Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (22 page)

I
 didn’t know you knew first aid,” I said to Crystal when we were by ourselves out on the porch.

“I don’t. Not really.”

We leaned side by side against the railing. The underbellies of the black clouds in the eastern sky were tinted russet, but it was still dark in Dog Cove. I put my face close and breathed the scent of her hair from behind her ear. She knew first aid. There were so many things still to learn about her. “Say, would you be interested in a little carnal knowledge?”

“Sure, but we have guests.”

“Presumably they’ll leave.”

“While I was fitting his sling, Arno told me he killed Compton Kempshall. He sort of whispered it in my ear. What are they doing? Who are they trying to protect?…You don’t care, you just want to satisfy your throbbing lust.”

Was that so bad? “Hawley told me
he
killed Kempshall. He had the murder weapon to prove it.”

“What? He carries it with him?”

“A Cub Scout hatchet. He had it in that gym bag. He had it to prove his point. And if the sheriff investigates, Hawley wants me to say he did it.”

“It’s fascinating, don’t you think?…You don’t, do you?”

“It’s making me edgy, all these people confessing to murder.”

“Under normal circumstances, yes, but this is an old murder. It’s not so real. Bones and bodies aren’t the same.” She was making
certain wanton moves with her left hand. “Can’t you think of it as the vacation mystery?”

“If you put it like that, I’ll agree to anything.”

“These folks think you’re a hero. Are you aware of that?”

“They do?”

“They said so. Hawley said it was very bad out there. He said you stood up and stepped right onto the other boat. I’ve always imagined since I was a little girl what it would be like to have carnal knowledge with a hero.”

Wow. If it hadn’t been raining, I might have suggested we avail ourselves of the privacy of the woods, roll around in a bed of ferns like our indigenous progenitors. I think Crystal felt it, too. I could see it in her eyes.

“Did you really want to have carnal knowledge with heroes or were you just being facetious?”

“No, it was a true fantasy. Now I will.”

“Tell me about the fantasy. I mean about sex with heroes like me.”

“No.”

Then I saw Roxanne, apparently heading our way, hesitate on the other side of the French doors, not wanting to intrude. I invited her out. Her face was tired, drawn, and old, but it was also strong and elegant, like one of those black-and-white photographs of Depression women who hold the family together, Ma Joad types. She had narrow features and a tall forehead. Hatless, her hair was pure white and long. She moved lightly, despite her age and what must have been a tough slog on foot over the hill from the Crack in the middle of the storm.

“I want to thank you again, dear,” she said to me.

“I was glad to help, Ms. Self.”

“Call me Roxanne.” She touched Crystal’s forearm. “And thank you, too, dear. You two are in love, aren’t you?”

Crystal patted Roxanne’s hand and said yes, we were.

“That’s good. I’m glad you’re here. The boathouse has been lonely for a long time.” It was all very maternal, familial, old-fashioned— until Roxanne said, “I’m told you found bones.”

“Accidentally,” I mentioned. “We weren’t looking.”

“Where?”

Crystal pointed off to the top of the hill, obliterated now in low cloud and fog.

“Out in the open?”

Crystal told her about the dogs.

“…Dwight is on his way over from the Crack,” she said distractedly. “He thinks we can cross the strait. We’ll be leaving you in peace soon.” She turned her back on the cove and leaned against the rail. “Clayton—Do you know how to get in touch with Clayton?”

“I have his New York number, but I believe he’s still in California.”

“California? He is? Oh, that’s wonderful!”

What? Wonderful?

“Why wonderful, Roxanne?” Crystal comes right out and asks. It’s one of the things I love about her.

Hawley was standing in the threshold between the French front doors. “Are you telling it?”

“I was about to.”

“Can I listen?”

She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. “He’s in California,” she said.

“He is? No kiddin’? For sure?”

Crystal and I watched them blankly. Why was that such good news, Clayton in California? Hawley ducked back in to tell his father that Clayton was in California.

