“Wouldn’t put it past either of the nieces to set it,” Joe said, stirring his coffee. He took a gulp. “The one who hangs out with the biker is some weird, let me tell you.”
“Just because she’s tattooed.” Sarah stretched out her own arm with its tattooed bracelet of leaves. “Grandmothers are getting tattooed these days. It’s the ‘in’ thing.”
“The younger one, the too, too sweet one,” Joe rolled his eyes and wriggled his hips, “she makes my dentures ache.” He showed his horsy yellow teeth in a grin.
“They say Burkhardt left his place to her.” Donald leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Far as I know, nobody’s talked about a will.” Lincoln moved to his usual place, his back to the shingled front of the store.
“I wonder who does inherit his place,” said Sarah.
Lincoln shrugged. “Eighteen million dollars.”
“Eighteen million,” Sarah mused. “That’s a pretty good motive for killing one’s uncle.”
At the police station, Casey looked at her watch. “The arson team was on the eight o’clock boat. They’ll be here any minute.”
“What about Junior?” said Victoria.
“He’ll stay at the place until I relieve him.” Casey straightened papers on her desk. “I’ve got to finish a couple of things before they get here. Here’s the motorcycle accident report. Look it over, will you? See if it makes sense to you.”
The morning was clear and cool, almost fall-like. Victoria wore a sage green turtleneck under her blue fleece jacket. She read Casey’s report, made a couple of minor corrections, and handed the papers back to the chief, just as the off-Island team pulled up in a white van.
Without waiting for introductions, Casey and Victoria got into the Bronco and led the way to Burkhardt’s. The arson van bumped along behind them.
In the bright sunlight, the remains of Burkhardt’s house seemed pathetically small. Smoke was still rising from the ruin. The chimney stood tall, untouched by the fire. Half-charred beams and boards, sills, flooring, and uprights stuck out at odd angles like jack- straws.
Victoria walked around the remains. In places, the grass was scorched where embers had fallen and started small fires. The air smelled of stale cigars, burned tar paper, burned plastic, burned metal, burned meat, paper, trash, garbage, rubber.
She was amazed to see piles of unburned newspapers and magazines in the midst of the rubble, odd things she thought would have burned, and metal things, twisted and molten, she thought would have survived.
Casey introduced Victoria to the arson team, two men and a woman, all three wearing boots and white jumpsuits that covered them completely. Victoria watched them move through the still- smoldering ashes, talking quietly, measuring, taking notes.
“Shit!” one of the men said. “Come here—Hank! Beth!”
The two hurried over to him, picking their way carefully through the ashes.
“Was someone in the house?” he called out to Casey.
“Not that I know of,” said Casey.
“We’ve found what looks like human remains.”
Victoria’s skin prickled.
Casey walked over to where the team stood.
“Any idea who could have been in the building?” the woman, Beth, asked Casey, who shook her head. “The owner?”
“Not the owner. He’s dead.” Casey stood at the edge of the ruin, her polished boots dusted with ash.
“A relative?”
Casey turned to Victoria. “What about Linda?”
Victoria felt as though she were somewhere else watching. “She came home last night, later than I did.”
Casey unsnapped her radio. “I’ll ask one of the guys to check on Harley. She was camping out last I knew.”
Victoria focused on Casey. “Hiram.” She said it softly, and when Casey looked over at her, she repeated it. “Hiram,” she said. “He called me from here three days ago. We found blood on the floor. It must have been his. That smell…”
Beth indicated the shapeless charred mound in the rubble. “All we can go by now are dental records.” Victoria looked away. “It’s going to help, having some idea who the victim might have been.”
Victoria walked to the edge of the grass clearing and looked up at the crystal blue sky. A gull soared overhead. The gull might have been the same bird she remembered from nearly a century ago. She heard the surf, pounding as it had pounded before her great-great- grandmother was born, and would continue to pound when her own many times great-grandchildren were older than she. Nothing would change that soaring gull or that beating surf. The sea would eat up the Island and disgorge it as sandbanks to snare mariners three thousand years from now.
She took a deep breath and let it out. She walked back toward Casey, who looked at her with concern.
“Are you okay, Victoria?”
Victoria stood up straight, stretching to her full height, which was still tall.
“Certainly.” Victoria strode back to the ruins, her nose held high. “How can I help?” she asked.
While Victoria had turned her back to the site, the arson team had zipped the remains into a plastic body bag and had carried it to the van.
Beth pulled down the mask that covered her mouth and nose. “Tell us if any of these objects we put off to one side mean anything to you.”
The team lifted up bundles of half-burned paper, a mattress that was nothing but springs, a lamp with a skeleton shade.
“Here’s the base of a computer,” said the man called Hank, his voice muffled by his face mask.
Victoria stared at it. “The CPU?” she asked.
“Right. I’ll set it next to the other things.” He pulled his face mask down. “These masks are a pain.”
“Where was the computer, can you tell?”
“Judging from what was underneath the unit when we found it, I would say it was on the second floor, probably in a room at the front of the house.” Hank stretched. “Back to work. If you think of anything, holler.”
