Second Sight

by Philip R. Craig

Frank had to stare for a moment before he got his hello out.

  Evangeline gave him her hand. “Hi,” she said. “I always like to stay on good terms with my soundmen.”

  Frank retrieved his hand and I had the impression that he was never going to wash it again.

  “Frank’s local talent,” said Harry. “Knows his stuff and everybody on the island, so something breaks or we need something, he knows how to get it in a rush. Don’t have to fly it in from the city.”

  “A good man to have.” She smiled at Frank, who seemed hypnotized. Then she looked out the window. “I came by to check out the sound system. I’m pretty damn picky, as you know. You want to go over it with me?”

  “Sure. You’re gonna like what we’re doing. No expenses being spared. There’s a lot of big money behind this show, and whatever I’ve asked for I’ve got, no questions asked. Right, Frank?”

  “Right,” said Frank, who had gotten most of his voice back.

  Harry and Evangeline stepped out of the van and Evangeline introduced us. “You in the business?” he asked.

  “No. I’m a fisherman.”

  “He’s my driver,” said Evangeline, putting on her glasses.

  “You should have professional security,” said Harry, frowning. “It’s not good for you to be wandering around without a pro.”

  “I have a pro at home looking after Janie. J.W.’s my security outside the house.”

  “Is he, now?” Harry looked at me thoughtfully, then nodded. “Well, lemme show you what we have.” And apparently he did that, although the language was Navajo to me. Talking steadily, he gestured at the contents of the van first, then led her, with me following, to the stage and around the edges of the field, where speakers had already been installed and others soon would be.

  When he was through, Evangeline smiled. “Looks great, Harry. I knew it would be, with you running things, but you know me; I like to see for myself. When I was a kid I had enough sound system fuckups to last me for my whole career.”

  “That’s what happens when you’re starting out, kid, but it won’t be happening here. This is the best stuff I’ve ever hooked up to.”

  “There’s sure a lot of it.”

  “Most I’ve ever seen for one show. Frank’s been worth his weight in gold. Don’t know if I could have done it without him. Knows these speaker systems better than I do and set up all of them by himself. When I retire you better hire him. You could do a lot worse.”

  “You’ll never retire, Harry. Say, I want to see Ogden Warner. You seen him around?”

  He frowned. “I thought you and Ogden were on the outs. Ever since that fuss with—”

  She interrupted. “That was personal. This is business. He’s directing this show and I want to talk to him.”

  “Okay, Vangie, if you want him you’ll find him over yonder in that RV. He’s made one end of it into his office. But I warn you: He works at his desk this time of day, and he doesn’t like being interrupted.”

  “Too bad. He give you any grief on this job?”

  Harry scowled then grinned. “Does he ever not give people grief? He took one look at Frank and told me to get rid of him. Wouldn’t say why, of course. I’ve seen him do that before: ax somebody he didn’t even know just to prove he’s boss. But he can’t have a show without sound, and I’m the best there is, so I told him I did my own hiring and if he didn’t like it I was on my way home. He didn’t like that at all, but he walked off.”

  “Good for you, Harry. Ogden can be a real pain in the ass, all right, but he’s like you: the best in the business.”

  “Yer right, kid, but don’t let him pull any fast ones on you.”

  “That’s why I want to see him. To make sure he doesn’t. I want my act done the way I want it, and I’m not interested in Ogden’s opinion. If you’re in touch with Scott, give him my regards and tell him to get well soon. Come on, J.W., let’s continue your musical education.”

  I followed her to an RV parked near the edge of the field. Beyond it, rising above the trees, I could see the top of what looked like a fair-size hotel. I presumed it was Peter Fredericks’s famous house. My own house was just barely too big to fit inside one of its chimneys.

  Evangeline knocked on the rear door of the RV. There was no response. She didn’t hesitate but pushed open the door and went in. I followed.

  She stopped just inside and shook her head as she looked at a man seated in a swivel chair, his upper body lying motionless on a desk fronting the chair.

