Dark Nantucket Noon (32 page)

Kitty had found a place at last, a low tent within a wild grapevine that was scrambling up into a red oak tree, and the floor of the tent was softly carpeted with poison ivy and fading ferns. She crawled into it and dropped down, shaking from the outpouring of her adrenal glands. Blood was brimming from a hundred small wounds and scratches, and she felt lightheaded, as though she had been picked up and whirled around by a twisting storm until she had spun her way at last into its dark silent heart. The interlaced twigs of oaks and junipers were tightly woven over her, and there was a cloud of mosquitoes gathering around her head; but looking off to one side she could see the same flock of gray sanderlings she had noticed before, wheeling and dipping over the water as if they were all one creature, as if they had been trained by a dancing master, as if they were moving to a music they alone could hear, as if the tide were swelling and receding in three-quarter time. They had a tricky way of turning so that they all darted into shadow at once and disappeared, and then reappeared together as the gray light struck them all one way.
Come, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow me! Whither shall I follow, follow, follow? Whither shall I follow, follow thee? Dip and soar! Oh, why are you flying without your clothes? And the sanderlings threw up their wings in horror and danced away, while Kitty's fingers moved in the fine gray sand, and the purple blood fell in round droplets that rested on the sand in perfect spherical beads
—
beautiful!
—
their rich red color on the fine gray sand.

39

“ … What d'ye say?”
“I say, pull like god-dam.”

Moby Dick

Homer's euphoria had disappeared, replaced by an uneasy sense of foreboding. He had dropped off Mary at the house on Vestal Street and then he had gone around to Bob Fern's place on the west side of town and picked up Bob, and now the two of them were on their way to Alden's place to wait for Kitty and Alice and Alden, and then of course there were all those things Homer had to go over with Kitty. But first he wanted to sit down with Bob and Alden, all three of them together, and go over the whole thing again. Together they ought to be able to come up with the name of somebody in the Nantucket Protection Society who might have called Dankbinkel last winter, somebody who would then have had a reason for killing Helen Green. Somebody who might also have taken a boat across Coatue from the harbor to Nantucket Sound, across that place between Bass Point and Five-Fingered Point that Kitty had discovered, where the water had washed right over.

“Homer, tell me how that went again,” said Bob Fern, “that part about the Red Sea and the eclipse of the sun. You said the moon did it, just the way Kitty said. I don't think I've got it straight in my own mind.”

“The moon did it because it eclipsed the sun, don't you see? Not only did it make the island dark enough for murder but it created the highest tides of the season, and lifted the water right up over Coatue.”

“Yes, I understand that. But what about the crossing of the Red Sea? What does that have to do with it?”

“Because it's just the same, don't you see? It says in Exodus that there was a strong east wind all night, just the way there was here, and it did the same thing it did here—it increased the normal effect of the tide. And here on Nantucket the moon and the sun and the storm together raised up the water till it came close to the very foot of the lighthouse, and together they lifted the harbor up and over the barrier to Nantucket Sound. So somebody went straight across Coatue from the harbor and headed up the Sound for Great Point and shot Helen Green at the instant of total darkness. But then the damn fool made a fatal mistake. He slipped back across Coatue into the harbor and dropped the spear gun over the side where he thought the water was deep enough, forgetting how far out the tide would go that very day. The thing must have lain there exposed to view that selfsame day! Only nobody saw it. And nobody would have discovered it at all, if it hadn't been for Kitty's determination to go out there again precisely six months later at the next time of highest and lowest tides. And then of course it happened for Kitty the way it happened for the Israelites. God made the sea dry land, and she walked across it in the midst of the sea. And bless her heart, she found that thing I left locked up on the back seat of the Scout. Blast those guinea hens. Do you see Alden's truck anyplace?”

“No, just Alice's car. I guess they're not back yet.” Homer and Bob Fern got out and stood beside Alden's toolshed looking around. The two brown goats came running up to the edge of the fenced-in pasture and stared at them, bleating.

