Nantucket Grand (13 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Nancy Drew and Captain Tweedy

The reported break-ins were a good excuse to poke around the place. With Blount connected to Thurman, both of them now tied, however faintly, to Andrew Thayer's cottage, the incidents at the LoGran compound seemed ominously well-timed. I didn't believe in coincidence, and if Sue Ann Pelzer shared my skepticism, she probably suspected I was chasing hunches, following up on leads I didn't want to share. Why else would the police chief himself show up for a minor burglary call? I had my answer ready to that. The NPD was a full-service institution and I was a hands-on leader. But Sue Ann never asked, and if she thought my presence was inappropriate, she never let on.

I followed her out the big French doors, walked across the wide deck, and down beyond the sweep of lawn to the house they all referred to as “the cottage.” It was more than enough house for me and the kids—a master bedroom downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs. Big sunny kitchen and living room, two and half baths—all decorated white on white, with beadboard walls, granite counter tops, six-light double-hung sash windows, gleaming heart pine floors—the new-money Nantucket standard.

“We looked around when the policemen left—all three times. We never saw a thing. Some drawers opened, some cabinets messed up. Someone turned on Doug's computer, but of course it's password protected. Whoever it was, they never had much time in here.”

“And Mr. Pell said nothing was missing.”

“Well…the cut crystal oil and vinegar set was gone, but we assumed the housepainters took it. Turned out one of the cleaning girls had put it in the wrong place! So that was a big non-event.”

“Do you mind if I poke around for a few minutes?”

“Be my guest. And you are. Anyone who sets foot on this property is my guest. As long as they're invited! Can I get you some coffee?”

“I'm good, thanks.”

“I'll be up at the house—just use the intercom. Dial six and I'll come running.”

I went through the place carefully, unmaking and re-making the beds, checking under the mattresses and the rugs, going through the drawers and cabinets, paging through the books on the shelves. I tramped back out to my cruiser, pulled a packet of ninhydrin from the trunk, and dusted for prints. I e-mailed pictures to the station, and ten minutes later Charlie Boyce had run them and come back with the news I expected: Blount and Sue Ann, nobody else. LoGran had their prints on file. Whoever broke in was smart enough to wear gloves.

Finally I did my favorite part of the job—crawling around on my hands and knees. I had crawled over the whole upstairs and was halfway through the kitchen when I found it: a tortoise-shell hair clip, stuck between two floor boards and almost invisible. I pried it out with tweezers and dropped it into a plastic evidence bag.

I stood up, feeling that first rush of excitement, with Obremski's old baseball analogies running in my head. Two outs, maybe—but now I had a man on first. Not bad.

The inning wasn't over yet.

The next hit came when I least expected it, at my daughter's high school chorus concert. As a ninth grader, Carrie was thrilled to be part of the ensemble, and she'd been accepted into the girls' a cappella group (“The Accidentals”) as well. Attending these performances—Tim was in the middle school band and they often played a double-bill—had become one of the secret ordeals of parenthood. The band was never in tune, the songs the chorus sang bored me…and then there were the plays, the basketball games and, even more excruciating, the parent-teacher evenings and orientation sessions. Tim's math teacher this year confessed, haltingly, that he had “never actually taught in a school setting” before. I had no answer for that one, but Todd Macy's help had come to the rescue.

One step inside the school building, and I got the creeps. I had always hated school, myself. But of course there was no getting out of these affairs. I had tried reading during one of Carrie's concerts, once—but even though I was sitting way in the back of our new shiny auditorium, my eagle-eyed daughter busted me.

I usually sat with Miranda and we caught up on police gossip and real estate while the audience gathered. We never got much chance to talk, since everyone took the opportunity to accost me about zoning violations, beach permits, noise violations, dog-leash scofflaws, and other complaints.

