On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery

by Sue Hallgarth

  The fourth summer Marjorie stayed in New York and Sabra Jane began a series of long conversations with Sallie Jacobus, who had been taking care of lodgers at Whale Cove for more than twenty years. Cobus, the islanders called her. Cobus, Coney, and Felix. People said the names as if they were one. Between 1900 and 1902, Sallie Jacobus and Sally Adams, two young graduates from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and Marie Felix, recently graduated from the Boston Cooking School, purchased twenty acres with a few outbuildings and immediately invited their friends to join them while they fixed the place up. Alice “Peter” Coney, a classmate of Sallie Jacobus, was first to take them up on the offer, and when Sally Adams decided to marry a young medical student, Coney bought her out.

  Each summer the number of friends who returned for the season increased. Cobus, Coney, and Felix bought adjacent cottages. They added bedrooms. They hired more kitchen help and enlarged the communal dining room in the main house until it served twenty-four at one sitting. Finally in 1926, several of the Cottage Girls, including Willa and Edith, bought adjoining land and built their own cottages but continued to use communal facilities and services. Whale Cove had become a cooperative, with Cobus in command. Sallie Jacobus had plenty of advice for Sabra Jane Briggs.

  By the fifth summer, Sabra Jane had given up the lease in North Head to start a new Anchorage twenty kilometers south, on land that had a farmhouse, one barn, two ponds, and a wooded ridge. She would repeat the Whale Cove experiment on the other end of Grand Manan, right down to the concept of central lodgings with a communal dining room surrounded by private cottages. Whale Cove had a full house. Sabra Jane was certain she could fill The Anchorage with her own younger clientele of single, professional women who wanted good company, good food, maid service, and a place away.

  The new Anchorage prospered so quickly during the next two summers that Sabra Jane hired several women from Seal Cove to help out while she and the Reo maintained a constant crawl up and down the island, hauling young women from New York, New Jersey, and as far west as Ohio to and from the docks at North Head. During the eighth summer, when Ray Gilmore and his brother Claude agreed to extend their one-car taxi service down island, Sabra Jane finally began to relax and even to take time away.

  Edith thought it generous of Sabra Jane to lend them a hand with a project as taxing as a rock wall, but everyone on the island was charitable that way. Distinct lines existed between islanders and off-islanders: off-islanders usually paid for the help they required—but everyone was available to assist everyone on Grand Manan. The whole island turned out in a storm, and because island time followed the tides, the same periods of high and low activity were built into everyone’s daily schedule.

  ROB FEENEY’S office had been in shade for several hours when he finally arrived from the S. S. Grand Manan, carrying a satchel of papers to file. The doorknob felt cool and firm against his hand. He liked its feel, the well-worn brass smooth to the center of his palm, and the quiet click of its latch. The door swung open, almost of its own volition, and Rob inhaled the odor of polished wood. He liked to keep everything about him well preserved.

  Pin stripes in front of the bakery caught Rob’s attention, and he paused for a moment, remembering those eyes. Then despite the afternoon’s warmth, he felt a chill and put the satchel down to button the jacket of his uniform. Just then, Sabra Jane Briggs exited the bakery, and Rob found himself witnessing an event he thought more promising of fireworks than any Canada Day parade—the Encounter of the Amazon and the Pin Stripes. Sabra Jane Briggs tolerated no fools, especially male fools, and Rob could only guess what the Pin Stripes might make of Sabra Jane. But the Encounter proved disappointing. The Pin Stripes’ eyes widened and then narrowed and grew hard at the center, hard at the edges. His mouth moved briefly, lips tightening over his teeth and curling into a sneer. But Sabra Jane merely glanced at her wrist and responded with something brief. Even from the rear it was clear she barely had noticed the man.

  Of course, Sabra Jane Briggs rarely did notice men, Rob chuckled to himself. But like most women more attentive to other women, she generally got on well with men. An affable, brotherly, sisterly, companionable getting-on, the words ran through Rob’s mind. A getting-on easier and less strained than what often passed for friendship or love between the sexes … or between men. Rob finished his musing and curved his right hand around the satchel’s leather handle. The encounter between Sabra Jane and the Pin Stripes had passed without the slightest pop of a firecracker, but even on such slim observation, Rob felt certain he knew few men who hated women the way this one did.

