“I knew her.” George’s gaze was fixed on the glittering horizon, her arms wrapped in a coral pashmina. “She spent every summer here as a kid. So did I.”
“What did you think of her?”
George smiled through the darkness. “She was one of the coolest people I knew.”
A white chrysanthemum burst over their heads, then another, and a third.
“Meaning what, exactly?” Merry asked.
“Oh—probably that she was different from the girls I went to school with in Connecticut all winter long. She was more worldly. Less sheltered. She knew who she wanted to be, and it wasn’t part of the herd. She lived in the city during the school year, you know. Her dad was working for CBS then, I think.”
“The city, meaning New York?”
George nodded. “I met up with her there, once. Christmas break. My mom invited her to the Plaza for hot chocolate. That was a mistake—I knew it as soon as she walked in. She’d taken the subway uptown and looked about ten years older than she was. I was wearing a party dress; she was in black leggings and boots. Nora was always more of an East Village than a Greenwich kind of girl.”
“But you liked her?”
“I wanted to be her.”
Merry glanced at Georgiana. She rarely suggested there was anything lacking in herself or her world. But one of the things Merry liked most about her almost-sister-in-law was her frankness. George was as authentic as Peter. Like Merry, both Masons had lost a brother and a parent; like Merry, they valued the relationships that remained to them. The people gathered around her under the flaring stars were bound by mutual affection and respect that, with luck, would endure until they died.
“Did you know the Murphy boys, too?” she asked George.
“They were already out of college by the time I met her. One of them was even married, I think. They were like two different generations.”
“That’s what the brothers say. They don’t seem particularly sad Nora’s dead.”
“No?” George stared at Merry. “I’m sure her dad is. They were incredibly close.”
It was the familiar phrase Merry had been hearing for days: Nora and Spence, Spence and Nora, telling exotic stories on the back lawn until one of them disappeared. “And yet, she’s been gone for years. They couldn’t even find her when their mother died.”
“Nora never got along with Barbara,” George said. “She used to say all the time that she wanted to know about her real parents, and Barb would never tell her. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe the truth was just lost in the war.”
Like Spence, Merry thought.
“I wonder if she ever found them,” George said.
They were all standing on the east end of the unkempt lawn, well to the right of the rose arbor and the steps down to the scrub and sand, which were lost in darkness, except for Laney—who was sitting alone beneath the arched trellis, her hands tucked into her sweatshirt sleeves and her shoulders hunched. She seemed uninterested in the fiery spectacle bursting in the distance, and Elliot felt a brief flicker of concern. She was so much quieter now than before the divorce. Kate, on the other hand, was infinitely more serene. She and Andre had pulled the two plastic Adirondack chairs over to this spot where the view of Jetties Beach was best, although it was obvious it was a woeful perch compared to the roof walk, which was still roped off with yellow crime scene tape. The two of them had abandoned the idea of sitting, however, and were craning on tiptoe over the neighbor’s hedges.
“We should go get Dad,” Elliot said.
Spence had eaten his dinner quietly, his head occasionally nodding into somnolence on his chest, and then had allowed David to walk him back to his room while Andre cleared the plates. He and Elliot had done the dishes. By the time they were stacked in the outdated washer, it was nearly dark. They had all drifted separately onto the lawn, Elliot and Andre carrying a bottle of wine, as darkness settled over the Sound. When the first rocket went up from Jetties, each of them jumped. And Elliot laughed. It was the first time he had felt lighthearted in days.
The tide was in, and waves collapsed relentlessly against the shore below them, a muted roar in his ears. Laney seemed fixated on the dark water. Elliot thought of walking over to her—cajoling her to join them—but he remembered what it was like to feel alienated from parents, from the whole world, in a single discordant moment. He left her alone and stood on tiptoe, waiting for the second flare to follow the first. Just past the lights of the beach club that lay between Step Above and Jetties, he could glimpse the fireworks platform moored out beyond the line of surf. A brilliant red-and-blue star burst over their heads.
