Death in Vineyard Waters

by Philip Craig

  “You got it, kid.”

  I got into the Landcruiser and drove back to Zee’s place. Although it was the very end of June, she had a fire going in the fireplace. I went in and wrapped my arms around her, and we sat in front of the fire for a long time looking at the flames. I made some coffee and laced it with brandy, honey, and lemon juice, and we drank that.

  “I’ve got to go to work in the morning,” she said at last, standing up.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. Then, “What if they don’t ever find his body? What if he didn’t drown but is still walking around somewhere?”

  “He isn’t walking around,” I said, wondering if he was. “And even if he is, he’s no danger to us anymore. He’d know by now that we’ve talked to the police and that killing us would serve no useful purpose anymore. I think I should stay with you tonight.”

  “No. Not tonight. I’m sorry. Do you mind?”

  I did mind. “No,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead and left.

  The next day was bright and sunny, and there were search boats on Katama Bay and outside the beach as well. There were four-by-fours on the Chappy shore and along the bay’s south shore as men looked for Tristan Cooper’s body. Even as those grim crews sought a corpse, the beach was filling with sunbathers and kite fliers oblivious to the somber work being done almost beside them. It was the first day of July, and pale new vacationers were after tans under yet another beautiful Vineyard sky. Day sailers pushed by gentle breezes moved over the waters of Katama Bay, mixing innocently with the boats of searchers. Along the shore, clam diggers and amateur quahoggers ignored the four-by-fours moving slowly along the water’s edge.

  I watched for a while from the beach, wondering if he’d washed inside the bay or whether the tide had taken him outside when it changed. I was not in a mood to fish, so I went home and made myself do some gardening, which I was also not in a mood to do. I heard the phone ring and managed to get to it before it stopped. It was Mattie Skye inviting me to supper.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be up to cooking, after all the commotion. Besides, we want to hear everything! Our feelings are all mixed up about Tristan. We’re sad and shocked at the same time. Still, it’s a wonderful scandal, far better than Ian and Marjorie being possible academic fakers. Come at six and we’ll ply you with rum to loosen your tongue. I phoned Zee at the hospital and she’s coming, too.”

  “I have fresh green beans in my garden,” I said. “I’ll bring a bunch.”

  Mattie met me at the kitchen door and steered me right outside again. “J. W., you be good to Zee. No smart mouthing for a while. She just spent a half hour telling me that she thinks there must be something wrong with her because first she married a jerk, then she thought Ian McGregor was fascinating, then Tristan Cooper enchanted her, a murderer, no less. She needs a man she can trust who won’t hurt her.” She looked sternly at me.

  I remembered the look on Zee’s face when I’d put McGregor’s face in the dirt and had my doubts that I was the man she needed. “I’m not sure I’m the guy for the job,” I said, and told Mattie why.

  “You men are such fools,” she said. “You and your fists and your guns. Little boys, all of you. None of you deserve a woman as good as Zee.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “I imagine I’ve added to her hurt one way or another, but if so it wasn’t my intent.”

  She touched my sleeve. “I know. That’s a big difference between you and the other men who’ve been in her life lately. Just be patient with her. She’s too strong to stay down long.”

  “My specialty is giving women joy.”

  She faked a swing at my jaw, then laughed. “You are a hopeless case, J. W. Jackson. Do be gentle, okay?”

  “If you give me a kiss, I’ll be anything you want, lady.”

  “Kiss, schmiss,” said Mattie. “All right, you wretched man.” She grabbed my hair and pulled my face down and gave me a good kiss. “Dr. Jerk, Ian McGregor, Tristan Cooper, and you. Maybe there is something wrong with that girl.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with John Skye. That man has blue-ribbon taste in women. Maybe you should let him take care of Zee.”

  “John Skye has his hands full with just me and the twins. He couldn’t handle another woman, too.”

  I imagined she was right about that and followed her into the kitchen, where I was immediately put to work preparing the beans I’d brought. Fresh garden beans are one of God’s gifts to man. Later, while we ate them and an excellent sole with dill sauce, I told them the tale of our adventure with Tristan Cooper. When we got to the part when Zee was awake, I turned the story over to her. She finished it, and after we answered as many questions as we could, even the twins seemed satisfied.

