Indian Pipes (12 page)

Casey returned with Junior to the Bronco. Victoria was back in her seat.

“The fire department is leaving a truck and two men to keep an eye on things,” Casey said. “Junior is staying here all night. Do you have a sleeping bag?” she asked him.

Junior nodded. His eyes turned down at the outer corners; his mouth turned up. To Victoria, he looked exceedingly young.

“Was the fire set by someone?” Victoria asked him.

“Seems likely,” Junior agreed.

“I’ll call the arson squad on the mainland,” Casey said. “We’ll come back in the morning when it’s light and the ashes have cooled. I’ll take you home now, Victoria.”

Home again, Victoria described the fire to Elizabeth as they ate the cold and fallen soufflé.

“I’ll make a fresh omelet,” Elizabeth said.

“Pretend it’s supposed to look like this,” said Victoria. “Put parsley around it, and we’ll have a new culinary treat.”

Elizabeth grunted.

“Linda’s not home yet?” Victoria asked.

Elizabeth looked at her watch. “She should be back by now, if she made the early movie.”

“I don’t look forward to breaking the news about the fire to her,” said Victoria.

“She may be relieved. Think of all the papers and junk she won’t have to look at.”

They waited up until after midnight for Linda. Finally a car pulled into the drive, and Linda came into the kitchen, wearing black slacks and a flowered blouse.

Victoria and Elizabeth were in the kitchen. “Bad news, I’m afraid,” Victoria said. “You might want to sit down.”

“Oh?” said Linda.

“I’ll get you a glass of sherry,” said Elizabeth.

“Scotch,” said Victoria.

Linda looked from one to the other. “What happened?”

“Your uncle’s place burned down tonight.”

Linda sat with a plop in the big captain’s chair in the kitchen. “I guess I could use a drink.” She waited until Elizabeth handed her the glass. “Did it burn to the ground?”

“There’s not much left,” Victoria said.

“Well, that takes care of the problem of cleaning up,” said Linda, holding up her glass. “Here’s to Uncle Jube.”

“Where was the fire last night?” Sarah was sitting on the bench at Alley’s. She looked from Joe, who had lifted up his cap and was scratching his head, to Donald, who was picking at fiberglass resin on his jeans.

Joe leaned against the post that held up the porch roof. “I didn’t know there was a fire.”

“Chilmark and West Tisbury both responded,” Sarah said. “I had my scanner on, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.” She stirred her coffee with a plastic straw and sucked on the end of it before she tossed it toward the trash can. “Somewhere on the Great Pond, I gathered.”

“Here comes Lincoln,” Donald said as a truck with rakes and a lawn mower in back pulled up behind Joe’s pickup.

“Whaddya know?” Lincoln greeted the three on the porch.

“Where was the fire last night?” Sarah asked.

Lincoln pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Wanna guess?”

“I’ve got to go to work in a couple of minutes.” Sarah looked at her watch and smoothed her bright red T-shirt, a map of Martha’s Vineyard with a glittery arrow aimed at the western end of the Island. “Where was the fire, Lincoln?”

“Jube Burkhardt’s place. Burnt to the ground. Junior saw it from his camp. By the time they got there it was too late. Funny it picked now to burn.”

“Wouldn’t put it past either of the nieces to set it,” Joe said, stirring his coffee. He took a gulp. “The one who hangs out with the biker is some weird, let me tell you.”

“Just because she’s tattooed.” Sarah stretched out her own arm with its tattooed bracelet of leaves. “Grandmothers are getting tattooed these days. It’s the ‘in’ thing.”

“The younger one, the too, too sweet one,” Joe rolled his eyes and wriggled his hips, “she makes my dentures ache.” He showed his horsy yellow teeth in a grin.

“They say Burkhardt left his place to her.” Donald leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“Far as I know, nobody’s talked about a will.” Lincoln moved to his usual place, his back to the shingled front of the store.

“I wonder who does inherit his place,” said Sarah.

Lincoln shrugged. “Eighteen million dollars.”

“Eighteen million,” Sarah mused. “That’s a pretty good motive for killing one’s uncle.”

At the police station, Casey looked at her watch. “The arson team was on the eight o’clock boat. They’ll be here any minute.”

