Death in Vineyard Waters

by Philip Craig

He made a large fist out of his right hand and the muscles jumped in his arm. He looked at me, smiled a dreamy smile, and relaxed the fist. “Of course you’re right about the theses. Either Marjorie got rid of it or I got rid of it. That’s logical.”

  “Unless they never arrived or unless the secretary I talked to at Weststock was lying.”

  “But if she did send them, then they should have arrived. And the only two people who might have gotten rid of them were Marjorie and I.”

  “Not the only people. Only the most likely people. Somebody we don’t know about might have done it.”

  He raised a brow. “Who? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know why Marjorie wanted the theses in the first place. If I knew that, maybe I could figure out who would have gotten rid of them.”

  He was looking at me, the dreamy smile back on his lips. “You expect people to lie, don’t you? You expect to be deceived.”

  “No, not really. Actually I believe almost everything I’m told. I don’t think people lie all the time or even a lot of the time. But I think it’s hard for them to tell the truth when they think their own lives are going to be seriously affected by what they say. Dostoevski believed that we’re so intent upon creating certain perceptions of ourselves that we can’t tell the truth even in our most secret journals, diaries that we never expect anyone else to read. I sometimes think I agree with him. Mostly, though, I trust people. I think it would be impossible to be happy otherwise. I can’t imagine living in a world where I couldn’t believe that people were more or less what they seemed. I think there are psychological terms for people who see themselves as surrounded by liars and deceivers. I know some people like that, and they all lead miserable lives. They’re all afraid. All of the time. I won’t live like that.”

  “And what do those people think of people like you?”

  “They think I’m a fool, a sucker. Maybe they’re right. I don’t think so. What was the subject of your thesis?”

  “I don’t want to bore you.” He shaped and relaxed his fist.

  “Bore me. Maybe it will mean something somewhere along the line.”

  He shrugged. “If you wish. It was a study of English drama during the reign of Charles the First, 1624 to 1642, when the theaters were closed. I was interested in showing the way drama grew increasingly dependent on the court during that period. I called it The Curtain Falls: The Last Period of Elizabethan Drama”

  “Was that something other people hadn’t written about?”

  “God, no. But I’d been in London and had gotten hold of some material that others had overlooked, so I was able to add a bit to the area. Nothing earthshaking, I assure you.”

  “Do you have a copy of your dissertation?”

  “I imagine so. Somewhere. I don’t remember looking at it since I got my degree.”

  “Do you know what Marjorie Summerharp’s thesis was about?”

  “You are a curious chap. Yes. I read it while I was researching my own thesis. She wrote about the court masque in seventeenth-century British drama.”

  “Why did you read it?”

  “I read everything I could find that might relate to my own topic. The court masque was a type of drama I had to consider, so I read her thesis. And several others, I should add.”

  “Can you think of anything that might tie the two theses together?”

  “Only what I’ve told you.”

  “Can anyone order a copy of someone’s thesis?”

  “I suppose so. I really don’t know.” For the third time he made a large fist. “Have you talked with Zee?”

  “We went fishing this morning. When we fish, we talk.”

  “She’s a bitch.”

  I glanced around the library. “What will John think when he finds this place all broken up?”

  “I’ll report that you started it.” He had become very smooth and graceful and was balanced on his feet. “Your bitch can learn to love a different face from the one you’re wearing.”

  “You have a bad mouth,” I said, putting my hands on one of John’s fine old oak chairs. “I can understand why Zee would prefer me to you. For one thing, I try not to call women nasty names and for another I don’t like smashing up good furniture that belongs to somebody else. I suggest that we either step outside in the rain where we can both slip and slide around like idiots or just forget this.”

  “So you’re a coward as well as a shithead. I should have known.” He leaned forward. “You aren’t worth getting wet for. I’ll be around here for a few days and I’ll look you up when the rain stops, so don’t think I’m through with you. Meanwhile, don’t forget to tell your bitch how I threw you out.”

  I let go of the chair, went into the kitchen and got my topsider, and then went out into the rain.

  11

  When I got home I phoned Northern Indiana University. The librarian put me through to Dr. Archbold, who remembered me from the conversation we’d had before. I asked her to send me copies of the two dissertations as quickly as possible.

  “I take it that you’ve developed an interest in the seventeenth-century British drama, Mr. Jackson.”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  “Are you also a teacher?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. In theater, then?”

  “In bluefish and clams, actually.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m a fisherman.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause, then an unexpected chuckle. “Yours is what my father used to call honest work, I believe. Well, you’ll get your dissertations as soon as I can have them copied and mailed. Good luck in your reading, Mr. Jackson.”

  After I rang off, I sought out my encyclopedia to look up court masques. I had no idea what they were.

