***
I caught up to Daisy as she was leaving the tent, two hours and a dozen more eulogies later. Like all good eulogies they took the form of anecdotes. Sylvester told the story of how Oscar had negotiated a small fee for every household chore he completed and then used the money to buy his father the fancy airless paint sprayer he had been coveting for years. Billy described Oscar teaching a kid to surf using his unique trick: plaster a big smile on your face while you’re paddling for the wave. It seemed crazy but it worked—it relaxed you somehow, gave you a goofy feeling that canceled your nerves. Billy had started using it himself in big waves, on the heavy days that intimidated him.
“I learned a lot from that kid,” he said. “I still have a lot to learn from him. But now I never will.”
“Now I never will.” The words were ricocheting around in my head like a fly under a lampshade when I caught up to Daisy at the far end of the field, heading for her car.
“Hey—hello, excuse me—Daisy?”
She stopped and turned. The movement smacked the words out of my head and I thought again—that kind of beauty must be a bizarre kind of hardship, a social handicap as extreme as acne or a harelip. “It will be in the paper next week,” I said, “but I thought I should tell you now. Blount confessed to Oscar’s murder. Along with everything else.”
“And you believed him?”
“He was…convincingly unrepentant.”
“So you’re done.”
“We still have the trials to prepare for, but the AG feels confident that we can—”
“Jesus Christ. It’s all happening exactly the way he said it would. He could have written it himself. Like one of those horrible PowerPoint presentations. Thing, thing, thing, each with its own little graph and pie chart.”
“Who could have? What are you talking about?”
She laughed, a strangled little bleat caught somewhere between a sneeze and a sob. “You have no idea what’s going on! You’re all so clueless. Strutting and preening, organizing victory parades with ticker tape, you should definitely get some ticker tape, you can buy it on eBay. And all the while he’s laughing because he played you all so perfectly and everybody is taking the fall but him and he wins again like always. It makes me sick. I mean—actually sick. I think I’m going to puke.”
I stepped back, but she grabbed the side mirror of her dark green MINI Cooper and steadied herself.
“Daisy, listen—”
“I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Not without my lawyer present. Besides…if they see me—you shouldn’t have come here. Just stay away. Stick your little gold star on the front of your notebook and get away from me.”
She yanked open the door and folded herself into the driver’s seat.
“Daisy, listen to me…if you have information about this case, you have to share it with the police. That’s the law. And it could help you. You could testify later—make some kind of deal. But it’s also—it’s your duty. It’s your moral obligation. You just talked about Oscar’s ghost haunting me. How about you?”
“I’m out of it, Chief. I’m done.” She keyed the engine. “As for Oscar’s ghost—if he wants to haunt me, he’s going to have to take a number and get on line.”
She revved the engine to an angry shriek and the rear wheels dug up a spray of dirt as she took off.
Alana Trikilis walked up to me as I stared after the vanished car.
“I’m worried about Ms. DeHart,” she said. “I think she’s real near the edge.”
“Yeah,” I nodded sympathetically. And I was thinking, Daisy’s on the edge, all right—and what I need most right now is to push her over it.
Who was she talking about? Her stepfather? Or one of his cronies? And what were they really doing, and why were they trying to manipulate the legal system? If any of that was even happening, if Daisy wasn’t busy spinning conspiracy theories. People as superficially smart and sane as Daisy had been convinced over the years that the moon walk was a hoax, AIDS was invented by the CIA, and the Sandy Hook shooting was a government plot to promote more gun control laws. You didn’t have to scratch too far below the surface to find the crazy. Maybe Daisy was just one more example. That was the most likely explanation. She had a lot of anger and resentment to work through, and I had a tough, complex criminal case tied up neatly, with a bow. I was happy to leave it at that.
But I was still mulling it over when I drove out to Polpis that evening, for one of my literary nights with Jane Stiles.
Chapter Twenty-seven
On Polpis Harbor Beach
“There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye,” Jane said. “There always is. There has to be.”
I shook my head, exhaling a quiet laugh. “In your books, you mean.”
She gave me a stern look. “Life imitates art.”
“Not in police work.”
“I told you all the different crimes this year were connected and you didn’t believe me then, either. But it was true.”
“Fair enough. But now you’re saying they’re connected two ways, which frankly gives me a headache tonight. I have no idea what the second one could be.”
“But you have to find out because that’s the really important connection. That’s the one someone’s hiding. And Daisy’s the key to it.”
We were eating ice cream cones. I had driven out to Polpis with sandwiches in hand, but all either of us wanted was a treat. It was a perfect early summer night and we drove to the ’Sconset Market for a couple of overpriced scoops. The ice cream was good and the market hadn’t changed at all in decades. It was a pleasant excursion, driving along the eastern edge of the island, skirting Sesachacha Pond, cutting through the old Sankaty Head golf course and then running parallel to the bluffs of Baxter Road into the little village.
