Authors: Cynthia Riggs

Paperwhite Narcissus (5 page)

BOOK: Paperwhite Narcissus

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The small parking area at Wasque was filled with vehicles—Edgartown police, state police, an ambulance, a collection of SUVs, and a Harley-Davidson.

In the interest of safety, most fishermen came by ferry and parked in the Wasque lot. But some drove along the thin barrier bar that connected Chappaquiddick to the rest of the Vineyard, a risky route to their secret fishing spots. One of these days the ocean would cut through the barrier bar that separated Katama Bay from the Atlantic. When that happened, depending on the tide, the bay would empty into the ocean or the ocean into the bay, flushing away everything in the way.

Katie leaned her bicycle against the split-rail fence next to the Harley and headed down the steep wooden steps that led from the bluff to the beach below. The presence of the motorcycle meant that Doc Jeffers was here. He must be medical examiner this week.

A group of people had gathered at the point a quarter-mile
down the beach. Katie had never seen a body before, and certainly didn’t want to see a corpse that had been bitten in half by a shark.

Doc Jeffers was bent over something. Katie edged closer. The doc was a tall, massive man wearing black leather biker’s pants, black boots festooned with steel chains, and a green V-neck scrub shirt that showed a triangle of curly white hair. He was talking into a small tape recorder.

Katie recognized the two fishermen who’d found the half-corpse, Simon Newkirk, her eye doctor, and Tom Dwyer, the mystery writer. She braced herself against the wind and walked over to them.

Tom, who was well over six feet, leaned down to talk to her. “I see your byline pretty regularly these days. How are things going?”

Katie hesitated. “You know Colley.”

“I know Colley, all right.” Tom turned away. “Simon spotted the body.”

Simon came over to her. “I can’t tell you much.”

Katie turned on her tape recorder, and Simon talked about hauling the half-body out of the surf. Katie tucked her blowing hair into her windbreaker collar and scribbled notes, holding the recorder and her notepad in one hand, her pen in the other.

“Anything to add, Mr. Dwyer?” she asked.

“Background stuff you might be able to use.” He told her about fishing the rip, the changing tide, dawn, and the morning sky.

“Is there any clue as to his identity? A wallet or something?” Katie asked.

“You’ll have to get that from Doc Jeffers,” Tom said.

Katie switched off her recorder and thanked them. She’d seen Ed Prada, an Edgartown police officer she’d gone to high school with, standing on the other side of the group huddled around the body. She’d had a crush on Ed ever since she could remember, but he’d been a senior when she was only a freshman and
she didn’t think he had ever noticed her. He’d gone off Island to college and had returned with a degree in criminal justice.

“Any idea who he was, Ed? Or how it happened?”

Ed, too, had to lean down to talk to Katie. “Doc Jeffers thinks the body’s been in the water two or three days. The top half is missing, head, arms, torso. No way of knowing who he was until the forensics people examine him. Could be a fisherman or someone off a passing boat.”

Katie turned her back to the wind so she could hear better. “Can they tell what kind of shark attacked him?”

“The doc says no bite marks. He thinks it was a boat propeller that killed him, not a shark.”

“
Not
a shark?” Katie scribbled in her small notebook.

Ed shook his head. “Sliced across his spine.”

Katie shuddered. “Would it take a big boat to do that kind of damage?”

“Not necessarily. Could have been a fishing vessel on the way to Georges Bank. Or a freighter, although most freighters go by way of the Cape Cod Canal, not the sound. Could easily have been a smaller boat, though. The Coast Guard’s checking vessel owners on the Cape and Islands.”

Katie nodded toward the knot of people. “Any thoughts on how the accident could have happened?”

Ed shrugged. “The victim may have fallen overboard and got swept under the boat into the propeller. Or he might have been in a small boat that got run down by a bigger boat. Hard to tell.”

“But to cut the body in half like that …”

“Can happen,” said Ed. “Obviously did.”

“Don’t boats have propeller guards?”

He shook his head. “The Coast Guard says prop guards pose hazards that can be worse than open blades.”

“What could be worse than that?” Katie nodded toward the body.

“Trauma and sure death if a person falls overboard and gets clobbered. Prop guards throw off maneuverability.”

Katie continued to write.

Ed traced a circle in the sand with his booted foot. “Before the authorities can tell what happened for sure, they’ll take the body to Falmouth for an autopsy. It would help if the upper half is found.”

