Dark Nantucket Noon (25 page)

But the mother blinked at Kitty and yanked her little boy away and hurried around to the other side of the boat, keeping a blank face aimed at Kitty like a pale defensive shield. Chagrined, Kitty turned away, and bolted for the front door. There she collided full-tilt with someone on his way in.

She fell, and lay for an instant on the floor, her sunglasses wrenched to one side. The man was bending over her, throwing out an involuntary hand to help her. The light from the doorway blurred around the edges of his hair. He said her name,
Kitty.

Violently Kitty jumped to her feet and thrust past him, stumbling away, her long coat flopping and slapping, her arms and legs mere chunks of logs, stumps of wood. The trouble with an island was you couldn't get away. It was too … damned … small.

30

But give me my tot, Matt, before I roll

over;

Jock, let's have your flipper, it's good for

to feel.…

MELVILLE
,
Tom Deadlight

Somebody was driving up the lane to Kitty's house. Was it another bloodsucking tourist? No, it was Homer's purple Chrysler with the crushed front fender. He would probably be hungry. Kitty looked in her refrigerator, went to the front door; and staggered back, gasping, whooping with laughter.

Homer was wearing a colossal wetsuit, complete with goggles and flippers. He lifted his huge frog feet, stumbled over the sill and fell into the rickety stair railing. The newel post collapsed. Kitty had a laughing fit. She couldn't stop. “A toad! A monster toad! Don't touch me, toad! I'll turn into one enormous wart!”

Homer picked himself up and began fumbling with shattered pieces of banister, grumbling. “We come into this world, I tell myself, to create, not to destroy, and the next thing I know I'm lying on another pile of splinters. Ouch. There's one in my thumb.”

“Poor Homer! Let me see.” Kitty squinted at his thumb, took hold of the free end of the splinter and pulled it out. “Homer, don't tell me you drove over here with those flippers on your feet?”

“Of course not. I put them on just now entirely for your benefit. What's more, I almost drowned on your behalf. Somehow I got my breathing apparatus on upside down. They didn't understand how that could happen, they said it was impossible, but I did.”

“Who said it was impossible?”

“The other members of the Nantucket Scuba-Diving Club. You know I'm taking these lessons from Ensign Hawkins and he invited me along to dive with the club. Say, Kitty, how about a little drink for a friend who has suffered untold hardship in the cause of righteousness?”

“A toddy for the monster toad! Come on in the kitchen, toad,” said Kitty. “I'll see what I can do. Pick up your feet!”

Homer lifted his flippers high and flopped after Kitty. “She was there, all right, our Min Wilhelmina Magee, I mean. Funny, she looked like a realtor even under water. I had a feeling she was laying out house lots down there. ‘This lovely property is known as Davy Jones' Locker. Second clam from the corner to the octopus on the rock. Fifty thousand clams.' Ha ha—joke.”

“Homer, you don't really think Mrs. Magee killed Helen Green? I mean, even if she is a scuba diver, I can't see her jumping off that big boat and swimming around Great Point and back again.”

“No, no, not Min Magee. The one I was interested in was a guy by the name of Spike Grap. Spike was on Cresswell's boat. He was supposed to be zonked out the whole time, dead drunk. Speaking of which, where's my—oh, thanks. Big strong fella, charter member of the Scuba-Diving Club. Dead-eye fisherman with that spear gun of his. It's not exactly the kind of device that could have been used on Helen Green, but he was complaining that somebody stole the one he had before. He had to buy a whole new outfit, suit and all. What I was hoping to do today was see him in action. But no sooner had he walked out into the water than I began splashing and howling and gagging and making a fool of myself with my breathing apparatus on wrong and had to be rescued by a couple of guys who were laughing so hard they almost drowned me a second time.”

“Honestly, Homer, I do think you're great. To keep trying this way, I mean”—Kitty's straight face dissolved—“even when you have absolutely no talent whatever—” She was off again, leaning back, gasping.

