Cape Cod

by William Martin

  “I found that painting in a barn in 1949. I bought it for fifty dollars. Worth a bit more today.” Agnes poured coffee and offered Janice a doughnut. “It’s supposed to be Thoreau.”

  “Without a care.” Which was not how Janice felt. She unfolded the last of Hannah’s letters. She had read them all now, absorbed them, seen the world through Hannah’s eyes, lectured her husband with Hannah’s words. But, buried in a box that no one had opened in decades, she had found a letter that said maybe it was time for her to come back to the present. “The artist’s mother was bothered by the same thing that’s been bothering me lately.”

  Agnes sat in her rocker, hummed a bit, as she sometimes did, and pressed the remote button to start the TV. “It’s about time you told me what’s really going on between you and Geoff.”

  Janice began to read: “ ‘Dear Nancy, The news reaches me—’ ”

  “It sounds as if they were worlds apart,” said Agnes, “and yet Hannah was here and Nancy was in your father’s house down in Dennis.”

  “ ‘—of your husband’s tragic death at the hands of Chinese pirates. The Lord’s ways are past finding out. He was a good man, no matter what. You showed great good sense to marry him over my objections. We shall all miss his courage and laconic humor.’ ”

  “Cape Cod virtues for certain.”

  “ ‘But I am concerned about his last words, as told by Captain Sears, for I fear that they have been on your mind. That damn book—’ ” Janice looked at her grandmother for some reaction, but Agnes’s eyes were on the television set. “ ‘That damn book must be forgotten.’ Now, here’s the crossed-out part. ‘Whatever Sam did with the book, he left no key to its whereabouts. Let us not search for it, either in this world or in the next. It will only bring sadness.’ ”

  “I wonder what she meant by ‘this world or the next.’ ”

  “I wonder about ‘that damn book.’ ” Janice had her qualms about the will she carried in her purse. If she also buried the information in this letter, she wouldn’t sleep at night. “Could the book have been the Mayflower log?”

  Zap. Agnes killed the TV picture with the remote. “The Mayflower log? Is that at the root of this thing between you and Geoff?”

  “You know about it?”

  Agnes laughed as though she’d just heard a gentle little joke. “Let me straighten you both out….”

  ii.

  Janice called the Truro house, but there was no answer. She let the phone ring, hoping Geoff was in the studio with his phone unplugged.

  After four rings, Keith’s little voice came on. “Hello. This is the Hilyard residence in Truro. We can’t come to the phone now, but—ssh, I’m not done.”

  “It’s my turn.” That was Sarah, whispering angrily.

  “No! Give it back. Ma-ah!”

  Now Janice’s own voice came on the line, calm and composed. “As you can hear, things are about normal at the Hilyard house. We can’t come to the phone right now, so leave your name and number and the time that you called—”

  Sarah jumped in. “Andwe’llgetbacktoyouassoonaswecan.”

  “Dork,” whispered Keith.

  Beep. “Geoff, this is Janice. I said I’d call this morning, in case you forgot. We have to talk. I’m at my grandmother’s house. And erase that tape.”

  What had they been thinking of when they let that go out over the phone lines?

  Then she called Rake’s house. No answer. She called Ma Little’s. The same.

  So she left the kids with her grandmother and drove to her father’s office in Dennis. It would have been logical for Geoff to show up there, but Geoff was being far from logical. Still, she went in. When she needed logic or a pep talk on how important this development was to the future of company and family, there was always her brother.

  He was sitting on his desk, playing with a golf ball. Dickerson and Blue Bigelow studied an overlay map of the wetlands on Jack’s Island.

  “Don’t start dividing it up yet.” Janice kissed her father and tugged at his beard.

  “We’re not, thanks to your dimwit husband,” said Blue.

  “With a son like the Humpster, I guess you’re an expert in dimwits.” Defending Geoff did not feel unusual, but she didn’t want to do too much of it. “Have you seen my dimwit?”

