A Vineyard Morning

by Jean Stone

  So they sneaked around like teenagers, savoring the anticipation.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” Annie said to him now. “It’s so crazy—and so loud—at my place. Everyone is hustling to meet the deadline. Speaking of which, I need to run something by you. I was wondering if I could borrow Lucy.”

  John nodded but kept his eyes fixed on the chowder. It might be the last batch of scallops until fall—as it was, Edgartown selectmen had voted to extend the season when small patches of the sweet shellfish had been found in the outer harbor. “Is it going to cost me anything?”

  She laughed. “Not a dime. I’ll even pay her.”

  He groaned. “Great. I wonder what she’ll do with it this time.”

  “Winnie said you were off in a million directions when you were a boy, and that your apple hasn’t fallen too far from you.”

  “Touché.” He stretched his wide, well-muscled shoulders. (“Dad has coply shoulders,” Lucy had once said, having “borrowed” the word from Blue Bloods, one of her favorite TV shows.) “So what’s up? More soap-making?” He reached into an upper cabinet and retrieved three chowder crocks.

  “No. Much more fun. And definitely cleaner. I want to decorate the Inn with things we can collect on island beaches. Sea glass, wampum, shells. Natural things, nothing all decked out like souvenirs.”

  “Sounds good.” He pulled a ladle from a drawer and began to transfer the chowder to the crocks. “And you want her to . . . ?”

  “Go beachcombing with me. Help me find unique things. Special things.”

  “Uh-huh. I see.”

  “So? Is it all right with you if I ask her?”

  “No,” he said.

  Just then Lucy trundled down the stairs and whirled into the kitchen, her intuitive radar always seeming to know it was okay to interrupt. “Hi, Annie. When’s dinner? I’m starving.”

  Annie knew she should have smiled and let the subject shift to Lucy, ask how her day had gone, and if she’d had a chance to work on her genealogy project. She wouldn’t ask Lucy to help hunt for decorating treasure, though Annie was still stunned by John’s negative reaction.

  So she only said hello, then got up from the table, walked four feet to him, and looked him squarely in the face. It is a handsome face, she thought. It is, indeed, Murphy agreed.

  Trying not to acknowledge Murphy’s impromptu presence, Annie said, “No?” She wasn’t sure if she should pursue the conversation with Lucy in the room.

  John said nothing.

  Lucy said, “Jeez, are you guys fighting?”

  Then John started to laugh. “No.”

  Annie remained baffled.

  He picked up two crocks, navigated around Annie, and walked them to the table where he set them down. “Annie wants to know if you’d like to help her look for stuff on the beaches to decorate the Inn. I said no.”

  “No?”

  “No. But I didn’t get a chance to add that you can go if you want—but only after you’ve done something else.”

  “What?”

  “Help me think of a decent name for this dog.”

  The puppy was at John’s feet, tail wagging, voice whimpering. He’d jumped up and raced over as soon as he’d heard the word “dog,” as if that’s what John had been calling the poor thing.

  “How about Restless?” Annie asked. “He’d fit in with both of you that way.”

  “Restless” was agreed upon. As was an hourly rate for Lucy to help comb the beach.

  The rest of the evening was pretty close to perfect. It was too bad that Annie knew perfection rarely lasted.

  * * *

  The next day, the warm sun returned. Annie wrote for a few hours, and she barely heard the thudding, banging sounds emitting from the Inn. She was blissfully immersed in the land of make-believe where her characters lived and breathed and laughed and cried.

  But at 12:30, there was a loud knock on her door.

  She sighed. She shut down her laptop, reminding herself to be grateful for the quiet time she’d had. Then she went to the door. Lucy was on the other side. “Hey, kiddo,” Annie said as she let her in. “I didn’t think you’d be here this early.”

  “It’s almost low tide, the best time to look for stuff. So I skipped study period. I also skipped English class. I figured I’d be with a famous author so I should get a pass.” She slung her backpack onto the rocking chair and smiled a bogus smile.

  “Your father won’t be happy.”

  “My father won’t know. Will he?”

