A Deadly Vineyard Holiday (12 page)

I thought some more and saw what looked like a bit
more light. “That's why Cricket is still with Zee and me, and not back in Washington or at the compound. Because in either of those places she's exposed to more suspects than she is when she's with us. At our place, the only possible suspect is—”

“Right you are. Cousin Karen. No other member of the Callahan staff or the Secret Service is around. Only Karen Lea.”

Only Karen Lea. “But that wasn't Karen who was tailing us,” I said.

“No, it wasn't. It might have been another agent, though, somebody Walt Pomerlieu sent to keep tabs on things, Karen included.”

“It wasn't an agent. We checked.”

He smiled at me. It was an ironic, grim little smile. “Did you?”

“Yes.” Then the lightbulb went on in my brain. “No. Karen told us that it wasn't another agent. But—”

“That's right,” said Begay. “But if she's one of the bad guys, and if she wanted to get free of surveillance, one of the best ways to do it is to give you the idea that your shadow is a bad guy, and get you to shake him, as, in fact, you did, with my help.”

I ran possibilities through my head. They did not produce happy thoughts. “The trouble is that you can't trust anybody. It could be Karen, or it could even be Walt Pomerlieu, or it could be somebody I don't even know about. It could be anybody.”

“Too bad Louis Renault isn't here to round up the usual suspects,” said Begay dryly. “Still, I think we can eliminate the president and his wife, and for the moment, let's eliminate you and Zee. And if you really feel daring, you can eliminate Toni and me.”

“All right, I'll eliminate all of the above.”

“And you can eliminate everybody you personally know on the island. None of them are in on this.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure enough not to waste any time worrying about them. But that's not to say that nobody outside the compound is involved. A second part of the current thinking is that some disgruntled spook or ex-spook may be in on it. My lady in Washington says the details in the letters show a pretty esoteric knowledge of what went wrong over there. And as you may know, there are so many spooks and ex-spooks on this island that some people call it Spook Haven.”

I hadn't heard that one before.

“A bunch of the old boys have retired here,” he went on. “In any case, whoever is doing this has a serious grudge and also has at least one person close to the president.”

“Why haven't they been able to nail him?”

“It's an imperfect world,” said Joe Begay, as we approached the house. “I'd say they may be close. I think that's why the girl is with you. So they can close the trap with her out of the way, and so she won't get hurt in case something goes wrong.” He gave me another of those small smiles. “Don't look so skeptical. It's working so far. The girl is still fine.”

“Terrific.”

“You still got that old thirty-eight of yours?”

“Yeah. At home in the gun case.”

“You might load it up and stick it in your pocket. The president is only gonna be on the island for another few days. If anything is going to happen here, it'll happen before he goes. And you know the old NRA saying: It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.' ”

“Yeah, yeah.” Manny Fonseca loved the NRA and that quotation in particular. But I don't like the organization's idiot fringe, and I really hate it when they're right.

There was a cheerful babble of baby talk going on when we came into the house. There seems to be nothing women enjoy more than talking about babies. Their own, if possible, but anyone's will do. I have heard grandmothers and great-grandmothers eagerly exchange detailed stories of their long-ago pregnancies and deliveries as though they had just happened yesterday. And the younger women and girls are all ears and, if they are young moms, eager to discuss their own babies and the labors involved in producing them.

“This talk is a female hormone thing,” said Joe Begay, making sure his voice was just loud enough to be heard by the women. “Sort of like guys talking about the National Football League. You'll have to get used to it now that you're married. Oh, hi, ladies.”

“It's nothing at all like the National Football League,” said Toni, raising her chin a bit. “You just don't understand. Testosterone has clogged the arteries to men's brains.”

Zee gave her a wide smile. “That explains a lot about Jeff that I never understood before. You're so smart.”

Toni patted her belly. “Having babies makes you wise and strong.”

Zee had envy in her face. It was still there when she looked at me. “Have you finished with your manly conversation?
National Football League talk or whatever it was?”

