Dead in Vineyard Sand (16 page)

I thought of the trail my children had found.

“But that stopped when they got older,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you think perhaps her parents were afraid that their daughter was becoming sexually involved with Gregory?”

He drew himself up. “I never said that. I wouldn't know. I suppose it's possible.”

“You say that Heather came here to play. Did Gregory and Belinda go to her house sometimes?”

Lines appeared in his forehead. “As they grew older they rarely went to the Willet house. Heather usually came here.”

“Why was that?”

“I don't know.”

“Can you guess? Were the Willets too strict? Some parents are. Their households are too controlled for children to enjoy themselves. Was that the case?”

“I don't know.”

“Later, the Willets didn't want their daughter to visit Gregory and Belinda. Had they disliked the Highsmith children from the first?”

“No. For years, the families got along very well. It was only later when they stopped socializing.”

“Then why didn't Gregory and Belinda go visit Heather more often?”

His eyes became emotionless as glass. “Gregory and Belinda usually preferred their own company to that of friends. I think Heather was more interested in them than they were in her.”

“Didn't they have other friends? At school, for instance? They were at the beach party with other kids they knew, after all.”

“Henry and Abigail enjoyed socializing and the children attended school parties and the like. I don't mean to imply that they were hermits.”

“What are you trying to imply?”

“Nothing. Nothing! I'm not implying anything. I'm just upset about everything that's happened.”

Again, he touched his forehead with his kerchief. I said, “The night of the beach party, Heather went off with them and a boy named Biff Collins. Were Gregory and Belinda friendly with Collins?”

“I think the boy is Gregory's friend, but I don't really know him well. Don't you think you should be trying to catch a killer instead of asking all these questions about the children? They've just suffered a terrible tragedy. Their father is dead and their mother may be dying.”

His face was growing red and I wondered if he was feeling chest pains. I put out my hand and he automatically took it. “Thanks for your help,” I said. “If you think of anything else, please call the Chilmark police or the state police.”

“I will.”

I turned, but stopped at the door. “One more thing. You and your wife have been loyal employees of the Highsmiths for years. My impression is that you're almost part of the family, and that in the normal course of things you would enjoy a few more years of work followed by a comfortable retirement. But if Abigail Highsmith should die, what will happen?”

He gave me a miserable look. “I don't know. I suppose it will depend on the lawyers.”

“And the children?”

He stared at me. “They're too young to make decisions about the estate.”

“But in five years Gregory will be twenty-one.”

His eyes were hooded. He nodded and turned back to the workbench, and I went outside. There was more I wanted to ask, but I didn't like the way he was breathing, and I didn't want to cause another stress attack.

I looked past the house, hoping to see Belinda and Gregory and their uncle coming back, but no one was in sight. To the west, through a gap in the trees, I could see part of a meadow and the cupola of a barn about where I thought the Willet place should be. I guessed that the path Heather Willet had taken in better days probably ran through that gap.

I glanced at the house and thought I saw a window curtain fall back into place. Was Wilma hoping that I'd go or hoping that I wouldn't?

I called to Joshua and Diana and they came around the western corner of the garage.

“Hey, Pa! We found a garden and a trail. This is a good place to explore!”

“Get into the truck and I'll show you where the trail leads.”

We got into the Land Cruiser and I drove down to Middle Road, thinking about loyalty. It was a characteristic that most people admired, but one that I had long looked at with a certain skepticism, since Hitler and Attila the Hun had followers as loyal or more loyal than the disciples of the saint of your choice. My stint as a Boston police officer had made it clear that it was a rare criminal who didn't have loyal supporters, and, as many sports critics have maintained, few people are more mindless than loyal sport fans, a typical crowd at a game being a primitive animal with a thousand heads and mouths, but no brain.

That the Shelkrotts were loyal to the Highsmiths was clear, but I wondered whether in this case that was an admirable or a suspect trait. I decided not to decide just yet.

At Middle Road, I turned right and drove to the next set of mailboxes. There I turned right again and approached the Willet house.