On this evening, Alana Trikilis' mother, Susan, was at the front of the line. Some rogue trash hauler was poaching her husband's Madaket route, and when he confronted the guy, it turned out he spoke no English. Nothing about the letter or David Lattimer, so it looked like Sam was keeping his word. If he had said anything to his wife, the urge to spread the gossip and double-check the story with me would have been irresistible.

“This other driver was from Eastern Europe somewhere,” she said. “Sam was scared.”

“Well, the next time it happens, tell him to say nothing and get the guy's license plate. We'll take it from there.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much. We've just been so—”

I interrupted her. “Susie…what's that in your hair? That clip?”

“It's a Goody—that's the manufacturer. They went out of business or something. You can still find the short ones, but these long ones…you have to pay twenty dollars for them on eBay. And then my daughter steals them! Once you have daughters, you can't call a single thing your own.”

“Especially when they wear your shoe size,” Miranda chimed in. Susie laughed and they compared gripes until the concert began.

I stopped listening. I had two men on base now. And I could feel the charge in my blood.

***

I pulled up next to Alana as she was walking home from school the next day.

“Get in.”

She could obviously hear the iron in my voice. She climbed into the front seat beside me and we drove to the surfside parking lot in silence. The wide field of macadam was deserted at this time of year. I pulled up to the gate beside the concession stand and we sat looking down across the dunes at the milling gray ocean.

“Chief…?

“I found something of yours.”

I reached into my pocket and tossed her the evidence bag with her mother's Goody hair clip inside.

“I'm not—it's…where did you find this?”

“In the kitchen at the LoGran cottage on Eel Point Road. What were you doing there, and how did you get in and…what the hell were you thinking? Breaking-and-entering is a felony, Alana.”

“I didn't break. I just entered. I had the key.”

“You stole the key.”

“I borrowed it.”

“Without permission.”

“And then I put it back in the fake rock. That's not exactly stealing is it?”

“Let's not split hairs. You didn't have the alarm code, so you didn't have time to steal anything.”

“I wasn't trying to steal anything! I was looking for evidence, just like you. Except you weren't. Until I got there.”

“So it's Nancy Drew and Captain Tweedy.”

She smiled. “I was thinking more…Maddy Clark and Police Chief Blote.”

“'You keep your nose out of police business, young lady!'” Then I did my best Blote
sotto-voce
double-take: “What did you find?”

Her brief laugh sounded more like a sigh. “Nothing. That's why I kept going back. Finally, I gave up.”

I turned off the engine, cracked a window, let the low grumble of the ocean and the sharp salty wind into the car. “How did it start?”

“I followed Doug Blount after he threatened me, and I saw where he lived and where he hid the key. That's all. For all the good it did me.”

“Jesus, Alana.”

“Chief—”

“You have to stop this. I understand your intentions, but—”

She twisted around to face me. “He's not the only one I followed.”

“Oh, God.”

“Jared and I have been tracking that McAllister guy and the Land Bank guy, Forrest. Last Saturday they were together. They had a big argument outside the Rose & Crown. I heard them say ‘blue heroin.'”

“Blue heroin?”

“I think it may be the street name for the opiate they're getting kids hooked on. Have you ever heard of it?”

I shook my head. “No. But I'll ask around.”

We sat in silence for a minute or two. The wind pushed at the car. “Are you going to arrest me?”

“No. I handed you the evidence, and no one else noticed it. But you have to stop this. It's dangerous. I don't want you getting hurt.”

She looked down. “Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“On your
Calvin and Hobbes
collection?”

“How did you know…? Okay.” Of course she loved
Calvin and Hobbes
. She was a cartoonist. “On My
Calvin and Hobbes
collection.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

But she was lying, and both of us knew it.

She could no more quit than I could.

Chapter Seventeen

Onward and Upward with the Arts

I mentioned the hair clip incident to Jane when I drove out to Polpis for our private reading, dismissing it as a minor footnote to the other cases I was working on.

“What if all the cases are really just one case?” she said. “That's how it would happen in my books.”

