Dark Nantucket Noon (9 page)

“Did you ever notice any evidence of psychosis in her before?”

“Why, no, and that's why it's so strange. She always seemed quite sane. Sensible! Oh, she got excited about her subject, but it was well within the range of …” Arthur shook his head philosophically. “Still waters,” he said. “Still waters run deepest of all.”

“And garrulous ones run shallowest,” growled Homer.

“Pardon me?”

“Tell me what you think she meant when she said, ‘The moon did it.'”

Arthur brightened. He jumped up. “That's what's so absolutely fascinating,” he said. “That's why I feel I can be of some use to the police in this case. This is Miss Clark's book of verse. Here, let me show you. This poem is about the moon. But the moon is the poet
herself
, do you see? Listen.

I shine upon the house
in which she sleeps.
I send one ray of light
within the window of her room.
I the moon go where I will.
Poor Sappho lies alone.

The moon is the
poet
, do you see? Kitty Clark
is
the moon!”

“So you think when she said, ‘The moon did it,' she was confessing to the murder?”

“Of course!”

Homer leaned over and looked at the poem. Then he smiled at Arthur and tapped the poem with his finger. “It's nice. Obviously inspired by that famous poem attributed to Sappho.”

Arthur's jaw dropped. “Sappho? Oh, of course. You know, something has just occurred to me. Sappho was a Lesbian, wasn't she? You don't suppose
Miss Clark
…?”

“Oh, for
Christ
's sake.”

10

The Town hath granted unto John Savidge two Acres of land to build upon and Commanage for three Cowes twenty sheep and one horse.…

Records of the Town of Nantucket,
1672

Homer stood on the sidewalk on India Street, looking at his tourist map of the town. The Ropers' house was on Fair Street. Where the hell was that? Oh, there it was, on the other side of Main. Wistfully Homer resigned himself to an empty stomach, folded up the map, stuck it in his pocket and set off, stalking down Centre Street, swinging around the Pacific National Bank to the intersection with Fair Street, walking more slowly along Fair Street, looking for the Ropers' house.

They were all much alike, these simple wooden dwellings, close to the street on high foundations. It was impossible to tell new ones from old ones. According to the map, this part of town was in the Historic District, which meant that any new building would have to conform to certain standards: it would have to look like the old ones, with clapboard siding or white cedar shingles, and a gable roof of a certain pitch, and chimneys and foundations of select common brick, and so on and so on. There was a move afoot to spread the Historic District over the entire island. Homer wondered whether he would vote for such a measure or not, if he were a citizen of Nantucket, and on sober reflection, looking left and right, decided that he would. It would mean conformity, academic and controlled, and any architect with a gleam of genius in his eye would have to stay the hell off the island. But so much of the mainland was ugly as sin. Here at least the tortured eye could rest. There was little that was not simple, modest and spare, the gray houses lying pleasantly on the low rolling landscape, or starting up along the street like these, erect as maiden aunts in tall straight chairs.

Here, this was the house. It was one of the old ones, surely, unless someone had artfully manufactured the tilt of the old roof line along with the roof walk and the row of glass panes above the front door. No, it was really old, all right. No one could manufacture the look of those weatherworn boards.

Homer banged on the brass knocker, and in a minute Letty Roper opened the door and invited him in. Letty was constructed according to a set of guidelines too, decided Homer, following her into the living room. Her nose was the right width relative to its height, her eyes were the proper degree of blue, and when she smiled her teeth protruded below her upper lip a distance that might have been ordained by statute, like the width of the shingles on the houses or the space between the pickets in the fences along the street. But something was missing. Homer thought tenderly of the dishevelment he loved in his wife. And Kitty Clark too had a skewed kind of charm.

“Just sit right down,” said Letty, “while I get us some coffee in the kitchen.” She disappeared. Homer sat down carefully on an antique chair beside a big television set and brooded some more. It wasn't so much what Mary Kelly and Kitty Clark had been born with, he decided, as what they had done to themselves. It was what their looking and listening and speaking had done to the delicate muscles around the eyesockets so that by some ephemeral optics light struck the watery film over the eye in a different way, displaying the opposite shore of the brain. In Letty Roper's case only a benevolent nature had so far been at work. (What had Helen Green's face been like? Homer wondered. When he had seen her stretched out on a marble table her features had been cleansed of everything but the pure pallor of death. The radiant beauty everyone spoke of had been dimmed, shadowed, eclipsed by death, by one piercing blow. Whose, whose, if not Kitty Clark's?)

Gloomily Homer slipped down in his fragile chair, telling himself it was just the low level of his blood sugar at the moment that was responsible for his melancholy, and therefore when Letty Roper handed him a cup of coffee with two cookies on the saucer he could have kissed her. He tried not to gobble the cookies too fast, but fortunately Letty was an easy talker like her husband, and she began immediately to talk about Joe Green. Homer munched and gulped.

“That poor man. He's absolutely prostrated. I've never seen him so unreachable, so just
not there.
He won't let any of us come near. It's heartbreaking. I don't know what to do. I was afraid he might not even be eating, so I've been taking some meals over to him, but he just calls out from that little room of his to leave them on the hall table. And the last time I came, he told me not to bring any more. But I'm just afraid he might starve, there all alone, or even
do something to himself.”

Homer swallowed his last piece of cookie and smiled at Letty. She was a sweet wholesome girl, sound and healthy like her husband, but somehow the two of them weren't quite what he would have expected in the close friends of a writer of the stature of Joseph Green. “How long have you known Mr. Green?” he said.

