Dead in Vineyard Sand (21 page)

“Maybe that was one of the attractions between them. But as alike as she and Henry were, they were different in one respect. Do you know anything about the Mad Hatters?”

“I know about the one in Alice, and I've read that real hatters used to go mad because of the mercury in the solutions they used to make felt hats.”

“This is a different family of Hatters. There's some speculation that maybe some early members of the family actually were in the hat business, but the generations that I know about were all in the literary-academic-scholarship professions. University professors, publishers, deep thinkers, and the like.”

A little door opened in my memory. “I remember now reading that Abigail Highsmith was Abigail Hatter when she met Henry at Harvard.”

“Right you are. Abigail was indeed a Hatter, and she was far from the first in her family to attend The World's Greatest University. Her ancestors had been at Harvard and Radcliffe for generations. They were famous for their brilliance but . . .” He swung at another pebble and bounced it only a few feeble feet. He advanced upon it and swung again, this time driving it into the trees. “Bogie. Drat. Where was I? Oh, yes . . . They were brilliant but they were also mad as March hares. Not all of them, of course, but so many that they became known as the Mad Hatters. If you hired a Hatter, you couldn't be sure whether you were getting a genius or a potential opium addict or duelist or babbling idiot. Hatters could be violent or the fanatic protectors of ticks and toads. Some of them were accused of having sexual relations with their dogs and horses, others attacked their dearest friends with sticks and swords and pistols; some of them went to jail, others went into mental hospitals and never came out.

“Of course, most of them weren't strange in any way but were famous lecturers or produced wonderful publications. Sometimes a whole generation would pass without producing a single Mad Hatter. But then, just when you were beginning to relax, Professor Hatter would run naked across the college green waving a cavalry saber and chasing the dean, or would be found
crouched under a rosebush babbling that the Martians had come to take him away.” John looked at me. “There are several Hatters, most of them apparently very sane, at work as we speak at respectable jobs at major universities and publishing houses and elsewhere. Abigail Highsmith is one of them.”

“Do you think the Hatters' madness has something to do with the shootings?”

“I have no idea,” said John. “But I think it's something you should consider. You've been spending most of your time trying to discover a logical suspect in the case, someone who had a strong reason to kill the Highsmiths. You've also given thought to the possibility that a fanatic of some kind might be responsible, a fanatic golfer, for instance. Well, even a fanatic usually has a reason for his behavior, no matter how bizarre that reason might seem to someone else; but if your killer is a madman, he doesn't need a reason. All he needs is an impulse.” He glanced at me. “The lawyers call it temporary insanity and they can usually find a psychologist who'll testify to it under oath.”

“Whoever is behind these shootings had a purpose,” I said, “and he remembered it long enough to shoot two people a few days apart. It wasn't a momentary impulse.”

John shrugged. “Even madmen sometimes have their reasons.” He gestured ahead with his stick. “Beware the fresh horse manure, J.W., or you'll be cleaning your sandals before you get back to solving this crime.”

When John and I finished our walk, we sat on his patio with Mattie, who had laid aside her gardening gloves and joined us for beer. It's hard to beat a cool beer on a warm day.

“We're abandoning you menfolk tomorrow, you know,” she reminded us. “We ladies are taking our four children to New Bedford for the day, to experience American civilization closer at hand.”

“By which you mean shopping,” said John. “Poor Joshua, going to the city with four women and a girl. I pity him.”

“He might like shopping,” said Mattie. “Some males do, you know, even if you two characters hate it.”

“We manly men don't mind shopping in liquor stores and hardware stores,” I said.

“And bookstores,” said John. “It's just girly stores that bore us.”

“Piff,” said Mattie.

“It's not the shopping so much,” I said, “it's the differences in the way women shop. When men shop they know what they want and they go and try to find it and then they come home. Women can spend all day just wandering around looking to see what's there. Zee says it's because men are hunters and women are gatherers. Cavemen went hunting a deer, killed it if they could, and came home; cavewomen wandered through the woods gathering whatever was out there. She says it's
biology and that Darwin would understand better than I do.”

