Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  Clarence Strangerfield, the crime-scene chief. His peremptory greeting was flung over one shoulder, and his broad jeans-clad bottom blocked her view of the pit over which he knelt. Merry broke into a trot, fingers grasping the edge of her hood to shield her face. The effort not to get wet in the midst of a deluge is a peculiarly human one—as only humans wear clothes, and occasionally mascara—and abruptly, disgustedly, Merry abandoned it. While she closed the distance of five hundred yards be­tween herself and the men, she took a mental census: Clarence; his assistant, Nat Coffin; John Fairborn—and Howie Seitz, his dark mop of curls glinting in the rain. Her father had sent her favorite first-year officer, the one she had trained and depended upon during the scut work of two murder investigations; Merry’s spir­its suddenly rose. It was too soon to declare the skeleton a result of murder, of course. It might be centuries old—the burial of an Indian, say, or one of the scores of men who first established Sconset as a seventeenth-century fishing colony. But the chief of Nantucket’s police was clearly weighing other possibilities, like death by vio­lence. And if he had sent his daughter and her favorite assistant, he might even let her investigate it.

  “Hey, guys,” she said casually as she came up to them. She laid a hand on Clarence’s shoulder.

  He grunted and heaved himself to his feet, hands on his bent knees for support. “Careful of the scene, now, Marradith.”

  She glanced around at the piles of disturbed sand, the torn beach plum, the scattering of small bones. The re­mains of a cement foundation, its house long vanished in January’s waves, lay jagged and broken in what had once been a yard. A wilting daffodil, brilliantly yellow against the sodden sand, had been flung down beside a bruised-red sand bucket. “Like there’s any evidence to preserve, Clare,” Merry said tartly. “These are kids we’re talking about, right?”

  “Ayeh,” the crime-scene chief said wearily. “And a dog. If you’ll believe.”

  “The dog’s taken a nip or two from a number of these bones.” Fairborn, the Nantucket police’s volunteer medical examiner, offered Merry a gnawed gray example. “Look at the damage. Hard to tell what’s dog and what’s death trauma.”

  “Great. And you’re sure they’re human?”

  “Well, the skull’s a pretty good indication,” Fairborn shot back, and took a drag on the cigarette he always kept lit between the fingers of his right hand. How a doctor could so imperil his health Merry never quite under­stood, but she accepted Fairborn’s smoking as a sign that he was somewhat normal. The man usually behaved like a stand-in for God.

  “Any idea how recently they were buried?”

  “The utter lack of flesh or ligament articulation might be a clue.”

  “Ligament articulation?” Merry recognized the term from her forensics class—ten years back now, wasn’t it? She just couldn’t quite remember what it meant.

  “Ligaments hold the skeleton together,” Fairborn said, with what passed for patience. “These bones lost theirs years ago. They’re completely disarticulated. Which means, in my view, that they weren’t killed last week.”

  “Thanks, Fairborn. You’re an immense help. Clarence?”

  The crime-scene chief looked at Merry from brown eyes as large and soulful as a basset hound’s and shook his head. “Ah’ve no idea, Marradith. Coulda been heah for yeahs, and the sand just worn away by the tides and whatnot this wintah. No tellin’, rally. What we need is a good forensic anthropologist, and I’m not sure we’ll find us one o’ those at the state crime lab in Boston. But befarh we worry about that, Nat here has an awful lot o’ siftin’ ahead, don’t yah, Nat?”

  The youngest of the numerous Coffins raised his brown head and smiled cheerfully. Nat labored over a large mesh sifter Merry suspected was culled from Clarence’s beloved garden tools; the crime-scene chief, as always, pursued his mission with precision and effi­ciency. No bone, no matter how disarticulated or long-buried in the Sconset sands, would slip from Clarence’s grasp.

  Merry surveyed the area silently, searching for the skull. She found it already bagged in plastic and set off to one side—incongruous and ghoulish and sobering.

  “Alas, poor Yorick,” Howie Seitz said as he followed the direction of her eyes.

  “You never cease to amaze me, Howie. I had no idea you could be a fan of both Kurt Cobain and Shakespeare.”

  “Hey, a poet’s a poet, Detective,” he protested.