Victoria moved an upended bucket close to the computer and sat down to examine it. The metal box was about a foot wide, almost two feet long, and about six inches high. The unit was charred and blistered on three of the five sides she could see. The two unburned sides had once been tan, but were now smoked to an ugly greenish gray. On what must have been the front, one of the unburned sides, there were two slots. On the opposite side were holes where wires might once have gone. Except for the slots and the back side, the box was featureless. Victoria examined it more closely. She eased herself onto her knees and studied the unit. She could make out what must have been a decal on the front that read, “digita…” and she couldn’t read the rest of the letters. She examined the smoky unburned side. It looked as though there might have been another decal. She wet her finger and rubbed the smoke off. She could barely make out the letters S…I…B…Y…. And that was all she could read. It was enough. She had found Sibyl.
CHAPTER 14
Victoria scrambled to her feet.
Casey was squatting near the charred wreckage of the house. She looked up at Victoria, concerned.
“Can you call Howland on your radio?” Victoria asked.
“I can contact the communications center and they’ll phone him,” Casey said. “What’s up, Victoria?”
“I’ve found Sibyl.”
“What?”
“When Jube Burkhardt said ‘Sibyl,’ the last word he said before he died, he was referring to his computer.”
Casey stood, with her notebook still in one hand. “A guy’s dying words are about his computer?”
“Something important must be on that computer,” Victoria insisted. “Important enough for Jube to worry about Sibyl, rather than face the fact that he was dying.”
Casey examined the box. “That computer’s a wreck.”
“Howland Atherton can retrieve something.”
“He’s not a magician.”
Victoria stood tall. “Before the compu
ter was burned, I asked you to have Howland look at it. We still have a chance of finding some clue.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll try to reach Atherton,” said Casey.
“Where’s Junior?”
“I sent him home.” She nodded to the opposite shore.
Victoria shaded her eyes and could see Junior’s dinghy pulled up on the beach in front of his camp. When she turned back, Casey was on the radio, giving the woman at the communications center directions to Burkhardt’s place to relay to Howland.
Casey hung up the mike and went back to where the arson team was sifting through the rubble. Their once-white jumpsuits and white boots were black, from feet to thighs, and their once-white gloves were filthy.
Victoria looked around for her bucket seat, found it tossed to one side, upended it and wiped it off with a paper towel from her pocket, then sat where she could watch both the arson team and the road.
She was composing a complicated poem on the back of an envelope, a sestina on the relativity of time, when about three-quarters of an hour later, she heard Howland’s car, an ancient white Renault wheeze into the grassy opening and stop with a shudder.
Howland unwound himself from behind the wheel, slammed the door, turned and examined the ruin. “What a mess.”
Victoria arose from her bucket seat. “They found Hiram.”
“He was in the house?”
“Someone was,” said Victoria. “There’s not much left to identify.”
Howland thrust his hands in his pockets and scowled. “Not a pleasant way to die.”
“I’m sure he was already dead,” said Victoria.
Howland looked at her thoughtfully. “I got a garbled message from the communications center about someone called Sibyl, a burned computer, and instructions to get here as quickly as I could.” He lifted his eyebrows at Victoria. “Communications said the message was from you.”
“Jube was still alive when Hiram reached him. He mumbled something, then said ‘Sibyl’ distinctly.”
Howland frowned.
Victoria went on. “Two things have puzzled me. One was the identity of Sibyl. Why would Jube call out that name as he was dying? As far as I knew, he had no relatives or friends named Sibyl.”
“And the second?” asked Howland.
“When Elizabeth and I came here after Jube’s death, his computer was running with a message that read, ‘Fatal Error.’ When Elizabeth and I returned the next day, the computer screen was blank, and the box, the computer itself, was missing.”
“And you’ve now found it?”
“The arson squad found it,” Victoria said. “They thought it might have fallen from the second floor.”
“Where does Sibyl come into this?”
Victoria described finding the decal on the side of the unit. “We need to know what’s on his computer.”
“What do you expect of me, Victoria? It’s not likely I can recover anything from a computer that got burned up in a fire, then fell to the ground from the second floor.”
“I asked the arson team to set it in the shade.”
“Lot of good that’ll do,” Howland muttered.
Victoria led him to a gnarled apple tree growing beside the barn. Late summer apples were rotting on the ground, where the sweet scent of fermenting fruit had attracted a steady buzz of yellow jackets. The computer leaned against the trunk of the tree.
“Great,” said Howland. “I’m allergic to wasps.” He stepped back as a yellow jacket flew past his head.
“Casey and I will carry it to your car.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Howland. “I’ll move it. Outta the way, wasps.” He stepped gingerly through the fallen apples, carefully brushed aside the yellow jackets that had landed on the computer, and carried the box to the open field near his car. He crouched down and studied the burned case from every angle. “I doubt if I can recover anything, Victoria. This thing is in bad shape.”
“If the computer can be fixed, you can do it,” Victoria said. She bent over him, her hands on her knees.
