On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery

by Sue Hallgarth

  “What I don’t understand,” continued the first voice, now attached to the pork-pie hat, “is why they don’t know more about him. At The Swallowtail, I mean. I realize it is too soon to hear anything from the wire the constable sent to St. John, but this what’s-his-name, Mr. Brown, must have written The Swallowtail for reservations. Wouldn’t you think they would have his address? Know where he came from? What he did for a living?”

  The woman interrupted herself, reaching across the table to select a Lucky Strike from the opened silver case resting in her husband’s hand. Edith recognized the brand even at this distance. It was Willa’s. Wouldn’t that scandalize Willa’s readers, to know that she smoked cigarettes? So many people still thought women like this one in the pork-pie hat racy and immoral, and those who thought that assumed Willa was just like they were. Well, let them think what they like, Edith smiled and looked away again.

  “The people at The Swallowtail certainly seemed to know everything about us,” the woman leaned forward again. Edith heard the woman’s chair creak and her husband strike a match. She noticed the top of his forehead had been pinkened by the sun.

  “Not exactly, dear,” the husband finally spoke. “I mean, they didn’t exactly know what business I was in,” he shook the match until the flame went out. “Now, what shall we order,” he turned with raised eyebrows back to their friends. Edith glanced out the window again.

  That young man who had helped Roy Sharkey deliver the load of stones for the rock garden was just then swinging from a ladder attached to the dock onto a blue and white fishing boat. It had an engine, Edith noticed. Earlier that spring, one of the fellows in the office next to hers at J. Walter Thompson asked the women’s department whether they thought a woman could handle an Evinrude. The result was an advertisement showing a woman at the tiller in house dress and heels, Edith snorted.

  A lobster boat this was, she guessed. The Barbara Ann, it said on the stern. Edith was never sure which boats were which, and now she couldn’t remember the young man’s name. James, that was it. Nice young fellow. Strong, too, and a worker. Edith hadn’t caught his last name. He had said ma’am three times. She made a mental note to ask Roy Sharkey when he planned to bring the next load of rocks. If young James had found work on one of the fishing boats, it might be a good while. He could be out at sea for several days, and Roy Sharkey was not known for ambition or hard work. His wagon and time on his hands had made his reputation.

  But the immediate concern, Edith reminded herself, was learning more about what happened on Seven Days Work and more, too, about Sabra Jane Briggs. Edith thought she might stop by Constable Daggett’s on her way back to Whale Cove. She could not believe Sabra Jane had been part of that tragic event. Someone else must also have been wearing a red shirt the previous afternoon. Why hadn’t anyone noticed?

  V

  CONSTABLE DAGGETT RETURNED from The Anchorage well over an hour ago, his wife told Edith. And he was already off again, this time in the direction of The Whistle. No, she did not know when he would return or what he had learned. Perhaps Miss Lewis could inquire later by telephone. Elizabeth Daggett was rather firm in suggesting that Edith inquire by phone. She did not open the screen door of the trim yellow house, nor did she invite Edith to step in.

  Edith supposed she would have been similarly firm. Willa even more so. Willa increasingly had taken to practicing what she called her Medusa stare, calculated to induce terror in the hardiest of gushers. She had learned the effectiveness of the Medusa from Olive Fremstad and went to some length in The Song of the Lark, much of which she based on Fremstad’s career, explaining how once Fremstad reached the Metropolitan Opera, she used the Medusa to protect her inner, artistic life. It had occurred to none of them at the time that Willa would ever need the diva’s mask for herself. But that was before Edith shifted to advertising and Willa met Alfred Knopf. Without Alfred, Edith thought, Willa might still be buried among the genteel ladies and sentimental authoresses on Houghton Mifflin’s list. Willa thought so, too. And now, though not everyone might agree, she was outdistancing even Edith Wharton. In fact, Edith guessed, no other American writer, with the possible exception of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ever laid such claim to a diva’s fame.

