Dark Nantucket Noon (7 page)

“A difference! Christ! We had it all set. The whole deal was set, all the signatures on the dotted line. One hundred acres of nice land over near Madaket. A million dollars it was worth. We were going to build really high-class hundred-thousand-dollar homes. And then that Nantucket Protection Society and that whole self-righteous bunch of people, they had to come along and put the kibosh on the whole thing. Got up a petition for the new bylaw, squeaked through Town Meeting with it. Left us holding the bag. There was Holworthy, the owner, out of his million. He was hopping mad. From now on all that hundred acres of his is good for is a place for the fucking birds. Excuse me. He can't build a doghouse on it. Oh, he could sell it to the town for part of their conservation district, but a fat lot of good that'll do him. They'd never pay what we were going to pay. No, his best bet is to sit tight and keep working to get the zoning back the way it was before. Outfox that woman Helen Green and her fucking Nantucket Protection Society. Excuse me.”

Kitty turned color. She asked a bold question. “Helen Green? Did you know she was dead?”

“Dead?”
Mr. Flakeley nearly went off the road. “Mrs. Green? Dead? Christ! No. I've been away. What happened?”

“They think—they think she was killed.”

“Killed?
You mean
murdered?
My God. Mrs. Green, dead! She was a beautiful young woman! … Here, this is the turnoff. Jesus, some people are so damn thoughtless, don't even keep their goddamn bushes cut back so a car can get through without getting scraped all to hell.…”

“I'll take it,” said Kitty, the moment the house came in sight. It was a shambling gray saltbox, swaybacked along the ridgepole, leaning a little outward on all sides, disintegrating into the tall golden grass around it. A bittersweet vine was strangling the downspouts and there were lilac suckers sprouting out of the foundation. The privy stood high and conspicuous on a little knoll.

“Well,” said Mr. Flakeley, smiling, cheering up at once. “Day goostibus, that's all I have to say. Each to his own poison.”

8

The Good Man pouring from his pitcher

clear,

But brims the poisoned well.

MELVILLE
, translation of a
twelfth-century poem

Dear Mr. Green,

I am Katharine Clark's attorney. I am convinced of her innocence. I feel sure you would not like to see her convicted for a crime she did not do. I can understand why you might not wish to talk to me, but I hope, in the interest of discovering the truth about your wife's death, that you will permit me to see you for an hour or so. I can be reached at Alden Dove's house.

Homer Kelly

Homer read his letter over, cursed himself for an egocentric bastard because every sentence began with “I,” stuffed the letter back in its envelope and dropped it in the mailbox. Then he crossed the cobblestoned street in the direction of the Pacific National Bank.

He was thinking of his sailors again, the men who had shipped with Melville. The ones who came back to Nantucket from the ship
Acushnet
might have brought their shares of her profits to the Pacific National Bank, their three-hundredth lay, perchance, like Ishmael's on the
Pequod.
And the backers of those voyages would have had dealings with this bank too, at the rate of so much gain for a barrel of sperm oil or seal oil or a firkin of ambergris rumbling over these very cobblestones on a horse-drawn dray—or so much loss for drowned barrels, drowned seamen, at the bottom of the Strait of Magellan.

Homer climbed the seven granite steps to the classical portico, right on time for his appointment with the bank's cashier Richard Roper. He had to step aside for some lady depositors who were coming out the door, because the Pacific National Bank was still very much in business, conducting the transactions of the resort trade, carrying the accounts of the shops and services that waited upon the tourists, handling the mortgages of the residents and the loans and deposits of the clammers and scallopers who made a living out of local waters, and of course cashing the traveler's checks of the tourists who flooded in and out in the summertime.

Inside the bank he stood for a minute looking up at the handsome Greek Revival proportions of the lofty room and at the murals on the wall and the old scales for weighing gold, and then he looked around for his landlady, Alice Dove.

Alice had her eye on him already. She was standing behind one of the tellers' windows, frowning at him. But that was just Alice's way. Homer walked up to her window and shook the bars playfully. “Good morning, Alice, dear,” he said, his genial bass voice echoing around the bank. “How's the old Federal Reserve System this morning? Fattening on the widow's mite just as usual? Could I see Mr. Roper?”

“Ssshhh,” said Alice calmly. She walked around to the tellers' barred door, and the custodian let him in. Then she tapped on another door, stuck her head in, pronounced Homer's name, stood back to let him go by, and pulled the door shut behind him.

Richard Roper had his hand out. He was walking around his desk. He had a ruddy youthful face, a high shining bald forehead, thinning blond hair, a cheery blue eye. He started off the interview with cordial courtesy by talking about the ship's portrait on the wall between the high windows. It was a happy childish painting, with a fair breeze blowing the chubby sails, whipping the blue water into choppy little waves.

“My great-great-grandfather owned that ship with his brother, and their cousin was the captain. They were all Ropers. She made four voyages from Nantucket, and she was gone three, four, five years at a time, bringing back thousands of barrels of sperm oil from the Pacific, and thousands of pounds of whalebone from the baleen whale. These pieces of scrimshaw in the glass case over here were made aboard her by one of the sailors. The one on the left is a whale's tooth, of course, and if you look closely, Mr. Kelly, you'll see the picture engraved on it, with the ship in the background behind the whaleboat. Can you read what it says on the side?”

Homer craned his head sideways. “ ‘A dead whale or a stove boat.' Yes, of course, that's in
Moby Dick
, a whaling man's profession of faith, like the Apostles' Creed.”

Richard Roper was bringing up a chair. The formalities were over. “You're representing Miss Clark, I understand,” he said. He sat down on the other side of his desk, behind a pile of
Wall Street Journals.

