Vineyard Blues

by Philip R. Craig

  “I’m not blaming anybody for anything yet,” I said in what I hoped was a comforting voice. “Now, take your time and tell me exactly what happened.”

  He wiped at his nose with his forearm and flashed worried eyes at the house. “They won’t be like you. You didn’t lose anything in the house; they lost everything they had, and they’ll blame me.”

  There seemed to be plenty of guilt in his group. The boy I’d seen at the ruin had been full of it, too.

  “Tell me what happened. Start with the girl. Who borrowed the moped?”

  “Why, Millie, of course.”

  “Millicent Dowling?”

  My brain was full of half-formed ideas.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Millie. She borrowed the moped just like before. But this time she didn’t bring it back.”

  “I know. I saw it leaning against a tree there, where the last house burned down.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I went down there later and found it and drove it back here.” He wiped at his eyes. “I didn’t want the cops or whoever to get it. I thought they’d trace it back to me and know I was involved, and then they’d find out Millie did it. I didn’t want that, but now here you are anyway, so what good did it do me? Now everybody will know.”

  “But you didn’t think she did it until afterward, did you?”

  “No! But now—”

  I interrupted. “You say Millie borrowed the moped another time. When was that?”

  “When the other fire started.” He suddenly gave me a cagey look. “Say, maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.”

  “You’ll talk to somebody,” I reminded him. “But maybe you’re not in this as deep as you think. Maybe you’re just an innocent guy who tried to do a friend a favor. Millicent Dowling is a friend, isn’t she?”

  He grasped at the straw. “Yeah. We’re very close.”

  “Of course. So you were glad to loan her your moped as a favor.”

  “Yeah, I was. Both times I offered to drive her to wherever she wanted to go, because the bike’s kind of tricky to start sometimes. But she said she’d rather go alone, so I said okay, started up the bike for her, and she went off.”

  “Where to?”

  “To spend the night with her grandparents, just like last time.”

  “Her grandparents?”

  “Yeah. They live in OB. She goes to see them now and then.”

  “What’s their name?”

  It was too early in the morning for a poser like that, but Adam tried to think. “Box, maybe?”

  “Box?”

  “Something like that,” said Adam, wiping an arm across his nose. “I think that’s it. Or maybe not . . .”

  “So she borrowed it earlier this week, the night of the first fire?”

  “Yeah. Then, when we heard about the fire, I got worried. But then she showed up the next morning.”

  “Did she talk about the fire?”

  “She said she heard the sirens clear up in OB.”

  “Do you think now that she started the two fires?”

  He began to fall to pieces again. “Jesus, I don’t want to think that, but that’s where I found the moped, so she must have been there. Somebody got killed in that fire!”

  “Where’s Millie now?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. She didn’t come home, and I haven’t heard from her. What I’m afraid of is . . . is . . .”

  He couldn’t say it, so I did. “That the body in the fire was hers?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I think. Jesus, she’s such a beautiful girl! I love her!” The sobs began again, as tears came down from his eyes like warm rain. I dug out my handkerchief and gave it to him. He held it against his face while his shoulders shook.

  When I thought he was ready, I said, “We don’t know yet who that body belongs to, but there’s a good chance it wasn’t Millie Dowling. Do you know where her grandparents live in OB?”

  “I don’t know. But Millie and Linda used to talk about how it was neat that the three of us were friends just like our grandparents were.”

  A little web began to form out of the individual strands of my thoughts. “Linda who?” I asked.

  “Linda Carlyle. You just asked me about her. She was a girl who worked here last year. We all sort of hung out together.”

  “You and Millie hung out with Linda Carlyle and Perry Jonson?”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “Yeah. How’d you know about Perry?”

  “I heard about him from some other people. I heard that Perry got beat up trying to fight a guy who’d hurt Linda, and that he and Linda are still together down in Atlanta. You just told me you love Millie. How close were the rest of you to one another?”

  He wiped at his eyes with my handkerchief. “Well, Perry and me were pals, but Millie and Linda were like sisters, you know? They were like twins, even. I mean, not in the way they looked, but like they were on the same waves all the time. Millie was sick when Linda left last year.”

  “Are you all in college together?”

  “We were a year ago, but Linda and Perry didn’t come back this past fall. Linda was all messed up, and Perry stayed out to be with her. Or that’s what Millie told me, anyway.”

  “Your grandfather’s name was Ernie Washington. What was Linda’s grandfather’s name?”

  He looked surprised. “Why, old Corrie’s her granddad. Corrie Appleyard. I thought you knew that, being a friend of the family. Grandpa and Corrie have been friends since they were kids.”

  Free-flying bits of information began to hit the web forming in my brain. The bits were flies, and I was the spider. I could feel their vibrations as they hit, and wrapped them in webbing so I could devour them at my leisure.

  “Do you know how I can get in touch with Corrie’s family?” I asked.

  “No. But I can probably find out from Grandpa.”

  I put a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Do that. And here’s what else you can do. I want you to talk to Millie’s friends. If she’s staying with one of them, I want to talk with her. If she’s not, I want you to find out her grandparents’ name and where they live. She must have mentioned it to somebody.”

