Indian Pipes (5 page)

Victoria looked at her watch.

Elizabeth checked the rearview mirror and passed a line of mopeds. “We’ll be in plenty of time for your phone call, Gram. He’s not supposed to call for another hour.”

They drove past West Tisbury’s tiny gray-shingled police station and turned in between the gateposts of Victoria’s driveway.

Elizabeth carried in the groceries, and Victoria followed.

“Message on the answering machine,” Elizabeth called out. “Want to hear?”

Victoria went into the dining room and leaned her forearms on the buffet where the dial phone and the new answering machine were connected by a maze of wires.

“Victoria, this is Hiram. It’s half-past three now. I’m at Burkhardt’s place.” He gave the number. “I’ve got to talk to you. It’s urgent. Call me back. Right away.”

C
HAPTER
5

“That’s a strange message. Jube Burkhardt’s number?” Victoria dialed. The phone rang and rang.

“Ten rings.” Victoria looked at her watch. “It’s not five o’clock yet.” She thumbed through the phone book. “I’ll try Hiram’s, see if he’s returned home.”

Elizabeth stood by silently.

Victoria counted the number of rings, and the answering machine picked up after five. She hung up and looked at her watch. “He called from Jube Burkhardt’s at three-thirty. That was almost an hour ago.”

“Do you want to drive to Jube’s? Or to Hiram’s in Aquinnah?” Elizabeth asked.

“I’m not sure what to do. Jube’s house is only a mile or so from here. Perhaps we should go there first.”

Victoria taped a note to the kitchen door saying where they’d gone in case Hiram stopped by. She unhooked her hat from the entry where she’d left it. Elizabeth was already at the car, brushing fallen leaves off the seat.

“You might hurry, Elizabeth. I’m uneasy about Hiram.”

Elizabeth turned left onto the main road, then left again onto New Lane, past Doane’s tidy hay field and Victoria’s unkempt pasture.

After a half mile the paved road ended and Elizabeth slowed. “I don’t know my way from here, Gram. You’ll have to navigate.”

Victoria directed her onto a rutted road that followed the shore of Tisbury Great Pond. At one point they lost their way in the maze of branching roads, and Elizabeth had to backtrack.

On the road to Burkhardt’s they saw only two vehicles. A red pickup truck turned off onto a side road before they reached it. A Jeep pulled aside onto the brushy edge so they could pass. Victoria waved thanks.

The road became a mere track, overgrown in the middle with grass and brush. The brush scraped along the underside of the car; grass swished past. Elizabeth slowed for tree roots that extended across the ruts. They wound through scrub oak and huckleberry brush. They could hear towhees rustling in the undergrowth calling, “Che-wink? Che-wink?”

The track stopped abruptly at an open grassy area.

An old gray-shingled house, much like the main part of Victoria’s house, stood in the center of the clearing. The front door faced the ocean. A visitor would arrive at the back door, which meant going through the added-on kitchen. No one used the front door of Vineyard houses. Burkhardt’s front door was probably swollen shut and unusable. Grass had grown up knee-high by the step, and bayberry bushes encroached on what might once have been the front lawn.

The curled weathered shingles of Burkhardt’s house were streaked with black. A line of gulls perched on the peak of the roof, which was stained with their droppings. When Elizabeth stopped the car with a rattle and a clank, the gulls lifted into the air, crying. Around the frame of each window, the paint, once green or blue, was peeling, showing bare wood that had weathered to an unhealthy brownish-black.

The house was on a small promontory, surrounded on three sides by the main body of the pond. To the left, a barrier bar separated Tis- bury Great Pond from the ocean. Breakers crested on the other side. Victoria could feel the steady rumble of pounding surf.

She opened the car door and stepped onto the crisp dry grass. “I don’t see Hiram’s car.”

“It doesn’t look as though anyone’s home.” Elizabeth knocked on the back door. No answer. She knocked again.

“Can you see through the windows?” Victoria asked.

Elizabeth went around the house, cupping her hands against the glass to cut the reflection.

“There’s an awful lot of stuff in there,” she said.

“We might as well try the door.” Victoria stepped up onto the large granite stone by the kitchen door and lifted the latch. The door opened with a squeal onto a small entry. A calico cat darted out of the
house and tore off into the huckleberry undergrowth beyond the grassy area.