  III

  “I DON’T RIGHTLY know what I think.” For the second time in the last hour, Mark Daggett tamped down the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and lit it with a wooden match. Daggett carried the matches in a tin case tucked away in his jacket pocket.

  “Did he jump. Was he pushed. Or did someone throw him over the edge,” Daggett retraced the possibilities, leaning against the back of his chair until it began to rock on its hind legs. His feet had disappeared under the table.

  It was often difficult on the island to get anything lit. Lamps, firewood. Tobacco was the least of it. Sea air dampened everything, and fog made it worse. Matches were often at a premium. Edith appreciated the forethought of Constable Daggett’s little tin case. Jacobus and the others didn’t seem to notice. No one spoke.

  Several of the chairs in the dining room were still occupied. A few of the women, including Willa, had gone on to bed. Nothing they could do now, and it was a strange vigil for a man they didn’t know and a death Edith had witnessed but none of them could explain.

  “THE registry down at Swallowtail says he’s John T. Brown. From New York,” Daggett paused to draw on his pipe, “but he hadn’t anything on him that would say if that’s right. Pockets were empty except for twelve American dollars. Tag in his suit says Boston.”

  Daggett had joined the women at Whale Cove just as they were finishing a very late dinner, delayed by all the excitement of the afternoon. He was returning to bring them up to date, he said, but immediately confessed that he had very little new information. Of more apparent interest were the plates of stew and baking powder biscuits Coney rescued for him from the kitchen. While he ate, he asked each of them to recount in detail her afternoon. Perhaps one of them had seen or heard something that by itself now seemed meaningless but later might solve the puzzle. This point in any investigation, he explained, was like finding and turning all the jigsaw pieces right side up. Once he had done that, he could begin sorting and matching them one to one. Edith, who genuinely disliked being the center of attention, spoke last. She began with the rock garden. Her statement was the longest and, despite occasional hesitations, the most vivid. Daggett paused often to take notes.

  When Edith finished, Daggett shook his head at Jacobus, who was offering refills. “I’ll have another piece of that carrot cake, though, if it’s handy. Worked up an appetite out there on the trail.”

  The phone call from Jacobus had come shortly after five-thirty. It took Daggett a good thirty minutes to get out the Chevrolet and drive to Whale Cove from North Head. Then he was preoccupied about seeing to the body. Eric Dawson brought the body as far as Whale Cove, where the ladies helped him take it out of his boat and lay it on the dock. They covered it with a tarpaulin.

  When Daggett arrived, Jacobus pointed him toward the tarpaulin. Eric Dawson sat slumped on the ground near the dock facing the Bay, his head between his knees. The women were scattered around him, the one called Cather sitting next to him. “Nonsense,” she was lecturing Eric, “women have been doing this for centuries. And we’ve none of us lived in the city so long we haven’t had to take care of our own.”

  “That’s right,” Jacobus turned toward them. “It’s men that have trouble with death. My father could never even clean his own game.”

  Daggett wondered momentarily if Jacobus would mind taking over this part of his job. He had seen very few bodies since he h
ad been sent home wounded from Ypres, all but one an accidental drowning. And from what Jacobus described on the phone, he wasn’t anxious to look at this one. The island had occasional hurricanes to deal with and fishing vessels lost at sea, but no violent crimes to speak of. A fist fight now and then and occasionally some men roughed up their wives. Daggett just called in the minister and left them alone.

  Off-islanders rarely did more than get lost. This one seemed to have done that and more, but the body told Daggett little more than he already knew. The man had gone over the cliff. Not much of the left side of the head remained. No apparent gunshot or stab wounds. Several broken bones. A mangled left hand. A series of tears in the left side of his suit, pockets torn inside and out, rips in the sleeves and pants legs. That was about it, all Daggett could see from what was left of him.