  It was silly, Edith supposed, to compare the actions of a constable’s wife to their own awkward attempts to deal with Willa’s fans. Not only had Willa and Edith worked very hard to create the situation in which they now found themselves, the reason Willa adopted the Medusa and used other devices to keep people at bay was as much to maintain the illusion in Willa’s fiction as it was to protect their privacy. Willa meant to evade both puffs, the Silly Woman and the Great Artist. She planned, in fact, to stay so far out of sight, her readers would never be quite certain who or where she was, especially in her novels. She was always experimenting, anyway, with different ways to tell a story and different stories to tell. I want to be a character actor, not a star, Willa declared. No typecasting, please. Or, she would say, I’m a wild turkey, I’ll scramble to find new feeding grounds whenever anyone sets foot on mine. And off she would go, up the stairs to start her morning’s work, Gabble, Gobble, Gabble, Gobble, arms akimbo, working up and down like wings.

  Elizabeth Daggett had no such motivation to explain her behavior. Or sense of humor, it seemed. Either she was very sour by nature or she too had some reason to master the fine art of polite distance. Edith did not like to think Mrs. Daggett was sour by nature, for that would mean Mr. Daggett had chosen unwisely. Edith preferred to think that marriage to the local constable brought with it the trials of being a partner to a certain kind of renown, where people felt free to ask questions whenever they pleased and freer still to offer their advice. Whatever reason Mrs. Daggett had for putting her off, Edith chose to believe it was positive.

  More important than worrying about Elizabeth Daggett was finding out what her husband was up to. Edith fairly trotted along Church Lane and picked her way as fast as she could over the rocks at Whale Cove. Perhaps Mr. Daggett had stopped at the cottage. Edith didn’t want to miss him, and she hoped Willa was ready to reappear. That was how she thought of it, Edith realized with a smile. Each morning Willa disappeared into her manuscript and remained there until it was time to come out. Well, Edith needed Willa to make her reappearance now. She wanted to talk over what was happening on Grand Manan, just as they always discussed what was happening in the worlds Willa created.

  Edith could already hear Willa saying they needed to do more homework. Then Edith would suggest that they walk to Seven Days Work to get a fuller sense of the circumstances, and as they set out they would consider what they knew of the characters, of Mr. Brown, the red shirt, and Sabra Jane Briggs. Only then could they speculate about who else might belong in the cast.

  WHEN Edith reached the cottage she found Willa in the Adirondack reviewing her manuscript and wearing the brown leather boots and twill pants she liked to use for hiking the more difficult trails on the island. Constable Daggett had indeed stopped by, Willa told Edith, but he had said nothing at all about Sabra Jane Briggs. He had, however, reluctantly agreed that it would be a good idea for the two of them to go back to Seven Days Work. He wanted Edith to help him determine the exact location the man had gone off the cliff. Daggett had already hiked back over the section of the trail they decided yesterday was most likely, but once again he had found nothing to give away the exact spot. He would rather be with them when they went, he said, to be sure they did not destroy evidence, but he also needed to go into North Head to continue to locate people who noticed Mr. Brown walking about. No one he talked to so far had seen Mr. Brown leave the village.

  Thirty minutes later they found a handwritten note pinned to a single strand of white cotton rope draped across the trail on Seven Days Work, just where the trail broke out of the woods and onto the open cliffs. The note said “Crime Scene, Do Not Enter.”

  “Busy man, our constable.”

  “Busy man,” Willa agreed, “who seems to have re
ad too many dime novels.” She eyed the note before raising the cotton rope for Edith to duck under. “Possible Crime Scene is what he should have written,” Willa suggested. “All we really know is that two people were present when one of them went off the cliff. Isn’t that right?”

  “And that the other one failed to go for help,” Edith tossed back over her shoulder.

  “Do we actually know that?” Willa paused to consider. “What did you see the red shirt do after Mr. Brown went off the cliff?”

  “Nothing,” Edith stopped to reconstruct the scene once more in her mind. “I mean, I did not seen him do anything,” she heard her own words come slow, deliberate. “I was not looking at him. I saw Mr. Brown fall, and I shouted to Eric Dawson, and you came, and then I ran for help.” Edith fast forwarded the motion picture film in her mind, then with a shrug she spoke more quickly, “The red shirt was there, and then it wasn’t.”