“Yes. Would you mind repeating for me what you told Chief Pike last week?”

“Certainly. Glad to oblige. Where shall I start?”

“Well, first of all,” said Homer, “you might tell me anything you know about Helen Green's physical condition. I saw the autopsy report yesterday. It mentioned some old black-and-blue marks on her arms and legs. Do you know anything about that? According to her husband's statement she had fallen downstairs earlier in the week. Is that accurate?”

Richard Roper smiled. “Well, if he said so, I presume that's what happened. If you're thinking he beat her, or something absurd like that, you're off on the wrong track. As for her health, I would say she was a woman in splendid physical condition. I admit I have an eye for feminine pulchritude, and Helen Green was one of the most purely beautiful women I've ever encountered. Classic features, golden hair. A real goddess. You know, tall and strong, like whooseywhatsis. Diana, the goddess of the hunt.”

Homer felt a pang on behalf of Kitty Clark's dark hair and brooding face, which had been set aside for the sake of this goddess. “I only saw the corpse,” he mumbled crudely. “Tell me, Mr. Roper, why did you and your wife decide to go to Great Point?”

“Well, Letty told me the Greens were planning to see the eclipse from Great Point. She writes for the paper, you see, and she was the one who wrote that story about what people were planning to do that day. So I suggested we go out there too, and then we could see the eclipse from the top of the lighthouse. Seemed a good place. The Chief Officer of the Nantucket Coast Guard is an old buddy of mine and I knew we could get the key from him. He and I often go out there in my old Chris-Craft to do a little fishing off Great Point Rip. Blues, mostly. Best fishing around the island. Helen knew that. She used to go out there too, and we'd see her surf casting plenty of times. She used to take that jeep all over the place. Of course she wasn't like some of those fools who tear up the grass that holds the dunes in place and drive over the nests of the terns in June. She was a real sportswoman, all right. Powerful golf and tennis player too. Anyway, I called her up and we arranged to go out to Great Point as a foursome to see the eclipse.”

“Then there were the five of you out there, right? You and your wife, and Joe and Helen Green, and Arthur Bird?”

“That's right. Bird was already there when we got to the lighthouse. He's sort of a friend of Joe's. Although I gather Joe didn't much like the way he hung around all the time. Kind of a pain in the neck—you could see that.”

“What time did you leave home to go out to Great Point?”

“At noon. We set off in Joe's jeep from his house at twelve o'clock. We had arranged to leave half an hour earlier but Helen was late. She'd been shopping. But we still had plenty of time to get there before the interesting part of the eclipse began. Must have been about twelve-thirty when we got to the lighthouse. The partial phase of the eclipse was just beginning. We all sat down on the west side of the lighthouse, eating our picnic lunch. And then a few minutes before totality we picked up our stuff and went upstairs. Helen saw a snake. I forgot about that. It was kind of a funny thing. She'd forgotten her bag, so after starting up the stairs she ran back down to get it, and when she started up again after us she said she'd seen a snake slithering away in the sand. Must have been that weird sort of darkness that had us all seeing things. Well, you know what it was like.”

“A snake? In the sand?”

“Probably just some optical effect. Maybe those interference bands they talked about, just before totality.”

Homer pondered, looking out the window at the Methodist Church across the street. “According to your statements, you all stayed together at the top of the lighthouse, shoulder to shoulder, during the eclipse, and none of you except Helen went down until the whole thing was over. How could you be sure everyone was under your eye the whole time?”

“Well, there wasn't much room to stand in up there. We were all jammed together. And besides it wasn't even dark in there during totality, because that blasted light went on behind us. There we were all flooded with light, trying to squint out the window at the eclipse. The whole thing was a big flop.” Dick Roper laughed and slapped the top of his desk. “Somebody should have thought of that, but none of us did.”

“You saw Miss Clark approaching the lighthouse? But you saw no one else, either coming or going?”

“No,
I
didn't see anybody else. As soon as we got up there and looked out, we saw her coming, and then of course we all kept staring at her. It was just before totality. There was a kind of—oh—a weird sort of feeling in the air. You know what I mean, don't you? You saw the thing too, didn't you?”

“I did,” said Homer gravely. “I know what you mean.”

“So when this girl came in sight it was—it was—well, ‘magic' is the only word I can think of. It was as if she came up out of the sea, like a mermaid or something. I mean, she was
beautiful.
She looked an awful lot like that picture of Venus on the half shell, you know the one? Half naked, that's the way she looked, with bare legs and bare feet and her skirt blowing off her and soaking wet. It looked like she'd been in the water. I can remember saying ‘Wow,' or something like that. And when she got close to us she suddenly reached up and took off her sunglasses—and there was this glowing face, and she was running toward us, stretching out her arms. I mean, it was all I could do to hold myself back, and I'm an old married man. I tell you, it was like a goddess coming up from the sea.”

“Another goddess,” murmured Homer, feeling oddly satisfied that Kitty was still in the running with Helen Green in the goddess department. “And then Helen went down to meet her?”

“Yes. When the girl took off her sunglasses Arthur Bird recognized her and said her name, and then Helen suddenly started ducking down the trap door. ‘I'm going to bring her up here,' she said, or something like that.”

“Did anyone try to stop Helen from going down? Those stairs are tricky, aren't they? Kind of dangerous?”

“Well, yes, they are. Letty said, ‘Now be careful on those stairs,' or something of the sort. Of course the lights were on down there, because we turned them on when we came up.”

“Did you hear screams from down below when the sun went into total eclipse?”