I laughed. “Yeah, well, unfortunately, things don't work out that neatly in real life.”

“But this is small-town real life, Henry, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone's hooked up in all kinds of odd ways. It's not like a city.”

“I guess.”

She smiled. “You'll see. It's all connected.”

Driving out to Jane's cottage in Polpis that evening, I wondered if she might help me with some of these cases. I was at an impasse; she had lived on the island most of her life. She was smart and intuitive. If nothing else, writing mysteries honed her ability to imagine scenarios and poke holes in them. Every crime is a story and I could tell from her reading at Emily Grimshaw's that she had a gem-quality story sense. Maybe I had told myself that this evening was going to be more of a professional consultation than a romance, because of Brad Thurman. I didn't even know if they were still together and I wasn't sure how to ask. I thought of my mother watching TV with me when I was a kid, badgering her about plot points. She would always smile and say, “Let it unfold.”

That sounded like good advice for tonight also. Even if Jane had ended things with Brad, the hangover from a toxic love affair could linger, and I wasn't as finished with Franny Tate as I should have been. It felt like a potential mess waiting to happen, “a regular monkey's tea party,” as my grandfather liked to say. Edna St. Vincent Millay started an affair with one of her readers after a particularly well-written fan letter. That was the way to do it: translate the love of words into a more urgent carnality without ambivalence or complications.

The drive from town settled my nerves. After the last sprawl of commerce—a lumber yard tucked into the trees on the right, our local Ford dealership on the left—vanished around a curve in the road, and the last ostentatious real-estate boondoggle fell behind me, Polpis Road turned into one of the most beautiful drives in New England. With the moors on one side and the grand old clapboard mansions allowing glimpses of the harbor between walls and hedges on the other, I could feel myself escaping the gravitational pull of the busy town and the crowded “mid-island,” with its convenience stores and gas stations. Much of the island had been spoiled—even despoiled—but the farther out you cruised along Polpis Road, the less it seemed to matter.

These old houses weren't going anywhere, though the cars in the driveway had changed (more MINIs and smart cars; fewer Hummers and Expeditions). The moors and the bogs were protected by the Land Bank and the Conservation Commission. This was Old Money country, shabby with a haughty indifference to the granite counter top and the Sub-Zero refrigerator: no one was selling, or moving, or installing a climate-controlled wine cellar or a state-of-the art digital screening room. Instead, they would keep on fishing in Coskata Pond, drinking Bloody Marys on the deck, and complaining about the food at the Yacht Club.

It was fitting that Jane found a place for herself out here, surrounded by the wealthy, but living hand-to-mouth, tucked away in a four-hundred-dollar-a-month cottage among the wild blackberries and the poison ivy. She discovered a few years ago that she was actually related to the owner, going back five generations of landed gentry. The thought clearly terrified his family when she mentioned it over cocktails one evening, as if she were going to rise up with a cold-eyed gang of Boston lawyers and demand her share of the old man's property. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She had been living out there for ten summers and it pleased her to find an ancestral connection to her cantankerous but affectionate landlord. Two years ago he installed a wood stove and now she took the place year-round, ending the “Nantucket shuffle” of seasonal housing that had plagued her since she graduated from college.

I pulled into the bluestone driveway, rolled past the main house, and down to the cottage. The lights were on in the dusk and when I climbed out of the car, the silence of the place closed over me like water. I breathed it like a fish, a new creature in a new world.

“This place is gorgeous,” I said when she came to the door. “I could feel my blood pressure dropping about ten points a mile as I drove out here.”

She smiled, stepping back to let me inside. “I know. The problem is, you never want to leave.”

Her hair was down, a frizzy blond cloud that softened her sharp features, as the gray cashmere cardigan buttoned over a flimsy tee-shirt and loose jeans accented the girlish allure of her body.

She pushed at her hair nervously, pressing the wild mane to her scalp. “I'm sorry. I look awful. My hair gets crazy when it's humid like this.”