The Willet house was a large, white-clapboard Cape with a brick chimney rising from the center of its roof. Behind it was the barn whose cupola I'd seen from the Highsmith place. The gravel driveway widened into a turning circle in front of the barn, and large sliding doors suggested that the building was now being used in part as a garage. There were dusty windows in the barn through which I could faintly see what looked like a small school bus. The walkway leading to the front door of the house was lined with early summer flowers, some of which were beginning to droop for lack of water.

The kitchen door of the house, which was closer to the driveway and barn, was clearly the door of choice for the family, as is often the case in New England, where formal front doors are routinely ignored by most people. I guessed that there had been and still might be a mudroom just inside the kitchen door, since the custom of ignoring the front door has its roots in olden times when family and visitors alike had to tramp through mud to get to the house and didn't want to dirty the parlor or living room with their boots. Thus, the kitchen door and the mudroom. Only formal guests would use the front door, and then only on fine days.

I wasn't formal, so I knocked on the kitchen door. There was no answer and I'd expected none. Still, the mowed lawn and generally well-kept look of the place
suggested that a caretaker had been at work recently, and I hoped he or she might still be around.

I circumnavigated the house and shouted a few hellos, but no one appeared. I considered using my lock picks, but wasn't nosy enough to actually do it. I'd gotten the picks years before at a yard sale given by a woman who was getting rid of her deceased husband's things and who had no idea at all what the picks were. I hadn't enlightened her, but I had wondered if her husband had been more than the simple carpenter he was known to have been.

Normally I kept my picks at home, but today they were in my pocket and would remain there, for the likelihood seemed dim indeed that I might find some hint in the house about why the Willets had broken relations with the Highsmiths or maybe even had planned a murder and carelessly left the plans behind on the living room table. I didn't mind breaking the law, but I preferred to do it for a good reason, and I didn't have one now.

So I didn't explore the house and returned to my truck, where Joshua and Diana were waiting. But then curiosity got the best of me.

I let the kids out and pointed at the meadow on the hill behind the barn.

“If you go up to that field,” I said, “I believe you'll find the trail you saw at the other house. I think the trail runs between the houses. You go explore and tell me if I'm right.”

They thought that was a good idea and ran up the hill while I went to the barn. The big doors were padlocked, but by squinting I could see enough through the cobwebbed windows to note that what I had thought was a school bus was in fact an elderly yellow, short-wheel-base Mitsubishi Pajero, an early-bird entry in the now
wildly popular SUV market. My guess was that it was the Willets' island car; too beat up for mainland use but just fine for Vineyard beaches and back roads and for teaching your daughter and her friends how to drive in your meadow. I understood that reasoning well, since my father had taught me to drive in a neighbor's field. My opinion of the Willets went up a bit.

I turned and took in their view of the Vineyard hills and green pastures and of the distant sea. It was a fine one, but I could not imagine a worse fate than the death of one's child, and I wondered if Heather's drowning would ever allow the Willets to enjoy this beauty again. The Buddha might still be able to smile, but neither I nor the Willets were the Buddha.

I walked up the hill and agreed with my children that the trail clearly led from the Willet meadow to the Highsmith house but vetoed the idea of continuing on to the Highsmiths'.

We got back into the truck and I drove down-island, full of fuzzy impressions and questions. In Edgartown, I took a left on Pease's Point Way, a right onto Morse, and a left onto Fuller Street, where, amid the street's lovely white houses, I came to Manny Fonseca's woodworking shop. Manny's shop was one of my children's favorite dangerous places and I had worked hard to teach them to stay clear of the saws and other woodworking machines and tools.

