The station consensus on Haden Krakauer was that the stresses of the last few days had knocked him off the rails, and he had launched on another of his famous benders. Haden’s sobriety was a delicate and tentative thing at the best of times. With school shootings and murders turning the island into a mock urban hellscape, he had obviously needed to hide out, and his favorite spot for that was the inside of a bottle, preferably a Smirnoff handle jug. Charlie Boyce had found store video from the Islander: Haden buying booze. A never-repaired software glitch dating from the last winter’s power outage had disabled the time and date stamping, but the clerk remembered seeing Haden and a pal there sometime in the last few days.
Kyle Donnelly said, “The last time Haden disappeared, it was about a year before you got here. He woke up in a motel outside New Orleans wearing some fat girl’s prom dress, with two hookers playing cribbage and a box of puppies. French bulldog puppies. Must have cost him a fortune. He had no idea how he got there, and the hookers weren’t talking.”
As for Billy, the note he left on his door two days ago for his daughter, Debbie, said, Gone surfing. Big swell at Cuttyhunk. The cash is for cabs and food. No parties, please!
Tiny Cuttyhunk Island, the outermost of the Elizabeth Islands—less than a mile long, population less than a hundred people—lay anchored between Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound. Its main appeal is a single, superb point break with a flat stone bottom that engineered perfect waves on a strong south swell. I’d heard Billy talk about the place for years, and his expeditions there by Boston Whaler were legend in the local surfing community. Debbie was taking care of his pug. She was sixteen and self-reliant, with a thriving babysitting business of her own, and she was used to Billy’s sudden surf trips.
So that was that: a phone call on the NPD personnel line, a liquor store sighting, and a note at the Madaket beach shack solved all the mysteries. No loose ends. No red flags. But something still bothered me.
When everyone was gone, I brought up the liquor store CCTV video. The snippet ran four minutes and ten seconds, according to the numerical readout on the bottom right of my computer screen. The time and date information had indeed been zapped out of the liquor store’s system. According to Kyle’s interview notes, they needed a tech guy to rewrite the JavaScript. But the owner was a jolly redneck Luddite who had never bothered with the upgrade. He laughed it off. “Shit, man, JavaScript? Ain’t that the way your handwriting looks after too many cups of coffee?”
But the gap nagged at me. It seemed minor, a relatively small window for speculation—the transaction could have occurred on Wednesday or Thursday, according to the clerk. The woman remembered Haden, and she hadn’t been working earlier in the week.
I ran the video again and froze on a frame showing the man with Haden. The guy was wearing a Toscana hoodie—the old, politically incorrect one with the cartoon of the back-end loader hiking up a woman’s dress. Locals sneered at the trite tourist outerwear sold at town shops, T-shirts featuring the imaginary “Nantucket University,” but a tee from Botticelli & Pohl, a local architecture firm with a cool logo, or a classic from a legendary contractor, like the Bruce Killen Death and Resurrection T-shirt, or an early D. Goodman Fine Painting and Ceramic Tile number from the eighties with its grout-knife swoop was a priceless totem for the wealthy washashores who craved some local cachet. The old-school Toscana sweat was a perfect example of the type. So the guy in the video could have been some slumming one-percenter. But there was only one person I knew personally who owned one of those old Toscana hoodies.
Billy Delavane.
My head was spinning. Could this be possible?
If the tape was made before Billy disappeared on Wednesday, it was all too possible. The bullet points lined up in my mind like someone else’s presentation:
Haden and Billy had been feuding for years.
The mother of Billy’s daughter was the long-lost love of Haden’s life, and Haden had spent endless drunken nights in the officers-club bar in Camp Doha, during his tour in Iraq, plotting out various unhinged revenge plans, including framing Billy for a series of bombings. He brooded about that shit literally for years. And no, he never actually did anything. Someone with a grudge against Haden had listened to all those schemes and come to the island to make it look like Haden was actually carrying them out…in effect framing him for the crime of framing Billy. I still got a migraine thinking about it. But that was history now. Haden never set off a bomb and never tried to frame Billy for anything.