  Daggett jotted his notes. What was odd was the suit, he tapped the end of his pencil against his note pad. And dress shoes. The expensive kind, leather with scrolled tops. What on earth was a man doing on Seven Days Work in a pin-striped suit wearing wing-tipped shoes.

  Daggett deputized Little John Winslow, who pulled up with a team and wagon within a few minutes of Daggett’s own arrival. Little John could haul the body to Doc Macaulay’s at Castalia, the only doctor on the island. He would check it over and do what was needed for the time being. The island had plenty of cemeteries but no coroner and no undertaker, though this man would eventually be shipped back to the United States for burial. Later this evening, Daggett would drive down to Castalia to take an imprint of his right hand for finger prints, but right now he wanted to have a look at the trail on the edge of Seven Days Work. From what Miss Lewis told him, someone in a red shirt might still be running toward The Whistle for help or lying there hurt.

  Miss Lewis, Miss Cather, Cobus, and Felix went along to help him locate the spot where the man had gone off the cliff. They saw no sign of a red shirt anywhere. In fact, they saw no signs of anything on the trail. Nothing let them know the exact place of the man’s fall. A few scuff marks here and there on the hard-packed earth and small patches of scattered stones in the open areas among the trees, but nothing unusual. They went as far as the place where the brook from Rocky Corner turned into a waterfall, then Cobus and Felix volunteered to cover the rest of the distance to The Whistle while Daggett and the others headed back to Whale Cove. There was just enough time before the sun went down for Eric Dawson to row him to the beach below.

  With the tide running out, Eric was uncertain about exactly which boulder caught the man’s fall, and they found nothing further to guide them. They reached the dock at Whale Cove just as Cobus and Felix returned to report that they had been alone on the trail, and no one at The Whistle remembered seeing anyone or hearing anything unusual that whole afternoon.

  By the time Daggett reached North Head, every villager readily directed his attention to The Swallowtail Inn. The stories about the dead stranger were already beginning to build. He had arrived only that morning on the S. S. Grand Manan. He came by himself and asked directions to The Swallowtail Inn. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, he had never before been on Grand Manan. He had eaten lunch at Rose Cottage and purchased three biscuits at the bakery. He had not yet fully unpacked his luggage. He had been seen on the docks and strolling through the village. Every person in North Head claimed to have exchanged words with him but no one remembered hearing his name. He had expressed interest in the island’s numerous trails.

  Were it not for Miss Lewis, Daggett would at that point have gone home for the evening satisfied that this unknown off-islander was unnecessarily hasty about hiking and had taken an incautious step in his wing-tipped shoes. But the red shirt had somehow to be explained. When it was, maybe then Daggett would understand how a man in a pin-striped suit could wind up on the rocks below Seven Days Work.

  DESPITE all the hard work Sabra Jane and Willa and Edith had put in on the wall, tea that afternoon had been intended more as an opportunity for conversation than a revival for tired bodies, though Edith had hoped it would serve both purposes. Now, her body thoroughly exhausted with the day’s events, Edith settled deeper into the mattress and chose to rest her mind in the pleasantness of that earlier conversation, hoping sleep would soon follow.

  Sabra Jane had been coming to Grand Manan for at least as long as they had, but she was still relatively unfamiliar to them. They always said hello when they saw each other in North Head, the main village on Grand Manan, within easy walking distance of Whale Cove, but Sabra Jane was not part of their Whale Cove enclave and so they had little occasion to get to know each other.

  “I grew up on Twenty-Seventh Street,” Edith found herself responding to Sabra Jane’s puzzled eyes during their conversation over tea. “In Lincoln, Nebraska, not New York.”

  “Of course, I should have realized. Twenty-Seventh Street just didn’t make sense with everything else you’ve said about living in New York,” Sabra Jane’s eyes, brown-flecked with gold, crinkled with her smile. She seemed unconcerned about crow’s feet and made no attempt to cover her freckles with powder or her head with a hat. Edith liked that about her. She was quite certain Willa did too.

  “Willa did not enjoy Twenty-Seventh Street or Lincoln as much as she might have,” Edith arched her right eyebrow, the only one that would arch. “I believe she felt somewhat constrained by Lincoln’s attention to good manners.”

