Death in Vineyard Waters

by Philip Craig

  She put a crooked pretend-coquettish smile on her face. “You mean you won’t fight for me like the heroes do in the novels and movies when a rival shows up?”

  I put my big hands on her shoulders and looked down at her. “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll fight for you. If this guy treats you badly, I’ll do my best to make him wish he was never born. But if you want to be with him, and I can see that you think you do, then I’ll not fight at all. You’re a grown-up woman, and you get to decide how you’re going to live your life.”

  “But you don’t want me to live it with you.”

  “What I want has nothing to do with this.”

  “Yes, it does. I feel like you’re just giving me away.”

  “I’m not. I can’t give away something I don’t own, and I don’t own you. I don’t keep slaves.”

  “Damn you!”

  “Look.” I nodded toward the barn, and she turned and saw Ian McGregor and Jill come out, laughing and talking. While Zee watched them come up to tables of food and drink, I walked back to John Skye, who had gathered a larger crowd while I’d been gone. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Zee talking to Ian McGregor while Jill, an annoyed look on her face, stood off to one side. Girls often lose out when real women enter the game of love.

  “J. W., meet some more guests.” John Skye’s tone was carefully toneless, a sure sign that he was half amused. I turned and met four people.

  “Bill Hooperman and Helen Barstone, meet J. W. Jackson.”

  Two of many on Marjorie Summerharp’s dimwit list, I recalled. Barstone was she of the cleavage and Hooperman was he of the appreciative eyes. As I shook hands with him, those eyes seemed angry. Words apparently had been exchanged between him and someone else. I could guess who. Helen Barstone ran her tongue along her upper lip as I took her hand. Whatever her intellectual deficiencies, she revealed few physical ones. I let my eyes fall upon her famous bosom, then raised them again to meet her gaze. She smiled. Hooperman’s eyes fired darts at Marjorie Summerharp and his mouth turned down at its corners.

  “And meet Hans and Marie Van Dam,” said John. More handshakes. “Hans and Marie are leasing Tristan’s land in Chilmark,” continued John. “They’re running the Sanctuary program up there. Maybe you’ve read about it.”

  I reached back into my memory. “I’ve read things in the Gazette, I believe.”

  Hans Van Dam smiled a smile full of bright teeth. He wore expensive Vineyard casuals and was tanned and healthy looking. His wife used makeup very carefully and was vaguely ethereal in a longish dress something like a sari. A hearty voice emerged from Van Dam’s bright mouth. “It’s a spiritual, psychological, and physical retreat for the well-to-do, to put it simply. Our guests receive sanctuary from their everyday troubles, can receive therapy from our counseling staff if they wish, and have a chance to take healthy exercise under the guidance of professional trainers. We offer a private beach, tennis courts, sailing and motorboating, massage, swimming, and private religious services for those who prefer not to attend the regular island churches.” He smiled his gleaming smile down at his wife, who answered with a mystic half smile of her own. “Have I left anything out, my dear?”

  She, like her husband, looked to be early or mid fortyish, although what with modern cosmetics and all, it’s hard to tell these days. Her voice was sibilant and slightly musical. “You might add that Tristan’s land was the most perfect we’ve found for our work. That it is not only isolated and lovely but ancient and holy as well.”

  “Of course, my dear, I should have made that clear. Sanctuary, Mr. Jackson, takes very seriously indeed the ancient stones and temples on the land we are leasing. I believe I would be right in saying that had we taken less interest in those sites, Tristan would have hesitated to lease us his property. Am I right, Tristan?”

  “You are,” agreed Tristan Cooper. “A half a dozen developers were begging for the privilege of making me a rich man in exchange for my land, and one of them, as you know, was even willing to name his proposed development ‘Standing Stones’ and design his landscape around them. A particularly wretched prospect. But then you arrived and have proved yourself a proper tenant.”