  He nodded. “Okay.” He didn’t seem very willing to defend his guess that their name was Box.

  “The quicker, the better,” I said. “I’m in the telephone book. Call me as soon as you find out something.”

  Another nod.

  “And don’t worry about being to blame for this mess. You’re not, as far as I can see. You’re just a friend who loaned his moped to a girl.”

  I got the number of the phone in the house, left Adam Washington to his thoughts, hopes, and fears, and drove home. There, I looked in the phone book for someone named Box. No luck, but no surprise, either. I tried directory assistance. No luck again.

  Box? How had he come up with a name like that?

  I walked out and looked at my construction project. It was as incomplete as my thoughts about the arson case, but while I was stymied by the case, I could at least make progress on the kids’ rooms, so I got my tools and went to work.

  Joshua, the helper child, wearing his small carpenter’s apron, banged on some nails and held the far end of boards I sawed. He hit his hand with his little hammer, cried just like a lot of grown-up men would like to do under the same circumstances, and got needed sympathy and first aid from his mom, Nurse Zee, who eyed me with a sardonic and skeptical gaze when I told him that such injuries were all in a day’s work for a builder and that with practice he’d stop hitting himself so often. To appease his mother, I also told him he could quit for the day if he wanted to, but he was soon back at his pounding and board holding. Such a manly little chap.

  As I worked on a wall, keeping an eye on my assistant just in case he did try to do something really dangerous, like use my power saws, I was reminded of the Quick Erection Company and wondered how things were going with Susanna Quick and Mr. Black.

  There seemed to be far too many predatory males
on the island of late, and I was frustrated and irked by the thought of them. With luck, I might at least identify Susanna’s stalker before too long, and with even more luck I might put him out of business. The Krane brothers, on the other hand, were probably beyond my scope, because they dealt with grown-up women, who, it could be argued, were consenting partners in their practices. I might think the Krane boys were feral and their women were victims, but they were all adults and responsible for their own actions, and that, according to my value system, made their relationships none of my business.

  It wasn’t the first time my thoughts and my emotions failed to agree, and it wasn’t the first time the conflict gave me grief.

  I worked until noon and made some progress with, or in spite of, Joshua’s help, then took a break for lunch.

  We ate out on the lawn tables under the yellow sun. On the far side of the distant barrier beach we could see the white sails moving over the dark blue waters of Nantucket Sound. It was a lovely island day, with the wind whispering through the trees. It said nothing of arson or other evils, but spoke only of beauty and gentleness.

  Joshua, tired from his morning’s work and full of food, decided to nap right there in his chair, and fell instantly asleep, the way innocent children often do, but corrupt adults rarely manage.

  I picked him up and carried him inside to his bed, so the summer sun wouldn’t burn his tender hide. Then I went back and cleared the table of plates and glasses and returned yet again to sit beside Zee, who was holding her daughter in her lap, but looked like she might have something to say to me.

  She did.

  — 24 —

  Diana the Huntress, having had a busy morning of her own, nodded sleepily on Zee’s lap.

  “Before I met you,” Zee began, “I dated other men.”

  I held up a hand. “I know that. You don’t have to tell me anything about it. Your life before we met is your business, not mine. It has nothing to do with us.”

  She nodded. “I know we both agreed to that, and that’s the way I want it to be, too. But sometimes—now, for instance—the past creeps into the present. I don’t want it sneaking between us, so I need to tell you some things.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it, then opened it long enough to say, “All right.”

  She bounced Diana gently on her knee, watching her daughter’s eyelids grow heavy. I felt a sense of sanctity as I looked at the two of them. Madonna and child.

  “When Paul divorced me,” said Zee, “I was a total wreck. I felt worthless. I came down here and lived with my aunt Amelia while I tried to put myself back together. You know about that, and you know that she helped me a lot, and that after a while, I began dating. What you don’t know is that I wasn’t very stable, and I did some foolish things with men.” She raised her great, dark eyes to mine. “Ben Krane and his brother were two of them. I must have been just the sort of fragile woman they look for. I was with Ben first, then he handed me on to Peter. They treated me like chattel, and that seems now to have been how I saw myself at that time: like a worthless thing that could be owned or thrown away by anybody.”

  A small red glow appeared deep in my psyche. I knew it of old; it was the beast that lives within us all, beneath the thin veneer of civilization. I feared it and used my will against it. But it wouldn’t go away.

  Zee ran a hand through her long, blue-black hair, pushing it back from her forehead as though to give more freedom to her voice and thoughts.

  “Ben is very conventional about what he wants from women. Mostly, it’s just dominance. Once he establishes that, and exercises it for a while, he gets bored with the woman and wants another one. Peter is very happy to take over.

  “Peter has a conventional marriage in New York, but he comes to the Vineyard so he can have women do things his wife doesn’t do. What he wants is very humiliating for the women, but some of them want that. Others find out they don’t. I was that kind. I did what Peter wanted for a while, but then, somehow, I realized one day that I was being a fool, and I left.”