But he wanted to. That was the point—he wanted to.
Dreams of revenge got him through two deployments in Iraq.
And there was more stuff, too. Rancor dating back to high school that neither of them ever talked about. A lot of history festering under the skin like a cedar splinter.
And then: Haden knew Billy’s routine. Billy always stocked up on beer and bagged ice before one of his surf trips, and always at the Islander. A swell hitting Cuttyhunk was all the information Haden needed, though on this gossip-ridden little island probably half the people Haden knew were aware of Billy’s planned expedition.
So it would have been easy to intercept him at the store.
And now both of them were gone.
I turned off the video.
That was crazy talk. Haden was no criminal. I’d made that point to Franny Tate four years ago when she was investigating the bombings. And lots of Nantucketers collected those old Toscana sweatshirts. It could have been any of two dozen people in that store with him.
And there was something else, some detail slightly askew. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I ran the tape yet again, cataloguing all the mostly irrelevant visual information: the hard liquor bottles lined up behind the counter; the March of Dimes collection box next to the cash register; the rack of Inquirer and Mirror copies beside a rack of the give-away newspaper, Yesterday Island; trays of candy below the counter; cartons of cigarettes lined up behind the video monitor bolted to the wall.
Nothing. I ran it again. Still nothing—except that maddening tickle of disquiet.
I set my harebrained theory about Haden as a mad kidnapper aside and got back to work.
We arrested Hamilton Tyler for attempted murder, conspiracy, and falsifying evidence. When I played him the tip line message from Billy Delavane he had tried to erase, showed him the gun—clean except for one ostentatiously perfect thumbprint—and let him read Sebastian Cruz’s deposition about being sent off to the far end of Eel Point Road by a call from the NPD about stolen leaf-blowers—Sebastian recognized Ham’s voice and wondered why the call had come from a burner cell and not the main switchboard at the police station—Ham broke down and confessed. The capper was his burner’s number on the call record of Elkins’s iPhone. For a young man who spent most of his short adult life studying criminals, he was strikingly inept at imitating them.
Ham’s downfall dominated the front page of the Inquirer and Mirror that week. (The Shoals had temporarily suspended publication while David Trezize was off-island.) And the story even made it into the Boston and Providence papers. I expected some blowback from the town, but Ham Tyler must have been more widely disliked than I realized.
I was with Jane the next day when the final mystery was solved and the last threat eliminated. I had gone to Apex Academy on Essex Road to pick her up for lunch. One of the girls on her landscaping crew had dropped her off for a late-morning meeting with Diana Fox. The head teacher was a formidable woman—“a force of nature,” someone had called her, comparing her to various natural disasters, from tornadoes to tsunamis. I was beginning to suspect sinkhole might be the more appropriate image.
So I got to the school early, expecting some fireworks, to provide backup if Jane needed it—the old LAPD Code 9 alert: officer needs assistance.
The academy dominated the far end of Essex Road off Bartlett Road, the only structure with vehicles from the “other�
�� Nantucket parked on the apron and at the curbside nearby—Range Rovers; BMW X5s; giant, new four-door Jeep Wranglers from the new dealership; and the inevitable MINI Cooper Countryman convertible.
Apex was clearly the preferred alternative school for the year-round residents who had the money to choose. Spanish was taught in the school but most likely not spoken in any of the students’ homes.
Inside, walking past a bulletin board that featured a Moby Dick reading group, rehearsals for the school production of Marat/Sade (seriously?), trips to the Boston Museum of Science and Plimoth Plantation, along with notifications for fundraising dinners at the Pearl, and babysitting services, the first door I reached was Diana Fox’s office.
There was no secretary at the desk in the anteroom, and the inner door was open.
