“It isn’t always easy. I mean, Sallie was already devastated, what with her father’s condition. Then Ian dying…But Mrs. Drummond is a trouper. An amazing lady. She can beat the beejesus out of me at tennis. Even with the copper bracelet I wear to improve my serve.”
Alexander—at least at that moment—didn’t strike me as particularly bright, Woods Hole association or not. But at least he admitted his discomfort, slight though it was. That inspired me to risk my next question. “Sallie didn’t mind my not taking the things Ian had brought from St. Harold’s, did she? I mean, I took some books that belonged to Ian, spiritual books.”
“Oh, Sallie really appreciated your stopping by. She considers you like family.”
That was perfect. Now I could speak. Being Sallie’s fiancé, he’d be able to tell me her frank opinions. He didn’t seem to have the guile or eloquence to disguise them. “Some people say…” I was unable to meet his stare, unable to meet his eyes, so I looked instead at some tall bottles of vinegar with herbs like rotting water weeds inside them. “Some people say Duncan Drummond and my mother had a fling…and that I’m the result.”
Alexander paused then said, “Holy Toledo. That’s got to be tough for you, Mark. That’s got to be awkward as hell.”
Then I just kept speaking: “I just found out the day of Ian’s funeral. My mother’s been alcoholic for years. They met at this jazz club. In Boston, in the South End. They were intimate, as you say, just once. Or so she says. The Drummonds’ lawyer worked out some sort of settlement. Now…Mr. Drummond has dementia, as you know. So I’ll never know the truth. Know him or his side of the story…” I began to choke up, I couldn’t help it. I felt like a fool. “…Has Sallie ever mentioned any of this?” I managed to ask.
“No way.”
“Have any of them? Fulton? George? Janet?”
“Not a word. I knew Sallie’s dad had sown his oats.”
“Well, sometime I’d like to talk with him.”
“With your dad. Who wouldn’t? Gosh, Mark, my heart goes out to you.”
“Could you arrange it? On the QT?”
“His memory is just like a sieve, Mark, I’ve got to be honest. I’m not sure you’ll get much information.”
“Don’t mention it to Sallie or the rest of them. Not until I ask you. Okay?” I’d made a mistake, I thought, telling him. But at least he’d listened, he hadn’t dismissed my story, hadn’t laughed or cut me off. “I’m not after money. That’s the last thing I’m looking for.”
“You just want to be recognized. You want validation. Of who you are. Hey, family is everything, Mark.”
We’d been gone a while, and I was worrying that Mrs. Drummond might come wandering in. I didn’t have the energy or nerve to repeat my story to her.
I tried to be jaunty but failed. “Stay cool,” I told Alexander in the front hall. Knowing that was impossible in this heat.
Chapter Thirty-two
The Berkshires are different from the rest of Massachusetts; there’s a luxuriance to the growth there. The soil must be richer than near Boston or on Cape Cod, and sometimes it seems as though the Berkshires are a fragment of something further south that pushed itself north into New England: tobacco can be grown on the banks of the Connecticut River. There’s real forest here, too, great stretches of it darkening whole hillsides, whole valleys, and rivers that run wild, unencumbered by cisterns or culverts or dams. Some are deep and silver-gray, others flow shallow, rippling over stones beneath the occasional covered bridge.
St. Harold’s was on the outskirts of a mill town, Stark, which once manufactured corsets and Dr. Elias Bennett’s Miracle Elixir, a patent medicine alleged to cure everything from impotence to whooping cough. Both factories had closed by the time I was a student, of course, their smokestacks innocent of any crimes against the ozone layer, their cobblestone courtyards invaded by weeds.
Now, Stark seemed bleaker than its name or any of my memories. The heat there had a staleness, as though the valley had somehow trapped it. Potholes, veritable canyons with their own geology, punctured the main street. The drugstore, Butler’s, with the marble counter veined blue like Roquefort cheese, was closed. Inside, where they had mixed the best lime rickies in all of New England, was full of dust and broken furniture. The metal thermometer nailed by the entrance suggested I should “Drink Moxie” and reported it was 97 degrees.
