Vineyard Chill (26 page)

Maybe her killer met her on the street before she got home and had taken her to the farm in his car and killed her there. But why would she have gone with him? Was he a lover who prevailed on her to go on a moonlit drive? If so, how had he known about the farm?

I turned back to Loretta Aldrich and asked, “Were you up late the night Nadine disappeared?”

She shook her head. “No. I've since wished that I had been. I might have seen something. I might even have been able to save her. But I was in bed, asleep, when she came home.”

“Did you notice anything unusual the next day? A strange car on the street? Some person who normally isn't around? Anything at all?”

“No. I do remember that it looked like it was going to snow and that Gordy went to the landfill that next morning, but the only reason I remember is because he'd gone just a couple of days before and had asked me, like he always does, if I had anything I wanted him to take. That morning he didn't ask.”

“Did you attach any significance to that?”

“No, but Gert seemed to. She watched him from her window while he loaded a rubbish bag into the van and kept watching until he drove out of sight.”

“Just one rubbish bag?”

“That's all I saw. Gert's usually not interested in trips to the dump. She's a strange one.”

I thought that Gertrude Brown was probably even stranger than Loretta Aldrich imagined.

When I left Loretta Aldrich's porch I once again saw a window curtain move in Gordon Brown's house. I felt eyes watching me and wondered if someday my private life would interest me so little that I'd be one of those people who constantly watch their neighbors.

Were their internal lives worse—less rewarding or pleasurable—than their external ones? Was the outside world more real and important than the inside one, the private one that no one else could share?

My own persuasion was that both were ultimately meaningless, but that didn't prevent me from thinking about values and acting as though they mattered. It just prevented me from believing my life had any purpose other than the one I invented as I went along. I thought of people who had religion. Gordon Brown had described his wife as one such. Their biggest problems were trying to figure out what their gods wanted them to do (the worst believers were sure they knew), and explaining the existence of evil. Although I lacked the solace of faith, my agnosticism at least freed me from dealing with those two classic problems.

I did, however, have similar ones having to do with how to live morally in an amoral world. Usually love was a good guide, but I had too little of that in me to be a saint, and I distrusted the concept of justice as an alternative.

Thus, feeling neither loving nor just, motivated only by the idea that the island would be fractionally safer if Nadine's killer was prevented from killing again, I walked to Gordon Brown's house and, as I neared it, saw the window curtain fall.

Gordon Brown opened his front door to my knock, frowned, then brightened a bit as he recognized me, and said, “Mr. Jackson, isn't it? You were here last week.”

He glanced behind him, then stepped out and pulled the door almost shut, although it was too cold for him to be outside wearing only a sweater over his winter shirt. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Don't want the chilly air to get into the house. My wife's not well.”

“So I've been told. Sorry. Is she bedridden?”

He looked startled. “Bedridden? No, no, not really.” He tapped a forefinger alongside his head. “She's just…she just doesn't like to leave the house anymore.”

“She was a large, lively woman when she was young, I'm told. Does she ever get outside anymore?”

He rubbed his jaw. “I can't remember the last time. It's been a while.”

“You must do all of the outside work, then. Shopping, going to the dump, mowing the lawn.”

“I don't mind, really. What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?” He glanced at his wristwatch and seemed to be listening to the inside of his house as much as to me.

“It must be particularly hard for you to live with the woman you love when there's nothing wrong with her physically, when she's strong and looks perfectly normal but isn't.”

“I'm used to it. I really have to go back inside.” He crossed his arms and hugged his chest. “It's cold out here.”

“The morning after Nadine Gibson disappeared, you made a trip to the dump. Do you remember that?”

His eyes grew worried and wary. “No, I don't. Did I? I go every couple of weeks, whenever stuff begins to pile up. Maybe I went that day. I don't remember.”

“You went just a couple of days earlier, so you wouldn't have had much rubbish that morning.” He stepped back toward the door, but I put a hand on his arm. “You put a rubbish bag into your van. What was in the bag?”

