Vineyard Blues (5 page)

I heard the news at the Dock Street Coffee Shop, where the Jacksons were having breakfast: juice for everybody; coffee for the big people; cereal for Diana; toast, bacon, and a scrambled egg for Joshua, who didn't care for soft egg yolks; a bagel for Zee; and the full-bloat breakfast—sausage, eggs, toast, and fried potatoes—for me. Delish! And with your food, you got to watch the cook do his work, never wasting a motion, his arms as graceful as a hula dancer's, rhythmic as a symphony conductor's. And you got the latest gossip. What more could you ask? Today the talk was mostly about last night's fire.

Opinions ranged from the mild to the wild: Another damned Ben Krane firetrap! Be a good thing if every slum he owned burned down! Just lucky that nobody got hurt. But maybe somebody did. A girl was missing. Girl named Millicent Dowling, according to a cop somebody knew. Her friends called her Millie, and nobody had seen her since the fire. As soon as they got the ruins cooled down enough to make a search, the firemen would go in and see if she maybe didn't get out, or look for anybody else who might be in there. Fire marshals would have to figure out what started it, too.

“What do you think, J.W.? Arson or just an accident?”

I looked at Charlie Bensen. I was sitting between him and Joshua. Charlie liked fires and kept his scanner on all the time so he could go watch the firemen do their work. He'd been a volunteer himself until he got too old.

“I don't know, Charlie,” I said. “You didn't do it, did you?”

Charlie grinned, showing a good set of new dentures. “I know what they say about firebugs working as firemen, but no, it wasn't me.” He sobered. “Thing is, there was that arson last spring. 'Nother Krane place. Maybe somebody's got it in for Ben Krane.”

“Maybe so.”

Charlie chewed some toast. “You remember about twenty-five years back we had that string of arsons in town? Summer places, mostly, empty and usually off someplace where there wasn't a hydrant anyplace close. I worked on most of them fires, but we couldn't save many of the places. Us and the cops could never prove who did it, but finally the arson stopped. You remember that?”

I'd been about fifteen at the time, but I did remember it. The fires had spooked a lot of people. I nodded. “The story I got was that the cops had a pretty good idea who did it even though they couldn't prove anything, so they had a talk with the perp and he shut himself down.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “That was the scuttlebutt. I never heard who they had in mind. Say, maybe whoever it was is back at work and is torching Ben Krane's places because he knows nobody'll be too mad at him for doing it!” He gave me another grin.

“Plenty of people got it in for Ben Krane,” said a voice from up the counter. That would be Zack Delwood, who didn't like anybody too much. Zack and I didn't socialize a lot.

I'd never thought that Zack was too bright, but he and Charlie were both right about Ben Krane. A lot of people would be glad if Ben got put out of business.

I, for instance, would not have wept if Ben had decided to move off island and take his houses and their occupants with him.

As if reading my mind, Zack loudly added, “Too damned many college kids down here, too! Burn down all of Krane's damned houses and they'd have to stay home and leave us islanders alone!”

It was a variation on the ever-popular attack on the Vineyard's summer visitors. Locals who didn't own businesses moaned all season about the traffic and the crowds and how great it had been in the old days when you knew your neighbors and could find a parking spot on Main Street. The island's businesspeople, on the other hand, wanted all of the visitors they could get, because tourism greased the Vineyard's wheels. Zack, being of the first class, scorned the summer people. Of course, he scorned most islanders, too, being a mean-minded guy in general. He and I had a truce, however, so he usually left me and mine out of his wide-ranging condemnations of his fellow humans. I never could understand how anyone could be so sour, but Zack managed it.

“Zack's right about Ben and about them college students, too,” said old Charlie, nodding his bald head. “We'd be better off without any of 'em. But I don't like the idea of burning buildings down when there's people in 'em.”

“What are you talking about, Charlie?” said yet another voice. “You haven't missed a fire in forty years.”

