A Vineyard Morning

by Jean Stone

  “I took a picture,” Lucy whispered to Annie. A few minutes earlier, John had tried to get Lucy to go back to Annie’s cottage, but the girl had planted her hands squarely on her slim hips and said, “Really, Dad? I’m not a baby anymore.” He’d opened his mouth as if to argue; then he’d merely shaken his head and gotten to work.

  “A picture of what?” Annie asked.

  “The guy’s head. I took it with my phone before my dad or anybody got here.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Someone had to do it. I shot it when you went up to the driveway to ask the cops to turn off their sirens.”

  Annie had forgotten that she’d done that.

  “I figured, what if something happened to the guy’s head before anybody got here?”

  Annie closed her eyes, then slowly opened them again. “First of all, it’s not a head. It’s part of a skull. And what could possibly have happened?”

  Lucy pursed her lips. “Lot of things! A dog could have come along and carried it away. Or a coyote.”

  “We don’t have coyotes here.”

  “Somebody saw one in Edgartown.”

  “And you think it swam across the harbor?”

  “I doubt they would have let him on the On Time. Not unless he had a round-trip ticket.”

  Jibber-jabbering with Lucy should have provided some distraction, but it didn’t. All the while, Annie wondered whom—or what—the skull might have belonged to, how long it had been in the seaweed and on the shore, and what the circumstance of death had been.

  “Hey,” Lucy added, “wouldn’t it be creepy if you found out the guy was killed while you were sleeping in your new place that’s a few short steps from the beach?”

  Annie shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “That’s enough, Lucy. I’m going inside; my feet are cold. It’s too early in the season to be shoeless in the sand.” But as she turned to leave, Earl ambled over.

  “This is a fine way to spend a spring afternoon,” he said. “And not too great for business.”

  “At least we haven’t opened yet,” Annie said. She hoped she’d also asked the drivers of the “official vehicles” to shut off their flashing lights; North Neck Road had seen enough of those.

  “It might take them that long to finish, though,” he said.

  Then Lucy stepped into the conversation—of course she did. “Will they put the guy’s head in one of those big black bags like on CSI?” she asked. “Or do you think they have smaller bags for body parts?”

  “Lucy,” her grandfather said sternly, “be nice.”

  Annie noticed that Lucy had glanced over at Jonas as she’d spoken. Perhaps she’d hoped to garner some attention from Taylor’s good-looking son.

  “I heard the Statie say he’d notify the medical examiner in Sandwich on the Cape,” Earl said. “If he has to come over, it’s going to take a while.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Annie said. She knew little about Cape Cod, other than it was the southernmost chunk of land in Massachusetts and was attached to the mainland by two bridges. It was also the last leg of the trip from Boston to Woods Hole to get the ferry to the Vineyard. In spite of all the times she’d driven the route, she hadn’t paid much attention to the Cape other than to feel it seemed to take forever to get from the Bourne Bridge to the Steamship Authority terminal.

  “Well,” Earl was continuing, “on top of everything else, we can’t get back to work until the ME figures something out.”

  Annie hoped she’d misunderstood. “What do you mean you ‘can’t get back to work’?”

  “At the Inn. Per the directive of Detective Sergeant Sloan. We can’t continue with the construction ’til we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “It’s an old skull!” Annie cried a little too loudly. “What’s the big deal?”

  Earl scratched his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “We’d better have a talk. Got any java in your place?”

  * * *

  Annie made coffee for Earl and poured iced tea for herself. Lucy had stayed down on the beach. She’d said she wanted to watch the process in case she became a cop someday.

  “Chocolate chip cookie?” Annie asked. “Though I just learned that peanut butter are your favorites.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll pass on a cookie. But for future information, chocolate chip are my favorites. Peanut butter cookies were the first things Lucy ever baked—she must have been seven or eight—and I guess I extolled their virtues too much. The truth is, they’re too dry for my taste, but I still swill ’em down with milk, give her a big hug, and tell her they’re the best cookies ever.”

