Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Geoff read the last lines. “ ‘Every man, innocent or not, will be needed. As for me, I’ve done my honor in this.’ ”

  “ ‘Innocent or not,’ ” repeated George. “They knew Ezra did it, but they needed bodies. They couldn’t string up one of the elders. Think of what it would have done to morale.”

  “But why would he kill her?” Jimmy was skeptical.

  “He’d gotten her pregnant…. She had something on him…. Who knows?” George had the imagination to come up with reasons all morning.

  But this couldn’t be it, thought Geoff. There might have been a time when the identity of Dorothy Bradford’s murderer would have mattered—to a WASP politician in an America overrun by immigrants, to Loyalists claiming the high ground before the Revolution. And it would rewrite a few history books. But could it stop the development of Jack’s Island? Geoff didn’t think so.

  Outside, the sky was now brightening quickly.

  Geoff’s ass still itched from the dried salt, and the smell of coffee reminded him that he was exhausted. He had that speed-freak up-all-night buzz in his head, and the edges of everything were beginning to vibrate. It was like being back in college, during finals, with his buddies buzzing beside him.

  He wondered if he should keep reading or go to sleep. After all, if Rake had pinned his hopes on this scandal, he was about eighty years too late. And what else could there be, other than the money that the book itself would be worth?

  But how could he put this book down now?

  iv.

  It was six-thirty when the phone rang at Carolyn Hallissey’s bedside.

  “It’s Nance.” He told her that Arnie Burr’s boat had blown up, the guys had cleared off Jack’s Island. “You have any ideas?”

  “Unh…” She yawned and pretended she had been pulled out of a deep slumber, but she had been awake most of the night.

  Nance prodded her a little. “Burr’s wife told the Coast Guard he was fishing around the target ship.”

  “Then maybe he was.”

  “I think he was chasing the log.”

  “He wouldn’t have had to go out in a boat to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “If the book still exists, I think it’s somewhere on that island.”

  “Why?”

  She flipped open a folder that lay on the other pillow. It contained photostats of the works of Tom Hilyard—old engravings from pictorial weeklies, paintings, lithographs. It fell open to one of the early paintings, Barn with Stone Cellar. “Just a hunch.”

  “Why didn’t you call about this?” Nance’s voice sounded like cement hardening.

  “It’s a new hunch.” Carolyn heard her son get up and go into the bathroom. He was happier than he had ever been. The quickest way to jeopardize his happiness would be to cross Nance. She had to give him something, and the barn was the oldest thing on the island. It would seem logical for the log to have been found there. “Try the cellar of the barn, where your ancestors hid.”

  v.

  “Don’t start sloppin’ food around, Ma,” said Jimmy. “You spill maple syrup on these books and—”

  Ma waved a knife at Thomas Weston’s box. “That thing protected ’em for near four hundred years. It can protect ’em through breakfast.”

  Jimmy’s son Jason, dark and black-haired, came scuffling into the kitchen.

  Then Massy Ritter came in for coffee. “I smell pancakes.”

  “You sure do.” Ma Little laughed, and her leathered hands began to fly back and forth above the skillet.

  “We’re thirsty, too,” said Massy. “How about a few beers?”

  Ma raised the spatula like a tomahawk.

  Geoff decided to get out of the line of fire and took the log into the living room. He scratched at his salted ass and dropped onto the sofa with the maple trim. He had forgotten that the log was worth a few million dollars. The money was almost secondary. It was, quite simply, a helluva story.

  George took the vinyl recliner with the cracked arms and flipped through the Lemuel Bellamy notebook. “Guaranteed best-seller.”

  Jimmy agreed, but he said he couldn’t stand the salt on his skin any longer and went off to the shower.

  Geoff was reading now of the death of Kate Hilyard, of the gravediggers, of Jack Hilyard standing on a hilltop, cursing the God he did not believe in, just like a modern man: “ ‘When the first shovel was drove into the sand to bury his wife, Jack Hilyard cried out as though the shovel had struck his own belly.’ ”

  Just the way Geoff had felt when he found Janice’s note pinned to the door.