“Zee is right, as usual,” said Mattie.

“How's the backyard bridge project coming along?” asked John.

“Nearly there. You'll be invited to the grand opening.”

As I drove away, I thought about the Mad Hatters. If Abigail Highsmith was one of the crazy members of that family, it was possible that she was, as John had suggested, the cause of Henry's almost unnatural irritation with me when we'd met at the fish market. Maybe her craziness had made him crazy and he had taken it out on me. Maybe her craziness also explained why she drove her bicycle off the road.

Maybe she was crazy enough to shoot her husband.

Hmmmm.

But John had told me that he'd never seen any sign that she was one of the Mad Hatters, and Joanne Homlish had sworn that a blue SUV that looked like mine had driven Abigail into the ditch, and someone besides Abigail had shot Abigail, so maybe she wasn't crazy at all. Maybe she was a sane Hatter, like most of them.

I went down into Edgartown and, because it was midafternoon and all of the sensible tourists were at the beach, I actually found a parking place on North Water Street, up toward the Harborview Hotel. Amazing but true.

I walked back to the library and once again dug out
Who's Who,
wherein I looked up Hatters and found very little other than that John had been right about the Hatter family's history of intellectual prominence and psychological peculiarities. Brimming with the confidence of the naive, I abandoned the book and went to the computer, where, amazingly enough, I was quickly
able to find much more about the Hatters, which included descriptions of family oddness and left no doubt in a reader's mind that some of the Hatters were very strange birds whose lives were characterized by all sorts of idiosyncrasies, including episodes of violent psychosis. One of the latter, I noted, was apparently Abigail Highsmith's grandfather, who had been obliged to live out his last years under the care of a private doctor.

Mad Hatters indeed.

While I was there, I found Jasper Jernigan's bio and reviewed what I'd previously read about him, but at first saw nothing new as I wondered some more about why a millionaire golf addict would need a combination bodyguard and golf buddy. But then some lines caught my eye and I felt a little tingle somewhere in my psyche. I'd read them the first time I'd scanned Jasper's biography, but had thought nothing of them. Now, however, the simple information jumped at me. Jasper had married Helen Collins and was stepfather to her two children, who attended the prestigious Tuttle School.

Margy and Biff Collins attended the Tuttle School, where Biff was on the swimming team. Both of them had been at the beach party, and Biff was the boy who had gone off with Heather Willet and the young Highsmiths.

According to Belinda Highsmith, Biff had gone for a swim almost immediately after the foursome had left the rest of the party and hadn't swum back until after Heather had disappeared.

The warm sun was on my back when I left the library and walked to the Land Cruiser. The dreaded summer meter cop was working her way along the street in front of me, whistling as she ticketed cars, but I passed her and pulled away before she got to my spot.

I wanted to talk with Jasper Jernigan, but Jasper lived on Nantucket, so I drove to Glen Norton's house instead.

I hadn't seen him since we'd found Henry Highsmith's body, and I wondered, idly, if he'd been back to play golf at Waterwoods. I doubted it.

My doubts were justified.

“Hell, no,” said Glen, after he'd put a glass in my hand and waved me out to a chair in his yard. “That business spooked me so much that I wonder if I can ever play out of a sand trap again. I haven't played a round since, at Waterwoods or anywhere else.”

“Maybe what you need to do is go out on the beach and whack away at the sand until you're past the jitters. That Highsmith business was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, after all, and you'll never be happy until you're out on the course again.”

“Yeah, you're right, but I'm not like you and Jasper and Gabe. You guys are all tougher than me, I guess. Hitting that hand shook me up pretty good!”

“Anybody would have been shaken,” I said. Then I added, “Except for Gabe. He never seemed to blink an eye. What do you know about him, anyway?”

“Gabe? Not much. He works for Jasper and pals around with him all the time. I haven't seen them apart for the past several years, in fact. When Jasper plays, Gabe plays.”

