Dark Nantucket Noon (4 page)

Kitty thought about it soberly. Then she leaned back against the wall, feeling very tired. “It was a woman's scream. It was her, of course, it was her. It was Mrs. Green. It was near me; quite near, I think.”

“Good.” Homer tested his footing in another fragile place. “What did you mean when you said, ‘The moon did it'?”

“Well—did you see the eclipse?”

“Yes, I saw it.”

“Well, then, I guess you know. Or you should know.” Kitty stopped and bit her lip.

“Oh, come off it. Well—all right, I guess I see what you mean. It was really something, wasn't it?” He reached over and patted her arm. “Now let's talk about the knife. Why do you carry a knife?”

“Self-protection. I'd carry a gun, except that I'm scared of guns. A knife can't go off by mistake.”

“They think it's not like a woman. I mean, you had an oilstone to sharpen it with, and everything.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing, nothing.” Homer waved his hand. “Why was the knife out of its sheath?”

“The snap must have been undone. It falls out. I've cut myself on it sometimes.”

Homer shook his head. “Oh, Katharine Clark.”

“Kitty. You don't believe me.”

“Yes, I believe you, Kitty.”

There was a pause. Homer looked at his shoe. “Let's be sure we know everything they have. What did they take from your bag? Try to remember everything.”

“Well, there was a cotton bandanna and a red wool sweater, both of them soaked with blood, and a small purse with about fifty dollars in it. And a hairbrush. And the newspaper and the map. And an exposed photographic plate for looking at the sun. A pair of woolen stockings. And—the remains of my lunch, a small Thermos. My knife, the oilstone, the sheath of the knife. My airplane ticket. A key ring.”

“Any papers? Identification? Letters?”

“Oh, just the cards I carry around: driver's license, Social Security, a university card so that I can park at B.U., a couple of—”

“That's where you teach? Boston University?”

“Yes. And some credit cards.” Kitty clenched her fists. “I'm afraid there may have been a picture. It was down among the cards. I never took it out and threw it away.”

“Whose picture? Joe's?”

“Yes.” Kitty felt strangled. She stood up and waved her arms. “Look, this is all so silly. I didn't kill the damned woman. I just saw her there after she was dead. When can I go home?”

Homer Kelly looked at her, his face expressionless. Her heart sank. “You'll be out on bail shortly,” he said. “Now, one more thing. Have you any history of mental illness?”

“Mental illness? Oh, of course, I see. They think I'm crazy. No. No, I haven't.”

“You've never been institutionalized for mental illness? Have you seen a psychiatrist? During the last year?”

“No. Not last year nor ever. Except for that jerk this afternoon.”

“Well, all right. I don't know if that's good or bad.” Homer turned his head and bellowed for Sergeant Fern with a huge roar that startled and pleased Kitty. It was a kind of primitive force, that roar. So was the strange violent event that had picked her up so ruthlessly and set her down in this place. Perhaps one primitive force could overcome the other.

Homer stood up. “Look, Kitty Clark, here's what's going to happen. You'll be arraigned, probably Monday. That's a formality. Then you'll be out on bail. I'll see to that. Later on there'll be a probable-cause hearing, and then the grand jury will deliver an indictment, and then we'll have to get ready for a trial before the superior court in May. Except that I'll make them postpone it till September, when the court sits again. So don't worry. I'll be back tomorrow morning. Good-bye.”

He was gone.

“Could I go across the hall?” whispered Kitty, as Sergeant Fern reached in the door for the chair.

“Certainly,” said Sergeant Fern, blushing; picking up the chair. It came apart in his hand and fell with an echoing crash that rattled off the tin walls of the cell. He collected the pieces of chair, hugged them to his chest and stood back to let Kitty out, his blush deepening because she was making noises in her throat and he thought she was laughing at him. But she was having all she could do not to start crying until she had closed the door of the bathroom behind her and turned on the water in the sink full force. Then she sobbed as quietly as she could, leaning up against the wall with her hands over her face. Feeling better at last, she washed her face and emerged from the small room.

Sergeant Fern was waiting for her, his face redder than ever. Had he heard her crying? Kitty followed him across the hall, glancing hungrily at the sky through the window of the door at the end of the corridor. “Oh, wait! Stop, stop,” she said. Something extraordinary was happening. Sergeant Fern looked where she was pointing.

“What is it?” he asked cautiously.

“Don't you see it?” said Kitty. “The sun. It's doing something again. It's a double rainbow. Oh, please, may I look?”

“I don't see anything,” said Sergeant Fern. But he let her stand at the door and look out. He stood beside her and looked too. The sun, as if to make up for having its eye put out, was making itself a twin. Above it in the western sky, beyond the brick building at the rear of the jail, glowed another, fainter sun, and passing through the second sun there was a rainbow, and above the rainbow there was another rainbow.
I'm still here with bells on
, the sun seemed to be saying.

Sergeant Fern smiled. “What do you know about that?” he said, and Kitty went back to her cell feeling comforted.

4

… if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun …

Moby Dick

Joe Green beheld the double bow around the sun from the front porch of a house belonging to Mrs. Donald Wilkinson on the North Bluff at Siasconset. He was still gaping at it when Mrs. Wilkinson opened the door.

“The sun,” he said, gesturing at it.

Mrs. Wilkinson studied her visitor coldly. She did not look at the sun.

Joe pulled himself away from the splendor in the sky. “I've lost something,” he said. “Last night. I wonder if anyone found a piece of paper around here anywhere?”

“Around here? This is private property.”

She was rich, Mrs. Wilkinson. Joe knew her well, although he had never met her before. She was one of a breed of rich arrogant old women whose husbands had retired to Nantucket. He opened his clenched fists with an effort of will. “Yes, I know,” he said. “That is, I thought the footpath was open to the public. I was just walking along the footpath.”