“Our Super Bowl predictions are all made, and the bookies have our money,” I said. “Time for our gang to head back down-island, if we're going to go clamming.”

“What about our shadow?” asked Karen. “He'll keep following us.”

“No, he won't,” said Joe Begay, and he told her about the bug and where we'd put it. “With any luck at all, Shadow is hanging out in some driveway over in Lobsterville, waiting for you to come out of the parking lot there. You should be home before he figures it all out.”

“When we get there,” said Karen, “we'll check the other cars. If this one was bugged, the others probably are, too.”

My very thought.

We said our good-byes and drove back down to Edgartown, passing the famous Chilmark gravestone of a once-renowned comedian who OD'ed himself to death at the height of his fame. His grave, a sacred site to his admirers, who honor his memory by adorning his stone with roaches, bottles, and beer cans, was once located farther into the cemetery. But the legions of his pilgrim fans wore such a wide trail to the holy sepulcher that the entire cemetery was in danger of being seriously damaged, so the Chilmarkians did the smart thing and moved the stone right next to the road, so it's the first one you see when you go in.

“Just like Jim Morrison's grave in Paris,” said Debby J., who thus revealed that she knew more about Paris than I did.

“Of course,” said Zee, “some people say that the grave is still right where it used to be, and only the stone was moved.”

“It's not what's true, it's what people think is true,” said Debby.

“More evidence that you have a future in politics,” said Zee, with a smile.

“No,” said Debby firmly. “When I grow up I want a job that doesn't attract any attention.”

“You can become a professional clammer,” I said. “I'll teach you the art this afternoon.”

“Good.”

“Or you can be a nurse or a schoolteacher or a cop,” said Karen. “Nobody ever pays any attention to them.”

“There are endless possibilities,” said Debby. “Is this a great country, or what?”

Not a bad kid, for a president's daughter.

When I got to John Skye's farm, I turned in.

“Qué pasa?”
asked Zee.

“I thought I'd invite John and Mattie and the twins to the big clambake. Debby and her sister here can use some company closer to their own age.”

“Oh, good!” exclaimed Debby.

“I also thought some of the Skye gang might want to go clamming with us this afternoon.”

“Good again!” cried Debby.

We pulled into the yard, where, not so long ago, Zee and I had gotten married under a summer sun. We got out of the Jeep as Mattie Skye came out of the house. Seeing Debby and Karen, she pointed toward the barn.

“Jen and Jill are in there, working on some tack,” she said.

Debby and Karen went toward the barn.

“You're all invited to a clambake Sunday,” I said to Mattie. “There'll be some other people there, too.” I told her when.

Debby, Karen, and the Skye twins came out of the
barn. “We've been invited to go clamming,” said one of the twins. “Can we take the Wagoneer?”

Mattie gave a look of appeal to the sky.

“We really do have to go clamming with them,” said the other twin. “Because there are four of us Skyes, and we can't expect J.W. and Zee and Karen and Debby to get clams for all of us, too. We have to go and help out.”

“And we'll need the Wagoneer to do it,” said her sister.

“Well,” said Mattie, with a sigh, “I guess it's all right. John is going to be busy in the library, working on that book of his, and I'm not going anywhere. But you girls have to start saving your money so you can buy a car of your own. You can't expect to use the Jeep every time you feel like.”

“Spoken like a classic mom,” said a daughter, giving her a fast hug. “Where are the keys?”

“You and Debby can ride with us,” said her sister to Karen. “We'll all go to Zee's house first, so you can get your baskets. Then we'll go . . .” She looked at me. “Where?”

“Eel Pond,” I said.

“Excellent!”

As we approached our driveway, I did a good deal of looking here and there, along the highway and in the trees on either side, but saw no Secret Service agents, villains, or any other kind of human beings, not even the normal joggers and bikers. Ditto for the driveway itself. I pulled into the yard and did another fast survey. Nobody was in sight.