Roxanne looked at us. “There’s been another murder in town,” she said. “One of the pilgrims or a tourist. They don’t know yet. Teddy Kelso thinks it’s a psychopath. The man was murdered the
same way as the young woman was. His head was split down the middle…”

“Maybe you’d better tell us, Roxanne,” suggested Crystal.

Hawley returned and stood against the outside wall like a little boy trying not to be noticed.

“Back that night—the night of the fire—Clayton Kempshall knocked on our door. He was about ten. We lived over on the other side of the island. It was blowing a gale of wind and cold that night. The kind of wind and cold that kills. We didn’t expect visitors. He must have been out there a long time, knocking, but we didn’t hear him because of the wind. We might not have seen him at all, except we began to notice a pale glare at first, like ice in the sea from a long distance off, then a flickering light, and that brought us to the door. There stood little Clayton on the step. He had on white pajamas—they were soaked in blood from top to hem.”

Crystal gasped.

“Yes. And he had his Cub Scout hatchet in his hand.”

Oh Jesus, it dawned on me. She meant to connect murders— the old one and the new ones—

His face pale and drawn, Arno appeared in the doorway, just stood there, head bowed listening, remembering.

“We warmed him, comforted him,” Roxanne continued. “Pretty soon, we became aware he didn’t know how he came to be running the island in a winter storm in blood-soaked pajamas. Like he was out of his head with fever. He seemed to know about the fire, but he didn’t know where his father was. He didn’t remember. Took a day and a half before the Castle burned itself out.

“Police came, experts, and poked around in the ashes. We were sure they’d find his father’s corpse. But we never questioned Clayton about the bloody pajamas, we just stayed with him and waited for him to tell us. But the experts found nothing. They said if there was remains in the ruins, they’d have found them. Even
now I don’t know for certain what happened in the Castle that night. Did Clayton kill his father with that little boy’s hatchet and drag his corpse through the storm all the way up there—?”

We looked up the hill; it seemed to be scudding along with the windblown clouds. We tried to imagine the scene that night. Gale wind and rain like last night, only cold, December. Clayton dragging the freshly killed corpse of his father over the rocks, through the undergrowth, brains running out on his pajamas. How could you forget a trip like that? But of course maybe the opposite is true.

“The police came and questioned Clayton. They were very suspicious. They suspected that Compton Kempshall faked it all so he could disappear. He was under investigation for all sorts of frauds and crimes. They thought Kempshall burned the Castle himself. But Clayton didn’t seem to know anything.

“Arno and me, we’d made a decision. We discussed it, before the police came. We decided not to tell anybody about the bloody pajamas or the hatchet, if Clayton didn’t tell them himself. I don’t know if that was a good decision or bad, we only wanted it to be best for him. If he didn’t remember then, maybe he’d never remember ever. I don’t know about that, I mean, whether the mind can work that way. But the fact was that boy did not remember. We burned the bloody pajamas.” She fell silent.

“Are you saying you think Clayton killed those people in Micmac?” Crystal asked.

She didn’t respond immediately. She looked down at the boards beneath our feet. “I think I hear Dwight’s boat coming.”

Crystal and I listened. We heard nothing.

“I believe you met Eunice and Lois?” said Roxanne.

“Yes,” said Crystal.

“Lois said she saw Clayton.”

“Here?”

“Lois said she saw him out in a little boat off the north end. Lois is a dear. I love her. But she’s…subject to fits. So that’s why
we’d be ever so grateful if you could get in touch with Clayton in California. Just to be sure.”

“I bet Shelly could track him down,” said Crystal.

“Shelly?”

“Jellyroll’s agent.” Jellyroll sat listening to the whole thing. When we looked at him, his tail thumped the deck. “I’ll call right now. All agents get up with the crack of dawn.” I called him. He was up. He said he’d get right on it. I told him thanks for sending Sid. Sid seemed perfect for the job.

Dwight came around the point. Hawley moved the boats away from the flat rock, so Dwight could dock there. We carefully put Arno aboard. He looked terrible, but he managed a nod to me and a faint grin as he went over the rail.

Hawley put his father’s boat on the mooring and in his own followed Dwight out of sight around the point.