Charlie leaned forward and looked up the counter toward whoever it was that had made that crack. “I admit it. I do like to watch a fire, but I don't want no people inside of it! You want to burn down Ben Krane's houses, you do it in the wintertime when they're empty!”

“You burn 'em down, Charlie. You were the fireman, I never was! Haw! Haw!”

Had the speaker remembered
Fahrenheit 451
and its fire-starting firemen?

Charlie hadn't. “Only fires I ever started was in a stove, goddammit!”

Other voices entered in.

“Probably nobody started this one either. Probably bad wiring. Ben Krane never puts a cent into those hovels of his.”

“Or one of those college students got stoned and left a cigarette butt burning in a couch or something.”

“How about them Sox?” asked someone, just to change the subject.

“What do you mean, how about 'em?” rejoined another fan. “It's only June, for God's sake. Plenty of time for them to do the Fenway flop.”

“Hey,” said Zee, who was always ready to talk baseball, “they may not have Roger anymore, but they have Pedro and they finally have an infield and some D in the outfield, too. They can catch anything hit near them. They'll be okay this year.”

“They can't hit the long ball. You got to hit the long ball to win at Fenway.”

Zee shook her head. “They hit the long ball for eighty years and never won a World Series. D is what wins for you. Same as in any sport. Ask the pros.”

And so it went. Baseball, summer tourists, fishing, and the fire took turns occupying the attention of the talkers. Tragic, comic, and inane subjects in a typical human mix. I'd heard it all before, except for the part about Millicent Dowling. Millie. The girl Adam Washington had fought with and then had perhaps gone to find.

“I think we're done here,” said Zee, wiping little hands and faces with napkins. “You kids ready to go?”

They were, and so we left, walking out into the parking lot at the foot of Main Street, where, it being early, there were actually still some parking slots.

Mike Smith's pickup was parked in front of the yacht club, which meant that Mike was already at work there, doing whatever needed to be done to keep the place shipshape and functioning, and in the channel beyond the club an early traveling yawl was heading out to sea. Off to our right, among the other moored boats this side of the Reading Room, we could see the
Shirley J.,
our eighteen-foot Herrischoff
America
catboat, bobbing at her stake, her bow toward the small southwest wind that was slowly rising with the sun. Beyond her, in the still not too full harbor, other yachts, both sailboats and power, hung quiet and dewy at their moorings. In another few weeks, the harbor would be wall to wall with boats, but right now many of the moorings were empty.

Above us the pale blue sky arched toward the horizon, and around us the village was slowly coming to life. Edgartown, with its flowers, trees, and green lawns, its narrow streets and white- or gray-shingled houses, and its docks, boats, and blue harbor, is the Vineyard's loveliest town and not a place to make you think of smoking ruins or missing girls. Its great captains' houses, its famous pagoda tree (brought to America in a flowerpot by a long-ago seaman), its church towers, its lighthouse, its shops, and its beaches are almost make-believe in their beauty, and make it easy to understand why tens of thousands of tourists show up every year.

We too never tired of the village, although we stayed away from it as much as possible in the summer because of the crowds. In the early mornings, before many people were up and around, we'd sometimes come down to the coffee shop for breakfast, but once people got to stirring and the streets started filling up, we stayed at home or headed for the far beaches of Chappaquiddick, where the only tourists were fisherpeople or picnickers.

Unless we wanted to go for a day sail.

In that case we sneaked down Cooke Street to Collins Beach, where we kept our dinghy chained to the Reading Room dock to prevent it from being stolen by gentlemen yachtsmen who felt no moral inhibitions about taking other people's dinghies if they needed to get out to their boats after late-night drinking. From Collins we would row out to the
Shirley J.,
trade dinghy for catboat on the mooring line, and catch the wind for a sail down harbor or out past the lighthouse into Nantucket Sound.

Now, Zee, holding Diana's hand, was eyeing the
Shirley J
. speculatively. “What do you think?” she asked. “It's a nice wind.”

