by Philip Craig
Zee shrugged. “It seemed to me that it was rooted in a kind of vanity that I didn’t expect in Ian.”
“Intelligent people are often vain. They’re famous for it, I understand. Marjorie Summerharp was vain and cruel, too. Maybe it’s an academic syndrome. Did your Professor McGregor tell you about his skinned knuckles while he was telling you other tales?”
She looked down at her beer. “He’s not my professor. Yes. He said something about a dispute with a man. He made light of it.”
“Who brought it up? You or he?”
She raised her eyes. “He did. Do you know what happened?”
“When the professor dropped the girl before you, her boyfriend decided to teach him a lesson. But the professor taught the lesson and the student flunked the test. Or so my spies inform me.” She drank some beer and shook her head. “It’s manly stuff,” I said. “Mere women can’t be expected to fathom it.”
“Men. Good grief.”
“Being a manly guy myself, I naturally appreciate the subtle nuances that are manifest in bloody fists and broken faces. I’d be glad to explain them to you, but you’d probably accuse me of pontificating.”
“That would bother you? Ha! You can pontificate with the best of them!”
“But I do it in a very modest way.”
Her smile made me ache. Her teeth were so bright that they seemed to glitter in the sun. “How are the tides?” she asked. “I’ve lost track, I’m afraid.”
“The fish will be waiting for you about six tomorrow morning.”
“Do you want to go?”
“I thought you were on the night shift.”
“I am. But I’ll be off at four in the morning. Do you want to go?”
“What about Ian McGregor? Won’t he feel left out?”
“Never mind Ian! Do you want to go fishing in the morning?”
I finished my beer. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Then I had another thought. “Why not this afternoon? We could take the dinghy over to the Cape Pogue gut.”
She looked into her glass. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Ah.”
“He’s teaching me how to surf sail.”
“Over at Mothers’ Beach.”
“Yes.” She looked at her watch. “I have to go home and change.” She stood up. I stood up.
“Maybe I’ll spy on you from my balcony. Check out just how great a teacher this guy is.”
She gave me a little smile. “I’ll meet you tomorrow morning in the Katama parking lot. Five o’clock?”
When she was gone, I felt both good and bad. I climbed up onto my balcony and looked across toward the beach I call Mothers’ Beach. It’s the state beach between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, where the young mothers take their babies and little children. The beach is close to the road, so the mothers don’t have to lug their chairs, cribs, umbrellas, and their tons of other gear too far. The wind is usually offshore, and the water is shallow and safe for young ones. The mothers can watch them and not worry too much while they get mothers’ tans: tanned backs and shoulders and tops of thighs, along with white fronts and calves. This because they sit with their backs to the sun so they can watch their kids in the water and can’t turn their backs on the water long enough to get their fronts tanned. The white-bellied young mothers remain two-toned until their children are grown a bit.
Zee, like me, was tanned all over.
Mothers’ Beach is also a good place to practice surf sailing. The waves are small and the offshore wind makes for little or no surf. All summer long I can see the bright sails of the surf sailors racing back and forth beyond the road. Later, when they are bolder, the surf sailors take their boards to South Beach and try their hands when the wind is high and the surf is boiling. I imagine that in Hawaii they seek out the monster surf. I think I read about a guy surf sailing all the way across the Atlantic and about another one trying to surf sail to the North Pole. Everyone to his own madness, I say.
I couldn’t really see the beach well enough to watch Zee or anybody else surf sail. Besides, I had other things to do.
I phoned John Skye’s farm, got Ian McGregor, and told him I wanted to go over Marjorie Summerharp’s papers some more. He hummed and then said sure, so I drove over.
His MG’s removable hard top still held up the surfboard and sail I’d earlier seen at John Skye’s cocktail party. McGregor was wearing swimming shorts and a shirt that said “You can trust me, I’m a doctor.”
“I’m afraid I can’t be here to help out this afternoon,” he said. “I have to be someplace else.”
“Zee told me,” I said. “I thought I’d bring you up to date and then work here for a while.” I told him about my morning drive and my talk with the chief.
McGregor listened, then nodded. “I didn’t see any boat of any kind that morning, although I guess the trawlers were working offshore somewhere. I don’t think you can see the beach from the parking lot, so I guess there could have been a boat.”
“I don’t know if there was one,” I said.
“What other explanation is there?”
“None that makes sense so far. Maybe I’ll find something here.”
“I hope so, but I can’t imagine what it might be.”
We went to the library and he unlocked the door. I told him that I’d lock up again when I was through, and he said he’d see me later then. I watched through a window while he got into his snappy refabricated little car and went buzzing off. It was the perfect picture of a sophisticated vacationer: sports car, surfboard, a tanned Apollo at the wheel, heading off to meet a beautiful woman at a golden beach beneath a bright blue summer sky. Romance!
I sat down and went to work.
I found names and initials I’d seen before, along with others that were totally new. I came across what appeared to be telephone numbers and wrote them down on a piece of paper, so I could check them out later. I studied microfilmed copies of elderly documents and pages of scribbles. A remarkable number of the documents had to do with frauds, fakes, phonies, and the people who had been taken in by them. Experts, it was clear, have been conned by slickers down through the ages, and Marjorie Summerharp had not, it seemed, proposed to be another such sucker.
