Death in Vineyard Waters (10 page)

“So I told him about the east and west tides,” said Zee, looking at me over her beer, “just like you told me when you got me started fishing down at Wasque.”

I made some sort of noise that was halfway between a
sniff and a grunt. I think it was supposed to be a noncommittal sign of recollection.

“So I started thinking about the situation,” said McGregor, “and the more I thought about it, the more odd it seemed that Marjorie would have been found where the trawler picked her up. It was clear that something unusual must have occurred after she parked her car down there at the end of Katama Road. But I can't figure out what it would be other than that for some reason she went into the water far to the west of where her car was parked and then drowned and was washed east on the rising tide until her body was netted by the trawler.” He turned the beer bottle in his hands. “But why would that happen? What if somebody, some nut, was there when she parked and made her go with him off to the west along the beach and then . . . I don't know . . . pushed her in or something. Or maybe she got away and swam out to escape.” He gave me a grim smile. “Crazy, huh? Probably it was nothing like that. Probably she just decided to go for a walk west along the beach, and then went swimming and drowned and washed out to where they found her. I don't know.”

“What's this got to do with me?”

“Zee tells me that you were a cop. That's one thing. You're also a guy who knows the tides and knows people around here and knows the area. I'm a stranger. I'm a college professor who can crawl around in books okay, but I'm no real-life detective. I want to find out what happened to Marjorie, and I want to hire you to do it. In a week I'll be going back to the mainland to tend to the publication of the paper Marjorie and I have been working on. But between now and then I want you to investigate her death. I'll be glad to pay you for your trouble. Marjorie meant a lot to me, and I would feel even worse about her death if I were to discover later, perhaps, that it wasn't just a simple accident. I want to know everything that I can, particularly about what happened that last morning.” He clenched the
fist with the skinned knuckles and looked me in the eye. “I'm very serious about this. If someone caused her death, I want to know about it.”

I looked at Zee. She gave a slight nod.

“I'm not a private detective,” I said. “You can hire a P.I. over on the Cape. Maybe there's one right here on the island. Did you look in the Yellow Pages?”

“I have indeed looked in the Yellow Pages and found a listing for private detectives, but I think that you're a better man for the job because you know the area and the circumstances of Marjorie's death.” He hesitated. “Besides, Zee thinks you're the one to do it.”

I looked at Zee. She looked back and drank some beer.

“You won't lose any money by taking the job,” said McGregor. “I know that may not be the most important consideration for you, but it's a considerable one. I'll pay you very well, enough to more than cover whatever losses you'll incur when you take time off from your fishing business. I want this matter investigated thoroughly, and I'm afraid the police may not have the time or the personnel to tend to it. This is important to me.”

“The chances are,” I said, “that she just went for a walk to the west along the beach. Maybe she did it every day before she swam. That's probably what happened. Occam's razor: The simplest explanation that covers the facts is probably the right one. Save your money.”

“Please,” said Zee.

I had led her up to Skye's kitchen door and left her there so she could meet McGregor. I'd hoped that she'd choose me instead of him then, but instead they'd started dating and now she wanted me to help him. “All right,” I said, “I'll do it.”

“I'll give you a retainer right now,” said McGregor. “I really appreciate this more than I can say, Mr. Jackson.”

“Make it cash,” I said, hearing the coldness in my voice.

“Anything you want.” He put his checkbook away. It said
that he'd either been confident or very hopeful of getting me. “I'll have to go to the bank. I don't carry much money around with me.”

“And I have to finish smoking my fish before I go to work for you, Doctor. When I finish here, I'll want to come over to the farm and have a look at things there—Marjorie Summerharp's papers, books, her room, anything that hasn't already been cleaned up and shipped out.”

“Most of it's gone, I'm afraid. Her personal belongings were sent to her people in Maine. I do have the papers associated with the project we were doing. The work's done, but our working papers are still in John's library. You're certainly welcome to see those and, of course, anything else that might interest you.”

“It's just a place to begin. Maybe she left something around that would give us a clue about what happened after she left the house that morning.”

We climbed out of our lawn chairs and Zee collected the beer bottles. She came over and looked up at me. “Thanks, J. W. I'm on the night shift right now, but I'm free afternoons. If I can help, I want to.”

Zee worked as a nurse at the Martha's Vineyard hospital. She was very good at her job. She was very good at everything she did.

“I'll let you know,” I said. “I'll show Dr. McGregor the decoys and then throw you both out. I have to think about how I'm going to earn my salary for the next week.” I turned my back to McGregor and dropped my voice. “Don't let yourself get hurt by this guy.”

Her warm face cooled. “I'm not a little girl.”

“I know. But watch yourself.”

She walked deliberately back to McGregor and took his arm. “Why don't you show us those decoys?” she asked lightly. McGregor flashed a smile that said victory. His blue eyes glinted in the sun. I led them to the house.

When they had gone, I considered how I felt about Ian
McGregor. He had seemed inclined to play handshake games and had punched out at least one man on the Vineyard. He was a bit overbearing and apparently used women until he tired of them, a common enough practice among handsome men of a certain type. Was he gentle with Zee? He could be charming, obviously, and he professed to be worried about Marjorie Summerharp's last hours. And he also professed to like my house and my father's decoys. And he was smart—even Marjorie Summerharp had agreed about that. He had his Ph.D., but said he knew he didn't know anything about what he thought of as detective work.