“Oh, just since he married Helen. Of course Dick and I have known Helen Boatwright all our lives.” Letty laughed charmingly. “You know, Dick wanted to marry Helen, but she wouldn't have him, so he married me instead.”

“I understand you write for the newspaper, Mrs. Roper.”

“Oh, yes. I do things for the
Friends Newsletter
and the
Inquirer and Mirror.
I wrote about where people were going to go to see the eclipse—the article that's so important in this case—and I wrote the obituary for Helen Green. And I wrote about you! Marjorie Abernathy in the Atheneum looked you up and told me all about you—how you wrote that Thoreau book with your wife, and how you were a detective, and all about that famous Concord case you solved, and everything. And now here you are, working on another dreadful case! Although I must say, Mr. Kelly, I don't see how your client has a leg to stand on, that Katharine Clark. She was obviously out of her mind. You weren't there. You didn't see. It was really dreadful. The way she kept talking about the moon. Anyway, I'm certainly glad she wasn't in love with
my
husband. When we saw her coming across the sand she was like a vision. I mean, I was surprised when I saw her in court the other day. She wasn't nearly so good-looking.” (Ah, poor Kitty, thought Homer. She had been wearing her somber face that day. To Letty Roper beauty had only one kind of face.)

“Well, as a reporter, could you tell me if you noticed any sort of vessel there offshore while you were at Great Point?”

“Oh, no, I'm sorry,” said Letty, shaking her head. “You'd think the descendant of a whaling family would have inherited a tendency to look out to sea. That's what the roof walk was for, on the top of this house. My great-great-grandmother and her mother and grandmother before her used to go
up scuttle
, as we say in Nantucket, to see if their men were coming home. But I'm afraid I didn't. And on the way back from Great Point I just couldn't take my eyes off Joe. He was ahead of us in the truck. I could see his head through the back window, and I was feeling so
sorry
for him.”

Homer felt dizzy with hunger in spite of the cookies and muddleheaded from listening to Letty. There was something else he had meant to talk about—something about the new zoning bylaw; that was it. He pulled himself together and asked whether or not Helen Green might have made some enemies with her new bylaw.

Letty widened her eyes and shook her head, and the sunlight pouring through the old glass of the window bounced off her shiny hair. “Well, yes, I suppose she did. A lot of people were pretty angry about it. Of course we had decided to vote against it, Dick and I, not because we wanted to make a lot of money from Dick's share of the sheep commons; we just voted against it on principle.”

“Sheep commons,” said Homer. “I read about sheep commons. Tell me about your husband's sheep commons.”

“Oh, I know I really shouldn't call it sheep commons anymore. You see, the original Proprietors wanted to raise sheep, and they set aside large pieces of grazing land to be held in common. So a sheep common was just like a share of stock. Though all it amounted to was the right to graze a certain number of sheep on the common land. And then later on, when people didn't have sheep anymore, some of the land was divided up for farming, and then a sheep common gave you the right to farm a certain piece of land. And then later on the whole thing broke down, and people were able to claim a certain amount of land for themselves in exchange for their sheep commons. Dick inherited about one hundred and fifty acres near Shawkemo.”

“One hundred and fifty acres? I suppose that's pretty valuable land on the island of Nantucket?”

“Oh, yes! We've been told it's worth—well, one or two million dollars!”

“One or two
million?
Holy cow.” Homer stared at Letty. “No wonder you voted against the new bylaw.”

“No, no, you don't understand. You're just like all the rest. Don't you see? We're old Nantucketers. We want to keep the land always, we want it to stay just the way it has always been. We don't want to sell it.”

“But some of the other landowners aren't as idealistic as you are, I gather?”

“No, they aren't, I'm afraid,” said Letty. “They're greedy, that's what they are.”

“Well, after all,” said Homer, waving his hand, wondering how to explain the wicked world to this innocent child, “perhaps they were holding their land for investment, and then their right to realize on the investment was taken away. It's not greedy exactly. It's the good old American way.”

“That's what they said! They kept talking about the sacred rights of private property, and so on! Well, actually, of course, Dick and I voted with them, as I said. We just felt it was wrong to force people to do the right thing. They ought to do it
because
it's right, out of deep moral conviction.” Letty's little round breasts swelled with sanctimonious air. “That's the way we felt. We were willing to spend the rest of our lives persuading other property owners to preserve their land. We had such plans!”

She was charming in her enthusiasm. Homer's cynicism was almost won over. He laughed. “But now you don't need to persuade anybody. They can't do anything with their land anyway now.”

“No. Unless the superior court or the state supreme court or the legislature reverses the bylaw. Helen was afraid that might happen, but she was ready to fight for it all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. But now, without her, I don't know what will happen to it.”

“Aren't there other people to carry on the fight? Was she so indispensable?”

“Well, of course there are plenty of other people in the Nantucket Protection Society who feel strongly about it, just as she did. But nobody,
nobody
, Mr. Kelly, had the kind of
dazzling
effect on people that Helen had. She was
radiant.
There was a sort of glitter about her, like—like the sun up in the sky.”

11

“Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”

MELVILLE,
Billy Budd

Homer laughed when he drove up to Kitty's door. The place was so—well, it was nice. He got out of the car and knocked on her ruined door.

Kitty looked out cautiously, then smiled broadly and let him in. “How do you like it?” she said.