On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery

by Sue Hallgarth

  “It’s no use,” Winifred finally halted her retrospection. “I can’t remember anything more. I just didn’t pay that much attention,” her eyes conveyed genuine sorrow.

  No one else recalled anything further. Jacobus and Felix had returned to the kitchen before the men passed by. They saw and heard nothing at all. And the others had told him all they could remember.

  “What now?” Jacobus rose to poke the logs into a better position. The fire leapt up.

  “Find out where the red button belongs, I guess, first thing in the morning,” Daggett closed his notebook and stretched his legs. Then he tucked the little notebook into the inner pocket of his jacket and let his open hand rest for a moment on his chest. He was reluctant to rise. It was warm and peaceful here.

  ROB FEENEY’S late evening constitutional took him past Newton’s Bakery, where he remembered the encounter. The man with the vacant eyes meeting the woman with the blazing hair. And red shirt, Rob reminded himself. And now the whole island was gossiping about Sabra Jane Briggs. The Amazon killed the misogynist, everyone was saying, and did so because she hated men.

  Rob had to laugh. He was certain that when he saw them in front of the bakery, they were meeting for the first time. Those eyes had widened before they narrowed, Rob remembered, and widened not from meeting the familiar but from discovering the unexpected … a woman dressed like a man.

  “I suppose I should have asked, but I didn’t want Constable Daggett to think we, like everyone else, suspected Sabra Jane Briggs,” Alice Jordan was clearly rueful over the missed opportunity to hear about village gossip. And to hear it from the constable’s point of view, Mary reminded her.

  When Daggett departed, the group around the fireplace broke up and the Jordans were just about to turn onto the path that ran along the orchard and up the hill to their cottage near the road. Willa and Edith would go straight on through the pines.

  “Sabra Jane is planning to work on our wall again tomorrow afternoon,” Edith was happy to point out.

  “Yes,” Willa finished Edith’s thought. “Perhaps we can ask her what she did when she left here yesterday,” Willa’s voice softened, “and about the button.”

  “The missing button,” Alice’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “I believe she would tell us,” Edith began to speculate. “She does seem to be a direct sort of person. Straightforward, I mean.”

  “Like me is what you mean,” Willa laughed. “Edith tries to be diplomatic about my lack of polish, but we both know it’s a matter of country and class. Edith at least had Smith College to smooth out her western edges, but despite the years I spent in Pittsburgh, there’s not a drop of small talk in me and I have no patience for etiquette,” Willa tilted her head. “Of course, those are nothing compared to Yankee roundaboutness.”

  Both Jordans smiled.

  “But, seriously,” Willa added as an afterthought, “do you think Sabra Jane would be offended by our asking?”

  “I wish I knew her better,” Alice turned to her sister, whose shoulders were in the midst of a shrug. “Cobus knows her fairly well. Why not ask her advice at breakfast?”

  “Excellent idea,” Willa agreed and said good night, taking Edith by the elbow for their trek through the woods.

  Moonlight slipped through the pines ahead, picking out in pencil points the path that led from the main house to their cottage. Behind them the orchard stood motionless in a light so stark it seemed almost to etch the young apples on their boughs.

  “I’m not ready for sleep,” Edith turned her back to the woods and paced in reverse to keep the orchard in view, “are you?”

  “I could sleep for days,” Willa yawned, “but I’ll settle for one good night.” She paused to look back. Edith had stopped.

  “It is so beautiful,” Edith spoke each word separately, looking first at the orchard and then at the moon-full sky, too bright for stars.

  Willa responded softly, “‘That tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies.’”

  Edith smiled at Willa’s Byron and countered with Ben Jonson.

  “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, /…Now the sun is laid to sleep, / Thou that mak’st a day of night, / Goddess excellently bright.”

  Willa yawned deeply.

  “My favorite,” Edith confessed.

  “Mmmm, but you omitted the poem in between.”

