“I suppose I’m being foolish,” Victoria said.
“Not at all, ma’am. My chief said all of us could learn a thing or two from you.”
Victoria sat back, a faint smile wrinkling her face. She reached into her bag, brought out her blue cap, and set it on her head again.
They had turned off onto a sandy road that curved around low bluffs and dunes. The Gay Head light swung around over their heads, red, white, red, white. The cliffs rose up on either side. Gulls soared above them. The surf boomed louder, echoing against the cliff walls. VanDyke turned left, and suddenly they were on the beach. Victoria could see the Elizabeth Islands in the distance. The individual sailboats she had viewed from the high cliffs now seemed an almost solid line of white.
“You want to go to the base of the cliffs, ma’am? I can drive along the beach.”
“Let’s stop about a quarter mile short of the overlook and walk from there. That is, if you don’t mind.” She looked at him. How handsome he and his fisherman brother were, she thought. The patrolman was staring straight ahead. His nose, not quite as large as hers, was lifted slightly.
“No, ma’am. Don’t mind at all.”
The two walked slowly along the base of the cliffs. Victoria zigzagged from the water to the cliffs, turning over clumps of seaweed, flipping stones, prying up pieces of driftwood with her lilac-wood stick. The patrolman walked slowly in a straight line, hands behind his back.
Occasionally she bent down, picked something up, and put it in her cloth bag.
“Look here,” she said to the patrolman. He strode over to her. “Footprints. Bare feet.”
“Yes, ma’am. A lot of people come here to swim.”
“This is different from somebody coming for a dip or to sunbathe.” She pointed with her stick. “The footprints go from the cliffs to the water, then disappear. Look ahead, you can see them again where they haven’t been washed away.”
“Yes, ma’am. A big man. Feet my size or larger.”
Victoria scanned the cliffs. “It looks as though he came down that gully. That’s where the prints start.”
The patrolman put both hands on his belt, and walked next to Victoria.
They had almost reached the base of the overlook, the place where Burkhardt must have started his climb. The footprints continued ahead of them.
“I wonder where he can be?” Victoria could see no one.
“Could be a tribal member. We can be hard to see if we want.” He grinned and Victoria smiled back.
She heard the rattle of falling stones, and stepped back quickly. A shower of baseball-size cobbles hit the sand and fanned out in front of them. Officer VanDyke stepped between Victoria and the cliff, put his hand on his belt, and looked up. Victoria shaded her eyes to search for the source of the rocks. The rocks seemed to have come from partway up the cliff.
Someone laughed, and the laughter echoed against the steep cliff face.
CHAPTER 8
The echo of the laugh died out, and Dojan, camouflaged by the brown and orange and red clay of the cliff, leaped from a shadowy recess onto the sand.
He greeted Victoria with a gap-toothed grin. “My friend!”
Victoria frowned. “You didn’t need to frighten us.”
“Whaddaya say, Dojan!” The patrolman held up his hand.
“Not much, Malachi!” Dojan replied, slapping his hand against VanDyke’s.
“Thought you were in Washington,” the patrolman said.
Dojan turned his head and peered at the line of islands to the northwest.
VanDyke laughed. “Hear you’re living on a yacht on the Potomac River. The first Indian member of the exclusive Washington Yacht Club. I hear they’re accepting women members, too. What’s the world coming to?”
Dojan growled.
VanDyke laughed again.
“Why don’t you sit over there on that flat rock,” Victoria ordered the patrolman. “Dojan and I need to talk.”
The surf crested and broke onto the rocks, no longer a steady rumble, but a distinct roar, crash, and swish.
Dojan said, when they were out of the patrolman’s hearing, “Somebody killed him.”
“Of course someone killed him.”
“You think somebody pushed him off the cliff?”
“What do you think?” Victoria asked.
Dojan shook his head, and the string of bones around his neck rattled. “He was killed down here.”
Victoria nodded. “We need to find a weapon. A rock, I suppose.” She looked around the beach, which was paved with cobbles. “A rock big enough to bash in his skull, but small enough so someone could hold it in one hand.”
