On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery

by Sue Hallgarth

  “None for me, thank you. Not while I’m on duty.”

  “On duty? How formal that sounds.”

  No mistaking it this time, Maggie Johnson was trying to be droll. Daggett offered a smile.

  “Well, have a biscuit then,” Jameson sank into his chair. “That is what you call crackers, isn’t it?” He put a hand on the empty chair next to him, “At the very least, you can sit and chat for a moment.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Daggett pulled out his notebook before he sat down.

  “An inquisition?”

  Rays from the late sun slanted through the wisteria, striking Maggie Johnson on the crown. Her brown hair fitted snug, like an aviator’s cap, and her eyes, turned fully on Daggett for the first time, overpowered the rest of her features. They were large and a very deep brown. She was, Daggett guessed, considered handsome. Possibly even beautiful, like a model in one of those magazines displaying women’s clothes.

  “You like to play tennis, do you?” Daggett returned Maggie Johnson’s gaze but decided to ignore her question, aiming his own directly at her husband.

  “Best game in the world,” Johnson’s tan exaggerated the whiteness of his teeth. “Even Maggie likes it, don’t you, Mags?”

  “I play, if that’s what you mean,” Maggie Johnson continued to rest her eyes on Daggett’s.

  “You have courts near where you live?”

  “We have courts where we live,” Maggie Johnson underscored the where.

  “I don’t believe I caught the location?”

  “Massachusetts,” Jameson held the plate of crackers in one hand and gestured with the other, “near Boston.”

  “With a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard,” Maggie glanced at her husband. “That’s why this trip is so absurd,” she paused to raise an eyebrow.

  Jean Jameson giggled.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Maggie continued, “this is a marvelous little island. For a while.” Her hand draped itself over the left arm of the swing and made a languid sweep in an apparent effort to indicate the whole of Grand Manan. “I’m sure you enjoy living here immensely,” she crooned. “It’s just that we needn’t be here with you.”

  “Matt lured us all into coming,” Jameson said heartily, “with marvelous tales about puffins.”

  “I’m an avid birder,” Matthew Johnson acknowledged over the rim of his glass.

  “I have yet to see a single puffin,” Jean Jameson complained, her voice flat.

  “Machias is the place for that,” Daggett began to explain. “The next island over. Any fisherman will take you and there’s an excursion motor launch,” he stopped. It was not his job to make Grand Manan palatable to these people. “But, tell me what you do in Boston,” he veered back onto course, aiming again at Matthew Johnson.

  “Do? In Boston? Oh, what business, you mean. Investments. Banking. Desk work. Nothing so vigorous as here.”

  “Matt hardly does anything anywhere, really,” Jameson put in. “Midas touch,” he nodded toward the couple on the swing, “and a rich wife.”

  “Don’t be jealous, Sammy,” Maggie Johnson chided. Jean Jameson laughed.

  “It’s Jean who has more money than God,” Matthew Johnson allowed, tipping his glass in her direction and bowing his head with great solemnity.

  DINNER that evening at Whale Cove began even livelier than usual, with everyone puzzling aloud over all the red shirts and all the loose buttons.

  “How did you ever think to go to Jackson’s Drygoods to look at the buttons on those shirts?” Winifred Bromhall had placed her hand on Edith’s arm, her eyes wide.

  “I didn’t, actually,” Edith confessed. “I just wanted to look at the shirts and perhaps find out how many people had bought them. They were wonderfully soft and I let my hands run over the fabric. That’s when I felt the loose thread.”

  “What a detective,” Margaret Byington exclaimed from across the table.

  “Here, here,” Willa laughed in agreement.

  “No, no, no. Not at all,” Edith felt herself blush. “It was purely by accident. The truth of the matter is Rebecca and I were engaged in gossip about Little John Winslow, and I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing.”

  “Little John Winslow,” Margaret exploded, “what a silly little man.”

  “Yes,” Winifred agreed. “We stopped by the bakery this afternoon and heard all about his nasty allegations. And not just about Sabra Jane. But about all of us.”

  “I’ll never understand such men,” the corners of Margaret’s mouth turned down and she shook her head. “What a trial he must be for his wife.”

