A Deadly Vineyard Holiday

by Philip R. Craig

  It didn’t take much to convince Cricket. “Come on, Mom! Say yes! It’d be great! I won’t have to have Walter Pomerlieu and Ted and Joan and Karen and all the rest of them hanging around all the time. I can go do what other kids do!”

  “Well . . .”

  “It’ll only be for a few days, Mom!”

  “Isn’t that the tone they call a teenager’s favorite whine?” I asked her mother, but looked at Cricket, who immediately studied me to see if she could read my face.

  She could, and rolled her eyes. “All right, I’m sorry. No more whining. But, please, Mom. Let me stay here!”

  “I’ll have to talk with your father. And Walt Pomerlieu isn’t going to like it.”

  “Walter Pomerlieu doesn’t like me to do anything. He’d like me to live in a gilded cage!”

  “It’s his job to take care of you.”

  “I know. But if I was here, he wouldn’t have to!”

  “Cricket,” I said. “This decision isn’t going to be made here or now. Your parents and Walt Pomerlieu don’t know anything about Zee or me. They aren’t going to let you come here or go anywhere else until they’re sure that it’s safe.”

  “But you’re not dangerous, Mr. Jackson.”

  “What makes you so sure? Besides, your parents and the Secret Service people don’t know that. They need time to check us out. It’s their job. You have to let them do it. Afterward, if things work out, we’d love to have you stay here for a while if you still want to.”

  “I’ll still want to!”

  Walt Pomerlieu came up onto the balcony. “We should probably be going, Mrs. Callahan. The president will be finishing his run about now, and he’ll be anxious to see you two.”

  At the cars, Myra Callahan again shook hands with Zee and me. “I can’t thank you enough for your kindness to Cricket. I’ll be in touch soon.”

  As she and the others climbed into the cars, the chief spoke quietly in my ear. “Something else maybe you should know. They tell me that at least one of the wackos who threaten the president is right here on the island. Maybe more than one.” He got into the driver’s seat.

  I looked at Ted. Perhaps in his place, knowing what he knew, what he lived with every day, I’d act like he acted.

  Sitting between him and Joan Lonergan, the president’s daughter leaned across and opened a window.

  “Thanks for everything!”

  “You can fish with me anytime,” I said, stepping back.

  “And you can always have a job as cook,” called Zee, smiling.

  The car turned around and drove away, and Cricket Callahan waved good-bye. Ted and Joan did not.

  “Well,” said Zee, taking my arm. “The day has gotten off to an interesting start.”

  True. Of course, “May you have an interesting life” is an ancient curse, and though we couldn’t know it that morning, we were already involved with a murderer. On the other hand, maybe if I had been paying more attention to the survey of mythology that was currently one of our bathroom books, I might have guessed that the Moerae were still at work, even though ancient Greece had long since crumbled into dust.

  — 3 —

  Two days later, we found out Cricket might actually accept our invitation when our breakfast was interrupted by a phone call from Walt Pomerlieu telling us that we’d soon have visitors. Soon was the word, since he was calling from a car that came down our driveway and unloaded several people in our yard before we even finished our coffee.

  One of the people was Joan Lonergan. She came up to our door with Pomerlieu, while the others spread out around the place, looking things over. With her was someone we already knew: Jake Spitz, of the FBI.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, shaking his hand.

  Spitz smiled at me, then at Zee. “We’re everywhere. I heard that you two got married. Congratulations.”

  “You know each other,” Pomerlieu observed.

  “I was up here on a job a while back,” said Spitz. “We ran into each other then.”

  Pomerlieu thought that over, then put the thought aside. “We’d like to take a look inside,” he said. Joan Lonergan nodded agreement.

  Zee, coffee cup in hand, shrugged and waved the two of them in.

  “That’s the spare bedroom,” I said.

  They went in and stayed awhile.

  Spitz looked after them. “What would we do without the old-boy network?” he said. “The intelligence crowd is almost incestuous. Everybody knows everybody else, and half of them are related to each other.”