Manny Fonseca, the Portagee Pistoleer, lived, breathed, dreamed, bought, sold, and fired guns, pistols in particular. He was a crack shot, a member and loud defender of the NRA, and Zee's pistol instructor. He had, in years past, been an equally loud and public critic of the local Wampanoags who lived up in what was then Gay Head but was now the town of Aquinnah, accusing them of being “professional Indians” since
they had made a big effort to be recognized as an official tribe only when there was some money to be made from it. Then, to the amusement of many, including me, Manny had discovered that an ancestral romance legally qualified
him
to be a Wampanoag, and thereafter he had turned his only partially good-humored criticism toward the non-Indian invaders of the nation in general and the island in particular.

Aside from his firearms expertise, Manny was also a first-class finish carpenter who was constantly kept busy by the mansionizers who were energetically buying properties, tearing down whatever buildings were already on the land, and building houses that were bigger and better than any previously known to the island. Manny limited his contracts and charged absurd amounts for his work, in part, I thought, so he would have more time to play with his beloved guns and to coach Zee for her pistol competitions. For Zee, a dedicated opponent of violence, had, with Manny's enthusiastic help, discovered that she was, ironically, a natural with a handgun and that she greatly enjoyed competitive shooting. I had once been a policeman, but Zee could shoot circles around me.

We went into the shop, inhaling the sweet smell of woods and oils, and I repeated my traditional warnings to the kids about dangerous tools and machines.

“We know, Pa. We'll just look.”

I kept an eye on them anyway, as they walked and looked, eager to touch but keeping their hands to themselves.

Manny was at a workbench, fitting together the pieces of a custom bureau. He glanced over his shoulder then turned back to his work, clamping one board to another. When the work satisfied him, he again turned to me and smiled.

“Hi, kids. Hello, J.W. What brings you to my humble Native American shop? Do you have some trinkets you'd like to exchange for my property?”

“Sure, if you're willing to trade.”

“We've smartened up since 1626. No more Manhattans for twenty-four dollars' worth of knickknacks.”

“Too bad. I could resell this place for a lot more than twenty-four bucks. I might even make enough money to live on Nantucket for a week or two.”

“I don't know if you'd get that much, but you might manage a midweek two-day rental in the off-season. Your wife is shooting better and better, by the way. She tell you that I told her she should try out for the Olympic team?”

“No. Did you?”

“Yeah. I got myself a Feinwerkbau a while back, so she can practice for the air pistol competition, and I'm getting a Walther O.P. for the rapid fire. I think she can do real good in either one or both if she sets her mind to it. She is a genuine natural. She's already getting better than me.”

High praise. “I'll talk with her about it,” I said. “It'd be nice to have an Olympic athlete in the family, but it might depend on how much time she has to train. She doesn't like to be away from the hospital too long. Remember how they wanted her to go out to Hollywood? She said thanks but no thanks.”

“I remember,” he said. “Those folks who made that movie here a few years back wanted her to go west so they could make her famous, but she told them she'd rather be a nurse than a movie star, and besides, she had a family to take care of. What brings you downtown, J.W.? Come summer, you usually hang around up there in the woods until after Labor Day.”

I got right to the point. “You used to shoot with the
father of the Willet girl who drowned up at Great Rock. Were you and he friendly or was it just a casual acquaintance?”

He shook his head, then, as people often do, answered a question that hadn't been asked. “Terrible thing, that young girl drowning like that. I haven't seen Ed since just after it happened. Hear that he and Geraldine left the island right afterward. She and the girl were there in the house together, you know, and Ed would come down weekends. I guess they both wanted to get away from the place after the drowning. Don't blame them a bit.”

“Neither do I. How'd you happen to know Willet?”

He leaned against the workbench and thought back. “I met Ed at the Rod and Gun Club pistol range several summers ago. He likes to come down and plink with his twenty-two. Shoots an old Colt Woodsman when he's here on weekends. We hit it off pretty good, and I showed him a couple of things he didn't know. I guess I'm sort of what they call a father figure for him, him being that much younger than me. He's from out in Michigan originally. Used to shoot as a kid and just kept it up. Nice guy. Met Geraldine a few times. Nice woman. Their girl was a wild one, I guess, but Ed didn't complain too much about her. More the doting-father type, if you know what I mean.”