  Court masques, it turned out, were masques performed at or for the court. What else? I should have guessed, I guessed. Dumb me. They’d started out as dances performed by masked lords and ladies dressed as shepherds or classical gods and goddesses and the like, and had progressed to include revels, pageants, and, eventually, entertainments by professional performers, many of them allegorical, complex, and increasingly expensive. Inigo Jones had devised scenery. Ben Jonson had written masques, as had almost every other playwright of note except Shakespeare. Why not Shakespeare? My book did not explain. My sense was that the masques, as Renaissance equivalents to modern movie special effects, had finally become so spectacular that they detracted from the drama and comedy they were initially intended to enhance.

  So I now knew something about Marjorie Summerharp’s doctoral thesis. Through my window the next morning I could see the wild white sea banging in from the northeast as the storm moved slowly off toward Nova Scotia. As I stood and looked through the rain-dashed windows, I thought about Marjorie. She had been fascinated by masks and deceptions all of her life. It was the core of her professional reputation.

  I got into my oilskins and drove downtown. Edgartown was even more crowded than usual. All of the normal shoppers and strollers were there and all of the beachers were there, too. I finally got to Collins Beach, where I parked. From the Reading Room parking area I could see the Mattie. She was doing fine, rising and falling slowly in the lee of the Yacht Club. She had a self-bailing cockpit and showed no sign of taking on water. Her lines were still snug on the stake. I left the Landcruiser on the beach and walked down South Water Street to Main. The rain was heavy and the wind was high, and I leaned into both as I walked.

  The narrow streets of Edgartown were filled with rain-soaked cars groping slowly ahead in search of nonexistent parking places, and the sidewalks were crowded with vacationers wearing bright rain gear and carrying brilliant umbrellas. There was a festive air about the town as the doors of the shops opened and closed and people ducked in and out of the rain. The bars and restaurants were doing boom business, as they usually do on stormy days. People were enjoying the break in the weather and were spending their money with enthusiasm, and the merchants were happy as clams at hi
gh tide.

  I found the chief standing in the lee of the drugstore, watching his summer rent-a-cops trying to keep rain-blinded cars from running over rain-blinded pedestrians. So far, they were succeeding.

  “One nice thing about the rain,” said the chief. “No mopeders to speak of. Here it is almost noon, and so far we haven’t had to take one moped driver to the hospital. I hope it rains all summer.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “All right,” he said, “I hope it rains half the summer. I don’t think I could stand to have this many people downtown every day.”

  “Your lot is not a happy one,” I agreed. “Get rid of one problem, another pops up in its place.”

  “I think you should start writing down these original gems of wisdom before they’re lost to the world,” said the chief. “Did you come down here just to help me hold up this wall, or did you have something else in mind?”

  “You hold up walls more often and better than anyone else in town,” I said. “I do not presume to be in your league as a wall holder-upper. No, I came to ask you which of your fine officers of the law was on patrol duty the night before Marjorie Summerharp supposedly went swimming.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “Whatever. Do you recall who it was?”

  “What time?”

  “Say, about two or three in the morning. Maybe between midnight and three or four. In there someplace.”

  “Precision is not your specialty, I take it.”

  “Between midnight and four, then.”

  “I think I remember. I can check the records. We probably had two men out that night. What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know who they saw driving around that morning. If they can remember seeing anyone driving to or from Katama or if they saw anyone parked in the Katama parking lot or along South Beach.”

  “There’s always somebody driving around or parked down that way.”

  “It was raining that night, remember?”

  “I remember. What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know if Marjorie Summerharp’s car or Ian McGregor’s car was seen down there that night between midnight and four.”

  “Why?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll think I have a good reason or should have a good reason to think I know what might have happened, but I don’t. But if either of those cars was seen down there between those times, I won’t be surprised.”

  The chief got out his pipe, turned it upside down in the rain, and lit it with his big Zippo lighter. The smoke floated up into my nose and I inhaled deeply. I had an terrible urge to run into the drugstore and buy myself a corncob pipe and a pack of Amphora.

  But I didn’t. Instead I watched the chief puff contentedly on his upside-down pipe as the rain dripped off his rain hood.

  “Tell me,” he said. “And give me credit for never thinking you have a good reason for thinking anything.”

  I considered this while I held my nose over the wafting smoke from his briar. “All right. Marjorie Summerharp had a particular interest in fakery. She wrote her dissertation on court masques, which were sophisticated entertainments involving aristocrats wearing tricky costumes and masks so nobody could be absolutely sure who they really were. And most of her research on this current paper she was writing with Ian McGregor had to do with proving this play they found wasn’t another con job by a literary faker. If she didn’t like scams, at least she was fascinated by them and knew a lot about them. I’ve been wondering if her death wasn’t a scam of some kind.”

  The chief took his pipe from his mouth and examined it carefully. “ ‘What do you mean?’ asked the slow-witted old chief of police.”

  “I mean that unless Marjorie swam out to sea a long way to the westward of where she left her car, she must have gone into the ocean between midnight and two or three o’clock instead of at six. That means she had to get there somehow, which means that she probably did it in either her own or Ian McGregor’s car. I’d like to know if your patrolmen happened to see either of those cars down that way that night.”

  The chief put his pipe back between his teeth. “But Ian McGregor said he took her down there that morning at six.”