“What about Junior?” said Victoria.

“He’ll stay at the place until I relieve him.” Casey straightened papers on her desk. “I’ve got to finish a couple of things before they get here. Here’s the motorcycle accident report. Look it over, will you? See if it makes sense to you.”

The morning was clear and cool, almost fall-like. Victoria wore a sage green turtleneck under her blue fleece jacket. She read Casey’s report, made a couple of minor corrections, and handed the papers back to the chief, just as the off-Island team pulled up in a white van.

Without waiting for introductions, Casey and Victoria got into the Bronco and led the way to Burkhardt’s. The arson van bumped along behind them.

In the bright sunlight, the remains of Burkhardt’s house seemed pathetically small. Smoke was still rising from the ruin. The chimney stood tall, untouched by the fire. Half-charred beams and boards, sills, flooring, and uprights stuck out at odd angles like jack- straws.

Victoria walked around the remains. In places, the grass was scorched where embers had fallen and started small fires. The air smelled of stale cigars, burned tar paper, burned plastic, burned metal, burned meat, paper, trash, garbage, rubber.

She was amazed to see piles of unburned newspapers and magazines in the midst of the rubble, odd things she thought would have
burned, and metal things, twisted and molten, she thought would have survived.

Casey introduced Victoria to the arson team, two men and a woman, all three wearing boots and white jumpsuits that covered them completely. Victoria watched them move through the still- smoldering ashes, talking quietly, measuring, taking notes.

“Shit!” one of the men said. “Come here—Hank! Beth!”

The two hurried over to him, picking their way carefully through the ashes.

“Was someone in the house?” he called out to Casey.

“Not that I know of,” said Casey.

“We’ve found what looks like human remains.”

Victoria’s skin prickled.

Casey walked over to where the team stood.

“Any idea who could have been in the building?” the woman, Beth, asked Casey, who shook her head. “The owner?”

“Not the owner. He’s dead.” Casey stood at the edge of the ruin, her polished boots dusted with ash.

“A relative?”

Casey turned to Victoria. “What about Linda?”

Victoria felt as though she were somewhere else watching. “She came home last night, later than I did.”

Casey unsnapped her radio. “I’ll ask one of the guys to check on Harley. She was camping out last I knew.”

Victoria focused on Casey. “Hiram.” She said it softly, and when Casey looked over at her, she repeated it. “Hiram,” she said. “He called me from here three days ago. We found blood on the floor. It must have been his. That smell…”

Beth indicated the shapeless charred mound in the rubble. “All we can go by now are dental records.” Victoria looked away. “It’s going to help, having some idea who the victim might have been.”

Victoria walked to the edge of the grass clearing and looked up at the crystal blue sky. A gull soared overhead. The gull might have been the same bird she remembered from nearly a century ago. She heard the surf, pounding as it had pounded before her great-great- grandmother was born, and would continue to pound when her own many times great-grandchildren were older than she. Nothing
would change that soaring gull or that beating surf. The sea would eat up the Island and disgorge it as sandbanks to snare mariners three thousand years from now.

She took a deep breath and let it out. She walked back toward Casey, who looked at her with concern.

“Are you okay, Victoria?”

Victoria stood up straight, stretching to her full height, which was still tall.

“Certainly.” Victoria strode back to the ruins, her nose held high. “How can I help?” she asked.

While Victoria had turned her back to the site, the arson team had zipped the remains into a plastic body bag and had carried it to the van.

Beth pulled down the mask that covered her mouth and nose. “Tell us if any of these objects we put off to one side mean anything to you.”

The team lifted up bundles of half-burned paper, a mattress that was nothing but springs, a lamp with a skeleton shade.

“Here’s the base of a computer,” said the man called Hank, his voice muffled by his face mask.

Victoria stared at it. “The CPU?” she asked.

“Right. I’ll set it next to the other things.” He pulled his face mask down. “These masks are a pain.”

“Where was the computer, can you tell?”

“Judging from what was underneath the unit when we found it, I would say it was on the second floor, probably in a room at the front of the house.” Hank stretched. “Back to work. If you think of anything, holler.”