Katie’s hair whipped loose from her collar and blew around her face again. “Is it possible that they’ll find the rest of him?”

Ed shrugged again. “Never can tell. Might wash up along the south shore. Or maybe they’ll never find him.”

There was not much for Katie to report, aside from the fact of the half-body possibly done in by a boat propeller. When she returned to the paper she would be able to write only a bare sketch of what had happened. She couldn’t begin to fill in the who, what, where, when, or why.

Doc Jeffers stood up, snapped off his latex gloves, and gestured toward the bluff and the distant parking lot.

“It’s a wrap,” he said. “Take him away.”

Katie put her notebook and pencil back in her pocket and climbed the wooden steps to the top of the bluff ahead of Ed. “Any chance you can give me and my bike a ride to the ferry, Ed?”

“Sure thing.”

Ed stowed Katie’s bicycle in the trunk of the police car and fastened the lid down with shock cords.

“Haven’t had much chance to talk to you, Katie, since you’ve been working for that psychopath,” he said once he was in the driver’s seat. “He been hitting on you?”

“I avoid him as much as I can.”

“He can start working on the summer interns soon. I feel sorry for his wife.”

“She’s his fifth wife, you know. I think she’s about to leave him for somebody else.”

“Can’t say as I blame her. An Islander?” Ed slowed for a crow in the middle of the road feeding on a run-over rabbit.

“Not exactly. Want to guess who it is?”

“Nope.”

“Think golf course developer.”

Ed glanced quickly at her. “Not Ambler Fieldstone?”

“Yup. J. Ambler Fieldstone. The
Enquirer’
s biggest advertiser.”

“Does Colley know?”

“The guys on the paper think he doesn’t have a clue. But I think he does know and doesn’t care. Advertising is more important to him than a mere wife.”

The road stopped at the dock. Ed parked behind another car and turned off the engine. Across the harbor, they could see vehicles driving onto the ferry.

“One of my psychology profs did his dissertation on narcissism,” Ed said while they waited. “Colley Jameson is a typical narcissist. The world exists for him and only for him. He has complete disregard for his wives, employees, and associates. He’s got this grandiose sense of himself—thinks he’s perfect, infallible, brilliant, and immune to punishment. A lot of serial killers are narcissists. Not that Colley’s a serial killer,” he added quickly.

“His pro-development editorials are angering a lot of people,” Katie said.

“Typical narcissist. Criticism doesn’t apply to him. He doesn’t hear what people are saying, doesn’t care what they think.”

The ferry returned to the Chappy side where they’d been waiting. Captain Brad unhooked the bow chain and a car and pickup truck drove off.

“What d’ya say, Ed,” said Captain Brad. “Identify the body yet?”

“Not yet. The cops, Doc, and the hearse should be along in a few minutes. They can tell you more than I can.”

Once they were back on the Edgartown side, Ed drove down the maze of one-way streets that led to the
Enquirer,
stopped in front of the paper, and unloaded Katie’s bike.

“Thanks,” she said. “You know what Colley’s wife’s name is?”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

“Calpurnia,” Katie answered.

“Calpurnia, as in Caesar’s wife?”

Katie nodded. “‘A wife beyond reproach.”’

Ed laughed. “How about a beer when you get off work? I’m through work around five.”

“I’d like that,” said Katie.

CHAPTER 6

Victoria stood at the west door, breathing in the morning air. Her garden could use more rain. Lettuce was up, bright green against the dark, compost-rich soil. She’d already harvested radishes and wintered-over kale.

The phone in the cookroom rang and she went inside to answer. The call was from Casey. After she hung up, Victoria nudged McCavity, her marmalade cat, out of her chair and sat with her elbows on the pine table, thinking.

In the west pasture, thin streamers of mist trailed from the tips of the cedars. Weak sunlight illuminated the white steeple of the Congregational church in the distance.

When her granddaughter Elizabeth came into the room, Victoria didn’t hear her. She was absorbed in her thoughts. Elizabeth had moved in with her grandmother after her divorce, and apparently was here to stay. She had a job, now, working in the Oak Bluffs harbor.

“What’s the matter, Gram?”

Whenever her granddaughter appeared unexpectedly, Victoria felt her spirits lift. Elizabeth reminded Victoria of Jonathan, her dead husband. Elizabeth had the same clear low voice, a feminine version of Jonathan’s. Like Jonathan, she was tall and slender and had broad swimmer’s shoulders.

