On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery

by Sue Hallgarth

  And none of them, not one of them, had ever heard of John Thomas Bush, Daggett shook a match loose from his little tin box. But Boston and New Bedford had. And so might Detroit.

  “IS that young James I hear?” Willa’s voice called through the screen.

  “Yes, ma’am,” James snapped to attention. “How are you today, Miss Cather?”

  “Just fine, James.” The screen door squeaked and Willa joined Edith on the back stoop.

  “James has been waiting for you to come down.”

  “I see,” Willa rubbed her palms together. “Well, here I am, quite ready to get back to good, hard, physical labor.”

  “Not today, I’m afraid,” Edith sighed.

  “That’s true,” Willa patted Edith’s arm just above her bandaged hand, “it will be quite a while before Miss Lewis can join us.”

  “The whole village heard about what happened,” James turned to Edith, his bearing slightly more formal. “We were very sorry to hear about your hand, Miss Lewis. My mother said I should tell you, if you need any help …”

  “Thank you, James. A few days and my hand will be as good as it used to be.”

  “We’ll make out just fine, James. But do thank your mother for thinking of us.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” James shifted his weight.

  “Now,” Willa looked around, “when are you bringing more rocks and where’s Mr. Sharkey?”

  “Mr. Sharkey’s not here, Miss Cather,” James squared his shoulders, “that’s not why I came.”

  Willa waited, but James’ silence extended. Willa chose to break it.

  “Would you care to sit down, James?”

  “Perhaps some lemonade,” Edith offered.

  “Yes, please,” James agreed but said nothing more and did not move.

  “How about the lawn chairs around front,” Willa stepped off the porch.

  “I’ll join you in a moment,” Edith disappeared inside.

  “It’s a perfect day,” Edith could hear Willa rounding the cottage. “Just look at those blues … the turquoise … the aqua … the sky touching the sea,” Willa would be punctuating her words with her hands. “With blues that pure, we must be at the very ends of the earth … where everything finally comes together.”

  Edith heard nothing from young James.

  DAGGETT lit a match and drew on his pipe. Burt Isaacs worked for Jack Watson. Daggett blew a smoke ring and contemplated the wall before him. Jack Watson went frequently to Montreal. Jackson Knoll lived in Montreal and probably spent time regularly in Boston and Detroit. Daggett blew a second ring, then spread out the last of the yellow half sheets.

  Boston and New Bedford. Both supplied the lists of known rum runners Daggett had requested. Many of the same names appeared on both lists, but not one of them had any apparent connection to Burt Isaacs, Jack Watson, Matthew Johnson, or Jackson Knoll. Daggett looked carefully for Knoll, then blew another smoke ring. No one in Boston or New Bedford had heard of anyone like them running liquor into the United States from the province of New Brunswick either. New Bedford, in fact, had never heard of Grand Manan. Why run booze from there into the United States, New Bedford wanted to know. Seems a bit out of the way. Did Grand Manan produce liquor as well as herring, Boston inquired. Good point, Daggett conceded and tapped out his pipe.

  On the other hand, New Bedford thought Daggett should contact federal agents in Detroit. Detroit’s bootleggers were restless, the spot was too hot. Places like Grand Manan might suddenly look good. New Bedford was beginning to look good, they said. The list of known bootleggers hanging around their docks had just leapt into double digits. Daggett ran his fingers through his hair and paused to scratch the back of his head. He found the act comforting.

  Facing the Bay

  “NOW,” Willa watched young James settle into one of the Adirondacks, his right hand clasping a glass of lemonade, “tell us why you’ve come.”

  “Actually, I’ve been by several times since dawn,” James’ knuckles threatened to turn white from his grip upon the glass. He sipped at the lemonade and set the glass down on the Adirondack’s wide arm. Finally, he folded his hands in his lap and left them there.

  “This morning? You were here earlier today?” Edith hadn’t noticed James earlier, though certainly he had been standing by the rock pile for several minutes before she went out to talk to him.