  Willa appeared to be contemplating Edith’s shrug, “And Eric Dawson never saw the red shirt and only saw Mr. Brown just before he landed.”

  Edith nodded and glanced out toward the weir, trying to imagine just what Eric Dawson had seen. But Eric Dawson had been rowing from the direction of Whale Cove. That meant his back was turned toward Seven Days Work. He must have seen Mr. Brown only because her shout drew his attention.

  “Maybe if we look at the weir and the cottage from different angles on the trail, that would help us pick the spot,” Willa suggested and Edith agreed. It was a sensible idea.

  The trail narrowed the minute it broke free of the woods, then ran for a good thirty or forty yards along the edge of the cliff, jutting in and out in sharp, irregular patterns, occasionally cutting back into the trees. Just beyond they could hear the two waterfalls. Here and there a solitary spruce gripped the rocks, its outer boughs bare, its tip thrown back from the sea. Years of living with the wind did that, Edith caught again a glimpse of naughty children leaning with their whole bodies to touch the ground.

  Edith called Willa’s attention to two places in the trail where the spruce were more numerous. “Let’s try there,” she pointed to the first one about thirty feet ahead.

  When they reached the spot where the cliff jutted forward, sporting enough soil to hold a few wisps of grass and three scrub spruce, Edith took a pair of binoculars out of the small case she carried loosely strapped around her neck. She aimed the binoculars first toward the weir and then toward the cottage. The weir was clearly visible, its round configuration slightly elongated from this angle into an oval. Unique to Grand Manan, herring weirs reminded Edith of the tadpoles crowding the fishbowl on the dining room sidetable of her childhood, their large heads and bulging eyes dragging bodies as narrow as banners listing in a slight breeze.

  Only weirs weren’t as numerous as pollywogs and the Bay of Fundy was hardly a fishbowl. From this angle, Edith thought, the weir Eric Dawson had been heading for looked more like a modified Cupid’s arrow pointed out to sea. Originally devised by the Passamaquoddy Indians and built just beyond low water, herring weirs consisted of a fence made of nets strung on poles that ran several hundred feet out from the shore in a line straight as an arrow’s shaft. At the arrow’s haft, the poles and nets swung into the rounded top of an enormous valentine not quite joined at the center, luring the herring into its snare. But instead of coming to a point, this heart-shaped arrowhead took on the snub-nosed appearance of a giant mallet, its tip worn and smoothed by generations of resistance to incoming waves.

  Edith admired common sense and ingenuity, and she paused for a moment to regard this passive form of fishing. Weirs trapped thousands of fish each year. Herring came inshore at night and dropped along the shore on the high water and ebb. Edith and Willa often heard fishermen talking about how they could tell when herring were playing in the area by their sweetish smell. When herring encountered a weir fence, they were forced to work offshore until they came to the opening at the haft and swam dead ahead, probably imagining themselves free, Edith guessed, until they met the mallet shaped head of nets at the tip and slipped into a continual swirl. Each weir, they had been told, held several tons of herring. Fishermen simply let the weir do its work until the owner negotiated a sale with a processor and a team of fishermen came to seine the weir and transport the fish to the smokehouses at Seal Cove.

  Herring Weir

  The only weir Edith had heard about before coming to Grand Manan was the one that drowned Eustacia Vye. But Thomas Hardy had never been to Grand Manan. Herring weirs worked just like cattle pens at the stock yards, Edith grinned at the thought, and fish farmers had about as much time as ranchers to negotiate a price for their perishable stock. Grand Manan, Edith and Willa had learned shortly before they arrived for their first visit in 1922, had been a major supplier of smoked herring since the 1880s, when the island’s weirs provided the world with more than 20,000 tons of herring a year. By now, Edith guessed, it must be more like 100,000 tons.

  “I wonder what Eric Dawson was doing out there,” Edith interrupted her own thoughts.