  “Including those two?”

  “Including Walt Pomerlieu, at least. I don’t know about Joan. She and Ted Harris only joined this outfit a year ago. But Walt is old New England blood with almost as old intelligence-security ties. I think his dad was OSS.”

  “How about you? Are you an old boy?”

  He grinned. “There are exceptions.”

  We watched agents inspecting the grounds, peering here and there, looking in the shed out back, eyeballing the gear in my corral, and wandering into the surrounding woods.

  When Pomerlieu and Lonergan came out of the house, Pomerlieu was saying, “The agent will take the bed nearest the door.”

  “Right,” said Lonergan. She looked at me. “You have a gun case in there. You a hunter?”

  “Sometimes. I don’t seem to do as much as I used to.”

  “What about those lock picks?”

  “I got those in a yard sale up-island. I can even open a lock or twp.”

  “You interested in housebreaking, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Do you think there’s still time for me to have a successful vocation in that field?” I asked. “Or am I too old to begin a new career?”

  Zee rolled her eyes, and Pomerlieu shook his head, but Lonergan was not amused. “There’s a gun magazine in there with your picture on it, Mrs. Jackson. You’re a competitive pistol shooter?”

  “My first competition,” said Zee, waving a finger at the magazine. “I came in fourth.”

  “You keep a weapon here in the house?”

  “Indeed I do.” Zee looked at me. “How many firearms do we have in here, Jeff?”

  I ticked them off on my fingers: “One thirty-aught-six rifle, three shotguns, my old thirty-eight S and W revolver, and your Beretta three-eighty. That’s six, all told, if I can still count.”

  “You do a lot of shooting,” said Pomerlieu.

  “I don’t like all these guns being here,” said Lonergan.

  “You were a policeman,” said Pomerlieu to me. It wasn’t a question.

  “Quite a while back.”

  “I understand you were shot and still carry the bullet.”

  “Yes. They decided it was better to leave it there than to try to get it out. You’re pretty well informed.”

  He nodded and looked at Zee. “And you’re a nurse at the hospital here.”

  “I am.”

  “You look around here some more,” he said to Joan Lonergan. “Let me know if you have any other concerns.” He glanced at a man taking a look at my Land Cruiser. “These agents are surveying the area to ascertain the security situation here. We have to know as much as we can about the grounds, possible approaches to the house, and that sort of thing.”

  “Come up onto the balcony, then,” said Zee. “You get a good view from there.” She watched Joan go into the kitchen, and frowned slightly. Then she sipped her cooling coffee. I wondered if she was thinking about the breakfast dishes, which were still on the kitchen table.

  We went up to the balcony and looked out over the yard and gardens, over Sengekontacket Pond to the roadway on the far barrier beach, and over that to Nantucket Sound and the distant haze that hid Cape Cod.

  “We eat up here sometimes,” said Zee. “And we have cocktails here, too.” She pointed down toward the pond. “The Rod and Gun Club is just the other side of those trees. That’s where I do my target shooting. People shoot down there off and on all week long. Skeet and targets. I know yo
u’re worried about guns, so you should know that they go with this territory. After you’ve been here awhile, you don’t pay much attention to the gunfire down there.”

  “Is there a path between here and there?”

  “No. You can make it through the trees and oak brush, but there’s no trail.”

  “How much land do you have here?”

  “About fifteen acres,” I said. “But there’s no fence around it, so it’s hard to know where our land stops and the next guy’s starts.”

  “Who’s the next guy?”

  “Felix Neck is one of them.”

  “The wildlife sanctuary? I’ve heard of it.” He looked around at the trees flowing away from the house. Then he looked carefully at the pond and the far barrier beach. I thought I knew what he was considering.

  “It’s a very long shot, even for a first-class sniper,” I said. “Besides, there are hundreds of people over there on the beach and in the water all day long, and he’d have a hard time not being seen.”