  “Yes, ma’am, more than once. Only I didn’t come up to the house,” James shifted his concentration from his knees to look at Edith. “I’ve heard that Miss Cather works until noon and allows no disturbances, even after she comes away from her desk. I thought perhaps Sundays …”

  “You were exactly right, James,” Willa interjected.

  “But what brings you?” Edith insisted.

  “Well, I know you saw me,” James seemed at once animated and still, his fingernails digging into his palms. Finally, he flexed his hands and placed them on the Adirondack’s arms. He tried again, “You saw me yesterday.”

  “We did,” Willa agreed.

  “Yes,” Edith nodded, “in your brilliant blue shirt.”

  During the brief pause that followed, James’ eyes widened. “You saw him, too,” he finally said.

  “Him,” Willa repeated as neither question nor statement. She was merely waiting.

  WHEN Daggett finished composing his telegrams to United States treasury agents in Detroit and police in Montreal, Boston, and New Bedford, he glanced at the clock. Nearly eleven-thirty. He reached for his pipe. The twists and turns in this case were beyond anything he had ever experienced. Daggett was certain he was on the right track, but not one lead was breaking his way. A corpse without papers. A meaningless button. A torch in the Chevrolet. An empty room searched.

  Just twists and turns but no true direction. Just zig, he struck a match, and zag.

  “HIM, yes,” James repeated, “you saw him, too.” He glanced up sharply, “Didn’t you?”

  Edith appreciated Willa’s restraint. She made no quick response. Without Willa, Edith feared she herself would give way to chatter. Yes, we saw him … he acted odd … we followed him … we saw you follow him … we don’t know why … tell us why … tell us. But Willa never chattered. Willa waited. Willa listened. Through silence and through words, Willa waited and listened. Now she waited until James got around to supplying the vague pronoun “him” with an antecedent. Edith also waited and, like Willa, stayed as calm as she could.

  Edith knew that Willa’s apparent calm only seemed to run counter to the tremendous intellectual energy she possessed. Actually, that calm, that restraint, was central to Willa’s creativity. That’s why solitude was so essential … with solitude she could find the still, distant place, the cool seat at the center of things but not of them. A preserve too easily disturbed. Willa rarely rushed to presumption or prejudged or responded offhand. She once did—she had to—as a drama critic and later as a magazine editor. But she preferred to take time to hear … with an inner as well as an outer ear. And then to ask just the right questions. Because, Willa said, everything is always open to question. There are no sure things and at least two sides to every truth. Truth is never simple, she said. Sometimes in her novels, Willa once confessed, she made truth appear to be simple. But that was fiction, pure fiction, she laughed.

  Edith wanted to laugh now, but that would be out of place. James was so serious, Willa so impassive. Edith took a long, slow breath and let it out at the same pace.

  James took his time, too. Finally, the words came like a sigh, “Him … you know, the man from Swallowtail.” With the words out, James seemed to grow somehow physically smaller, decompressed. He slumped in his chair, refolded his hands, and placed them in his lap.

  “The man from Swallowtail,” Willa repeated. “Yes, we saw him. Why were you following him, James?”

  “I didn’t say I was,” James glanced up sharply. “Not at first, anyway.”

  “And once you did?”

  “You saw me at Hole in the Wall, right? Whe
re he cut inland? Well, I cut inland, too.”

  Both women nodded. James studied them for a moment.

  “And at Eel Brook? We saw you there, too,” Edith decided to take her turn.

  “At Eel Brook,” James stared at Edith. “How could you …,” he swung around and shaded his eyes and let his gaze run along the rocky shore all the way to Ashburton Head. Eel Brook lay between.

  “Binoculars,” Willa offered.

  “We were watching several seals … three of them, I guess … play their way up the coast,” Edith was fully part of this conversation now.

  “Seals. Three seals,” James seemed to want to make meaning of the words. Finally, he swung back around.

  The women waited.

  “I see,” James finally broke the silence.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” James broke the silence again, rubbing the grass with the bottom of his right boot. His head moved side to side.

