Death in Vineyard Waters (2 page)

“So, what are you doing down here?” I asked Dr. Summerharp, so as not to hear that laughter or that clever voice.

“We're preparing a paper for one of those obscure but vitally important journals that we academics take terribly seriously. It will be my last such contribution to scholarship and thus is of little professional consequence to me, but for Ian it will mean great things for his career. My career, you see, is basically over, while his is just flowering.”

A touch of bitterness dwelt in her tone, I thought. I heard Zee's laughter. “And what is the subject of your learned paper?” I asked.

Dr. Summerharp glanced at me, and again that brief smile touched her thin, dry lips. “Are you are another academician, Mr. Jackson?”

John Skye laughed. “I assure you he's no academician. He may have problems, but that's not one of them. No, Marjorie, J. W. is a normal human. A fisherman, a handyman, and an ex Boston cop. And I warn you, J. W., Marjorie is a jester as well as being a genuine brain. A lot of her more solemn colleagues are confused by that. She's tweaked a few scholarly noses in her day, so watch yours.”

“I'll keep my gloves up,” I said.

“So you're an ex-policeman,” she said.

“Retired.”

“You're young to be retired.”

“I'm independently poor.”

“An unoriginal remark.” I felt like a schoolboy as she looked at me with those steely eyes.

“J. W. was shot and is retired on a disability pension,” said John Skye. “He gets a little something from Uncle Sam, too, in compensation for some shrapnel he acquired in our recent undeclared war.”

How did he know about that? “How did you know about that?” I asked. I was not inclined to share such information. I looked at him.

“I have my sources,” he said. “I'm an intellectual, remember? We intellectuals are paid to be smart.” I looked at him some more. “I talked to George Martin,” he said. “Your name came up.”

George Martin and I had shared more than one flask of brandy at Wasque while waiting for the October bluefish to show up.
In vino Veritas,

“How shot are you?” asked Marjorie Summerharp.

“Just enough to loaf on Martha's Vineyard all year and pretend to fish for a living.”

She looked at me with her iron eyes, waiting. I suddenly wished that I could be one of her students. “The bullet lodged near my spine,” I said. “They decided to leave it there instead of trying to take it out. It doesn't hurt and it probably won't ever move. The shrapnel was mostly in my legs and they got most of it out. It's no big deal.”

“I see.” She dug down and extracted a large clam who had lived a long clam life but had now come near to the end of it. She dropped the almost late great clam into her bucket. “Well, for what it's worth, we're drafting a paper that maintains that a document we found a couple of years ago near London is, in fact, a fragment of a previously unknown Shakespearean play.”

I thought about that as hard as I could, so as not to hear Zee's voice blending with that of Dr. Ian McGregor. But I had little luck. My attention was not under my control. I took it by the throat and focused it on Shakespeare.

“I thought they had all of Shakespeare's plays already.”

“That's what everybody thinks but Ian and me. This paper we're writing is about how we found it and why we think it's the real thing.”

“Why should anybody think it isn't?”

She raised her gray eyebrows in feigned scorn. “You, the ex-cop, should ask? Because it will be perceived as a scam! What else? We scholarly types are particularly susceptible to con men, you must know. We've believed in the Baron of Arizona, the Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, and dozens of fake Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Klees. You can imagine how people will react to the announcement that an unknown Shakespeare has been unearthed. And I don't blame them. I didn't believe it myself when we found it.”

“But now you do.”

She hesitated. “Yes. At the moment.”

“And that means something to me, at least,” said John Skye, “because Marjorie, here, in spite of the jokes she's played at the expense of our stuffier colleagues, is the very
Queen of Skeptics in our profession. She doubts everyone and every conclusion and every thesis. She turns scholars pale, makes ambitious intellectuals shudder when she examines their texts, sends grad students into the streets to earn their livings with tin cups and dark glasses. A veritable fiend for legitimate research.” He grinned and dug up a clam. “She's a famously formidable doubter and one, I'm glad to say, who was not on the board that read
my
thesis!”

“And well you should feel that way, John Skye. Your conclusions about the language of
Gawain
are open to considerable debate.”

“You see what I mean?” asked Skye. “The woman is not even talking about her own field, yet takes me to task after all these years!”

“And why not? You wrote a slick thesis and you talk a good game, but all good teachers have a bit of con in them. Why not you? Your students say you're a ham at heart.”

“Sacrilege,” protested Skye mildly.

“Why do you believe the document you found is real?” I asked, to hear the sound of my voice instead of McGregor's.

Dr. Summerharp had found herself a clam colony, a senior citizen retirement home, from the size of them—all big and mature. She brought up one after the other and for a while ignored my question. Quite understandable, I thought, envying her find. I like big clams; Zee, on the other hand, favors the medium to small variety and claims that the big ones make her gag.

The professor exhausted her mother lode of clams, dug a bit more, and sat back on her skinny heels. “Because we checked out everything and everything checks. The paper is the kind they used then, made out of rags. The ink is the right sort—lampblack and a solution of gums. The age of the document is right—as right as carbon dating can establish it, that is. The document was in a book bound in the seventeenth century, so if it's a fake, it's a very early fake, which seems unlikely, since nobody thought enough of Shakespeare
in those days to write a play and sign his name to it. And the signature we have is a lot like the signatures we think are Shakespeare's. Ergo, we have a genuine document.”