  He glanced at me. “You a sniper when you were in Nam?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll check opt that area over there, of course, but from here I’d say that we have people who can probably get in there, take their shots, and get out again without ever being seen by anybody. And if we have people like that, somebody else might have them, too.”

  “Terrific,” said Zee.

  “Not to worry.” Pomerlieu smiled. “I’m paid to have an active imagination. I fret about airplanes, submarines, and all sorts of unlikely possibilities. It goes with the job, but I’m really a family man, myself. You want to see my wife and kids?”

  “You bet,” said Zee, who was of late deeply interested in such pictures.

  Pomerlieu was already pulling out his wallet and displaying a photo of a comfortable-looking woman and two teenage boys. Mom and sons were smiling, showing large teeth in equine faces. “Maggie and the boys are visiting her sister here, while I’m up here on the job. That’s Dan and that’s Milt.” He was obviously proud of his crew.

  “You’re a lucky man,” said Zee enviously.

  “I am, and that’s a fact,” agreed Pomerlieu. “Your family is the most important thing in your life.”

  Zee took my arm. “You’re right about that.”

  An hour later, he and his people all went away.

  “What do you think?” asked Zee. “Did we pass or flunk?”

  “I don’t think Joan Lonergan has much confidence in us. My burglar tools and our shooting irons did not please her.”

  “She’s probably just mad because I get to live with you, and she doesn’t.”

  “I was too modest to suggest that myself.”

  The Callahans’ decision came faster than I expected. A phone call from a happy-sounding Cricket said she was coming right after lunch.

  “I thought her father was famous for not making quick judgments,” I said to Zee.

  “Spoken like a man who has never been hounded by a teenage daughter,” said Zee. “When I think of the things I put my father through . . .” She frowned. “If Cricket plans to do anything out in public while she’s with us, we’ve got to do something about the way she looks so people won’t know who she is. I wonder . . .”

  “Dora’s Dooz,” said my mouth, acting on its own.

  “Dora’s Dooz?” Zee gave me a quick and none-too-kindly look. “You mean La Belle Dora, the hairdresser, your old flame? What about her?”

  Sometimes our brains are somewhere else, but our mouths are always right here. Still, I felt unjustly accused.

  “I didn’t know you when I dated Dora. Anyway, that was a long time ago and we’re both married now. To different people, I might add.”

  “I know that. What about her Dooz?”

  Dora LaBell and I had enjoyed a busy few months together during the time I’d first come down to the island to forget about my life on the Boston PD and the marriage that my police career had helped to dismember. After our heady time as a couple, both of us had gone on to other people, and Dora had opened Dora’s Dooz, a beauty salon within which I had never stepped, but which according to other women I’d come to know, was the right place to go if you wanted to become a new you.

  Dora had married Mahmud ibn Qasim, better known as Big Mike. Big Mike was a sociable guy who loved to talk. You never told him anything unless you wanted it to become public knowledge. His ancestors had once lived in the land of the five seas, but he now ran Mike’s Electric in Vineyard Haven. Big Mike’s name was an irony since he was barely as tall as his short wife, but he was fiercely proud and protective of her, making up with passion what he lacked in stature, and he was rumored to carry a Persian dagger in his boot. Both he and Dora were, as some wag noted, small but big enough.

  “Dora’s Dooz,” I now said. “Dora has magic hands. . . .”

  “How would you know?”

  Ancient memory, in fact. But I said, “Hundreds, even thousands, maybe millions of women have told me so. Just because you never have to go to a beauty parlor doesn’t mean that other women don’t. They all say that Dora can make you over so your best friends barely recognize you. You’ve heard that yourself. Admit it.”

  “Well . . .”

  “And Dora’s just the opposite of Mike. She never gossips. At least, she never did when I was seeing her. She probably hears amazing things from her customers, but she never passes anything along. She keeps her mouth shut. You’ve heard that, too, haven’t you?”