  “Well, I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” James’ voice picked up volume. “Both of you. You’ve been kind and, as my mother says, you know the world,” his right hand waved vaguely toward the mainland.

  Edith could see Willa’s eyes kindle with compassion. They must be careful not to give too much warmth too soon. But Willa knew that.

  “Eric said that you calmed him when he brought the body in,” James turned to Willa and inspected her face. “Eric says you have sense. And Daggett says you write books. He called you wise.”

  Willa smiled in reply.

  “Daggett said you know humankind,” James flicked a glance in Edith’s direction, “both of you.”

  Edith allowed herself a smile.

  “I came here,” an involuntary cough interrupted James. “I came here to tell you everything,” he cleared his throat.

  The women waited.

  “You went to Eel Brook to see about rocks,” Willa finally began for him. “Rocks to bring here,” she motioned toward the wall at the back of the cottage. “You didn’t say anything to Sharkey about it. You just went. You wanted to see what you could find.”

  “Right. Exactly right,” James shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “How did you …”

  “I understand how things happen.”

  “Yes, I see. Well, like I said, I wasn’t following anyone exactly. I thought it might be easier to get rocks from Eel Brook and carry them to Whale Cove by boat,” he motioned with his hands, “than load them on the wagon and bring them up here. It was hard to get the wagon through the woods where we had been going.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Willa’s voice was gentle. “And the man from Swallowtail?” She paused. “I can never remember his name.”

  James stared at Willa, his eyes saying, Oh, Oh yes, I forgot that part, then he turned quickly toward Seven Days Work.

  “Johnson,” Edith spoke the name.

  “Matthew Johnson,” James said the full name and swung back to rest to his eyes again on Willa’s.

  “Matthew Johnson, of course. Thank you, James. And when you saw him, he was on the beach picking his way around boulders. He moved in odd ways. It was almost as though he were hiding or looking for something, or maybe he wanted to hide something. And,” Willa paused again, “he was heading directly for the place where the man went off the cliff.”

  “You knew where that was?” Edith watched James closely.

  James kept his eyes on Willa.

  “Everybody knows.”

  “Is that why you followed him?”

  “I thought he might have had something to do with it,” James glanced at Edith, then dropped his eyes.

  “They were both strangers. To the island, I mean,” James looked up again. “Maybe they knew each other. That’s what I thought. Anyway, you’re right,” he shrugged at last, “Matthew Johnson acted strange. He was moving real slow, head down, stopping, bending over. I thought he might have been searching for something.”

  “Something you wanted?”

  James jerked his head toward Willa. His eyes widened.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  “He put something in his pocket.”

  Edith heard a sharp intake of breath and realized it was hers. She had also seen Mr. Johnson put something in his pocket, but at the time, it hadn’t registered as important. She wished now they had written something about that on the note to Mark Daggett. They had told Daggett nothing at all about why they wanted him to stop by, she realized now. Nothing specific. They had felt rather silly about the whole thing. Doubly silly because they had lost sight of Mr. Johnson in the woods above North Head. Still …

  “Do you know what it was he put in his pocket?”

  Willa’s question broke Edith’s reverie.

  James shook his head.

  Edith raised her hand and held it close to her breast. It throbbed under the bandage.

  “Do you want to say what happened next?”

  “A light flashed from your cliff.”

  “Binoculars,” Willa nodded.

  “Picked up by the sun, glinting,” James nodded. “Your binoculars, I guess.”

  “And then?”

  “Johnson looked up. Not at you,” James shook his head. “At the cliff,” he nodded toward Seven Days Work. “He stared at the place where the man went off the cliff. Then he ran.”

  “Is that when you saw Constable Daggett?”

  “Constable Daggett?” James visibly paled.

  LEADS everywhere, but not one that was solid and not one that had broken his way, Daggett shook his head and laid his pipe on the desk. And none of the telegrams spread out before him pointed with certainty toward any one person. Not Burt Isaacs, not Jackson Knoll, not Matthew Johnson, not even Jack Watson. Worse, Daggett had nothing beyond a hunch from New Bedford to push for a link between John Thomas Bush and bootleggers. New Bedford seemed more interested in the disappearance of his girlfriend than in his connection to known criminals. And Feeney’s assertion that Matthew Johnson had been on the S. S. Grand Manan when it docked simply made no sense at all.