  “So that’s the kind of work you do at your desk, eh? How can you sleep like that when there’s so much to do and all this commotion outside? Hey, Ogden, wake up! Time to go to work!”

  But Ogden didn’t wake up.

  I looked at him, then put my hands on Evangeline’s shoulders.

  “Stay right here,” I said.

  I went to Warner and put a finger on his throat. There was no pulse. His eyes were wide and empty. There was a bloody mark around his throat. I went back to Evangeline. She was staring at the man.

  “Go to Harry,” I said. “If there are any medics around, have him get them over here. Tell him to call the cops, too, and have them bring an ambulance. I think you’ll be needing a new director. This one is dead.” I kept my gaze level and my voice calm. “I’ll wait here until the cops come. Walk, do not run. No reason to get people excited ahead of time.”

  She never said a word. Instead, she nodded, went out the door, and walked toward the sound truck.

  Chapter Six

  Brady

  After I hung up with J.W., I called Julie, my secretary, at home and told her I was taking a few days off next week and she might as well do the same. She started to protest—we had clients to tend to, after all, court appearances to keep, hours to bill—but when I explained my mission for Mike and Neddie Doyle, she suddenly went silent.

  After a minute, I said, “Julie? You there?”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” she said. “You go find that girl and bring her home to those poor parents. Any idea how long you’ll be gone?”

  “No idea. Until I give up, I guess.”

  “Don’t you even think about giving up, Brady Coyne. You find that girl. I’ll clear the calendar for the week, and if it looks like you’ll need more time, you just let me know.”

  I hung up smiling. The only thing Julie considered more important than accruing billable hours and making money was nurturing parent-child relationships, although getting me married and settled down was high on her list of priorities. After several disappointments—Julie’s, not necessarily mine—she now had high hopes for Evie Banyon.

  Which reminded me: Evie would be arriving around seven for our regular Saturday-night sleepover. Usually we spent the weekends together. We never planned them. We let them evolve from our moods and the weather and whatever whim occurred to one of us. Just being together was the main point.

  Whatever we ended up doing, we always managed to find time to make love.

  My first thought was that Evie would be upset when I told her I had to drive down to Woods Hole and catch the ferry to the Vineyard early Sunday morning. Women depend on routines. They like their men to be predictable.

  My second thought was that I was projecting. Evie had taught me that I shouldn’t base my expectations of her on my experiences with other women. That was unfair to both of us. Evie was Evie, she kept telling me. She wasn’t Gloria or Alex or Terri or Sylvie or any of the other women I’d been involved with, and lumping them all together was the worst kind of stereotypical thinking.

  Well, we’d see how she reacted.

  I had a couple hours before she was due to arrive. So I tucked Christa’s photo in my shirt pocket, took the elevator down to the lobby, and headed up Commercial Street to the photocopy shop.

  I used the machine that made color copies. I set it for high magnification, and after a couple of experimental tries I was able to block out the foreground and background and Mike Doyle and completely fill the le
tter-size sheet of paper with Christa’s face and the upper half of her body. The original photo was well focused, and the enlargement came out sharp and clear. You could see that Christa had eyes the color of hot fudge and one slightly crooked incisor.

  I ran off fifty copies, paid with my credit card, tucked the copies into the transparent plastic envelope they gave me, and headed home.

  I still had an hour before Evie would arrive, so I threw a few days’ worth of casual clothes into my small duffel. Jeans, shorts, bathing suit, a few T-shirts and boxers and pairs of socks, a couple flannel shirts, a windbreaker, an extra pair of sneakers, my dop kit, and my dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, my regular bedtime reading.

  I also added my good Canon with the zoom lens, my bird-watching binoculars, and my little battery-powered tape recorder, just because it seemed to me that any sleuth, however amateur, should have some gadgets with him.

  I decided not to bring my fly-fishing gear. I wanted to travel light, and I figured that if J.W. and I ended up going fishing, I could use one of his surf-casting rods.