“I think yes,” I said. “How about down to the far corner of Katama? We can do some clamming while we sop up the beneficial rays of the sun, and tomorrow I'll fry up some of the catch and make a chowder with the rest.”

Her white teeth flashed. “Let's do it. Home to get some gear and food, then back again.”

One of the nice things about living on an island is that you can go sailing and clamming whenever you feel like it. We felt like it pretty often.

So it wasn't long before I was rowing us out to the stake, and not much later that we were beating down harbor, against both wind and falling tide, under the warming sun. We passed the huge house owned by the Vineyard's most famous car dealer, a guy who could fit our whole house in his living room, and then sailed by the lovely ketch
Wynjie
, admiring her as always as she swung at her mooring. In the lee of the hills to our right, we battled through the narrows into Katama Bay, caught the wind again, and headed on to the southeast corner of the bay. There I put our bow on the beach, dropped sail, unloaded family and gear, then pushed the boat back into the channel and dropped the hook.

The water was warm and the clam flats had risen out of the falling tide. We got the umbrella and the beach chairs set up, set the cooler near at hand, and got the beach blanket and the shovels and pails laid out. Zee stripped to her bikini, and I felt my eyes widen as usual. She saw my face and grinned. I helped the kids out of their shirts and turned them loose, since in that corner of Katama Pond the water is so shallow near the shore that it's a safe place for small children.

Another good thing about it is that it's one of the best spots in Edgartown for steamers and quahogs. Today I was after steamers, so I got my gloves and wire bucket and walked out onto the flats. Joshua came, too, wearing his own little rubber gloves.

There are a lot of ways to get steamer clams. You can dig for them with a shovel or a fork, you can use a toilet plunger to suck them up to the top of the sand, or, if you're a professional, you can use a pump and a hose to wash them up to where you can get to them with a rake.

I prefer to get down on my hands and knees and dig for them as if I were strip-mining. I don't own a pump-and-hose unit, and I think I break fewer shells with my hands than when I use a shovel or a fork. But you can slice your hands up pretty well when you're digging for clams, so good gloves make the job a lot easier. Joshua, wanting to do things the way his pa did, was also a digger, although his staying power wasn't as great as mine.

I liked to clam. There was a nice mindless quality about it. You could clam and enjoy the sun on your back and think about something else entirely.

In spite of my own wishes to stay away from grief, I thought about house fires and Millie Dowling and Adam Washington. Then I thought about Susanna Quick and her telephone calls. Once again the serpents in Eden seemed to be sliding out from under the rocks. Or maybe they were always out in the open, but I was just too blinded by the garden to see them.

At home again, I put my catch into a five-gallon bucket of salt water, so the clams could spit out sand overnight and be clean and ready to eat tomorrow. I put the bucket in the shade and got back to work on the addition to the house. Fires might burn, people might go missing, comets might come out of heaven and threaten the earth itself, but the world kept turning and all the normal stuff had to go on. It was another beautiful Vineyard day on beautiful Martha's Vineyard; no wonder I had no intention of living anywhere else.

Zee had Diana out in front of the house someplace, but Joshua was helping me, handing me nails that I dropped and steadying boards that I sawed and nailed. Maybe he'd end up with the magic hands that I lacked, hands that could do finish carpentry, hands that could fix a car or a radio, or build a boat, or carve a decoy, or play good blues or flamenco guitar, or do other subtle work that mine were not too good at. I hoped so.

I worked on and finally Joshua grew tired of playing grown-up, said, “Bye, Pa,” and went off to join his mother and sister. Smart Joshua. Time enough later to be an adult, to wake to the farm forever fled. Time now to be young and easy, happy as the grass was green.

Green became red and my mind turned to last night's fire. Had Adam Washington ever showed up? Had Millie Dowling made an appearance, or were her ashes going to be found in the smoldering ruin of the house?