Crystal and I went to bed.

TWENTY-ONE

A
rtie—somebody’s calling.” Crystal was pulling on a sweatshirt, shimmying into a pair of jeans. Jellyroll was barking. I was trying to regain consciousness. I studied the clock. It was late afternoon. We had slept all day.

Crystal looked out the small, high bedroom window. “It’s Hawley,” she said.

“What’s he want?”

She didn’t know. I joined her at the window.

Hawley was docking his boat against the flat rock. He shouted and waved his arm excitedly as he did so.

We went out on the porch to see. The air was cool and damp. Jellyroll, turning circles, was charging up on human excitement.

“I got ’em! C’mere, I got ’em!” Hawley vaulted over the side of the boat with docking lines in hand. He was vibrating. Jellyroll sprinted down the steps and jumped at him. “I got the bastards in the boat right now! Hi, Jellyroll!”

“Who?”

“Who? The stalkers, that’s who! I got ’em!”

“You mean you—?”

“Damn right, I do!” He pointed into the cabin of his boat.

Uh-oh. Crystal and I looked at each other, down at Hawley and his boat, then back at each other.

Crystal clambered aboard Hawley’s boat, but she didn’t look down the companionway that led below until I came aboard. Side by side we bent at the waist and looked in. Hawley, grinning
proudly like a suburbanite showing off his new hatchback, flooded the place with powerful bright light—

They were stuffed back to back down there on the floor and chained together by the necks.

Cabin wasn’t really the right word for the place in which they were chained. The Belgian’s boat in Micmac had a cabin, but not this one. It was a dark pit full of gear. There were a couple of anchors, scuba tanks, fins, weight belts, welding equipment, miles of coiled rope and chain, a pile of lobster buoy floats, and a lot of arcane urchining paraphernalia. For amenities, he had a lopsided bed frame of naked plywood with a deflated air mattress and a grimy sleeping bag. For a galley he had a blackened single-burner camp stove, a crusted plastic coffee mug, and a Swiss Army knife. Hawley’s home stank of mildew, sweat, and dead fish. There was no standing headroom. There was barely sitting headroom.

It was Dick Desmond, all right. He even looked TV-familiar to me at that moment, something about his lower face, despite the raw terror that distorted it. He squinted and covered his eyes with the crook of his arm, and with the other hand he clutched the chain links that dug into his throat. A line of spittle spilled from the corner of his mouth. “Please,” he pleaded, “I have money. I can pay! Cash!”

We couldn’t see his son, the videographer, because he was facing forward, but I could hear him whimper as he tried to turn his head our way within the strict confines.

Jellyroll tried to squeeze his snout into the hatchway to see what the attraction was.

“Dick Desmond?” I said just to be sure.

“Y-y-yes.”

“
Ten Pins
, right?”

“Are you a…fan? Wait. It’s you, with the R-r-ruff Dog. I met you, remember? In the town.”

“Who’s with you?”

“That’s my son.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Doing? This—this madman kidnapped us at gunpoint!”

“Look who’s talking,” said Hawley, “a fucking dog stalker.”

“No, I mean, why are you here in the first place?”

“Vacation, we’re on vacation, that’s all, a father-and-son vacation. He’s a film student at NYU. He wanted to get some moody coastal material, you know. We’re just cruising the coast!”

“…Have you been stalking my dog?” I demanded, but there was no heft behind it, no commitment. It was barely a demand. I was beginning to feel like a cruel asshole. “You were sending us threatening bowling sheets!” I tried to sound like a man full of conviction.

The son moaned.

“No, please,” said Dick, “I don’t bowl. I loathe bowling. Even on the show, I never bowled.” He was babbling now, trying to talk death away. “You never once saw me bowl. I don’t even know how to keep score! Look, I know how you feel. If somebody was stalking my dog, I’d be upset, too. And I wouldn’t blame you if you hurt them. But it’s just that we’re not them. I swear! Please! We’re choking to death down here!” I could see the mortal fear etched on his face like old age. “Plus it stinks!”