  I realized I had no idea how long I’d be staying on the Vineyard. Screw it. If I ran out of clean clothes, I’d use the Jacksons’ washing machine. If I needed something I didn’t have, I’d borrow it from J.W. or buy it down there.

  It took me about ten minutes to pack. I used to drive Gloria, my ex-wife, nuts when we were heading for a vacation. She’d spend weeks agonizing over what to bring, trying things on, rejecting them, buying new things and taking them back, packing and unpacking and repacking, and when she was done, she always moaned that she knew she’d forgotten something. Me, I just threw some stuff into a duffel, and when we got to where we were going, I made do with what I had.

  I left my bag beside the door, got a beer, and took it out onto my balcony overlooking the harbor, and I guess I dozed off with my feet up on the railing, because the next thing I knew Evie was kissing the back of my neck.

  I opened my eyes and she pressed her forehead against mine. “Hey, big guy,” she whispered in that husky voice that never failed to make me shiver.

  I kissed her mouth, and we held it for a while. Then she pulled away and sat beside me. She’d fetched two cold bottles of Sam Adams from my refrigerator, and we sat there for a few minutes, sipping beer and watching the airplanes swarm around Logan Airport across the harbor.

  “You running out on me?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re all packed and ready to go. What’s up?”

  I told her about Christa Doyle and about my meeting with Mike and Neddie and talking to Alyssa Romano. “So I gotta go to the Vineyard,” I said. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Early.”

  Evie was quiet for what seemed like a long time. Then she said, “Well, I’ll drive you to the ferry.”

  “Oh, hell, that’s not necessary,” I said. “I’ve got to get up early, and it’s a long drive. I can leave my car in one of the lots, take the shuttle bus. I have no idea how long I’ll be down there.”

  “You don’t get it,” she said. “I want to drive you. And I want to be there to pick you up when you come back. Do you understand?”

  “Me?” I laughed. “Understand women? Ho, ho. I thought you might be upset.”

  Evie blew out a breath. “There you go again, lumping us all together. I’m me, remember?”

  I turned and kissed her cheek. “Yes, you are. And that’s why I love you.”

  She stood up and held out her hands to me. “Come on, then. Prove it.”

  We had a late dinner at the Union Oyster House, and when we got back to my apartment, Evie picked up the envelope of photocopies that I’d left on the kitchen table. “Is this Christa?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Pretty girl. She looks all grown-up. I would’ve said she was twenty-two or twenty-three at least.”

  “She was sixteen in that photo. She’s eighteen now.”

  “She’s into body piercing in a big way,” Evie said. “Look.” She touched Christa’s ears. “Looks like at least half a dozen rings and studs in each ear. And look.” She put her finger on Christa’s belly button. “She’s got a stud here, too.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” I said. “It wasn’t apparent in the photo. It’s pretty clear in the enlargements, though.” I looked at Evie. “Do you see anything else?”

  She squinted at the picture. “You got a magnifying glass?”

  I went to my desk and fetched my round Sherlock Holmes magnifier for her. She held it over the photo. “I thought so,” she mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Look. Her necklace.”

  I took the glass. Christa was wearing a gold chain around her neck, and dangling from it on the outside of her T-shirt was a gold charm. It was a bent-over, more-or-less-human figure. It looked like he was playing a flute, and he had…

  “Is that what it looks like?” I said.

  Evie smiled. “Oh, yes. That is a penis. A very large, erect penis. This is Kokopelli, the wandering flute player, the trickster, the seducer with his bag of songs on his back. He’s a beloved pagan deity of fertility. Kind of a universal figure. You see him a lot in pictographs and glyphs on rocks and in caves in New Mexico and Arizona. He brings new life and joy wherever he goes.” She poked at the photo. “This guy is the real deal. Nowadays you’ll see a lot of Kokopellis without the giant dick.”

  “Do you know everything?” I said.

  She smiled. “I know a lot.”