We strolled out into the center of ’Sconset, which consisted of a small rotary, two restaurants, a liquor store, the post office, and the market, with the little rectangle of park beside it. Kids were cruising by on bicycles and you could see that the rich people had already started to arrive for the season, tall and handsome and blond, with perfectly dressed kids and great hair, talking about tennis dates and tee times and Muffy’s divorce.
Jane pointed at two big blondes in tennis clothes, climbing out of a Lexus SUV.
“Look at that hair,” she whispered to me. “If I had that hair, I’d be driving that Lexus.”
“But you don’t want a Lexus.”
“That’s not the point. I could have whatever I wanted, with hair like that. I mean what else do they have going for them?”
“They’re pretty.”
“They’re okay looking. Really check them out.”
I did. She was right—regular, ordinary features. The bodies weren’t much better. “They have some cellulite happening.”
“And they’re not that bright, either,” she said. “I wouldn’t exactly call that a high water mark in political discourse.” She nodded toward one of the kids scampering by in a “John Kerry For President—of France” tee-shirt.
I nodded. “Someone bought him that item.”
“Someone bought it for his big brother. And kept it for the next kid.”
“Dumb and sentimental. Great combination.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’s got the hair.”
We strolled back to the car and waited on line and drove down under the pedestrian bridge to look at the water. An old Volkswagen beetle drove by—a powder blue convertible, nineteen seventies vintage.
“That’s the car I want,” Jane said.
“Nice.”
“It just reminds me of—I used to drive one of those. I loved it.”
“I’m not sure you need world-class hair to get an old bug.”
“Maybe not. But my ex-husband was the mechanic in the family. His idea of a fun Sunday afternoon was climbing u
nder the car to replace the solenoid. Whatever that is.”
“I don’t think cars even have them anymore.”
We drove back to Polpis and took turns eating our sandwiches (Turkey Terrifics from Provisions) and reading aloud.
Before Jane started her story she said. “I have a poem for you! I was thinking of it all day, looking at all the self-important Somebodies strutting around town. It’s Emily Dickinson…
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog–
To tell one’s name—the livelong June–
To an admiring Bog!”
I laughed. “That’s perfect. I love that. I can’t believe I never saw that poem before.”
“Apparently she was at some party and all the men were bloviating about their writing and politics and whatever and she was just like—get me out of here.”
“Wow.”
“She’s my favorite hermit.”
“And I’m supposed to follow that poem?”
She smiled. “You’re supposed to try.”
“Well, there’s one I wrote about you—actually something you told me this winter—about going back to the town where you lived when you were a little kid, before your family moved here? Checking out your old house, looking up at your bedroom window. I did that, too. My dad owned so many houses over the years I could make it a tour: maps to the drunken screenwriter’s homes. So anyway I finally wrote something about it.”
She set her sandwich down and took a sip of wine.
“Shoot.”
“That might not be the best thing to say to a trigger-happy local cop.”
“Fine. Proceed with some thoughtful community policing, Officer.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s called ‘Homecoming.’” I pulled the folded sheet of paper out of my back pocket.
This happiness is small and fragile
Hope and irony crowded together
Like a Baptist and an abortion doctor
Carpooling
This happiness is like returning home
And seeing how your hometown has changed
The new school
The mall where the movie theatre
Used to be;
The hardware store is gone
Victim of the modern world—
It sells software now
You saw the end of the sign and thought
“Something is still the same”
Too soon.
Still, some things remain
The big sycamores
Still sprinkle the sidewalk with shade
Your house is still there.
It’s someone else’s house now;
They’ve added a garage
Someone is sleeping behind your window
Probably someone like you:
A little girl who can’t imagine ever leaving
Ever coming back, looking for a homecoming
Among the busy strangers
On the new streets
And finding it
In the dry, yeasty smell from the bakery
(It’s still there)
Carried through the dark air
On the morning wind;
Finding it
In a smooth piece of glass
Stained amber by sunrise
In the vacant lot
Where your mother warned you
Not to run barefoot.
She lifted her glass in a toast. “Nice. Especially the end. I never really felt at home there, though. After we moved here it didn’t even seem real anymore. It was just—I can’t describe it.”
“You always say that and then you describe things beautifully.”
“Okay. It was like someone had described it to me, and I had this super clear idea of the place from what they said but it wasn’t like the real place at all. That was the shock going back. The town in my head was so much nicer. And the hardware store turning into a software store. You remembered that.”
“That image summed things up perfectly.”
“I was going to use it somewhere. But I donate it to you. For your birthday.”
“Best present ever.”
