Death in Vineyard Waters

by Philip Craig

  “Hooperman!” She laughed. “What a dolt! She keeps Hooperman on the string because he’s safe, like that wimp of a husband of hers, but I saw how she looked at you when you kept her boyfriend from misbehaving.”

  “She must drive Hooperman wild. First McGregor, now me.”

  “Oh, you know about her and Ian, eh? Well, I’d hardly say that Ian was her first, and as far as I know you’re just the current prospect. Hooperman may feel wild, but he won’t ever do anything rash unless it’s to someone weaker, like me. Don’t worry about Hooperman, the twit. Thanks for interfering the other day, by the way. Bill was quite in his cups.”

  “I hear that Ian McGregor is a bit more physical than Hooperman.”

  “Ah, yes. You do have big ears, Mr. Jackson. I take it you refer to the young Sanctuary lad and the lass with the copper hair. The girl and Ian met up island when he and I were visiting Tristan, and naturally she succumbed to his charms. They were an item for a couple of weeks till he got bored. The morning after he shed her, the boy showed up feeling Irish and manly. It was an interesting vignette, since I’ve rarely had the opportunity to personally observe the masculine rites of supremacy. I was just going for my morning swim, but I stayed to watch. I think the boy had been drinking. Possibly all night. At any rate, they exchanged words rather loudly, the boy saying he would not allow the girl to be so sorely used and Ian responding that she was only a whore anyway. Then the boy went at him and Ian knocked him down. He got up and Ian knocked him down again. Then the boy went to his car and drove away and Ian apologized to me for the scene. Actually, I thought he enjoyed it.” She tilted her head. “That was a couple of days before we all met on the clam flats. I fancy Ian might have more trouble with you. I wouldn’t mind having a front-row seat for that one.”

  “I don’t like trouble,” I said. Then I felt a smile on my face. “You are a tiger.” She grinned, and I got into the Landcrusier and went to town to sell my fish.

  During the next couple of days I motored my dinghy across to the Cape Pogue gut and fished there with some luck. Taking the dinghy from Collins Beach in Edgartown saved me the long drive out to Cape Pogue and then back down the elbow to the gut—twenty minutes by boat versus an hour by Landcruiser.

  Then, for two days, I went up island, a place I rarely go, and fished Squibnocket and Lobsterville. I don’t like to go to Gay Head, the island’s westernmost town, because I dislike their politics and their tourist practices: pay toilets, overpriced parking lots, and not only No Parking signs but No Pausing signs on their roads. When I’m king of the world, I’m going to ban pay toilets on religious grounds as an abomination in the eyes of God. Until then, I avoid Gay Head except to fish. I do roam Gay Head’s fishing grounds when I can find a place to park, since there are few better places to cast a line, especially for bass.

  And when I wasn’t fishing up island, during late mornings or afternoons I worked the shellfishing grounds in Edgartown, digging clams or raking for quahogs at the south end of Katama Bay. I had a market for littlenecks and sold most of what I got, but my clamming was done mostly for me; I love them steamed, fried, chowdered, any way at all except raw. Why not raw? I wondered. After all, I ate raw littlenecks and raw oysters and raw scallops; why not raw soft-shell clams? Because they looked yucky?

  And I worked in my garden, weeding it more than I’d ever weeded it before, more than it needed to be weeded.

  And I cooked complicated things that required much chopping and sorting and different stages of preparation; and I ate many-coursed meals with more than one wine. Alone.

  And finally the weather changed. A west wind blew in a steady all-night rain from New York and I slept soundly and decided I was getting better.

  The evening of the following day I opened the Vineyard Gazette, which was now coming out in its twice-a-week summer editions, and saw that Marjorie Summerharp’s body had been brought up in the nets of a trawler fishing off South Beach south of Katama Bay. Three or four of them had been working off the beach most of the summer, their spreaders making them look like great water birds opening their wings as they swam. When the Mary Pachico had hauled in her catch at noon the previous day, Marjorie Summerharp, clad in her old-fashioned black bathing suit and white bathing cap, was there among the fish, quite dead.