  “Why? Did your toilet overflow again? I’ll send the Humpster to pump it. He’s good at pumpin’. Good at perk tests, too.” Blue gestured to an arcane mistake on the map. “But he still don’t know how to mark off wetland, the stupid son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t talk about your son like that.” Dickerson patted his pockets until he found his medicine bottle. He counted out four pills. “Trust him. Build him up, even when he makes mistakes. Then, when you come back from sick leave and find him doin’ a lot of things he doesn’t want to tell you about, you won’t worry that he’s done anything stupid.”

  Blue stuck his little finger into his ear and pulled out a wad of wax. He inspected it for a moment, then consigned it to the leg of his trousers.

  Janice saw this nervous little twitch, and she knew that her father did as well. People had once called Dickerson “The Lobster” for the invisible antenna that let him pick up the vibrations in any negotiation. He couldn’t miss something right in front of him.

  Doug grabbed his putter and began to twirl it, which was one of his nervous twitches. “Jan, tell Geoff that when the Conservation Commission leaves, we’ll be bringing in a back-hoe to do preliminary perk tests for the septic system. Without the Board of Health looking over our shoulder.”

  “That quick?” asked Janice.

  “We want to know what to expect before they come in. We may also clear out a space to park some heavy equipment.” Doug began to tap golf balls into a cup. “Like Dad always says, when everyone’s runnin’ away, jump in.”

  “Words to live by.” Janice sensed the tension, almost another dimension, like time.

  “Yeah, jump right in, right over the edge.” Dickerson went to the water cooler and swallowed down a fistful of pills. Then he looked at Janice. “I’ve been back in my office for over two weeks, and every time I start to talk about financing, Doug says he’s made arrangements, and I shouldn’t worry. Do you know anything?”

  Before she could answer, Doug jumped in. “When you took sick, Dad, I said, leave the money to me. You’re the idea man now. I’ll fight the town and the banks and the Cape Cod Commission. You come up with the concepts.”

  “They’re kickin’ the old man upstairs, Jan,” said Dickerson.

  “We worry about you, Dad,” she said. “Doug’s tried to protect you.”

  “I worry, too.” He looked at his son. “But I’m done with it. Tomorrow the attorney power expires. Before the Conservation Commission visits that island, I want some answers. And if you think the answers will kill me, I’ll take a nitro first.” He grabbed his fishing rod and headed for the door. “Now I’m going out to work the pond lilies.”

  Blue rubbed his hand across his face, as though searching for another orifice to clean. Janice hoped he’d stay away from his nose.

  Doug tapped three balls toward the little cup in the middle of the floor.

  And Janice said, “Douglas, who’s behind you?”

  “Just find your husband and straighten him out. It doesn’t matter who holds the note.”

  “Is it the one who came at us a few years ago? Nance?”

  Doug missed a two-footer.

  John M. Nance. For an instant, she wondered if she could make Clara’s will stand up. “This’ll kill Dad.”

  Doug stood up from the ball. “Janice, work with me on this. When everything is in place, Dad will love the deal. Convince yourself, then go find Geoff and convince him.”

  She decided not to fight her brother. What was done was done. Her first priority was her husband. She was going to exercise her gloating rights. Then she would straighten things out. “Any idea where Geoff might be?”

  “Try Old Comers.” Doug hit another one.
“I hear he’s been talking a lot with the director about this log foolishness. They say she’s, uh, pretty smart.”

  Pretty smart. Pretty? Smart? Pretty and smart? A dangerous combination.

  “How much talking can he do with a museum director?” she asked.

  “Enough… I guess. Walking out on him hasn’t worked. I think you better go back to him, work on him from within.”

  Doug was telling her more than he was saying. She heard it in his voice, in that halting advance toward and retreat from honesty that was so familiar.

  “I told you before, Doug, I’m not playing a game—”

  Just then the phone rang.

  “I’m not here,” said Doug.

  “Me neither,” said Blue.

  Maybe it was Geoff, so Janice answered.