I slipped inside to eavesdrop.
Jane’s voice: “—a completely unacceptable response!”
“I can’t help that. I have a problem with praise.”
“Then get over it! Kids need praise! You’re not a ballet master or a drill instructor. You’re a teacher.”
“What a lovely way to put it. Ballet and master and drill instructor! I think of myself as a combination of both. Instilling grace and discipline—and the will to fight.”
“Kids need kindness.”
“Kids abuse kindness! Particularly little boys. Just last week I assigned them to do a capsule review of a summer reading book. A capsule review! To make their lives a little easier and give them a fun assignment. But also to teach concision. Sam chose James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.”
“I know.”
“Then perhaps you remember the four words he chose to use for his full book report.”
Jane laughed. “Jim met a bug.”
“That is ludicrous!”
“It’s concise.”
“It’s disrespectful!”
“It’s funny. Funny stuff is often disrespectful. You would have picked up on that if you had a sense of humor.”
“I have a perfectly functional sense of humor! And I do not appreciate these ad hominem attacks. We are discussing your son, not me, and I strongly suggest you start him on a course of Adderall.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m very much afraid he suffers from attention deficit disorder.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on obvious syndrome-conforming behavioral symptomology. Lack of attention, fidgeting, doodling, daydreaming in class.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he’s bored?”
“Excuse me?”
“Bored—not interested. You’re boring, Ms. Fox! Sam is responding the way any healthy kid responds when he’s bored. Get him interested, and see what happens! I’ve been reading to Sam from 1984 every night. Last night we spent two hours discussing The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.”
“What does that have to do with 1984?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, the bible of the Resistance—the book within the book. It’s meta-text, Diana. Ask Sam sometime; he loves meta-text. He’ll talk about it for hours. Because he’s interested.”
A sniff. “The Resistance. That’s appropriate. Perhaps he views his own disruptive behavior in that same grandiose light.”
“What disruptive behavior?”
“Well, for one thing, he insists on drawing pictures of me for the amusement of his classmates, placing my head on top of various animal bodies. Ridiculous animals! A kangaroo, a giraffe, and a penguin. I am not a penguin!”
“Did you discuss the drawings?”
“I confiscated them.”
“Those drawings are constitutionally protected free speech—and private property. You had no right to do that.”
“I am not a penguin!”
“He wasn’t saying that. He was saying you look like a penguin.”
“I demand an apology.”
“And I want those drawings back. Along with Sam’s book of riddles. You know, I was looking through that book the other day, and I found one riddle that applied perfectly to you. It goes like this—How do you draw a line and then, without touching it, make it longer?”
“This is absurd.”
“The answer is, you draw another, shorter line next to it. Then it’s the longer line. I would say that sums up your teaching philosophy perfectly. Make yourself feel bigger by making other people feel small.”
“This is all beside the point. The question is, what are you going to do about this situation?”
“Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”
“Oh, yes? And what might that be?”
“I’m getting Sam away from here and putting him in the public school—where he should have been in the first place.”
“He’ll never get a decent education there.”
“I did. So did all my friends.”
“Well, things have changed and not for the better. I hope your little boy can speak Spanish. That’s the lingua franca at Cyrus Pierce right now.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Don’t roll your eyes at me! It’s true. We’re being overrun by these people!”
I heard Jane push her chair back. “That’s what the Wampanoag Indians said three hundred and sixty years ago—when Thomas Macy and the Quakers showed up. The difference is, the Indians were right—and you’re just a bigot. You should read 1984 sometime. Orwell has a lot to say about people like you. Check it out. And take notes. I may come back and give you a famous Diana Fox ten-page pop quiz. You wouldn’t want to flunk it.”
Jane came out a few seconds later, holding Sam’s book in one hand and his drawings in the other. She seemed amazingly calm.
I gave her a hug. “How did it go?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
When we were outside in the cool, windy sunshine, she said, “How much did you hear?”
