Death in Vineyard Waters (22 page)

We walked on a bit. “What do you want to know?” she asked tightly.

“Maybe it will make you more comfortable to know I'm not interested in green cards one way or another.”

“How very consoling. What do you want from me?”

“I have reason to believe that you and perhaps some other of the young people who work here are contributing sexual favors to Sanctuary's guests. Before you comment, you should also know that I don't care one way or the other
about whether you engage in such activities and that your answer will reach no other ears if it is honest. I am not interested in preventing or reporting activities between consenting adults. On the other hand, if you lie to me, I will suggest to my friends in Immigration that they investigate Sanctuary and its employees. I might have the vice people do the same.”

We strolled beneath the trees. The southwest wind stirred the leaves and bent the flowers and tall grasses.

“I have five sisters and two brothers in Sligo,” she said. “They don't know what I do over here. All they know is that the money comes. When they save enough, others will come over here. There's no work in Ireland.”

“So that's why McGregor called you a whore. He knew.”

“Women are fools. I'm a fool. I trusted him. I told him too much. I didn't want anything between us. I thought that he and I . . .”

We paused at a turn in the path and looked westward toward Squibnocket. The sun danced on the blue water and the trees were many shades of green. The sky arched up like a blue bowl, pale at the horizon, darker at the zenith.

“Is this work of yours part of the Van Dams' offering to their guests, or is it something private between you and your clients?”

She gave an expressionless laugh. “You won't see it written in any brochures. But it's understood. Not all of us offer such services, but some do. We are allowed to keep whatever gifts we might receive, and that makes the work rather lucrative. We are very discreet.”

“I take it that the Van Dams can insure that discretion by reminding you that you have no work permits.”

“A simple weapon but an excellent one.”

“You have attended to Tristan Cooper among others.”

She flashed me an amused glance. “Ah, yes. Would you believe that was not for profit? I was curious about him, if you must know. A man more than eighty years old, after all.
And would you believe that he loves well? He does indeed. It gives one hope for one's old age! He is a fine old man.” We turned back toward the tennis courts. “If I pack quickly,” she said, “perhaps I can be away before your Immigration friends can find me.”

“They won't find you because of me,” I said. “I am not the conscience of mankind. How you live is your business.” We came up to Barkley and I handed him my medallion. “Give this to Dr. Van Dam,” I said. Then I shook hands with Maggie Leary. “Sorry we couldn't do business,” I said. “I could have given you a real deal on whole life. Maybe another time.”

Her hand was small and firm. “Yes. Perhaps another time. Thank you, Mr. Jackson.”

Her doubles partner crossed to her as I left. “Huh,” I heard him say, just before I passed beyond his voice, “the nerve of that chap. Selling insurance here. How did he get in, I wonder? I'm going to speak to Van Dam about this. We shouldn't have to put up with fellows like that.”

14

I got into the Landcruiser and drove out past the smiling gate guards. Two driveways back toward West Tisbury, I took an unmarked driveway. A few hundred yards along the road I passed a well-tended family cemetery full of departed Coopers. A small granite mausoleum with a padlocked metal door was built half into a low hill on the far side. Beyond the hill I came to a well-built cottage. Tristan Cooper was standing on the porch looking at the road as I drove into sight.

He recognized me immediately and came to meet me. He was wearing only old shorts and stout shoes, and his ancient skin was brown and tight over his stringy muscles. He reminded me of a film I'd seen of Picasso. His was the same sort of vital face, his shoulders and arms showed the same lean strength, and he moved with the same economy of motion.

“Jackson, it's you. Welcome. J. W., isn't it?”

“That'll do. I phoned but no one answered.”

“I've been out, working. There.” He pointed to the graveyard. “I keep it neat. They'll plant me there one day and I want the neighborhood to be in shape.” He grinned a feral grin.

“I came to see the stones.”

“Ha. Not the gravestones, but the great stones. Coopers lie beneath the gravestones, but no one lies beneath the great stones. Or perhaps they do. Excellent. Delighted to show you. Come along, then.” He strode away and spoke over his shoulder as I followed. “Do you know anything about the stones of Martha's Vineyard?”

“Only what a couple of your friends have said, that you think they're evidence of pre-Columbian contacts between European and American cultures. There's a lot of controversy about it, I gather.”

“For a lot of people, American history starts with 1492. Actually, almost everybody now knows that there were native civilizations here long before that and that Columbus was certainly not the first European to reach these shores and return home again. Even Marjorie Summerharp, bless her wouldn't have denied the Scandal avian explorations, and she might even have accepted the Brendan voyages and the fishing journeys of the Azorians to the Grand Banks. You know that the Vineyard is thought by some to be the Vinland that Leif Ericson explored?”

“I thought they'd decided that Newfoundland was Vinland.”

He laughed. “Yes, the site of L'Anse Aux Meadows. History is looking at the past through a picket fence. We only see part of it and we have to guess at the rest. If you want to learn about the Vineyard-Vinland theory, go down to the Historical Society in Edgartown and do some reading. Begin with Huntington's essay in the
Intelligencer
—that'll give you a start. As for me, I'm after older game. Look, you can see the Altar from here.”

