INDIAN PIPES

by Cynthia Riggs

  INDIAN

  PIPES

  OTHER MARTHA’S VINEYARD MYSTERIES

  BY CYNTHIA RIGGS

  The Paperwhite Narcissus

  Jack in the Pulpit

  The Cemetery Yew

  The Cranefly Orchid Murders

  Deadly Nightshade

  INDIAN

  PIPES

  CYNTHIA RIGGS

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR

  NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  INDIAN PIPES. Copyright © 2006 by Cynthia Riggs. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35476-3

  ISBN-10: 0-312-35476-2

  First Edition: May 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR

  DIONIS COFFIN RIGGS

  POET

  1898–1997

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Victoria Trumbull’s Hall of Fame, those friends, relatives, and colleagues who have helped to keep her alive and well, include Arlene Silva, who sent me off to Vermont College, which awarded me an MFA; and my manuscript critiquers, Alvida and Ralph Jones, and Ann and Bill Fielder. My two writers’ groups are not the least bit afraid to tell me something doesn’t work. Members include Jacqueline Sexton, Shirley W. Mayhew, Wendy Hathaway, Carolyn O’Daly, Rev. Bonna Whitten-Stovall (Southern Baptist), Jeanne Hewett, Ernie Weiss, Nelson W. Potter, Ethel Sherman, Rev. Judy Campbell (Unitarian-Universalist), Rev. Mary Jane O’Connor-Ropp (Methodist), and Rabbi Carla Theodore.

  G. Miki Hayden went over the manuscript with her red pencil, fixing a lot of stuff that hadn’t worked.

  Most of all, thanks to Jonathan Revere, friend, plot doctor, cat minder, computer expert, plumber, fire builder, television producer, the quickest wit in the Commonwealth, and the Island’s “feared enigma.” What would I do without his frequent, “Have you thought of…?”

  Thanks to The Bunch of Grapes, Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year, which stacks my books between the latest Harry Potter and David McCullough’s 1776. Thanks to the West Tisbury Library, which keeps my books on the “hot new mysteries” shelf.

  Bed-and-breakfast guests and West Tisbury villagers have been inspiration for story ideas and good and bad guys. I could not have manufactured my characters without their help.

  Thank you Nancy Love, my agent, and Ruth Cavin of St. Martin’s Minotaur, the top editor in the mystery field.

  Despite what you may read in the Island newspapers, and despite what the West Tisbury selectmen are saying, my stories are pure fiction, the characters are figments of my imagination, and I’ve even taken liberties with some of the places.

  —Cynthia Riggs

  INDIAN

  PIPES

  CHAPTER 1

  The fog poured in from Vineyard Sound, driven by a northwest wind that whipped it up the steep clay cliffs, streamers of denseness interspersed with open patches.

  Through gaps in the fog, ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull could see the beam from the lighthouse as it swept round and round above them, alternating red and white, warning mariners of the treacherous rocks of Devil’s Bridge that stretched out into the sound far below them. Victoria’s geologist daughter Amelia claimed the rocks were a terminal moraine dropped by the glacier twenty thousand years ago. Wampanoag legend said the rocks were scattered by the giant Moshup when he emptied his pipe into the waters of the sound.

  As the light swept above them in the gathering dusk, droplets of moisture in Victoria’s white hair glistened red, then white. She leaned on the stick her granddaughter Elizabeth had cut from the lilac tree, and gazed down. She could hear the pounding surf two hundred feet below her, but she could see almost nothing. The bell buoy off Devil’s Bridge clanged. Far away, a foghorn moaned.

  “Hiram Pennybacker is the worst bore on this Island,” said Elizabeth, who was standing behind her grandmother.

  Victoria’s wrinkles framed her smile. “He’s got some fierce competition,” she said.

  “We simply wanted to drop off that broken chair for him to fix, but no. Talk, talk, talk.” Elizabeth edged closer to the fence. Her arms were summer-tan against her white T-shirt. “You can’t see much, can you.” Every gesture her granddaughter made reminded Victoria of Jonathan, her dead husband. Elizabeth, who was in her early thirties, was tall and slim and stood straight, like her grandfather.

  “Hiram’s lonely,” Victoria said softly.

  Elizabeth shivered. “It’s mysterious this time of evening, no one around, and the mist swirling. It feels more like October than August.” She turned away from the fence. “Let’s go home, Gram, and have a cup of tea.”

  “Wait a moment.” Victoria stared down at the cliff. “I thought I saw something move.”

  Elizabeth stepped back to where her grandmother stood with her knobby fingers laced in the fence wires, her walking stick in hand.

  “Where?” Elizabeth followed her grandmother’s gaze. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Something moved. Look!” The fog had thinned briefly, and Victoria pointed to a wild rosebush that clung to the gullied orange clay below them.

  “I still don’t see anything. Only poison ivy.” Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her body. “Let’s go.”