And he had Zee.

I had plenty of reasons to dislike and distrust him.

7

I smoke my fish for about five hours, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on weather conditions—air temperature and moisture affect the time it takes. The test is by eye. When the fillets look just the right color, a sleek golden brown, they're done. I turn off the smoker, take the fillets out, put them on the porch to cool, then wrap them in plastic wrap. Then it's off to my secret, illegal buyer. He takes an order every week during the summer, which helps the Jackson budget quite a bit.

After I'd delivered the smoked fish and collected my illicit payment, I drove to John Skye's farm. Zee's Jeep was there, parked beside McGregor's MG, a reconditioned sportster about twenty years old but looking rakishly brand new. It sported a roof rack upon which was the surfboard John Skye had pointed out at the cocktail party. I parked beside the
MG and had a good look at my ancient Landcruiser—lots of rust, many dents, bent bumpers. It looked worse than usual. I gave a wheel a kick and went to the house as the kitchen door opened and Zee and McGregor came out. They both looked smashing, as though they had stepped out of a chamber of commerce ad to entice even more folk to the island: handsome couple, perfectly maintained old New England farmhouse, new Jeep and impeccably reconditioned English sports car parked on the fringe of a green lawn, handsome barn in the background. A perfect image of a perfect island.

And McGregor did the right thing—he handed me an envelope full of cash. “I'll show you Marjorie's room,” he said.

Marjorie Summerharp's room had been on the second floor of the farmhouse, at the top of the back stairs. At the foot of the stairs was a back door leading out onto a screened porch overlooking a green swale that bent out of sight behind the barn. There was a white fence across the front of the swale, and I knew it to be a pasture for the twins' horses. The view from Marjorie Summerharp's room was a loftier perspective of the same scene, which allowed you to look over the treetops and catch a glimpse of the sea. “Ocean view,” the real estate brochures would say.

The room was pretty well cleaned out, just as Ian McGregor had said it was.

“She didn't bring much down with her,” he said as I opened the door of a narrow closet and looked at a few wooden coat hangers. “She had only a small suitcase and her briefcase. She was pretty sardonic about the amount of stuff I brought. I'm afraid I'm not a guy who travels light unless he has to. Since I was driving down, I brought as much as I could pack into the MG or carry on top of it. She was of the ‘one is enough' school of packing and used to tell me she could travel to Europe for a month and take everything she needed in a flight bag. Why, she only had
that one old bathing suit and cap even though she swam every day. Said she could only wear one at a time and didn't need any more.” He had a self-deprecating smile on his face. I could see how he could be charming.

I looked under the bed and opened the drawers of the dresser and the nightstand. The bed had been remade with clean sheets, and there was no sign that Marjorie Summerharp had ever been there. I thought of something my father had sometimes said about hunting and fishing, that it was good to be in the woods and by the shore, but that we should walk so lightly that we'd leave no sign that we'd passed that way.

Ian McGregor leaned against the door frame, hands in his pockets, and Zee stood beside him, arms folded, as I worked my way around the room, finding nothing.

“I don't think there's anything here,” said Zee. “I helped Ian get her things together after the police said it was okay. We sent everything to Maine. She has kinfolk up there.”

I lifted up the mattress, saw nothing, and let it drop.

“I do have her academic papers,” said Ian McGregor. “They're downstairs in the library.”

We went down the front stairs and entered John Skye's library—four walls covered with books, a large desk, an old globe, several leather chairs and a matching couch, reading lamps, two smaller tables, and a couple of straight wooden chairs. A large old Turkish rug covered most of the floor. It was a comfortable place, like the one I'll have in my house after I win the lottery and can remodel. John Skye had told me once that he'd read all of some of the books and some of almost all of them and that the others were books he intended to read when he had time. The desk and tables were covered with papers and folders.

McGregor gestured. “This is where we worked. Much of this is photocopied material having to do with Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, Arthurian writings. We had to play devil's advocates because we had to be absolutely sure that the document we'd found wasn't just another forgery. The
result was that we spent more time trying to prove that the manuscript is a fake than to promote it. As it turned out, the more we worked to disprove it, the more we became sure that it was genuine.”

“Let me have a look at her papers,” I said. “Maybe there's something there that will give me a clue about something.”

“Like what?” asked Zee.

I didn't know. “I don't know,” I said. “Maybe a hint about suicide. Maybe a note to meet somebody at the beach. I don't know.”

What I got was several hundred pages of photographed documents, pages written in a tiny, tight hand, and other pages of scribbles in two different hands. There were lots of initials. Most, it turned out, referred to people, places, and terms I'd never heard of. McGregor leaned over my shoulder and pointed. “The small handwriting is hers, the big sprawling one is mine. When our schedules kept us apart, we'd write notes to one another and answer them. The notes in her hand alone were her reasoning and summing up of the studies we made and discussed together. When we were sure of ourselves, we'd type up that portion of our paper and proofread it together.”