  A terrific grandfather, through and through.

  He waited until a steaming mug was in front of him before clearing his throat for what Annie suspected were details she might not want to hear.

  “So . . .” He began slowly, as was his typical pace, the kind that tempted her to lean across the table, reach down his throat, and pull out his words. “We might have a problem.”

  She sipped her tea, waiting for the rest. She stared down at her feet and realized she’d forgotten to rinse off the sand.

  “Here’s how it works,” he finally added. “If the ME concludes your skull is human, then the fun begins. He’ll call in the state archeologist, and one of them has to determine if it’s ancient. The archeologist might want to come out and do his own assessment of the area. My guess is one of them is going to look for other fragments, then the skull and any backup evidence will go to Boston to be studied, scanned, and God knows what else. I’m not exactly sure who does what, but I do know a lot of folks will be involved.”

  “Hold it,” Annie interrupted. “What do you mean by ancient? Could this thing be thousands of years old? Like that Kennewick man they found in Washington State back in the nineties?”

  “Doubtful. When it comes to bones, around here they call them ‘ancient’ instead of ‘fresh’ if they’re not from a new death. Like if they didn’t wash ashore because of something that happened a few days ago or even a month. If it’s been around a while, it’s considered old news. Ancient.”

  “Okay. So if it’s fresh and not ancient, they’ll have to investigate.”

  “Right. They’ll need to figure out if it was an accident or . . . foul play.” At least he hadn’t said “murder.”

  “I don’t know much,” Annie said, “but it looks to me as if, yes, that bone’s been around a while. If they determine that it’s ancient, why will that be a problem for us?”

  Earl sighed. “Native people, dear girl. In addition to the ME and the archeologist, the state police have to notify the tribe about your find. On Chappy—or anywhere on the island—it would most likely be Wampanoag. In which case, the bone will be turned over to them. No matter how old it is or isn’t.”

  Annie stirred her tea. “So . . . what am I missing? Why would that be a problem for us?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s going to take time to determine who this guy was—assuming it’s a guy.”

  “Detective Sloan said it could be from an animal.”

  Earl shook his head. “That’s no animal, Annie. He might have told you that because he thought you’d be less upset. But nope. That’s a human skull. Or I’d guess about half of one. But no matter what, right now, we’ll have to stop construction.”

  Impatience began a slow burn inside her. “Why? What does this have to do with the Inn?” She wondered if her voice had been too loud.

  Earl cleared his throat. Again. “Here’s the short version: we might be sitting on sacred land, Annie. If your skull is Wampanoag, they have to make sure it didn’t come from an old burial ground. Also, if it really is ancient, as in the ‘old’ kind of ancient like that Kennewick guy, our property might be declared a historic site. In either case, it means there’s going to be a ream of red tape. And we need to be prepared for the worst.”

  “The ‘worst’ being?”

  He took a long drink of coffee. “The worst will be
we won’t be allowed to have an Inn here at all.”

  About some things, Earl liked to exaggerate—the weather, the size of the blue fish someone caught during the derby, the fact that peanut butter cookies were the best ever. But Annie didn’t think this was one of those times. Her slow burn of impatience settled into smoldering worry. If there was no Inn, Earl and Kevin would lose their investment. Though they—not even Kevin—had not detailed their personal finances, Annie didn’t think that either man could afford to lose that much. She supposed that, like many older islanders, most of Earl’s worth was tied up in his land. It reminded Annie of an elderly friend of Winnie’s who lived on a meager Social Security check but couldn’t bring herself to part with her valuable ten acres because it was where her life, her home were rooted. Island tradesmen and landscapers took turns taking care of the woman’s place for free; their families made sure she was looked after. After all, her husband had been a fisherman who’d once fed most of them.

