Dead in Vineyard Sand (17 page)

“Up in Chilmark he lived next door to a family named Highsmith. They were friendly for years and their kids played together. He ever talk about that?”

Manny eyed me. “Highsmith's the one who got shot, isn't he? And his wife too, they say. I hear that you and him scuffled a few days earlier. That true?”

I gave him my version of the encounter and told him about being on the golf course when Highsmith's body was found.

“I didn't know you're a golfer, J.W.”

“I'm not. I got talked into playing by Glen Norton. Now there are some people who add my scuffle with Highsmith to me being there when we found the body in that sand trap and think I might have something to do with his death. I'm trying to get clear of that idea.”

Manny was instantly indignant. “Hell, J.W., anybody knows you, knows you didn't kill him. What bullshit! Oops! Sorry, kids!”

“That's okay,” said little Diana, who was nearby, peering at a lathe. “Cow manure is good fertilizer, Pa says.”

“Your pa is right,” said Manny, relieved.

Diana drifted away and Manny turned back to me. I lowered my voice. “A while back there was some kind of falling-out between the Willets and the Highsmiths after they'd been friends for years. I think it had to do with their children but I don't know any more than that. Did Ed Willet ever talk about it with you?”

“You don't think Ed Willet shot Highsmith, do you? Hell, Ed and Geraldine weren't even on the island when that happened. Besides, Ed wouldn't ever shoot anybody. I think he's some kind of Quaker, in fact.”

“A Quaker who likes to shoot?”

“Why not? He just doesn't like the idea of shooting people. Like Zee, for gosh sakes. She wouldn't hurt a fly.”

Zee had, in fact, ended the career of many a fly, tick, and mosquito, and had once shot a couple of thugs in self-defense, but he'd made his point.

“I'd still like to know what happened to sour the relationship between the Willets and the Highsmiths. It seemed to happen when the kids reached puberty.”

Manny's face became wary. “You're putting me in a hard spot, J.W. I'm not sure I want to pass on what Ed
said. I might have got it wrong in the first place and you might get it wronger because I got it wrong.”

Good old Manny. A nice guy even though he did belong to the NRA. I said, “I'm in a hard spot myself, Manny. There are people on this island who think I may have cacked Henry Highsmith. I'd like to prove them wrong.”

“But you didn't kill him.”

“But they think I might have. You said that Heather Willet was a wild one. What do you mean? It must have been something her father said.”

“The girl's dead, J.W. It's not right to speak ill of the dead.”

He didn't like this conversation, but I pushed it. “What ill is that, Manny? You can't hurt her now. She's past hurt. If it's that she might have been sexually active at fifteen, you won't be telling me anything I haven't already heard. That night she went off with two boys and another girl, and she was naked when they found her body. Is that it? Is that what made her father call her wild?”

Manny rubbed his jaw and dropped his own voice. “I'm getting to be a stuffy old man. All this modern sex stuff you see on TV seems a little too much to me. Maybe what goes on between grown-ups is okay, but what the kids know and do worries me. I don't like it.”

“So it was her sexual activity that bothered her father. Is that why he broke off with the Highsmiths? So Heather wouldn't spend so much time with Gregory Highsmith?”

He seemed to search for words. Then he said, hesitantly and slowly, “Yeah, that was part of it, but there was more, I think. He didn't like what he saw in the Highsmith kids after they got older. He didn't want Heather to hang out with them anymore.”

“Why not?”

Manny frowned and flicked his eyes toward Joshua and Diana. “I'm not really sure. Ed didn't say much and he was careful when he talked, but he let things slip out sometimes. I may have heard him wrong or misinterpreted what he said, but one thing I remember is that when he told Henry and Abigail Highsmith that Heather wouldn't be going over to their house anymore, neither of them seemed surprised or argued. He said it was as if they had been expecting it.”

“But Heather was at the beach party and so were Gregory and Belinda, and she had gone off with the Highsmiths and a boy named Biff Collins when she drowned. That doesn't sound like a broken friendship between the kids.”