“Look at that,” said Bob. “Look at that poor nanny's milk bag. I'll bet nobody milked her this morning. And say, Homer, Jupiter's gone.”

“Well, good for him,” said Homer. “He must have flapped up over the fence. I wonder if Alice knew. She didn't mention it this morning. Listen to the dogs! What are they making such a racket for?”

“Maybe they're after Jupiter,” said Bob. He ran behind the house and found two of the dogs barking at one of Alice's cats, which was hissing at them from the top of the laundry pole, its claws dug in, its fur on end. Bob shooed away the dogs and rescued the cat, and Homer rushed off to the chicken shed, where a third dog was yipping in a high treble above a tremendous angry squawking of furious hens. The air inside the shed was full of feathers. Frightened chicks were tumbling around in the incubator, and the hens were hurling themselves at poor Fly, who was yelping in a corner.

Somebody had left the door open. “Here, boy,” said Homer. “Good dog.” He batted his way through flapping wings and took hold of Fly's collar and dragged him out, glancing up to make sure there was no great white swan perched in the rafters. Then he slammed the door between himself and Fly and went back to take another look.
What was that?
There was a shotgun in the rafters. Homer reached up and snatched it down. It was a shotgun from which the barrel had been removed.

Bob Fern had been mildly surprised at being dragged away from his lunch by a man babbling incoherently about the moon and the crossing of the Red Sea. Now he was further stunned when Homer burst out of the chicken shed shouting at the top of his lungs, cursing himself for a blind fool, hurling himself into his car. Backing up, he almost ran into Bob, who was trying to dodge around the car and get in the other side. “My God,” cried Homer, “I left them all out there together. It was Alden, Bob, it was Alden—it was as plain as the nose on my face all the time—and I went off and left him there with Kitty. Christ in blazes, we can't go out there in this thing. I've got to go back to town for the Scout. God damn it, Fern, she found the spear gun. He didn't like it when she found the spear gun. I saw his face! I should have recognized his face!”

“Alden's face?” said Bob politely. “You recognized Alden Dove?” Bob's head crashed against the windshield as Homer jammed on the brakes at the intersection of the driveway with the Polpis Road, and Bob clenched his teeth and groaned.

“The
Andrea Doria!”
shouted Homer. “Good God, Bob, Alden was a diver, he went down to that sunken liner, the
Andrea Doria.
And his partner had an accident, he died in the attempt. It was in the paper, Alden's photograph, with black grease on his face, and it wasn't until I saw him just now, and there was grease on his face again, and it was all contorted with some kind of trouble, and there was something else—I know, he had his glasses pushed up on his forehead just like the diver's mask.” Homer was gesturing wildly with one hand to show Bob, and the car was veering all over the Polpis Road. “The two faces were one and the same. The diver was Alden! Alden Dove!”

“Try Joe Green's place,” said Bob Fern quickly. “He's got a jeep. You wouldn't have to go all the way back to town. Here, here, slow down, this is his driveway.”

“Good for you, Bob. Good for you. Goddamn his soul in hell if the jeep's not there.”

The jeep was there. And so was Joe Green himself, running to open the door as Homer's car roared up and shrieked to a stop. Homer shouted at him, and Joe rushed out of the house and threw himself into the jeep. Homer and Bob Fern jumped from the car into the jeep as Joe backed it up, and Homer nearly fell out again as it gathered speed down the driveway. Joe burst out onto the Polpis Road without slowing down. He said nothing. His eyes were alight, his galvanized hands gripped the wheel.

“I'll feel like a fool if we meet them on the road,” shouted Homer, straining forward in the bucket seat. But there was no great lumbering vehicle coming their way on the Polpis Road. There was nobody on the road at all until they stopped at the air pump at Wauwinet to lock the front wheel hubs and get the jeep into four-wheel drive. The Nantucket Fire Department was there before them, a bunch of men in rubber coats and boots, letting the air out of the tires of one of their pumping trucks.

“Fire somewhere?” yelled Homer, tumbling out of the jeep.