Victoria brushed her hand in front of her face before she answered. “Half of a body washed up on Chappaquiddick.”

“Half? How awful. Who found it? Where?”

“A man’s body. Simon Newkirk and Tom Dwyer were fishing at Wasque.”

“That’s horrible,” Elizabeth said. “Let me get a cup of coffee before you say any more. Can I get you one?”

Victoria shook her head. “None for me, thanks.”

Elizabeth returned, set her mug on the table, and sat down. “Was that what the call a few minutes ago was about?”

Victoria nodded. “They haven’t been able to identify the body.”

“Was he killed by a shark?”

“I haven’t heard any details.”

Elizabeth ran her fingers through her short, sun-bleached hair.

Victoria continued. “Casey wants me to show her the way to Quansoo. She’s been asked to help look for the rest of the body.”

Elizabeth made a sour face. “Sounds like fun.”

“Volunteers are walking along the south shore, from Quansoo to the opening, from Long Point to Oyster-Watcha, from Oyster-Watcha to Edgartown Great Pond, and from there to Katama.”

“What if the rest of the body is still in the ocean?”

“The Coast Guard has sent a cutter to search off the south shore,” Victoria said. “They’ll send a helicopter later this morning, if we still haven’t found the body.”

“
We?
” said Elizabeth. “Casey wants you to go with her to find the body?”

“Naturally,” said Victoria.

Elizabeth picked her coffee mug up and set it down again. “Is there anything I can do to help? The harbor is busy right now, but I can take off for this.”

“The harbormaster has a scanner, doesn’t he?”

“Everybody on this Island has a scanner except you, Gram. You don’t seem to need one.” Elizabeth glanced out the window. “Here’s Casey now.”

Before Victoria went to the door to greet the police chief, she set her blue baseball cap on her hair and looked at her reflection
in one of the small panes in the kitchen window. The cap’s mirrored gold stitching read WEST TISBURY POLICE, DEPUTY.

She gathered up her cloth bag and her walking stick from behind the kitchen door, picked up her heavy sweater, and went out to the police Bronco.

From Victoria’s house, Casey drove up Brandy Brow, past Alley’s store, where the regulars were basking on the porch in the warm June morning. They waved as the Bronco went by. The Quansoo Road was about a mile beyond Alley’s. Casey turned left onto the sand road. “I don’t know how to get there from here, Victoria. You’ll have to navigate.”

Victoria’s grandparents had taken her to Quansoo in the horse-drawn wagon scores of times. She’d walked the road, traveled it by horseback, by bicycle, and, once she and Jonathan owned one, by car, with children and grandchildren packed inside, or standing on the running board.

That is, until Casey arrived on Island and confiscated her driver’s license. Simply because she had backed into the Meals on Wheels van. Victoria scowled. The driver of the van had overreacted.

She straightened her cap. Well, she told herself, if it hadn’t been for the van incident, she would probably not be a police deputy, riding shotgun with the chief.

She directed Casey through the tangle of branching roads that led off to either side. Sunlight filtered through new leaves, casting perfect sun-coins along their route. Chewinks rustled in last autumn’s fallen oak leaves, sounding more like deer browsing than small birds hunting insects. Crows signaled to other crows, who signaled back.

After two miles, the overarching trees thinned out and became stunted, shorn by salt winds, then gave way to low scrub oak and bayberry, wild rose and poison ivy, then grasses. The road ended at a straight, narrow creek. Casey parked the Bronco and got out.

“Wait for me here, Victoria. I shouldn’t be too long.”

But Victoria had already gotten out of the Bronco and started across the wooden bridge that spanned the creek.

Casey mumbled something that Victoria ignored.

The first view of the ocean through the dunes always, always took Victoria’s breath away. She’d made this trip across the creek and through the dunes how many times? Five thousand? Ten thousand? The view was never the same. Today the ocean seemed menacing. Part of the feeling came from the brewing storm. But part was because somewhere out there, or washed up somewhere on the beach, was half of a man, a person who’d been alive only a few days before.

Victoria shivered.

“Are you going to be warm enough?” Casey asked.

“I’m not cold.” Victoria unzipped the heavy sweater she was wearing. “Canadian,” she said, opening it to show its thickness. “From Fiona’s parents.”

“Fiona?”

“My granddaughter-in-law.”