He brushed weakly at my hand. “Rubbish, I guess. How can you expect me to remember? It was a year ago. Let go of me.”

I let go, but before he could duck into the house I said, “If you go inside now, I'm going right to the police, so talk to me.”

His face was touched with fear. “What do you want?”

“You don't have much of a social life anymore, do you? You and your wife used to go bird-watching and do other things that young couples do. But that's all ended, hasn't it?”

“I guess so. But that's because Gert is sick. She's sick and she doesn't want me to be away from her.”

“That's right. You get out of the house to do chores like mowing the grass where she can keep an eye on you, but the only times you get away from her is when you go to the store or the dump. And she doesn't like that, does she?”

“No. But that's understandable. She's sick.”

“You're a sociable guy, Gordy. The neighbors like you and you like being their friend, don't you?”

“Sure. Of course I do.” He was shivering.

“You chat with them when you see them. You like it in the summertime when there are people around for you to talk to.”

“Yes. It's cold out here. Aren't you cold?”

“We can go inside if you prefer.”

“No, no. This is fine.”

“Gert doesn't like it when you're outside talking, does she?”

“I guess not, but you can't blame her. She's—”

“I know. She's sick. She especially doesn't like it when you talk with women. Isn't that so?”

“What are you trying to get me to say?”

“She didn't like Nadine Gibson, did she? You told me Gert thought the girl was a sinner, the way she lived with her boyfriend, and that she was glad when the boy left.”

“That's right.”

“But a couple of nights later another man spent the night at Nadine's house. How did Gert feel about that?”

He looked past me and said in a small voice, “She called her a whore.”

“How did she feel when she found out you weren't charging Nadine full rent?”

He turned visibly pale. “What!”

“You heard me.”

He pressed his fists hard against the sides of his face. I saw that his teeth were gritted. He made not a sound.

“What I think happened,” I said, “is this: Your wife had never liked the attention you paid to the girl, and when she found out about the rent deal you'd been giving her and then saw another man spend the night with her, the combination of betrayals was too much for her. She left the house that night when she knew Nadine would be coming home from work and she met her out somewhere along the way, probably in the shadow of a house or a tree a block or more from here, out of the moonlight, and she beat her to death with a piece of pipe or a tool of some kind she probably got out of your truck. I don't think you knew anything about it until she came back home. It that pretty close to what happened?”

He said nothing, but only stood there with a silent howl of pain on his face. I went on.

“I think she was wearing clothes covered with blood, because beatings spatter more blood than you'd think possible. I think you got her out of her clothes and into the shower, and that you made her go to bed while you put her bloody things into a rubbish bag. You didn't take the bag with you because you were afraid the clothes might be found and identified so you left them there while you got a sheet and drove to where the body was. You wrapped the body so you wouldn't get blood all over the inside of your truck. Then, because it was too cold to dig a grave and because you remembered the old Olmstead ruin, you took the body up there and buried it under the rubble in the cellar, where there was a good chance it wouldn't be found for years. How am I doing so far?”

He was staring into nothingness. “How do these things happen?” he asked the gods who live out there.

I said, “The next morning you took the bag of bloody clothes to the landfill, where the chances were they'd never be found. And they never were found. Then you got even luckier: a snowstorm covered the place where the murder occurred, and the snow didn't melt for a long time. For a year, the body wasn't found and maybe you were beginning to think everything was going to work out after all. But then one day my friend Bonzo found a bird's nest made in part from long red hair and that was the beginning of the end for you and Gertrude.”

“She's sick,” he said. “She has been for a long time.”

“You need a lawyer,” I said. “I imagine there's a good chance that your wife will get off with an insanity plea, but even if she doesn't, there's no death penalty in Massachusetts.”

His eyes were watery and he was shivering. “Oh, poor Gertrude. Poor Nadine.”

Poor you, I thought. Poor all of us.

“I'm going to the police with this,” I said. “You go back inside and don't upset your wife if you can help it. She saw me coming here and she'll want to know what we talked about.”

