Nantucket Grand (3 page)

Chapter Three

A Folded Flag

Todd Macy's memorial was being held in Madaket, at the old Admiralty Club, a big, rambling old building that mostly consisted of one giant room dominated by a massive fireplace. Long tables were set up in rows under the high wooden beams, with seating for seventy-five or eighty. The fire was roaring and the place was jammed—a least a hundred friends and family crowded the place, taking up every chair and lined up against the walls, standing room only.

Todd had served with the Marine Corps in Iraq and he got the full military send-off, with the cannon on the lawn banging a hole in the day, and the geese flapping by overhead harmonizing with the bugler on “Taps.” A grizzled old vet presented Todd's widow, Sandra, with a folded flag before everyone retired inside to hear their neighbors remember their friend. Todd had been a prankster in his youth, painting out the “l” in the Madaket Public Landing sign, drag racing on Milestone Road, and organizing a famous party at Fortieth Pole, where three jeeps and a Range Rover got caught in the rising tide. A puttering techie and strident environmentalist, he had more than ten thousand followers on his Twitter account, where he posted occasional musings like “Daylight savings time—jet lag without travel” and “‘Why would I lie?' should never be taken as a rhetorical question.” Just last month he had begun to tweet on the subject of the coming global climate apocalypse. “They say it takes 20 years to wreck a town. 200 to wreck a planet.” And “Give us 2,000 more years, we'll take out the whole galaxy.”

Todd had found a home at the Land Bank, where in the week before he died he managed to forestall chairman Chuck Forrest's efforts to scuttle a major land-trade. A couple wanted to barter thirty undeveloped acres around Long Pond for a bank-owned old house in Tom Nevers. At the last minute, Chuck tried to back out—someone offered the Land Bank a couple of million for the place, and he wanted the cash.

“The Long Pond property is worth ten times that much,” Todd pointed out.

“But we can't sell it! That's the whole point!”

“We're not supposed to sell it. But we're not supposed to sell the Tom Nevers parcel, either. And you're about to do that.”

That was how he had described the argument to me, at least. He'd won that battle. He'd convinced the buyers to pull out of the deal with a secret tour of the old mansion that included the full inventory of Nantucket entropy: crumbling chimneys, carpenter bee drill holes in the trim, wasps' nests under the eaves, dry rot, termites, and a powderpost beetle infestation—not quite the “turnkey” home that Chuck Forrest had promised. But that was only a skirmish. Todd had confided to me that he feared much bigger struggles ahead.

I had to wonder—who was going to fight them now?

Even his death struck me as symbolic—shot by a stray bullet as he walked the moors in deer hunting season. He and his dog had both been wearing their bright orange vests, but it hadn't made any difference to the trigger-happy drunk who took him out.

I turned my attention back to the side of the big room that had been cleared out to accommodate a podium. A woman was telling the story of how Todd had delivered her baby in her car, pulled over to the side of Polpis Road in a whiteout blizzard, twenty-two years ago. The child was a boy named Connor, recently graduated from MIT and living in Boston.

He stood beside his mom and described Todd tutoring him on eighth-grade math homework. I smiled. Todd had done the same for Tim this year, dropping by for a beer to chat about Land Bank issues, and staying to work some algebra problems with my son. When I thanked him he'd just shrugged and said, “This stuff is easy. Teachers try to complicate it to make themselves look important.”

Connor announced to enthusiastic applause that he was adopting Todd's black lab, with his landlord's blessing. Other people took their turns at the lectern, describing a home-brewer whose beer could “knock a lumberjack on his ass,” and a gourmet cook who had prepared Christmas dinner at the Our Island Home nursing home every year for the last decade.

Billy Delavane stood up to talk about their surfing days in the eighties, before a damaged rotator cuff made Todd hang up his wetsuit for good. On one memorable autumn swell in Madaket, Todd managed to break three surfboards, take a ten-stitch gash in his forehead, and get his car towed. His response? Drive Billy's truck to the emergency room, return an hour later, borrow one of Billy's boards and paddle back out.

“He broke that board, too,” Billy said with a rueful smile. “I think that's some kind of record.”

