A Deadly Vineyard Holiday

by Philip R. Craig

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it was just some bird-watcher who strayed from Felix Neck.”

  “But you don’t believe that, do you?” Debby was no fool.

  “You and Karen go down to the house,” I said. “I’m going to see if our birder left again. If he did, I’m going to try to find out where he went. Stay inside until Walt Pomerlieu and his crew get here.”

  Karen looked at me. “You be careful. Are you armed?”

  “I don’t plan on shooting anybody,” I said. “I just want to see where the guy went.”

  “There are probably a couple of agents up there in the woods where they found that newspaperman,” said Karen. “Maybe they saw something.”

  “If I see them, I’ll ask them.”

  “What newspaperman?” asked Debby.

  “You may as well tell her about him,” I said to Karen.

  “Yeah.” Debby looked at Karen. “Tell me about it. Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  The two of them went down the driveway, and I went into the woods, again following my thread fence. I came to the spot where Shadow had gone in, and I retied the thread. Then I came to the spot where Shadow had come out. Human footprints headed north toward the wildlife sanctuary. Somewhere farther along the thread I knew I’d probably find the spot where the deer had gone on south, but the deer didn’t interest me. I retied the exit break and followed Shadow’s trail toward Felix Neck.

  The thread had been intact when I’d checked it out this morning, but after that the house had been empty most of the day, first when we’d gone to the pistol range, then when we’d gone up to Gay Head, then when we’d gone to the clam flats, and finally when Zee had left for work and the rest of us had gone downtown. Shadow could have come anytime we’d been away.

  Why had he come? To harm Debby? Had he left something behind, besides the bugs we’d found on the cars? If he had, would Pomerlieu and his people find it?

  Shadow didn’t leave a lot of trail, but it was enough for me to follow, thanks to my seasons of deer hunting and to the heels on his shoes, which left marks where moccasins would have left none. He wasn’t Hiawatha, then, nor Chingachgook, but someone else less gifted in wilderness lore and skills, and I felt I was at least his match in the forest. I moved warily, pausing to sweep the trees and brush with my eyes as far ahead as I could, then trotting along Shadow’s path.

  I came to the end of my land and passed over into the wildlife sanctuary. Off to my right, between some trees, I saw the pole topped by the osprey’s nest that I’d seen earlier, after Burt Phillips’s body had been found. Somewhere in this area, supposedly, were the Secret Service agents Karen had mentioned, guarding against the very thing that Shadow had accomplished: an approach to my house from the north. Shadow might not be Natty Bumppo, but he was apparently more of a woodsman than Walt Pomerlieu’s two agents were.

  I stopped in the shadow of a tall oak and followed Shadow’s path with my eyes. It led to the northwest, to the long driveway that ended at the parking lot by the Felix Neck buildings. Once it got to the drive, I was pretty sure I’d lose it, because a lot of people walk around Felix Neck admiring the flora and fauna, and I, not being Lou Wetzel, either, wouldn’t be able to tell Shadow’s footprints from any of the others.

  But maybe one of the agents, woodsman or not, had seen something. I stood and looked, turning slowly. If I was a Secret Service agent on duty in the woods, wishing I were somewhere else, probably, where would I put myself? In the shade, certainly. Would I have insect repellent, or would I be slapping mosquitoes and other bugs? Repellent, probably. Even the Secret Service probably knew there were insects in the woods, especially in woods near the wetlands along Sengekontacket Pond, and would have prepared for them.

  I saw movement about two hundred yards away, across a clearing, beneath a pine tree. I looked harder and saw that it was a man stretching his arms, then doing leg thrusts to keep himself limber. His back seemed to be toward me most of the time. I walked that way. When I was about twenty-five yards away, he turned to face me, and I saw that it was Ted Harris.

  He watched me come to him, his eyes no friendlier than usual.

  “Birding?” he asked.

  I nodded. “A flightless, featherless biped. Maybe you’ve seen it. It went down to my house from up this direction sometime today, and came back this way later.”

  His lip curled. “So now you’re Daniel Boone, eh? How do you know it wasn’t earlier?”

  It seemed clear that Ted and I were not destined to become the best of friends. We rubbed each other wrong. “I know,” I said. “The question is, what do you know? Did you see anybody go that way or come back?”

  He studied me. “I report to my boss, not to you.”

  “You report to whoever you want to. Right about now your boss is down at my house, sweeping it for bugs or maybe explosives my bird may have left behind before he came back up here to this sanctuary you’re supposedly watching. So if you want to report to Walt Pomerlieu, he’s not far away.”

  He looked at his watch. “I came on duty here two hours ago. Nobody but you has come past in that time.”

  Was it my turn to curl a lip? “How would you know? Or is it you that’s Daniel Boone?”

  A little smile flicked across his face. “Not all of us Secret Service types have spent our lives on the mean streets. Some of us are country hicks.” He waved a hand in the direction of my house. “I watched you coming along for ten minutes, then practically had to give semaphore signals before you saw me. If anybody else came by in the last two hours, I’d have seen him.”

  I believed him. Almost.

  “Maybe it was you who made that trail,” I said.

