“Aw, Ma.”
“She’s younger than you are. You don’t have to be a babysitter, but you’re her big brother. Go on, now. You have time to get there and come back before lunch. If you’re late there may not be any left for you.”
The four children walked along the beach toward the narrow sandy road that led over the sand dunes and on to the lighthouse. Looking at them I remembered adventures I’d had at that age. I’d been a pretty careful kid but had come home a few times with cuts and bruises I hadn’t had when I’d left. My father had been interested in my travels but hadn’t ever made a big issue out of my injuries, contenting himself with applying Band-Aids and iodine to my wounds until I was up to telling of my adventures. I hoped I would be as wise.
We filled bags with seaweed and stuffed them into the back of the truck, only leaving room for the four kids, us, and the lunch basket. When the truck was packed, we spread the old bedspread that we use for a beach blanket on the sand on the sunny side of the truck and flopped down side by side.
“I believe this is the way it’s supposed to be,” said Zee, lying on her back with her eyes shut behind her dark glasses. “This is why people pay thousands of dollars to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.”
“Would you like a beer?”
“Not yet. I feel like I have too many clothes on.”
“I feel like that, too.”
“That you have too many?”
“No, that you have.”
“I suspect that if I shed what I’m wearing I’d actually be a bit chilly. I have an idea. Why don’t you get naked and then lie there awhile and let me know if it’s really warm enough for nude beaching. I’ll lie here like this and wait for your report.”
We lay in the sunshine and listened to the gulls and the sound of small waves slapping the sand at our feet.
By and by I heard children’s voices. From their sound I concluded that no one was dead or seriously wounded. I rose and got the lunch basket and put it on the bedspread.
When the four children rounded the truck and spied us, they looked happy.
“How was your adventure?” I asked.
“Excellent,” said Joshua.
“We went all the way to the lighthouse and back,” said Diana.
“I forgot to tell you to be careful of cars.”
“We didn’t see any cars, and besides, we know what to do. You just step off out of the way.”
“My dad says just to remember that there are a lot of idiots driving cars,” said Jim.
“A good thing to remember. If you guys are ready for lunch, lunch is ready for you. Find places to sit on the blanket.”
There were sandwiches and potato chips for all, pickles and olives, soft drinks for the kids, and Sam Adams for Zee and me. For dessert, an apple apiece.
When lunch was over, all of us spent some time casting lures into the empty sea, just in case something was there. Then we put the rods back in the roof rack, put all of the paper and empty containers back in the lunch basket, put it and the bedspread and ourselves in the truck, and went home.
As we waited on the Chappy side for the little On Time ferry to pick us up and carry us over to Edgartown, I was glad to have observed that Joshua and Jim seemed to have totally forgotten that they’d ever punched each other. I didn’t think that I’d ever had any fights at their age, but maybe kids were maturing faster these days. In any case, the two of them seemed to be as close as ever. Perhaps it was because their battles had ended in a draw, leaving neither a winner or a loser, so that a balance was maintained between them.
It had been a good day, but as I thought of the combative friendship between the two boys and of how love and hate often seem two sides of the same coin, I found myself wondering if the latter was what had led to the death of Nadine Gibson.
The On Time arrived and carried us across to the village. I dropped off Mary and Jim at their homes and drove on to ours.
A lot of people had loved Nadine. Had something flipped the coin in one of the people I’d interviewed? Or was there another lover-hater out there, as yet unknown to me?
The sun was sinking and the air was cooling. As I emptied our bags of seaweed out by the garden, I wondered if Nadine’s killer had had as lovely a day as I’d had.
25
Are murderers as happy as other people? There’s a notion that they’re not, that somehow they are doomed to suffer from their killings. Raskolnikov certainly did, as did Shakespeare’s Richard III and Lady Macbeth, although I wasn’t persuaded by Bill’s dramatizations. Hamlet, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the blood he shed in the last act. My suspicion was that guilt may not be as common as some would like to believe and that killers probably laugh as often as anyone else.