“What'll I tell her?”

I couldn't think of an answer to that, so I just said, “Wait for the police. Don't do anything unusual. Make some tea. That might help.”

As he opened the door I heard her voice. It reminded me of a crow's cawing. “Gordon! What are you doing out there? Is that man trying to sell you something? I saw him come from Loretta Aldrich's house. Get rid of him!”

He shut the door and I walked back to my truck and drove to the state police station.

Dom Agganis was at his desk sifting through the pile of papers that was always on his desk. Between the papers and the computer he didn't have a lot of spare space.

“I think you need a bigger file cabinet,” I said. “I suggest the trash barrel out behind the barracks. If anything there is really important they'll send it to you again.”

“I know you're right,” he said, “but I never know when the governor might walk in and I wouldn't want him to think I'm not working on something.”

“Has he ever walked in?”

“Not yet, but it could happen anytime. What brings you here? Nosing around in police business again?” He leaned back in his chair, stretched, and put his thick hands behind his neck.

“'Tis better to give than to receive,” I said, sitting down. I'd felt tired before I'd even finished talking with Gordon Brown. I was more tired now, wearied the way we are by angry argument or depravity.

“You look to be in a giving mood,” said Dom, eyeing me keenly. “If so, I'm in a mood to receive.”

So I sat and told him of my day. My voice droned in my ears like the buzzing of a distant swarm of bees. There was no inflection in it, no tone, only words following other words until, after what seemed a long time, the words stopped abruptly and I was looking almost sleepily at Dom.

I saw a tape recorder on his desk and wondered how long it had been there. From the beginning, I guessed. Now he leaned forward and turned it off.

“We'll need more than you got,” he said.

I nodded. “I know, but it's a start. Maybe you can still find the clothes he threw away.”

“I doubt it. It's been a year. We can look.”

“I imagine he's cleaned his truck, but there might be bloodstains that he missed.”

“There's a chance of that. Luminol should find it if it's there.”

“He probably put the weapon in with the clothes if she brought it home, but maybe not. I forgot to ask. He has a van probably loaded with pipes and plumbing tools. Gertrude might have used his favorite pipe wrench, and maybe he loved it too much to part with it.”

“Not likely, but possible.”

“There must have been a lot of blood where the killing took place. Brown couldn't have cleaned it all up in the middle of the night, even with all that moonlight to help him find it, and he wouldn't have wanted to stay on the scene very long for fear someone would come by.”

“If you're right, that spot is somewhere between the girl's house and the Fireside, which is quite a stretch of territory. And a year's gone by and God knows how many people, dogs, and kids have messed up the crime scene. Too bad about that snowstorm. If it hadn't been for that, we might have figured this all out a year ago.”

“Maybe you can use luminol in the likeliest spots. I figure it happened in the shadows. Maybe that'll narrow the possibilities.”

“Maybe we can get Gertrude to lead us to the spot.”

“Maybe.”

“There are a lot of maybes in this conversation. You got anything else for me to think about? No. Then thanks and good-bye.”

I went out into the cool, clear March air. A wind was coming off the water and I could see a ferry coming around West Chop bringing cars and travelers to the Blessed Isle.

I climbed into the Land Cruiser and drove home. It was the middle of the afternoon and I felt the way a writer friend had once described his feelings when he was “between books”: slightly ill at ease, existential, wondering if I had wasted my life and if I would ever do anything worthwhile. What I needed was company and a beer. Or maybe two or three beers.

I stopped on Circuit Avenue and went down the stairs into the Vineyard Wine and Cheese Shop, the island's only basement liquor store. I bought a six-pack of Sam Adams lager and, because neither my wife nor my children were yet at home, drove to Ted Overhill's barn. There I found Clay Stockton whistling as he worked.

The barn was warm and comfortable. I climbed up and sat in the schooner's cockpit and invited Clay to join me in a Sam. He was glad to do it.