  “Yes,” Edith agreed and reached for the salad.

  “Yes,” Willa nodded.

  Willa, Edith knew, encountered enough such men to make the horrifying effects of ignorance and misogyny clear in her fiction. Wick Cutter, Buck Scales, two of the worst of her misogynists, were evil. But Little John was really not a bad man. Just very ignorant. Yet it was the nonsense men like Little John spouted that made the evils of misogyny possible, Edith thought. Also, it seemed, the evils of a misogynist like Mr. Brown. And again she saw the body, angled slightly toward her, plummet from the cliff wearing what she now knew to be a pin-striped suit and wing-tipped shoes.

  LATER, much later, Daggett stared at the notebook outstretched before him on the desk. One line said Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, investments, new rich. Another said hiked alone, tiff, others Castalia, check Gilmore. Farther down, Daggett studied again the third line in his handwriting. Red shirt, backpack, button missing left sleeve.

  Yes, Matthew Johnson had walked from Tattons Corner to The Whistle early in the afternoon of the day Mr. Brown died. He was alone on the road and saw no one. On the way back, he took the Red Trail around Ashburton Head and got as far as the waterfall at Seven Days Work. At that point, Johnson said, he cut inland along the brook. About half way to the road, near where a fallen log crossed the trail, he stopped to rest and eat some pemmican. It was well beyond noon, he had had no lunch, and the others in his party had taken the picnic hamper with them. When he finished the pemmican, he removed the light wool shirt he had been wearing in lieu of a jacket and tied it loosely around his neck. Once the sun burned off that morning’s fog, the day turned warm, even in the woods. He grew so warm by the time he reached the road that he put the shirt in his backpack. Yes, the shirt was red. He had purchased it at Jackson’s Drygoods earlier that day. And yes, when he untied the sleeves from around his neck, he noticed the button on the left sleeve was missing.

  Johnson stayed on the road until he came to a cottage and stopped to ask how to get to Whale Cove. Once there, he made his way back to the Red Trail and walked on into North Head. An older woman, Boston accent, gave him the necessary directions. He couldn’t remember who told him about the hiking trails in the first place. Someone he spoke to in the village, perhaps the banker, perhaps Andrews or his wife. Johnson saw no one on the trail at Seven Days Work or on the road, certainly not Mr. Brown. And no one else in a red shirt. Johnson did not believe anyone saw him either. With further prompting, he recalled hearing the sound of a bicycle on gravel as he neared the road. That was all he remembered.

  Yes, Johnson nodded again in answer to Daggett’s question, the button was in place shortly before noon when he began his walk. He remembered distinctly fastening the buttons on both sleeves. He first put the shirt on when Claude Gilmore stopped at Tattons Corner to let him out. The four of them were on the way to Castalia, to watch birds on the marsh. Johnson planned the excursion and was to have gone with them, but his wife’s irritability was more than he could bear that afternoon. He had gone off by himself to maintain the equilibrium of their marriage. That’s exactly what he said, the equilibrium of their marriage. The Jamesons affirmed his statement, as did Maggie Johnson. According to her they often chose not to be together.

  Matthew Johnson was absolutely certain about when he noticed the button missing. That happened when he untied the sleeves and rolled the
shirt up to put it in his backpack. By that time, he had achieved a pleasant mood again. The missing button threatened to destroy it. Johnson was not in the habit of purchasing ready-made clothes, but having forgotten his sweater when they set out, he asked Claude Gilmore to stop long enough for him to run in to get something warm. The fog had taken its time burning off and the air felt raw well into the afternoon. The tiff with his wife began when Johnson asked Gilmore to make the stop at Jackson’s Drygoods and picked up steam when Maggie caught sight of what he bought. She did not like the color red. Johnson did. She thought the workmanship shoddy and had a great deal to say about the garment workers who produced it. Johnson found himself in the ridiculous position of defending his purchase by upholding the general standard of quality in the garment industry over the last twenty years. The missing button not only brought back the whole quarrel, it served to affirm Maggie’s opinion of the garment industry.