“Did you ever notice how Gabe's drives always go in the same area as Jasper's drives? How they never get too far apart on the fairways?”

Glen frowned at me. “I never thought about it, but now that you mention it, I guess that's right.”

“Did you ever know Gabe to beat Jasper on any hole except one that was followed by a par-three hole? My impression was that Gabe's the better golfer, but that
day we played together I never saw him drive before Jasper did except on that par-three fourth hole.”

Glen squinted at me. “What are you getting at?”

“I noticed that Gabe always waited for Jasper to drive first, then drove close to wherever Jasper drove. He had to three-putt on the first two holes in order to stay behind Jasper, but he won the third hole pretty easily after Jasper got close to the green on his second shot. Gabe drove first on the fourth hole and landed on the green, but I'll bet you a nickel that he was going to lose that hole to Jasper if we'd gotten a chance to play it.”

Glen sipped his drink and frowned fiercely at his glass.

“Why would he do that?”

“So he could see where Jasper's drive went off the next tee before he made his own drive. He's good enough to control his drives but he has to know where Jasper drives so he can put his own ball pretty close to it and give himself a reason to stay near Jasper. He couldn't do that if Jasper was a pro, but Jasper's not a pro and his drives are short. Did you ever notice that Gabe carries a carbine or some sort of sawed-off rifle in his golf bag?”

Glen's narrowed eyes widened. “Hell, no! Does he? What are you telling me?”

“I think I'm telling you that Gabe is Jasper's bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard?!”

“Gabe stays close to Jasper on the golf course and has a rifle in case he needs one. That tells me that Jasper has enemies. I'm hoping that you can tell me something about them and maybe about Gabe.”

“Good grief,” said Glen, shaking his head. “I don't know anything about any of this. I must be more naive than I thought. No wonder I'm the only one of us
who's still spooked by that hand in the sand trap. I feel like Little Red Riding Hood in a forest full of wolves!”

“You don't have any idea about who might be interested in attacking Jasper?”

Glen had another drink from his glass. “No. I've read about celebrities surrounded by bodyguards and I know about the secret service and all that, but I never guessed that Jasper had his own guard.”

“Jasper and Henry Highsmith tangled in the newspapers, and the exchanges got pretty hot. Did you ever hear Jasper actually threaten Henry or say that Henry had threatened him?”

“No! Never. I never heard him say any such thing. Are you trying to say that Jasper might have had something to do with Highsmith's murder? That's a crazy idea, J.W.!”

“I don't know if it's crazy,” I said, “but it could well be wrong. The cops will be asking the same questions if they haven't done it already, though. What do you know about Jasper's family?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know he has a place on Nantucket. Did he fly over that day just to play with us at Waterwoods?”

“Yes, he did. He's got his own jet, so he flies to a lot of New England courses during the summer. Why?”

“He's married to a woman with two children by a previous marriage. Both kids go to school in Connecticut and both of them were at that beach party earlier this summer, when the Willet girl drowned. I'd like to talk with the boy. Do you know if he's staying somewhere here on the Vineyard?”

“That's one thing I do know,” said Glen, who seemed glad to know something for a change. “All of Jasper's family are over on Nantucket. The kids came over here just for that party. Sort of a welcome-to-summer party
with their friends, I think Jasper called it. Of course it turned out to be a terrible night and his kids went back to Nantucket as soon as the police were through talking with them. I think the boy is lifeguarding over there this summer. Why all these questions about Jasper and his family? They're fine people.”

“The boy, Biff Collins, was one of the last people to see the girl alive. I'd like to hear what he has to say about what happened that night.”

“The police already talked with him.”

“I'd like to talk with him myself, and maybe you can help me out.”

“How?”

“If I go over to Nantucket, I might run into a stone wall because Jasper and his family don't really know me. But you're Jasper's friend. If you call him and ask him to let me talk to him and his stepson, I might be able to ask them a few questions and get some answers.”