  “Well, yes . . .”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “So, let’s ask Dora to come up here as soon as Cricket gets here, and have her redo Cricket. Make her into a new girl. What do you think? Dora will never tell, and Cricket will be able to go places just like a normal person can.”

  Zee brooded, then took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. But I’m not going to call her. She’s your friend. You call her.”

  “But this is woman stuff.”

  “You call her.”

  So I called the salon, told the voice on the other end who I was and that I wanted to talk to Dora, then got Dora and told her who was coming to my house and what I wanted. Dora was surprised but cool.

  “Well, well. This’ll be a first for me. I’ll be there. But let’s not tell Mike that I’m going up into the woods to your place. If he finds out what I’m doing up there, it won’t be hush-hush very long.”

  Just after lunch, she arrived. I introduced her to Zee and was pleased to note that after they eyed each other they also smiled real smiles.

  “I see why we’ve never met,” said Dora. “You don’t need any help from the likes of me.”

  “You should see me early in the morning. No, maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “She doesn’t need you in the early morning, either,” I said. “The person who needs you is Cricket Callahan, and I think that’s her right now.”

  Sure enough, a car was coming down our long, sandy driveway.

  “I thought our guns and stuff might have made us persona non grata,” said Zee. “But I was wrong.”

  “The guns probably don’t make them happy,” I said, “but maybe me having been a cop and you being a nurse compensated. Let’s see now, Cricket can be my cousin visiting from out west. . . .”

  “What will we do with her?” asked Zee, sounding slightly anxious.

  “Treat her like we’d treat a cousin from out west,” I said. “We’ll invite her to do whatever we do, and let her do whatever she wants to do.”

  “She’s too young to do whatever she wants to do, but I think she should probably do things with kids her own age. She has grown-ups around her all of the time, and she needs a change. I’m going to call Mattie Skye and see if Jill and Jen will come over.”

  “To meet my cousin. Good idea.”

  “Right. Those, two are always up to something or other, and they have a lot of friends.”

  “My only plan is to have a clambake this weekend,” I said. “So this afternoon I think I’ll go see if I
can nail a few quahogs.”

  The car pulled into the yard. It was a completely nondescript car, the very kind you’d never expect the daughter of the president of the United States to be riding in.

  A young woman got out of the driver’s side. I recognized her as being the person who had been with Myra Callahan two days before. She wore shorts and sandals and a shirt that was loose enough to hide a pistol at her belt. She carried a large handbag. Cricket Callahan got out of the passenger’s seat. She looked happy. “We’re here!” said Cricket.

  “I’m Karen Lea,” said the young woman, putting out her hand. It was a firm hand. “I’ll be staying with Cricket.”

  So there would be two cousins instead of one.

  “Grab your bags and take them into your room,” I said. “Then stick this car over there by ours. This is Dora Qasim.”

  Dora took in both Cricket and Karen Lea with swift, professional glances.

  “Dora is going to do some work on Cricket,” I said, and told our guests the plan.

  “Oh, good,” said Cricket. “Then Karen and I will be able to go anywhere and nobody’ll know us!”

  “That’s the idea,” said Zee. “And while you two get settled in and Dora does her work, I’m going to make a phone call.”

  The women went into the house, and I went out back to the shed and collected my rake and floating wire basket. As I was putting them into the Land Cruiser, Zee came out, looking pleased.

  “The twins just got their driver’s licenses, and they’re coming over in about an hour. Any excuse to use the family car, I suspect. Their father may not get his Jeep back all summer.”

  Karen Lea came out the kitchen door and looked around. I waved her over.

  “Wander around all you want,” I said. “Look the place over. There’s one thing, though. Even after Cricket gets her new look, we have to have a story we can agree about.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  I gave them the cousins-from-out-west idea, but Karen shook her head. “Neither one of us knows enough about out west. How about cousins from, say, Maryland or Virginia?”

  “Fine. You’re sisters. Two of my father’s little brother’s kids. My father never had a little brother, by the way, but what the hell.”