  Nothing did.

  XX

  “WHAT DID YOU do then, James,” Willa continued to pursue her line of questions, “what did you do when the man began to run?”

  James inhaled deeply, took a long swallow of lemonade from his glass and wiped his mouth with his hand. His hands were steady. His eyes returned to the beach below Seven Days Work and then to Eel Brook.

  “I slipped into the woods and headed for Whale Cove.”

  “For Whale Cove? Why not North Head?”

  “I thought I could match his speed.”

  “That was a long run,” Edith’s mind darted to their own fumbling rush once they saw the man run. Willa hadn’t been wearing shoes, only the loose-fitting moccasins she liked to wear during her morning’s work. And Edith had been hampered by the swaddling of bandages on her left hand. But once Willa changed into proper shoes, they had moved quickly.

  “You were very fast,” Willa observed.

  “I know short cuts,” James’ smile tightened, “and Johnson slowed down.”

  Edith recalled Johnson’s tennis whites flitting through the trees that rose above the shoreline on the trail to Hole in the Wall.

  “I saw the two of you crossing the Cove,” young James tipped up his glass and swallowed the last of his lemonade. His knuckles were white.

  Willa nodded.

  “You were following him, too.”

  “We were, yes.”

  “Why?”

  DAGGETT pushed back from his desk, thinking he could smoke the pipe he had filled … or he could take a chance that Miss Cather was finished with her work for the day and drive over to Whale Cove … or he could meet Elizabeth and Jennifer coming out of church.

  Daggett decided he could smoke his pipe any time, and Miss Cather and Miss Lewis would be there when he needed them. Those were two things of which he could be certain. Exactly when he would need Miss Cather and Mi
ss Lewis, he had no way of knowing. Nor did he know what they might have to tell him. But whatever it was could not be terribly urgent. It had already kept through the night, it would keep a while longer.

  Instead, he would fetch Elizabeth and Jennifer from church. Some things rightly deserved precedence. Then, while Elizabeth fixed Sunday dinner, he would drive over to speak to the ladies at Whale Cove. If he were careful about the ashes, he could smoke his pipe on the way.

  “COME, James, you’ve wasted enough time,” Willa declared. “Out with it.”

  Young James set his empty lemonade glass down on the Adirondack’s arm and looked directly at Willa.

  “You did not follow Matthew Johnson simply because he happened to be on the beach,” Willa cocked an eyebrow and lowered her voice, “did you?”

  James froze like a rabbit who’s heard the twig snap. The pupils in his dark eyes flinched.

  “And you did not just happen to be at Eel Brook looking for an alternative way to bring rocks here for our wall.”

  When Willa reached the word rocks, James began to breathe. He glanced at the cottage, then swung his body toward the coast, twisting sideways in the Adirondack until he faced altogether Seven Days Work and Ashburton Head. Eel Brook lay between.

  Willa folded her arms.

  “Actually, I was there looking for rocks and Johnson did just happen to be on the beach. But … well,” James sighed, “you are right. I followed him because he was Matthew Johnson.”

  “You thought he killed John Thomas Bush?”

  Edith harbored the suspicion herself. Why else would Matthew Johnson run the minute he saw Daggett?

  “No, that’s not what you thought, is it, James,” Willa pushed harder, never taking her eyes from James’ pale face.

  “No.”

  THE Chevrolet coughed twice before the engine caught. Daggett settled back against the seat and admonished himself for not checking the spark plugs earlier in the day. Perhaps it wasn’t the plugs. Perhaps it was the fuel mix, water in the line, the filter, the carburetor, the distributor, the starter. Daggett mentally moved through each part in its turn. Once he got Elizabeth and Jennifer home, he decided, he would have to take a look under the hood.