  I had a sudden sense of guilt, remembering the last time I’d seen her, thinking of the warnings I’d suggested be given to her but that I’d not given myself when we’d spoken that last morning, remembering the sight of her out in the blue waves, swimming effortlessly, her wiry arms rising and falling in a steady rhythm, remembering the wink she’d once given me and the dry, ironic voice and the tough, wrinkled face and cool eyes and her surprising laughter and frankness and how I’d liked her for no reason I could name.

  What had happened to her? I read the article through. According to Ian McGregor, she had left the farm to take her morning swim just as he was starting his morning run, so he’d ridden with her to South Beach and run home from there. She had not come back at her usual time, but he had been working and had not thought much about it. Toward midmorning, when she still hadn’t returned, he had phoned a friend, Mrs. Zeolinda Madieras, expressing concern, and the two of them had driven to South Beach and found Dr. Summerharp’s car at the end of the Katama Road, still parked where it had been when he’d left her that morning. The lifeguard had seen nothing of the missing woman since coming on duty. McGregor had then contacted the police, who in turn contacted the coast guard. A couple of hours later, the Mary Pachico had hauled in the body from a point a mile straight offshore from where the victim’s car was parked. There was sea water in her lungs, and every indication was that she had drowned.

  I had been fishing up at Lobsterville that morning and so had missed the action: police cars, coast guard helicopters, the works. John Skye would have phoned me the news, but John and Mattie and the girls had left for Colorado earlier in the week and probably didn’t know anything about it themselves, yet. Zee hadn’t called either; but why should she?

  I got a Molson from the fridge and took it and the paper outside and up onto the balcony, where I could look out on the Sound and watch the sailboats inch toward their night anchorages through the light evening winds. Cars drove silently along the road on the other side of Anthier’s Pond, going to and from Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. Bicyclists moved along the bike path beside the road, and beyond them the bright sails of windsurfers still glided back and forth along the beach; some of the June people were taking advantage of the fine weather and were stretching their beach time as far as they could. They neither knew nor cared that Marjorie Summerharp had just drowned not five miles from where they swam so safely.

  I drank my beer and read the article again. It still contained the same information; I hadn’t missed a thing. I thought it was probably just as well that the people on the boats and beaches knew nothing of the fate of Marjorie Summerharp or of the other dark events of Vineyard life. For them, after all, the Vineyard was a place in the sun, a gold-rimmed green gem set in an azure sea, where they could forget for a time the realities that would confront them soon enough when their vacations ended. They were pleased to live for a time in their summer dreams, and I was not about to deny them that pleasure. Time enough for hard times; no need to seek them out. Time enough to read of the deaths of kings and the ruin of lives.

  I finished my beer and drove down to the new drugstore at the triangle, where the Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs roads split coming out of Edgartown. There are a lot of newly built stores there, and I like them because I can reach them without having to drive through the A & P traffic jam. I bought a copy of the Boston Globe and read its version of the story. Marjorie Summerharp was a well-known figure in higher education circles, and the Globe writers had gotten considerable comment from her colleagues, all of which was tactful and complimentary and expressed regret in the proper tones, but some of which suggested that she had been ill and more than a little depressed over her health and impendin
g retirement.

  A hint of suicide, I took it, although no one actually said that. Marjorie Summerharp in death received mostly rave reviews. I wondered if she would have been amused or irritated by them.

  The next edition of the Gazette referred to the official coroner’s report: death by accidental drowning. A trace of alcohol and sleeping pills was found, but insufficient to cause coma. Another tiny hint of suicide? The Gazette does not emphasize the unpleasant side of local stories when it can help it.

