Death in the Off-Season

by Francine Mathews

  “Come in, Sandy, and have a seat.” She opened the door and stood to one side. “Will had an accident Friday night and had to go to the hospital.”

  “He did?” Sandy’s eyes widened, and to her surprise, he looked over his shoulder. “I wondered why he missed the game Saturday. You sure it was an accident?”

  Merry’s eyes narrowed.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Is he gonna be all right?”

  “He’s got a fractured skull, and he’s in a coma. They flew him to Boston for tests. I don’t know much more than that.” She took a gamble and leaned confidentially toward Sandy. “Somebody staked a wire across the path Will uses through the moors. You know anything about that?”

  Fear filled his eyes.

  “Will’s had a rough time getting back into school since his dad’s death last year, hasn’t he?” Merry persisted. “If this accident was a trick, Sandy—played by the football team, maybe?—a lot of people are going to be asking questions. Particularly if Will doesn’t make it. You can tell your buddies I said that.”

  Sandy tried to speak, but no sound came. Instead, he lunged for the door.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” he shot over his shoulder. “Totally wrong.” Then he was gone, pedaling furiously toward school on his bike.

  “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.” Alison was staring out over the bog’s tangle of maroon vines and scarlet fruit that ran from her feet to the line of marshland in the southwest that marked the verge of Gibbs Pond.

  “I know.” Peter was quiet for an instant, caught short by his love for this bit of land and his way of life. “You’ll have to stop by tomorrow, when I’ll be wet-harvesting again, and see what the red tide really looks like. In spring, when the vines are in flower, it’s spectacular in a different way.”

  “What color are they?”

  “Pinkish-white. They look like long-necked birds—hence the name, or one theory of the name, at least. ‘Crane-berries’ became ‘cranberries’ over time.”

  “It’s a haven, isn’t it, Peter?”

  “The bog?”

  “The house, this land, the unobstructed view, even the distance from town. You must feel utterly alone on earth, and master of it.”

  “I do,” he said. It was like Alison to see the freedom in his solitude. He was thankful for that.

  He had risen early to tend to the sheep, feeling Rafe’s absence keenly. By midmorning he had been at the Jared Coffin House, hoping Alison had conquered jet lag and the weariness that must have come on the heels of their nocturnal walk through the back streets of Nan­tucket town. He had found the woman he knew again, somewhere in the darkness—not the object of his passion, but the best friend he had missed inexpressibly through the years. No one had known him as well as she, before or since; and in his heart of hearts, he thought no one ever would again.

  He had told her about Rusty’s death—and his illness, the bitter­ness that had filled his blackmail letters; his banishment and loss. She remained silent through most of it, her head down as they passed the unlit and shuttered houses.

  “He was warped,” she said finally. “I thought I could take it—the coldness, the way he enjoyed humiliating me—because I thought he needed me. Why else would he have done what he did to you? Why else would I—” She looked up at him then, her face composed. “Rusty needed no one.”

  “That’s all past, Alison,” he had said, very quietly, and they had walked on.

  He shook himself out of reverie and turned to look at her now, all her ghosts banished, her face alive in morning sun. It was incompre­hensible that she had never been here with him before, and unthink­able that she should ever leave. As she would, all too soon.

  “Let’s eat,” he said.

  He handed her the photograph from Rusty’s waterlogged gym bag when she had finished her tuna fish sandwich. They were sitting on the wooden deck at the back of the saltbox, and Alison had discarded her sandals. Ney lay blissfully under her chair while she traced slow circles in his fur with the tip of her big toe. Whenever she stopped, Ney raised his head in outrage, cocking one ear in her direction, and then sank down with a clink of his tags as her foot resumed its perambulations across his stomach. The dog had accepted her immediately.

  Her brow furrowed as she studied the photograph of Max Mason and the unknown woman. Then she went still. Schuyler Tate-Jackson was right. Ali­son knew who the woman was.