  “Our religious services,” explained Marie Van Dam in her dusky voice, “are not denominational in any modern sense. Rather, we attempt to orient ourselves to the cosmos, as it were, and try to treat all creation as sacred. We believe that the religious wisdom of the ancient people who built such monuments as those we find on Tristan’s land was akin to our own, and thus we hold services at those sites for whomever wishes to join us in our songs and prayers.” She smiled suddenly, showing small, even teeth. “We also encourage our guests to attend services in the local churches. So we are not so unconventional as you might imagine, Mr. Jackson. We use both modern and ancient methods of therapy and are quite shameless about it.” She put her silken arm around her husband’s. “Our guests will testify to our success, won’t they, darling?”

  “Indeed. Our files contain dozens of letters of appreciation, and many of our guests have returned for second, third, or even fourth visits. You should come by yourself, Mr. Jackson, and have a tour of our grounds and offerings. Call ahead and one of us may shake free from our schedules and take you around; otherwise, one of our staff will assist you.” His wide, toothy grin sparkled with sincerity.

  “Thanks. Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “Good God,” said Marjorie Summerharp, “next we’ll be hearing about flying saucers and Mu. I think I need another drink.” She had been standing beside Tristan Cooper all this time with a sour milk look on her face. To be grouped not only with Hooperman and Barstone but with the Van Dams as well was apparently more than she could bear. She looked disgustedly at Hans Van Dam. “You’re an advertising brochure for a brothel, nothing more.”

  Hooperman’s angry eyes bulged. “By God!” he cried, “you are a bitch!”

  “And you are an ass!” she replied, thrusting a finger at him.

  Hooperman gave a drunken bellow and plunged toward her with a raised right arm. He was a large man thirty years her junior and moved remarkably quickly. But I had been thinking about his anger and caught his arm as he went by me. He spun and swung blindly at me. I took the blow on my forearm, then held his wrists in my hands. His eyes blazed, and he wrenched in vain to free himself.

  I squeezed his wrists. “Stop,” I said. He swore and tried to jerk away, but I held him tighter. “Stop,” I repeated.

  As suddenly as his anger had caught him up, it left him. His shoulders slumped and he shook as though chilled. Then Helen Barstone was at his side, and John and Tristan Cooper stepped near and put their hands upon his shoulders. Hooperman took long breaths and his eyes closed. I released his wrists and stepped away.

  “Amazing,” said Marjorie Summerharp. “Now I really do want that drink.” She headed for the bar while the Van Dams and Helen Barstone looked coldly after her. Skye’s eyes seemed to be laughing. Tristan Cooper’s were expressionless. I glanced around the yard. It had happened so fast that no one else seemed to have noticed anything.

  Mattie Skye’s voice announced that dinner was ready to be eaten and that if we wanted it hot we’d better dig in now. Our party moved toward the food tables, relieved murmurs indicating that some of its members at least were glad to be extracted from an awkward moment. Helen Barstone held Hooperman’s arm. As she led him away, she threw me what might have been a grateful glance.

  I ate roast beef beside Mattie and John, and we talked of their upcoming trip to Colorado. Fifty feet away, at a table under a large oak, Jill and Jen and Zee shared the pleasure of Ian McGregor’s company. The four of them seemed to be laughing a lot. When I left for home right after supper, they were still at it.

  4

  That night I could smell the fragrance of Zee’s hair on my pillow, so I got up and went out into the living room of my house and read until I was too sleepy to know what I was looking at. My furniture is comfortable but old and sagging, mostly stuff
my father bought long ago and some that I’ve salvaged from the world’s champion discount store, the Big D, a.k.a. the Edgartown dump, where every bargain comes with an absolute money-back guarantee. Edgartown is a summer home for a lot of very wealthy people who throw away housefuls of perfectly good stuff just because they may be tired of it or too busy or lazy or unimaginative to fix some simple malfunction in it. Other year-round islanders and I take the stuff home and use it. We are dump pickers because we like finding things and fixing them up and because some of us have thin wallets. Maybe if I win the Megabucks I’ll forego dump picking, but until then I won’t.