  Marjorie Summerharp had been elderly and not in good health. She had gone swimming at six in the morning as was her custom and apparently simply swam out too far and drowned before she could get back to shore. That was all. Relatives had taken the body to Maine for burial. Dr. Ian McGregor, greatly upset by the death of his colleague, had concluded his work on the paper he and Dr. Summerharp had been working on and intended to publish it as scheduled in both of their names. The paper would be dedicated to her memory.

  Touching. Annoyed that the word had come into my mind, I examined the photo of him that accompanied the story. Broad shoulders slumped, Apollonian face drawn in sorrow, the picture of formal grief. Behind him, a bit out of focus, stood Zee and the chief of the Edgartown police, both solemn.

  Marjorie Summerharp had been dead for almost a week when I saw the photo, and I had spoken to no one about the matter. I had, however, been reading the Globe every day, looking for a detail I never found. And now I read the Gazette from end to end and didn’t find it there either. I thought about it as I watched the day dim into evening and the distant beach-goers gather their umbrellas and pull in their kites and reluctantly depart for their vacation homes. It occurred to me that I was probably making something out of nothing, that others would have asked the question in my mind, and having asked it, must have gotten a satisfactory answer in reply.

  I climbed down off the balcony and made myself a refrigerator soup: all of the leftover vegetables and meats in the fridge mixed together, simmered in a bit of bouillon and wine, and served with homemade white bread. Delicious! I had seconds and then drank two Cognacs while I listened to the news and heard about a lot of things, but didn’t hear anything of the detail I hadn’t found in the papers.

  Later, reading in bed, I somehow got to thinking about ice cubes, about how, when I saw that the ice cube container in the freezer was getting low, I would break the ice cube trays into it until it was full, so I wouldn’t have to do it again for a while, but that Zee would only put in as many cubes as she needed right then.

  The next morning, I was up at three and at Wasque at four and back home again by seven and downtown by nine, looking for the chief of police.

  6

  The chief was, typically, not in his office. When a town of 2,500 winter souls becomes a town ten times that big in the summer, nobody in the police department has much time to sit in the office except, in this case, Kit Goulart, ace woman-of-all-work, who was there five days a week making sure the system worked as well as possible.

  “Nice badge,” I said, eyeing it appreciatively.

  “If there was a law against leering, you’d be a lifer,” said Kit.

  “Chief in?”

  “He’s on Main Street someplace,” said Kit.

  “If I was chief, I’d stay right here,” I said, staring at her badge with wide eyes.

  “Get out of here!”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I already have one more husband than I can manage.”

  “I doubt that,” I said as I left. I liked Kit. She and her husband Joe looked like twins, both six feet tall and weighing 250 or so. A matched team.

  The chief was at the corner of Main and Water Street, watching a young summer rent-a-cop directing traffic. She wasn’t doing too badly, either, and so the chief had time for me. We leaned against the wall of the bank and watched the cars creep by.

  “Why they’re here on a day like this, instead of at the beach, I’ll never know,” he said. He’d been saying that as long as I’d known him.

  I didn’t know either. “They’re city people,” I said. “They’re uncomfortable unless they’re in traffic jams. They feel unnatural at the beach because there’s so much room there and so much clean air. They like exhaust fumes and horns honking and so they drive around Edgartown all day, down Main, back out past the A & P, around the Square Rigger and back past the A & P to Main Street again. It gives them a sense of using their vacations in a meaningful way. Everybody knows that.”

  “Now that we’ve cleared that up,” said the chief, “we come to a tougher question. What are you doing here? You hide out in the woods all summer and only come into civilization for booze.”

  “You wound me. Only last week I was at the library . . .”

  “Astonishing. I didn’t know that you could read.”

  “You’re confusing me with Edgartown policemen. I’m famous for my comic book collection, and when they’re off work, all your crew come by to look at the pictures and ask me what the little letters say. I’m thinking of charging tuition.”

  “Not a bad idea,” said the chief. “From the look of some of their reports, they could use some help along literary lines. You have a pained expression on your face. Have you been thinking of something?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  “And . . .”