  “He told me he was going out to check the nets and see whether herring had begun to work their way in,” Willa stepped back several paces toward the woods and sat down on a rock. “Jason Logan smelled them in the cove the night before last.”

  Edith remained on the ledge. It felt like the right place, precipitous, precarious. If someone were to rush from behind or give even the slightest nudge, well. The red-shirted arm again flung out in her mind and the man in the suit seemed to leap once more into his sideways dive. Edith took a step back. She could not see their cottage with her naked eye, only that portion of the cliff that swung out to form their lawn. It also held the small stand of pines that grew below their cottage, shielding it from the others in their conclave.

  That was where she had stood the previous afternoon, she was sure. Just there, a few feet north and west of the first pine. Right on the edge, she had been, but probably not noticeable to anyone standing on Seven Days Work. Underbrush and tall grass camouflaged the edge. Behind, the evergreens on their cliff, nestled well into Whale Cove, stood tall, their limber boughs heavy and deeply green. Looking at them through binoculars, Edith also saw them for a moment in her mind. So still the pines were and erect, shading the moss-covered ground beneath, redecorated each year with fresh blankets of pine needles and cones. Edith knew those arms swung sometimes violently in high winds and hurricanes, but compared to the few stalwart spruce that braved the constant assault of salt winds off the sea at Seven Days Work, their pines, it seemed to Edith, lolled like overfed gods.

  “WELL, what do you think?” Willa’s patience was wearing thin.

  “Oh,” Edith hadn’t noticed how far she had slipped into her own thoughts, “I was just thinking how deceptive this spot would be to someone who didn’t know the island.”

  Willa’s eyes formed the question before she raised it. “Deceptive?”

  “Standing here I could believe there were no cottages on this side at all,” Edith raised her binoculars to look at the shoreline on the other side of Whale Cove, “and if I didn’t know from having been there, it would never occur to me that across the cove was the trail to Hole in the Wall.”

  “I doubt that anyone could see from there without binoculars,” Willa raised her hand to shade her own eyes.

  Edith contemplated the shoreline, then swung the glasses back toward their cottage. For pinpointing the spot where the man had gone off the cliff, it was not important that all she could see were the pine trees and not their cottage. What mattered was where she had been, not where the cottage stood. Edith wished briefly that before they left, they had gotten out her easel and repositioned it in the spot she had been the previous afternoon. But had she done that, Edith guessed, they probably would not have been able to see the easel from this distance, even with binoculars. After all, she had barely been able to make out the red shirt and the business suit, and she supposed her body would have been pretty well camouflaged by tall grass and underbrush.
The easel too.

  “It could have happened here,” Willa broke in again. “Both the weir and our cliff would have direct views. And if Mr. Brown had been talking to the red shirt from where I am,” Willa spoke from her rock, “you would not have been able to see him, would you?”

  THE second outcropping of spruce, about ten yards further on, turned out to be less promising. Standing in the open area there they found themselves more likely to face toward Ashburton Head than Whale Cove. Willa tried but found no comfortable spot for sitting and no easy access to the woods behind.

  “Let’s go back to the first place for another look,” Willa suggested. “That must be the spot.”

  Twice more they retraced their steps, then settled together on the first site. Besides the three spruce and a few patches of grass, the area totaled probably less than a hundred square feet of almost solid rock, its bit of surface dirt packed tight. The trail ran in varying degrees near the edge for twelve feet or so then swung back in again toward the woods behind. They were approximately twenty feet south of the waterfalls.

  With the site determined, they separated to comb the area carefully. They could hear the waterfall and the waves below and an occasional cry from a gull off shore. They had no idea what to look for. Scuff marks, perhaps, a drop of blood, a fallen pen knife, a gun. Nothing appeared to give them a clue.

  Twenty minutes later, Edith broke their silence. “I do believe this is the right place,” she stood at the edge of the cliff, her hands on her hips, looking down to determine the trajectory of Mr. Brown’s fall and the site of his landing, “but I do not understand why we are finding no sign of their being here.”

  “It seems likely that neither Mr. Brown nor the person in the red shirt took time to tidy up.”