I thought such thoughts on Sunday, as Zee and I worked in our garden and got our peas planted, refilled the bird feeders, and performed other yard tasks. Joshua and Diana, meanwhile, did spring cleaning in the tree house in the big beech, tossing out leaves and broken branches. When you own property, there’s always work to be done, and I liked doing it most of the time. Sometimes, in fact, it seemed to me that my few acres and my family constituted a whole planet and its occupants, and that I needed nothing more from life and had no obligations to any larger universe.
But Donne was right, of course, and the outer world rightly or wrongly demanded attention from all of its inhabitants, including me, especially when it was out of joint. Some groups of people living out in the western deserts believed, I’d read, that crimes were committed by people out of touch with themselves and the world; that they could be cured by being put back in harmony with the universe; that crime was a manifestation of a sickness of the soul best dealt with by curing rituals rather than by penalties. It was a notion not unfamiliar to psychiatrists, some of whom saw evil as a manifestation of mental illness, not sin.
The victims of killers were, of course, just as dead, whatever the cause.
While we cleaned our yard and our little fish pond of winter debris, I mentally reviewed the conversations I’d had with people who had known Nadine and the observations I’d made while talking with them. I hoped I wasn’t forgetting anything and that I wasn’t attaching too little significance to some detail that seemed inconsequential. I wondered whom I should interview that I hadn’t already interviewed, who might know something important, whom I’d managed to overlook.
Who had hated Nadine? And why?
Into my thinking appeared two people I hadn’t considered before. They were lean and gray-haired and neatly coiffed, and were wearing expensive, informal clothes. Justin Wyner and Genevieve Geller, Marshall Lea stalwarts, conservationists, and birders, people who were more familiar than most with the old Olmstead farm where Nadine’s body had been found. They knew of the old drive leading into the place. They knew of the fallen house and the debris-filled basement. Had they known Nadine?
Had Justin Wyner, aging but still hale, and rich enough to perhaps buy the attention of a young working woman, ever spent time in the Fireside, where he, like many others, had seen and been enchanted by the girl with strawberry hair? Had she flirted with him, then spurned him? Had he struck her down in a rage, then buried her in one place he knew well, since the ground was too frozen for him to dig a proper grave?
Or had Genevieve, a firebrand for conservation, found them out and done the girl in out of fury and jealousy?
Such a scenario seemed unlikely but not impossible. In affairs of the heart no act is impossible.
So the next day, when my wife and children had gone off to the lives they led when I wasn’t with them, I drove back to Oak Bluffs and knocked on the door of Bonzo’s house. His mother was at work, teaching, but Bonzo had not yet left for his job at the Fireside. He seemed glad to see me.
“J.W. Whatcha doin’ here so early? Come in where it’s warm. I’m having some cocoa with marshmallow on top. You can have some, too. It’s really good!”
I went in and sat down and he bustled around and brought tw
o steaming cups to the table. The cocoa tasted sweet and good and the marshmallow reminded me of when I was a kid.
“Bonzo,” I said, “I wonder if you can remember something for me.”
“Gee,” he said, furrowing his brow. “I can remember some stuff real good, but not everything.”
“Nobody can remember everything,” I said. “What I want to know is whether Justin Wyner or his wife used to come in to the Fireside. Can you remember ever seeing them there? Justin Wyner and his wife are the two people who went with us up to Olmstead’s farm when we first went looking for Nadine. Do you remember them? They belong to the Marshall Lea Foundation. Two lean, gray-haired people? She knew about how far robins go to get material to build their nests.”
His dim eyes brightened, and he smiled with the pleasure of recollection. “Oh, yeah. I remember her. And I remember him, too.”
“Good. Now try to remember if either of them used to come into the Fireside back when Nadine was working there. Think hard.”
He frowned and rolled his eyes up toward his forehead and then to one side and then the other. Why do we do that? I wondered, as I watched him, knowing that I did the same thing myself.