  He read a bit more, then paraphrased for George. “Get this. Jack runs off, goes to a place where the whales strand, so Jones and Simeon Bigelow go after him in the shallop, sailing five hours south southeast, across tideflats.”

  George sat up straight. “The only tideflats south southeast of Plymouth are the Brewster flats.”

  “This means Jack Hilyard went to that island in the first winter.”

  “That isn’t mentioned in Bradford.”

  “The log says Bradford was sick when it happened. He never wrote about it.” Geoff felt the kind of excitement that gripped him when he had been fighting a design idea for days and suddenly it came clear before him, just as he was planning to give up and go to bed. That jolt of energy could keep him going all night. Or all day.

  He dug his toes into the braided rug. “Jones and Simeon Bigelow find Jack Hilyard and his kid in a clearing—listen to this—‘around a square of stones, perhaps half a rod on each side, around what once had been a hole in the ground. Jack says he’ll use it as root cellar for the house he will build over it.’ Now, get this: ‘The stones were all of the same size, like ballast stones, and went down deep, as if builded for a foundation. I found this most puzzling, as it looked like the work of civilized man.’ ”

  “Foundation?” Jimmy came into the room, toweling off after his shower. “Who in the hell would’ve built a foundation on Jack’s Island?”

  “No Indian,” said George.

  “Maybe the friends of that corpse they found buried in Corn Hill,” said Geoff.

  “Keep reading,” said George.

  Geoff gave him a look. “Okay. Jack finds an axe on this island—an iron axe ‘engraved with a strange kind of writing, here shown.’ ” He studied the blocklike letters, which looked somehow familiar.

  Geoff read verbatim now. “ ‘Simeon thought it came from an Indian grave and should be put back, but Jack said he found it in the mud when digging for clams. Simeon disbelieved this, for what metal can survive in seawater?’ ”

  “It would have rusted after a few months,” said George. “It must have been French fishermen.”

  “But the French have the same alphabet we have.”

  George shrugged and pointed to the letters. “There’s P, Q, O, J… Wait a minute.” He studied the letters, then picked up Bellamy’s notebook, flipped a few pages, and found it—in the tiny, tortured script of Lemuel Bellamy, the same letters and a dozen more.

  “Bellamy was a Cape Cod preacher before he went off to become an English lord,” George explained. “One night he went ‘to fetch from Jack’s Island a stepping-stone for the church. I found it buried in sand at the back of the barn.’ ”

  “Rake’s barn,” said Geoff.

  George kept reading. “ ‘The stepping-stone must have been the front of an ancient dwelling that looked from this place to the sea. Who built it, I cannot tell, for’ ”—here George slowed his pace—“ ‘the doorstep was covered with markings that looked like letters, the scratchings of some language now forgotten. As I rode home beneath a black and starry sky, those letters spoke to me of the void. The God we pray to is no more personal than the stars, no more knowable than the letters on that stone.’ Another existentialist.”

  “Another man,” said Geoff. “Keep reading.”

  “ ‘I had reached nearly to my parish in the west of Sandwich when I was overwhelmed by this truth. In an unknowabl
e universe, I chose to know a woman. I chose what I thought was love. Yet now, at the end of my life, those letters remain in my mind’s eye, cold and unblinking. I set them down so that someone may someday decipher their meaning’ ”:

  And the connections came quickly. The strange letters on axe and stepping-stone were the same. An iron axe, one of them said. The Iron Axe? one of them asked. And a lettered stepping-stone? Why did those letters look so familiar?

  And then Geoff knew. “Because they’re the letters on the Bourne Stone. The Bourne Stone was found on Jack’s Island.”

  “The Bourne Stone”—Jimmy raised his voice—“which some say came from Scandinavia.”

  “Where the Vikings lived,” said George.

  “And made their iron axes,” added Geoff.

  “A legend for everything,” shouted Ma from the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 36

  July 17

  Answers and Questions

  Geoff felt much better after a hot shower. He borrowed a pair of Jimmy’s jeans and a tight green T-shirt that read, “I played Fireball, Wampanoag Powwow, July 4, 1986.”