And apparently had found nothing fraudulent about the play in question. As I came to her later notes, it seemed that she had become almost persuaded of the quarto’s authenticity. Almost, but not quite. I remembered her craggy face and the toughness of her voice and wondered if she ever absolutely believed in anything. Likely not, I suspected. If it could be doubted, she would doubt it.
Bored, I had a perverse desire to see the final draft of the paper, but McGregor’s desk drawers were locked. I knelt and looked at the drawers. Not hard to jimmy, really. I mean, how sophisticated are the locks on desks, especially old ones like this one of John Skye’s?
I left the library and went upstairs. I got a coat hanger from a bedroom closet, came back down, went to the kitchen, found the junk drawer every kitchen has, and took the pliers I knew I’d find there. Back in the library, I straightened then sharply bent the end of the coat hanger and slipped it into the keyhole of the center desk drawer.
Bingo. The lock clicked and the drawer slid open.
The third drawer I opened contained the manuscript. I sat down at the desk and began to read it.
It consisted of four parts: a narrative of the discovery of the document and the circumstances that had led up to it, a description of the document and a photocopy of three of its pages to illustrate that description, a description of the tests that had been applied to the document, and, finally, a commentary on the origin and merit of the play itself.
It appeared that the article was to be accompanied by photographs of the book in which the document Wad been found, of the library where it had been discovered, and of McGregor and Marjorie Summerharp.
The play, in quarto form, had been found bound with other seventeenth-century documents in a book in the library of a family
named Pavier, descendants of Thomas Pavier, a bookseller in London at the time of Shakespeare’s death. McGregor had gained access to the library some years before by dint of having been teacher to a Miss Genna Pavier, granddaughter of the library’s owner, when she was doing graduate work in America. She had prevailed upon her grandfather to allow her teacher to examine the library in search of materials in the area of his specialization, seventeenth-century English drama. The old man, it seemed, had until then followed a family tradition of not allowing scholars into the library, the origin of this policy being unclear but presumably due to some real or imagined insult or event in the eighteenth-century or before. McGregor had charmed the old man just as he had charmed the granddaughter and had worked there a portion of each summer since, examining the books for material pertaining to his work, particularly his interest in a trio of playwrights I’d never heard of, three guys named Dekker, Marston, and Middleton.
Marjorie Summerharp had become involved almost as a fluke. She had gone to London for purely social reasons to visit friends (Ah, I thought, she did have some!) and had bumped into McGregor at a theater during intermission. He had not even known she was abroad. But as fate would have it, he had a day or two earlier come across a play in the Pavier library that, although its author was unnamed, seemed to McGregor to be in the style of William Ireland, the well-known forger of Shakespearean dramas. Knowing of Dr. Summerharp’s interest and expertise in such matters, he had invited her to examine the document. She, having become a bit bored with socializing, accepted the invitation and thus arrived at the Pavier manor house and was in the library examining the Ireland forgery when McGregor happened to pull out a previously unexamined volume and, totally unexpectedly, found the play they were now presenting to the public.
The two scholars immediately suspected that they might have stumbled on a manuscript as authentic as Ireland’s was obviously fraudulent. But Marjorie Summerharp was by inclination and experience a professional skeptic, and Ian McGregor had no wish to join the parade of scholars and experts who had been gulled in the past, so both had agreed to keep silent about their find and to subject it to the closest of scrutinies until they could be certain of its character.
I remembered McGregor saying that the love of drudgery was the test of a vocation. Cops and scholars had that much in common, at least. Both jobs took lots of patience. But my patience, unlike McGregor’s, was not the literary kind. I couldn’t imagine doing what he and Marjorie Summerharp had then done: spend two years testing a manuscript.
First they made long searches to see if such a play might have been mentioned in some other document, some list, some reference, some notation; then they communicated with other scholars and institutions—university libraries, the Folger, the many initials and telephone numbers I’d found.
And of course the secret was soon no secret at all. Rumors and speculation crept and then ran through the world of scholarship. Cameras and modern devices had been brought in. Photos had been taken, scientific tests had been conducted. The precious book itself had been secreted out to the laboratories of the British Museum and there had its paper, ink, typeface, and binding materials put to tests that could not prove that the work was of the proper period but could also not prove that it was not.
And now the book was again in the Pavier library, a domain closed to all entry but McGregor’s and Summerharp’s.
I picked up the draft of an introductory statement by McGregor telling of the untimely death of his colleague and of the invaluable contributions she had made to the project. It was quite well written, expressing affection for her in life, sadness at her death, and determination to get on with the scholarship so important to both of them. He was a smoothie, I thought. Then I wondered if I’d have thought that if he wasn’t right now out on a windsurfer with Zee. So I put the smoothie thought back down in the pit whence it had come.
I put the manuscript back in the desk where I found it, relocked all the drawers, wrote some notes, locked up the library and the house, and went home. I was tired and didn’t feel too smart.
