“We need Madeline Clark to do some digging. Maybe at the Atheneum. She always finds some vital clue in an old library book.”
“That only happened twice!”
“Or the Hall of Records.”
“Okay, okay. But Maddy is an expert researcher. You have to give her that.”
“Unlike the Blote and his Keystone Kops, who let her do all the work and then take the credit.”
“That happens in real life. It’s the number one thing that happens. I worked for two years as an executive secretary at American Express in New York. I did all the work and my boss took all the credit.”
“Which is why you quit.”
“I never said I liked it. But that’s the way the world works.”
The conversation had drifted. I knew the necessary course correction, but it was a topic I’d been avoiding. Jane wouldn’t like the questions and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answers. Still, I had to address, not the elephant, maybe the pile of drug paraphernalia in the room, the litter of pornographic thumb drives.
“I was hoping Brad might have some answers,” I said finally.
She stood up and started clearing off the table. “I don’t want to talk about Brad.”
“Me neither.”
“That’s over. For real now. For good.”
“I know.”
“I pick horrible men. Present company excluded. I hope.”
“Thanks.”
“Brad seemed great at first, too. Smart, successful, good-looking. He ran in the Boston Marathon. He read my big mother-daughter novel and said, ‘You don’t read stuff like this. Why don’t you try writing what you like to read?’ That’s how I started the Maddy Clark books. Brad was right. I sold The View from Altar Rock to the first publisher who read it. I didn’t even have an agent at that point. I hired a lawyer instead. Much better.” She held out her glass. “More wine, please.”
I took another bottle out of the fridge, opened it and poured us each a glass.
I took a swallow—ice cold, tart and dry. “We’ve been questioning Brad, but he doesn’t seem to know anything beyond the basics.”
“A foot soldier in the army of porn.”
“Something like that.”
“He can be ambitious, though.”
“Really?”
“In his own field. He was bragging about some huge deal he had going with Grady Malone, the last time I saw him. Lots of high-end houses, ten years’ worth of work, time, and materials, cost plus. He really hit the jackpot, supposedly. But I haven’t heard anything about it since. He could have been making the whole thing up. You know—one more Nantucket delusionoid. Sometimes I think this place is actually a government-sanctioned bird sanctuary for weirdos and losers. People who can’t make it anywhere else.”
“Like me?”
“And me. And everyone else I know. Do you think Brad Thurman could be a building contractor anywhere but here? Some customer yelled at him years ago, “My house leaks!” And he said, “All my houses leak,” as if that made perfect sense. Mike Henderson gets forty dollars an hour for spreading paint on flat surfaces. You could literally train a chimpanzee to do that and then you could pay them in bananas. But Mike gets forty dollars an hour!”
“I hear he’s thinking of raising it to fifty.”
She shook her head. “Only on Nantucket.”
I took another sip of wine and made a note to myself—time to have a little chat with Grady Malone.
At the sink, Jane said, “So what did you think of Jonathan Pell’s stepdaughter?”
I had to laugh. “How did you know that?”
“It’s a small island, Mr. Washashore. Seriously, though—what did you think of her? She always struck me as the kind of woman the hero in a crime novel would fall for. You know…gorgeous, sultry, damaged, mysterious?”
“Nantucket noir?”
She nodded. “The classic femme fatale.”
“Not to me. She’s too…extreme. She’s lived her whole life in this crazy spotlight, everyone focused on her, and so she’s focused on them, focusing on her. It turns into this toxic narcissistic feedback loop unless you’re really strong. She struck me as flimsy at best. I went to school with this fat girl who lost like sixty pounds in the summer between junior and senior years. She came back to school looking fantastic—she had always been pretty. You know, the kind of girl where you say, if she just lost some weight…Well, she did, and every boy in the school was hitting on her, teachers were hitting on her, random strangers in the street were hitting on her.”
“So what did she do?”
“She went out and ordered the first in a long series of chocolate ice cream sundaes.”
“That’s one solution.”
I stood up to dry the dishes and set them on the shelves above the sink. “I prefer a different kind of good looks.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Looks that might not be so glaringly obvious, but they’re connected to the mind, to the spirit behind the face. Daisy smiles and it’s a blow. You dodge the punch or it hits you. It’s calculated. It has nothing to do with what she’s thinking. You smile, and I want to know what struck you as funny. I want to be in on the joke.”
“So you like my looks.”
“Is that so incredible?”
“It’s odd. But if you weren’t a little eccentric you wouldn’t be living here.”
“Hey—”
“I used to be pretty. You should see some of the pictures from plays I was in ten years ago.”
“And ten years from now you’ll be saying the same thing. ‘I looked pretty good ten years ago.’ Why not just accept the fact that you look good right now?”
“Because I don’t. I have wrinkles and frizzy hair.”
“You’re forty years old. You have laugh lines and curls.”
“You’re demented.” But she was smiling a little.
I put the last wineglass away and turned to face her. “Here’s my theory. You’re beautiful but you don’t feel that way because you’re on the wrong side—the inside, looking out. No wait, listen to this. It’s like…you’re in this one tiny room with bad wallpaper, peering out of the threadbare curtains, and you don’t realize…you live in a fabulous mansion!”
