Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “Sure. Say, Will—you did us proud out there yesterday.”

  “Thank you, sir. You saw the game?”

  “Reminded me of Paul’s better days.” Mr. Winslow was a large, affable man with commensurate appetites; he crunched an entire biscotti into his mouth while Will waited politely, tray extended. From the expression of false jollity on the man’s face, Will knew the conversation wasn’t over.

  “Listen, son,” Winslow said confidentially, “have you seen Paul lately?”

  “Yeah. He was at the game, too. And he was having breakfast at Congdon’s this morning. I said …hello.”

  “How’d he seem to you?” The man kept his eyes on the tray, as though debating among its offerings.

  Will stiffened slightly and averted his eyes. “Okay, I guess.”

  Jack Winslow looked at him then. “Is he still using drugs?”

  “You’d better ask Paul about that, sir. I really wouldn’t know.”

  “Then I assume he still is.” Jack shook his head, and Will could feel the frustrated rage. “Ever since his mother and I divorced—no, make that ever since I remarried, he’s been like a stranger. When I think of how Marion loved that boy—hell, how much I love him—I could shake every bone in his body.”

  “It can be hard getting used to a new parent,” Will said carefully.

  “You seem to have managed it pretty well!”

  “But my father died.” Will shifted the platter from his right hand to his left, wondering why he was saying all this to Jack Winslow. “Death is different. It feels less like it’s your fault.”

  Jack Winslow’s face froze. “You think that’s what Paul feels? That we divorced because of him?”

  “I have no idea what Paul feels. We’re not that good friends. But he’s sure trying to punish somebody. Maybe it’s you—or maybe it’s himself.”

  “Maybe it’s both.”

  Will did not reply. He had seen Winslow’s new wife; she was twenty years younger than Paul’s mother, and she was expecting her first child. What nineteen-year-old boy wouldn’t resent the new family he had never chosen, and grieve for the one he had lost? Will understood it completely. His own situation was utterly different.

  “Paul needs friends, son,” Jack Winslow said haltingly. “Good friends. People he can count on when things are tough.”

  Since he can no longer count on his parents, Will thought. But he only said, “He probably needs a father more.” And then flushed at his own rudeness.

  For a moment, Jack said nothing, his jaws working at the hard biscotti. “I suppose I deserve that. I thought kicking him out of the house might knock some sense into him. But it may only have hurt him more. First his mother leaves, and then I abandon him….” Winslow’s eyes met Will’s, with almost a sense of shock, as though he had forgotten the boy’s presence. Then his expression changed, and he clapped Will lightly on the back. “Get going with those cookies, son, before I eat the whole tray.”

  “Yes, sir. Enjoy the party.”

  By the time Will worked his way around the room to his mother’s chair by the fire, it was empty. Merry Folger, however, was sitting there with her gaze bent on the flames. She looked up and smiled.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  “Hi, Mere. Want a biscotti?” He thrust the tray toward her like a blocking tackle, hoping food would deflect her attention from the needle he’d found on/the harbor bottom.

  “Biscotti. Sure. I’ve eaten everything else in the house.” She chose one and turned it in her hands, studying the layer of chocolate and cookie as though it might tell her fortune. “Thanks, by the way, for saving that plastic bag.”

  Will swallowed hard. Jorie’s face, and the memory of the lie he had told her, rose painfully in his mind. “No problem. Did you … find anything important?”

  “Could be. I’ll let you know if I can.” Merry studied his face. “You look spooked, Will. What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” she mused, “I’ve said that myself on occasion. Sometimes I even mean it. Other times, I’m just avoiding a topic.”

  He shrugged and looked away in embarrassment. “I meant, nothing to do with you, Merry. Or that bag.”

  “Oh. Girl trouble?”

  Will gave up and perched on the arm of Tess’s empty chair. “Sometimes I think it’s girl trouble. Other times I think it’s just life.”

  “That’s another thing I’ve often said. This wouldn’t happen to be the girl with the big doe eyes and the jeans torn out at the knee?”