We sat eating quietly for a while. The crickets orchestrated the night outside, their own amateur Phillip Glass symphony. Planes heading for Boston and New York droned by overhead.
Jane assembled her papers. In the recent installments of her new Madeline Clark novel, Poverty Point, Maddy had searched the house where the murder took place, after the police—under the inept leadership of Police Chief Bill Blote—turned the place upside down and found nothing. Maddy, with her tireless ant-like industry and the patience of a fly-fisherman, had dug out a broken bracelet from the crack between two wide floorboards.
“I stole that from you,” Jane confessed. “The hair clip. Tit for tat.”
Anyway, Maddy instantly recognized the double pyramid slashed vertically by a cursive capital “S” because Maddy’s ex-husband—like Jane’s—had been a Scientologist for many years. Jane’s ex had left the church in disgust when he finally found out the details of its wacky theology, but Maddy’s remained stalwart.
Chief Blote showed zero interest in this new evidence, of course. The man “wouldn’t recognize an elephant if it was stepping on his foot.” Blote’s view: the bracelet could have been there for years, could have belonged to anyone, could even have been placed there to throw the police off the scent.
“But he would have had to assume you’d find it,” Maddy said sweetly.
As always happened in Jane’s books, the blundering pompous clowns who made up the NPD arrested the wrong person. The evidence was circumstantial and the eyewitness was a drunk. But there was nothing Maddy could do about it. She had no suspect of her own.
Until she did some last-minute marketing.
Here’s the end of the chapter she read me:
After weeks of false leads and dead ends, “red herrings and rotten bluefish,” as Maddy called them, she finally solved the puzzle of Raymond Scully’s murder in a single moment, driving into the Stop&Shop parking lot.
As usual she was cruising the crowded tarmac trying to find the spot closest to the store. She could walk for hours when she was in the mood, but she hated any unnecessary exercise and dreaded seeing people she knew among the cars and shopping carts. There were all the people she didn’t like, and the acquaintances who would invariably want to “catch up.” But the worst were the old friends who insisted on having actual conversations in the canned goods aisle. You could lose an hour or two in the soul-sapping fluorescent light, listening to someone’s divorce update or the tribulations of the Whalers’ last road trip.
Maddy was on her third circuit when she saw Bradley Morrell wheeling a cart full of grocery bags to his car. An artist who specialized in sea gulls, sailboats at anchor, and cobblestone street scenes, Bradley was always talking about moving to New York where his “real” work (messy abstractions in mud brown and exhaust purple) would be taken seriously. Of course he never left. Nantucket was the capital city of procrastination. It ate away at peoples’ ambitions like powderpost beetles chewing away at an old house. Everyone was going to write that book, use all the sound equipment in their basement to finally cut a demo record, get a portfolio of their photographs together—after the summer season, next year, on the first of never.
It didn’t matter to Bradley Morrell; he was a trust fund baby who could afford to indulge his airs and affectations. He was normally quite useless, but he was going to come in handy today—Maddy could take his parking space!
She idled the car, watching him.
; He lifted the hatchback of his SUV and started loading in the paper bags. His cell phone rang and, distracted for a second, he banged his head on the sharp edge of the raised panel. He grunted in pain, closed his eyes and moved his forehead up to touch the exact spot where he had clouted himself.
Maddy gasped, the real thing, inhaling so hard the breath scraped her throat. She knew that gesture very well. Derrick had done it all the time. It was called Contact Assist, a technique for dealing with injuries developed by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1960s.
Brady Morrell was a Scientologist. She had his clear bracelet in her pocket. She stared at him as he finished loading the car.
She knew Brady was the killer now. All she had to do was prove it.
Jane set the papers aside. “Well?”
“Excellent. I especially liked the word ‘scrape’—people gasp all the time in fiction but writers don’t usually bother to describe what it actually feels like.”
She grinned. “I gasped a lot to test it out. That hurts!”
I finished my wine. “I just wish things could work out so neatly in an actual investigation.”
“You found the bullet that killed Todd Macy—and the rifle it came from.”
“True. But, ultimately, Blount confessed and that’s how about ninety percent of all real cases get solved. Not by finding some bracelet and the amateur sleuth making the connection because she happens to be familiar with the killer’s weirdo religious sect. And by the way—the real police chief of Nantucket would have found that bracelet. Or at least acknowledged that it was important. I mean—I found the hair clip!”
“But you have to have dumbo cops in a cozy mystery. That doesn’t hurt your feelings, does it?”
“No, no. It’s funny. Blote without the ‘a’—so fat he can’t even spell his own name.”
She nodded. “That was a little on the nose.”
“Loose ends,” I said, “that’s what you’re missing.”
“But that’s why people read mysteries! It’s the one place in life where all the loose ends get tied up.”
Nantucket Grand Page 24