  “Lucy . . .”

  “I know. I shouldn’t put you in the middle. My mom says I always do that with her and Dad. I’ve gotten good at it. Sorry.”

  Annie wasn’t sure what to say; she was neither prepared nor had been asked to act as a stepmother. “Egg salad sandwich for lunch? I made them for the crew, with extra ones in case you were hungry.”

  “Sure. And you won’t tell Dad?”

  Dropping a couple of sandwiches, two small bags of Cape Cod potato chips, and two apples in a paper bag, she replied, “Not this time. But let’s not do it again, okay?”

  “Deal. But so you know, tomorrow is Wednesday. I have study periods all afternoon, so I can come then, too.”

  “Okay, you win. And as for today, we’ll have a walking picnic while we hunt for treasures. Do you have water?”

  Lucy grabbed a stainless bottle from her backpack. “I could use a refill.” Few year-round islanders used plastic water bottles anymore. The Vineyard had seen more than its share of plastic trash along the shoreline and beached sea life tangled in the debris. She went to the sink, turned on the tap, and filled her bottle. “Is Gramps up at the house?”

  “I expect he is.”

  “After you left last night, I made him cookies. Peanut butter. His favorites.”

  Annie was surprised; she’d thought that chocolate chip were Earl’s favorites, which was why she made them so often.

  Lucy unzipped her backpack, dropped in the lunch bag, and pulled out a covered tin container. “Can we deliver the cookies first?”

  “Absolutely.” Then, armed with optimism and two cloth tote bags for stashing their treasures, Annie followed Lucy out the door.

  As they went up the hill toward the house, Annie noticed a young man striding toward the dumpster, balancing a sheet of drywall high over his head. It took her a few seconds to realize it was Jonas.

  “Hey, Annie,” he called to her. “Man, this place is going to be outstanding.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Lucy stepped forward and introduced herself before Annie had a chance. “Earl’s my grandfather,” she added. “We’re bringing him my homemade cookies; if you’re nice, maybe he’ll share.” She smiled sweetly, and . . . did she bat her eyelashes a little?

  Stepping back, Annie wondered if Lucy thought Jonas was cute. A hunk. Whatever they called it these days. He had filled out in the past year; he seemed more muscular, more mature; his once ginger hair had lightened to almost strawberry-blond; his blue eyes were framed by long, dark lashes—the kind of lashes girls longed for, but that often went to boys. Annie figured he was at least eight years older than Lucy. Far too old for a fourteen-year-old girl. Well, she thought, maybe Lucy wasn’t smitten. Maybe she was only being friendly. Dream on, Annie thought she heard Murphy whisper.

  “Cookies,” he said as he heaved the drywall into the dumpster. “Cool. I’ll be right there.”

  Annie tapped Lucy’s shoulder. “Come on, honey. We have work to do.”

  * * *

  “He’s gorgeous,” Lucy said, after they’d delivered the cookies to a very grateful Gramps and walked down to the beach.

  “You never met Jonas before?” Annie asked, trying to keep the conversation light. “He’s Taylor’s son.”

  “We don’t exactly travel in the same circles.” As if there were more than one big circle on the Vineyard. “What’s the real story behind him? I know he hasn’t been here forever.”

  “Long story. I’ll tel
l you about it when we aren’t on a more important mission.”

  “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “I have no idea. But he’s a lot older than you, honey. He graduated from college last year.”

  Lucy made no further comment, but Annie supposed the conversation might resume at a later point. The girl was far too stubborn—like her dad—to let it go.

  They trundled off to the low, soft dunes and found a path through slender stalks of beach grass that waved in easy synchronization, the way swimmers sometimes did.

  Then Lucy asked, “How are you going to control beach access so your guests don’t trample everything?”

  Yes, Annie thought, for the hundredth time, John’s daughter was definitely an island girl. “Good question. But Kevin and your grandfather have met with the environmental people several times. I expect it’s been discussed.”

  Lucy unwrapped her sandwich and dove into it while they walked. “It’s very important to help prevent erosion wherever possible. I’ll talk to Gramps to make sure it’s been considered.” Sometimes she seemed older, wiser than her years.