What a nosy person I was. Hadn't I moved down to the island precisely because I wanted to be left alone and have no more to do with the troubles of the world? And wasn't it a fact that I'd only met Adam Washington once and I'd never met Millicent Dowling at all? That their fates were not my concern?

Yet the two of them occupied my thoughts. Corrie would be worried about his friend's son. Maybe that made it my concern.

I nailed another board and stepped back to admire my work. Not bad. At this rate, if I could come up with some money for materials, I'd have the new wing ready on schedule. That being the case, it seemed a good time to take a break and do something else.

Maybe take a ride over to the place where Corrie was staying and catch up on the news.

I put away my tools and went around the house to tell Zee my plans. No Zee. I went inside. She was in the kitchen holding Diana on her hip and stirring a pot of what smelled like cream of refrigerator soup, one of my favorites. Joshua was playing some sort of game with the cats, Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, which the three of them perfectly understood.

“We'll all go,” Zee said, turning off the burner and shoving the pot to the back of the stove. She looked up at me. “I'm curious, too. What a pair we are.”

I gave her a kiss. I liked her as much as I loved her. I got hold of Joshua and we all climbed into the Land Cruiser.

The house where Corrie was staying looked worse in the daylight than in darkness, and worse this morning than usual, since the lawn and porch were littered with the remains of last night's party: beer cans, empty bottles, crumpled potato chip bags, and other debris, including a T-shirt and what looked a lot like a pair of women's under-pants. The place smelled of stale beer, sweat, and, faintly, marijuana. A beer keg lay beside the stairs to the porch.

Off to one side of the house, Corrie Appleyard was squatting beside a battered moped, adjusting something. He glanced up, rose, and came toward us. He looked as though he hadn't slept too well. Apparently a life of late-night gigs had not immunized him to chaos or allowed him to ignore loud music and drunks and to snooze soundly through a Vineyard college party such as had happened here last night.

“Sleep well?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I've done better.” He gestured toward the moped. “Had me a motorcycle once. That machine there belongs to my host, Adam. Should start a little easier now, but it still needs work.”

Mopeds are one of the island's principal summer hazards, primarily because the people who rent them don't know how to ride them safely and are constantly crashing and being taken to the hospital in an ongoing drama known to the police as Moped Mop Up. Some of the more experienced police officers prefer night duty to day duty during the summer precisely because Moped Mop Up takes place for the most part during daylight hours, and they'd rather leave the scraping up and the hospital runs to the summer cops.

I looked at the rubble on the lawn. “If you slept at all last night, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

He nodded. “You work some places I've worked, you could sleep through hell afterwards.” He seemed in a good mood.

Zee apparently noted this. “Adam get back?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma'am. Late. After you all left.”

So far, so good. “He ever catch up with the girl?” I asked.

Corrie smiled. “I heard him come home with a girl. I guess it was Millie, but I didn't see her.” He nodded toward the house behind him. “They're all still sawing wood. Young folks these days ain't much on rising early.”

Were they ever? I was glad that Millicent Dowling was okay and said so.

“Me, too,” said Corrie, losing his smile. “Place where she lived was empty when it burned, but for a while people were afraid she was in it.”

“Where was she?”

“Nobody has told me that yet.”

Zee touched my sleeve. “Let's go have a look at the place. Maybe the fire marshal will be there and we can find out what started it.”

Ben Krane owned a lot of property. Too much, in the opinion of a lot of people. I looked at Corrie. “Where was the fire?”

He thought, then waved a hand in a gesture that took in most of the island. “Over there in what they call Arbutus Park. Or so they tell me. I never been there, myself.”

Zee smiled at him. “You want a ride to the church tonight?”

“No, thank you. Some ladies from the guild are going to pick me up and bring me back.”

“Fine. I hope we can get in. I think they may have a lot bigger congregation tonight than usual.”

“I'll save you a couple of seats in the front row.”

“Super,” said Zee, and we drove away.

As we approached Arbutus Park, I could smell the sour stench of smoke. It got stronger as we turned up the bumpy sand road that led away from the highway and into the woods.