“Gee,” he said finally. “I don’t remember whether they was ever there or not. A lot of people come in there, you know. We got regulars but we get a lot of other people, too, and I don’t remember them all.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember them, but maybe they came in when I wasn’t working. That could happen because I don’t work there all the time, you know. Sometimes I get time off.”
“I know you do, Bonzo. Well, I was just wondering. Are you working today?”
“I sure am. This isn’t a day off for me. I got things to do.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “In fact, I got to go there as soon as I finish my cocoa because I got work to do before the doors open.”
“I’ll drive you. Do you know who’s tending bar today?”
“I think it’s Jake, but sometimes Helen comes on for the noon shift.”
Either would do. When we had drunk our cocoa, we drove into town and I parked in the lot off Kennebec, behind the bar. Bonzo rapped on the back door and Jake opened it.
“J.W. Afraid we aren’t open yet.” He stepped aside as Bonzo ducked past him.
“I’m not looking for a drink,” I said. “I’m after information. Do you know a man named Justin Wyner? Sixty-five or seventy, maybe, gray hair, slim and straight. Belongs to the Marshall Lea Foundation, and looks like he has money. Wife called Genevieve Geller.”
Jake said, “We don’t usually get Marshall Lea types in here.” The tone of his voice indicated that he, like me, was not a Marshall Lea fan. He didn’t look like a bird-watcher, so I guessed him to be a shooter who’d been shut out of his hunting grounds by some Marshall Lea land purchase.
“In that case,” I said, “you’d probably remember him if he’d started hanging around here a year or so ago. Dignified. Dresses well.”
“Unlike you and most of my regulars,” said Jake. “Yeah, I’d probably remember anybody who was dignified and well dressed and hung around the place. But I don’t. The dignified, well-dressed types who wander in here usually don’t come back. Maybe you should ask Helen or Clancy. Maybe one of them will remember more than I do.”
I thanked him for his help and advice and went back to the truck. As I drove away, a few degrees too cold for comfort, I decided that I would definitely get Clay to fix my heater. If I was going to keep the Land Cruiser, I needed a way to make it warmer in the winter.
Of course I didn’t have to keep the truck. It was forty years old, after all. Maybe I’d been too cheap for too long. Maybe I should bite the bullet and spend some money on a newer vehicle. The prospect was both pleasant and unpleasant; pleasant because a new truck was bound to be more comfortable, unpleasant because there actually wasn’t anything really wrong with the old Toyota. It was cold in the winter but I’d never caught pneumonia or been frostbitten while driving. Besides, Clay was going to fix the heater.
I circled around the Flying Horses then took Circuit Avenue out to Wing Road and went on to Barnes Road. I parked near the narrow lane that led up to the old Olmstead place, took note of the car and truck tracks that had recently used it, ignored the No Trespassing signs, and walked up to the fallen house. There was yellow police tape around the site, and a lot of the rubble that had been in the cellar hole when last I’d been there was now piled outside of the foundation walls, where it had been deposited by a backhoe. The area where Nadine’s body had been found was now fairly clear of debris.
I wondered if the police had found anything useful to their investigation. A signed confession by the killer would have been a nice discovery but I didn’t think they’d found one. How about the murder weapon, covered with bloody fingerprints? How about the murder weapon without the fingerprints?
I studied the site. Whoever had deposited the body could have driven right to the cellar hole, then dumped the body, covered it with rubble, and left. I remembered the bartender, Clancy O’Brien, telling me that it had been a bright, moonlit night, so the killer probably could have turned off his headlights down at the road and not turned them on again until the burial job was done and he was headed home. No one would have seen him come or go.
I wondered if I should start questioning the people who lived nearby on Barnes Road, in case one of them had seen something, but I was pretty sure that the police had already done that and that I wouldn’t learn anything they didn’t know. So, instead of talking with the neighbors, I went to Clancy O’Brien’s house. It was about time for him to be up and about.