“Column of smoke,” said the fire chief. “Big pillar of smoke off there at the Head of the Harbor.”

Bob Fern and Homer were wrenching at the tires with a screwdriver and a tire iron, while Joe Green kept the engine throbbing and pulsing, one hand on the knob that controlled the four-wheel drive. He whammed it into place as they jumped back in the jeep, and they were off again, bounding along the sandy track in the wake of the fire engine, which had a good head start.

They could see the smoke now, off to the left. “It's my shack,” said Joe. He was driving now like a crazy man. The jeep was jolting from crest to crest of the washboard track, and the three men inside it rose and fell on the hard seats, bucking up and slamming down. At the place where the road forked Joe whirled the steering wheel and they bore down on the fire truck. Men were dropping off the running boards, snatching at the hoses, coupling them together, shouting at each other, running around the smoldering shack.

“My God, what's the use,” moaned Homer, climbing down, sick at heart.

The roof had fallen in. If Kitty had been in there she would have been crushed to death. Homer and Bob Fern stumbled around the house to the beach, but Joe began attacking the smoking timbers with his bare hands, lifting them, wrenching them out of the hold of the nails, heaving them aside. The fire chief rushed at him, shouting, “Get away from there, you fool. It's no use.”

Bob Fern found the pickup truck in the rising water of the tidal stream that flowed from Coskata Pond. The tide was swirling around the hubs of the tires. Bob waded out to it with Homer. “My God, what's it doing here?” cried Homer. “Something's wrong. He would never have left it here.”

Bob was splashing back to the shore, he was standing and turning, examining the stretch of beach that ran around to Coatue, looking out over the water, twisting swiftly around to stare at the bluff, where Joe was climbing up, clawing at roots and clumps of beach grass.

It was Joe, therefore, who found the broken place in the massed barrier of tangled juniper, and the fragments of torn cloth clinging to twigs and thorns. The trail was little more than a succession of snapped stems and broken branches, but he thrust himself along it, shouting,
“Kitty, Kitty.”

Dimly Kitty heard her name. Someone was calling, “Kitty, Kitty!” Surely the man who was standing over her was not calling her name, because the call was far away, and he was nearby. She could feel his presence, hear his breathing, but she didn't want to open her eyes and look at him. She just wanted to burrow her head still farther down into the ground and listen to the distant music of her name, which was coming closer and closer, accompanied by percussive noises, brittle and sharp, snapping and crashing like drums and castanets, like marble lids falling back and shivering into chips and shards.

Kitty woke up suddenly, rolled her head back, and saw Alden and Joe. And Joe was looking at Alden, his torn face full of joy. Joe's bleeding hands gripped the trunks of two trees like the hands of Samson in the temple of Dagon. Alden was bleeding too. There were red gashes all over his arms and face. The two men seized one another like dogs and fell cruelly into the underbrush, and Joe's arm was around the other's neck, lifting and pounding the gray face into the ground. Then the man underneath rolled away and staggered to his feet and crashed off through the thorny trees, lurching and falling, and they could hear the breaking of branches as he stumbled through them, growing fainter and fainter until there was no sound but that of their own voices, murmuring one another's names over and over.

Bob Fern saw them coming out of the woods, and he started toward them, but he couldn't bear to look at their faces. She was all right, thank God. The hell with the rest of it, as long as she was safe. Then Bob saw something else, and he shouted at Homer. Alden Dove was there, in plain sight, a hundred yards away, leaping up into the back of his truck, snatching something out of it, jumping down and running up the shore of the tidal stream in the direction of Coskata Pond. Bob and Homer took off after him, but Alden was too quick for them. When they came pounding up to the shore of the pond he was nowhere to be seen, and when they ran around the pond to the Atlantic shore on the other side they saw nothing but the sanderlings skimming and darting over a seamless lapping of small waves where a man weighted down with steel tire chains had gently lowered himself below the surface of the water. The slight disturbance was of no interest to the sanderlings after all, and they soared away to continue their dancing flight in another place.