INDIAN PIPES

by Cynthia Riggs

  “They do that. Change.”

  “You went there this morning?” Linda asked brightly, switching the subject.

  Victoria nodded. “There’s not much left.”

  “Is the barn still standing?”

  “Yes. The fire was confined to the house. All that’s left is the chimney, charred wood, and bundles of papers.”

  “Was that all?” Linda asked, eyes wide over the rim of her cup. “Everything gone?”

  “They found mattress springs, door hinges, the kitchen stove, non- burnables. Also, they found the charred remains of his computer.”

  “Was the computer salvageable?”

  “I would guess not, but I don’t know much about computers. The outside was burned and the plastic fittings on back were melted.”

  “My uncle wrote me notes at Christmas. Then when he got the computer, he’d e-mail practically every week. He used it for everything, correspondence, records, bills.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I suppose it had a copy of his will on it?”

  Victoria said nothing.

  “Did the police take it?”

  Victoria held the teapot over Linda’s cup. “Would you like more tea?”

  “Thank you. Did…”

  Victoria stood suddenly. She didn’t want to discuss the computer. Nor did she want to discuss Burkhardt’s will. As if she had remembered something, she said, “I’ve got to make a phone call. I’ll be right back.” She went into the dining room and dialed Howland. She knew he hadn’t had time to get home yet, but she wanted to stall long enough to think. She waited until his answering machine came on, said the first thing she could think of into the phone, and hung up.

  She returned to Linda. “No answer. I’ll try later.”

  “Did they find anything else at my uncle’s?” Linda asked. “Evidence of arson or something?”

  Victoria toyed with her cup. “I’m afraid they did find something.”

  “Oh? What did they find?”

  “The remains of a body.”

  The color suddenly washed out of Linda’s face, like a shade pulled down. She turned ash-gray. “Someone died in the fire? That’s…that’s horrible. That’s awful.” She stood up, knocked over her teacup, which skidded across the table, fell to the floor, and broke. She set both hands flat on the table and hung her head down.

  CHAPTER 21

  Victoria, astonished, thought that Linda might faint. She had been so cool about her uncle’s death and the fire. She claimed she had gone shopping all day, and certainly she had brought back enough plastic bags with labels from fancy stores. Victoria started to get up. She would pour some ammonia on a damp facecloth and hold it under Linda’s nose, that was it.

  “Who was it?” Linda said softly, “Do they know?”

  Victoria sat down again and handed Linda a couple of paper napkins. “Before the police can identify the body, they have to check dental records.”

  Linda mopped at the sodden tablecloth. Her color had returned slightly, but her face was still gray.

  “When will they know?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. Don’t worry about the tablecloth. It was time for it to go into the wash anyway.”

  “The computer. I suppose it’s mine now?”

  “Did your uncle leave his property to you?”

  “He said he was going to.”

  “Someone has to find his will.”

  “The property is mine now.”

  Victoria half-closed her eyes. “I don’t believe anyone knows, at this time, whether he willed it to you or to your sister or to both of you.” Victoria took the soggy napkins and dropped them into the trash. McCavity, who was curled up in the wastebasket, stuck his head up and yowled.

  “I’m sorry, Cavvy, I didn’t see you,” Victoria said to the cat. She looked back at Linda. “Or perhaps he left the property to a third party.”

  “He left it to me. I know he left it to me.”

  “I can’t help you.” Victoria brushed crumbs off the tablecloth into her hand and dropped them in her saucer. “You should go to your uncle’s place to see what’s left of it. There may be some small thing you can salvage.”

  “I don’t want to see what’s left of the house.” Linda hid her face in her hands.

  Victoria gazed at her.

  “I’m glad it’s gone,” Linda said.

  “What happened to make you feel this way?”

  Linda wrapped her hands around her stomach and rocked back and forth in her chair. “I’m sorry I broke your cup, Mrs. Trumbull. It was a lovely old cup.”

  “It was just a cup. You were about to tell me something.”

  “Nothing.” Linda stood up. “Nothing at all.”

  A chickadee landed on the bird feeder, snatched a seed, and flitted off.