  Surprised, Will nodded.

  “Caught you staring at her yesterday. She in your class?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But she’s already taken by Paul Winslow.”

  “How do you know Paul?”

  “He did some dredging for us yesterday. In the boat basin.”

  “Paul?! With the police?!”

  “I know,” Merry smiled sardonically. “It’s not often a junkie will get within five feet of a uniform, much less volunteer for the job. But he knew Jay Santorski.”

  “The dead scalloper.” Will’s mind was reeling. “You know about Paul?”

  “I know what the marks on his forearm mean. He wasn’t wearing a jacket yesterday, despite the freezing rain. I guess dredging is warm work.”

  “Not that warm,” Will said.

  “How do you know Paul?”

  “He was a year ahead of me in school.”

  “And his girlfriend?”

  “I’m not sure Jorie’s his girlfriend anymore.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. If you care about her, keep her out of Paul’s clutches. It’s a hard road back from where he’s gone.”

  “Paul used to be a good guy,” Will protested. “He just needs help right now.”

  Merry looked at him searchingly. “Do you know where he gets his drugs, Will?”

  “No. And I don’t want to.” But perhaps, he thought privately, he ought to find out.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Margot lay in bed alone and waited for the sound of fog horns that never came.

  It was a moonlit night, and no blinds fell across her window. Far below and beyond it, crashing on the deserted Sconset beach, was a sea the color of mourning. Sankaty Light’s sweeping beam swept across its face, offering terrifying glimpses of waves caught in the act of curling. The sea was never still, never slept. It teemed with untold monsters. There were more of them at night.

  Since sleep was denied her, she wished for the comfort of fog—its formless blanketing death. Both fog and sleep were lost somewhere over the Atlantic. Grief tore at Margot ‘s entrails, famished and unrequited.

  Why had Owen told her to go away? He must know that she was waiting for Katia and Jay. Margot had seen the open wound of love in Owen’s face when he pleaded with her that afternoon. Or perhaps it was a hint of hate. He had always been jealous of Jay. Was that why he insisted Jay’s arm was punctured by needles? To deepen her present misery?

  She had seen Jay the night he died. There were no marks on his arm. Jay had never used heroin. He thought of it as death.

  Margot pushed herself out of bed and felt her way downstairs toward the kitchen phone. She still knew Jay’s number by heart.

  Sue Morningstar, groggy with sleep and her own bottomless grief, answered on the fifth ring. It was just as Margot was beginning to speak that something—the rising wind? an unquiet ghost?—blew open the front door.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A layer of torn cloud partly screened the face of the moon when the last ferry rounded the end of Brant Point, but the light was strong enough to trace a wavering path across the calm seas of the harbor. Peter Mason stood in the bow in the darkness, following the path with his eyes. The gale winds had dropped, but the air was raw. Tomorrow would probably bring fog.

  The ferry slid past the Easy Street Basin and the pilings of Old North Wharf. A moored dory bearing a blazing Christmas tree amidships bobbed gently in the steamship’s wake. An overwhelmin
g sensation of coming home filled Peter’s soul, buoyed him on its current, and made him grip the ferry rail with quiet happiness. Everything he had ever loved was in this small place.

  A phrase of a late Beethoven quartet jangled in his brain—much as the Emerson String Quartet might have played it. Or was playing it, even now, to a pair of empty seats in the center of Carnegie Hall’s fifth row.

  A klaxon sounded; the loudspeaker boomed. Vehicle drivers were ordered to the lower cargo decks. Peter gave a last look at the moon’s path, felt the ferry hull lurch against its obdurate berth. Then he bid farewell to the darkness and went in search of his car.

  He was not an unforgiving man, nor yet an obtuse one. He understood the importance of Merry’s work, to herself and the people she served. He recognized the burden under which she had labored for much of the past year, and with a lover’s peculiar intimacy he knew the demons that haunted her. But if Peter was capable of insight and forbearance, he was nonetheless a man prey to easy wounding; he had been betrayed in love before. As he watched Merry purposefully packing her things in Greenwich, and enduring the silent drive to La Guardia Airport, he had begun to wonder whether he was too kind, too forbearing, and in the end supportive to his own detriment. The women he loved had a tendency to take Peter Mason entirely for granted.