  Diana was a rag doll, snoozing in her mother’s arms. I wondered if somewhere deep in her subconscious she was recording the words being spoken.

  “I was embarrassed and ashamed and angry,” said Zee. “I blamed Ben and Peter at first, but most of all I was angry at myself. That all happened a long time before I met you, and I thought I’d put it all behind me, but then you took this job.”

  I was caught between her voice and the crimson fury pulsating on the margins of my consciousness.

  A crooked smile appeared on Zee’s face. “And then I was angry with you for taking this job. And when you wouldn’t give it up, I was angry with everything. It was terrible.”

  “You should have told me then.” The words sounded to me as though they came from someone living in a cave.

  “No. Because in the past two days I’ve finally realized that I had no business being mad at you or Ben or Peter or myself; I was angry about something that happened between other people long ago, people who aren’t here now.”

  My barbed-wire voice said, “The Krane boys are still here.”

  She shook her head. “But the person I was then isn’t around anymore. She was sick, but she got better and now she’s long gone. What happened then has nothing to do with now. I’m not that girl anymore and I haven’t been for a long time. I think Ben and Peter Krane were wretched men then, and that they probably still are, but they have nothing to do with me. I’m free of both of them and that girl, too.” She looked at me. “And I want you to be free of her and them.”

  I said nothing.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I told you about this so you’d understand. I’m a different person, and my life is different now. And I’m living it with you. It’s you I love, and I don’t care if you work with Ben Krane or not. He means nothing at all to me.” She rocked Diana in her arms. “The world is full of men like the Kranes, and it always will be. They’re a dime a dozen, and not worth a heavy sweat or a second thought.”

  I sat and said nothing.

  “I’ll put the babe in her bed and be right back,” said Zee.

  While she was gone I thought of her courage in telling me what she had told, and doubted if I’d ever tell her of some of my own early activities. I set my will against the red glow and drove the beast away, or at least out of sight. If I couldn’t rid the world of its evils, I could at least try to rid myself of some of those in me. When Zee got back, it was my turn to talk.

  “All right,” I said, “I won’t think about what happened back then, but I have to think about what’s happening now. Ben and Peter are still up to their old tricks, and those tricks may have a lot to do with these fires.”

  “If you find evidence that will nail Ben and Peter to the wall, it’ll be just fine with me, because I think they’re scum. I just don’t want you to do it because of what happened to me.”

  “I won’t,” I said, hoping it wasn’t a lie.

  We looked at each other and I saw that she was smiling. She suddenly no longer seemed sacred and pure, but divinely profane and totally feminine; no longer Mary, but Eve. It was a cleansing, familiar, carnal feeling I often got when seeing her.

  “I like being married to you,” she said.

  My pulse beat in my veins. “Ditto, Brother Smut.”

  “Where did that phrase come from, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. My dad used to say it.”

  “I love having a couple of little Jacksons.”

  “What this world needs is more Jacksons; no doubt about it.”

  “As to that, I think it has just the right number.”

  I licked my lips. “Shucks. I was just giving thought to being fruitful and multiplying.”

  She grinned. “As Chanticleer would point out, we’re shaped the way we are for delyte, too. Will you settle for that?”

  I stripped off my T-shirt in reply.

  “Gosh,” said Zee, unbuttoning her shirt. “Right here in the yard?”

>   I kicked off my sandals and slid out of my shorts.

  “What about low-flying planes?”

  “The pilots will be so distracted they’ll all crash. Not one will live to tell the tale. Here, allow me to help you slip into nothing more comfortable.”

  She allowed me.

  Afterward we lay on the grass and looked up at the sky.

  “You seem to have worked up a sweat,” said Zee, running her hand over my belly.

  “And you have some grass stains in certain places.”

  “The shower is big enough for two.”

  “Did you notice that Oliver Underfoot and Velcro were interested in what they were seeing?”

  “They’re very smart cats. But how do you know what they were doing? You were supposed to be looking only at me.” She stretched like a black panther, arching her back, and flexing her shoulders.

  “I’m looking at you now,” I said and pulled her to me.

  Later, in the outdoor shower that we use nine months of the year, I washed her long black hair and scrubbed her back and knew that life was good. I was hanging my towel on the solar dryer when I heard the phone ringing. I got to it just in time.

  “How many times do I have to tell you that you should get an answering machine?” said Quinn. “I can hear you puffing all the way up here in Boston. You’re getting too old for these frantic dashes.”

  “Nonsense,” I puffed. “I haven’t lost a step.”

  “I’ve got some information about your friend Corrie Appleyard.”

  My ears went up. “Tell me.”

  The information was that Corrie had married long ago, but, being a rolling stone sort of musician, hadn’t spent much time at the Mississippi home place where his wife still lived. He was there from time to time and sent money back when he had some. His visits had resulted in three children, two boys and a girl. One boy died in the Korea police action, the other was a musician in New Orleans, and the girl was a Philadelphia physician.

  Hearing that, I interrupted. “Did she marry a guy named Carlyle?”