Dark Nantucket Noon (17 page)

“Well, I'm sorry,” said Kitty. On the way to Wauwinet she sat forward on the bucket seat of Homer's rented Scout looking eagerly left and right, and soon she was telling him the names of the trees and bushes along the road. She had been learning from Alice Dove, borrowing books from Alice. “Look at that, Homer. That's broom, Scotch broom. And that gray-green stuff is reindeer moss. It's just like lichen on a tree or a stone wall, only in the field it's just like a little plant. And those wonderful gray trees are tupelo.
Look
at them.”

Homer's good humor began to drain away. The more cheerful Kitty was, the worse he felt. It meant she was relying on him, thinking he had matters under control, and he knew to his sorrow that he was faulty at the core. He looked where she pointed and nodded and made assenting growls.

On the sandy track beyond Wauwinet she became intolerable. She kept exclaiming with delight. She made him stop the truck. She jumped down to take a closer look at the stunted junipers and the low gray leafless vegetation. “This is Coskata,” she said. “The Coskata Woods. There's a pond here somewhere. I don't know what those twisted trees are, do you?”

“I don't know one tree from another,” grumbled Homer.

“But aren't they beautiful?” demanded Kitty.

“Oh, sure. Sort of Japanese, eh?”

“Yes. I suppose the Japanese islands have the same strong winds that stunt and dwarf and shape the trees.” She was pointing back along the way they had come. “I read something last night about this beach. The sea broke through there once, a long time ago. They used to haul their boats across. It was like a shortcut into the harbor from the Atlantic, so they didn't have to go way around to the mouth of the harbor. It's still called the Haulover, that part of the shore.”

Homer's interest picked up. “No kidding—is that so? Well, I wasn't such a damn fool after all. So there
were
two entrances to the harbor, not just one. Could they get across there now? I mean at high tide? Looks like a pretty high bluff all the way around.”

“It is. I've climbed it. No, it's all built up again with a high dune.”

Homer looked back along the shore as he climbed into the truck. “Too bad about the bluff. If there were still a weak place there, it might have been a way to get out of the harbor without being seen.” He started the motor and soon the Scout was whining along in second gear once again, rearing and dipping in the mushy sand.

They emerged from the wooded part of the neck and came out on the Gauls, the sandy strip that divided the open Atlantic from Nantucket Sound. The lighthouse was a small white spire far ahead of them, just as it had appeared to Kitty when she had walked along the beach. They were quiet as they wallowed and bounded along the churning track. In the shadow of the lighthouse Homer parked the truck and they climbed out.

“It's low tide now, isn't it?” said Kitty. “The water's much farther away.” She turned and looked at the lighthouse. Then she made herself walk up to it and touch the wall at the place where Helen's body had lain. The sand beneath the wall exhibited no stain. There was nothing there now but bits of stone and gravel and clumps of beach grass, bending in the wind, the tips tracing curving lines in the loose sand. There were a few chunks of broken asphalt.

Homer poked at the asphalt with his shoe. “There used to be a house here, years ago, Alden says, with a full staff of people. And a lawn, and a golf driving course. But it's all been washed away.”

“Washed away?”

“Storms tear away chunks. The south shore has lost a mile since the last ice age. The shoreline changes all the time. The sand builds up in some places, washes away from others. The whole island will be gone someday.”

Everything was doomed. Gloomily Kitty followed Homer to the scarred door, and they went inside. Then to her surprise she found her interest aroused once again. There was a cast-iron stairway that wound around and around, up and up into the dark tower. No one had told her that it was fragile and delicate-looking like lace. The treads were a fretted network like iron embroidery, like old sewing machines, like the Alhambra, like the crisscrossing dense members of the island trees. Over her head the staircase curved in narrowing spirals like those of the twisting shell in the pocket of her jacket at home, and she thought sentimentally for a moment about her own death, and about convolutions and spiral turnings and twistings that narrowed down at last to some dark hidden inner chamber where one could fold and curl oneself infinitesimally small.

“Pretty,” admitted Homer, “but no fun to climb. You go first. I'll catch you if you slip.”

There was a rope attached to the wall, a kind of railing, but halfway up it skipped a bolt and stretched across the narrow space, getting in the way. Kitty groped with her fingers on the cold stone of the wall and thought about Helen Green hurrying down the stairs alone.

“There now, here's the first landing,” said Homer. “We're almost there. One more short flight to the padlock. The Chief Officer of the Coast Guard loaned me the key.”

