Dark Nantucket Noon (19 page)

“We started to go around the island, didn't we, Harper?” said Mrs. Magee sharply. “Going west around Tuckernuck.”

“Yeah, but we changed our minds, remember?” said Cresswell. “When Spike began to throw up over the side.” Mrs. Magee made a face, and Cresswell turned to Homer. “And just between you and me, friend, I was in no condition to handle shoal waters, so we turned around and headed north. Sure, we were off Great Point part of the time. A good ways out, naturally. We were having a little party, kinda horsing around. I didn't want to take any chances running into Great Point Rip.”

“Did you see any activity at the lighthouse while you were cruising? Could you see anything going on there on Great Point?”

“Well, we were pretty busy,” said Mrs. Magee firmly. “I mean, we were looking up at the eclipse, weren't we, Harper? Of course we were down in the cabin most of the time, until the sky got really dark the way it did, and then we went up on deck just long enough to see that part of it for a couple of minutes, and then we went down again to have the rest of our lunch.”

Cresswell poked Homer, his shining face jovial. “Some of 'em were too sozzled to even get up on deck. Didn't even know what was going on.”

“Harper, you're exaggerating,” Mrs. Magee frowned. “I assure you, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Cresswell is not in the habit of presiding at drunken brawls in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” Mrs. Magee had a light quick habit of speech, and her gestures were rapid to match. She snapped open a cigarette case and lit a cigarette in a series of efficient motions.

“Of course, he isn't,” said Homer soothingly. “Tell me, Mr. Cresswell, that's a forty-five-footer, isn't it, that Big Bertha of yours? Must be a hell of a lot of fun, cruising around in a big sport-fisherman like that. Do you actually do much in the way of fishing?”

“Oh, sure.” Cresswell's face sobered somewhat and he talked with a certain authority about his apparatus and the kinds and sizes of the fish he had reeled in off the island of Nantucket. “Of course in Florida I used to catch just about everything. You name it.”

“Ever do any diving? Spearfishing? That kind of thing?”

“Oh, heck, no. Me? Can't even swim. But Min, here—to look at her you wouldn't think it, but she dives. She's got a form-fitting rubber outfit that's really something.” Cresswell made a shape in the air and guffawed.

“But of course nobody was in the water at that particular party, I'll bet,” mused Homer gaily, “unless somebody was having such a good time he jumped in with all his clothes on.”

“Oh, good heavens, no,” said Mrs. Magee.

“Change the subject,” said Homer. “I'd like to talk about the last Nantucket Town Meeting. I understand you are unhappy about the vote on the new bylaw, Mrs. Magee. The paper said this morning that you and Mr. Holworthy are making an appeal to the superior court.”

“That is correct.” Mrs. Magee reached forward and knocked the ash off her cigarette. “It isn't American. Free enterprise is supposed to be the way of life in this country, and some of us who have faith in the democratic system have sunk our hard-earned money into our belief in this way of life, and now we're supposed to accept the loss of our investment as if it were in the cause of conservation, and it's not.” She flicked ash. “It's power. Those people wanted to take power into their own hands.”

“Who? What people?”

“Oh, that woman, Helen Green. I mean, I'm sorry she's dead, but … And Alice Dove. That whole fucking Nantucket Protection Society.” Mrs. Magee had come to life. Her artificial gentility had disappeared. Her eyes were the frozen blue of polar ice. She raced on, talking fast. Homer listened with open mouth. Maybe she had read a chapter or two of
Moby Dick
after all.

She stopped and jammed out her cigarette.

“Attagirl, Min,” said Harper J. Cresswell.

Out of doors, Captain Ahab lifted his narrow jaw and howled.

23

“Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind.”

Moby Dick

Bob Fern was leaning over Jupiter's fence when Homer drove up to the house after his interview with Mrs. Magee.

“He's looking a little better,” said Bob. “Those wounds on his breast are healing up nicely.”

“Do you think he'll ever fly again?” said Homer.

“Can't tell until we see if his feathers grow in again after he molts. If all those primaries come back, I don't see why he shouldn't fly. But if they don't, well, that won't be so good.” Bob looked up from the scarred white shape of the great bird in the pen and turned to Homer. “I'm afraid I've got a little piece of bad news,” he said.