“Most of it. The end of it. You’re really putting Sam into Cyrus Pierce?”
“If they’ll take him.”
“I think they have to take him.”
I was parked on the curb. As we climbed into my cruiser, I said, “Joe couldn’t make the meeting?” Joe was her ex-husband.
She shrugged. “He’s kind of opted out of this whole thing. He’s a good dad—Sammy loves him. But he’s not that great at the real-life stuff…school and taxes and child support. It’s fine. Really. That’s the great thing about divorce. I don’t have to resent Joe for being Joe any more, or expect him to take care of me or Sam. I can take care of us.”
I reached across to squeeze her knee. “And now you have a little extra help.”
She grinned. “Can you arrest Diana Fox?”
“Not yet. But I can cook you dinner and take Sam to Little League.”
She leaned over to kiss my cheek. “That sounds good enough for Nantucket.”
“I love it when you set the bar low.”
I pulled out, did a two-point turn, and headed for Bartlett Road.
“We never should have put Sam in that school,” Jane said after a while. “We were snobs. I hate to admit it, but I was a snob. A big, stupid snob.”
“Sam will be fine. And I don’t know much about Apex Academy or Diana Fox, but I can tell you one thing. She definitely looks like a penguin.”
We were halfway home when I got the call from Charlie Boyce. He’d identified the pilot of a Cirrus Vision who’d been found dead in the cockpit of his plane that morning. The death had been provisionally ruled a suicide, but the man in the private jet wasn’t the bipolar dot-com millionaire or guilt-besotted Wall Street corporate raider whom one might have expected driving the airport road and glancing at the array of multimillion-dollar private aircraft parked on the tarmac. As some wag pointed out later, it was a telling detail that the Cirrus Vision was the cheape
st private jet you could buy, and this one was preowned—a used model that probably sold for under a million dollars. That detail made locals smile because the wealthy aviator was, in fact, a local Nantucket boy from one of the stingiest families on the island.
And Jane had known him since high school.
The Bascombs were “tight as ticks” in local argot, borderline hoarders who never threw anything away and never spent a dime when a penny could get them a crappy substitute. Jim “Sippy” Bascomb’s mother famously boiled and reused her dental floss, a small, specific lunacy that spoke volumes for the off-kilter thrift of the whole pinched, squinting family.
Jim was an only child, and he “pulled a Larrabee” when his mother finally died, except the Bascombs owned ten times more property than the Larrabees—or the Tylers—and in much better locations. Only the Delavanes could boast comparable holdings.
Unlike Billy Delavane or Ham Tyler, Sippy had unloaded everything as fast as he could. There were Realtors pacing out the main house on the day of his mother’s memorial service, and you could see surveyors’ tripods and orange spray paint on more than two hundred acres of prime Nantucket land by the next week. Sippy could have sold all that real estate to the Land Bank or the Conservation Foundation and made an ample five or six million dollars instead of the fifty he supposedly cleared.
When David Trezize asked him about that at the time, Sippy’s answer was succinct: “I owe this island nothing.”
By all accounts, Sippy was a mean, ugly, bitter little boy who grew up to be a mean, ugly, bitter little man, and everyone was glad to see him go when he finally left.
Jane was especially glad. She was the first fifteen-year-old she had ever heard of with a stalker, and Sippy had remained a vaguely troubling presence right until he sold his family’s property and disappeared in the early summer of 2010. She knew the dead flowers she received on her birthday every year came from him, and she suspected the MV keyed into every car she drove was Sippy’s work, also. Jane had been a big Whalers booster in the old days with a proud, strident, irrational contempt for Nantucket’s sister island. Sippy always sat with the Martha’s Vineyard fans at the big rivalry football games and had actually been caught spray-painting the MV initials on the gym wall. Keying Jane’s car was the next logical step in his bizarre love-hate relationship with the island and the girl who had somehow come to represent it for him.
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