“In the maid’s quarters.”
“Exactly! You see your crummy room and the view of the estate. I see the mansion with the girl peering out from behind the curtains.”
“So what am I supposed to do about that?”
I pulled her into a hug. “You should get out more.”
“Astral projection?”
“Or a stroll in the garden.”
She pushed away and took my hand. “Come on, let’s go.”
She grabbed a flashlight on the way out the door, but the moon was full and we didn’t need it. We picked our way through the narrow path behind the cottage, ducking under low-hanging branches and sidestepping the poison ivy. The path opened into rolling fields mowed by the Land Bank, ashen and spectral in the moonlight. We could see the harbor beyond the far trees. A faint wind lifted out of the south west.
We found our way to a dirt parking lot and then down to the public landing, a little beach lined with overturned Boston Whalers and kayaks. We chose a boat and sat down.
“It’s beautiful out here,” I said.
She nodded. “It’s the only place that still feels like home to me.”
We studied the sailboats moored on the dark water, listened to the halyards knocking against the masts, the lap of small waves on the packed sand.
“Look at the moon,” she said after a while.
I had to twist around to see it, caught and almost hidden in the branches and leaves of a big elm tree behind us.
“It’s huge,” I said.
“Chekhov wrote somewhere that one moment
can change everything.”
I turned back to face her and she kissed me.
It was utterly unexpected, though it shouldn’t have been. It was bold and crazy and I kissed her back and let the jagged current pass through me. I slipped my hand under her shirt, touched her back and the moment leapt from romance to frenzy. We were really kissing now. We tried to lie down on the damp curved wood of the boat’s hull. We almost slipped off and we both started laughing.
“Let’s get back inside,” I said
Her eyes flashed. She nodded, and grabbed the back of my neck and kissed me again, and then we were running along the moon-bright paths of grass, back to the cottage, and the small cozy bedroom, and the bed.
Part Three: Tourist Season
Chapter Twenty-eight
In Memoriam, Andrew Thayer
Andrew Thayer’s funeral was held on June 28th, 2015, at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Orange Street. A rough head count by The Inquirer and Mirror estimated that more than three thousand people came to pay their respects that morning. Only a fraction of them actually made it into the church. The line, which started at dawn, stretched down Orange Street, across Main Street and along Center Street all the way to the Jared Coffin House.
Chosen mourners, including Jane, who sat up front with the other friends and the family, stood at the lectern to eulogize and reminisce. I couldn’t help thinking that every one of those three thousand people standing outside must have a few stories of their own—thousands of amusing and heartfelt anecdotes jostling each other in the misting summer rain.
How many people would attend the average person’s funeral? Wife and kids, close friends, coworkers, cousins from out-of-state, a stray niece or nephew—enough people to fill a living room.
Andy Thayer’s mourners filled a town.
Many people spoke during the service, talking about bringing his killer to justice, describing Andy’s charitable works (he donated a hundred Vermont farm-raised turkeys to the food pantry every Thanksgiving and routinely gave hundred-dollar tips “to turn the day around” for waiters in his favorite restaurants), his lifelong slow-motion catastrophe as a sailor (he had sunk three different boats over the years—one right outside the jetties during a stormy Opera Cup race in the mid-nineties), and his Pied Piperish appeal to other peoples’ children. He could imitate various insects and perform all the parts on Sesame Street with perfect accuracy. “I should open a comedy club for five-year-olds,” he once remarked.
But David Trezize’s comments touched me the most. I hadn’t realized they were such good friends.
“Andy was uniquely…meticulous about other people, and their feelings,” David said, as he settled himself at the podium. “When Andy was in love, on the woman’s birthday he sent flowers to her mother. As a thank you. And he always remembered them—birthdays and anniversaries. If you noticed a David Lazarus watercolor at the X-Gallery months before, you’d find it under the tree at Christmas. He paid attention. If I lost two pounds he was like ‘Working out? It shows.’
“Back when I was just out of college, living on Ramen noodles and popcorn, he’d tell me to get dinner at the Boarding House and put it on his tab. And he’d say ‘Ignore the right side of the menu.’ And there’d be a good bottle of Chardonnay on ice at the table waiting for me. He knew I wouldn’t order wine if someone else was paying. So he took care of it in advance. That was classy. But you all know this stuff.
“If Andy stayed in your house for a few days, the place was immaculate when he left, with fresh flowers on the kitchen table. He was the perfect houseguest. He always did the dishes. He was never late. He was always early, in fact—‘pathologically early,’ that was the way he put it. Maybe so, but he never kept you waiting. He opened doors for people. It sounds petty but it adds up. He’d travel halfway around the world to attend a graduation. If he borrowed your car, it didn’t just come back with a full tank of gas. He detailed it. He sent ‘thank you’ notes. He sent newspaper clippings—anything he thought you’d be interested in, and he was always right. Clippings.
“He wrote by hand and he had the most perfect copperplate handwriting I’ve ever seen. I won’t be seeing it again, and I guess that’s the hardest thing to believe. He really is gone and we all have to get used that.”