“Just a little piece? Well, come on in and let's have it. Hold on there, you pooches. You're not supposed to come in till your mammy comes home from the bank.”

Homer held the door slightly ajar, shoving at muzzles and paws, making room for Bob Fern. Bob squeezed inside the house, took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and put it down on the table next to a bird's nest, a bag of thistle seed, the marble paperweight with Alice's and Alden's initials on it, a jar containing regurgitated mouse bones from an owl's stomach, and Alice's field glasses. “It's a poem,” said Bob.

“Oh?” Homer took a look at the scrap of paper. “Oh, that,” he said.
“
‘Joseph's Coat.' We know all about that. It's that ballad of Kitty's. They clipped that from her apartment.”

“Not the one I copied, they didn't. A lady brought it in. A Mrs. Wilkinson. Rich old lady, lives in ‘Sconset. She brought it to Chief Pike after she read about the case in the paper. Said she thought it might mean something.”

“Mrs. Wilkinson? Where have I heard of Mrs. Wilkinson before? Oh, I know. The Property Owners Rights Association. They're going to have their first meeting at her house. Where in God's name did Mrs. Wilkinson get hold of the damned thing? Not that it matters. The district attorney already has Kitty's own copy.”

“But the one I saw is Joe Green's.”

“What?” Homer stared at Bob Fern. “Kitty never gave one to Joe Green.”

“Well, he had it. Anyway, this woman
says
he did, because he came to her house and asked for it back. The day of the eclipse. He told her he had lost a piece of paper on the beach the night before. She found it, all right, but instead of giving it back to him she brought it to us.”

“So that's what he lost. He told me he lost a piece of paper. It means he knew—he knew how Kitty still felt about him. Maybe that was why he couldn't sleep. He was walking around with it. He was restless with it.” Homer read the poem again. It took him a moment to feel his way through Bob Fern's rounded penmanship to the grim images of Kitty's language.

Drag the hem of Joseph's coat
Through the bloody cloven throat.
Dead, the sacrificial goat,
Kneeling in the rain.
Up speaks the goat by some black art,
“Brothers, take my beating heart
To Joseph's house, to him impart
My love's dark talisman,
Its utterance of sorrow,
Its bleeding message plain:
‘Put on your coat again,
Your bloody coat again.'”

Homer remembered what Kitty had said about it.
I was feeling maudlin that day. I stood out in the rain in the parking lot behind my apartment house and bawled, with the rain running down my face and my hair all wet. Then I came in and wrote this stupid thing, and then of course I felt better, with all that masochism out of my system. It was supposed to be something like one of those old bloodthirsty ballads.…

Bob Fern was reading the poem over again too, trying to come to terms once more with the obscurities and complexities and depths and heights and passions and intensities of the strange girl with whom he had fallen so hopelessly in love. “You see what it looks like,” he said. “It looks like the two of them were in some kind of communication
before
Mrs. Green was killed. Over there in Barnstable they'll think there was some kind of plot between Miss Clark and Mr. Green. What do
you
think it means, Mr. Kelly? All that blood in there!”

“Well, goddamnit, any fool can see that the sacrificial goat is Kitty, goddamnit, and the damn-fool coat is her feeling for him, and the blood is—Do I have to spell it out? Good God. The blood is her suffering, or pain, or something, don't you see? Excuse me, Fern.”

“But the trouble is, it looks like the bloody throat could be Helen Green, and the bloody coat is, well, maybe it's Miss Clark, and when it says here, Tut on your coat again,' it means, Come back to me even though I cover myself with Helen's blood, you see.”

“Fern,” snarled Homer, “why don't you join Arthur Bird? The two of you should write a book. Make your fortune.
The Poetical Misadventures of R. Fern and A. Bird.
That's a damned lie. Kitty's the bloody throat; she told me so. I should have known you fools on the other side would get the whole thing wrong side up.”

“Well, whatever it means,” said Bob Fern bravely, “what was Joe Green doing with it the night before?”

“Damned if I know,” said Homer gloomily.

“Are you going to show it to Kitty—I mean, Miss Clark?”