“I hope it’s all right to let her out.” Victoria looked in the direction the cat had disappeared.

“Hallo!” Elizabeth called. “Anybody home?”

No answer.

The entry was hung with coats and yellow slickers, a denim carpenter’s apron, a couple of baseball caps. Three or four fishing rods, a kayak paddle, and a pair of oars were propped against the inner door, and a collection of lures, most of them old looking, lined a shelf. Spiderwebs festooned the ceiling, wedded the sleeve of one coat to another, strung the lines of the fishing rods together. The splintery wood floor, partially covered with a worn piece of linoleum, had a collection of hip boots, waders, and worn leather boots, their rusty eyelets laced with rawhide thongs, green with mold.

“Whew!” said Elizabeth. “Men!”

Victoria entered the kitchen, and stopped abruptly.

The sink was full of dirty dishes from days’ worth of meals. The kitchen table was covered with old-fashioned oilcloth cracked in places so that brown cloth backing showed through. The oilcloth itself was almost hidden by newspapers, coffee mugs, dishes from which someone must once have eaten eggs, a blackened aluminum coffeepot, and a day-old half-grapefruit.

Victoria was aware of the hum of the refrigerator, off to one side of the kitchen. It may once have been white, but now it was a pale coffee color, a greasy sheen that was thicker on its curved top. A layer of bacon fat in a black iron skillet on the stove showed tracks and tooth marks and droppings of last night’s mice.

“Well,” said Victoria, looking around without touching anything. “Let’s see what’s in the living room.”

A path, only wide enough for one person, wandered through waist-high stacks of newspapers and magazines and books and unopened mail and catalogs. Pieces of clothing, cardboard boxes, a broken lamp, seeded the stacks.

Victoria followed the path to a cul-de-sac where there was an overstuffed easy chair with a reading lamp next to it and an end
table covered with papers. A wastepaper basket on the floor overflowed with clipped newspapers and orange peels and plastic wrappers. A coffee mug with a half inch of moldy coffee sat on the floor. The chair and table were surrounded by the indescribable wall of stuff.

“I’ve only read about people like this,” Elizabeth said after they’d surveyed the hopeless sea of junk.

Victoria sighed. “I’m sympathetic. He wanted to read all those newspapers and clip out items of interest. Those old curtains were probably too good to throw out. That bucket looks like something he picked up on the beach. Who knows when you might need something like that?”

“Don’t talk like that, Gram, it’s scary!”

Victoria looked around. “Hiram called from here.”

“A pile of stuff probably fell on him, and he’s buried underneath it.”

“That’s not amusing.” Victoria frowned. “You probably never heard of the Collyer brothers in New York. That’s how they died. Buried under stacks of newspapers that toppled over on them.”

“Let’s see if we can find the telephone.” Elizabeth moved down a side path. “It’s probably near his chair. Is there a table anywhere under all this?”

Victoria stood amid the heaps of stuff, scanning the walls, the ceiling, the windows she could see above the piles, the floor, where she could see it.

“A wire comes in through that window. If we can follow it under all this…” Victoria stopped. “Here’s the phone. On a desk as you move toward the front of the house.”

“How could he do any work at all? It’s choked.”

“He probably knew where everything was.” Victoria gazed at the mess.

They stood in the small opening where the drop-leaf desk was piled with papers, and studied the mess around them. To one side of the desk was a computer, its fan humming. The lighted screen read
FATAL ERROR
, in white print on a blue screen.

Victoria stopped. “Something is spilled on the floor. Recently, I would guess.” She pointed to a reddish-brown stain, still wet
looking, which covered part of an unfolded newspaper and ran over onto a thin once-green carpet. “Blood?” Elizabeth whispered. “I don’t know what it could be.” “You don’t suppose…”

Victoria stood up straight. “We’ve got to get Casey here, right away.”

C
HAPTER
6

Police Chief Casey O’Neill was scooping corn out of a large galvanized trash can and flinging it to the ducks, geese, and swans that gathered around her when Victoria and Elizabeth pulled into the oyster-shell parking area in front of the police station. The geese hissed and nipped at one another and at the chief.

“Hey, Deputy, what’s up?” Casey dropped the scoop back into the trash can and put the lid back on. “I’m about to go home for supper. Remember how I said those ducks made my police station look unprofessional?” She swept her arm around. “Well, they do, and now I figure to hell with it.”