  “And maybe you know the answer to a question.”

  “We policemen are encyclopedias of information. Why, only this morning I was able to tell a woman from New York that there is no bridge between the Vineyard and the mainland. She seemed shocked.”

  “I dare say she was. My question is also well within your scope, I’m sure. If Marjorie Summerharp went swimming at six in the morning, how come her body was found six hours later a mile straight out from where she entered the water?”

  The chief thought. “You got me. What’s the answer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe because that’s where the Mary Pachico was trawling. If the boat hadn’t been there, it wouldn’t have collected her in its nets.”

  “Very sharp. Now I know why they made you chief. The thing is, if Marjorie Summerharp drowned off the end of the Katama Road where they found her car, she shouldn’t have been a mile straight out from that spot six hours later.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the tide was dead low at six o’clock that morning and ran east for the next six hours. If she went in at six o’clock like the papers said, and if she drowned like the papers said, her body should have washed way off toward Wasque Point by the time the Mary Pachico picked her up. But the Mary Pachico netted her straight out from the end of the road.”

  The chief watched his rent-a-cop stop traffic for a batch of tourists in sunglasses, shorts, and wild shirts who wanted to go from where they were to the other side of the street. Traffic backed up beyond the town hall. Then the rent-a-cop waved the cars ahead and the long line inched forward.

  The chief looked up and down the street. Cops’ eyes are always moving. “Maybe the Mary Pachico netted her down that way but didn’t haul in until she was back off Katama.”

  “Yeah. Maybe so. I didn’t see anything about it in the papers. Did anybody ask?”

  “I imagine somebody did. I didn’t.” He looked at me. “I’ll call the coast guard. It should be in their report.”

  “Will you let me know?”

  “No.”

  “Not even if I kiss your foot right here on Main Street?”

  His eyebrows went up. “Well, maybe if you kiss my ass.” He pushed away from the wall and went to help his rent-a-f-cop, who had gotten herself into a problem she couldn’t solve, a complex jam of cars and pedestrians that had created a kind of gridlock. “I’ll let you know,” he said as the horns began to honk.

  The next morning, as I was going into the station to find out where he was, he arrived in the cruiser and stepped out. He gestured toward his office. “ ‘ “Step into my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.
’ ”

  I ogled Kit Goulart as we passed her and she clutched her heart in feigned passion.

  The only soft chair in the chief’s office is his. The rest are hard. I took one.

  “According to the coast guard, the Mary Pachico was trawling west of Katama. She’d come east along the south shore and hauled just after making her turn to go west again.”

  We looked at each other.

  “There’s no way Marjorie Summerharp’s body should have been out west of Katama,” I said.

  “So, maybe she just swam straight out for a mile. People do things like that. They just swim out so far that they can’t get back. They do it on purpose.”

  “You mean she may have committed suicide?”

  He shrugged. “There was some talk. It could be. She was a good swimmer, they say, and maybe she could have gotten out a mile.”

  “So she swam out a mile, then swam against the tide for six hours until she drowned. That’s what she’d have had to do in order to get gathered into the Mary Pachico’s nets.”

  He got out his pipe, and I enviously watched him stuff tobacco into it. Except for an occasional cigar, I have given up smoking but will never, never stop missing my pipe. Knowing this, the chief lit up anyway, but gave me a look not totally devoid of sympathy.

  “So how did she get out there?”

  “She could have gotten there if she went into the water several miles to the west. The tides could have carried her there in six hours. I don’t know how far a body would drift in six hours, but the coast guard can probably figure it out.”

  “Maybe I’ll ask them to do that.”

  “Another possibility is that she went into the water earlier than six o’clock and washed first west, then east. I figure that’s what could have happened if, say, she went into the water about midnight. She’d have washed west fornix hours, then east for six hours, and ended up about where the Mary Pachico picked her up.”

  “But she didn’t go into the water at midnight. She went in at six o’clock, as she usually did.”