My stop in Stark made me even more uneasy about visiting St. Harold’s. Schools, like constellations and the Lincoln Memorial, are supposed to outlast you. You’re not prepared for the demise of your school. It’s too total, like the collapse of an entire culture: Aztec Mexico, Imperial Russia.
So, braking at the entrance, I braced myself. The school’s wrought-iron gate, with its pretentious vines and berries, had been sanded and painted; not a lesion of rust was in sight, a good sign. The gate resembled that of a Newport mansion. Indeed, St. Harold’s occupied the grounds of Fayrlawne, an Italianate monstrosity thrown up by Stoddard T. Stark, the Corset King—whose factory dominated the local economy at a time when nearby Lenox was called “the inland Newport” and the Berkshires germinated mock palazzos and faux chateaux. Stark sold Fayrlawne after his wife died in an archery accident. After its founding in 1893, St. Harold’s had grown, engendering an abundance of classrooms and dormitories and the magnificent chapel, a scaled-down copy of Ely Cathedral here above the banks of Lake Chiccataubett.
The carved inscription on the gate remained intact: the school’s name, seal, and date of its founding in Latin. No guards or roadblocks deflected visitors.
In defiance of any ban, a built-in sprinkler system was drenching the green lawns with arcs of water. Indeed, water was puddling on the soccer field, creating miniature Okeefenokees, swamps that might yield egrets or alligators. In fact, animals, like people, were seeking refuge in cool nests, away from the heart-stopping heat.
The Stark mansion had served as the school’s administration building. I’d expected memories of my past to come crowding into my consciousness on its steps. But to me St. Harold’s was people, the rowdiness of the dormitory or the wonder and drudgery of the classroom. These deserted buildings were devoid of all that, sad as an empty funhouse.
I pulled at the brass knob on the door to the mansion, brilliant as a planet in the sunlight. The door was locked. Through a window, I could see a familiar Tudor table with bulbous legs, like an old man with swollen ankles. I banged on the door and rang the bell, getting no response.
I wandered through the various parking lots. Not a car was in sight, although the asphalt was new, freshly marked with white lines delineating the spaces. No handicapped parking was offered. Physically, the buildings had been improved: brick sandblasted clean, a tower’s clock revived, some urns and pediments and other ornamentation restored, but something essential, something deeper, was missing. The school’s soul had been hijacked.
My last destination was the chapel, built of Indiana limestone, with flying buttresses delicate as the bones of an extinct bird. Its exterior all but glowed; the moss had been dug from the gargoyles’ eyes, the oxidation scoured from the drainpipes.
Merely as a formality, I nudged the heavy door. To my surprise, it creaked aside on its Gothic hinges. Inside, I followed a cool, mosaic-floored corridor that led to the main chapel. The sound of my shoes echoed off the stone, and, for a moment, I stopped, swearing I detected something else—a bubbling, like a motor churning water. When I turned into the nave, the bubbling grew louder, and a sour smell, like something rotting, dominated the air.
In the center of the aisle, between the rows of carved pews facing each other as in college chapels at Oxford, gleaming in the light from the donated stained glass, stood three huge green tanks. A sound like an outboard motor churning water while docked rumbled inside them.
I couldn’t believe these things were here, in this space where we’d taken communion. The tanks were made of dark, firm plastic, six by ten feet, five feet deep. Their smell—a stench now, a ro
tting that assaulted your nostrils—became so strong I held my breath.
I climbed into the pews to peer over into the first tank. The water was roiling with a silvery mass, crowded with hundreds of fish. They seemed to cover the entire surface, like herring on a run, choking a stream with movement. Then, I noticed that most of the fish were not moving the water. Some submerged pump or motor was moving them. Most of the fish were dead—stiff, bloated, stinking.
Cupping my hand over my nose, I drew in a deep breath, again inhaling the stink of decay. Quickly, I peered into the two other tanks. Pumps or motors were running in them too.
“Who are you and why are you here?”