  They kicked off their sneakers and stepped onto the beach that stretched below the Inn and proved its description as waterfront property. Like the burial ground at Christiantown, the beach looked as if no one had been there since the previous autumn; it seemed untouched by man or even the gentle beasts of Chappy—rabbits, chipmunks, deer. But nature had done its wild bidding, thanks to the icy winds of winter: quahog, scallop, and other shells were scattered across the sand; small stones of multicolor variations were gathered in a ribbon at the tide line; clumps of seaweed were wound around debris—a remnant of a fish net, a barnacled conch shell, charred remnants of a log. John had told Annie that charred wood on the beach was often from a campfire, but sometimes had been petrified after a fire on a wooden boat and had washed ashore. She had told him she’d rather think it was the result of a group of happy people who’d been together on a summer night, toasting marshmallows, telling tales, and studying the champagne bubbles of stars painted on the night sky.

  “All I see is lots of crap,” Lucy said. Perhaps she wasn’t as much of a romantic as Annie. “But check out the driftwood.” She pointed to a row of logs strung along the base of the dunes, as if the previous owners of the property had attempted to build a wall to protect the sand. “They’d have been better off to plant more beach grass. The more plugs in the sand, the stronger the hold.”

  The only experience Annie had with beaches was from when her family had rented a small cottage on the Vineyard for two weeks every summer. Back then few people were concerned about erosion—at least she didn’t remember it being talked about at their dinner table.

  Just then a ray of sunlight sparkled off a piece of something bluish that was tucked among the stones.

  Sea glass?

  Annie bent to check it out. She pushed away a clump of seaweed and grasped what looked like a disk from the bottom of a bottle; she pulled out an orb of aqua glass, about two inches in diameter, smooth and frosted by the tides.

  “Lucy! Look! We have a winner!” She held it up to the sunlight, in awe of the work done by the sea.

  Lucy scrambled over and held open a bag. “Nice going. Drop it in before you lose it.”

  Annie set it carefully in the bag, as if, despite its being tumbled who knew how many times on the seafloor, dropping it into a cloth bag would cause it to break.

  “Years ago Gramps taught me to use my feet to pull apart the seaweed. He said that’s where the good stuff is.”

  “Looks like he was right,” Annie replied.

  “He usually is.” Lucy looked in the opposite direction from where they had been walking. “If we split up,” she said, “we’ll find more stuff. I’ll go south. You go north.” She handed Annie the bag and took the empty one.

  Annie deferred to her; she doubted this was the first time Lucy had gone beachcombing.

  So they split up, and Annie meandered to the right, strolling with her head bent to the sand, aware that this was far more fun than dwelling on her troubles. She collected several small, pretty stones, a few pieces of wampum, all with possibilities for a nice “Vineyard natural” décor. She thought it might be fun to challenge guests to add to the Inn’s collection; maybe she should offer one of her soaps as a prize each week for the most creative “find.” Lost in peaceful thoughts, she then noticed a group of boulders where the land curved toward Cape Poge. Another bundle of seaweed, much larger than the first, was twisted among the rocks.

  Following Earl’s instructions, Annie maneuvered her toes to separate the seaweed. But the dark-green mass was tough and slimy and too knotted to let loose. She looked around the beach. Her gaze landed on the driftwood by the dunes; she went over and retrieved a narrow but sturdy shard.

  Poking at the mass again, she hooked a sizeable clump nearly the size of a soccer ball. She lifted it from between the rocks, and realized that the seaweed was wrapped around something hard . . . Another rock?

  She dumped the whole thing on the sand and used the stick to peel away the weeds, and, sure enough, another rock was there—this one kind of whitish. She gave it a sharp poke . . . and punched through what might have been a hole. She wondered if it was a conch shell—a beautiful, smooth, white island one, not like the plastic ones in souvenir shops in beach towns or the huge pink ones transported by the thousands from the Caribbean.

  “Well, jeez,” Annie muttered, mimicking Lucy.

