On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery (18 page)

B
Y LATE MORNING
, the gale winds and sheets of rain that startled the island shortly before midnight tapered to a drizzle. The front was already blowing out to sea. No time to waste, Edith decided. By afternoon everything would change. The sky would be blue, the air crisp, the grass freshly green. Beautiful in aftermath, but what Edith wanted was happening now. The storm’s colors intensified to their fiercest hues. Dazzling purples and cobalt blues, dashing grays and thundering greens.

The deep tinge stretching across the rounded bottom of the enormous cloud hanging now over the weir. Plum. Positively plum, Edith dipped her brush into the jar of water she kept for that purpose and tried again to get just the right mix before the cloud scudded off. Looking through a rain-drenched window, one could never be sure of shape. But accuracy didn’t matter here, she tried a stroke, impression did.

Had their impressions the night before been accurate, Edith shifted her position on the stool and winced.

The word
involuntary
flitted again through her mind. Her body ached, every bone bruised, every muscle strained. The run last night had been long, long enough to stiffen them both for several days, without all that scrambling around on the side of the cliff. Edith set her brush near the paint box and reached down with her right hand to rub the backs of her legs. They were tighter than she had realized.

Willa had given Edith’s shoulders and back a thorough massage before heading up to the attic room for her morning’s work. But with her left hand bandaged, its cut still fresh, Edith was able to reciprocate only by applying liniment to Willa’s shoulders and lower back. It’s a wonder Willa managed to do such a thorough job, Edith marveled. For too long now, the thumb on Willa’s writing hand had given her so much trouble she often wore a splint, but the splint got in her way and relieved only part of the pain. That turned her growly and depressed. But Willa’s thumb finally improved and now she wouldn’t notice how cramped her legs were, Edith guessed, until she got up from her desk. When her hand worked and her writing was going well, Willa rarely noticed anything until she was finished for the day.

Edith tried stretching in her sitting position, one leg at a time. Creaky, that’s what Willa said the night before. We’re getting old and creaky.

“Nonsense,” Edith heard herself say aloud. But maybe Willa was right. Maybe she was getting creaky. Cracked, too. Here she was talking to herself just like Crazy Eddie, the neighbor who so frightened her as a child.

Edward Williams had been notorious throughout Lincoln, but nowhere more than on the block where they lived. Everyone knew he talked to himself and made strange, batting motions with his hands. Children imitated him and adults laughed. He’s harmless, their elders would say, he’s just old. But old held no meaning for Edith then, and Crazy Eddie wandered into their yard many more times than she liked. He was always getting lost, trying, he would say, to find his way home. Often as not he was at home when he said that.

Edith’s best friend Jamie had busied himself adding hundreds of stories to the neighborhood lore about Crazy Eddie. Malevolent inventions, close to the truth. Too close to tell the difference. And Jamie had used those stories to taunt Edith, claiming that if she refused to do whatever he told her to do, he would tell Crazy Eddie to come and carry her off. Edith learned immediately to obey. But when she caught on to the lie, she caught on to power and that was the end of Jamie.

Later that year, when Crazy Eddie finally died, Edith acquired her first awareness of death. Such gifts we bring each other, Edith stretched her arms in the air and sighed deeply, then brought them down slowly and suspended them momentarily at shoulder height before letting them drop into her lap.

Ready to concentrate again, she hooked her heels on the bottom rung of the stool, looked back at the clouds, then studied again the shapes on her paper.

Hamstrings, tight hamstrings, the thought flitted through, then dissolved in the swirls of plum and purple before her. Edith reached again for her brush.

In the window the round-bottomed cloud gave way to wisps of dark gray edged with lavender and indigo. There seemed to be a race on, the field so crowded, clouds rushing neck and neck. Individual colors streamed together, then broke free. Edith dipped her brush. Lavender leading, indigo on the outside.

What had that man been doing? What could make him stay in the same place during the whole of their long run, Edith tried a mixture of violet and mauve.

He must have been in that spot for at least twenty minutes. Easily twenty, Edith pulled a stroke across. This one arched high above the others. She let her hand pause in the air.

It must have taken Willa a good ten minutes to make the phone call. And then the long run. She decided on a touch of azure, there, just above the others.