The voice made my skeleton jump inside my skin. Someone had followed me up the aisle, a woman about forty, with skin dark as cloves but with the long blond hair of a Lorelei on her rock in the Rhine. “Who are you and why are you here?” Her voice was clear, with the directness of a therapist. The lilt of her accent suggested she was from India, but that hair fought with the rest of her appearance; she seemed bizarre as the blue-skinned Hindu goddess Kali.
Something made me blurt the truth: “I’m Mark, from Cape Cod.”
A smile transformed her face. “Ah yes, of course. You haven’t earned your name yet. How are things in Truro?”
I hadn’t earned my name. Earned my Nordic name, I assumed. When I’d said I was from Cape Cod, meaning Provincetown, she’d thought I’d meant Truro, thought I was one of them.
I found something to say: “The Cape is having a terrible drought, like everywhere else.” Then I remembered the sprinklers on the lawns here, squandering water, dispersing it so freely it formed pools.
“Of course, there’s no drought here, here at the compound, thanks to the Master.” She gave a quick laugh, light as music. “M-I-T, Ph.D. The Master created an ingenious sprinkler system which taps Lake Chiccataubett. So we’re free from the watering ban.”
We were standing closest to the tank by the altar. From their niches on the chapel walls, narrow stone apostles glowered at the scene. The stench from the fish was overwhelming, yet she said nothing about it, nor did she bother to introduce herself. She might be some sort of leader in their world and assumed I knew who she was.
“Is the engineering proceeding on schedule?” she asked.
Was she testing me, or making conversation? She seemed accepting, even warm, but with a certain sense of formality. She was treating me with care, the way a non-native speaker treats the English language. I had no idea what “engineering” she’d referred to. Then her incongruous hair made me remember Jason and his crates of strawberry preserves for Scents of Being.
“The preserves are selling like mad.” I hesitated to link myself directly to him because he knew I wasn’t one of these people, and knew I was after something more than jam recipes.
“Jason was here the other day.” She giggled. “He’s adorable.” Then she bent low beside the tank and scooped something from a canister which she sprinkled across the surface of the tank, meal for the fish. “We use the dead fish for fertilizer,” she said, not seeming disturbed by the stench.
I was wondering if somehow I could learn if Ian had been here, if she knew Ian at all. Since he was an alumnus of the school, I tried to broach the subject of St. Harold’s. “This is a beautiful chapel.”
“It isn’t a chapel anymore. Remember, it was deconsecrated.”
“Wasn’t it a school at one time?” Sallie Drummond had told me Ian was involved with liquidating many of the school’s assets. Of course, Ian was a lawyer with an interest in real estate. Were his interests “out west” actually in western Massachusetts?
I marshaled all my acting skills, struggling to make the remark sound casual: “It still says St. Harold’s on the gate.”
She cast scoops of meal into the other stinking tanks.
“Do many nostalgic alumni drop by?”
She set down the scoop in a canister of meal, and then rubbed her hands together, brushing them clean. “There were some nasty people connected with that school, that St. Harold’s,” she said.
Was this insult to the chapel, to the school’s spiritual heart, a way of vanquishing the old purposes of this land? Or the twisted whim of an all-powerful leader.
She turned to leave.
Chapter Thirty-three
Back in Provincetown, I went straight to the police, finally ready to tell them everything. It was way beyond my scope as a private individual to solve this case, to bring anyone to justice.
“It’s all connected,” I told Sergeant Almeida.
He was sitting at a gray metal desk, eating a meatball submarine sandwich that was doing its best to drip over his hands onto the stack of paperwork in front of him. “Come again?”
“Those people in Truro, that pseudo-Scandinavian Manson Family, Ian’s murder, and maybe Chloe’s kidnapping. Who knows?”
“We know, more than you. That’s our business.”
“If you know so damn much, why haven’t you made any arrests or found Chloe?”
“Sit down.”
The chair was molded plastic, a little too low to the ground. “You don’t mind?” He produced his tape recorder and recited the date and time and names of the people present. Once again, the tape began turning.
Chloe’s picture was thumb-tacked on the wall, along with missing children from throughout America; some of them missing for years. I checked for a man matching Edward’s description of his assailant, his rapist, but found none.