“Seriously. We need Spence.”
“Dad’s fine,” David said wearily. “He doesn’t give a damn about fireworks.”
“But what if we ought to see them with him?” Elliot countered. “This could be the last year he’s in the house. The last year he’s even partly in his right mind. We should have him here.”
“You want to take a group picture, too, and post it online?” David asked sarcastically.
“Andre,” Elliot called. “Would you go see if Dad is up?”
“No,” David interjected. “He’s asleep. Let him rest in peace.”
It was a curious choice of words; Elliot could tell he wasn’t the only one who thought so by the way Laney’s head suddenly jerked around, by the way Kate turned to stare at David. Without a word, Andre walked quietly toward the house.
Another rocket exploded overhead.
“That’s a peony,” Elliot said.
“Chrysanthemum,” David corrected.
“Peonies have fatter streamers. Chrysanthemums are narrow.”
“Well, you’re the gay guy. I guess you’d know.”
His brother said this with complete indifference. It was neither a joke nor a slur. But it was entirely of a piece with what Elliot saw as David’s casual cruelty. He didn’t care about Elliot’s feelings; he never had, from the time they were toddlers together. He’d never congratulated him on his happiness today, when Elliot had announced his plans to marry. Had David always been joyless? Incapable of empathy? Or just since Kate left?
David’s eyes were fixed on the fireworks blooming overhead. A weeping willow, Elliot knew it was called—but he didn’t tell David that. Instead, he made room for Laney, who had trudged over from the steps to join them.
“Dad,” she said.
David glanced down at her.
“Tonight, while Mom and I were making dinner, Grandpa said that Nora knew all his secrets. Which were actually lies. He said he’d made a fortune off them. What did he mean? Are his books just bullshit? Did he make them up?”
“What are you talking about, Laney?” Elliot demanded.
“Grandpa!” She wheeled around, her fists balled in her sweatshirt. “He said Nora was going to write a book about the truth. But that, thanks to Mom, it wouldn’t happen now. What did he mean?”
“I have no idea,” David said.
“Don’t you see?” Laney demanded. “Don’t you get it? Grandpa thinks Mom killed her.”
Chapter Thirteen
At 9 a.m. on July Fourth, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were read aloud at the Unitarian Universalist church on Orange Street.
At 9:45, the Cyrus Peirce Middle School music teacher sang the national anthem from the steps of the Pacific National Bank at the top of Main Street. The crowd was invited to sing “America the Beautiful” with her afterward, and many of them did. By that time, thousands of people were strolling through the center of town, which was closed to vehicle traffic, and the Orange Street church was poised to strike ten o’clock.
This was the signal to open the dunk tank stationed at the corner of Union Street and Main. People lined up to toss bean bags at it and drown their neighbors.
The watermelon eating contest was staged on
tables lined up around the Nantucket Fountain, at the foot of Main Street. Further up, on opposite sidewalks, were face painting and the pie eating contest. A puppet show was scheduled at ten-thirty on the steps of the Methodist church at Main and Centre Streets, and at eleven o’clock the bike decoration contest, including tricycles and wagons, would be judged at the corner of Federal and Main.
But the culminating quarter-hour of the morning’s festivities, from eleven-forty-five until noon, was the real point of Nantucket’s Fourth of July. During those fifteen minutes, an epic water fight roared out between the Nantucket Fire Department’s hoses—using an antique hand-pumper and a modern ladder truck—and the Boynton Lane Reserves, wielding a LaFrance firetruck dating from the 1920s. Spectators were invited to bring water pistols of their or own, or, alternatively, umbrellas. The entire street party got soaked.
This was Meredith’s favorite summer ritual. She’d been dancing under the hook-and-ladders from the time she could walk. But this July she was fated to miss the show. She was assessing the bike decorations critically with Peter when her cell phone rang.
“Detective Folger?”
“Yes, sir?” she said. There was no mistaking Bob Pocock’s voice.
“Get out to Lincoln Ave right now. There’s been another one of your accidents.”