Manny looked at me. “I don't think Heather wanted to break off the friendship. I think she wanted Gregory. I'd be willing to bet that she sneaked out of the house to go to that party and get together with him. It was her parents who didn't want her to keep company with the Highsmith kids.”

I thought about that. Four kids sneak out and meet at a beach and a few hours later one of them is dead.

I asked Manny if he could think of any connection between what had happened on the beach and the death of Henry Highsmith and the attack on his wife. He couldn't. I thanked him for his time, collected my children, and headed for the door.

“Talk with Zee about that Olympic idea,” said Manny, as I left. “I think she can make the team.”

“I'll tell her you mentioned it.”

“Make sure you do. She's a natural!”

Outside, Diana the Huntress, who was always on the trail of food, had not forgotten our earlier discussion.

“Pa?”

“What?”

“We're hungry. Can we have lunch at The Bite? Can we have fried clams?”

“Why not? Get into the truck.”

Back in Menemsha, at The Bite, we had the island's best fried clams for lunch and afterward had ice cream for dessert. It was a proper Vineyard summer meal, and it was shared by others who came to the counter in a steady stream.

Above us, the sun hung high in the blue sky that arced from horizon to horizon, and out beyond the parking lot, the small beach was filled with sunbathers. Beyond them Vineyard Sound glittered over to the Elizabeth Islands, on one of which, long ago, a leper colony had existed. Now that island was a school for troubled boys just a short slide from jail, where they got a last, tough chance to learn to fly right. I admired the people who ran the school but had often wondered how its graduates fared once they got back to their old neighborhoods. Jesus had reportedly observed that the poor would always be among us, and I suspected the same was true of criminals.

One of whom was operational on this side of the sound.

On the way back down-island, my son, who had been patient all morning, spoke.

“Pa?”

“What, Joshua?”

“How come you're looking in the mirror so much?”

“Oh, just checking. When you drive, you check in all directions so you don't hit anything and nobody hits you.”

“Pa.”

“What, Diana?”

“Are we going to work on the bridge today?”

It was a fair question.

“Sure.”

So I put crime on a back burner and we spent the rest of the afternoon making great progress on the bridge. Tarzan would have been proud of us.

Zee was too, when she came home from the hospital and she and I were admiring our handiwork over martinis on the balcony.

“Another day or two and we'll be done,” I said. “Then the kids can have their choice of trees: the beech or the oak.”

“It'll be almost as good as a real jungle. I hope nobody falls out of a tree and breaks something.”

It was a universal and eternal fear of all parents who lived near trees, and one to which I was not immune, although I tried to keep my concerns in check since it was my view that kids had to be allowed to take reasonable chances and to suffer a certain amount of hurt when they fell or ignored warnings. It was, I knew, an old-fashioned idea, but one that I liked better than forbidding them activities that included an element of danger.

I considered telling Zee not to worry, but that advice has never, to my knowledge, kept anyone from worrying; just the opposite, in fact. So I contented myself with pointing out details of the day's construction and at bedtime was satisfied that no one had fallen out of the trees that day. Parenting is a day-by-day phenomenon.

The next day was Zee's day off, and I asked her how she'd like to spend it. The answer was: First she'd like to go to the beach, taking along a couple of rods, of
course, in case there were any stray bluefish swimming by. Then she wanted to wash her hair. Both the children and I thought those were proper plans, so I loaded the Land Cruiser with beach gear and put rods in their roof racks while Zee packed a cooler with food and drink.

We drove down to Katama, then shifted into four-wheel drive and headed east over Norton Point Beach. On both sides of us the water danced in the sun.

We found a spot on East Beach, about halfway to Wasque, and spread ourselves out. It was a lovely summer day, with a small southwest wind blowing warm air over the sand and sea. While Joshua and Diana tested the water and dug in the sand, Zee and I took turns sunning ourselves on the big bedspread we used as a beach blanket and wandering down the beach, lazily casting for fish that showed no interest in our lures.

When the fish are biting, you have to keep your mind on what you're doing, but when they're ignoring you and you're just casting and reeling in because you like the feel of doing it, you can think of many other things.