Daisy spoke next. I noticed Pell’s private detective, Louis Berman, standing in the back staring at her. So, he just solved that missing-persons case—and picked up the easiest fee ever. No sign of Pell, himself, though.
“Andy was a true friend,” Daisy was saying. “And he was the living proof that it’s possible for a man to be friends with a woman. We sort of established in tenth grade that he’d always be in love with me, and I’d never be in love with him and we never talked about it again. He cooked me a million dinners, and let me live in his house when I had nowhere else to go. I remember one time he ironed my best pleated skirt before I went out on a date with some boy. How many men can iron a pleated skirt?
“But he was brave, too. Let me tell you this one story. I was at the Chicken Box a couple of years ago and this man was being really obnoxious, hitting on me and really scaring me, frankly. Andy came in and saw what was happening and told the man to stop. Andy was tall but this guy was huge. The guy said, ‘Let’s take it outside,’ and Andy said, ‘No I’d rather do it in front of your friends.’ Then he reached across the bar—the bartender was cutting limes—and took the knife. He held it out to the guy, who said something like ‘What’s this about?’ And Andy said, “I want you to be armed. I want there to be no question for any of these witnesses when I kick your ass, that I did it in self-defense. I’m not going to jail for this, and you’re not pressing charges. Go on, big boy. Take the knife.’”
Daisy paused, glanced over the packed pews. “The guy backed down, and the whole bar started breathing again. Afterward I said, ‘Oh, my God, do you know karate or something and you never told anyone?’ He said, ‘No, that guy would have kicked the crap out of me and cut me up like a pumpkin.’ That’s brave. And cool. Andy was a great poker player, too. But I guess you figured that one out by now.”
When she stepped down, there were prayers and hymns and the Naturals and the Accidentals preformed a creditable version of Andy’s favorite song, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.”
It was a good service—it served its primary function, which was to inhabit the big old building with Andy’s spirit for an hour or two. Everyone felt a little closer to him as they filed out into the drizzling street, and a little closer to each other, also.
I caught up to Daisy on Orange Street as she was walking to her car. “I need to talk to you about Andy’s death.”
She studied me coolly. “I already said everything I have to say about Andrew.”
I took a couple of seconds. “I’m talking about the criminal investigation of his murder.”
“I know nothing about that. I wasn’t arrested for that. And I won’t talk to you. I don’t want to be seen talking to you.”
“We can talk in private. Come to the station. We can—”
“I have to go.”
“Ms. DeHart—” I reached out to grasp her arm.
She snatched it away convulsively. “Let me go!”
The shout drew a dozen startled looks and she used the confusion and my embarrassment to break free from the crowd and flee up the street.
Luckily, I had parked my big blue-and-white NPD Ford Explorer a block behind her, and I followed her easily as she drove away. I thought she’d take a left and head down to Union Street, assuming she was still staying at Andrew’s house. But she kept on going, taking a right on York Street, across Pleasant and past the old mill, crossing the top of Madaket Road at the monument and curving along New Lane, accelerating into the long curve around the top of Woodbury Lane.
We both raced into that curve too fast, but her low-slung compact hugged the turn and powered into the strai
ghtaway. My big SUV rocked on its axle and almost tipped over. I cursed, braked hard, and eased back into my own lane as a line of cars coming the other way rushed past me. Then a Range Rover pulled out of a hedge-screened driveway and forced me to a full stop.
By the time I was rolling again, Daisy’s MINI was gone.
***
I was going to have to find her the hard way…or wait for her pre-trial deposition, which could be weeks away. I could feel it—Jane was right. Daisy knew the whole story I was trying to piece together, and I needed to hear it now. People had died to keep these secrets and anyone might be next, including Daisy herself. Something big was happening, something bad, building to a sinister climax, and I was stumbling around in the dark, helpless and blind, unable to see it or stop it.
Daisy could turn on the lights.
I pulled onto the grassy verge beside New Town Cemetery to think. Daisy had been pulled into the judicial system, and that meant she left a trail. There was paperwork on her now. The first thing I had to find out was who posted her bond.
I pulled out and drove back to town.
At the courthouse, I pulled the records and saw that the paperwork on the cash surety had been signed by “John Smith.” That was original. Why not “John Doe”?
I checked the surveillance footage and the clerk identified a tall blond kid with a starter mustache and a Patriots cap as the delivery boy. They printed out a screen grab and I passed it around the station. Barnaby Toll recognized the picture—it was a Jordan Toombs. They had gone through NHS together. Jordan co-edited the student newspaper Veritas in his senior year with a girl named Andrea Pellegrini. She had stayed on the island, working for her father’s alarm company. I got her on the phone. All she could tell me was that Jordan had worked for The Inquirer and Mirror, but quit a few months before. She had no idea what he was doing now. They had dated briefly, broken up badly, and now saw each other only by accident, the punitive chance encounters of small-town life, from the cereal aisle at Stop&Shop to the next table at Kitty Murtagh’s, on five-dollar burger night.
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