  “Where’s Elizabeth?” Linda asked abruptly.

  “She’s still at work. She has a dinner and theater date tonight, and will probably be home late.”

  “I wonder what happened to Uncle Jube’s computer.” Linda turned to watch a finch that had landed on the feeder. The feeder swung gently.

  “Do you have plans for this evening?” Victoria asked.

  “I was going to visit someone I know. Maybe I’ll go to my uncle’s before it gets dark. I probably ought to look at the old place. I’ll pick up a sandwich somewhere.” She cleared the remains of the tea things from the table. “I’m sorry about your cup. I’ll see if I can find one like it in an antique shop.”

  “Please, don’t worry about the cup.”

  “Will you be okay here by yourself? I didn’t even think.”

  “Of course,” Victoria said.

  Victoria fed McCavity and made herself an omelet. She worked on the sestina she had started earlier while she nibbled at the omelet. McCavity hopped up into her lap. When she finished supper, she cleared her dishes and put away the leftover food. She was tired. She let McCavity out, and went to bed early. Her bedroom was the small west room on the second floor. She read for a while before she turned out her light. Her usual bedtime was close to midnight. It wasn’t nine o’clock yet. She seldom had trouble falling asleep, no matter when she went to bed, but tonight she felt restless. Her legs itched. Scratching didn’t help. The familiar creaks and moans of her old house seemed different somehow.

  She thought about Elizabeth and her date, the reporter from the Cape Cod paper, a nice young man. She had a brief twinge, not of envy, but of wishing they’d invited her to go to the play with them. She loved theater. As a girl, she’d dreamed of becoming an actress. Crickets chirped in the west meadow. She heard the eerie, almost human, cry of an owl. The night wind whispered through the small screen that held the window open. She hadn’t been troubled by mosquitoes this year. The summer had been quite dry, and her garden had suffered. She hadn’t even felt like weeding, it had been so dry. Something banged downstairs, and she tried to identify what might have caused the noise. A shutter thumping against the front of the house? There didn’t seem to be enough wind for that. One of the kitchen doors slamming? She tried to think which one it might be. Each had its own sound.

  She saw, for the first time, a strange light on the ceiling, almost the shape of a tiny footprint. Was there a light on in the attic that was shining into the room? How could it, unless there was a hole in the ceiling? And a light on in the attic. Maybe it was a reflected streetlight. But the closest streetlight was at the firehouse a half mile away. Then she realized with relief—and realized that it had worried her— that the thing on the ceiling was a plastic phosphorescent footprint that her great-grandson had stuck up there when he stayed in her room earlier this summer. She laughed out loud.

  She heard the banging noise again. What was causing that? She put her hand up to her neck where she felt something pressing against her. It was the shell necklace Bernice Minnowfish had put around her neck, and she’d forgotten all about it. She started to take it off and then decided not to. She rubbed the itch on her legs. Perhaps she should get up and put
lotion on them. Her skin was probably dry. Maybe if she took an aspirin the itch would go away. That meant getting up and going downstairs, and that seemed like too much trouble. If she went downstairs, she could heat up a glass of milk. Then she probably wouldn’t need to take an aspirin, and she could get the hand lotion from the bathroom. She needed to use the toilet, anyway. She could probably last until morning, but that was another reason for going downstairs. While she was downstairs, she would put the necklace in the box she kept for great-grandchildren’s play jewels. She heard the banging noise again, and she swung her feet out of bed. She would find out what that noise was.

  “Come in and meet my grandmother, Chuck. She’ll want to hear all about the play.” Elizabeth and her date had returned around eleven.

  “Is she still up?” Chuck looked around the brightly lighted kitchen. “I don’t want to disturb her.”

  “She doesn’t usually go to bed until late,” Elizabeth said. “She wouldn’t leave all these lights on. She must be upstairs. You’re welcome to look around.” Elizabeth took the stairs two at a time. “Gram? It’s me. I’m home.”

  There was no answer.

