Dark Nantucket Noon (14 page)

Homer stared at the two pictures. “Good boy,” he said.

Sergeant Fern flushed with pleasure. “The trouble is, they're on the wrong side of Great Point. The lighthouse is down near the water on the other side, the Atlantic side.”

“That's right. Dick Roper saw them out in the Sound too, while the sky was getting dark.”

“But then it got almost like the middle of the night,” said Sergeant Fern. “What if one of them went across Point Rip in the dark and down the Atlantic side to the lighthouse, and then somebody threw a knife at Mrs. Green, and then the boat turned around and crossed the Rip again into the Sound, where it was when Bird took those pictures? I've been thinking a lot about that.”

“But my God, man,” protested Homer, “that's where the shoal is. Nobody could get across there, could they?”

“Oh, sure,” said Bob Fern. “They do it all the time at high tide. They just rock up and down a little bit, and then they're over. You have to go pretty slow and easy. I've done it. Alden has done it, haven't you, Alden?”

Alden shook his head. “Not me. That plywood bottom of mine, I don't trust it in a place like that.”

“Well, say,” said Homer, beginning to get excited, “that's pretty good. The best thing about it is that they were all looking the other way, staring at Kitty coming along the sand, stark naked the way she was. The boat could have been coming right around behind their—”

“Stark
naked?”

Homer looked at Bob's horrified face and patted him on the shoulder. “No, no, I didn't mean naked. She's a nice girl, after all. I mean, she may be a murderer, but she's genteel and well brought up. Kitty Clark doesn't go around naked, certainly not: Her skirt was blowing up in the wind, that's all, and it seems to have provoked a small sensation up there in the top of the lighthouse.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.”

“Anyway,” said Homer, “the point is, some vessel with a shallow draft might have come around that end of the point unobserved and snuck up on Helen Green. And then at the instant of totality the deed was done. Kitty screamed because of the eclipse. Helen screamed because she was being killed. And the killer just turned around and went back across Point Rip in the dark and appeared on the Sound side again when the sun came out. Of course there's the problem of time. Two-and-a-half minutes of darkness probably wasn't long enough to accomplish all of that. And then there's the weapon. What did this seagoing murderer kill her
with?”

“A harpoon?” suggested Bob Fern brightly.

Homer burst out laughing. Alden shook his head, threw a dish towel at the sink and went outside. “There's my Nantucket boy,” said Homer. “Up speaks the shade of your ancestor the whaling man! Maybe he comes back during every eclipse of the sun, this old harpooner, and stands up in the bow of his boat, and this time he sees the dim shadowy figure of a pretty blond woman, the spitting image of a white whale if ever he saw one, so
whammo!
he lets her have it. Or maybe it was the Ancient Mariner with his crossbow. Or a plaster cupid with a bow and arrow from the sunken ballroom of the
Andrea Doric.
Or the great god Neptune himself with his pitchfork. Oh, come now, Bob—the point is, you're dead right. It could have been something like that. If the thing was done from the water, there had to be some kind of sharp-pointed weapon with a string on one end. Say, maybe that's what the snake was. What Helen saw just before she went up the stairs, when it was almost dark. It might have been a first attempt, and it missed, and she saw the rope trailing away in the sand. But it couldn't have been a harpoon; no. I saw those things in the Whaling Museum. Big things with toggles on them; they'd make a huge hole. Or they'd hang on to the body and drag it into the water. Say, Bob, do you suppose Cresswell's boat could have come across the Rip? He was out there, all right. Everybody saw him. He's that real estate lady's boyfriend—you know, that Mrs. Wilhelmina Magee.”

“Too big. Couldn't have taken that big tub over Point Rip.”

“Well, maybe he had a skin-diver or something. I don't suppose you skin-dive, do you, Bob?”

“No, but plenty of people on the island do.”

“Well, good. That'll keep me busy for a while, tracking them all down. Thanks, Bob. You've been a big help. I'll tell Kitty. She'll be pleased.”

Bob's face lit up. “Tell her … tell her …”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her I liked the rainbow.”

17

“Starbuck!”

“Sir.”

“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky.…”

“ … I think, Sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nan tucket.”

Moby Dick

Jupiter woke early, and lifted his beak from under his wing. Then he waddled out of the barn-red box that was his house and headed down the muddy slope to the swampy place and pecked at the fragile ice that had formed on the water during the night. The sun was up, casting thin horizontal beams of dawnlight on the red wall of his house, turning it to glowing copper, sending slanting rays over his little pond, stroking the ice, melting it almost as quickly as he could break it into delicate transparent fragments. The warm spring sunlight awoke something like a memory in the small round cage of his brain, a dim recollection of a time when he had not poked at the sparse shoots of this same stand of sedge and reed, when he had not been all alone. There had been another, a white and splendid one, a mate, an intimate companion.