  So he did not call Merry Folger from the Steamship Authority terminal. He merely drove his car down the boat ramp, through town, and straight out Orange Street, ignoring the turning into Fair and her above-the-garage domain. He did not allow himself to question his behavior as he shot out of the Rotary toward Polpis, and the hundred acres of Mason Farms, where the cranberry vines lay frozen and colorless under the December sky. The effort it cost him to thrust Merry firmly out of his mind was evident in the frown that creased his brow, and the unblinking nature of his gaze as he stared at the floodlit road beyond his headlights. For what, then, had he come home?

  He told himself that there was no purpose to spending a week alone in New York. That he had work to do, although this was the time of year when his farm demanded the least attention. In fact, he had spent all of six hours in Manhattan, and came away dazed by traffic and the great city’s magnificent decay. He had been too long an island-dweller; the urban landscape hurt his eyes. He longed for isolation, for silence pierced by birds, for an inner peace made manifest in the singular curl of a wave.

  He did not come home for Merry.

  If anything, he came home to deny himself her presence. In this he thought to find the answer to the loneliness he carried around like a bit of shrapnel. It had occurred to Peter that he needed Merry too much. It might even be this considerable need that was stifling her spirit, making her balk at marriage and the endless toll of years. If Peter feared anything, it was that he might lose Merry forever. So he decided to leave her first.

  There was a danger in dependency upon any one human being; it laid the soul open to abuse. He would pull back. He would let go. And in this distance, he would find his strength.

  It was just possible that she would notice.

  Peter wanted Merry to comprehend how much he mattered. He wanted her to die for lack of him.

  As an impulse—as an operative plan—it was the very reverse of his usual supportive self. It appealed to his love of discipline, his self-sufficient ideal. Both had kept him a relative recluse on Nantucket for the decade before he had met Meredith Folger. Returning to them now was like another sort of homecoming. He was safest when he was alone.

  And as he turned into the hummocked terrain of the moors, nothing above but the stars thrown like so much salt across the sky, Peter smiled.

  There was no one to greet him when he pulled up before the old house. He had given his housekeeper, Rebecca, the week off. Rafe had driven out daily to tend the sheep and feed the dog, who barked frantically as Peter shoved open the front door. He spent a moment fondling Ney’s ears, while the dog’s tail thumped rhythmically against a bench that stood in the hall; and Peter noticed, as always when he saw Ney again after a brief absence, that the dog was growing old. The knowledge twisted in his heart.

  He stooped to pick up his mail, and read through it as he walked toward the kitchen. Bills; credit card offers; contribution requests from Princeton (so necessary at the end of the year); and a postcard from his friend Sky Tate-Jackson, showing a statue of Buddha reclining. Sky had been traveling with his wife through Asia for four months now, and the postcards came like fragmentary thoughts, long after their posting in obscure places, full of talk about weather and vistas that Sky had already forgotten. The impulse to write while on vacation, Peter thought, had much more to do with the person traveling than the person to whom he wrote. Postcards were the wanderer’s last tie to a life he no longer believed existed—and a threat that he might someday return.

  He read the words on the back of the Buddha, a faint smile flickering over his lips, and then turned to a long white envelope with a preprinted label and no return address. Another solicitation for money, he thought; and he was not disappointed.

  Dear Friend of the Head of the Harbor, it began. A recent study released by an interdisciplinary team of noted Woods Hole scientists has found an appallingly high level of nitrogen in the waters of Nantucket Harbor.

  It was high, Peter argued mentally, but not appallingly so. Nothing like the problem in Chesapeake Bay or Long Island Sound, where Georgiana and her children sailed all summer. He had read a copy of the Woods Hole report. He had felt obliged to do so—he fertilized his cranberries several times a year, and the runoff of nitrogen through his bog system and its related wetlands probably fed straight into the harbor.