  “Hello, Jan!” That voice. “Phyllis Baxter here. Any luck on a rotten little rathole house?”

  “A few possibilities.”

  “Any addresses? My client would like to do some drivebys. I guess she has some time to kill.”

  Janice fished in her purse for her notebook and gave Phyllis the addresses of three houses, including the place in Eastham. She recommended staying away from that one, but couldn’t have cared less.

  What she did care about was the will, also written in the notebook. She glanced at it and almost showed it to her brother. Then she shoved it back.

  She drove to Old Comers. Geoff’s car was not in the lot, which was a bigger relief than she was prepared to admit. Pretty and smart. She should never have left.

  iii.

  John M. Nance sat in the lounge at the Indian Valley Country Club in Mashpee. The bartender was polishing glasses. The shades were drawn to keep out the morning glare. But Nance wore his sunglasses. “A young lady out on the first tee awaits my charms. This better be good.”

  John Lambeth opened a manila envelope containing a photo enlargement. “I took this. Nearly got caught.”

  Nance peered over his sunglasses. “Caught?”

  “Charcoal on the floorboards, just as you suspected.” Lambeth held a magnifying glass over the picture. “Things have faded, but you can still see the four marks, just like the ones on your axe.”

  “So the family story is true. Maybe Carolyn knows what else this means.” Nance thought a minute. “And Hilyard’s friends? Did you sow a little confusion among them?”

  “One of my people followed them to the Bell-in-Hand last night, then paid a visit to Provincetown.”

  “Good. Anything to keep them guessing. We don’t want any of them to know who’s coming at them or from what angle.”

  Now Lambeth slipped another folder from the envelope. “The material on Bill Rains, the conservation commissioner. Credit history, academic records, whatever else we could come up with. Why?” Lambeth slipped a stick of gum into his mouth.

  “We’re in a fight.” Nance slipped a black golf glove onto his left hand, a nice contrast to his white sweater and white slacks. “What do you think of my course and all the condos?”

  “Real nice.” Lambeth folded his arms. He wore a black polo shirt and tan slacks, and his machine-made Nautilus muscles seemed to move by hydraulics.

  “We had to fight to build it. Back in 1977, the Indians decided they wanted all the open land in the town, whether they owned it or not. And they were the ones who’d sold most of it to begin with.”

  “Even this?”

  Nance gestured to the first fairway, a five-hundred-yard dogleg around a marsh. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but not if you have a slice.”

  “Fifteen years ago, it was nothing but scrub pine around an old cranberry bog that some half-breed had been nursing for years. He made more money selling that land to me than he’d made in his whole life from cranberry sauce.”

  “No harm in that.”

  “Now it’s beautiful, and people enjoy it. The hand of man making the most of nature, no matter what the tree huggers say. It’s a good thing. And it’s legal. There’s nothing more fundamental to this country than property rights. We fought to remind the courts of that in 1977, and we’re fighting today.”

  “That still doesn’t explain what you want with Rains, or why I sent someone down to P-town last night.”

  “It’s part of the fight.” Nance finished his iced tea and stood. “And there are a lot of ways to win. How old are you, Lambeth?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Young to have your own detective agency, and with nothing more than a Harvard degree, not the best qualified. You should be paying me for the privilege of learning from a master. When it’s over, I won’t be surprised if you turn down your fee.” The clatter of his spikes on the floor made him sound like some kind of badly lubricated machine, but he was very smooth.

  iv.

  Janice drove to Truro. Forty minutes through thickening Route 6 traffic, and found no one at their house. Her last shot was George, sitcom writer in the dunes.

  It was near noon. The parking lot at the National Seashore was filling fast. To drive into the dunes, you needed four-wheel drive, which she didn’t have, and enough backup gear to launch the space shuttle. So she parked in the broiling sun and walked.

  She loved the bleakness of the dunes, the mountains of sand and heat, the little brows of dune grass trying to hold them in place, the forests of bleached tree trunks rising like ghosts from the sand that smothered them. But she wanted none of it in the July heat.