  “Particularly when he’s dead.” Merry blew out a gusty breath—that failed in its object of lifting her sodden bangs—and turned away from them all.

  The address her father had given her belonged to a house two down from the corner of Beach and Codfish Park roads—safe, for the moment, from the ravages of storm and tide—with neat ligustrum hedges by the door and the pale golden façade common to the island’s newly shingled. Trellised roses ran the length of the catslide roof; a welcoming light shone in the window. No wonder the kids had come here for help.

  Merry ran up the crushed quahog-shell path to the sheltered doorway, pushed back her hood, and stabbed the bell.

  It was a man who answered her summons—nearly seventy, perhaps, with gnarled hands poking from the ends of a heather-blue sweater, and thinning salt-and-pepper hair. The eyes behind his half glasses held a roguish twin­kle that even the vicarious discovery of a skeleton had failed to dim. He peered at Merry through his storm door, nodded twice, then opened it wide.

  “Detective Meredith Folger, Nantucket police,” she said, and held out her badge.

  “Lenny Schwartz.” He adjusted the glasses to peer at the police shield, in much the same manner that a man will gaze at the label of a wine bottle he has ordered, at once knowing and ignorant; then he studied her, his eyebrows raised. “You’re a detective,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m impressed. I didn’t know Nantucket allowed women to handle murder. How progressive.”

  “What makes you think this is murder, Mr. Schwartz?”

  To Merry’s surprise his face creased in a smile. “Well, now—if you don’t sound like the star of every police show I’ve ever seen. Have I just talked myself into being sus­pect number one?”

  “That takes more than talk.”

  “Thank goodness,” he said mildly, and led her into the living room.

  “My wife, Ruth.” Lenny motioned to a broad-hipped woman in a Shetland sweater sitting protectively close to two young children huddled on an overstuffed sofa. Both balanced Dixie cups of what appeared to be Coca-Cola in their small hands and stared at her fearfully. “And our neighbors, Cecil and Nan Markham. This is Detective—Meredith?—Folger.”

  With the telltale hesitation of one who endures signifi­cant back pain, Ruth Schwartz stood up and extended her hand. Merry shook it.

  “We’re so glad you could come,” Ruth said, and glanced at the two children.

  “I’m sorry that I have to intrude.” Merry swung her leather purse from her shoulder and fished in its capa­cious depths for her laptop, then felt the square bulk of her reading glasses and pulled those out, too. “I could take the kids home and talk to them there, if that’s more convenient—”

  “I think perhaps you ought to do it here,” Ruth Schwartz interposed, with what Merry read as a signifi­cant look. So home was not a congenial place for the young Markhams. “We’ve called their mother. I’m sure Imogen will be along fairly soon.”

  “In that case—”

  “Please, take a chair. Can I get you anything? Soda? Coffee?”

  “You know, a cup of tea would be great,” Merry said gratefully. “It’s really chilly out there.”

  “Yes. And the Daffodil Festival is only a week away—”

  “Ruth,” Lenny Schwartz said warningly. “The detec­tive’s tea.”

  “I’m going, I’m going.” Ruth shot her husband a look, one that acknowledged her garrulousness as it reproved h
im for censuring it. Then she smiled at Merry and moved stiffly toward the kitchen. An imposing woman, gray hair drawn back in a loose bun, her high cheekbones still markedly beautiful.

  “Weather’s killing her back,” Lenny explained, “and of course she refuses to lay off the gardening this close to Daffodil Weekend. She’s got several entries in the show. But that’s neither here nor there, right? You want to talk to the kids.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re really from the police?” a small voice said. Merry turned and found Cecil Markham’s large gray eyes fixed upon her. “Why aren’t you in uniform, then?”

  Merry was struck by something in his tone—a refine­ment of accent she couldn’t quite place—and she turned this over in her mind as she took a chair near Cecil and Nan. “It’s Saturday,” she replied, opening her laptop and settling her glasses on her nose. “And, besides, I’m a detective. A lot of us don’t bother with uniforms.”

  “Oh.” Cecil was obviously disappointed—and some­thing else . . . Relieved? Perhaps a real policeman would have been too intimidating.