  “I know. Somehow the poem doesn’t matter right now.”

  “The moon matters. Fair Diana, ’tis a-hunting she will go.”

  “We must, too,” Edith caught Willa’s hand to pull her along, “but not a-hunting. ’Tis too late this night for us.”

  “Ummm, well beyond our bedtime.”

  Edith responded with a yawn.

  “This sleuthing is a tiring business,” Willa complained, “all that hiking in the afternoon and so much puzzling in the evening.”

  “It does require a different kind of concentration,” Edith agreed. She saw again the intensity in Winifred’s eyes, and their conversation with Daggett began to replay itself in her mind.

  “I wonder if Mr. Brown was one of the men Winifred saw. What do you think?”

  “I am too sleepy to think and wondering about Mr. Brown will just keep us awake.”

  “That and the moon,” Edith agreed. She often had a touch of insomnia.

  When the path broke out of the woods just above their cottage, Edith halted again, her hand on Willa’s arm. The splash of moon-glow flooding the area struck her like a physical force. So moved she could not contain herself, Edith stretched as high over her head as her hands could reach, then drew her arms down and out, as if to encompass the whole of the scene before them, their cottage, the cliffs, the sea beyond.

  “Listen to the crickets,” Willa said after a moment and touched Edith’s arm.

  IX

  DAGGETT LEFT THE house early the next morning to walk the trail from Whistle Road to the waterfalls and inspect more carefully the sites Miss Cather and Miss Lewis described. He had removed the button from his wallet and placed it in his jacket pocket, where every now and then he touched it like a talisman. It was, he knew, exactly like the button missing from the left sleeve of Miss Briggs’ red shirt.

  Daggett was in no hurry to arrest Miss Briggs. As far as he had been able to tell, even with opportunity and means, she had no motive. And there were several things he needed to check on first, not the least of which were the two men Miss Bromhall had noticed and the question marks he had placed in his notebook.

  He had also to locate the third passenger to arrive with Mr. Brown and Miss Driscoll on the S. S. Grand Manan. The man had to be somewhere on the island. Daggett just didn’t know how to look for him. He should have insisted that Feeney’s young assistant open up the office the night before and retrieve the list of passengers. At least then he would have had a name. But it had been so late in the evening. And now it was so early, Daggett could only plan to swing by to see Feeney as soon as he finished checking out the trail. Or if something else intervened, perhaps when the steamer returned to North Head later that morning, Daggett could at least get a physical description. Possibly one of the crew had overheard a name.

  Miss Driscoll had been of little help. She told Daggett she had not really looked at the man and had spoken only a word or two with Mr. Brown, nothing worth jotting into the notebook. Daggett could only hope the crew would prove more useful. He also intended to stop by Jackson’s Drygoods and ask about their supply of red shirts, Daggett touched the button again, but first he wanted to see for himself where the button had been lodged and look once more at the cliff. Miss Briggs could wait. It wasn’t likely she would leave the island.

  “COME on, man. What are you waiting for?” Little John Winslow’s voice was insistent, his manner abrasive.

  Little John had arranged his stocky body, legs spread, elbows crooked, to occupy most of the room on the sidewalk in front of the North Head Bank. His small audience blocked Daggett’s progress toward the boat landing, wh
ere the S. S. Grand Manan was preparing to dock.

  Little John’s entourage was already excited. Eva McDaniels, his eager disciple, had hitched her thin shoulders as high as she could and posted herself firmly beside Little John to glare at Daggett. The Winslow’s black-and-white puppy pranced and yapped and jumped against Daggett’s legs. Daggett reached down and patted the puppy’s head, then picked him up and handed him to Little John’s son Jocko.

  “Just the man I’ve been looking for,” Daggett worked hard to make his voice sound hearty, but Little John was not to be distracted.

  “I always said it would come to no good having so many women on the island.”