“I think it looks great.”

“It looks horrible. It's okay. You can say so. It looks like I stuck my fingers in a wall socket. The Mad Scientist look”

“I like it.”

“You're out of your mind.”

“Lucky for you.”

She squinted at me. “We'll see about that.” Then she noticed the bag in my hand. “What did you bring? I'm starving. I was fine until five minutes ago, then my blood sugar dropped. I was about to start eating shredded wheat out of the box.”

“Ugh. That would definitely have spoiled your appetite for the shelled lobster, homemade red cabbage coleslaw, and potato salad I have here. Plus the baguette and the Ecuadoran raspberries. Oh, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. No, wait a minute. Two bottles.”

“Sounds like a wild night you've got in mind. Good thing Sam's with his dad.”

I lifted out one of the bottles. “Onward and upward with the arts.”

The cottage was a simple rectangle maybe fifteen feet by forty. I stepped into a high raftered, open-stud living room, with yachting pennants, old quarter boards and fishing rods decorating the beams, 1920s Nantucket movie theater one-sheets (Rose Tremaine in
Private Lives
at the 'Sconset Casino), family photographs, and equestrian prints tacked to the wooden walls. The cracked cement floor was softened by sisal rugs, set about with an old velour couch and white wicker chairs. A camp bed with stuffed animals took up the front corner of the room, with a hinged screen folded and leaning against the wall for privacy. “That's where Sam sleeps,” Jane said. I had a similar ad hoc arrangement, sleeping on my couch so my kids wouldn't have to be roommates.

I set the food down and pulled off my coat. The wood stove fire glowed red behind the isinglass and took the chill off the night. A dusty television sat on an antique desk between two windows, but it looked as though it hadn't been used in years. Beyond the dining room table, a raised step led to the kitchen, with doors into the bedroom and the bath. Jane had lit candles and hurricane lamps. The place was cozy, lost in time.

I stood looking around, taking it all in.

“It's like some relic of another era,” I said.

She smiled. “Just like me.”

We walked into the kitchen and I unpacked the bags.

“And what era would that be?” I asked her. “When would you like to be living? The eighties?”

She gave a little puckered wince, as if she had just stepped into a cloud of gnats. “God, no.”

“The seventies?”

“Maybe. The seventies had great clothes and movies.”

“The sixties?”

“Closer.” She handed me a corkscrew and while I was working it she said, “I guess…the fifties. No—the late forties. Just after World War Two. Men wore hats and kids didn't wear bike helmets. Cars had fins. People drank scotch out of little flasks at football games. The Giants played the Polo Grounds. Everybody smoked and nobody cared. John O'Hara world. That's my era.”

“I have a fondness for Hollywood in the eighties. David Lattimer would say I miss being a kid.”

“You must have had a cool childhood.”

“It was weird—bicoastal. I spent vacations in L.A.—enough time to get hooked on my dad's world, but not enough to really be part of it. I was always on the outside. Which was actually okay, because my dad's new family was seriously fucked up. My half-sister was overdosing on LSD, my stepbrother tried to drown me in the swimming pool, and my stepmother was right out of Grimm's fairy tales—the uncut German version. None of this smiley-face American shit. I think she secretly wanted to chop me up and stick me in a batch of cookies. But she wouldn't be caught dead baking, and it's not the kind of thing you can ask the Filipino chef to do unless you're planning to give him a really big bonus, which was not her style.”

She laughed. “It can't possibly have been that bad.”

“That's why I can't write about that stuff. No one believes it. No one believed the Mary Tyler Moore character in
Ordinary People
and I was like…‘that bitch is Mary Poppins next to my stepmother.' I'm not saying it was totally crazy and corrupt. But there's a reason why my real brother and I both went into law enforcement.”

“Well, my parents stayed married and I sometimes wish they hadn't. My mom deserves a better life. She—I don't know. She chose it, I guess. She chose him. But I don't think she really knew what her choices were. She could have walked away. She almost did a few times.”