She found Clarence Strangerfield at the foot of Step Above’s stairs, to the left of the boardwalk that led across the fifty feet of heather and scrub that separated the cliff from the beach’s barrier dunes. The crime scene chief was kneeling in groundsel, wavy hairgrass, sumac, and bayberry. He had wrapped bungee cords around his pants legs to keep them tightly cinched. Clare was deadly afraid of tick-borne diseases. And the corpse might well be crawling with them.
Nantucket was overrun with white-tailed deer, which offered blood meals to legions of ticks in the 50 percent of the island that was conservation open space, as well as the 50 percent that was roads and well-tended backyards, where deer were dismayingly just as plentiful. Adult ticks laid eggs that hatched into baby ticks that became hosts of destructive bacteria—not from deer, but from the mice they infested in their larval stages. Lyme disease was the most obvious illness, but there were others less well-known, like babeosis, which attacked the spleen and was life-threatening and increasingly virulent on the island. Public service flyers distributed on the ferries and in airplanes during the summer season warned of the tick danger, sending steady streams of vacationers into the emergency room.
Clarence’s brother-in-law had been flown to Boston with acute babeosis last year.
Merry stepped off the boardwalk into the scrub and picked her way toward the scene. Clarence was photographing the body, which was sprawled facedown. Summer Hughes was kneeling opposite the crime scene chief, a pair of calipers in her hand, positioned over the base of the skull. They had arrived well before Merry—presumably Bob Pocock had dispatched them before calling her. Beyond the two crouching figures Merry glimpsed Nat Coffin, Clarence’s assistant, and Joe Potts—both men wearing protective gloves and booties. They were systematically searching through the underbrush for anything that might be evidence.
“Hey, Merry.” Summer’s eyes drifted past her to the EMTs who were clattering down the steps with a collapsed gurney and body bag.
Clarence glanced over his shoulder. “You want to see him in situ?”
She walked forward and crouched down.
Spencer Murphy had bled from a blow to the base of his skull. His sparse silver hair was singed with crimson just above the C-vertebra of his neck. This was bonily visible and poignantly weak with age under his mottled skin. His shoulders were slumped in defeat and awkwardly positioned where he had fallen in the scrub. His legs were doubled beneath him.
His feet, she noticed, were bare.
“Strange posture,” she said.
“A-yeh,” Clarence agreed. “He landed on his knees.”
“Why no shoes?”
“Maybe he didn’t like sand in ’em.”
Merry frowned at Clarence.
“The family thinks he tried to walk down to the beach in the dark. He’d talked recently about wanting to be here by the water. Asked his granddaughter to help him. He said he didn’t trust the railings on his own. I gahther he’s not been too steady of late.”
“What does it look like to you, Clare?”
“Must’ve missed the stairs, Marradith, and stumbled off the cliff in the dark.”
“How does a man who’s lived here for decades miss his own staircase?” Merry demanded. “There’s a trellis arch marking the top landing! It wasn’t foggy last night.”
“No,” Clarence agreed. “But if he tripped on the steps I’d expect him to be lying on ’em. There are four different landings between here and the top, for heaven’s sake. But he came to rest in the scrub, all the way at the bottom.”
Merry peered at the wound. She didn’t have to probe it to know that the skull was fractured.
“Doctor? Could this be caused by impact with a wooden railing?”
Summer pursed her lips. “I’d be more inclined to think it was a rock. A chunk of granite hidden by the scrub.”
“Which further argues against him going down the stairs,” Merry said. “We’ll examine the railings, of course—but have Potts and Coffin search the cliff slope for instruments of death, Clare, would you?”
“A’ carse.”
“Any thoughts about time of death?”
Summer reached for Murphy’s arm and attempted to lift it. “He’s cool and stiff. In warm weather like this, rigor will have begun to set in pretty fast—say, within two to three hours of death. This rigor is well-advanced, meaning he’s already stiffened throughout his body—so I’d estimate he’s been dead at least eight hours, possibly twelve. What time is it now?”