  Elizabeth knocked on the side of the open door to her grandmother’s room and went in. The light on the table next to the bed was on, and the bedclothes were thrown back as if her grandmother had been in bed. Her book was open and facedown on the table. Her clothes, the ones Elizabeth remembered seeing her wear today, were draped over the back of the rocking chair in her bedroom. Elizabeth’s stomach had an awful prickling feeling.

  “Grammy!”

  She went to the door of the upstairs bathroom. No one there. She went from room to room. The two front bedrooms, the Indian room, the small room over the kitchen. She turned on the light at the foot of the attic stairs and went up, brushing cobwebs out of her way.

  “Grammy?”

  She pounded down the attic stairs, down the front stairs. Chuck looked up from examining her grandfather’s war medals.

  “Find her?”

  “Maybe she had an attack of some kind. Maybe she fell. I should never have left her alone. I keep forgetting how old she is. I keep thinking she’s my age, and she’s in her nineties, for Pete’s sake.”

  While she talked, Elizabeth moved from the library, where they’d been earlier today, to the front parlor, to the small bedroom off the dining room. She checked the kitchen again, opened each of the six doors. She looked in the cookroom, the bathroom off the cookroom. The light was on in the bathroom, and the door to the medicine cabinet over the toilet was open.

  “We should have asked her to go with us. Where could she be? She’s never sick. Why was the medicine cabinet open—did she fall and hurt herself? Did she have to go to the hospital?”

  Chuck said nothing.

  Elizabeth went into the woodshed. “Gram, are you okay?” She came back into the kitchen, and, with a sob, sat down on one of the gray-painted kitchen chairs.

  “Is there someone you can call?” Chuck stood over her.

  “Howland.” She got to her feet. “I’ll call him first. He’ll know what to do.” She dialed the phone on the buffet, spoke into it, and hung up. “He said he’d be here in ten minutes. He told me to call the police chief.”

  Casey was there in the Bronco within two minutes.

  “Dojan warned me,” Casey said. “I didn’t listen.”

  Together, Casey, Elizabeth, and Chuck went through the house from attic to woodshed. They opened the cellar bulkhead doors and went down the stone steps into the cold musty interior. Nothing. The motor on the old freezer hummed. The food in it must be twenty years old, Elizabeth thought. She’d never opened it. The cobwebs had not been disturbed. They checked the small cellar on the other side of the house, the one that had the water heater and furnace. Nothing. Casey called Junior Norton, who arrived before Howland, and Casey, Junior, Chuck, and Elizabeth fanned out, searching outdoors. Under the lilac brushes. Around the Norway maples. The fishpond. The big old apple tree with branches that touched the ground. The grape arbor. Nothing. The young man who rented the garden shed next to the grape arbor was visiting his family in Maine. They opened the door to his shack and looked around. Nothing.

  Casey called the hospital. Doc Erickson had been on in the emergency room all evening and had not seen Victoria. He asked around anyway. Everybody knew Victoria, all the nurses, the volunteers, the doctors. She had not been admitted.

  Elizabeth was sobbing when Howland drove up.

  “Do you know how to get in touch with Dojan?” he asked Elizabeth. “We need him.”

  “I’ll call the Aquinnah police,” Junior said.

  “Where’s Linda?” Howland asked. “She was here earlier.”

  “I haven’t seen her all day,” mumbled Elizabeth.

  “Everybody sit down.” Casey took over. “We’ll think this through.” They went into the cookroom and sat around the pine table. Elizabeth recalled Victoria sitting here at the table this afternoon, writing her poetry. She saw an envelope on the table with a few lines penciled on it. She took a deep breath and let it out.

  “We’ll find her,” Casey said. “And when we do, I’m enrolling her in a police training course.” She slapped a notebook on the table. “She’s got to stop pretending she’s a cop. I should never have appointed her my deputy.” She turned to Howland. “What do you have to say?”

  Howland shook his head.

  “She would never go out without leaving a note,” Elizabeth said. “Not unless someone forced her.”

  “What are you thinking, Howland?” Casey asked. “Better tell us.”

  “Burkhardt’s killer may believe Victoria knows something,” Howland said. “Hiram may have guessed the killer’s identity and told Victoria.”