“That's what I get,” growled Homer, “sacrificing my life, almost. That's what I get when I crawl up to your door seeking the warm hand of sympathy and the balm of human kindness. Laughter. It hurts, that's what it does.”

Kitty struggled with herself and at last subsided. She sat down primly and tried to focus her attention upon the subject at hand. “Tell me some more about Spike Grap,” she said. “He sounds interesting to me.”

“Well, about all I know about him so far is that he has a financial interest in Mrs. Magee's business. She has a new corporation now, Magee Enterprises. That woman never stops. She's a walking incarnate gathering together into one person of all the pressures that could destroy this island someday. She reminds me of something Melville said about the devil, that the marplot of Eden is sure to slip in his little card. That's Mrs. Magee all over, slipping in her little card.” Homer shook his head. “Well, anyway, back to Spike Grap. My diving friend in the Coast Guard, Ensign Hawkins—he thinks Spike is the culprit. ‘There's your man,' he says to me in funereal tones.”

“Well, why not?” said Kitty. “He knew all about those spearfishing guns, didn't he? Maybe the spear he claims was stolen from him was the murder weapon and he hid it or buried it or destroyed it somehow.”

“Oh, sure, he's an appealing suspect in a lot of ways. Hawkins was all for buttonholing Spike there and then, with the Nantucket Scuba-Diving Club all standing at attention, saluting, goggles on, fins together. He thinks Spike is sick because he's so fanatic about diving; it's a monomania. He doesn't even have a girl friend; he's probably in love with a fish. Obviously a homicidal maniac, Hawkins says.”

“Well, couldn't he be right?”

“Oh, no, I don't think so. I talked to Spike. He's a monomaniac, all right. All he talks about is fishing. Bluefish, rock bass, blackfish, flounder, codfish. Oh, of course I'll keep after him. I'll see if I can get anybody who was on Cresswell's boat that day to admit Spike wasn't out cold there on the bunk in plain sight whenever anybody went to the john, snoring on his stomach in his red-white-and-blue-striped blazer. I suppose they could all be lying. And then there's the problem of how to make the dratted spear go straight in air. I haven't figured that one out yet. Hello, what's that?”

Kitty looked out the window and wrinkled her nose. “It's just rubberneckers. They usually turn around and drive right out again. Oh, no, they're stopping. Hide, quick! In a minute they'll be peeking in the window.”

“What?”
Homer took one look out the window at the eager family pouring out of the car—mama, papa, sister, brother, Auntie Mae and Uncle Frank—and leaped to his feet.
“Oh, no, they won't,”
he thundered, hurling himself out the door in his monster toad suit, pulling his mask down over his face, taking tremendous leaps in his frog feet, hollering, snatching up an eight-foot fence rail. In a moment he came lumbering back, his chest heaving.

“They'll sue you,” laughed Kitty.

“Let 'em.” Homer sat down, then reared up once again at the unmistakable sound of another approaching car.

“Stop!” shouted Kitty. “Homer, wait! I think it's—Homer! Stop! It's Sergeant Fern!”

But Homer was already lunging at the car with his fence rail. And Bob Fern was leaping out of the driver's seat with gun in hand, his jaw clenched, his strong heart thudding in his breast, prepared to rescue Kitty at any cost from the monstrous frog that had her in its power.

“Stop, stop,”
screamed Kitty.

Homer and Bob Fern stared at each other, then Homer turned away, breathing hard, and hurled the fence rail at the ground.

Sergeant Fern's chest was also rising and falling. However, he put his gun away with dignity, while Kitty, sobbing with laughter, leaned limply against the wall.

“I'll go away if I'm not wanted,” said Bob Fern.

Homer turned around and embraced him and clapped him on the back, and apologized and patted his cheek and invited him to come in the house. Kitty apologized too, and explained that Homer was just sticking up for her rights: he had thought Bob was a Peeping Tom like the others.