  The little smile flicked again. “That’s one of the possibilities. Another is that there isn’t any trail at all. Another is that you made it yourself. Or maybe the king of Siam made it.”

  “Oh, there’s a trail,” I said. “Come over and have a look. Maybe you can tell if it was the king of Siam. I don’t think so, because if it was, he’d have had Anna with him, and I think this is a one-person track.”

  We walked back to the trail and looked at it.

  “Never noticed this when I came on duty,” said Ted. “Someday I’ll probably trip over a curb and break my neck.” His eyes followed the trail first to the south, then back toward the Felix Neck driveway. “One person headed north. You say this guy went down from here, then came back out?”

  “I didn’t back track the first trail I found,” I said, “but that’s what I figure.” I told him everything about finding the trail except about the thread. “The trail led down from this direction and then led back.”

  “Smallish foot,” said Ted, squatting on his heels and pointing at a print in the ground. “This guy wore shoes, not herring boxes without topses. That proves it wasn’t you.”

  “Or you, either, Clementine, unless you can walk on your hands.”

  “As a matter of fact, I can walk on my hands. But not that far. So I guess we’re both in the clear.” He stood up and swept the forest with his eyes. “You’re sure about it not having happened before you left this morning?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a snow-white dove descended from heaven, circled my head three times, then alighted on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, ‘This happened after you all left the house this morning.’ That’s why.”

  He stared at me, then shrugged. “That means it happened on an earlier watch than mine. Maybe the one just before I got here.”

  “That’s what it means,” I said. “Who had that watch?”

  Frank pointed a forefinger to the sky and made little circles with it. “It was probably the same dove. It told me not to tell you.”

  “I’ll bet Walt Pomerlieu can tell me,” I said.

  “Ask him,” said Ted. He turned and walked away, frowning.

  — 15 —

  By the time I walked bac
k through the trees to our house, it was beginning to get dark. Walt Pomerlieu and a carload of agents were there. One of them was Joan Lonergan. When I came out of the woods, two of the agents stopped what they were doing and kept their eyes on me.

  “I’m J. W. Jackson,” I said. “I live here.”

  The agents kept watching. One put a hand on his hip.

  Pomerlieu looked up. “Yeah, that’s him,” he said.

  The agents nodded and went back to work. They were going over the grounds, buildings, and cars for whatever they might find. Karen Lea and Debby were fifty feet up the driveway, just watching.

  “We found this in your telephone and this in your living room,” said Pomerlieu. He showed me two small devices. “Everything you said in the house or on the phone could be heard.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I had been dumb so often lately that another example of my stupidity seemed only natural.

  “I’m not used to this espionage stuff” was all I could manage as an explanation, but I could feel anger rising inside of me. Someone had actually come into my house, where nobody belonged except Zee and me and our guests, and had listened to everything we had to say. It was more than just irksome.

  Pomerlieu’s tone was intended to calm. “No reason for you to be hard on yourself. How could you have guessed?”

  I thought for a moment. “If these bugs work twenty-four hours a day, does that mean that whoever planted them has to listen twenty-four hours a day? Because if it does, it must mean that there’s a good-sized team out there, three or four people at least, taking turns at the listening post.”

  “It doesn’t mean that,” said Pomerlieu, “because they could have just taped whatever they heard and played it back later.”

  “So we can’t guess how many people there are?”

  “No,” he said. “Where were you just now?”

  I told him about the trail coming into the house and the one going north to the Felix Neck sanctuary, and of my meeting with Ted Harris. “He surprised me,” I said. “He knows what he’s doing in the woods.”

  “He should,” said Pomerlieu. “He came to us from another agency. He was in their operations directorate for years, working mostly overseas. He switched to us when they brought him back from his last job. He does know his way around.”

  “He wouldn’t tell me who had the shift before his.”

  Pomerlieu allowed himself a smile. “Good.”

  “Not from my point of view. Whoever came down here did it on that shift. I’d like to talk to the guy who was on duty.”

  “We’ll attend to that. Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry? Trust your Secret Service? You jest.”

  The humor went out of his face. “I don’t jest, Mr. Jackson. My job is to protect the family of the president of the United States, and I take that job seriously.”

  “You’re all serious, but so far we’ve got somebody bugging our cars and our house, somebody following us up to Gay Head, and somebody coming down through the woods past agents of yours who never saw a thing. Who had the duty up there? Some city gink who wouldn’t know a moose from a mouse? Somebody who was so busy slapping mosquitoes that he’d miss an elephant going by?”

  A ripple of anger crossed Pomerlieu’s face. “No elephants would get by Joan.”

  Joan Lonergan? “You mean Joan Lonergan was on watch up there before Ted? What does she know about the woods?”

  “Probably more than you,” said Pomerlieu in a cold voice. “She and Ted came to us at the same time. They were partners on their last job overseas. You could drop Joan Lonergan naked into the Amazon jungle five hundred miles from the nearest human being, and she’d walk out okay. I don’t think the same could be said for you or me.”

  I looked at him for a moment, then said, “I’m trying to imagine Joan Lonergan naked in the Amazon jungle, but I can’t quite pull it off. I keep seeing an image of Sheena. Joan doesn’t have blond hair or a leopard-skin bikini, does she?”