  “My words exactly,” Eva McDaniels joined in, her voice threatening to turn shrill. “Women should be at home with their families.”

  “It’s against nature’s laws, that’s what it is. Women need husbands to take care of them and babies to keep them out of trouble,” Little John’s mustache twitched violently. He clapped one hand down hard against Jocko’s shoulder. Jocko tightened his grip on the puppy.

  “A woman’s home is her domain,” Eva’s lips drew tight.

  Daggett had heard that before, usually from Eva. She ran it as a kind of subtitle in the Recipe Exchange. Elizabeth repeated it at times. Odd how women’s mouths shaped themselves around those words. Rather like sucking lemons. Daggett felt his own lips purse with the thought.

  “What do these women think they’re doing, earning money and, and, and taking vacations,” Little John fairly sputtered. Spittle that formed little puddles at the edges of his lips became flexible strings when he opened his mouth and blew into bubbles that never quite popped. Daggett found himself almost amused.

  “You’d think they were ladies of leisure, the way they come here,” Eva interjected, her lips pursing tighter still.

  “Well, they’re not. There’s no lady in them. And I’ll tell you what they’re doing,” Little John slapped one hand against the other, “they’re taking jobs away from men, that’s what they’re doing.”

  “Women shouldn’t have money of their own,” Eva’s head bobbed up and down. “Just look at what they do with it. Throw it away on their own pleasure, that’s what they do. I tell you it’s not right. Women should not have jobs or money of their own.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Emma Parker came bustling out of the bank, gray curls swinging, her purse clasped tight against her stomach.

  Daggett grinned. Eva McDaniels had gone too far this time.

  “I work for my living,” Emma’s eyes snapped.

  “You’re a widow,” Eva responded sharply. “That’s different.”

  “I make my own way. Always have.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Little John tried to wrest control of the argument again, “but we’re talking about women that have never been married. They’re bad luck around the sea. Everyone knows that. A bad lot altogether, that’s what they are. And they’re invading the island.”

  Eva’s head began to bob again.

  Little John continued his diatribe, “Worse and worse it gets. So many new ones coming to The Anchorage to stay with that, that, that scarlet woman.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Miss Briggs,” Emma Parker held her voice steady.

  “High-falutin’ ways,” Little John growled.

  “Floosies,” Eva could no longer stay quiet, “all of them, floosies.”

  “Flappers,” Emma corrected, turning her gaze to the rest of the assemblage. “It is true,” she addressed them, “that the women at The Anchorage are younger and perhaps more lively than the Cottage Girls at Whale Cove, but …”

  “The Cottage Girls,” Little John mimicked in falsetto, “the Poor Soiled Doves, Disappointed in Love.”

  Daggett feared Little John could go on for some time chanting the names islanders had devised for the two summer colonies. Winters were long on Grand Manan and islanders could be creative in their amusements. Little John, in particular, was known for his doggerel.

  “You must excuse me,” James Enderby’s formidable height appeared in the doorway directly behind Emma Parker, his hands spread against his waistcoat, thumbs hooked in his watch chain.

  Daggett gave up any notion of interrupting. Enderby would take care of it, his polite baritone shutting Little John off like a faucet.

  But Eva McDaniels didn’t miss a beat, “You’ve heard, haven’t you, James, about the red button?”

  Daggett felt his jaw drop. He had told no one. If Eva McDaniels knew about the button, all of Grand Manan must be fully apprised or would be before long.

  Enderby did not answer but turned to Little John, “I’m afraid I could not help but overhear your remarks just now.” He paused to clear his throat and lift his hand from his vest.

  “What’s the matter now, James? Cat got your tongue?”

  Little John’s surliness surprised even Daggett. This could hardly be the beginning of a conversation. What was happening here?

  “No cat has ever gotten my tongue, Little John, though I am not at all certain I can say the same for the two of you,” Enderby’s gray eyes narrowed.