  Victoria didn’t reply. She willed the fog to part again so she could see whatever it was that had moved. The motion wasn’t from the wind, it was more like an animal. A dog, perhaps, was trying to get back up the cliff.

  “Gram?”

  Victoria caught a glimpse again of something, farther away than she had thought and much larger than a dog.

  “There!” she said. “See? It looks like a person.”

  Elizabeth put both hands on the pipe rail at the top of the fence and peered down toward the rosebush. “You’re right, Gram. Someone must have fallen.”

  “We need to get help right away,” said Victoria.

  “I’ll climb down.” Elizabeth started to lift herself over the fence.

  Victoria shook her head. “Go back to Hiram’s, quick. Call the fire department, and get Hiram to come back with a rope. I’ll wait.”

  Elizabeth hurried away.

  Victoria kept watch as darkness closed in, as the lighthouse beams overhead grew brighter and more diffuse. She caught only momentary glimpses of the form near the
rosebush, no longer moving.

  The ten or fifteen minutes it took Hiram to arrive seemed far longer. Victoria’s eyes hurt from staring down the slope, trying to pierce through the murk. When he finally arrived, Hiram was carrying a backpack and a fat coil of rope around his right shoulder. He walked with his back bent slightly and his feet splayed out. He was a short, stocky man in his fifties, with a slight potbelly and gray hair worn in a crew cut.

  “Thought you had to get right home,” he mumbled around the pipe clenched between his teeth.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said Victoria.

  “The fire truck’s on the way. Nelson and his boy were at supper. His turn to drive this week.”

  Victoria was feeling the evening chill. “I haven’t seen any movement since Elizabeth left to get you, Hiram.”

  “I’ll climb down.” He squatted next to her and secured an end of his rope to the fence post. “This ought to be long enough.”

  When Elizabeth returned, she was carrying a sweater. “This was in the car, Gram. Thought you might want it.”

  “Thank you.” Victoria leaned her stick against the fence post and slipped her arms into the wool cardigan Elizabeth held for her.

  Hiram undid the straps of his backpack and fumbled through it until he found a flashlight. He flicked on the light and aimed the beam down the cliff. “Can’t see a thing down there. It’s a pea-souper. Seen it coming for a couple of days. How far down is he, Victoria?”

  “About a quarter of the way to the bottom, I would guess.” She thought for a moment. “Where the cliff changes from a gentle slope and drops straight to the rocks. Right at the break is a rosebush.”

  “I know the place you mean,” said Hiram. “Bad spot.” He lifted himself over the fence rail, and, twisting a section of rope around his waist, started down toward the cliff face. Victoria watched him until he disappeared, hunched slightly, picking his way carefully on the slippery clay, stepping through the lush growth of poison ivy. She saw the circle of his flashlight beam fade away.

  Elizabeth tilted her head to one side. “I hear the fire truck.”

  Victoria, too, heard the heavy thrum of the engine. From where she stood she could see the fog glow as the truck’s rotating red lights mimicked the lighthouse above them. Figures trudged up the steps, and she recognized Nelson Minnowfish, his boy Sam, and a third person she didn’t know. They were carrying ladders, more rope, and handheld searchlights that threw shadows of the chain-link fence against the bank of fog beyond.

  “Evenin’, Miz Trumbull,” Nelson said. “Where’s Hiram?”

  Victoria pointed. “He’s climbing down to where I saw the person.”

  “Shoulda waited for us to get here.” Nelson aimed his searchlight. “Hiram!” he yelled down. “Can you hear?”

  “Nelson?” Hiram’s muffled voice came back up the cliff. “We got a problem. Send down the stretcher.”

  “Somebody down there?” Nelson shouted.

  “Yep,” Hiram shouted back.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man,” Hiram said.

  “Alive?”

  “Can’t tell.” The words echoed against the cliff.

  Everything was a blur to Victoria from then on. Radio, lights, the ambulance, EMTs, shadows of moving people. Ladders lowered down the cliff, ropes, shouts. The aluminum stretcher was handed up and over the fence and set on the ground. EMTs and firefighters crowded around.

  Victoria stepped away. She did not want to see the form on the stretcher. The only voices were sharp orders. Except for the foghorn moaning off Paul’s Point and the mournful clang of the bell buoy, the only other sounds were mechanical. She heard the throb of the fire engine, the click of the rotating lights on the ambulance, a shout of “All clear!” and the buzz of a defibrillator that might start a heart pumping again.

  Finally, the EMTs, the firemen, the police, stood aside, and, one by one, moved away from the stretcher.

  A technician Victoria had seen at the hospital passed her, peeling off a surgical glove, his head down.

  “Is he dead?” Victoria asked.

  The EMT looked up, disoriented.

  “What?” He focused suddenly on Victoria.

  “Is he dead?” Victoria asked again, louder.

  He nodded, peeling off the second surgical glove. “He was gone, ma’am. Nothing we could do.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am. They thought he was from West Tisbury. I’m not from up-Island, myself. Excuse me.” He moved on down the steps to the ambulance.