  “I only met her once,” she said. “When she walked up to our table in a restaurant downtown—and threw what your mother would term a scene.”

  Peter’s lips twitched.

  “I assumed she was one of Rusty’s discarded women. We had an annoying tendency to run into them in the most unlikely—and likely—places. But I was wrong. She wasn’t his girlfriend at all. She was your father’s.”

  Peter reached for the photograph. He had half expected this; Meredith Folger had made it plain. His eyes slid over the woman leaning into the car. She couldn’t have been much older than Georgiana at the time. He glanced up and found Alison watching him, her eyes holding something like pity.

  “Rusty was afraid of her. I think she was threatening to confront your mother.”

  “Why would that bother Rusty?”

  “I don’t know,” Alison said. “I never saw her again. I wasn’t supposed to know about her existence. Rusty figured the less he told me, the better.”

  “But you’re sure he was frightened,” Peter said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “He wouldn’t take her calls, he wouldn’t speak of her; and he never told me why.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right before I left him.”

  “You left him?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “Right after Thanksgiving. I heard he went to Brazil a couple of weeks later. We never spoke again. Not that I was easy to find—I was running from my own demons.”

  Something in his face must have challenged her to name them.

  “Guilt,” she said. “Shame. Loss. The knowledge that I had been a fool, and nothing could fix it.”

  He looked down at Ney, feeling no sense of victory. When he met her eyes she was fine again.

  “This woman,” he said. “Did you know her name?”

  “It wasn’t a real one,” Alison said. “A nickname, I suppose. Now, what was it? Something odd, something made up, like Bambi. Or Sunny. Or—no, was it—”

  “Sundance,” Peter said.

  When the phone rang he was expecting Rafe and news of Will. But it was Lucy Jacoby on the line.

  “I kicked myself for staying away when your brother died. I won’t make the same mistake twice. How is Will?”

  “You heard,” Peter said. “I should have called you.”

  “Of course you should have. But you’ve probably been trying to find whoever did it, and personally, I think that’s more worthwhile.” She hesitated for a moment. “There were some pretty gory stories running around school today. I heard he was in Cottage Hospital, but I figured you’d know the truth. How bad is it, Peter?”

  “He’s not coming out of the coma,” Peter said gently, “and they’ve flown him to Boston. I’m planning to head over there myself today.”

  “Poor kid. Peter—it wasn’t—he didn’t try to kill him­self, did he?”

  “Good God, no. Where did you get that idea?”

  “I’m so glad,” Lucy said. “Listen, I have something for Will. A book of short stories. They say people in comas can hear what you say to them. Tess could read to Will. It might help bring him back.”

  “That’s good of you, Lucy. Drop the book by after school and I’ll take it over tonight. In a few days, if we’re lucky, he may be able to read it himself.”

  Merry folger had her feet up on her desk and her chair a
t a danger­ous angle, rocking on two legs. Clarence Strangerfield’s forensic report was spread before her, and it told her things that, unfortunately, she had already guessed. The footprints taken from Peter Mason’s driveway matched in size, although not in shoe style, the prints left two nights later under the tree near his house, where someone had waited for him to walk the dog to the barn. Any closer identification—without a pair of suspect shoes—was impossible. She reflected on the sloppiness of this particular murderer, and wondered what it meant. Were the prints someone else’s, left by the killer to frame an innocent person? Or did they betray a serendipitous quality, opportunities seized, without time to cover one’s tracks, as it were?

  And then there were the fingerprints.

  “Yo, Merry!”

  She looked up. Matt Bailey stood at her cubical. “There’s a kid outside wants to see you.”

  Her chair came down with a clunk. “Threats, unfortunately, work better than promises,” she sighed, and walked out to the station entrance. Beyond the double doors, squinting in the sun, Sandy Stewart was straddling his bike. She walked over to him.

  “I think I know why they hurt Will,” he said, without preamble. His face was stony and his voice flat, signs he was here because he had no choice. He reached around for his school backpack and swung it off his shoulder. “They made a mistake,” he said, pulling out Thirteen Reasons Why. “It should have been me.”