  After finally staggering back to bed and sleeping badly with the scent of Zee in my dreams, I was up again at three and back at Wasque Point at four to catch the last two hours of the tide as it fell away to the west. The fish were there, as were three other four-by-fours full of fishermen, and when we were not too busy reeling in bluefish to do so, we watched the red sun climb out of Nantucket Sound and bring another fair summer morning to the island. Wasque is one of the loveliest places in America from which to watch a rising sun. The sky brightens slowly, and if there are clouds they become touched with reds and yellows and whites and odd shadows; then, like something out of a Japanese painting, the round sun rises, newborn once again, and the world is fresh and clean in the singing light.

  And when the bluefish are in, it’s even better. I have a market for my bluefish, so I do not mess around. I fished hard until, about a half hour before six, the bluefish decided to go off somewhere else. I got a final one with a diamond jig far out in the last of the rip, and then there weren’t any more for us shore fishermen. Far out beyond our casts, early morning boatmen were still doing nicely, thank you. They could follow the fish wherever they went, of course, and I thought again about somehow buying myself a good, simple boat that I could use for fishing during the summer and fall and scalloping during the fall and winter. Something strong and stable that would get me out there and back again reasonably quickly. I didn’t need a speedboat, but I didn’t want to take forever getting out to the shoals or coming home afterward. The winds can brisk up pretty quickly around Martha’s Vineyard, and I wanted to be able to get back to harbor without delay, if need be.

  But right now my dinghy was the only boat I could afford, so until someone left a bigger one in the dump, I was a shore fisherman. It could be worse, I thought, as I watched the sun climb into the sky and wash light over land and sea.

  While I was drinking coffee and listening to a country and western station from Rhode Island on the Landcruiser’s old but good radio, John Skye drove up, took one look, and sighed.

  “All gone, eh?”

  “Perfect timing, Professor.”

  “Serves me right. Too much party last night. I overslept this morning. Oh, well. I’ll pick up some quahogs instead. Sorry you had to leave so early last evening.” He squinted at me and poured himself some coffee from his jug. “Woman trouble, I take it. Ian’s got the touch, whatever it is. For what it’s worth, his women don’t normally stay with him long. He’s easily bored, they say, and some say he has a temper. You might keep that in mind in case he points it at you. Still, most of his ladies keep right on thinking highly of him after they go their separate ways. It’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, amazing.” A guy on the radio was singing that he had a funny feeling that he wouldn’t be feeling funny very long. I had to smile.

  “He’s got what they call charm,” said Skye. “Even Marjorie likes him, and she doesn’t like anybody very much.”

  “How is your sweet-tempered lady professor friend? Still as cheerful and loving as when last I saw her?”

  “Marjorie? Just the same. She gets sourer every year, but I just ignore it. She’s okay in my book. She may not be politic, but she’s smart and she’s honest and she hates a phony, and that’s good enough for me.” He nodded toward the west. “You’ll probably see her car parked at the end of the pavement when you go back. A beat-up Chevy Nova. She’ll be taking her six A.M. swim.”

  “People shouldn’t swim alone, they say.”

  “I’ll let you tell her that, J. W. She’s been doing it for sixty years, and she’s not about to change her ways now.”

  “In that case, you might suggest to her that South Beach may not be the safest place for solo swimming. There’s a good tide there sometimes, and sometimes the breakers get pretty rough. She doesn’t look too strong to me.”

  “I gave her that sermon when she first came down here. That’s probably why she’s swimming there instead of up at the bend between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs where I recommended she go. She’s got a stubborn streak that’s close to perverse.”

  The independent sort. “Tell me,” I said, “is she sick?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s none of my business one way or the other, but I saw blood on her handkerchief after she coughed.”

  He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. She never mentioned it.” He paused. “But then she wouldn’t.”