“Maybe he threw the rock into the ocean,” Dojan said. “Maybe the tide came in and washed it clean.”
“Maybe, but who knows. We may find something.” They walked slowly away from the patrolman, who sat on the rock where Victoria had told him to sit. Dojan walked with his hands behind him, his back bent. Victoria continued her back-and-forth search, occasionally looking up the side of the cliff.
“See, Dojan, this is where he began his climb.”
Dojan came over to her and looked up the gully in the steep cliff. They could see marks in the naturally eroded clay, marks of fingers clutching for rough spots to pull a person up. A long smooth stretch that might have been caused by a stomach sliding up the cliff. They could see an occasional splotch of dark color that contrasted with the clay. As they looked higher, they could see where tufts of grass had apparently been grabbed for a handhold, flattened places where a foot must have rested.
Starting from the base of the cliffs above the high tide mark, they combed the beach in a widening semicircle.
“Here, Dojan. This would be about the right size.” Victoria pointed with her stick to a rounded cobble about the size and shape of a baseball.
“No.” Dojan shook his head. “Must be bigger. Rougher.”
“I’m taking it with us.” She picked it up, and set down her cloth bag so she could take notes. They circled, collecting stones. Dojan took the cloth bag, which had become quite heavy. They found a dozen likely cobbles before they went back to where Patrolman VanDyke sat, piling sand into a castle. He had set small stones around the castle’s turrets, a flag of Irish moss on a tower. A wave crashed. The swash raced toward his castle and filled the moat with foam and hopping sand fleas.
His radio crackled, and VanDyke unsnapped it from his belt and answered. After he signed off, he asked, “Where’s your van, Dojan?”
“Tribal Headquarters.”
“Okay if I take you and Mrs. Trumbull there and leave you? I got to respond to a call. Can you get her home?”
Dojan held up his hand, palm out. “I will drive my friend home after we report to Chief Hawkbill.”
Malachi dropped them off at headquarters, and the two went inside to the chief’s office. The chief was dozing at his desk, his hands clasped in front of him, his head nodding. Behind him Victoria could see the sweep of the Atlantic Ocean, an unbroken steel blue.
The chief sat up with a jerk, smacked his lips together, and smiled sheepishly. “This paperwork is an ideal excuse for a nap,” he said. He stood up and held out both hands to Victoria, who took them in hers. “I thought you had run away, Dojan. Gone to the beach with your girlfriend?” The chief smiled. “The police have closed the case, you know.”
“It was no accident,” Dojan said.
“Yes. Yes, certainly. We agree.” The chief shrugged.
“Suppose we were to find a weapon,” Victoria asked. “Would the police reopen the investigation?”
Chief Hawkbill looked from Victoria to Dojan and back to Victoria. “Let us see your weapon. Please sit, Victoria Trumbull. And you, Dojan Minnowfish.”
Dojan hefted Victoria’s cloth bag onto the chief’s desk with a thunk of rock against varnished wood.
Victoria pulled her chair close to the desk.
“What have we here?” the chief asked.
“We don’t w
ant to scratch the finish on your desk,” said Victoria.
The chief pointed. “Dojan, please hand me that copy of the Enquirer.” He moved what he’d been working on from his desk to a table behind him and spread the newspaper out.
Victoria pulled out one rock after another until they covered the desk. “One of these may have been the murder weapon,” she said.
The chief looked over the top of his thick glasses. “So the three of us will look them over carefully for hair and blood,” he said. “If we identify any such thing, we will call the Aquinnah police.”
Victoria’s eyes were bright and she nodded.
“Not at all likely,” the chief said. “Have you identified them in
some way?”
Victoria showed him her notebook with its sketch maps. Chief Hawkbill picked up one of the rocks and turned it over, scattering damp sand on the newspaper. “Not likely, Mrs. Trumbull,” he repeated.
Victoria could hear the distant sound of breakers on the South Shore, the cry of a hawk, the mewling of gulls.
The chief glanced out the window. “The wind is dying down. It’s going to be hot this afternoon.” He opened his desk drawer and gave Victoria a large magnifying glass.