“What others?” asked Bob Fern.

“No, no, Bob, there's a good boy,” said Homer soothingly. “Come on in and tell us what you've got on your mind.”

Bob was wearing his Sunday suit again. “I couldn't find you at the Doves' house just now, Mr. Kelly, so I thought I'd see if you were over here.”

“Quick thinking, Bob,” said Homer. “Come on in. And call me Homer.”

“You see, I've just turned in my badge.”

“Oh, say, Bob, I'm sorry.”

“Well, I did it fast before the chief could fire me. He caught me going through the file. And anyhow,” said Bob, bravely cheerful, “I decided I couldn't serve both God and Mammon at the same time.”

“That's our Bob!” said Homer. “Although, come to think of it, Mammon helps to pay for the groceries. What will you do now? Here, sit down.”

Homer offered Bob the backless chair, but Bob wouldn't sit while a lady was standing. He leaned awkwardly against the mantelpiece instead, and Kitty politely sat down on the chair, suddenly deciding it was what a lady should do at a time like that.

“I live pretty cheap anyway,” said Bob. “I've got my scalloping money put away. Something will turn up.” He was keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Homer, but the brave show was for Kitty.

She felt it and tried to say something kind. “Bob, I want to thank you for helping us. I'm terribly sorry it's made all this trouble for you.” Oh, if only she hadn't laughed.

Bob looked at her courageously. “Nothing is any trouble.” Kitty modestly dropped her basilisk eyes, but Bob was carried away. “It just means I'll have more time to work for you,” he said, and with an enthusiastic sweep of his arm he knocked some of Kitty's shells off the mantel. They fell with a dismal clatter to the floor. “Oh, gosh, I'm sorry,” said Bob, getting down on his knees to pick everything up. “Gee, I'm afraid some of these scallop shells are broken. Forgive me, Kitty. I'll get you some more. I'll go out this afternoon and get you some more, Kitty.”

“Oh, no, no, Bob, don't be silly,” said Kitty. She bent down and picked up the twisted core of the broken whelk. It was cold to the touch. She held it in her hands and let it suck the warmth out of her fingers and absorb into itself her good humor, the good spirits of the morning.

31

The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?

Moby Dick

They all went to Homer's house for lunch. “I'll cook,” said Homer, as Alice Dove looked up severely at the three of them from inside the chicken-wire enclosure of Jupiter's pen.

Alice had just come home from her morning in the Pacific National Bank, and she was still wearing her respectable bank teller's dress. “Oh, no, you won't, Homer Kelly,” she said. “The last time you used my pots and pans you burnt a hole in one.”

“Don't worry, Alice,” said Kitty. “I brought some bread and cheese from my house. We're all set. Homer just wanted to come home and take his rubber suit off.”

“And I've got some plums and peaches here,” said Bob Fern, beaming at Alice, brandishing a paper bag. “Say, Alice, Jupiter looks pretty good today.”

Alice's face softened. “Oh, do you think so? I wish you'd take a look at that wing of his and see if you think his new primaries are coming in.”

Obligingly Bob unfastened the roll of chicken wire Alice used for a gate and knelt down on the hard trampled ground beside the big white bird, holding him easily with one arm, spreading out his wounded wing with the other. The gap in Jupiter's feathers was downy at the edges. “Well, something's coming in. Let's hope some of those feathers are going to be big strong ones.” Bob let go of Jupiter and stood up to watch him waddle after the kernels of cracked corn Alice had thrown down.

“I'd love to see him fly,” said Kitty.

“Maybe he'll dismember his dimemberer,” said Homer darkly, “the way Ahab wanted to do.”

They went inside. But at the door Alice stopped. “There they are again,” she said. She was looking down her driveway. Bob and Kitty and Homer looked too. They saw a man with a tripod over his shoulder walking along the road, trailed by another man carrying a long ruled stick and a shovel.