  Elizabeth eased next to her grandmother and put her arms around Victoria’s sloping shoulders.

  “It’s lucky you found him, Grammy.”

  Victoria looked up at her granddaughter. “They said he’s from West Tisbury. Someone we know? If only we hadn’t lingered so long at Hiram’s. The person was still alive when I first saw him, I’m sure he was.”

  “They said he’d lost too much blood, Gram. That he was too badly hurt. They said he must have crawled up from the rocks where he fell to where you saw him. They said it was a miracle he could move at all, after the fall. It’s almost two hundred feet. There was nothing anyone could do. Nothing at all. That’s what they said.”

  Together, Victoria and Elizabeth walked back to the car. Victoria held her lilac stick tightly, not because she needed it, but because it comforted her.

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference if we’d left Hiram’s earlier,” Elizabeth said into her grandmother’s silence. “Even if we hadn’t stayed to hear his talk about politics and casinos, we couldn’t have saved the guy.”

  “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough who he was.” Victoria brushed sand off the car seat and sat on the edge, her feet on the ground. “Phew! I didn’t realize how long I’d been standing.” She faced out into the dark night. “That poor man.”

  Around them figures passed in front of the fire truck and the ambulance. Victoria heard subdued voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Objects strobed in and out of view, illuminated briefly by flashing lights that came from every direction.

  Elizabeth turned the key, and the car started up with a rattle. “I wonder how the Island Enquirer will report this. The newspaper wants visitors to think Martha’s Vineyard is an idyllic retreat, that accidents and deaths and casino plans don’t exist.”

  Victoria lifted her long legs into the car and shut the door.

  Elizabeth went on. “According to the paper, we don’t have any crime. No arguments. No poor people. No racial tension. No political scummery…”

  “I’m not sure scummery is a word,” Victoria said, stowing the lilac-wood stick behind her.

  Elizabeth backed out of the parking spot. When they’d arrived, theirs was the only car. Now the parking area was full of emergency vehicles and villagers who’d heard over the scanner about the man who’d fallen off the cliffs. Elizabeth’s car headlights shone on a police officer who had materialized at the pedestrian crossing.

  Victoria rolled down her window. “Have you seen Hiram Pennybacker?” she asked the officer.

  “He left quite a while ago, Mrs. Trumbull,” she answered. “Right after I got here.”

  On the main road heading toward West Tisbury and home, neither Victoria nor Elizabeth spoke for some time. The curvy road skirted fields and meadows held in with stone fences, hidden now in darkness. Their lights picked up a deer by the side of the road, its eyes bright, tensed to leap. Elizabeth slowed, and the deer turned and bounded back over a stone wall.

  “I can’t imagine how he could have fallen,” Victoria said finally. “Everybody from the Island knows how to get to the bottom of the cliffs safely.”

  “Maybe he got dizzy or lost his balance,” Elizabeth said. She switched on the high beam, and the fog turned into a dazzling white wall. She dimmed the lights again and the wall receded.

  “But you don’t go straight down the cliffs. Everybody knows that.” Victoria opened th
e window a crack and the sound of the night came in. She lifted her great nose to smell the salt air, the last hay crop, sun-dried and baled in fields they couldn’t see, wet wool as they passed sheep grazing on the hill that overlooked the Atlantic.

  “The way to the foot of the cliffs is down that gully,” Victoria continued. “It’s steep, but you wouldn’t kill yourself if you fell. You’d slide to the bottom.”

  “No one’s supposed to climb on the cliffs.”

  “We climbed all over them when we were children,” Victoria said. “We’d smear clay on our bodies and pretend we were Indians.”

  “Native Americans,” said Elizabeth.

  “We’d bring the clay home,” Victoria went on, “and make ashtrays. You had to be clever not to mix up all the different colors into a muddy-looking creation. Everybody had ashtrays then.”

  As they left Aquinnah, the rugged hills eased into flatter land, the road straightened, and the fog thinned.

  “Did Hiram know who the man was?” Victoria asked.

  “I couldn’t tell. He had a funny look on his face when he came back up the cliff with the stretcher bearers.”

  Victoria was quiet for a moment. “He was undoubtedly upset about the man being badly hurt.”

  “It was more than that,” said Elizabeth. “He seemed upset about something else. I got the impression that he wasn’t surprised at finding that man.”

  They dipped into the valley that marked the West Tisbury town line, passed the gas station and the old Grange Hall, Town Hall, and the church.

  “You remember how Hiram was telling us about the tribe’s plans for a casino, Gram?”

  Victoria nodded. “Hiram is tedious with his talk about town politics and gambling casinos. I don’t want to hear another word about either.”

  “We’re going to hear a lot more before it’s over,” Elizabeth said. “If the tribe gets approval for a casino, it’s going to change the Island forever.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with change.”