  “That’s right. But maybe he lied. Unless somebody took her off to the west just after he left her at the Katama parking lot, she couldn’t possibly have been found out there where the trawler picked her up. So far, I haven’t seen an iota of evidence that she went into the sea from out to the west someplace. You were going to ask some questions about that, too. Did you come up with anything?”

  “Not yet. There’s an inquiry in this week’s paper asking anybody who was on the beach that morning to get in touch with me if they saw anything that might relate to her activities. Are you saying McGregor lied?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “People lie for lots of reasons.”

  “Name one, in this case.”

  “Maybe he killed her.”

  “Give me a break. Why would he kill her? What’s his motive?”

  “How should I know? Maybe he didn’t like her writing style. What do I know about these literary scholars? Besides, there’s the matter of the theses that have gone missing.”

  He looked interested for the first time. “What theses?”

  I told him about the theses.

  “Hmmmph,” he said, and puffed for a while. “That might be worth looking into.”

  “I plan to,” I said. “Gosh, maybe we’ll find one of those clues you read about.”

  “That would be exciting,” said the chief. “You can be sure of one thing. These scholarly types are about ninety-nine percent the same as everybody else. People kill each other for the same reasons, whatever they do for a living or whatever money they have.”

  “Well, I don’t know why anyone would kill her. I’m not saying McGregor did. Maybe he had another reason for lying.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like protecting her. There were hints in the papers that she was sick and maybe suicidal. Insurance policies don’t pay off on suicides, do they? Maybe she was sick and depressed and wanted to do herself in in a way that looked like an accident, and he agreed to tell everybody that she went swimming as usual that morning so everything would seem normal when actually he drove her down there at two or three in the morning so she could swim out when there’d be no chance of anybody seeing her and maybe picking her up before she could drown herself.”

  The chiefs pipe smoke floated up into the rain. “There are a couple of big maybes in that argument, but I’ll check it out,” he said at last. “I doubt if anybody saw anything, but I’ll ask. It’s hard to see much on a rainy night.”

  “I know. You’ll let me know?”

  “Yes.” He gave me an ironic look. “There is one small detail that sort of weakens your theory.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Marjorie Summerharp was seen driving down to South Beach about six that morning. Aside from that little fact, your theory isn’t too bad. Romantic, but not bad. Not true, of course, but not bad.”

  “A petty detail that I haven’t got worked out yet.”

  “Sure.”

  A woman appeared out of the rain. She held a sopping parking ticket under the chiefs nose. “Look at this!” she said. “A ticket! I pay taxes in this town! Look at this ticket! I’m a native, not some summer gink! I live in this town!”

  “Yes, Ada,” said the chief. He took the ticket and looked at it. “There’s a half-hour parking limit on Main Street, Ada. You know that.”

  “You see this street? You see these people? How am I supposed to get everything done in half an hour? I got the post office, I got the hardware store for Gus, I got the paper store, I got the bank. And now I got this ticket!”

  It seemed to be a good time for me to leave, so I did.

  The vanity of intellectuals has been observed by smarter people than I am, and some have argued that this vanity creates within intelle
ctuals a state of constant frustration based largely on the fact that they are not admired, financially rewarded, or adored as much as they believe they and their brains deserve to be. Thus the intellectuals become complainers or critics or harpers and bitchers about government, for example, because of vanity. Smart politicians, knowing this, turn the intellectual venom away from themselves by embracing the brains, who then, feeling loved and appreciated at last, attack the critics of politicians who flatter them.

  Intellectuals, then, could be bought off with real or feigned adoration or respect. When they didn’t get it, they got mad. Like Ian McGregor when he didn’t get it from Zee.

  The windshield wipers’ on the Landcruiser were not too terrific, so I drove slowly through the rain. Creeping out of Edgartown, I thought about symbols, about how we tend to prefer symbols to reality. How we will borrow money and put ourselves in debt in order to buy expensive cars that will symbolize our financial success. How we will choose certain clothing because it is symbolic of the people we want others to think we are, how we similarly choose furniture, neighborhoods, and even food for symbolic reasons, preferring the symbols to the actualities of our lives. Particularly, I remembered the case of a brilliant college student who was caught cheating on an examination so he could attain the grade point average necessary to win a Phi Beta Kappa key. For him, as for all cheaters on exams in all the schools of all the world, the symbol of success was more important than the success itself.

  I thought of John Skye’s library. So many books. John lived in a scholar’s world of which I knew little, though of late I’d caught a glimpse of it. The big world is made up of little worlds that most of us know nothing of.

  My world was usually one of fish and fishermen, but now might again include crime and criminals. I was aware that I was enjoying the variation in my routine and linked it to the almost forgotten pleasures of police work in Boston. Occasional snooping seemed to appeal to me. I wondered if that was good or bad.

  The rain beat against the windshield, and the trees shivered and swayed alongside the road. It was a better than average storm and was probably causing some damage along some coast or other. Chatham, which had lost a barrier beach in a winter gale, was probably catching it again.