  “She said she was retiring. Maybe her health is one of the reasons.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Skye. “She’s over seventy and she’s been hanging on to her job a long time past normal retirement age. There’s pressure to move her out. Young bucks want the old-timers out so they can find tenure slots for themselves. Can’t blame them, really. And there’s the fact that Marjorie hasn’t produced much writing for quite a while. This Shakespeare thing will send her out with a bang, which will please her just because it will annoy the harpers who think she’s all done as a scholar. And finally, the simple truth is that a lot of people just plain don’t like Marjorie very much. She doesn’t smile at administrators, she laughs at people and ideas her colleagues take seriously, she says what she means at faculty meetings, and she doesn’t take to the idea that her classrooms are democracies. She figures that her job is to teach her students what she knows and test them on that whether they like it or agree with it or not.

  “Oh, she’ll be wined and dined and given a chair with a Weststock logo and she’ll get a plaque and maybe she’ll even get a bookshelf in the library named after her, compliments of some alum the president will nail for a financial contribution for her memorial. But she will be retired, no doubt about it.”

  I felt mean and therefore nosy. “What’s with her and Tristan Cooper?”

  Skye squinted at me then shrugged. “He was department chairman when she joined Weststock. Gossip has it that they had something going together before he packed it in and moved down here to protect his rocks and work on his theories of early European and African encounters with the New World. She became Renaissance chair. He was always a controversial guy, I’m told. Divorced twice, rumors about other women. The Brilliant but Decadent Professor tales. I heard them when I joined the faculty just after he resigned.”

  “Under pressure?”

  “I’ve heard various stories, but you should know that academics are great gossips. Marjorie says they live such boring private lives that they have to make up tales about their colleagues just so they can continue to think of themselves as interesting people. Could be.”

  “You met him down here?”

  “At a cocktail party. We’re not friends, but we’ve had some good conversations and he’s showed me the stones on his property. Maybe we get along because I’m the type he expected to scoff but I didn’t.”

  “Speaking of gossiping, do you know why Marjorie Summerharp loathes the Van Dams? I got the impression that words had passed between them before I arrived and was introduced.”

  “Ah. Well, Marjorie detests religion for profit in general and quasi-mystics in particular. As you might guess, the Van Dams are perfect targets for her arrows, and she’d fired a few just before you joined us. A few remarks equating certain religious hypocrisy with sexual perversion, as I recall. She’s mentioned that theory to me before, and she’s surely not the only one to advance it. The Van Dams have excellent st
age presence and never batted an eye. They just tried to look lovingly sorry for her. Bill Hooperman was not so cool.” He finished his coffee. “By the way, thanks for stopping Bill before he did something stupid. He’d been into the gin, I think, and Marjorie got to him. I’d never seen him pop his cork before. He phoned apologies this morning.”

  “Passions run high within the ivy walls.”

  “I think he’s permanently mad at Ian McGregor, and since he can’t take it out on Ian because Ian would make mincemeat out of him, Bill let loose at Marjorie. My own ten-cent psychology. You get it free.”

  “Why’s he mad at McGregor?”

  “A woman—what else? Helen Barstone, if rumor has it right. Bill fancies himself her man when her husband’s not around, but Ian took her, kept her, and only gave her back when he met a sweet young thing from up island. That was a couple of weeks ago. Bill took it hard. Helen was more realistic. Women usually are.”

  “So now McGregor has an up-island girl.”

  Skye’s face assumed a careful expression. “I understand that she’s also been returned to her previous boyfriend, who got a face full of fist when he took issue with Ian’s handling of the situation. I’m told it happened right in my front yard, but I wasn’t up to see it. An early morning fracas.” He shook his cup upside down. “I guess I’ll make a couple of casts, since I’m here. Then I want some big quahogs for chowder. There are a lot of littlenecks along the south end of Katama Bay, but there aren’t many big ones. You have any wise advice?”

  I told him to try Pocha Pond. There are some nice big growlers out there in the mud. At low tide you can see them with your bare eyeballs. As he got his rod down off his truck roof, I left. Now I understood McGregor’s skinned knuckles, at least. I wondered if I should try to stop worrying about Zee.