  The hands on the clock on Daggett’s office wall said eight forty-five. So much to do, Daggett glanced again through his notebook. He hadn’t yet managed to talk to Rob Feeney. Well, nothing there that couldn’t wait another day, Daggett reached for his pipe. The sun would go down soon.

  XII

  “HUH, HUH, HUH, huh,” Edith could barely distinguish the sound of her own from Willa’s breathing, Willa was that close, running near Edith through the quiet night air. Silent except for regular explosions of breath and an occasional crunch of rock underfoot, they ran with measured pace in the moonlight.

  Thank God for moonlight, Edith glanced ahead to where the trail etched its way through a meadow, then cut into the darkened woods beyond. Sharp as the part in a person’s hair, Edith described the scene to herself, then found her mind roaming and pulled it up short. She did not want to think about what lay ahead. She would force herself to concentrate on the moment. The throb of her lungs, the huh, huh of their breath, the rushed fall of each foot, the scene around, the surround. Edith caught herself. She was slipping into an old habit of repeating words and sounds in her head, nonsensical words, serious words, words for the sake of their sounds. Sibilants, consonants, vowels. From here she would slide into scenes and imaginings.

  Edith shook herself back to the moment, to wonder how moonlight could so blur the familiar yet sharpen detail. The wildflowers off to her left Edith knew by day to be a mass of blazing purple, but to her night eye they registered as individual and distinct, shadowy spikes with particular twists and solitary heads. Not a mass at all, but hundreds, even thousands, of individuals. It took moonlight to show them that way, moonlight to see, Edith chuckled to herself, lunar lucidity. Thank God for moonlight and for their knowledge of the trail, Edith glanced up to investigate a bank of encroaching clouds, then jumped a tiny rivulet emanating from the spring she knew to be near but could not discern.

  Willa set the pace when they came to the woods. Edith picked it up again at Seven Days Work, and they snaked their way in and out along the cliffs, almost without thought daring the edge, racing always toward a pinpoint of light. A pinpoint that moved. A pinpoint they had noticed and wanted to reach because it moved, because it bobbed and bounced and flashed and yet stayed put.

  The bobbing light had been stationary for a long while now. They had first seen it from the edge of their cliff. Home alone for the evening, Edith and Willa had been out on their lawn chairs watching the sun set and the moon rise. Everyone else had gone into North Head to see the latest film showing at the Happy Hour Theatre. After Edith spotted the light, they watched it for a moment together, then Edith stood sentinel while Willa ran to the main house to phone Daggett. He was on his way now in the Chevrolet. He planned to meet them where the trail headed inland near the waterfall, but he would have to come in from the road and use a torch because he didn’t know the trails the way they did. Willa had told him they would try to reach the waterfall without using a flashlight, for the surprise factor. You shouldn’t go at all, he had said. But he supposed he couldn’t stop them. Be careful, was all he said at the end, you know the danger.

  Care-ful, dan-ger. The words ran through Edith’s mind like a mantra, pairing the fall of her feet. Care-ful, dan-ger.

  A plosive for landing with a hold on the n, soft g for rocking to take off again. Care-ful, dan-ger. The words entered her consciousness in quite the same way, Edith remembered with a start, as they had years before when, as a child, she had touched a match to a firecracker for the very first time. Her father had called out the warning at a large garden party. Everyone had come, even William Jennings Bryan, who was about to run for president of the United States. He was just one of their neighbors as far as Edith was concerned, but she remembered that Fourth of July because of the way he roared his approval, louder than anyone, when Edith succeeded. A display of fireworks had followed. Boom. Boom. Boom. Huge, sparkling displays and the shooting flares of Roman candles. Edith saw them all again and heard the long ahhhhs that came after.

  A forest fire began to roar through Edith’s lungs. Repeated, searing pain, flame after flame after flame. Her head ached. She had only her mind to hold on to her stride, willing her legs to keep pumping, arms to keep moving through air. Care-ful, dan-ger, her feet continued to fly down the trail.

  There it was again. Close now, that light. Very close. Two more bends in the trail, an eighth of a mile, no more. Edith reached back to signal Willa to an abrupt stop, then dropped to her knees and at the same time clamped a hand over the lower portion of her face. She was dimly aware that Willa had halted beside her.