“There's a sign—‘No trespassing.'” Mrs. Wilkinson dragged on her cigarette with thin orange lips. “It's hard to see how you could have missed the no trespassing sign.”

Goddamn the woman. “I'm sorry. It was dark. And I guess I dropped the piece of paper and it blew away. It might be in your garage. I slept for a while in your garage.”

“My toolshed. You went to sleep in my toolshed?”

“Yes. Did anyone find any paper there? A single folded sheet of paper, eight and a half by eleven?”

“No.”

Enraged, polite, Joe turned away. But then by some trick of light from the fading spectacle in the sky, Mrs. Wilkinson suddenly recognized him as Nantucket's famous young novelist, Joseph Green, and she immediately became another woman. Hail, fellow, well met! Wouldn't he come in?

He would not. He was ducking out from under the porch lattice and climbing into his car. Mrs. Wilkinson watched him drive, away, and then she turned slowly and walked to the fireplace in her living room. With a brass fire tongs she probed in the neat pile of kindling and bundled newspapers her maid, Millie, had laid on the hearth. Somewhere in the pile there should be a crumpled piece of paper she had herself found wedged under a clutter of driftwood on the beach that morning. She had picked it up and brought it inside and dropped it on the logs behind the gold fan. Mrs. Wilkinson stooped over the fireplace opening and poked and poked. Ah, there it was. She lifted the tongs, grasped the piece of paper and began to read.

5

Napoleon was a great man, a great soldier, and a great statesman; but he was an off-islander.

NANTUCKET SCHOOLBOY

Next day, Homer Kelly sat down in his accustomed chair in the library of the Whaling Museum on Broad Street and looked over the letter he had started to his wife on Friday—an eon ago, a couple of eons ago now.

Dearest Mary,

By the time you get this I will have beheld the eclipse, which is supposed to begin throwing its shadow over the island tomorrow around noon. I'll write you a flabbergasted letter tomorrow night.

In the meantime I'm spending my days here in the library of the Whaling Museum, where I sit in monkish solitude, looking up the men who sailed with young Melville in 1841 on the whaler
Acushnet.
This is a grand place. After a couple of hours in the company of these seamen's logs the floor of the library begins to feel like a quarterdeck. It tips beneath my feet. The winds of the Horn whistle around my chair. I can hear the creaking of the masts, and there's old Daggoo in the mainmasthead, crying, “There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”

For an abominably lonely and wifeless man, I'm feeling fairly settled in at last. Do you remember those comic maps of the United States with a few little states squeezed in around Texas? Well, a Nantucketer's view of this continent is pretty much like that. I now see North America as a large but rather vague and somewhat hostile island over there across Nantucket Sound somewhere, a place called “America” or “away,” absolutely chock-full of ignorant off-islanders. I only wish I were a Boatwright or a Roper or a Coffin or a Macy or a Folger or a Starbuck—then I wouldn't feel like such an oafish outsider. But of course everybody has been enormously kind to me, especially Mrs. Deerborn here in the library of the museum, and Miss Abernathy at the Atheneum, which is what they call the public library, and of course Alice and Alden Dove, who are renting me a room in their place out on the moors. Alice works part time in the bank, and Alden is a scalloper during this season of the year, but they also tend a bunch of chickens and goats and dogs and a crippled swan and I don't know what-all. Reminds me of your sister's place back home in Concord, sort of a messy busy place, things happening all the time, work going on. You'd like it.

God damn it, I wish you were here right now. Do you really think those British feminists are going to keep you there so long, waving their brollies and stamping their feet? I know, I
know
that marvelous fellowship is supposed to last all summer, but I worry whether or not your life can be sustained that long in the desert wastes of the British Museum.

As for me, I expect I will have exhausted the records here on the island in about a week's time. Then I'll go over to New Bedford and see what I can dig up there, and then I'll go home to Concord and write up my little piece. But when you come home again at last, Mary, darling, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have a holiday on this island. I want to show you around. I want to gesture grandly like an Indian sachem or a First Purchaser or a Proprietor. I want to say, “Lo! see where the boat comes in! Avast! here's where my tire went flat! Behold! a place to buy fried clams!”

Good-bye for now, my sweeting. The library's closing. (It's starting to pour. Maybe we won't see the eclipse after all.)

Your loving husband,
Homer

…
Maybe we won't see the eclipse after all.
Good God, thought Homer, it would have been better for Katharine Clark if the storm had gone right on howling, because then maybe she would never have come to the island. He thrust his letter aside, jerked another sheet of paper out of his briefcase and began again.

Mary, the world has turned upside down, the veil of the temple has been rent in twain, all hell has broken loose. The sky was clear and we saw the eclipse, all right, and it was all you said it would be, spectacular, astounding—but unfortunately it was a lot more than that. The two minutes of darkness turned out to be a period of wicked grace for somebody who used that little interval of blackest midnight in the middle of the day to murder a woman. I've been called in by the poor girl who was found hanging over the body. Remember those verses we liked by someone named Katharine Clark? It's her. The accused, I mean, not the victim. It's a ghastly business. The grieving husband is Joseph Green, who wrote that novel that was all over the place for a while. We didn't read it, I remember, because we were on our honeymoon at the time and indifferent to other people's passions. At any rate, Katharine Clark is supposed to have killed Green's wife because she was in love with Green. Kitty is a downy-cheeked child who reminds me sadly of Melville's Billy Budd, who was strung up on the yardarm for killing somebody in a moment of fury and frustration. Not that I think Kitty killed anybody. I'm positive she didn't. It's her helpless sort of innocence that reminds me of Billy. She's in the jelly of youth, to use a Melvillean expression. And of course unless I can save her she's going to get the yardarm treatment.