What brings you to that conclusion?”

  Her arms tightened around me. “Because all participants feel joy, regardless of gender.”

  “You have a point.”

  She held my hand but rolled over onto her back and looked at the ceiling where our fishing rods were hung as rods had been hung since my father had bought the place decades before.

  “Of course,” she said, “Puritans look upon pleasure as a sign of sin.”

  “That probably doesn’t keep them from sex,” I said. “Remember Byron.”

  “Yes, poor Byron. It’s bad to have a religious upbringing that doesn’t keep you from sinning but does keep you from enjoying it as much as you should. It’s a familiar song, I’m afraid, but I’m glad to say it’s not one you or I sing.” She squeezed my fingers and flashed me a white, sensual, feline smile.

  “Obscenity the Puritans,” I said.

  “It would probably be good for them,” agreed Zee. “Did you know that Cheryl Bradford has a brother?”

  “A Puritan brother?”

  “No. I’m changing the subject. Her brother is sort of like one of those militia types you read about who live out in Idaho in log cabins. Only this one lives in West Tisbury.”

  “Where’d you learn about this guy?” I asked.

  “From Cheryl. Then, once she’d told me, I heard it some more. You know how it is: you’ve never heard of something; then as soon as you finally do, you hear about it all the time.”

  “How’d you happen to be talking with Cheryl Bradford?”

  “I work in the ER at the hospital, remember? I meet a lot of people, including Bradfords. Cheryl’s daughter Annie Pease got tossed off her horse into some barbed wire a while back. Cheryl brought the girl in and we stitched her up and they took her home.”

  “How old was the girl?”

  “She was about sixteen then. She’s at Harvard now. All the Bradford women used to go to Vassar, but now there isn’t any Vassar so they go to Harvard.”

  “I thought Harvard only took the intellectually elite.”

  “You obviously never dated any Harvard men.”

  “You got me th
ere. Cheryl Bradford doesn’t look old enough to have a daughter at Harvard.”

  “Neither do you, but you are.”

  “How come Cheryl Bradford is still a Bradford if she has a daughter named Annie Pease? Didn’t she marry the girl’s dad?”

  “She went back to being a Bradford when her husband died. But Annie was born a Pease and still is one.”

  “What was the husband’s name?”

  “George Pease, as in Pease’s Point Way. If you believe that story about Europeans settling on the Vineyard before 1642, the Peases have been here longer than the Mayhews, even.”

  “Maud Mayhew went back to her maiden name, too, after all three of her marriages ended. It must be a habit among local upper-class ladies. I take it that Annie Pease survived her horse wreck without too much damage.”

  “The Bradfords are tough,” said Zee. “They’ve owned that farm of theirs for a long time and they use horse liniment to cure their wounds most of the time. Anyway, while the girl was being stitched up, Cheryl mentioned her brother Ethan. He’d been riding with the girl when the accident happened and had brought her back to the house.”

  “Uncle Ethan, the hermit. Why doesn’t he stay on the old homestead?”

  “His mother likes her horses better than she likes him, I gather. A very crusty lady. When he brought Annie to the house, his mother was so furious with him that Ethan fled the farm to save his hide. Cheryl says he has a cabin in the wilds of West Tisbury and spends his time trying to avoid the twentieth century. He eats fish and jacked deer and whatever he can grow in his garden or find in the woods. Do you think the kids are asleep?”

  “If the noise we’ve been making hasn’t gotten them out here to see what’s been going on, I’d say they must be asleep. Why?”

  “This is why,” she said, and rolled back toward me.