“You don’t understand.” Howland got to his feet and stood up straight, towering above Victoria, who was not short. She looked up at him. She’d always admired his fine patrician nose, almost as large as hers. His turned-down mouth gave him an expression of strong disapproval, which Victoria knew was not the case. His mouth turned down even further when he smiled. He was wearing the gray sweater she remembered from some time ago, the one with the moth hole in the back, the coffee stain on the front. A big toe stuck out through the broken stitching in the front of one of his shoes. The only tidy aspect of Howland was his hair, silver on the sides, dark on top. It curled around his forehead and over his ears in elegant waves. Not a hair was out of place. Victoria suspected Howland had nothing to do with the way his hair placed itself neatly on his head.
“You’re not listening, Victoria. You can’t expect a computer to go through a fire, get dropped fifteen or twenty feet, and then expect to be able to recover anything at all.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to get something from it,” Victoria said, and walked away.
Howland glanced at her, and his mouth turned down. “Okay, I’ll get the chief’s approval to take it.”
After he conferred with Casey, Howland loaded the box named Sibyl into the back of his station wagon and slid it toward the front of the car.
“Be careful of it,” Victoria cautioned.
“Yeah, yeah,” Howland mumbled as he slammed the back of the car shut. “Where do you want me to take this thing?”
“Can you examine it at my house?”
“Your house is better than mine,” said Howland.
“Then leave it on the desk in my library.”
“I gather you’d like to watch me work,” Howland said. “I suppose if I can find anything at all on the hard drive, I can use Elizabeth’s computer to read it.” He held up both hands. “Don’t expect miracles, Victoria. The insides are undoubtedly fused. At the very least, the data on the hard drive will be affected by heat.”
He got back into his car. Victoria watched until he drove around the curve and out of sight.
Casey was at the front of the house, carefully moving rubble out of the wreckage and noting where it had been. Instead of disturbing her, Victoria went to the barn.
The door was ajar, the way it had been earlier. The hinges squealed as she opened it. She heard a rustling inside, a mouse perhaps, or the barn owl. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she stared at the floor where the tracks had been. They were gone, as if they had never been. The floor had a thin layer of dust and chaff, as if it had not been disturbed for years. There were no traces of tracks, no grease spots. The floor didn’t even seem to have been swept. Victoria knew that she had not imagined the tracks. She, Elizabeth, and Casey had all seen them.
Victoria stepped outside into the sunlight again and beckoned to Casey, who came over immediately.
“What do you think of this?” Victoria showed her the unmarked floor.
“Somebody took a lot of trouble to clean up,” Casey said. “I wish I’d taken photos of those tracks.”
“There was no reason to,” Victoria said. “No one thought a crime had been committed.”
“I should have listened to you,” said Casey.
CHAPTER 15
“This isn’t your office, Dojan.” Peter had walked in softly while Do- jan was dialing the phone in Chief Hawkbill’s office. Dojan looked over his shoulder.
“I have business,” he muttered.
“Your business is in Washington. You take orders from Patience and me, not from that old man.”
Dojan opened his mouth in a pink O that contrasted with his black beard; he opened his eyes wide so his dark irises were surrounded by bloodshot whites.
“Don’t pull that shit on me, Dojan. You don’t scare me with your craziness.”
“I have business,” Dojan repeated, pointing at the floor. “Here.”
“What business? Now Hiram�
��s dead…” Peter didn’t finish. Do- jan stepped toward the smaller man and grasped Peter’s upper arms.
“Hiram dead? Liar!”
“They found him, Dojan, burnt to a crisp.”
Dojan shook him. Peter’s straight black hair flopped back and forth into his eyes. He smiled.
“Temper, temper.” Peter’s smile was a long thin line with no trace of amusement. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Dojan. Let go of me.”
Dojan gave Peter a slight push and dropped his hands to his sides. “What happened to Hiram?”
“They found his body where you left him, Dojan. At least, the old lady, Mrs. Trumbull, thinks it’s his body. Can’t tell until they check dental records.” Peter took his comb out of his pocket and slicked his hair back.
“Hiram can’t be dead.” Dojan’s hands hung by his sides.
“They’re already saying you killed him.”
“No,” said Dojan. “I would never kill Hiram.”
“That’s not what they’re saying, Dojan. You didn’t get blamed for killing that guy in Oak Bluffs, but we know who killed him, don’t we?” Peter smiled his thin smile. “You’d better go back to Washington before it’s too late.”
“What do you mean, burned?”
“Come off it. You know as well as everybody else on the Island that Burkhardt’s house burned down last night.”
Dojan shook his head.
“Your old lady friend and the lady cop and the arson team from off-Island have been at the scene all morning. Where were you last night?”
“On my boat.”
“In Menemsha?”
Dojan nodded.
“I suppose you were tied up on a town mooring?”
“Anchored.”
“Convenient, Dojan. No one to check on you.”
“I had nothing to do with a fire.”
Peter changed the subject. “And you’re doing all you can to get the casino permit at the federal level. Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I suppose.”
Dojan was silent.
“More white men controlling our lives,” Peter said.
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