“But she came back.”

“My dad writes a mean love-letter.”

I poured two glasses of wine, handed her one and made a toast.

“To our crazy families, who made us the writers we are today.”

I cut the lobster into the bunch of mescal greens Jane had in the fridge, and made an olive oil and vinegar dressing while she put the baguette in the oven and set the table.

We sat down to eat and Jane said, “What made you the policeman that you are today? That's the real question.”

“I actually solved a murder when I was fifteen years old. But that's a long story for another time. The real beginning was a few years before that.”

She took a bite of bread, chewing expectantly.

“Our apartment got robbed when I was twelve. The place was trashed. This was like…July, 1984. It happened over the weekend—we'd been staying in this little house in Rockland County that my mom rented in the summers. We got back Monday morning and the front door lock was broken. My mom called the police and these two cops showed up, a middle-aged guy and a younger woman, who was some kind of trainee. The guy, his name was Officer O'Donnell, Alan O'Donnell I found out later, he was just—cool.”

Jane sat forward. “How so?”

“Very polite but very observant. Like my mom opened the fridge to make some coffee for them before she remembered that the burglars had smashed her coffee machine. Mr. Coffee. So O'Donnell took the other cop aside and sent her for takeout. When she got back, he took the black one, the woman got regular and he gave me an Orangina, my favorite soda. It was still called Orelia then. I was surprised, and so was my mom—hers was half-and-half, no sugar. He noticed the half pint of light cream and the Orelia when she opened the fridge…for all of five seconds. So my mom said, ‘No sugar?' and he said, ‘Just a guess. Most people who keep half-and-half use it for their coffee and I didn't see a sugar bowl.' She smiled for the first time that day and said, ‘Well, you guessed right, Officer O'Donnell.' By that time I was hoping she'd marry him. My mom had lots of bad boyfriends in those days, and I noticed this cop wasn't wearing a wedding ring.”

“Did she wind up dating him?”

“No, no. A more observant kid would probably have caught the dent on his ring finger. O'Donnell never wore his wedding ring to work, but he was married, all right. Twenty years, five kids, and three grandchildren—at age forty-seven.”

“They were busy.”

I shrugged. “Catholics. There's more. He showed up two weeks later with my mom's Betamax. He had noticed one of the tapes in the mess on the living room floor. When they caught some burglar and went through his stash he found the tape-player. Not too many people still had Betamax stuff in 1985. He said, ‘You're a diehard, Ms. Kennis. I like that.”

“So whatever became of Officer O'Donnell?”

“He was killed in a shootout two years later.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“We went to the funeral. There were like five thousand people there. Not just cops. Lots of people, regular people, people he'd helped.”

Jane finished her wine. “So you wanted to be Officer O'Donnell?”

I stared down her smile. “I could do a lot worse.”

“My father always said police work draws the best people and the worst people and not much in between.”

“Most of us are just muddling through. You should use that line in one of your books, though.”

“Actually I did, this morning.”

She read me a little of the new book after we did the dishes and I offered a poem or two.

The book was called
Poverty Point
—all her novels used Nantucket landmarks and geographical points of interest as titles. This one referred to the spit of land next door to the Island Home, a gorgeous piece of property with a million-dollar view of the harbor and Coatue. The book involved a classic Nantucket land-grab with greedy developers trying to buy the Island Home property and turn it into a water-view subdivision that would net them millions. But a wily old resident starts to figure it out. Soon he and his spunky granddaughter—the girl who left her husband in the first chapter Jane had presented at Emily Grimshaw's salon—die under suspicious circumstances. At least the circumstances are suspicious to Maddy Clark. The Nantucket police can't be bothered, as usual.

I wasn't in much of a position to protest, with my own desultory investigations fizzling around me right and left. And so we came to her suggestion that all my cases might be tied together somehow. We were standing at her door, me buttoning my coat against the sharp December night outside.