  Kevin had an income from a few condos in Boston that he owned and rented, but Annie thought that was it. The money from the sale of his business had gone into a trust for his wife’s medical care, which might continue for a long time.

  And if there were no Inn, what about the tenants that they’d already signed up? Annie knew firsthand the struggle to find year-round housing on the island. Then she gulped as something else occurred to her. What about her? Annie couldn’t afford to buy a place, not until her income caught up with the years that it had taken to pay off her ex-husband’s debts.

  She knew that neither John nor she were ready to make a lifelong commitment. But without one, what should she do? Should she move back to Boston where she’d lived most of her life? If Kevin went too, at least she’d have family there. And Donna! Why did Annie often forget about her birth mother? At the very least she needed to get ready for Donna’s visit. If Annie’s world was going to fall apart anyway, what was one more bit of drama over which she had positively no control?

  Earl pushed back his chair and stood. “There’s always a chance none of this will come to anything. Maybe your skull isn’t even real; maybe it’s a leftover toy from a party last summer. Or maybe it’s an old Halloween prank. Stranger things have happened out here on Chappy.”

  Annie wished he would stop calling it her skull. She stood and carried her glass and his mug to the sink. She couldn’t see very far down the beach from her kitchen window. But if she opened the window, she might hear voices talking in low murmurs. It was hard to believe that one small, solitary part of someone or something might impact so many innocent people.

  “As the kids today would say,” she said, “this totally sucks.”

  “Yup,” Earl replied. “In the old days, if somebody died and the family didn’t have a plot, or if the poor dead soul didn’t have a family, it wasn’t uncommon for a neighbor or a friend or even an acquaintance to roll the body in a rug—or maybe in a tarp if he was a fisherman—and stuff him in the back of somebody’s station wagon. Then they’d drive onto the boat and deliver him to a funeral home over on the Cape.”

  As he was telling his tale—“spinning his yarn,” her dad would have called it—Annie felt her eyes grow wide. “That’s a joke, right?”

  Earl shook his head. “Nope. Even back then it took a whole lot of paperwork and a lot of dough to get a body off this goofball island. It was easier to use a station wagon. And it meant that the dead guy would have a decent burial. ’Course, if he or she was cremated, the ashes were picked up later and brought back to the Vineyard for distribution off the cliffs or somewhere on his or her property. Back in the fifties, I remember my dad telling me that one guy wanted his ashes spread on the sidewalk outside The Ritz in OB.” He chuckled. “More than once, I’ve wondered if that was another island legend or if it really happened.”

  If there was an appropriate comment, Annie couldn’t think of it.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “we have a funeral home here now that takes care of everything. And, as for us, until I get the official word on what is or what isn’t going to happen, I’m going back to the main house. I can finish up painting the front bedroom. Nobody but us will know the difference. Besides, I’m better off being productive than standing around, staring at a bunch of sand and seaweed, playing armchair detective.”

  Chapter 6

  “I need to tell Mom not to come,” Kevin said.

  Annie had known she was too distracted to sit at her laptop and get any halfway decent writing done, so she’d walked back to the beach, retrieved her sneakers, then gone to where Kevin stood—on the outside of the area that was now squared off by yellow police tape, the kind that sent chills down the spines of most passersby, not that anyone would be passing by a private beach on Chappaquiddick, especially in April. John, two other Edgartown officers, and the state police remained. Annie noticed that Lucy was still there, too, though she’d moved over to the dunes and was talking to Jonas. Taylor was gone, which was fine with Annie, though she felt somewhat guilty about that.

  “I sent the crew home until further notice,” Kevin said.

  “There’s still six weeks to finish,” Annie said.

  “Five weeks, three days.”

  “But who’s counting, right?”

  “All the more reason I can’t deal with Mom right now. I love her dearly, but sometimes she can be—what’s the word?—formidable?”