I went through the house and out the back door, then followed my thread around through the trees. It was unbroken. I came back into the yard as John Skye's Wagoneer came down the driveway. By the time the Wagoneer had unloaded its passengers, I was underneath
the Land Cruiser, looking for a bug. I looked everywhere I could think of, but found nothing. Karen was searching her car, and I went to help out. Just as I got there, she found it. It looked like the one Joe Begay had found on Zee's Jeep.

Karen ran a hand through her hair. “Just my car and Zee's. Why not yours?”

“Maybe Shadow never got a chance to bug it.”

I thought maybe I should know, but I didn't. Neither did she.

“Strange,” she said. She looked at the bug. “Maybe our people can trace this.”

Maybe they could. I looked at my watch. “Maybe this isn't important anymore, but if we want to go clamming, we've got a low tide to catch.”

She gave a little snort. “The world doesn't stop turning, does it?”

“No.”

“Let's go clamming, then.”

I got into my bathing suit and the pink Papa's Pizza T-shirt that I wear when I go clamming, donned the cap with my shellfishing permit pinned to it, and went out to my shed and dug out four clamming baskets, two metal ones and two made out of plastic milk cartons. All had Styrofoam flotation laced to them, and lines you could use to tie them to yourself so the tide wouldn't carry them off. I got out a clamming fork, a clam rake, and my combination toilet plunger and quahog rake: plunger on one end of the long handle, rake on the other. And I found a half-dozen pairs of rubber gloves.

Some people like to dig clams with a clamming fork or clam rake, and others like to suck them up out of the mud with a toilet plunger and then gather them up with a quahog rake. Zee and I prefer to crawl around on our
hands and knees and dig them up by hand, in sort of a mini-strip-mining operation, wearing rubber gloves to save wear and tear on our fingers.

With all the gear I had collected, along with whatever the twins had brought from home, I figured we had enough stuff to accommodate whatever clamming style our gang would prefer. I tossed everything into the back of the Land Cruiser, added two five-gallon buckets, and when the women and the girls came out of the house in their bathing suits, we were ready to go. Over her suit, Karen wore a loose-fitting shirt. The better to hide her pistol, I suspected. She also carried her huge shoulder bag, which contained who knew what in addition to her radio.

Eel Pond, on the northeastern side of Edgartown, is a rich depository for several kinds of shellfish: quahogs, soft-shell clams, and mussels. It is fished all summer long, but never seems to suffer too much from such use. In fact, its mussels are barely harvested at all, although they are perhaps the sweetest and best-tasting of all the shellfish. Unlike many of our fellow islanders, Zee and I are enthusiastic mussel collectors and eaters.

Today, however, soft-shell clams were our intended prey, so we drove down to the town landing on the pond, unloaded our gear, and walked off to the right, over the slippery mud and through the grass and sea lavender, toward the place where a little island rises out of the water at low tide. We waded across the pond to the neck of land on the far side and came to our favorite shellfishing spot.

Zee and I donned our gloves and went down on our knees. Karen and Debby, new at the job, paired off with the twins, with the clam rake, clamming fork, and plunger.

East, beyond the beach grass on the spit of land beside which we were digging, and south toward the Edgartown lighthouse, Little Beach was filled with August people vacationing with all their might, as well they should, considering the prices they were paying for the privilege. We could hear laughter and voices floating on the wind, and could see the tops of sails outside of the lighthouse, moving in and out of Edgartown Harbor. In the opposite direction, near the landing, where we'd parked our cars, small sail- and powerboats were moored, including two eighteen-foot catboats much like our own
Shirley J.
There were other shellfishers working the shallows on the far side of the little island and enjoying the warm summer sun on their backs.

Eden. Before the birth of Cain.

By mid-August, Eel Pond had been seriously shellfished, and the clams that had been so abundant in June were now harder to find. Which meant that today it would take us maybe two hours, instead of one, to get our mess. No problem, though, since what could we be doing that was more enjoyable than what we were already doing?