“What’s this!” Victoria had found some hairlike stuff clinging to the seventh or eighth rock she examined.
“Seaweed,” Dojan said. “Algae.”
She set the rock aside and continued her search.
“Ah!” She handed another rock to the chief, pointing to a brown stain on it.
The chief looked it over carefully. “That is an iron stain. That rustred color is common on the Aquinnah beach and cliffs.” He shook his head. “You have gone to a great deal of effort in vain. It is most unlikely that two amateurs—wise and clever amateurs, it’s true,” he looked over his glasses at them-”would find a rock that happens to show evidence of murder. We don’t know for a certainty that Mr. Burkhardt was killed on the beach. Nor do we know it was a rock that killed him.” He sighed. “The police, even believing his death to be an accident, have been over that beach with the same thought, looking for anything he might have fallen onto that would have killed him.”
“It’s worth looking,” Victoria said, stubbornly.
“Yes, it is worth looking. But the tide has been in, the tide has been out, four or five times in the two days since Mr. Burkhardt was killed. You will only find evidence remaining on a weapon if it was left above the high tide line.” The chief peered at them. “A murder that may not be a murder, on a beach that may not have been the site, with a weapon that may or may not have been left at the scene. Why wouldn’t the killer use the simple expedient of tossing the weapon into the ocean? Surely he wouldn’t drop it where you, Victoria Trumbull, and you, Dojan Minnowfish, would find it?”
They continued to look at the rocks, but found nothing more than hairlike seaweed and bloodlike iron stains.
The chief sat back when they had finished. “If I were planning a killing, I would not take a chance on finding a deadly beach cobble. Unless, of course, this was a spur-of-the-moment killing.”
“It wasn’t.” Victoria put the stones back in her cloth bag. “Jube planned to meet someone on the beach.”
“In that case, if it were me,” the chief spread his chunky hand on his chest, “I would probably carry something with me, a tire iron comes to mind, or a handheld sledgehammer, something small with considerable weight.”
“Wouldn’t it be obvious to Jube that the person was carrying something suspicious?” Victoria asked.
“Not necessarily. The loose clothing we affect today conceals everything. Excess weight, for example.” He patted his own gut, cloaked in a brilliantly flowered Hawaiian shirt. “Dojan, can you take a small boat off the beach?”
“On a calm day.”
“The wind has shifted,” Victoria said, looking out the window at the tall cedars that were no longer swaying.
“Will you be able to see bottom?” asked the chief.
Dojan shrugged. “It is shallow as far as a man could throw a hammer, not even a fathom. The water is clear.”
“Who has a dinghy we can use?” Victoria turned from Dojan to the chief.
Dojan stood. “Obed has an inflatable.”
The chief lifted the phone and dialed. When he finished speaking, he set the phone down again and turned to Dojan. “Cell phones are a modern miracle. Obed is out on his boat now. He will bring his dinghy ashore and meet you near his grandmother’s house.”
Dojan grunted.
“And you, Victoria Trumbull, are you willing to stay onshore to keep Dojan in a straight line?”
Victoria nodded.
Twenty minutes later Dojan parked his van at the edge of Trudy VanDyke’s property, and they waited for Obed, who rowed ashore in his dinghy from his anchored fishing boat.
“I got nothing better to do,” Obed said. “The fish aren’t biting. Almost a slick calm out there now.”
The waves now lapped on the shore, gentle swishes that hissed softly. A sandpiper scurried along the edge of the swash, dipping its long beak into the sand.
After Dojan showed Victoria where to stand, Obed shoved the rubber inflatable off the beach and took the oars. Victoria leaned on her stick and watched for signals. Dojan peered down into the water. Obed rowed out, fifty feet, Victoria guessed. Then they turned toward her. Each time they came in close to the beach, Dojan signaled Victoria, who moved three paces down the line. Her back ached from standing and shuffling along. When she reached a large rock, she was glad to sit. The water was so calm she could hear every word Do- jan said to Obed. “Go left.” “Stop.” “Keep going.”