  “By Jove,” said John. “That tale earns you both another picnic sail on the Mattie. What do you say to an overnight trip to Tarpaulin Cove? We can make it up there one day and be home the next evening. Zee, you and J. W. can be the official ship’s tale tellers. The girls can bring their guitar and banjo. What do you say?”

  Zee looked at me, “Well . . .”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  “Fine! I think you two could use a short holiday.”

  The next weekend we made the trip, sailing out of Edgartown, around East Chop and West Chop and catching a west tide up Vineyard Sound to the lovely little cove on Naushon Island. A half dozen boats were anchored there already, for it is a favorite stopover for cruising sailors, but we hauled up Mattie’s centerboard and pulled deep into shallow waters where we’d have little close company.

  We took the dinghy ashore and walked the clean, empty beach out to the lighthouse and back. Then, as the others continued their explorations, I swam out to the Mattie and prepared supper: fried chicken with my newest secret sauce, accompanied by more fresh green beans from my garden and wild rice, all to be washed down with a Colombard chilled on ice in my cooler.

  The chicken was terrific. We ate it all and everything else, too.

  “Naturally you all want to know the secret of my sauce,” I said, “because you still have hopes of becoming as good a cook as me. But I don’t mind telling you, because I’m a manly sort of cook and have no fear of potential rivals.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do want to know,” said Zee. “It was yummy.”

  “You are a woman of discriminating taste. It was indeed yummy. Peanut butter is the secret. You mix that and some oil and vinegar and soy sauce and lemon juice and ginger and garlic and chili peppers all together and blast them with your food processor if you happen to have one, which we don’t. Then you smear it over your chicken or beef or pork or whatever and voilà! another masterpiece from the kitchen of J. W. Jackson.”

  “I take it you’ll be more precise when I copy down the specifics,” said Mattie.

  “For you, every detail.”

  “Peanut butter,” said Jill. “Who ever heard of cooking with peanut butter? You’re not supposed to cook with peanut butter, you’re supposed to eat it in sandwiches.”

  “You ate your share,” said Jen. “I thought it was excellent.” She licked a finger and gave her sister a curt nod and me a nice smile.

  “I always said you were a young woman of good taste, Jen,” I said. “Your sister has a long way to go to reach your level of maturity.”

  “I’m Jill,” she said.

  “No, you’re not,” said her mother. “Don’t give poor J. W. a hard time.”

  I was shocked. “Good grief, do you mean I actually got them right for once?”

  Mattie patted my arm. “We all knew you would do it, J. W. You’re not really as dumb as you act sometimes.”

  Sleeping six people on an eighteen-foot catboat isn’t hard if it doesn’t rain. The twins got the vee births in the cabin and the grownups unrolled sleeping pads on the wide deck of the cockpit. All night long the Mattie moved gently upon her anchor rope and the stars swung overhead. As I was drifting asleep, I felt a hand touch mine
and turned and saw Zee’s face in the starlight. She was smiling. We slept hand in hand all night long, and on the long sail home the next day we were happy.

  When we got back we learned that Tristan Cooper’s body had been found in the nets of a trawler about a mile off South Beach, not far from where Marjorie Summerharp’s body had been found. I decided that maybe there was a God after all. Zee was moody for a time, but then cheered up. She was a tender but tough woman. I asked her to marry me. She shook her head.

  “No. But ask me again. As soon as I know that I can live without you, I might say yes.”

  “I’ll keep asking. I know I can live without you,” I lied, “but I don’t want to. Besides, you need somebody around who can cook.”

  “I can cook.”

  “I can cook better.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Can.”

  “Not.”

  “Too.”

  The pale July people browned. There seemed to be more of them on the roads than ever before. The bluefish began to fade away and go north to entertain the Cape Ann and Maine fishermen. They would return in September, but until then I would have to hunt other fish and harvest the land. I did serious shellfishing, gathered blueberries, picked and preserved the bounty from my garden.

  One hot afternoon as I was sweating over many jars of pickles, Zee’s little Jeep came down my driveway and Zee and John and Mattie Skye got out. I gave them beer, finished the batch of pickled summer squash I was working on, and joined them on my balcony.