  Edith’s chest heaved fire. Fierce pains shot through her shoulders, legs, the soles of her feet. Her ears pounded. She hoped the hand gripping her mouth would quiet the sound of her breathing. She could no longer hear and had no time for her body. Not now, not with the light right there.

  It was more than a pinpoint now. It was a beam, a large beam. It stroked the trees inland from the cliff. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Then it halted and turned, as they had seen it do earlier from the cliffs by their cottage, to shoot down the rocks and rake across the shore to the sea.

  Edith felt rather than heard Willa crouch beside her, but they both heard the stone Willa’s shoe dislodged. It made three sharp pings in a vertical drop to the rocks below. No cascade, no great rush. Just three sharp pings.

  Edith caught her breath and felt her abdomen pressed hard against her spine. The beam suspended its progress, hovered momentarily, and then swung violently upward to hit Edith directly in the eyes.

  Edith felt herself lurch and Willa’s hand clutch her shoulder. Then she reeled backward and down, falling out of the light. She felt the sudden warmth of Willa’s hand on her arm and heard a muttered damnation. Her elbow scraped rock. Her feet slipped toward the edge of the cliff. They slid off.

  Involuntary, that was the word that presented itself. Edith’s hands clutched the earth. A sharp pain shot through her left palm. Then she felt Willa’s arm cross her waist and hold firm. Safe. Saved.

  Had that been what happened to Mr. Brown, an involuntary slip? But there had been no arm to catch him, only the red-shirted arm that flung itself out before he went off the cliff.

  Edith blinked at the halo of brightness just ahead. But the beam had vanished, she knew that. And with it, the person who held the light.

  “Identify yourself.”

  Willa’s words boomed across the void. They exploded and reverberated but drew no other sound.

  “Which way did he go?” Willa tightened her grip.

  Edith shook her head.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “See anything?”

  “No.”

  “Damnation.”

  “WHOEVER it was saw Edith, that’s for certain,” Willa glanced around the dining room until her eyes came to rest again on Daggett’s face.

  “And parts of you as well,” Edith laughed.

  “The two of us were all stirred together like scrambled eggs,” Willa’s laugh was
deep and rich. “Edith was just about to go over the cliff.”

  “You must have been frightened half to death,” Margaret Byington’s eyes showed her concern.

  “Only about a quarter to death,” Willa chuckled and turned her attention back to the steaming cup of Sanka Jacobus shoved toward her across the blue-checkered oilcloth.

  “The truth is it didn’t occur to either of us to be really frightened until it was all over,” Edith reached across the table to take Willa’s hand, “and then we were terrified.”

  Edith’s left hand, the jagged cut on her palm swathed with gauze, lay still in her lap.

  “Neither of us moved for at least five minutes after he’d gone.”

  “The light had been so bright,” Edith nodded, “I couldn’t see to move.”

  “Yes,” Daggett leaned back in his chair and contemplated Edith’s face, “let’s go back to that point.”

  Daggett’s notebook lay open next to the empty cobbler dish on the checkered cloth. He flipped back through the top few pages, coming to rest on the third, his finger tracing a line midway down.

  “Just how big was that light?”

  “I have no idea,” Edith shrugged.

  “Big,” Willa set down her cup and retrieved her hand, then spread her fingers and drew her hands back and forth in the air until they settled on creating a circle about eight inches in diameter.

  “What made it so bright do you think?”

  “Number of batteries? Size of bulb?” it was Willa’s turn to shrug.

  “How high off the ground was it?”

  “How high did the person hold it? Good question,” Willa frowned. “Three feet, maybe three and a half,” she turned to Edith, “What would you say?”

  Edith closed her eyes to return to the cliff. Before its glare hit, she had been able to see the light. When they rounded the curve, it was trained on the twisted trunks of cedars near the edge. It spent several moments caressing the base of each tree, flooding the large outcropping of rocks nearby. From there it had inched back into the pines that formed the woods beyond the trail. It would pick out one pine, then another, and starting about midway up, move slowly down and around, until it had embraced each pine the way it had the cedars. Then suddenly, abruptly, in the seconds before Willa’s foot disturbed the stone, the beam had swung away from the trees and shot down the rocks toward the waves below.