  The Conservation Commission would be at Jack’s Island by eight o’clock. And he would be there to meet them, with a welcoming committee of the frightened, the nervous, the greedy, and maybe, the enlightened.

  First he called Carolyn Hallissey. “I have the log.”

  “I never thought you’d find it in the cellar of Rake’s barn.”

  And he broke the basic rule of negotiating. He spoke before he thought. “I didn’t.”

  “We wouldn’t want Charlie Balls and the Irish Eye to know that.”

  And he heard the familiar echo in her voice: always negotiating. Just like his wife. “What do you want?”

  “Give Old Comers first option. A preemptive bid.”

  “This could bring millions at auction.” That was better, he thought.

  “If a pair of drug runners find out what you stole from their chimney, you’ll never spend a nickel without looking over your shoulder,” she said.

  He couldn’t argue with that one. “And if I accept?”

  “Get three appraisals and take the median. You get the money. Six million, minimum.”

  Too good to be true, which meant it probably was. “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. You get money; I get prestige and a bonus. If I’d found it myself, my contract wouldn’t give me much more.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “One word: Robby. I’m doing this for my little boy. He likes this place. It’s good for him. We want to stay.”

  So Geoff took the deal. He didn’t have much choice, and he believed he could trust her. But there was one thing more: “Nance’s axe. The one in his company logo. Is there writing on it?”

  And, as if to show her good faith, she told the whole story. She even quoted Sam Hilyard’s 1814 letter word for word.

  And for Geoff, the connections grew stronger. The strange-lettered axe still existed, and it belonged to Nance. “Can you bring the axe to Rake Hilyard’s barn?”

  “I’ll try. But Nance might come with it.”

  “The more the merrier.”

  Next call: his wife. He should have called her first, but this morning business came first, and so far the business had been better than he could have expected.

  He said, “Grandma Agnes was wrong.”

  “Geoffrey? Thank God. They’re talking about a boat explosion on the radio.”

  A couple of nasty answers spun through his head, but they never got out. The relief in her voice was too real. He was still furious with her, but it wasn’t going to last forever. He told her to be at Rake’s barn that morning. “And bring your father.”

  “He’s in trouble, Geoff. Douglas really blew it.”

  Now he got annoyed. Underneath the plea, she was negotiating again. Always negotiating.

  But he was making no more deals. “The truth may clear up the trouble, and answer a few of the questions.”

  “Including ours?”

  “Maybe.”

  ii.

  Geoff sent George, Ma Little, and the log straight to Jack’s Island, along with an armed guard of Massy Ritter and three of his friends.

  Then he and Jimmy made a stop at the Brewster General Store, where the tourists and the locals mingled over newspapers and coffee and chitchat about the weather. The store had been the heart of the town since 1858. Now, there were a few too many souvenirs for sale and not enough staples, and the place felt more like a museum of Americana than a real store, but the doughnuts were always fresh, which guaranteed that Conservation Commissioner Bill Rains would be sitting on a bench out front every morning.

  “The Commission postponed the visit to Jack’s Island,” said Rains when he saw them. “I don’t think Blue Bigelow will be in any condition to go over the wetland surveys that his son and Arnie Burr did last week.”

  “We’d still like you to come down,” said Geoff.

  “What for?” Rains bit into a big sugar cruller that left little flakes of white in his beard and mustache.

  “Isn’t the Conservation Commission in charge of archaeological remains?”

  “Yeah.” Rains put the doughnut on a piece of wax paper and opened his Boston Globe to the sports page.

  “Well, we think we’ve found something that might be Viking.”

  “Oh, Christ, not that again.” He threw down the paper. “There’s never been a shred of hard evidence—”

  “You know more local history than anyone,” said Geoff. “And you’ve heard all the Viking myths.”

  “So I’ve read all the sagas, a lot of imprecise oral tradition that somebody set down in the fourteenth century. So what?”

  Geoff sat next to him. “And you’ve also been on archaeological digs.”