“Where were you on the night of June fifteenth?” Almeida asked. “The night Ian Drummond was killed.”
“I have new information.”
“Just answer the question.”
“I told you, I’d been to Herring Cove that day. I spent most of the day at Herring Cove.”
“That day. Until what time?”
“Until a little after dark.”
“And you got there how?”
“Using my car.” They had obviously seen my car, late, in the Herring Cove parking lot. He was placing me at the scene of the crime, at the time Ian had died.
He smiled, not at me, but at a sheet of paper adjacent to the sandwich on his desk. “You have a dark green Volvo 240 sedan?” He reeled off the number of my license plate.
“Yes.”
“And that car was parked at the Herring Cove lot until at least ten on the night of June fifteenth? Correct?”
I nodded.
“One of my colleagues, Officer John Hammond, noted your car in the Herring Cove parking lot at ten-oh-eight on the night of June fifteenth. The car was empty, so, presumably you were still on the beach. You were on the beach, in fact, when Ian Drummond was killed.”
The air-conditioning in the station was inadequate, and the humidity seemed thicker than chowder. Sweat was darkening my polo shirt, turning the blue an incriminating indigo.
“The coroner estimated the time of Ian Drummond’s death as nine-fifteen on the night of June fifteenth, a time you—and your Volvo—were in the general vicinity.”
“I didn’t kill Ian!” I snapped.
His smile was one of suppressed satisfaction.
I was going to fill in some blanks. I didn’t kill Ian, the people from Truro did, I was thinking—not Clark, Edward’s schizophrenic brother; he was too fragile, they’d sent someone tougher, someone reliable. Of course Almeida’s questions suggested he had his doubts about blaming their John Doe for Ian’s death, for blaming him for anything beyond the slashings at the museum.
I forced myself to say it, I said it quickly, blurted it out, to make sure I couldn’t hesitate, couldn’t stop—“I saw Ian that day, I saw him twice. Once when he was alive, and once when he was dead.”
Almeida almost choked on his mouthful of sandwich and Sprite.
Some part of me felt back in command.
“You were enemies. You had a bust-up at Quahog, I saw you.”
“We kissed and made up. Literally.”
“Don’t get wise with me
. Go on.” Almeida checked the tape to make sure it was behaving.
So I told him what had happened that day at Herring Cove, my lingering at the beach until no one else was there, then Ian calling me to his hollow in the dunes. I told him about getting drunk on Ian’s bottle of vodka, about Ian apologizing for his bullying in the past, about our quick sex and his leaving, telling me, “Vaya con Díos.”
“Then what?”
“I swam for a while. Then I fell asleep on the beach. When I woke up, it was dark. I took the breakwater back to the shore road. I wanted to see the lights from town, for re-assurance. I was worried about bashers, about Christian Soldiers. I was scared to walk back along the beach in the dark.”
“What time did you leave the beach?”
“I’m not sure. But when I first saw Ian, saw his body…I thought it was someone fishing.”
“Fishing?”
“From a distance. People fish off the breakwater at night. Of course once I was close and saw his throat cut open.” The throat wound was a detail the media hadn’t reported.
Almeida stood. “You actually were there. You were smack-dab at the crime scene yet withheld this information! You withheld this information when we questioned you at your apartment! What kind of game are you playing, Mr. Comedian? If you think because I’m new here—”
“I’m not playing anyone! I came here voluntarily!”
He sat down then picked up the telephone. “C’mere, it’s important,” he said into the receiver. Seconds later DeRenzi rushed in, the skinny, sallow, detective who’d been with Almeida at my apartment. “Tell him,” said Almeida, “tell him what you just told me.”
My shirt was saturated with sweat. My bare arms felt glued to the Popisicle-orange chair. “I found Ian’s body on the breakwater. We’d had sex in the dunes, then I’d fallen asleep. I found him when I walked back to my car.”
“He came here on his own,” Almeida threw in.
“Did you plan to meet Ian?” DeRenzi asked. “Was this tryst prearranged?”
The Fisher Boy Page 23