She coughed and pulled a kerchief from a pocket and wiped her lips. I saw flecks of pink on the kerchief before she tucked it away.

“What's the play about?”

“It's only a piece of a play. Part of one act. I'm not sure it was ever finished—”

“It's about King Arthur,” interrupted John Skye. “That's what interests me.”

“You medievalists have limited concerns,” said Dr. Summerharp in what I was beginning to recognize as her Severe tone. “I assure you, Mr. Jackson, that the subject of the play is of only incidental importance.”

“Nonsense,” said Skye, unintimidated. “The interesting thing, J. W., is that for the last thousand years everybody and his dog, except Shakespeare, has written about King Arthur. Shakespeare wrote about Romans and Italians and about Scotsmen and Lear and the War of the Roses and about this and that, but never about Arthur. I've always wondered why not, so when Marjorie told me about this find of hers, I took to it like a crow to a dead cat.”

“A wonderful image, John,” said Dr. Summerharp.

Skye grinned. “Image be damned. If you're right about this manuscript, Marjorie, it'll take a load off my mind that's been there for thirty years or more.”

“The load you're carrying isn't on your mind, John,” said Marjorie Summerharp. To my surprise, she gave me a devilish wink.

Then, just as I was beginning to feel pretty good, the sound of Zee's voice floated back into my consciousness and pulled my eyes around. “. . . There isn't a Mr. Madieras,” she was saying. “There was a Dr. Madieras, but there isn't anymore . . .”

She and Ian McGregor were side by side on their muddy
knees, digging in the dark sand and talking in an exploratory way that I didn't care for very much. Worse yet, McGregor's bucket was already fuller than it had any right to be. The bastard was a master clammer as well as a Greek god. I climbed to my feet.

“I think we've got enough, Zee,” I said. “Between us we can feed a small army.”

Zee looked at her clam bucket, her face averted from mine, then flowed up onto her feet like a dancer. “Okay, Jeff. I guess you're right.” She smiled down at Ian McGregor. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

“And you,” he said. “Thanks for the clamming lesson.”

“You're a natural.” She grinned. He grinned.

“Nice to meet
you
” I said to Dr. Summerharp. I nodded to McGregor, the natural clammer. “If you two need any help around John's place, just give me a ring. See you later, John. Have a nice trip west.”

I restrained an impulse to grasp Zee firmly by the arm as we walked to the Landcruiser. As we went, she glanced back and waved. Then she looked up at me and blushed a bit, I thought. I could feel McGregor's eyes following us.

2

What color is jealousy? Envy is green, you get red with anger, white with fear, blue with cold, and spotty with fever. I felt sort of purple but remembered that it, like red, was for rage.

Not that I had any right to be angry. I didn't own Zee; I wasn't married to her; I wasn't even living with her (if
only because she'd declined my invitation). I was her wooer, her friend, a lover. Only those things . . .

She wasn't too far away from a bad marriage to the jerk of a doctor I'd never met. She was beginning to feel human again and to have some fun in life, to feel attractive and worthwhile and adventuresome. And maybe I was just part of the adventure. She wasn't that to me, but maybe I was that to her. Certainly she owed me nothing.

So now here she was, meeting a handsome, successful, charming man and apparently feeling tingles she liked feeling, even if she felt guilty about feeling them because I was there.

I thought these thoughts and others like them as I prepared a bachelor lunch, Zee having gone home to West Tisbury to tend to private matters about which I, brooding as we had driven to my place from the beach, had not bothered to inquire. Zee, thinking thoughts of her own and no doubt knowing why I was saying nothing, had nothing much to say either. At my place she picked up her Jeep and left.

But even those lorn of love must eat. So I cooked and listened to a tape of Pavarotti filling my house with a sound like emeralds and diamonds. While Pavarotti sang of grand Italian passions and I thought of Zee's attraction to Ian McGregor, my hands were preparing a salad made from fresh vegetables from my garden and leftover bluefish from yesterday's stuffed bluefish supper. My dry mouth began to water of its own accord. I got a Molson from the fridge and unbaggied a loaf of bread I'd made in the distant past, the day before yesterday, before Zee and McGregor ever met.

The Molson wasn't bad. Neither was the bread—Betty Crocker's white bread from her
old
cookbook. I bake it four loaves at a time and usually eat the first one before it's even cool. This was the last of the last batch, since I'd given a loaf to Zee and had eaten two by myself already. Betty C's bread is dynamite stuff, but lacks staying power.

I found another beer, took bread and salad outside, and
sat in my yard, under the hot June sun. There, I looked out upon the blue Vineyard Sound, where the sailboats leaned in the wind and the powerboats left white lines behind them across the pale blue water. I ate for a while, got yet another beer, and ate a bit more. It was good, but not as good as it should have been. I knew why. Yesterday, Zee had been with me for lunch under the noonday sun. Today, she was not.

I went to the garden and picked weeds for a while. There, as I was on my knees between the kale and the cucumbers, I heard the phone ringing.

It's always a fifty-fifty proposition as to whether I'll get to my phone just before it stops ringing or just afterward. Still, since I don't get many calls, it's worth my time, I figure, to make the dash. After all, one never knows, do one?