  “But none of them were Viking.” Rains took another bite and talked with his mouth full. “When people read the sagas about the Wonder Strands of Vinland, they want to think it’s the Great Beach of Cape Cod, with the wild grapevines in the woods. They hear about the Norse wall in Province-town—”

  “What’s that?” Jimmy Little carefully peeled the plastic top from a coffee cup and took a few slurps.

  “In the nineteenth century an excavator hit a wall in the sand, thirty feet under the original ground level. Supposedly it’s made of ballast stones.”

  “Why hasn’t anybody dug it up?” asked Geoff.

  “Because all these theories have holes you could sail through in a longboat. They’re bullshit. But fun bullshit.”

  Geoff understood the skepticism. It was the right attitude. But when Rains got going on something that interested him, you couldn’t shut him up.

  “Take Frederick Pohl.” Rains licked the sugar from his mustache. “An English teacher from Brooklyn. In 1948 he used the sagas to plot Leif Ericson’s voyage from Greenland to Vinland. He said Ericson must have hit Nantucket, turned north to the Cape, and sailed right up the Bass River to Follins Pond. He even found rocks in Follins Pond, with mooring holes like the ones in the fjords of Norway. Ergo, the Vikings had been in Dennis. Ta-dah, big article in the Saturday Evening Post, then a book. Of course, those holes can be found all over North America. And so can fake rune stones—you know, rocks with Viking inscriptions. There’s even a town in Oklahoma that claims they have a runestone. Give me a break.”

  “Would you give me a break if I told you I’d found a Norse ruin that could keep Nance off Jack’s Island?”

  Rains ate the rest of his cruller in one gulp. Five minutes later they turned off 6A and drove toward the causeway. Rains was still talking.

  “This is like comedy, don’t forget. You buy the premise, you buy the bit. Your premise is that Vinland the Good was Cape Cod. So you buy what people have been selling for a hundred years: Leif Ericson’s brother Thorwald stopped at the tip of the Cape to repair his keel and raised a monument of timbers, naming the place—what else?—Kiarlness. Keel Cape. And the base of the monument was that Norse
wall that nobody gives a shit about.”

  Jimmy laughed. “Maybe he stopped off in Napi’s for bouillabaisse.”

  “C’mon, Jim. One smartass is enough,” said Geoff.

  “Yeah, or Ciro’s for pasta,” added Rains. “Then he sailed west. This would have taken him to Boston or even up the coast to Maine. But some benighted souls have argued that he ended up in Yarmouth.”

  “Which isn’t too far from Brewster.”

  “Have it your way. Thorwald’s bunch wanted to set up light housekeeping someplace near good water, wood, game, shellfish—someplace with a decent anchorage, of course.”

  “That would rule out the flats,” said Jimmy.

  “The channels through the flats were probably deeper then. Don’t forget, Billingsgate was still an island. The sand hadn’t been spread around.”

  “We’re experts on Billingsgate,” said Geoff.

  “Now, the Indians—the Vikings called them Skraelings—they were friendly at first, probably traded a bit, until they found out the Vikings were planning to settle. And there goes the neighborhood. The Indians attacked. Thorwald got sent to Valhalla. The Vikings got sent home.”

  Up ahead, Jack’s Island now appeared. The tops of the trees looked sharp and shadowed in the fresh morning light. A delicate gray mist rose from the marsh. And a blue heron poked along the edge of a little stream.

  In the middle of the causeway, Geoff put on the brake.

  “What are you stopping for?” asked Jimmy.

  “So we can remember why we’ve gone through all this.”

  Rains leaned over the front seat and peered through the windshield. This morning he was wearing a blue flannel shirt. “They call me a tree-hugger because I want to protect sights, and sites, like this. We’ve lost so many. People just don’t understand how valuable this is, just as it is.”

  “Just as it is,” repeated Geoff. Then he pulled a postcard from his pocket and offered it to Rains. “I assume you’ve seen this.”

  “The Bourne Stone? That old hoax?”

  “If I could tie the Bourne Stone to John Nance’s iron axe and a root cellar on Jack’s Island, what would you say?”