  Enderby hooked his right thumb over his watch chain and placed his left hand, fist folded, against the small of his back. It was characteristic of Enderby to stand so when he had something serious to say. Daggett was delighted by the prospects.

  “As I told you earlier,” Enderby’s mild tone belied the anger that flashed behind his glasses, “I believe you are being quite unreasonable. Miss Lewis, Miss Cather, Miss Cobus, Miss Felix and all the rest of the Cottage Girls are each of them the soul of propriety,” Enderby’s gray-suited form seemed to grow taller as he spoke. “You should not carry on with your spurious jokes.”

  “Call me unreasonable! Call me unreasonable!” Little John sputtered. “What do you call murder then?” And without waiting for an answer, he declared, “Murderess. That’s what Sabra Jane Briggs is. She did it. You all know it.”

  “And the red button proves it,” Eva spun around toward Daggett.

  “Well, not exactly,” Daggett cleared his throat.

  “You,” Little John swung the whole of his body to face Daggett, “You’ve not done a thing to stop her.”

  “Now, Little John,” Daggett tried soothing.

  “A man’s not safe in his bed with the likes of them on the island.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Daggett raised his voice and took a step toward Little John. He got no closer. Jocko’s puppy crooned, and just as suddenly Daggett felt his pant leg pull stiff one way then another, as if it had been caught by a fierce wind. Sharp teeth grazed his ankle.

  “You,” Daggett exploded, pointing his finger at Jocko, “you take care of your dog. And you,” he jabbed the finger at Little John, “you come with me. There are questions here that need answers,” Daggett turned on his heel. “Now.”

  Jason Tinsley, suspended in midstride at the door of his pharmacy, raised his hand and opened his mouth as if he were about to make a speech of his own.

  “I mean now,” Daggett flung over his shoulder again from the middle of the street, without looking to see whether Little John followed. The hair on the back of Daggett’s neck stood stiff against his collar. He realized he would need every minute it took to reach his office to regain his composure.

  “THAT’S what Emma Parker told me not more than ten minutes ago,” Rebecca Jackson almost danced on her tiptoes. “Constable Daggett stormed off so fast, Little John was out of breath trying to catch up.”

  Edith laughed, “I met Little John the day of Mr. Brown’s death. He does seem a blustery sort of fellow.”

  “The town clown, my husband calls him,” Rebecca Jackson’s hand fluttered near her mouth, “when no one’s listening except me, of course.”

  “I’ll keep it to myself,” Edith smiled and moved toward the rear of the store where the Jacksons kept their men’s wear. “Now, let’s have a look at your shirts.”

  Rebecca followed on her side of the counter, its dark walnut po
lished by more than thirty years of service. Shelves lining the walls behind her rose all the way to the ceiling, their cubicles filled with bolts of material and ready-made clothing. On a middle shelf at the very back were three red shirts, neatly folded and stacked.

  “We had eight to begin with when the order first came in,” Rebecca placed the stack on the counter.

  Edith looked from the shirts to Rebecca.

  “I already told the constable we sold five. Sabra Jane’s was the second. The first went to Sam Jackson. It’s nice and warm for being out on his boat, he says.” Sam was Rebecca’s brother-in-law.

  Rebecca ran her hand over the shirt on top, then handed it to Edith.

  “See how soft it is.”

  It was soft, Edith glanced back at the shelf. Too bad it did not come in other colors. Willa would love the light wool but the red was all wrong. Willa liked rich, primary colors, but she did much better in green. Edith preferred mauve and pastels for herself or black when they were in the city.

  “Mary Daniels bought one of these shirts two weeks ago. For a present, I believe she said. And yesterday one of the young fellows in that party at Swallowtail got one. The fellow that wears the tennis outfits all the time. You know the one I mean?”

  Edith nodded. His pinkened forehead hovered before her with the Lucky Strikes he had extended to his wife.

  “Matthew Johnson, yes,” Edith glanced up, “Johnson with an h.”