“No. And for God's sake call her Kitty. She won't eat you, you know, Bob, even if she is a knife murderess.”

“She isn't! How can you say that? She's too good! She's too fine!” Bob Fern's breath was coming fast. He was glaring at Homer, his color coming and going. “I
know
she didn't do it!”

Homer smiled and patted Bob's glowing cheek. “Good. That makes two of us.”

Bob turned away and stared at the mouse bones in the jar. “There's another funny thing. Helen Green was all over the place that Saturday morning. She was seen at the Maria Mitchell Observatory, and Altar Rock, and the Old Mill.”

“She
was?
No kidding! What in Christ's name was she up to?”

“Nobody knows. She apparently just drove up to all those places and walked around for a minute or two and then drove away without talking to anybody. They were all places where people were getting ready to watch the eclipse.”

“So they were. I was at Altar Rock myself later on. What the hell do you suppose she was doing?”

“I don't know.” Bob turned around again, his expression fierce.

“Homer, I don't know how much longer I can stick it out. Chief Pike gave me a talking-to this morning. Said I mustn't let my … feelings get in the way of my duty to my badge. But right now I feel like … just ripping that badge off and throwing it in Nantucket Sound!”

“Now, Bob, you're letting that bloodcurdling poetry of Kitty's carry you away. Maybe you ought to forget about helping Kitty, and just concentrate on being a model Nantucket police officer.”

“No, sir,” said Bob Fern, his jaw hardening, his shoulders stiffening. “I've made a vow, a secret vow—secret until now!—to do everything in my power to prove to the world the innocence of Katharine Clark.”

“Good boy,” said Homer. “That's the ticket.” He watched Bob stalk out of the house and depart in his car with stern steadfast backings and staunch forward rushings, resolution and devotion in every jounce and bounce of his old Chevrolet as it disappeared down the rutted drive. “I'll bet he signed it in blood,” decided Homer. “I'll bet he signed that vow in blood from his own big goofy thumb.”

24

Evil and good, they braided play Into one cord.…

MELVILLE,
Clarel

Homer climbed into his car and drove to Kitty's, chewing over in his mind the tasty bits of news Fern had offered up on the sacrificial plate of his tin policeman's badge. There was something deliciously tantalizing in the thought of the restless rovings of the two Greens, man and wife, during the twenty-four hours before Helen's death. There was Joe, on the one hand, wandering around the island all night long with Kitty's poem in his hand. And there was Helen, on the other, rushing from place to place the next morning, looking for something. Searching all over, trying to find it. Something or somebody. But what? Or whom? Joe had lost that piece of paper—could Helen have been looking for that? But why would she look for it in those three places? Joe hadn't been anywhere near any of them. Or had he?

Homer found Kitty poking around the sloping ground in front of her house with a muddy book in her hand. Her knees and face were muddy. “Is this blueberry?” she said. “This thing here? Maybe it's broom crowberry. I wish I weren't so ignorant. I hate to keep bothering Alice.”

“Why don't you ask Bob Fern?” said Homer. “He knows all that stuff. Besides, the poor fool is in love with you.”

Kitty put out her hand to catch a raindrop. “There, I knew it would begin soon.” She strode into the house in front of Homer, her head down. “I wish he wouldn't get himself in trouble on my account. I don't dare look at him. I feel like a basilisk. You know, that dragon that kills with one glance of its, horrible gruesome eye.”

“A basilisk.” Homer laughed. “Well, thank heaven I'm safe. To me you're just a client who happens to have horrible gruesome eyes. Strictly business arrangement. Listen, basilisk, I met Mrs. Magee this morning.”

“No! What was she like?”

“Oh, she was all right. You just have to kind of wrench yourself around and see things from her point of view. When she stopped being refined I sort of liked her. Say, what do basilisks eat? Besides the corpses of their victims? Basil, naturally—har har. What have you got in your icebox a fellow could …”

“Well, I'll take a look. Sit down.” Kitty took some hard-boiled eggs and a loaf of rye bread out of her refrigerator and began shelling the eggs. “I had a letter from my publisher this morning,” she said solemnly.

“Oh?”