  “Which one of you found the bones today on the beach?” Merry looked first at the small red-haired girl and then at her brother. The children exchanged a glance, then studied their cups of Coke.

  “I did,” the girl said finally. “Then Cecil came and helped. We thought it was buried treasure.”

  As Merry’s brow furrowed, Cecil elaborated. “Pirates always leave bones on top of their jewels. To signal their mates and ward off the curious.” There it was again—the unconscious formality, the stilted diction. As though he had learned to speak from reading books.

  “Ah,” Merry said. “I see. You kept digging, then, in the hope of hitting pay dirt.”

  “But then we found the—Cecil found the skull,” Nan said in a thin voice. She shivered, her red curls shaking. “It was horrible.”

  Merry nodded thoughtfully and sat back against the chair’s needlepoint pillow, studying the Markhams. They did not look like happy children—although any child who found a skull on the beach might be similarly sobered. “Nan,” Merry said, “I’d like you to tell me something, if you can. Why did you decide to dig in that spot in the first place?”

  “It was Satchmo,” she said promptly.

  “Satchmo?”

  “Their dog.” Ruth Schwartz appeared at Merry’s side with a steaming mug of tea. “He’s drying off in the kitchen. A dear old thing.”

  “Satchmo started the digging,” Nan said. “He must have smelled the bones.”

  “Satchmo’s a great digger,” Cecil offered, “and he loves bones.”

  “But why were you sitting near the condemned houses at all?”

  Nan’s change of expression was swift and formidable. “Cecil wouldn’t let me play.”

  “But there was going to be a battle, Nan!”

  Merry turned to him. “And girls aren’t allowed to fight?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What about me?” she asked blandly. “I’m a police de­tective. We have to fight sometimes.”

  “Can you fire a gun?” Nan’s voice was filled with awe.

  “Yes. But I try to avoid it.”

  “Golly,” Cecil breathed.

  “So you were sent off to play by yourself while Cecil fought his battles,” Merry said to Nan. “Why that spot anyway? It’s an awful mess, with the houses gone and the foundations exposed.”

  “I didn’t start out there, exactly.” The girl’s eyes nar­rowed with her effort to remember. “Satchmo and I were having a tea party. And then I saw some daffodils up near the concrete edge, and went to pick them. Satchmo started digging then, I guess.”

  “And what did you think when he found the bones?”

  Nan shrugged—the catchall little-girl gesture of igno­rance and indifference. “I thought maybe he’d buried them there himself. Satchmo’s got bones everywhere. But then I saw a real little one—like a twig—and I wanted to show Cecil.”

  The doorbell sang out sharply in the quiet of the cozy living room, and Merry jumped.

  “That’ll be Imogen,” Lenny said, and disappeared into the hallway.

  “Miss Detective.” Cecil’s hand was tugging at Merry’s sleeve, and his voice had grown oddly desperate. “Please tell Mummy it wasn’t our fault. That we found those bones, I mean. Please tell her we didn’t mean to do it.”

  And as Lenny Schwartz ushered Imogen Markham into the room, Merry saw why she intimidated her children.

  She was a frail-looking woman, hollow-eyed and dark-haired, with two sharp lines running from her nose to the corners of her mouth. Her forehead was similarly creased, suggesting weariness and unwonted aging, al­though Merry decided the woman couldn’t be more than forty. Imogen Markham wore a pair of faded duck trousers and a torn blue T-shirt under a jacket pulled hastily over her shoulders; the clothing hung upon her body. A tide of stale cigarette smoke permeated the room as soon as she entered it.

  “Whatever did you have to run to the Schwartzes’ for, then?” she asked, her voice deep with irritation as she looked at her children. Merry grasped at the sound of that husky voice, finding in it the explanation for Cecil’s oddities—Imogen Markham was British.

  “Hello, Imogen,” Ruth Schwartz said.

  Imogen ignored her and crossed rapidly to her son. She jerked the boy to his feet with one fluid movement of her arm. He hung his head. Nan sank miserably into the sofa.

  Merry stood up and extended her hand. “Meredith Folger, Mrs. Markham. Nantucket police.”

  “You’ve done with the children, then?” Imogen Markham demanded, by way of greeting.