I looked ahead and saw a long gray stone outlined against the sky atop a small hill. A moment later we were there. Tristan Cooper was panting slightly and there was sweat on his hard brown skin.

The stone was granite of the kind seen all over Martha's Vineyard in walls, foundations, fields, and woods. It was roughly shaped into a rectangle. It was a dozen feet long, a third that wide and stood three feet above the surface of the lawn that surrounded it. A shallow channel was carved around the edge of the upper surface of the stone, outlining its perimeter.

Tristan Cooper placed his hands upon the stone and peered up at me with his bright old eyes. “A glacier brought these stones down during the last ice age. When the glacier stopped and then retreated, it left behind a pile of dirt and stone it had pushed before it. That stone and dirt became the islands off the south coast of New England—Nantucket, the Vineyard, Block Island, Long Island, and the other smaller ones. A long time later, people arrived. Still later, people from across the sea arrived. Look at this. Obviously worked by human hands, right? The groove might be intended to catch blood and funnel it down here. See, here's a drainage cut at this corner. The questions are: who did it, when, and why?

“Human sacrifice was practiced by people all over the world. The Bible is full of it—Ahaz, Manasseh, the sons of Hinnom, the Molech worshipers and others. Read it, by the way, it's a good book. The Wolf Clan of the Pawnees sacrificed
a captured maiden every spring when Mars was the morning star, and there was human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism among Mississippi Valley people and among the Nootka and Kwakiutl on the north Pacific coast. So we shouldn't be surprised if it was tried on the Vineyard, too. Maybe right here.” He patted the stone.

“Maybe.”

“And maybe not,” he said briskly. “I agree. Critics of those of us who believe Europeans contacted America long before the Vikings got here would say that this stone was shaped and positioned here either by colonialists in the seventeenth century or by archeological fakers who did it as a joke in the spirit of the Cardiff Giant hoax. I say not. There was no practical use for such a stone in colonial times, and my family's records indicate that the stone has been here since the late eighteenth century at least. Besides, look here.” He bent over a corner of the stone. I joined him and looked down. Incised faintly into the side and end of the stone were roughly parallel lines leading away from the vertical corner. There were longer lines and shorter lines. I could see no pattern in them. “Ogham,” he said happily. “Two thousand years old, I reckon. Celtic. No colonialist or faker carved these! They were here before scholars could even read ogham!” He slapped the stone and stood up. His face shone.

“A kind of writing,” I said, remembering Marjorie Summerharp's reference to such evidence. “Can you read it?”

“Yes, my lad, I can. But let's talk of that later. Look there. Do you see that notch in the hill? See that rock poking up out of the scrub? At the summer solstice, if you stand at this altar stone, the sun rises over that rock. I have photographs of the event. The rock has been worked with tools and it's standing upright, so it's not there by chance. And there, do you see that standing stone to the south? There on the slope. Yes? The sun of the winter solstice rises over that stone. Damned near froze when I photographed that. And look there and there and there . . .”

His voice was like an ancient parchment, and as I turned and followed his voice and pointing arm I saw a circle of stones standing around the altar stone fifty yards or so away from it. They were rough-hewn granite rocks, some half hidden in scrub brush, others leaning, others apparently fallen. I seemed to slide backwards through time. Then Cooper's voice stopped and I moved back into the present. I blinked and Cooper said, “Have you ever been to Europe, J. W.?”

“No.”

“There are circles like this all over Britain and others on the Continent clear down to the African coast. Stonehenge, Avebury, Callenish, Stenness, Stanton Drew. And they're here in New England, too. Right here and in New Hampshire and Vermont. Over there, in Europe, they've got names and no one questions their antiquity or importance, but here they're nameless and the people who want to study them are cranks and crackpots. Like me.” He grinned a lupine grin. “Come along and see some more.”

He turned, and we went down off the hill along a slope broken by rocks and scrub, ducking under trees and dodging roots. In a swale below the Altar, dug into a cliff face, was a stone structure. Two large stones framed the doorway and another great flat stone topped the opening. Earth covered the topping stone. Cooper gestured, and we went inside. The room was stale and dark, but there was light aplenty from the door. The walls and ceiling were made of large flat stones, some, I guessed, weighing tons.

“There are dozens of these in New England,” said Cooper, extending a hand to touch a wall. “Root cellars, according to our critics. Built by colonialists, just like the Altar. But why a root cellar here? Why did they move such great stones to build it? Could they have moved such stones? It makes no sense, no sense at all. And did the native people, those called ‘Indians' build it, then? No, they did not. They were as ingenious as any folk, but there's no archeological evidence that they ever built such structures. Who, then? Europeans,
my lad, Europeans. Chambers such as this are found throughout ancient Europe. They were temples perhaps, or perhaps ceremonial chambers of lesser stature than temples. Do you note the direction of the door? No? At the winter solstice precisely, a shaft of light enters this door and reaches back there, to the far wall. It touches the base of the wall and then withdraws and is seen no more for another year. What do you think of that?”

“Sun worship. A ceremony to bring the sun back before it's gone forever.”

“Quite right. The work of a Christian colonialist? Pshaw! Look above you.”