“I remember you also resolved to get the selectmen to install a lock on the station-house door.”

“Can you imagine a twenty-four-hour, walk-in, unlocked police station anywhere else on earth?” Casey looked closely at Victoria. “What is it now, Victoria?”

“I think you need to see what we found.”

“What did you find?”

“We’ve just come back from Jube Burkhardt’s house.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Looking for Hiram Pennybacker.”

“I will never understand you Islanders,” said Casey, shaking her head. “You walk into people’s unlocked houses any old time, day or night.” Casey, who came from off-Island, had been hired as police chief after Ben Norton, chief for thirty years, retired. “Let me make sure the station-house door is at least latched so ducks don’t wander in. Get in the Bronco, Victoria. I’ll be right with you.”

“If you don’t need me, I’m going home,” Elizabeth said.

Victoria lifted her hand in acknowledgment. She took her blue baseball cap from her cloth bag, lifted herself into the passenger
seat, and set the cap on her chair. She pulled down the sun visor to expose a small mirror. The cap was the one Casey had given her. Stitched on it in gold letters were the words
WEST TISBURY POLICE, DEPUTY.

“I heard on the scanner how you found Jube Burkhardt’s body, Victoria,” Casey said as she climbed into the driver’s seat. “What a shame, an accident like that.”

“It was no accident. It couldn’t have been.”

“The Aquinnah police have no reason to suspect anything else.”

“There’s plenty of reason,” Victoria insisted. “Jube knew his way down the cliffs. He wouldn’t have fallen by accident.” She paused. “Hiram got to him before he died. His last word was ‘Sibyl.’ “

“Who’s Sibyl?” Casey backed out of the small parking lot and headed toward New Lane.

“I don’t have any idea who Sibyl is. So far they’re not taking Jube’s death seriously.”

“They certainly are. They’re checking the fence to make sure it’s secure.”

“That’s what I mean. He didn’t fall from there. Now Hiram’s missing. He called me from the old Mitchell place around three- thirty, almost three hours ago.”

“What was he doing there?”

“I have no idea.”

Casey slowed to let a flock of guinea fowl cross the New Lane in front of her.

“Is Sibyl one of his nieces?” she asked while they waited for the guineas to fluff their polka-dotted feathers, stretch their necks, cackle a series of metallic cries, and stare at the vehicle. Casey tapped the horn and the birds scurried to the side of the road.

“His older niece is Harriet and the younger is Linda. I don’t know their middle names,” Victoria said.

“Let’s hope this is a wild goose chase.” Casey made a wry face. “I think you may be oversensitive after finding Burkhardt’s body.”

To their left, every tall weed and shrub in Victoria’s overgrown meadow glowed with golden light from the afternoon sun. Casey slowed to make a tight turn down the hill.

“Over the past week Burkhardt must have called me a dozen
times to complain about the motorcycle rally this weekend.” At the bottom of the hill Casey made a sharp turn. “You’ll have to help me find his place.”

“How many motorcycles will there be altogether?”

“About five hundred. It’s a combined Harley-Davidson/Indian rally. They hope to raise around twenty-thousand dollars for charity this weekend.”

“They’ve been driving past my house for the past three or four days. I can’t hear myself think. Isn’t there some way they can make less noise and still have a good time?”

“The noise is part of the shtick,” Casey said. “The town’s noise ordinance is almost impossible to enforce. First you have to catch the offending biker.”

“They’ll ruin their ears,” said Victoria. “Turn right here.” She indicated a road that skirted the cove. “Why was Jube so upset about the motorcycles?”

“Noise. Bad guy image.”

“Can’t the selectmen do anything?”

“The selectmen support the bikers.”

“That leaves you in an awkward spot, doesn’t it?”

“If someone complains about noise, I’ll have to track down the motorcycle, test it, and issue a citation.”

“Do I call you to complain?”

“Maybe I should set you up in a folding chair by the side of the road with a clipboard and a decibel meter.”

“I’ll do it,” Victoria said. “Turn left here.”

“I don’t know, Victoria. Twenty-thousand bucks for the hospital and the teen club will make a difference in their budgets. Burkhardt’s feeling stems from personal matters. His older niece lives with one.”

“Right,” said Victoria, pointing.