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  “Neither do I, sad to say. If she’s so good in the woods, why didn’t she see the person who came down here on her watch?”

  “That’s one of the things I’ll ask her,” said Pomerlieu, looking across the yard to where Joan Lonergan was nosing around our outdoor shower. “When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

  “If you think I need to.”

  “If I think you need to.”

  “What agency did they work for before they came to you?”

  He put on his long-suffering face. “That’s one of the things you don’t need to know, Mr. Jackson.”

  There was a sudden gathering of agents over by the outdoor shower. We looked that way, and I saw a dusty man come out of the crawl space under the house, where Velcro and Oliver Underfoot sometimes like to go to escape the summer heat. The man brushed at cobwebs that adorned his face and showed his find to Lonergan and his other companions. Then he and Lonergan came to Pomerlieu.

  “You’ll want to see this, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  The agent hesitated, glancing at me. “It’s okay,” said Pomerlieu.

  The agent revealed a plastic bag containing a small square box with strips of tape hanging from it. “I found it under the house,” said the agent. “As near as I can figure, it was right under the bed where the girl sleeps.”

  “Jesus,” said Pomerlieu.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  The agent looked at Pomerlieu, who was definitely pale but managed a shrug.

  “It looks like a bomb,” said Lonergan. “One of the kind you can detonate by radio. It was taped onto a floor joist.”

  Pomerlieu pointed across the yard. “Take it over beyond the garden and put it down. If it’s what it seems to be, whoever put it there can set it off whenever he wants to. Do it.”

  “Yes, sir.” The agent walked swiftly to the far corner of the yard and put the plastic bag on the ground, then trotted back.

  “Call the bomb people,” said Pomerlieu.

  “Yes, sir.” Lonergan walked away and lifted her wrist to her mouth.

  “And go over everything again. If there was one, there may be others.”

  “Yes, sir.” The male agent went first to his companions, who listened and then scattered, two of them going back under the house itself. Then he began talking into his collar.

  Pomerlieu dug out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “Good Lord, a bomb. If it had gone off . . .” He looked anguished.

  “But it didn’t,” I said, feeling an unexpected sympathy for him. “And now it won’t.”

  “I know, but . . .” He seemed to become aware of himself, and to pull himself together. “This is bad business,” he muttered, and went into the house.

  Bad business, indeed. I was shaking from fear and anger. A bomb under my house!

  I watched the agents swarm over, under, through, and around my buildings, and ran different scenarios through my head. Eventually, Pomerlieu reappeared, spoke to various agents, then came over to me.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything else, Mr. Jackson. I’m afraid your house has been turned a bit upside down, though. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Better that than another bomb we never learned about. Listen, can you send somebody up to the hospital to check out Zee’s Jeep? It may have another one of those bugs on it.”

  “What makes you think so? Didn’t you already find the one on her car?”

  “That was this morning’s bug. If there’s another one, whoever planted it did it this afternoon, while we were clamming. Ted went on duty about the time the girls and I drove downtown, and if we can believe him, the guy who made that trail did it before Ted got there.”

  “How do you know it didn’t happen before you went clamming?” asked Pomerlieu.

  “Because the only time her Jeep was here and people weren’t was when we were clamming. If the guy who made the trail planted this bomb, he might have planted another bug a
t the same time.”

  “We’ll check out her Jeep,” said Pomerlieu.

  “Good.” I wished I knew whether the bomb and the bugs in the house had been put there this afternoon or installed earlier, when the first car bugs were installed. “You’re sure you’ve found everything?”

  He looked at Lonergan, who was coming out of the house. She gave him a nod.

  He nodded back and turned to me. “I think we’ve found all there was to find here. Now we’ll have to get to work on that trail. It’s possible that you’re right about the bomber having made it.”

  It seemed a good time to try again for information. “Do you want to tell me what you think is going on?”

  He opened his mouth, then shut it again. “I understand your feelings, particularly in light of what we’ve found here just now. But you don’t need to know. Excuse me.” He stepped out into the driveway and waved Karen and Debby in.

  As they walked toward us, a flatbed truck carrying a large circular container came down the driveway behind them. They stepped aside to let it pass, and it arrived and unloaded three people I presumed to be the bomb squad. Pomerlieu spoke to them and pointed across the garden. The people backed the truck as near to the plastic bag as they could get, then began to unload gear and climb into suits that looked like they’d been designed for outer space.

  “You may not tell me anything,” I said to Pomerlieu as Debby and Karen came on toward us, “but it’s pretty obvious that somebody has some nasty plans for cousin Debby, and that you think that person’s got an agent inside the president’s compound. You may have thought that Debby was going to be safer here with Zee and me than she would be out there with the presidential party, but do you still think so?”

  His face was expressionless. “Go on.”

  Karen and Debby weren’t too far away now, so I didn’t have much more time.

  “I’ve been wondering why the inside agent didn’t do the job on Debby’s face before now, instead of—”

  Pomerlieu’s big hand shot out and gripped my shoulder. “How do you know about the threat to her face? Where did you get that information?”