They walked to the edge of the swash where the sand was firm, then turned left, heading east along the straight sweep of beach.

“Take your time, Victoria. We’re not in a hurry.”

Victoria had marched ahead of Casey, who had to walk briskly to keep up. Victoria looked over her shoulder and slowed. She had to admit, the pace was a bit faster than she, too, cared to maintain.

A roll of dirty gray clouds was moving in slowly from the south. Far out, breakers built up, moved inshore, crested, curled over, and crashed onto the beach in a continuous roll that progressed along the beach behind them. Victoria felt the steady rumble.

Twice, Casey trudged up to the high-tide line to check on a piece of flotsam or jetsam. “Lobster pot buoy,” she reported
back. “Tangled in plastic netting.” Or a piece of lumber, silvered by salt water and sun.

Before they had gone far, Victoria stopped and leaned on her walking stick. “The fishermen found the body three or four hours ago, just as the tide changed. Therefore, we’re not likely to find anything high on the beach.”

Casey grunted. “What do you mean?”

“It’s likely the body didn’t wash ashore on an earlier tide,” Victoria said. “So we need to look near the line of breakers.”

A procession of sandpipers flew down and raced along the swash line, dipping their bills in unison into the wet sand, dodging incoming sheets of foaming water.

Victoria poked her stick into a drift of seaweed and bent down to pick up a pretty stone, which she tucked away in her cloth bag.

“What’s that?” Casey called out suddenly.

Victoria turned to see Casey pointing to something just beyond the surf.

“A seal,” Victoria said. “You don’t see them often on the south shore.” She rested on her stick and caught her breath. Her sore toe was beginning to ache. She really must slow down, she thought. This might be a long walk.

Casey stopped next to her. “We’re supposed to go only as far as the opening. Another team is starting from the other side.” The opening was a cut in the barrier bar that let seawater flow into the Great Pond to nourish oysters and clams.

Victoria and Casey had walked about two-thirds of the distance to the opening when Victoria spotted the body.

The body was just inshore from the line of breakers. It drifted up on the beach with each breaking wave, then washed back to sea again. The head, arms, and torso flopped in a strangely lifelike way.

Victoria jabbed her stick into the sand and leaned on it. She could think of nothing to say.

Casey caught up with her, stopped, and stared at the half-corpse drifting back and forth between the sea and the shore. “I was hoping we wouldn’t be the ones to find him.”

The flock of sandpipers took off, turned into the wind with a flash of white, and settled back on the swash line beyond the drifting body.

“Well,” Victoria said, taking a deep breath. “What now?”

“I call in,” said Casey. She unfastened her radio from her belt.

Victoria moved away from the ocean toward the dunes and eased herself down onto a big silvered tree trunk.

Casey finished her radio call and sat next to Victoria. “I don’t suppose he’ll go anywhere.”

Victoria shook her head. “Not until the tide changes.”

“Was it anybody you knew, Victoria? An Islander?”

“I didn’t want to look too closely,” Victoria replied.

Doc Jeffers recognized the body and shook his head. A patient of his and a golfing partner, he said. He refused to say more. He made a small joke about his relief that the two halves weren’t from two victims.

The EMTs then carried Victoria’s half down the beach, over the dunes, and across the bridge, and loaded it into the hearse. Toby, the undertaker, would be taking the body to Falmouth for autopsy. He, too, made a sly comment about the convenience of not having to make two trips off Island to convey one body.

After it was all over, Victoria and Casey returned to the police station. Victoria sat in her usual chair in front of Casey’s desk while the chief finished paperwork having to do with finding the half-corpse. Victoria untied the laces of her right shoe.

Finally Casey set her pen down.

“Doc Jeffers knew who the victim was,” Victoria said. “Do you suppose he’ll be willing to give out the name yet?”

“I’ll call him.” Casey reached for the phone. When she finished, she hung up and leaned her elbows on the desk. “Lord!”

“Did he say who it was?”

“The golf course developer.”

“J. Ambler Fieldstone?”

Casey nodded.

Victoria took a deep breath and sat back again.

“The Coast Guard is trying to locate the vessel that ran him down, or anyone who might have witnessed the incident.”

“Cut in half,” Victoria murmured. “What an awful way to die.”

“The state police are notifying his widow. I’m glad I don’t have to.”

“Mrs. Fieldstone was talking to her lawyer about a divorce, did you know that?”