“I hope the girl is okay,” said Zee. “Fire scares me more than most things. Do you know where you're going?”

“There's an old farmhouse up here a ways that always looked to me like a typical Ben Krane place.”

“You mean it looks like a dump and every summer it's filled with college kids.”

“That's what I mean.”

“I guess you're right. There's a fire truck.”

We stopped on the road across from the blackened ruins of the house. There wasn't much left. A few wisps of smoke still drifted into the air, watched by some of Edgartown's volunteer firemen. One of them was Frank Costa. He came over.

“Went up like a torch,” he said. “Good thing nobody was at home.”

“What started it?” asked Zee.

“Too soon to say. Could be anything. Cigarette, bad wiring, you name it.”

“Arson?”

The possibility didn't seem to surprise Frank. “Could be, I guess. No hydrants anywhere close, pretty isolated spot, so nobody much would be around after the kids went off to that party. We had a bunch of arsons in places like this a few years back. You remember them?”

“I remember.”

He yawned. “I been here all day. I'm ready to hit the sack.” He turned and looked down the road, and when he did I could hear the sound of a car. “Well, well,” said Frank. “Here comes the owner, I do believe.”

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a new Land Rover coming up the road. It parked behind us and Ben Krane got out and looked angrily at the ruin.

He was a tall, handsome man with a face like a hawk's. He was twice divorced, but, according to gossip, women who weren't married to him found him fascinating. He always seemed to have an attractive one around, anyway, though rarely the same one for too long. He and I bumped into each other now and then, and I had no fault to find with him other than his profession as slumlord.

Zee's views were stronger. She considered him a creep.

“Not much left standing, Ben,” said Frank.

“When's the fire marshal going to get here?” snapped Ben.

“Not much he can do till things cool down and he can get in there,” said Frank.

“The sooner the better. One of those damned kids probably left a cigarette someplace. I ought to make them take out insurance!”

“Trust Ben to come up with another way to squeeze money out of somebody,” hissed Zee. “Come to think of it, I'm surprised he doesn't already do that. He could do it through his own company and make money coming and going.”

“Down, Fang. Maybe he's just a shocked landlord, distraught with grief.”

“Ben Krane has never been distraught about anything in his life. You have to have feelings to be distraught!”

Ben glanced our way, then came over to the car and leaned down. “Hello, J.W., what brings you out this way? Hello, Zee. Haven't seen you for a while.”

“Hello, Ben,” said Zee. “No, it's been a while. Did I hear you say you burned this place down for the insurance?”

He managed to place a thin smile on his falcon face. “Same old Zee, always quick with the quip. These your kids? Pair of cuties. Little girl looks just like you, Zee. She's going to grow up to be a beauty, J.W. You'll be fighting off the boys in a few years.” He straightened and looked at his Rolex. “Well, I'm going to circumnavigate what's left of this place, then I have to get back to work.”

He walked toward the smoking remains of the house.

“I wouldn't be surprised if he actually did torch it,” said Zee. “It's probably insured for more than it's worth and he's already collected his summer rent. He gets it up front and the kids will have to sue him to get it back.”

“I imagine those thoughts will cross the fire marshal's mind,” I said, putting the old Toyota in gear. Fires are like killings. They may be accidental or they may be on purpose, but if they're on purpose, the first suspects are people close to the casualty. Of course, strangers commit crimes, too, but not as often as you might think. We usually get robbed or killed by our friends and families, and a lot of people burn down their own buildings.

We drove home to get ready for Corrie's concert in Oak Bluffs. We wanted to look respectable so Corrie wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with us.

Zee sniffed at her sleeve and wrinkled her nose. “We all smell like smoke,” she said. “These clothes will have to be washed.”

I remembered a fire that had made me sick the first year I was a cop in Boston. A guy had been smoking in bed and had burned himself up. The whole apartment had smelled like cooked hot dogs.