  “So what would you say about a sixteen-year-old girl who wears one of these fellows around her neck?”

  Evie shook her head. “I wouldn’t try to read too much into it, Brady. Native American stuff is very popular nowadays. Kokopelli stands for love and music and happiness. He makes you smile, doesn’t he?”

  “Mainly he makes me feel inadequate,” I said.

  She wrapped her arms around my chest and wiggled her pelvis against me. “I think we’d better address that issue,” she said.

  We left my apartment on Lewis Wharf in Boston around eight-thirty in Evie’s Volkswagen Jetta, and at quarter of eleven on Sunday morning I was climbing the ramp onto the ferry that would take me to Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard.

  As I handed my ticket to the Steamship Authority guy, I noticed another man standing beside him. This other guy had a short, federal-issue haircut and a smoothly shaved face. He was wearing sunglasses and a white short-sleeved shirt and pressed khaki pants, and from behind those glasses he appeared to be scrutinizing the people coming aboard. He was holding a two-way radio.

  He ran his eyes over me. Hmm. A single man carrying a well-worn L.L. Bean duffel bag and an ancient briefcase.

  I gave him a smile, and his eyes slid away to the person behind me.

  Before September 11, I’d never been aware of security precautions on the ferry, although I’d always managed to time my visits with the Jacksons to avoid conflict with presidential vacations.

  I went up to the top deck. It was mobbed. Summer People. There were young couples with toddlers, middle-aged couples with dogs on leashes, college-aged kids in clusters. With the Celebration for Humanity just a week away, I figured the island would be even more of a zoo than it normally was in August. I’d been reading about this event for several months, thinking how the Vineyard would be number one on my list of places to avoid during the Celebration—and here I was, heading straight into the fray.

  I found a place at the ferry rail from which I could watch Woods Hole on Cape Cod grow small behind us and the green mound in the ocean that was Martha’s Vineyard grow larger. The ferry ride took less than an hour, but it always felt like traveling to a foreign country—which was probably why islanders like J.W. and Zee always distinguished the Vineyard from the mainland, which they called “America.”

  We’d been chugging across the Vineyard Sound for about fifteen minutes when someone touched my shoulder. I turned. It was the guy in the sunglasses who’d been giving passengers the once-over as we climbed aboard.
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  “May I ask your business on the Vineyard, sir?” he said.

  “Is this a random check,” I said, “or do I appear unduly suspicious?”

  “Your business, sir?” he repeated without a smile.

  “It’s because I’m alone, isn’t it?”

  “Random,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  He frowned for an instant, then dug into his pocket and showed me a card with his picture on it. Massachusetts State Police. Sergeant Robert Lamm.

  I nodded. “I’m looking for a girl.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  I opened my briefcase, took out one of the copies of Christa’s photograph, and handed it to him. “You’re a trained observer,” I said. “Do you remember seeing her?”

  He glanced at the picture. “No.” He handed it back to me.

  “Would you keep it?” I said. “If you see her, call me? I’ll give you a number where—”

  “No,” he repeated. And then he moved away from me and disappeared in the crowd.

  Oh, well.

  The ferryboat docked at the wharf on Vineyard Haven at quarter of twelve. It took me ten minutes to shuffle down the stairs from the top deck to the ramp, and when I got to the bottom the state cop with the sunglasses was there, watching us all get off.

  As I started to move past him, he gripped my arm and pulled me aside. A wisecrack came to my tongue, but I swallowed it. These security guys were never noted for their sense of humor. So I said, “What’s up?”

  “Why don’t you let me have that picture,” he said.

  “You’ll keep an eye out for her?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a daughter.”

  I took out one of the photocopies and wrote my name and the Jacksons’ phone number on the back of it. “Her name is Christa Doyle,” I said. “The photo is two years old. She’s eighteen now.”

  “My daughter’s six,” the guy said. “I can’t imagine losing her.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  He nodded, and already his eyes had shifted to the crowds that were coming down the ramp from the ferry.