I thought about Glen Norton, Gabe Fuller, and Jasper Jernigan.

I believed I knew Glen well enough to exclude him from my list of murder suspects, but I also knew that more than one citizen has been shocked to discover that his mild, helpful, good-natured, churchgoing neighbor is actually a mass murderer with a backyard full of buried bodies. Still, Glen's expression when he'd uncovered Highsmith's hand and his shaky demeanor afterward suggested that his shock was real. Of course it was possible that he'd killed Highsmith but that someone else had buried the body where Glen had found it. The scenario was unlikely, but would account for Glen's
reaction. True crime is generally more straightforward than that, however, so for the time being I set Glen to one side of my mental list of suspects.

Jasper Jernigan and Gabe Fuller were other breeds of cat. I considered Jasper.

On the golf course, he had been a pleasant, lighthearted companion, but I'd seen his letters in the paper and they bespoke a temperament capable of deep resentment and towering passion. He identified so closely with golf that he considered an attack on the proposed Pin Oaks course to be an attack on him personally. I knew political, religious, and other ideological zealots who also took any criticism of their beliefs as an assault on them, and whose passions threatened to run high enough to kill. Sports fans were often such people, which is no surprise since “fan” is short for “fanatic.” Many a soccer ref has had to run for his life, and more than one hockey dad has been killed by another as their sons played the game.

I wanted to know more about Jasper, but the person who really interested me was Gabe Fuller, the taciturn man who carried a short-barreled rifle in his golf bag.

As I thought back to those three-plus holes that we'd played, it seemed as clear now as it had then that Gabe was doing double duty as Jasper's bodyguard and golfing pal. I remembered those eyes constantly looking here then there, ahead then back, into the woods then out on the fairway, always moving; I remembered how he rarely strayed far from Jasper, how he never drove too far from where Jasper's errant strokes sent his ball.

Wealth and power breed enemies, and Jasper thereby might need a bodyguard, especially taking into consideration his hot-tempered and acid-tongued attacks on the anti-golf crowd. If those letters were typical of his response to other adversaries, I suspected
that there might be a lot of people out there who would not weep at the news of Jasper's demise or who, indeed, might be glad to assist in that consummation.

If so, Gabe was just the man for Jasper: a capable bodyguard who was at the same time a pleasant and capable golf partner.

My time with Jasper and Gabe had been brief, but long enough that I'd gotten the impression that Jasper's trust in Gabe was near total; Gabe's loyalty to Jasper, on the other hand, was harder for me to assess, for while Jasper showed his emotions, Gabe's face had revealed little.

Just how loyal was Gabe? Was he one of those soldiers who would step between his employer and a gunman even as the trigger was being pulled? Was he one who would not reason why, but would ride into the valley of death, sabering the gunners and charging an army while all the world wondered?

And would he go farther? Was he one who would, without hesitation or question, assassinate his master's enemies, who wouldn't spare a sigh though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie?

If so, was Jasper so mad at Henry Highsmith that he'd sent Gabe not only to shoot him but to bury him in what Henry might have equated with a pit of excrement, a final insult even after death?

I reached back in my memory and recalled Jasper following the discovery of Highsmith's body. Glen had been quite distressed, but Jasper had shown much less reaction initially, and had seemed totally collected by the time the police had arrived.

Hmmmm.

Gabe had shown no emotion at all, although he'd assured Glen that he, too, had been rattled. I hadn't believed him then and I didn't believe him now.

Another thought: maybe Gabe had killed Highsmith without being ordered to do so, motivated by what he took to be the unstated wishes of his boss, or by a loyal wish to silence an enemy before he became more dangerous. A preemptive strike, as it were; such strikes were, after all, quite popular these days in very high war-making circles, and Gabe might have felt that what was good for the nation was good for Jasper.

Or maybe Gabe had misunderstood some remark Jasper had made. It wouldn't be the first time a crime had been committed because of a misunderstanding. I thought of an earlier Henry's four loyal knights and of Becket.