  Chapter 32

  Peter had left three messages for Rafe over the course of the morning, and none had been returned. He told himself that meant nothing—Will might be just the same, and Rafe and Tess taking some much-needed rest. Or Will could be in the midst of the tests the Cot­tage Hospital had flown him to Boston to receive. He pushed aside the thought that Rafe was riveted to the boy’s bedside, unaware of Peter’s calls, because Will was fighting for his life.

  So he leaped for the phone when it rang again, and again he was disappointed.

  “Peter!”

  “Buck,” he said, his voice flagging.

  “Well, am I ever the consolation prize today,” Buck Maplethorne said, nettled. “You’d think I was trying to sell snowplows in June, with all the response I’ve been getting.”

  “No harm meant, Buckie, I’m just waiting on someone else’s call, that’s all.”

  “Well, I won’t keep you. Just called to say your rented beater’s come in, so you’re all set for harvesting tomorrow, and you can come by the nursery anytime to pick it up.”

  “Thanks,” Peter said.

  He left Alison on the deck with a book and Ney settled at her feet, took the battered Ford that served Mason Farms as an all-purpose hauler, and drove off without a thought.

  Mondays in mid-september were quiet at Maplethorne’s, with the summer folks gone and the island hunkering down for wet weather. Peter found Buck unloading ficus trees bound for his greenhouse.

  “Here already? Hey, I’ve got a great snowplow I can sell you. Cheap.” He grinned, his broad face betraying none of the financial worries that had beset his life since starting the business. Peter was one of his best customers. He placed orders in winter, when the off-islander petunia market was long gone.

  Buck led him to where the yellow metal beater sat under a tree, awkward and purposeless on dry land. “It’s a beaut. And you’re only paying the five days. Have it back to me by five on Friday and we’re set.”

  “Could you help me get it into the truck? I can’t lift it alone with this arm.”

  “Hey, you’re not lifting it at all. Daniel!” he yelled, cupping his mouth with one hand in the direction of the greenhouse. Buck’s seventeen-year-old son came at a trot. “Let’s get this beater into Mr. Mason’s truck.”

  Daniel nodded abruptly in Peter’s direction and bent to his task, with utter disregard for his back or the proper mechanics of lifting. The yellow metal frame rose triumphantly into the air and settled onto the floor of the old Ford. Buck winked at Peter. “Wouldn’t want you to have to get it off the truck when you get home, either. You wait for one of your crew, you hear me? Say, how are you driving that thing with one hand?”

  “Recklessly,” Peter said. “Thanks a lot, Buck. I’ll see you Friday.”

  “Wait a sec,” Buck Maplethorne said as Peter climbed carefully into the cab. “I’ll be forgetting my name next. I found that rose you wanted.”

  “You did?”

  “Yep. At least, I found out what it’s called. Getting the rose’ll be a bit trickier.”

  “Can’t we order it?”

  “If it were a commercially grown hybrid, sure. But it’s not.”

  Buck was intent upon enjoying his tale. Peter turned off the igni­tion and opened the truck door. “Go ahead, Buckie.”

  “Well, first I looked online in commercial catalogues, but it didn’t match any of the pictures. The rose you gave me looks like it’s got some Hybrid Perpetual in it, and that scent—there’s Musk rose in that flower’s genes. So then I hunted around the heirloom rosarians’ stock, but the color’s too modern for an old rose. Finally I took a photograph and sent it to the American Rose Society.”

  “Something that would never occur to me.”

  “They got back to me this morning. It’s a cross of the hybrid tea Tropicana and the hybrid musk Cornelia.”

  “A remarkable piece of detective work. What’s its name, by the way?”

  “Sundance,” Buck said. “But the kick’ll be to find it. The horticulturalist who hybridized it has never put the rose on the market. We’ll have to contact her directly. There’s probably only a few of these bushes in existence.”