Why didn’t he simply look around and leave? Why swing that light back over exactly the same territory time after time? The words slowed in her mind then repeated.

“I
AM
beginning to think none of this will ever fit together. So many pieces, no apparent design,” Willa pushed herself up from the rock wall with a hand on each knee. She stepped back and stretched, then brushed her hands firmly against each other.

“Last night’s rain didn’t help any, either,” Edith glanced up. “What a soggy mess.”

“Patience, patience. You’ll see,” Sabra Jane Briggs shoved her trowel deep in the earth.

Willa took off her hat and swirled several loose hairs away from her eyes, then bent over to pat her forehead with the loose end of her shirt tail and wipe the sweat from her eyes. When she straightened, the tail was still in her hand.

“Why on earth did you let me choose a white blouse to do this sort of work?” Willa turned to Edith to demand. With the chuckle that followed, Willa’s dimples deepened. She tucked in her shirt tail, ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head vigorously. Then she replaced her hat. It was her favorite hat, a close-woven straw with flat brim and wide ribbon, the blue of her eyes.

“Why don’t we take a break and have some of the lemonade Jacobus brought over,” Edith rocked back on her heels. “I, for one, could use a respite,” she removed her work gloves, taking special care with the left. The wound on her palm would be tender for days.

“This business with the flashlight,” Sabra Jane stood up and brushed damp earth from her knees, “tell me more about it.”

“Talk about too many pieces with no apparent design,” Edith said over her shoulder, letting the screen door slam behind her. Willa filled in the story while she retrieved the oatmeal cookies and lemonade.

So thoughtful, Jacobus, Edith smiled to herself. She knew they would choose to work on their rock wall while everyone else from the main house, Jacobus included, took off for an afternoon’s hike to Money Cove.

Actually, Edith corrected herself, Matt, the tricolored dog of no particular breed, brought the cookies. Matt was short for Mattie, which was short for Mathilda, but Edith thought of Matt as a descriptor for Matt’s favorite position and place, a full-length sprawl in front of the door to the main house.

Just before lunch, when Edith caught sight of Matt and Jacobus swinging along the path from the main house, she had laughed out loud. Jacobus carried a huge jug of lemonade, and Matt, head high, ears alert, body taut, bore a wicker hamper full of sandwiches and cookies, its handle firmly clamped between her teeth. Matt was wonderfully serious and well mannered and devoted to Jacobus, but she was also young and good humored and crazy about Willa. When Jacobus had put the lemonade on the counter and reached for the basket, Matt leapt past her and thundered through the cottage to the attic stairs. Taking their tight, old-fashioned turns in two strides, Matt did not stop until she had deposited the basket in Willa’s lap and planted both front paws directly on the center keys of Willa’s typewriter. The old Oliver gave a tremendous clack.

Edith chuckled and finished arranging her tray. She paused at the screen door. Willa and Sabra Jane were engaged in waving simultaneous but opposite directions to Roy Sharkey, whose wagon Edith could not see. She could hear it, however, on the lawn by the side of the cottage. She guessed young James must be turning the horses to back the wagon closer in toward their burgeoning wall.

“Fine job you’re doing there,” Roy Sharkey stood with his hands deep in his pockets, studying their handiwork. The folds of his belly rolled over his belt and pulled his back into an exaggerated curve. Just like a broken-backed mule, Edith decided about Roy Sharkey’s spine. But this is a swayback, Willa would say, that has nothing to do with hard work. Minus his jacket, Roy Sharkey looked even less accustomed to physical labor than he had when he delivered the first load of rocks. But then, Edith remembered, young James had done most of the actual work.

“You can put this load in the same place you put the last one,” Sabra Jane stood near the dwindling pile of flat, charcoal-gray stones. Dull streaks of red zigzagged along their edges and cut through their centers.

“Why not put the load over here, instead? This would be closer to the wall,” Willa’s hand aimed in a general direction to the north of the previous pile.

“Whatever you say, ladies,” Roy Sharkey’s face maintained its stillness, except for his mouth. His grin was blessed by straight teeth.

Roy Sharkey’s smile was his best feature, Edith decided, though it was difficult to tell what his face might look like without the grizzled stubble and jutting cigar that, along with his belly, served as his trademark.