  He’d smiled as he said it, but Annie got the point. She also wondered if that was why she hadn’t yet been able to fully connect with Donna. But for both her sake and Kevin’s, she wanted to sound optimistic. “Maybe by Saturday they’ll know where the skull came from and it can fade into one more piece of short-lived Vineyard gossip.”

  “Seriously? Do you know how long things can take when you’re dealing with the government? Especially in Boston. It takes forever to get a building permit. And God forbid someone claims to have seen a new species of a creepy spider or a minuscule shard of what they think might be old pottery, because it can shut down major construction of a high-rise for months.”

  So Earl’s predictions hadn’t been exaggerations.

  “Well, I’m sure Donna will be disappointed. But she’ll probably understand.”

  He laughed. “No, she won’t. She’ll want to come anyway. Then she’ll drive everyone crazy—including me—which won’t be helpful. She means well. She really does. But she doesn’t want to see me—or now you, too—not get what we want. All I need to do is figure out how to tell her not to come. Then let her know I mean it.”

  Annie wondered why he was so insistent. Maybe he was the only one who Donna would drive crazy.

  “Kevin?” she asked gently. “What’s wrong? You’ve told me about a few things Donna did when you were young that were upsetting at the time, but wasn’t that just typical kids-versus-parents stuff? Has something else happened?”

  He looked out to the water. “No. It isn’t really about her.”

  “What then? I mean, right now I could do without company as much as you, even our mother. But you seem kind of angry.”

  “Not angry. Distressed.”

  “About the Inn?”

  “Partly.”

  Only partly? “What else?”

  He folded his arms. “John suggested that the skull could be partial skeletal remains from a body that had fallen off, or been tossed off a ship. Or a boat. Buried at sea, intentionally or not.”

  “That would be good for us, though, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that mean our property wasn’t sacred ground?”

  “Yeah, but it could mean that your little treasure is something worse.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it could be from the body of Taylor’s old boyfriend. Remember the story about him? Jonas’s father?”

  Of course Annie remembered. Taylor had had a boyfriend over twenty years ago, a son of wealthy seasonal Vineyard residents (who later became Annie’s landlords). Taylor had been an island girl; her father, a fisherman. It had seemed like one
of those too-predictable summer scenarios: rich boy meets poor girl, boy’s family disapproves, boy goes back to prep school in September. But that boy—whose name Annie couldn’t remember—had an unfortunate accident, or so it was recorded, on his small sailboat that he and Taylor had taken out one day. He had fallen overboard; Taylor claimed she’d tried, but hadn’t been able to find him in the water, it had happened so fast. What few people knew at the time was that Taylor was pregnant. The baby’s grandparents—the Flanagans—had insisted on raising Jonas; they’d told everyone that his mother was a Boston girl who’d wanted money but not the baby. The truth, however, was that Taylor hadn’t felt she’d had a choice. She had no way and no means with which to raise a baby, while her boyfriend’s parents could well afford to give him a good life. The money they gave Taylor paid for her college education, got her parents out of debt, and enabled her mother to stay in their home after Taylor’s father died. But Taylor and the Flanagan boy had truly been in love—and Jonas had found letters that proved it. It wasn’t until the previous summer that mother and son had been reunited; since then the two of them had become “thick as thieves,” as Earl would have said with a lighthearted chuckle.

  It had been a sad love story with a surprisingly decent ending.

  Until now.

  Annie touched Kevin’s arm. “But if it is . . . What was his name?”

  “Derek.”

  “Right. Derek Flanagan. But if it’s . . . him . . .” Her words didn’t gel.

  “Yeah, well,” Kevin continued, “I guess the good news would be that because Derek wasn’t a Wampanoag our property won’t be labeled ‘sacred land.’”

  Yes, that was one thought. Then Annie had another. “And because Derek’s death was years ago . . . because the remains wouldn’t be what Earl told me would be considered ‘fresh’ . . . it shouldn’t delay construction, should it? Wasn’t Derek’s case closed?”