Merry pulled out her phone and glanced at it. “Time for the water fight.”
“Eleven forty-five,” Clarence explained.
“Okay. So if we take conservative parameters for both onset and duration—meaning three hours for rigor to set in, and at least eight hours’ duration, possibly twelve right now—I doubt he died much before nine p.m. last night, or was alive much past one a.m. this morning.” Summer rose to her feet.
“In the wee small hours,” Merry said thoughtfully. “I guess he was a night-wanderer.”
But that was before Elliot Murphy showed her Spence’s suicide note.
He intercepted her as, in a superfluity of caution, she was sealing off Spencer Murphy’s bedroom for Clarence to examine. The French doors to the deck that Murphy apparently had left open were still propped ajar so that Nat Coffin could dust the knob and edges for fingerprints when he was done searching the cliff face. Merry was stretching yellow crime scene tape across that part of the deck, blocking access. She had done the same in the interior hallway leading to Spencer Murphy’s bedroom door. This was still locked from the inside. She would leave it to Clarence’s team to dust the interior room knob there, as well.
“Why are you doing this?” Elliot asked in puzzlement. “He didn’t die here.”
“It could be helpful to examine the last room he was in,” Merry said blandly.
“That was probably his den,” Elliot replied. “I found this note from Dad there, propped against his typewriter. When we couldn’t find him this morning I checked the den first.”
He handed Merry a sheet of paper. It had been torn from a ringed notebook—probably like the one she’d found in Spencer Murphy’s car, with drawings of birds and notes about sightings. On the top right corner was a sketch of what looked like an osprey. There was usually a nest each summer, Merry thought vaguely, out near Madaket. In the middle of the sheet were a few sentences in the same spidery handwriting she’d seen before. David says I poisoned Nora. How could I do something like that? I can’t go on like this anymore.
She glanced at Elliot.
“Your brother told your father that he poisoned your sister?”
“That sounds like a Spanish grammar drill,” Elliot retorted. “Yes, I did not eat the food of the brown cat. Dad overheard us talking about the cyanide Saturday night. It was an accident.”
“They seem to happen all the time in this house.” Merry studied the note again. “I noticed Mr. Murphy wrote things down when he needed to remember them. Appointments, people’s names, days of the week. Do you think he wanted to remember that David thought he’d killed Nora?”
“I don’t know!” Elliot cried. “What does it matter, now? He’s gone.”
Merry fluttered the notebook page. “The point is why these words were written. As a declaration of intent—I’m so appalled at what I’ve done that I’m going to throw myself off the cliff—or as a jog to memory: David says I poisoned Nora. This piece of paper doesn’t prove suicide.”
“Not explicitly. But he certainly left it here last night and he’s dead this morning. I wish so much I’d talked to him before bed—maybe I could have stopped him—”
The skin around Elliot’s eyes was inflamed and rubbery. He had been weeping.
“When did you last see him?” Merry asked.
“At dinner. I wanted him to watch the fireworks afterward with us, but he’d already gone to bed. When Andre checked on him around nine-twenty, he was asleep.”
“He actually saw him?”
Elliot hesitated. “No. He knocked on his bedroom door. Dad didn’t answer and the room was dark, so Andre just came back out to watch the fireworks.”
So Spencer Murphy was unaccounted for, really, at nine-twenty. It seemed unlikely he’d hurl himself over the cliff while his entire family was watching fireworks on the back lawn—and the Jetties show hadn’t ended, Merry remembered, until roughly nine-forty-five. “When did you go to bed, Mr. Murphy?”
“A few minutes before eleven,” Elliot said.
“And when did you start to worry about your father’s absence this morning?”
“Laney was up first, around seven-thirty. She went out onto the lawn to look at the ocean. When she turned back, she noticed that the French doors to Dad’s bedroom door were open. She checked to see if he was there—and found the room empty. The bedroom door to the house was still locked. He must have simply walked outside in the dark and gone over the cliff.”
Death of a Wharf Rat Page 12