  Then she tugged on the entire mess and lifted the stick. Some of the seaweed fell away, revealing a mass that looked almost like a bone; it curved the way a face curved along a jawline. That’s when Annie realized that her stick was stuck in what might have been the socket of an eye.

  She screamed. Jumped back. Dropped the stick. She slipped and fell hard on her butt onto the sand, her heart racing the way it hadn’t raced since she’d thought someone or something had been trying to break into her cottage in the middle of the night in the dead of winter.

  She put a hand up to her chest. “Lucy!” She must have shouted loudly enough for the long-dead Praying Indians in West Tisbury to hear.

  But Lucy didn’t answer; she probably was too far down the beach to be in range. Or she’d gone back to the Inn to flirt with Jonas.

  Yanking her phone out of her pocket, her hands shaking, her lips quivering, and her eyes fixed on the bone, Annie tapped the link to Lucy’s number.

  “Call your father!” she shouted when Lucy answered. “There’s a body on the beach!”

  Chapter 5

  Later, when the beach was clogged with EMTs, local and state police, and the Inn’s construction crew of half a dozen, plus Earl and Kevin, too, Annie wondered why she hadn’t called John instead of alerting Lucy first. She also wondered why she’d said it was a body when, in fact, it simply looked like a part of someone’s head. Half a skull. White bone, bleached by seawater, yellowed in some places from being wrapped up in the seaweed and God only knew what else for God only knew how long.

  She must have been in shock.

  But now, because Annie had said it was a body, the entire cast of first-responder characters was there. They’d brought the rescue boat from the Chappy fire station because Annie had said the body was on the beach, but she hadn’t specified whether or not it had been close to the water. Taylor was hanging out with the EMTs because she was one, too, though that day she was technically working at the Inn. As, of course, was her son, Jonas, who stood alone about a dozen feet behind Annie and Lucy, leaning against a dune.

  The state police were there because the local ones (i.e. John, et al) had notified them right away because it was an unattended death.

  “Skeletal remains,” John told Annie, who was barely listening, “are considered unattended. Then it’s up to the Staties to work in conjunction with the district attorney’s office on Cape Cod.” He added something about Boston that Annie didn’t follow, and then he wandered back to his fellow civil servants before she coul
d ask him to repeat it.

  All she knew for sure was that it seemed like a lot of manpower and falderal for a single piece of bone.

  Ten or fifteen or who-knew-how-many minutes later, a state policeman walked over to her. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Lou Sloan. The brim of his hat shaded his face, except for his gray sideburns. He had questions for Annie: How much seaweed had been wrapped around the remains? Did she touch any of the actual “material”? Was it in the same spot where she’d found it or had she moved it? Then he told her that his team would be taking photos, collecting evidence, and trying to predetermine if it was human or animal.

  Animal? Though Annie hated to think that anyone or anything had died, there was some relief in thinking that the bone might have belonged to a critter with four legs instead of two.

  “Lots of bones are remarkably similar,” the detective explained. “For instance, vertebrae that looks human can be from a whale. And did you ever see the paw of a seal once the flesh has been . . . well, once it’s gone? It’s a dead ringer—pardon the lousy pun—for the skeleton of a human hand.”

  With all the mysteries Annie had written and all the research she had done, she would have thought she’d have already known those things. Instead she stood, stupefied, her eyes fixed on the scene as Sloan’s assistants gathered, tagged, and bagged. She felt like a gawking bystander, but could not pull her gaze away.

  “That is so cool,” Lucy said, giving Annie a nudge. “Especially about the seal.”

  “It’s nature,” the detective sergeant said with a shrug. Then he added, “Please don’t leave Chappaquiddick. We might have more questions.” And he went back to examining the area.

  Over the years, Annie had been to plenty of crime scenes, studying law enforcement officers at work and taking copious notes (too copious, as the stacks of notebooks in her desk drawers attested). She’d spent countless hours firing questions at police, forensic specialists, psychological profilers, prosecutors, and district attorneys—whoever could offer real-life facts to help create her made-up mysteries. This time, it was different. It was in her backyard. Literally.