  “My grandmother didn’t know anything. I was with her when she saw Burkhardt on the cliff and when Hiram went down to him.”

  “Burkhardt’s dying word was ‘Sibyl,’ right?” said Howland.

  “His computer,” Casey said.

  “Is it possible that there’s another Sibyl, a person?” Howland looked from Elizabeth to Casey. Elizabeth shook her head. Casey looked blank.

  Junior’s radio crackled and he answered. It was the Aquinnah police chief.

  “You need Dojan?”

  “Right away,” said Junior.

  “Haven’t seen him all day. I’ll send Malachi in the cruiser, have him check Dojan’s boat.”

  “Roger,” said Junior. “Thanks, Chief.”

  “Has someone kidnapped her? Why? And what will they do with her?” Elizabeth ran her fingers through her hair, and pulled off the earrings she’d worn on her date. “Will they let her go when they find she knows nothing?”

  “Would she have set out on some errand on her own?” Chuck asked.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Her clothes are still upstairs. She wouldn’t have gone outside without proper clothes.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Elizabeth got up. “I’m making coffee.” She started to reach for the coffee grounds, but stopped and turned. “My grandmother almost never uses this overhead light. She doesn’t like it because it glares.”

  “The light was on?” Casey said.

  “The kitchen light and the bathroom light both. The medicine cabinet was open, too.”

  “Can you tell if anything is missing or out of place?”

  “I’ll check the bathroom.” Elizabeth left the coffee unmade. “There’s an aspirin bottle on the counter and a glass of water.”

  “Would that be Victoria’s?” Casey asked.

  “Aspirin is the only medicine she takes. She might have gone to bed early and come downstairs to get it.”

  Chuck took a notebook out of his inside coat pocket. “Someone may have been waiting for her downstairs.”

  “How would they anticipate that she would need an aspirin?” Elizabeth said.

  “They may have been searching for something and she surprised them.”

  “Oh, my God!” Elizabeth said
. “They’re looking for that computer. This is awful. Poor Gram. She must feel helpless!”

  “Helpless, my foot,” Casey said stoutly. “I feel sorry for any kidnapper who’d tangle with Victoria.”

  The Aquinnah police cruiser pulled into the driveway and turned around the circle, blue lights rotating. Malachi came into the kitchen.

  “Evening, Chief,” he said to Casey.

  “No sign of Dojan?” Casey said.

  He shook his head. “I checked everywhere he might be, his mother’s house, his cousin’s, Tribal Headquarters, the foot of the cliffs. I checked in Menemsha to see if he was on his boat, or on Obed’s fishing boat. Nowhere. He’s not in Menemsha. He’s not in Aquinnah. I left messages everywhere to contact Aquinnah police if he shows up.”

  “Dojan intended to guard Victoria,” said Howland. “She made a fuss, dismissed us. We left, since Linda was here.”

  “I don’t know Dojan, but I’ve heard of him,” Chuck said. “He’s unusual, from what I hear. Different.”

  Heads nodded.

  “There was a rumor that he’d been sent to Washington by the tribal council as some kind of punishment.”

  “Not exactly a rumor,” Howland mumbled.

  “Dojan wouldn’t have kidnapped her, would he?”

  “No. Certainly not. Not Dojan,” Howland said. “Unlikely.” He paused. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  By now, it was almost three in the morning. People in uniforms, in shorts and T-shirts, in theater-going clothes, crowded in and out of Victoria’s kitchen and cookroom. Elizabeth brewed pot after pot of coffee. The kitchen sink was full of coffee mugs. At one point, How- land got up, washed the mugs, and made fried egg sandwiches. Police radios crackled with static, squelched as calls came in.

  There were no reports of Victoria from any of the towns. Ferries had made their last runs before Victoria disappeared, and would not start again until early morning. Casey had called the Steamship Authority and directed them to inspect every car, van, truck that could possibly hide a person. Check the trunks, the truck bodies….

  The hunt for Dojan had yielded nothing. No one had seen his van since early afternoon. Junior had gone down the Tiah’s Cove Road starting around ten-thirty, waking people to ask if they had seen anything that might lead the police to Victoria.