The afternoon wore on. Three times Dojan dived to retrieve some object he’d seen. He was still wearing his mesh shirt and black jeans. Each time, the object turned out to be a false lead. The sun settled to Victoria’s left. She realized she hadn’t had lunch, and reached into her cloth bag for the candy bar she’d bought at Alley’s when she’d cashed a ten-dollar check this morning.
“Stop,” Dojan ordered for the fourth time.
Victoria looked up.
“My friend,” he called out to her. “We have found something this time.”
Victoria crumpled up the candy wrapper and put it in her bag, then drew out her notebook and pen.
Dojan again catapulted himself out of the dinghy with a splash. He stood, chest-high in the water, and wiped his hand across his face. Then he bent over in a surface dive, head and shoulders underwater, feet in the air, and resurfaced seconds later brandishing a tool. The tool had a foot-long handle that ended in a thick curved iron rod with a flat spadelike head.
Victoria shaded her eyes against the glare coming off the water. “That’s a weeding hook,” she called out. “Looks like a new one. I have a weeder just like that.” “Want to keep looking?” Obed said to Dojan.
Dojan shook his head, spraying water from his wet hair like a black dog. He hefted the heavy tool from one hand to the other as he waded toward shore, his clothes dripping water.
“Don’t get your fingerprints on it!” Victoria called.
Dojan grunted, and held the tool by the leather thong that threaded through the handle.
“You could do some serious damage with that thing,” Obed said to Victoria.
“It’s certainly death on weeds,” said Victoria.
CHAPTER 9
Chief Hawkbill had already closed his office door and was heading for the parking lot when Victoria and Dojan arrived.
Victoria held up the weeding hook by its rawhide thong.
“What have we here, Victoria Trumbull?” The chief reopened his door, turned on the lights, offered Victoria a chair, and took his own seat behind his desk. Dojan stood, water still trickling from his clothes and hair, and dripping onto the rug.
“I don’t suppose there’ll be any fingerprints?” Victoria handed him the lethal-looking weapon. The chief took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and held the tool gingerly.
“The forensic scientists can do miracles with microscopic evidence,” he said. “Yes, this should go to the police.” He peered over his glasses at Dojan, then at Victoria, whose face was pinkly sunburned. “I will recommend to the Aquinnah police that they keep this as possible evidence.”
“It’s more than possible evidence,” Victoria said. “There’s no reason for a nice shiny garden tool to end up in Vineyard Sound. I’m sure they can match Jube Burkhardt’s injuries with the curve of the hook.”
Chief Hawkbill nodded. “Although the police have closed the case, their minds are sometimes open.”
The following afternoon, Victoria was writing at the cookroom table, glancing out the window occasionally. Chief Hawkbill had called earlier to say he had given the weeding hook to the Aquinnah police, and would call when he had information.
In the meantime, Victoria wondered, where was Hiram? And where was his friend Tad? Had Tad killed Jube and then run off with Hiram? She was sure the stain on Jube’s floor was blood, but whose? A person’s? Hiram’s? It was too fresh for Jube’s. And where was Jube Burkhardt’s car?
The hazy afternoon light touched the goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, the tall grass, the lacy yellow fern of the asparagus bed. Everything shimmered with a dusting of soft gold. She could see the old Agricultural Society Hall next to the church, and the new library this side of it.
Jube Burkhardt had met his killer on the beach below the cliffs. Of that, she was sure. If she had planned to kill someone, she thought, she’d have suggested they first meet someplace convenient to both of them, then go together in one car. In that way, she wouldn’t need to worry about two cars being at the scene of the crime. But where would she leave a car if she were the killer? Somewhere between Jube’s house and Gay Head. Victoria had trouble calling Aquinnah any name other than the one she’d known all her life, Gay Head, named for the brightly colored clay of the headland.
She continued to stare out at the golden rooftops. The trees had grown, of course. Maley’s Gallery was new, only forty years old or thereabouts, but his house was old. Next to Maley’s were three or four other houses, hidden, now, by trees.
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