Victoria moved an upended bucket close to the computer and sat down to examine it. The metal box was about a foot wide, almost two feet long, and about six inches high. The unit was charred and blistered on three of the five sides she could see. The two unburned sides had once been tan, but were now smoked to an ugly greenish gray. On what must have been the front, one of the unburned sides, there were two slots. On the opposite side were holes where wires might once have gone. Except for the slots and the back side, the box was featureless. Victoria examined it more closely. She eased herself
onto her knees and studied the unit. She could make out what must have been a decal on the front that read, “digita…” and she couldn’t read the rest of the letters. She examined the smoky unburned side. It looked as though there might have been another decal. She wet her finger and rubbed the smoke off. She could barely make out the letters S…I…B…Y…. And that was all she could read. It was enough. She had found Sibyl.

C
HAPTER
14

Victoria scrambled to her feet.

Casey was squatting near the charred wreckage of the house. She looked up at Victoria, concerned.

“Can you call Howland on your radio?” Victoria asked.

“I can contact the communications center and they’ll phone him,” Casey said. “What’s up, Victoria?”

“I’ve found Sibyl.”

“What?”

“When Jube Burkhardt said ‘Sibyl,’ the last word he said before he died, he was referring to his computer.”

Casey stood, with her notebook still in one hand. “A guy’s dying words are about his
computer?”

“Something important must be on that computer,” Victoria insisted. “Important enough for Jube to worry about Sibyl, rather than face the fact that he was dying.”

Casey examined the box. “That computer’s a wreck.”

“Howland Atherton can retrieve something.”

“He’s not a magician.”

Victoria stood tall. “Before the computer was burned, I asked you to have Howland look at it. We still have a chance of finding some clue.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll try to reach Atherton,” said Casey.

“Where’s Junior?”

“I sent him home.” She nodded to the opposite shore.

Victoria shaded her eyes and could see Junior’s dinghy pulled up on the beach in front of his camp. When she turned back, Casey was on the radio, giving the woman at the communications center directions to Burkhardt’s place to relay to Howland.

Casey hung up the mike and went back to where the arson team
was sifting through the rubble. Their once-white jumpsuits and white boots were black, from feet to thighs, and their once-white gloves were filthy.

Victoria looked around for her bucket seat, found it tossed to one side, upended it and wiped it off with a paper towel from her pocket, then sat where she could watch both the arson team and the road.

She was composing a complicated poem on the back of an envelope, a sestina on the relativity of time, when about three-quarters of an hour later, she heard Howland’s car, an ancient white Renault wheeze into the grassy opening and stop with a shudder.

Howland unwound himself from behind the wheel, slammed the door, turned and examined the ruin. “What a mess.”

Victoria arose from her bucket seat. “They found Hiram.”

“He was in the house?”

“Someone was,” said Victoria. “There’s not much left to identify.”

Howland thrust his hands in his pockets and scowled. “Not a pleasant way to die.”

“I’m sure he was already dead,” said Victoria.

Howland looked at her thoughtfully. “I got a garbled message from the communications center about someone called Sibyl, a burned computer, and instructions to get here as quickly as I could.” He lifted his eyebrows at Victoria. “Communications said the message was from you.”

“Jube was still alive when Hiram reached him. He mumbled something, then said ‘Sibyl’ distinctly.”

Howland frowned.

Victoria went on. “Two things have puzzled me. One was the identity of Sibyl. Why would Jube call out that name as he was dying? As far as I knew, he had no relatives or friends named Sibyl.”

“And the second?” asked Howland.

“When Elizabeth and I came here after Jube’s death, his computer was running with a message that read, ‘Fatal Error.’ When Elizabeth and I returned the next day, the computer screen was blank, and the box, the computer itself, was missing.”

“And you’ve now found it?”

“The arson squad found it,” Victoria said. “They thought it might have fallen from the second floor.”

“Where does Sibyl come into this?”

Victoria described finding the decal on the side of the unit. “We need to know what’s on his computer.”

“What do you expect of me, Victoria? It’s not likely I can recover anything from a computer that got burned up in a fire, then fell to the ground from the second floor.”

“I asked the arson team to set it in the shade.”