  “As did you,” Willa reminded her. “Dancing lessons, drawing lessons, piano lessons,” Willa shifted to an exaggerated drawl, “and club meetings, club meetings, club meetings.”

  Sabra Jane giggled, “Ogdensburg, too. Didn’t matter that we lived on a farm. It took ten years in Greenwich Village to unlearn those lessons and get on with the real ones.” Sabra Jane retrieved two oatmeal cookies from the plate Edith passed and placed them on the napkin in her lap. Then ignoring the cookies, she began an elaborate flourish. “Living on Grand Manan,” Sabra Jane’s hand swept from the woods behind their white trimmed cottage, to the terraced lawn where they sat, to the open sea beyond, “living on Grand Manan means I take only what I want from those lessons.” She leaned back and added her feet to the wicker, crossing one booted ankle over the other, “The rest I ignore.”

  “And here I had been thinking you were just young enough to have missed the white gloves and drawing rooms altogether,” Edith plucked at a raisin on the edge of a cookie. “I lived through those lessons,” she glanced at Willa, “but apparently I haven’t yet managed to live them down.”

  Willa grinned in reply.

  “Nonetheless, those were heady times for the New Woman, and my Aunt Mary was an important personage,” Edith hesitated, glancing again at Willa, then chose to go on, “important to me and to Lincoln. She started the art league and was very active in founding the General Federation …”

  “Your aunt, my hat,” Willa emptied her cup.

  Edith half rose to flick away a bee, sending it back to the purple foxgloves near the cottage. When she sank back into her chair, Willa was well into her argument.

  “Admit it, Edith, it wasn’t just your aunt.” Settling her cup in her lap, Willa began ticking her right index finger against the fingers on her left hand, “It was your cousins, your brother, your sisters, your mother, your father.” She ran out of fingers and pointed directly at Edith, “And you.” Then she spread both hands in the air and stiffened her arms as though she were holding a banner to exclaim, “The Civic-Minded Lewises.”

  They all laughed.

  “You can’t deny it,” Willa shook her head at Edith and helped herself to a cookie. “One of Lincoln’s most promising and prominent men, her father was,” Willa turned back to Sabra Jane, “He was a banker. Her cousin, too. Good friends with Charlie Dawes. Helped him win the Vice Presidency. He’s a bank president in Boston now,” Willa took a firm bite of the cookie. “Her cousin Dan,” she crunched, “not Dawes, of course.”

  “I had heard you were both from the Plains, but I didn’t realize you grew
up in the same town.”

  “We didn’t,” Edith assured Sabra Jane. “We didn’t even know each other. Willa’s a little older and grew up about a hundred miles west, in a small town called Red Cloud, but she came to Lincoln for the university.” Explanation over, Edith reverted to teasing. “Willa went to parties with my cousins and knew everyone my parents did, but she always insists she wasn’t part of that crowd.”

  “I wasn’t. And you left before you were old enough to feel the politics of that place.” Willa took a deep breath and turned to Sabra Jane, “Edith graduated from Smith,” then back at Edith, softening her tone, “but you were just a starry-eyed youngster back then, gazing off into the firmament,” she paused, “and into the eyes of others.”

  “Now, now, now, remember who it was who was bewitched in those days,” Edith chided, grinning back at the twinkle in Willa’s eyes, slate blue today like her blouse. “Willa caused a bit of a scandal at the university because of the way she chose to wear her hair. Short,” Edith raised her hand and separated her fingers less than an inch, making it clear by contrast that her own bobbed and graying locks were much longer than Willa’s auburn hair had been. “I mean really short,” she restated, “and often as not, she called herself William.”

  “Ha! My family always called me Willie,” Willa squared her shoulders to sit taller in the Adirondack, but her eyes still laughed and the dimples in her cheeks deepened.

  “And she had a smash, that’s what we used to call it, on a brilliant young classmate and tennis champion,” Edith lowered her lids, sliding her eyes sideways toward Willa, “by the name of Louise Pound.” Edith’s voice eased down and held the last consonant with a hint of breathiness.