  Instead, she took to the beach, walking barefoot beside the cooling surf. There were bathers, sand castle architects, surfers enjoying the minor leagues of their sport, surf casters enjoying the major leagues of theirs, vacationers living for two weeks in their fifty-week Cape Cod fantasy.

  Everyone had Cape Cod fantasies. Sometimes Janice needed to come to the National Seashore, away from the increasingly suburban Upper Cape, to remember that this was a place of dreams for everyone, from the first Englishmen to those two teenagers wrapped in a beach towel, hiding behind a dune, going at it like, well, two teenagers.

  What was her fantasy? Not a question she usually asked. Maybe it was the heat that brought it on. Or the intense clarity of a place colored only in gradations of blue and brown. Or the hunt for a husband whose fantasy had colored everything else.

  Up in the dunes, the sand was so hot it burned her insteps. By the time she reached George’s shack, the little tar-paper roof and sun-silvered shingles looked like an oasis.

  She heard music—the sunny-day jazz of Pat Metheny. She followed it around to the deck and stopped.

  A young man was giving George a back rub. He had one of those haircuts that took everything off the sides and left the curls on top, and another indecent little jockstrap bathing suit.

  “Hello, George.”

  “Janice, honey.” George rolled over and turned off the boom box. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed. But why should he? This was George, and at least he was wearing bathing trunks. “Meet my friend David.”

  David gave her a little wave and sat back with a kind of disinterested look, like a mechanic interrupted in the middle of an oil change.

  George sent him down to the pump to get some cold water and invited Janice into his shack. After the intense sunlight, the little place seemed air conditioned.

  But when her eyes adjusted, Janice saw that George’s shack had been trashed. The table was broken, the bookshelf had been torn from the wall, and somebody had spray-painted “Faggots, Mo-nigs, and fools” on the door.

  Then Georgie took off his sunglasses. His eyes looked like two plums. Same color, almost the same shape. “Won’t be needing any eyeliner for a while.” He pulled down his bathing trunks so she could see one buttock. “Fork marks.”

  “Who did this?”

  “They came in on four-wheel drive. Three of them. I think your cousin Clarence sent them. But he wasn’t here.”

  “That pig. We should press charges.” She tried to touch his face, but he pulled away.

  “No proo
f.” He looked out into the bright sunlight, as though he didn’t want to talk about this. “Do you like my friend David? He’s a fan. He loves ‘Legal Eagles,’ and he’s an amateur historian. It was good to have him last night, after they left.”

  “Do you have any ice?” She looked around for the refrigerator. But the dune shacks had no power. “Oh, shit, Georgie, you have to be more careful.”

  “Helluva life, isn’t it? On top of all we go through, now we got Mother Nature shoutin’, Hey, faggot, be careful—disease.”

  “I’m not Mother Nature.”

  “More like Mother Courage, wandering the Cape with your children.”

  “I’m not her, either. I’m just looking for Geoff, and you should be looking for some ice.”

  “Geoff is looking for Geoff, even as we speak.”

  “Where?”

  “Someplace with his list.” George looked around at the mess. “There’s something to this log-and-island business, Janice.”

  “Maybe to the island business, but forget about the log.”

  David appeared with a bucket of water. “It’s good and cool.” He dipped a cloth into the bucket and pressed it against George’s eyes.

  George didn’t even flinch. He told Janice that when she found Geoff, she should warn him to watch out for the Humpster.

  v.

  Hammer drills. That was all Geoff could think of when he woke up. Hammer drills running inside his head.

  The night before, he and Jimmy had killed a six-pack while they ruminated over the charcoal markings they had found in the barn cellar. And should they call the police about the break-in? But what would the police do? Dust for prints and keep them awake. So they killed another six-pack, which nearly killed Geoff by morning.

  The only painkiller he could find in Rake’s medicine cabinet was a tin of crumbling Bayer aspirin. He took three and drove to the junkyard near Allen Harbor in Harwich.