  “You know who cultivated it?” Peter thought he could name the woman himself.

  “Lady by the name of Betty Scott,” Buck replied. “Lives in Westchester County somewhere.”

  “I know,” Peter said. “I’m sorry, Buck, but I’ve got to get back to the farm.”

  He was gone before the nurseryman could answer.

  Merry pulled up to the saltbox on the moor and scanned the blank windows. Rafe was right. Peter wasn’t at the house—probably some­where in town with Alison Miller. She stifled a vague sense of unease and told herself that there was nothing unusual in Peter’s sightseeing with a friend. But the short hair on the back of her neck was tingling uncontrollably.

  She had come for Rafe’s clothes and should have headed straight for the barn. She was bound for Lucy Jacoby’s house as soon as she got the clothes to the airport. But she followed the tin­gling on her neck and walked around the back of the house, searching for some sign of life, something she couldn’t identify.

  Ney pulled himself to his feet, stretching luxuriously in greeting as she mounted the three steps to the deck. She saw the emptied iced tea glasses and the deserted chairs ranged around a mortally danger­ous photograph. They had been here not long before, and they had left in a hurry. With a sense of foreboding, she opened the cover of a book of short stories dropped carelessly on the table near the snapshot of Max Mason and the woman he had loved. She saw the name on the flyleaf and began to swear.

  She ran back to the Explorer, heart pounding, and threw it into gear.

  Lucy Jacoby.

  Who had inadvertently left a blackmail letter addressed to Sundance in the copy of Thirteen Reasons Why that she’d given to Will.

  Who had knocked Will off his bike that same evening, desperate to search his backpack while he lay concussed on the moor nearby.

  Lucy, who had probably spent a weekend of suspense and remorse, wondering where the book had gone.

  Lucy, whose fingerprints on a bottle of wine matched the prints left on a wooden button from a sweater she claimed to have given away.

  Lucy, dressed to the nines, leaning against Maxwell Mason’s car in a photograph taken ten years ago.

  Lucy, who had stopped by Peter’s house, and found Alison Miller—the one pe
rson who could positively identify her as Sundance, link her to Rusty, and define her motive for murder.

  Merry roared from the moors into Milestone Road, and turned toward Tom Nevers Head.

  Chapter 33

  Up in the cool dimness of her loft bedroom, Lucy had Rafe’s nine-millimeter Browning—the one she had taken from the barn the night she shot Peter Mason—trained on Alison, whose hands and feet were bound. Forty minutes had passed since they had unexpectedly met on Peter’s deck.

  Lucy looked very different from the girl in the bruised photograph of Max Mason’s limousine that lay on the table between them—she had changed her hair and everything about her style—but just glimpsing the picture made her blood run cold.

  She had recognized Alison immediately.

  Alison had not recognized her.

  The two women drank iced tea and chatted about books, Will Starbuck, and the island. Then Lucy sug­gested they take a drive through the moors. Peter had abandoned them both. There was a pumpkin farm out toward Tom Nevers. Had Alison seen Tom Nevers?

  Alison couldn’t remember.

  Lucy left the book she’d brought for Will on the table with the empty iced tea glasses, so that Peter would know everything was fine. He might think she’d driven Alison back to town or even to the airport. With luck, he wouldn’t look for the woman for hours.

  It was only later, in Lucy’s car, that Alison realized who she was.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Lucy said now, laying the gun down on her bookcase. “It’s just that I need some time. So I can get off the island before anybody knows.” She turned to her closet and pulled a suitcase down from the top shelf.

  Alison shifted slightly to ease the strain in her shoulders. Her wrists were painfully snug in the small of her back. “But I know, Lucy,” she said quietly. “And I doubt you’ll ignore that.”

  Lucy’s hands stilled for an instant, and she looked at her with wounded and naked eyes. “I know you think I’m danger­ous because of Rusty. But it was just a moment that happened.” Her voice faltered and broke. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”