  Nitrogen is contributing to the decline of shellfish and plant life throughout the Head of the Harbor. The barrier shore of Coatue, prized by islander and seasonal resident alike for its unspoiled beauty, is severely affected. But measures can be taken to control the destructive impact of nitrogen in our waters. Won’t you join with us now, before Nantucket’s island beauty is silenced forever?

  Since when were scallops and eelgrass vocal, Peter wondered irritably, and glanced up at the letterhead for the name of the person who had so mangled his mother tongue.

  Under the rubric “Board of Directors” he found several names he recognized. Owen Harley he knew through Rafe. And then there was Mac McIntyre, one of Nantucket’s selectmen, and Sally Forsyte, who owned a local plant nursery. That was interesting; they’d won over a landscape designer to the cause of nonfertilization. It was only natural, he supposed, that they would try to recruit Peter Mason, one of the island’s commercial growers. He scanned to the end of the list, then backtracked to a name that seemed familiar.

  Jay Santorski.

  Then words tugged at his brain, but no face obligingly surfaced. Jay Santorski. How did he know that name?

  And then it came to him—the scalloper who had ruined his vacation. Peter frowned, and looked back at the list.

  Below Santorski was another name Peter knew.

  Hannah Moore.

  It seemed for an instant that his heart stopped, and then recommenced beating with a painful jerk. Hannah Moore. He hadn’t thought of her in years. A curious expression came over his face—a look of caution and faint excitement, as though he saw temptation clearly and debated its purpose. If Hannah Moore was crusading for the environment with Merry’s dead scalloper, Peter might put their long-dead acquaintance to some practical use.

  And he might teach Merry a lesson into the bargain.

  He read through the petition to its closing plea for funds, then refolded it carefully and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket.

  He knew he’d come home for a reason.

  • • •

  The telephone jerked Merry out of an abyss of sleep. She groped for the receiver groggily—aware, despite the haze of interrupted dreams, of the quickening of her heart. It could only be Peter, fresh from Carnegie Hall.

  “Detective Folger?”

  A woman’s voice. Merry’s heart
came down to earth.

  “Speaking,” she muttered, and dragged a hand through her hair.

  “It’s Sue Morningstar. I’m sorry to call so late—”

  “That’s okay.” Merry glanced at her bedside clock, and read a quarter past midnight. She must sound like she’d walked out of a tomb. “What is it, Sue?”

  “Margot St. John just called me.”

  “Morgot called you?”

  “Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it? I guess I’m the person she thinks of most when she thinks of Jay. She’d heard about the drug overdose thing.”

  Merry sat up. “From whom?”

  “Owen Harley. He told her Jay’s arm had needle marks on it. When it came out of the harbor. Did you deliberately lie to me yesterday, Detective?”

  “I’d call it more of an omission,” Merry said reasonably. “Some things, believe it or not, are confidential in an investigation.”

  “Except when you’re talking to Harley.” Sue didn’t attempt to hide her bitterness.

  “Harley didn’t have a reporter’s notebook or a story deadline when I interviewed him. What else did Margot say?”

  “She insisted Jay had never shot heroin. That he never had needle marks on his arm.”

  “She didn’t see him the night he died,” Merry objected. “Two people have told me she was practicing all evening with Owen Harley’s swing band. Did she say anything else?”

  “I didn’t talk to her long. Someone came in and she had to hang up.”

  A small trill of apprehension ran along Merry’s spine. “Roommate?”

  “She doesn’t have one—she’s house-sitting for an off-islander. But her friends drop by at all hours.”

  “I see.”

  “Detective—I’m worried about Margot. I know that’s hard to believe, given how much I dislike her. But she sounded … afraid. Spooky, in fact.”

  “Spooky?”

  “She said someone called Katia had come for Jay, and they would both be back for her soon.”

  Again, the insistent trill. “Was she as high as a kite?” Merry asked sharply.