  Beyond the garden we could see the beach with its bright umbrellas, brighter surf sails and parked cars. The Sound beyond was dark blue under a pale blue sky, and there were white sails moving through a gentle wind. A thin cloud hung high over Cape Cod, and the Cape Pogue lighthouse stood clearly against the meeting of sea and sky.

  “Here,” said John, handing me a small magazine. I opened it. It was full of fine gray print. “Just off the presses,” said John. “An examination copy. It won’t be officially released until after Labor Day.”

  I looked at the table of contents. The lead article was about Shakespeare’s King Arthur, authored by Drs. Marjorie Summerharp and Ian McGregor. It was preceded by a brief tribute to Marjorie Summerharp by Ian McGregor.

  I leafed through the magazine. “I don’t see anything about the two dissertations.”

  “No, you don’t. We don’t yet know for sure that F. X. Eastford didn’t exist. I’m willing to cover all bets that he didn’t, but it will take time to prove it. Meanwhile, the Shakespeare article will come out on schedule, as it should, since it’s an important piece. In fact, this edition of the journal might even go into extra printings and make its publishers some money for a change.”

  “Even though Marjorie and Ian probably both faked their thesis references.”

  “Even though. Nobody on the mainland knows anything about those dissertations. Besides, even if they fudged before it doesn’t mean they fudged this time. Nobody’s dishonest all of the time, not even in the ivory tower.”

  “Why did Marjorie want to look at those theses, anyway?”

  “Knowing her, I’d guess that when she couldn’t find any fault with the play they’d found, she decided to snoop around in Ian’s background to see if she could find one in him. Maybe he said something about quoting her thesis in his own, but after forty years she couldn’t remember exactly what she’d faked herself. She had a nose for academic fraud, maybe because she was good at it herself. Besides, she loved to snoop.”

  “And so do you,” said Mattie.

  “Absolutely,” said Skye. “It’s fun. Helen Barstone, Bill Hooperman, and I are the snoopers. Three profs on the trail of fraud and murder in the groves of academe. Did the late, great Marjorie Summerharp create F. X. Eastford? Did Ian McGregor, handsome discoverer of a lost Shakespeare play, fake a quotation from the fictional F. X. Eastford? What drove the world-famous scholar Dr. Tristan Cooper to murder? What were the sex secrets of Sanctuary? It’s hot stuff, and my partners Helen and Bill have a terrific edge on everybody else because they just finished spending weeks working with Tristan.”

  Mattie grinned. “It’s too bad they don’t have pulp magazines anymore. You could write for them instead of those dull academic rags.”

  “Riches and fame shall be ours at last,” said Skye. “I can see it now: fifty weeks on the Times bestseller list, movie contracts, interviews on the late show. I’ll get tenure and we’ll be able to buy a summer place on the Vineyard. Beautiful women will seek me out.”

  “You already have tenure and we already have a place on the Vineyard and I’ve already sought you out,” said Mattie.

  He put his arm around her. “Well, whatever,” he said.

  I put my arm around Zee, and the four of us drank our beer and looked out over my green garden to where the white-sailed boats, pushed by warm winds, moved across the innocent shark-filled sea.

  THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD MYSTERY SERIES BY PHILIP R. CRAIG

  A Beautiful Place to Die

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #1)

  Death in Vineyard Waters

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #2)

  Vineyard Deceit

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #3)

  Vineyard Fear

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #4)

  Off Season

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #5)

  A Case of Vineyard Poison

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #6)

  Death on a Vineyard Beach

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #7)

  A Deadly Vineyard Holiday

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #8)

  A Shoot on Martha’s Vineyard

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #9)

  A Fatal Vineyard Season

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #10)

  Vineyard Blues

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #11)

  Vineyard Shadows

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #12)

  Vineyard Enigma

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #13)

  A Vineyard Killing

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #14)

  Murder at a Vineyard Mansion

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #15)

  Vineyard Prey

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #16)

  Dead in Vineyard Sand

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #17)

  Vineyard Stalker

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #18)

  Vineyard Chill

  (Martha’s Vineyard Mystery #19)

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Philip R. Craig

  Originally published in hardcover as The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea

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  First Scribner ebook edition July 2016

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  ISBN 978-1-5011-5354-9 (ebook)