I thought of saying a few words, but this meeting was for old-timers only. I hadn't hung out at Jim Powers' shack or gotten drunk at Preston's. I only had one anecdote, and Connor's story made it feel redundant. Apparently Todd helped lots of kids with their math homework over the years. I was probably one of the last people to hear from Todd, but it was—and remains—a ghostly Boston accent speaking on my office voicemail. The day before he'd been shot, Todd called the police station and insisted on talking to me. I was out, so he left a message. A short one, just three terse sentences: “Something bad is happening. I need to talk to you, and not over the phone. Call me.”

I did, but by the time I got around to it the next day, he was lying among the brambles of North Pasture in the Middle Moors with a two-inch hole in his chest.

After the service, everyone milled around on the lawn, small groups talking, people taking turns for a moment with Todd's family. A small gap of blue sky opened up in the clouds to the north, casting a shaft of light onto the Sound. I paid my respects and stood by the big anchor at the edge of the property with Billy Delavane.

“Great guy,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Who else could get all the Thayers together in one room?”

I looked around. All three brothers were there, Andrew, Mike, and Larry, along with Billy's old flame, Joyce. They had a daughter together, Debbie, now a restless and gangly thirteen-year-old, standing apart from her mother, obviously feeling oppressed and unfairly tyrannized by these meaningless family rituals, staring at the crabgrass, waiting for the moment when she could start texting her friends. She lived most of the time with Billy and he kept her on a loose rein; but Joyce shared custody and she had rules. One of them was clearly being broken. She said something and Debbie looked up to speak with Sandra, who pulled her into a hug. Debbie controlled a flinch and reluctantly hugged the widow back.

“Good girl,” Billy said. “Debbie likes hugs about as much as Dervish.” His pug definitely abjured displays of physical affection; I could testify to that.

Joyce and her daughter said their final condolences and started strolling toward us. I wished my son, Tim, could be here. This was first moment I could recall seeing Debbie without her clique of friends. On second thought, it wouldn't have mattered much—if Tim had attended the service, my daughter, Caroline, would have been there also, and she was part of that clique. I would say the leader, but the balance of power shifted on a daily basis. She would have effectively insulated Debbie from Tim's advances, all by herself. She'd been doing that for weeks.

Billy pulled a silver flask out of his coat pocket, twisted the cap off, took a quick pull and passed it to me. “It's Notch.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

Notch was a local single malt priced at eight hundred eighty-eight dollars by Triple Eight Distillery. Even $88.08 would have priced it above sixteen-year-old Lagavulin I preferred, so I could buy a case of the stuff for that price. The whole enterprise was hilariously delusional, but typical of Nantucket. We're always looking for new ways of making rich people feel richer, skinning them smartly in the process.

Billy laughed. “Dean Long gets it for me free, dude. I found the leak in his living room a couple of years ago. I had to pull off half the shingles on the east side. Turned out it was coming in from one of the dormers on the third floor. It was like this insane puzzle. I kept after it long after Dean gave up. I wound up not charging him for the last few weeks. Why should he pay to finance my hobby? So instead he slips me a bottle of Notch every year. That works for me. It's nice stuff, if you don't have to pay for it.”

I took a swig. I had to admit it was good. But I wasn't paying for it either. I could see Billy studying my squint. He knew I was trying to do the math. But that was his specialty. “About twenty-five bucks a sip,” he said.

“Jesus Christ. What a racket.” I took another pull. “I feel richer already.”

I handed him back the flask and scanned the crowd again. Charles Forrest had taken Andy Thayer aside, and they were standing near the cannon across the wide lawn from us, talking intently. Chuck jabbed at Andy's solar plexus with a stubby finger. The second time he did it, Andy reached across his chest and grabbed the finger, twisting it up and back. Chuck's yelp carried sharply across the lawn, a pale echo of the cannon shot earlier. People turned, and then turned away.

I started toward them but Billy grabbed my arm. “Let it play out, Chief. It's finished already.”

He was right. Chuck stepped back, cradling his injured hand, and bumped into Jane Stiles. He glared at her briefly and then stalked away. She studied his retreat for a few seconds, then started across the rabbit-bitten lawn toward us.