Above the second landing there was a metal trap door that slid to the side. Kitty climbed the last ladder and stepped out into the small twelve-sided chamber at the top of the tower. “Oh,” she said. “Wow,” said Homer. Around them lay the sea and the blue sky, and running away from them to the southwest, the sandy strip by which they had come, and the whole broad island. They could see the scalloped line of Coatue, point cusping beyond point, and the cold blue harbor, and the stubby lighthouse at Brant Point. Then they turned and looked northward, and Homer pointed out the clear fan of sand spreading away like a moth's wing under the water, lifting close to the surface here and there where waves broke in little white crests.

“Terrible wrecks they've had around this island,” said Homer. “I've been reading about them. There are shoals everywhere, and they keep shifting and changing. A mariner really has to know what he's doing. They have to keep putting out new maps of the shoal waters all the time.”

They turned to inspect the optical system that rose up in the middle of the chamber. It was a simple device, a narrow pillar surmounted by a hexagon of six little plastic lenses above a small bulb. “Is that what makes the light?” said Kitty. “Why, there's nothing to it.”

“Yes, they've made these things much more efficient now,” said Homer. He put his nose against the window that faced southeast, and peered downward. “Look, you can't even see the truck from up here. Everything near the base of the lighthouse is out of sight.”

Kitty looked down, and remembered something. “What happened to those pictures Arthur took? Did you ever get to see them?”

“Yes, I saw them.” Homer looked uncomfortably at the black-backed gulls, which were wheeling and dropping on the other side of the point, diving for clams in the lagoon. “Well, they were gruesome, as a matter of fact,” he said. “And that reminds me, I forgot to tell you about Fern. Sergeant Bob Fern from the police department has volunteered to help us out. He's the one who showed me the pictures.”

“Sergeant Fern? But he's not supposed to help the defense, is he? I should think that would be—”

“No, he's not. He'll probably lose his job, if they find out. And there's something else I forgot. I was supposed to tell you he liked the rainbow.”

“He did?” Kitty ruminated on this fact soberly.

“Now listen, Kitty Clark,” said Homer, “let's get to work. It still seems so strange to me that you didn't see Helen until she was dead, and yet you heard her scream. What could she have been up to? Let's go through the motions again. I'll try being Helen. Do you have any idea where you were when you took off your sunglasses? That was when Arthur Bird said your name, and so that was when Helen started down. Go back to where you were when you took them off. Then I'll start down.”

She didn't look much like a goddess today, thought Homer, watching a foreshortened Kitty hurry away across the sand. In that fat parka she was a solid little lump with toothpick legs. Now she was turning around and staring up at him with her hands on her hips. He waved at her, and promptly she made a motion as if she were taking off her sunglasses, and then she began loping in the direction of the lighthouse.

Homer started down through the trap door, telling himself to use all deliberate haste. When he got to the bottom he opened the door a crack and peeked out. Kitty was there; she was just turning away. Homer stepped out silently. She was a couple of yards in front of him now, looking down at the sand. He stood still with his eyes on Kitty's back. Now she was looking up and making a dutiful squealing noise, to show that the sun had gone into total eclipse. Homer squealed too, in a horrible falsetto, and collapsed backward, trying to fall more or less naturally, but peering over his shoulder to make, sure he wouldn't knock his head against the stones of the wall. Lying flat on his back, he looked up at Kitty. She was standing in the same place, her head down, counting out loud, patiently working her way through the two-and-a-half minutes of imaginary darkness. Then she lifted her head and moved out of his sight to the right. A moment later she was standing over him.

“Did you hear me open the door just after you turned your back?” he said, getting to his feet, brushing sand off his pants.

“No. Do you think she just walked right out behind me? And then somebody killed her?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she was killed on the other side of the door and then her body was thrown outside. Well, anyway, I've had enough. Let's go. I'll just gasp my way back up and lock that trap door again. Wait a minute.”

They were halfway home before Homer could think of something cheerful to say to the glum girl sitting beside him. “Listen, my friend,” he said, digging her puffy sleeve with his elbow. “You know what we're going to do right now? We're going to find us a nice cozy saloon and get
smashed.
Then we're going to go to some ritzy place like the whatchamacallit Coffin House and eat half a dozen lobsters apiece and drink a couple of gallons of white wine, and then we're going to stagger out into the street roaring and raging, and we're going to
bash
down the door of the Town and County Building, and we're going to
crash
the annual meeting of the Nantucket Protection Society. How about it? We'll
smash
and
bash
and
crash
our way in there and break up the meeting.”

Kitty laughed. “Good,” she said. “And then why don't we make some drunken motions? You make some, I'll second 'em, I'll make some, you second 'em.”

“Sink
the island,” shouted Homer. ‘‘Moved and seconded, island of Nantucket, latitude forty-one degrees north, longitude seventy degrees west of Greenwich.
Sink it! Sink it!
Sink it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday next! Poor Alden Dove, he'll be embarrassed. He's supposed to be giving a talk about scallops.”