And he was up and about, albeit still a bit blurry-eyed. However, when I described Justin and Genevieve he couldn’t remember ever seeing such folk in the Fireside, and he thought he’d remember them if they’d been there more than once.
I declined his offer to join him in a midday beer and breakfast and asked instead to look at his phone book. In the book I found and noted the telephone number and address of Justin and Genevieve. They lived in Chilmark, off North Road. I had nowhere else to go, so I went there.
Justin and Genevieve’s mailbox was one of several mounted in a row on a long timber beside a narrow sandy lane. Their house wasn’t one of the new mansions that were going up all over the island. Rather, it was a fair-sized old farmhouse at the end of the winding drive, from which smaller drives took off on either side, each marked with a tiny sign naming the family or families who lived in that direction. The Geller-Wyner farm buildings—barn, sheds of various kinds, and what looked like a couple of rabbit hutches—were worn but well maintained. The house had a nice view of Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands on its far side, and, in the blue distance, the mainland beyond Buzzards Bay. A Range Rover was parked in the yard. I parked my truck beside it and studied the two. There was no doubt that the Range Rover would win if they had a beauty contest.
When I knocked on the door, Genevieve Geller answered and, before she could stop herself, looked at me disapprovingly. But her training in gentility quickly asserted itself and she said, “Why, Mr. Jackson. What brings you this way? Please come in.”
I followed her into an entrance hall that held a rather ornate wooden coat-and-hat rack that was actually holding some winter coats and hats. There was a worn Oriental rug on the wide boards of the floor, and two large old pewter plates were mounted on a wall beside a door through which she led me into a living room made warm by both the fire in its fireplace and by its decor. There were paintings from the Hudson River School on its walls, more Oriental rugs on its floor, and an ancient blunderbuss and a pair of muzzle-loading pistols mounted above the fireplace mantel. The chairs and sofa were large and old and comfortable-looking, and bookshelves held Victorian knickknacks along with old books bound in leather.
Not bad.
“Would you like some tea?”
“Please don’t bother. I just came to ask your husband a question.”
“I’ll call him. He’s i
n his study writing his memoirs for our grandchildren. Our son is constantly at Justin to write them because if he doesn’t, no one will know what sort of life he lived. I think it’s a good thing to have a written family history, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said. “But I’ve never tried writing one. Perhaps I can talk with him in his study. I’ll only interrupt him for a minute.”
“Come right this way.”
I followed her down a hall to a small room. The door was open and Justin Wyner was sitting in front of a computer, pecking away with two fingers like the newspaper reporters always did in old movies. He looked up when his wife rapped on the open door.
“You remember Mr. Jackson, Justin. From the other day when we were at the Olmstead place looking for that unfortunate young woman.”
“Of course.” He stood up and shook my hand. He had the firm grip of someone who used his hands for more than hitting a keyboard with his trigger fingers.
“Mr. Jackson has come to ask you a question,” said Genevieve.
“Ask away,” said Justin.
“Did you ever drink beer at the Fireside?”
He squinted at me through what looked like thin-rimmed reading glasses. “That’s the question?”
“That’s it.”
“Well, the answer is yes. A long time ago I drank beer in a lot of places, including the Fireside. You remember me taking you there, don’t you, Gen? Back when we were up at Harvard and Radcliffe in the winter and down here in the summer.”
“You took me to a lot of dives in those days, dear. The Fireside was one of them. I believe the idea was that if you plied me with cheap drink you might have your way with me later.”
“And it worked like a charm. We’ve been married longer than you’ve been alive, Mr. Jackson. Is that the answer you were after?”
“I take it that once you got her in your clutches you no longer had a need to buy her beer in Oak Bluffs bars.”
He smiled. “That’s the truth. I don’t think I’ve been in the Fireside for fifty years. Maybe we should go back, Gen, just to see if it’s as wonderfully decadent as I thought it was in those days.”
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