  “For the moment.”

  “Right. Then we’ll be leaving. Step smartly, Nan.” Imogen wheeled for the door, mouth set and black hair rippling snakelike across her narrow back. Cecil dragged at her heels.

  “Mrs. Markham,” Merry called after her as Nan slid to her feet and took a reluctant step in her mother’s wake, “I’d like to speak to you, if I may.”

  “What is it?”

  Merry glanced at the children’s averted faces. Nan had given up the battle not to cry. “Could we talk a moment in private?”

  A faint, derisive smile flickered across Imogen Markham’s face and was gone. “Whatever for? You think these kids hear anything?”

  “Yes,” Merry rejoined evenly. “I do.”

  Imogen rolled her eyes. She turned Cecil abruptly toward the Schwartzes’ kitchen. “Go get the dog, mate, and take your sister with you,” she commanded, with a slap to his behind.

  The children scuttled off without a backward glance.

  “Get on with it, then,” Imogen told Merry.

  “It’s possible that what happened today on the beach might disturb your children for some time to come. You should expect nightmares at the very least. Possibly an aversion to the entire area. Maybe even an unwillingness to go out alone.”

  Imogen laughed derisively. “With all the violence on the telly? You think a few bones are going to unnerve my Cecil and Nan? You don’t know kids, Miss Nantucket Policewoman. They’re nasty little beggars. Haven’t a sen­sitive bone in their bodies. It takes growing up to teach you pain.”

  “Then I’d say Nan and Cecil are growing up fast,” Merry said softly, and bit back the words too late. Imogen Markham’s face, if anything, became instantly more closed and unreachable. Nevertheless, Merry reached down to her purse and fished out her wallet. “I’m no psy­chiatrist. I’m only telling you what I’ve learned from ex­perience. But I’d like to give you this.”

  Imogen took the small buff card from Merry’s extended hand. “What’s this?”

  “A counseling service we recommend. In case you find your children are more sensitive than you think.”

  The woman looked at Merry for the briefest second. Then, deliberately, she tore the card in
two.

  When the Markhams had gone—a silent and fulmi­nating trio blackly outlined against the sodden sky—Merry took her leave of Lenny and Ruth Schwartz.

  “You were very good to those children today,” she told them. “I’d like to thank you, even if Mrs. Markham won’t.”

  “Oh, we never expect thanks from Imogen,” Lenny said roguishly. “It’s against her creed. She’s a confirmed mis­anthrope. Any spark of gratitude would cause her face to crack.”

  “Sad, isn’t it?” Ruth said a trifle wistfully. “They’re such gifted children.”

  “Are they?”

  Ruth glanced at Lenny. “Well, I think so,” she said. “Not that I’m an authority. Nan is utterly delightful—a budding poet. The child asks the most curious questions—all about the mentality of things. Do dogs fear death? Are waves the sea’s way of reaching for the shore when it wants to be human? She’s absolutely enchanted with flowers, of course, and is always stealing into the garden when her mother’s in one of her moods.”

  “Cecil lives entirely in his mind,” her husband added, “when he’s not living in his books. A daydreamer. Well, they both come by the imagination naturally.”

  “From—their mother?”

  Lenny snorted. “Not Imogen. At least, not that anyone would be able to tell. No, from Ian. Ian Markham. He was a fairly famous sculptor, you know. Sank his boat and drowned in a squall about eight years back.”

  “That Ian Markham!” Merry exclaimed, jolted by memory. A flamboyant British expatriate—known for his charm, his daring work, his high-paying clients, and his sudden, tragic death. Markham had taken the island’s art world by storm, if only briefly. “And his wife has stayed here all these years?”

  “Kept the studio, the house, the whole artist schtick.” Lenny nodded. “Stuck up a forest of no trespassing signs when the tourists started collecting on the front lawn. You’d think she loved it here in Sconset. Couldn’t tear herself away. It’s absolutely weird, I think.”

  “Now, Lenny.” Ruth’s voice held the mildest reproof. “We’ve no idea how Imogen feels about living here.”

  “The hell we don’t,” he rejoined. “You always know ex­actly how Imogen feels.”