Sabra Jane held her silence. Willa looked at Sabra Jane, then at Roy Sharkey, and then at the wall. No one moved. “I guess over there would be better, after all. More out of the way when we’re not handling rocks.”

“Right you are,” the cigar bobbed.

Edith advanced with the tray, “Will you join us, Mr. Sharkey?”

“Thank you, Miss. Later, perhaps,” the cigar bobbed. “Right now James and me best be unloading these stones,” he gestured at his wagon, making its slow, heavy progress backward around the edge of the house.

“We’ll see if we can save you some lemonade, then,” Willa nodded and led the way around the cottage to their lawn chairs, still sitting near the edge of the cliff. When they arrived at the chairs, she placed a hand on each hip and stood for a moment with her back arched, arms akimbo. “Lord, I’m stiff,” she sighed.

“I’m not surprised after a jaunt like that,” Sabra Jane shaded her eyes to survey the cliffs where they had run the night before. “How ever did you manage that in the dark?”

“Actually, it wasn’t so dark,” Edith shaded her eyes to look as well. Sunlight glinted off the waterfalls and brightened the cliffs all along Seven Days Work. Sharp details from the night before had long ago disappeared, washed away by the sun. Different features drew Edith’s attention now. The dark cedars and rugged cliffs, masses of yellow tinged with red and brown, and below gray-green boulders strewn like pebbles to the edge of the sea. Daylight rendered the trail at the top of the cliff altogether invisible. But it had never been visible from here, Edith reminded herself, unless someone like Mr. Brown stepped too near the edge.

“Moonlight,” Willa settled into the Adirondack chair next to Edith, “you’d be surprised how well you can see by moonlight.”

“That’s true,” Sabra Jane turned away from the cliff. “It was bright last night before the clouds moved in, I remember.”

“It was a lovely evening,” Edith nodded. “We sat here for the longest while just watching the moon and listening.”

“Yes,” Sabra Jane glanced out toward the weir, “I love that sort of evening. The waves, the night sounds,” she looked at Willa. “Actually,” her voice turned suddenly brisk, “how stupid of me. We often take midnight hikes to Southern Head. Moonlight hikes. Of course you can see. It’s a whole other experience to be guided by moonlight, isn’t it?”

Willa laughed, “I thoroughly enjoyed last night. I expect I would have enjoyed the running, too, had we a different reason for doing it.”

Sabra Jane accepted a lemonade and sat down.

“Actually, I did enjoy it,” Willa corrected herself, “up to the moment my foot found that stone.”

“From beauty and fear to sheer terror,” Edith handed the cookies to Willa with a melodramatic flourish, “all in the flick of an instant.”

“That’s one dramatic catharsis I choose to live for a long while without repeating,” Willa chuckled.

“For a moment there,” Edith raised her glass, “I was afraid we had lost the opportunity to make such choices.”

“You were awfully lucky not to fall,” Sabra Jane’s words carried separate emphases.

“Yes,” Edith and Willa agreed simultaneously.

They sat for a moment in silence. Edith glanced again at Seven Days Work. The height was stupefying. And no one except the fellow with the flashlight would have seen or heard them during their long fall. No one at all.

“What if he’d had a gun,” Sabra Jane’s eyes had widened. “What if he had tried to shoot you. What if he had tried to force you off the cliff.”

“Daggett thought he might have had a gun,” Willa’s response was almost contemplative, “and for some reason chose not to use it. Maybe with the dark, the noise, he didn’t want to risk a shot.”

“He may have realized we weren’t close enough to see him,” Edith tried to make a different sense of it, “not to identify him, anyway.”

“And don’t forget, he had been there all that time inspecting the place,” Willa continued to think out loud. “He must have realized there was nothing there to incriminate him, so why shoot. He took off running instead.”

“Yes,” the word came quickly with Sabra Jane’s nod, red waves following the toss of her hair, “but what was he looking for? And who was he?”

T
HE
sound of the Chevrolet’s motor gave way to the sharp bang of a car door.

“Hey, what’s all this now? You best watch where you step,” Roy Sharkey’s hoarse protest barely preceded Little John Winslow and Constable Daggett. They rounded the corner of the cottage, Daggett carrying a large pillowcase with something heavy inside. Loosely draped, it swung with his stride.