Jupiter had been thrusting his long neck under the water to probe for new shoots in the muddy bottom, but now this bright image made him lift his head uneasily, and shake it, and arch his throat, because the vision in his mind was blood-suffused, splattered and stained with red—the red of the blood on her breast, the red of his fury as he had struck at her destroyer, the red of his own pain. And deeper down and farther back in the hollow bones and pinions of his wings he was suddenly aware of a vague wild surging free desire—to rise! To rise as he had risen a thousand times before, with a tumultuous beating of his wings at the water, to throw himself in a heavy heaving thrust at the air with a mute cry choking in his throat, to lift himself from the surface of the pond, the water arching backward from his wingtips in a spray, showering in crystal plumes from his dripping feet—to lift and lift.…

In a burst of longing he made a sudden rush up the sloping ground, his wings flapping frantically, his long neck outthrust. But the effort hurt him in a dozen places, and one wing leaked air where the feathers had been destroyed. He was thrown off balance, and fell back to one side in puzzled despair. Then a familiar tonking sound distracted him. Alice Dove was beating a metal ladle against the side of the pot in which she had mixed his breakfast. She was whistling and crooning at him. “Come here, my beauty. Come to your breakfast. Come, my poor Jupiter. I saw you! I saw what you were trying to do just now! But it's too soon, I tell you. Wait, wait. Someday you will fly. Someday.”

Another long slanting ray of the rising sun shone through the old glass of the high east window in Kitty's bedroom, a lever of light that pried her out of bed. She jumped up and walked out to the privy, her coat on over her nightgown. Reaching for the latch of the privy door, she saw in the raking light something she had not seen before. There was a rough circle scratched on the bleached boards, and the surface of the door was pitted with holes and scars. Someone must have used it for target practice. Maybe Mr. Biddle had thrown knives at it in his spare time. (Oh, she was sick of thinking about knives.) Before going back to the house, Kitty stood on the knoll and looked around at the clear windy morning.

It was like standing above a billowing silver sea of scrub oaks. They were waist high, and the sound of the light breeze in their contorted branches was like the sound of waves rustling along a shore. Behind her Mr. Biddle's house reared up like an awkward wooden ship floating in a valley between foaming hills. A bird was singing quietly, clearly, near to Kitty.
Whiddleda-whiddleda-whiddleda.
She could see its dark shape not far away, its lifted head and open beak. She clapped her hands to make it fly, but instead it dropped out of sight and reappeared farther away on a branch tip, its watery warble distant now and more tentative. A jay flew from one low hill to another, uttering a strident cry. In the direction of the rising sun a hawk banked and turned, hovering, the ends of its primaries fluttering, poising in the breeze that buoyed it above the gray sea. Off to the north the dawnlight glittered on a rooftop.
Sail ho!
Whose house was that? Could it be the Doves'? Of course it was the Doves'. They were her next-door neighbors; she hadn't realized how near they were. She would walk there! Kitty hurried back to the house, pulled on her jeans and a sweater and a down-filled parka. Then she went back to the knoll behind the house and headed across lots, keeping the sunlit roof in sight.

She should have brought a knife or a pair of pruning shears. The opening in the twiggy undergrowth had looked like a path, but before long her way was barred with great arching bull briers heavy as steel cables, thorny, an entanglement of barbed wire. With her gloved hands Kitty lifted them out of the way, one at a time.

There, now the path was clear again. But not for long. The undergrowth began to close in. Soon she was entangled up to her waist in a network of interwoven bushes. How thick they were, these interpenetrating layers, each stiff bough branching, each branch dividing, each division fingering into twigs, each twig separating in thick filaments. Something about the landscape by which she was surrounded caught Kitty's fancy, pricked up her interest in its thorny surface. The silver sea in the dawnlight … She wanted to know the names of things.

But she was not going to get where she wanted to go. Her parka was torn in a dozen places. Reluctantly she turned back, pushing with her padded body, until at last the low trees around Mr. Biddle's house welcomed her back with a stiff swaying of their dense boughs, which blocked the rising sun with netted crisscrossed members almost as profuse and multitudinous as if they were in leaf.

Kitty looked down regretfully at her ruined parka. How did one take a walk on this part of Nantucket Island? Apparently one stuck to the road. Too bad. She went back into the house, swallowed some cold cereal and set off again, striding along her driveway beside the tracks of a deer which had bounded along the road in the same direction during the night.

At the Polpis Road she turned right and hiked along for a half mile or so, then as she reached the Doves' driveway she stopped short, because Alice's car was turning onto the road. Alice pulled over and thrust her dour face out the car window. “Want to come with me?” said Alice. “I'm going around the island, checking on the swan population. Do it every Sunday.”

“Oh, sure,” said Kitty. She climbed in beside Alice and they headed up the road past Kitty's driveway. Before long Alice pulled off and parked the car.

“This is the Quaise salt marsh,” said Alice. “There's a pair in here. Come on. There's an old road. You'll probably get your feet wet.”

“What did you say happened to Jupiter?” said Kitty. “You said somebody shot him? Why would anybody do that?”

Alice was silent, marching along the dirt road beside Kitty. Then suddenly she threw the door of her face wide open. “It was here on this road, right here. Someone came along here too fast in an open car and ran over his mate. And then Jupiter rushed out. You should see how splendid they are, the males, with their great wings threatening and their long necks stretched forward, hissing with their open beaks! But then instead of driving away, the fool picked up a gun and shot at him, point-blank. I saw it. I was over there, sitting beside those trees.”

“Who was it?” said Kitty. “Who shot him?”