9
Because life will not stop for me, I kindly stop for it. One of the pleasures from such stops is food. I opened a can of artichoke hearts in water, drained them, chopped them, and mixed them up with Parmesan cheese and mayo, put everything into a baking dish and shoved it into a 350 oven. While it baked, I got the Stoli out of the freezer and poured myself a glass. To add just the right touch of nip, I added a tiny pickled chili pepper I’d canned last summer. Superior stuff to an olive or onion. I got out the crackers and put them on a tray, finished my excellent ultimate martini, and poured myself a follow-up Dos Equis. When they were nicely done, I took the baked artichoke hearts out of the oven and carried them, the crackers, and beer up onto my balcony, where I sat and ate and thought.
The sun was still warm on my shoulders, but there was a cool evening breeze moving through the trees and fussing with my hair. Beyond the garden, beyond the pond, beyond the road on the other side where the cars were moving back and forth between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, the sailboats were walking silently across the flat blue water. Nearer to the beach, the smaller sails of the windsurfers raced brightly to and fro. Was one of them Ian McGregor’s?
I dipped crackers into the baked artichoke hearts and thought of tomorrow morning’s fishing date with Zee. That was better than thinking about Ian McGregor’s surf sailing. Then I thought about the Marjorie Summerharp business for a while. John Skye would be getting back in a day or two. Maybe he’d know something about the dead woman that would help me figure out what had happened to her.
Man does not live on hors d’oeuvres alone, so I finally went down and thawed out a chowder I had in the freezer and had a couple of bowls of that. I love chowder. While I ate, I listened to a tape of Beverly Sills singing songs from La Traviata. It pleases me to know that Beverly and I both live on the same island in the summertime. Sometimes I cry when I listen to her sing.
As I was finishing up with the dishes, the phone rang. It was Ian McGregor. There was an odd note in his voice, a formal stiffness. He asked how things had gone. I told him everything except the part about reading his manuscript.
“No progress, then?” He seemed indifferent, rigid.
“Not yet. I’d like to talk to a couple of people. Maybe you know where I can find them. They were at the cocktail party.”
“Who?”
“Two professorial types. Bill Hooperman and Helen Barstone. They both knew Marjorie Summerharp. Maybe they know something.”
“I can’t imagine what.”
“I’m just grabbing straws.”
He had the numbers. Both of them lived up island near Menemsha.
“You should talk to Tristan Cooper, too,” he said coldly. “Marjorie took a copy of our manuscript up to him just the day before she died. Maybe she mentioned something to him that might be useful.”
“I thought I would do that. I want to see the Van Dams, too.”
“The Van Dams?”
“Hooperman and the Van Dams crossed swords with Marjorie at John’s party. Maybe they were mad enough to do something to her.”
“I find that difficult to imagine. Bill Hooperman? I don’t think so.” There was contempt in his voice.
“He tried to take a swing at Marjorie. Didn’t she mention it?”
“No. Did he really?”
“He was drunk and John said he apologized the next day, but he really did try to take a swing at her. Has Tristan Cooper returned the manuscript yet? And if so, what did he think of it?”
“I’m going to pick it up later this evening. Sunday I’m leaving for the mainland. I have an appointment with the publishers the next day.”
“I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”
“Do,” said McGregor. “Zee spoke to you, I imagine.”
“Not since this morning.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sure she will.” His voice was without color.
“What about?” I a
sked, but as I did he hung up.
I called Bill Hooperman, the academic pugilist.
If you wish somebody was dead and the somebody dies, sometimes you feel guilty. Hooperman admitted that kind of guilt to me with a kind of innocence that almost charmed me. He even thanked me for having stepped between him and Marjorie. But he offered no information about her death. “I can’t tell you a thing. I don’t want to speak badly of the dead, but frankly I found her to be a bitter and cantankerous woman. She was cruel and spread a lot of malicious gossip about her colleagues. She herself was more petty than the people she accused of being so. It takes one to know one, I often thought.”
“Can you think of anyone she might have met on the beach the day she died? Did she ever mention anybody she knew here on the island who might have been down there that morning?”
“I never heard of anyone you don’t know about already, but then I wouldn’t have, since she and I did not meet socially.”
“You met at John Skye’s cocktail party.”
“That was at John’s invitation only, I assure you. Marjorie and I scarcely spoke.” He paused. “Of course, I was interested in the project she was working on. Several of us were interested in that.”
“So that’s one reason you came to the party?”
“Yes. I was also there because Tristan Cooper had been invited, but the Shakespeare document was the principal subject of interest. We were all curious for the details, but I’m afraid we didn’t get much in that regard. McGregor and Marjorie were quite tight-lipped about their paper. We all went home knowing no more than before.”
But filled with John Skye’s booze and roast beef. To say nothing of venom.
“I understand that you and Helen Barstone have been interviewing Tristan Cooper.”
“Yes. Marjorie’s sarcasm notwithstanding, Tristan’s work merits a wider audience than it’s received, particularly in legitimate academic circles. There is increasing evidence supporting his theories of pre-Columbian Euro-American trade and explorations. Helen and I plan to publish our interview with him and hope to get a book out of it.”