She was wearing a short black dress and black stockings under an unbuttoned gray overcoat with wide lapels that looked like something out of a forties movie. The damp weather had teased her curly hair out into a wild frizzy mane, tamed under a charcoal head scarf.

Billy nodded at her appreciatively. “She cleans up good.”

I nodded. It was a pleasant shock—I had never seen Jane in a dress before. Mostly she wore her landscaping clothes—jeans and a tee-shirt, or a moth-eaten Fair Isle sweater. She was a writer, too—she wrote what they call “cozy” mysteries, but of course you couldn't make a living from that. So she kept her all-girl landscaping crew and scribbled on the side. That was typical of the trades on Nantucket. Everyone had something going on the side—the carpenter with a darkroom in the basement, the plumber with a recording studio in the garage, the housepainter who kept a falcon. And the police chief wrote poetry.

I'd been published in a few small magazines, but Jane Stiles was the real thing. She had three books in print, all part of a detective series set on the island, featuring a local librarian/sleuth named Madeline Clark. Jane's small-scale success hadn't changed her attitude and lifestyle at all. She still worked sixty hours a week, belittled her success, and deflected compliments with acid wit and a cringe of genuine discomfort. Her fashion sense hadn't shifted, either. She still managed the same trick, turning a complete indifference to her appearance into a kind of high style that you'd have to work hard to copy effectively.

It was an “old money” look—I often thought of Katherine Hepburn in baggy sweats tooling around New York on her bicycle. Later I found out that Jane's family had burned through their money a long time before. But a certain residual elegance remained. It was the way she held her head, her hand gestures—there were generations of gracious hostesses lurking in her DNA.

She could have been hosting this affair, the way she moved from group to group with a light touch on the arm and a word or two. She seemed to know everyone, and everyone knew her. She whispered something to Sandra, paused a moment for our premier real estate shark, Elaine Bailey, and kept angling toward us.

“Hi, Chief. Billy,” she said when she reached the anchor. Billy tilted his head in greeting.

“Hey, Jane,” I said.

“Sad day.”

“Awful. Senseless and stupid. What a waste. I wish we could ban hunting sometimes.”

Billy snorted. “Then the deer would take over this island, Chief. Them and the rats. Chase all the rich people away. Can't have that. I'll tell you something. It's a good thing people jack a few out of season or we'd never keep a lid on it. Not that I'd ever do that.”

I lifted my arms, palms out. “Of course not.”

“So, you're sure it was an accident?” Jane said.

“Oh, boy,” Billy laughed. “The whodunit lady strikes again! ‘I suspect foul play, sir!' Your Maddy Clark always finds clues the police don't catch. Hence the term ‘clueless,' am I right? ‘This isn't plaster dust, Officer Dimbulb. It's dandruff…just like I noticed on Least Likely Suspect Guy's blazer!'”

Jane punched him on the arm. “Very funny. Can I use that dandruff idea, though? I like it.”

“My pleasure. But you better mention me in the acknowledgments. And sign me a copy.”

“I always sign you a copy.”

“But make this one more personal. ‘To Billy, who felt me up at our senior prom.'”

“I had totally forgotten about that.”

“Liar.”

She turned to me. “Seriously, though, Chief. I heard something a little weird back there.”

“What was it?”

“Well…Chuck Forrest was talking to Andy Thayer—I didn't hear the whole conversation but I sneaked over to eavesdrop because that's what I do for a living when I'm not weeding flower beds and mowing lawns. It is! Anyway, they didn't notice me. I'm quite unobtrusive.”

“Chuck walked right into you!” Billy said.

“My point exactly. So this is what he said.” She closed her eyes for a moment of concentration, then opened them wide. “‘Tough break. But it could happen to anyone, Andy. Life's a minefield. You better watch your step.' Wait, I just re-wrote that! I was trying to make it sound more threatening. Hold on. No, no—he actually said ‘you have to' not ‘you better.' Like, the general ‘you.' People in general. ‘You have to watch your step.' But then he said, ‘Word to the wise.'”

I nodded. “That sounds pretty specific to me. And pretty threatening.”