We played with Eddie on the living room floor until it was time for his bath and dinner. He babbled almost without stopping, as though he had something very important to tell us and we just weren’t getting it. He looked very intense, his face a small, very young version of his father’s. It gave me warm feelings to see how one generation inherited what was most important from the preceding one.
When we were able to talk, I said to Jack, “What would you think of my calling Sister Joseph and inviting her out for tomorrow and the day after?”
“Interesting idea. You thinking of her well-being or you want to see what she makes of this case?”
“Both. I know it’s a long drive from St. Stephen’s, but I bet she’s never been here and I think seeing a magnificent sunset is almost a religious experience.”
“You making up her excuses?”
“She’s clever enough to make up her own, and besides, she doesn’t need any. And the truth is, at this point what we know doesn’t make much sense, and except for interviewing Dodie, I don’t know where to look for new information.”
“Springer’s prints may give us some.”
“It won’t be conclusive, whichever way it goes. If Dodie’s prints aren’t anywhere around the Klein house, what does it tell us? That she didn’t touch anything there. We know she was there. That’s been confirmed by two witnesses. And suppose her prints are there. She could have helped Tina pull the bike out of the crawl space. It doesn’t mean she put Tina’s body inside.”
“So Murchison opens the gate and then says toodle-ooh?”
“Why not? They’re talking about something, Tina says she wants to take a ride somewhere, they walk back to the crawl space and say good-bye.”
“You should be a defense attorney.”
I smiled. “I have a busy schedule right now. I’ll leave that to you.”
“You’re right that it won’t be conclusive, but every little bit of evidence placing Murchison at the crime scene is bad for her.”
“Which she knows, Jack. She may specialize in writing wills and organizing estates but she knows the law. If she kills Tina and stuffs her body in the crawl space, she knows eventually someone will match her prints with the ones she’s leaving behind.”
“So there won’t be any to find.”
“So it means nothing. How do you feel about my giving Sister Joseph a ring?”
“Go to it. We’ve got an extra bedroom. She can have as much privacy as she wants, and if I remember correctly, she eats anything.”
“You remember right. Keep an eye on Eddie and I’ll make the call. I think I can catch her before evening prayers.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’ve stumbled on a body on Fire Island,” Joseph said, when she picked up the phone.
“Two bodies. How are you?”
We exchanged enough conversation to bring each other up to date on health and family. Then Joseph said, “Does that mean I can expect a visit?”
“Actually, no. It means I’m inviting you to come here tomorrow and stay over one night at least.” I thought I’d give her the option of longer or shorter. There was a Catholic church in a nearby town if she wanted to try it. “We have a comfortable extra bedroom with two beds and you’re welcome to bring one of the nuns along.”
“This is very tempting.”
“I’m glad. You can leave St. Stephen’s whatever time you want tomorrow, the earlier the better, and call me from the ferry. I’ll be there with a wagon to carry your luggage.”
“A wagon for my luggage! Chris, how much luggage do I need for an overnight stay?”
“As much as you want to take. Will you come?”
“I will be delighted.”
I had offered an invitation to a second nun in case she felt more comfortable not traveling and staying overnight alone. In the old days, sisters were not allowed to visit anyone in their homes. Visits were generally made only to family members, and the nun would spend the night in a nearby convent. During the years that I had visited my aunt on a regular basis, I had done so with the permission of the Superior. My aunt was family and also widowed, so she lived alone, and I had stayed with her in a room she considered mine.
Also, in times gone by, nuns traveled in pairs. Things are very different today but I wanted Joseph to have the option of doing what made her most comfortable. I would reimburse her for her travel expenses, as her allowance was very small, and I wouldn’t dream of asking her to pay for this trip.
I was thrilled she was coming. I told Eddie all about her as I bathed him. He had met her a couple of times, but not for a few months. As I soaped him up and rinsed him off, I tried to get him to say “Joseph” or at least “Joe.” He looked at me as though I were nuts and I got nowhere. But we would have time to work on it the next morning.
Jack and I went outside after dinner, talking about what we would cook for Joseph, what we should show her, how we would cover the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, as Aunt Meg had covered the one in the house we now own and live in for all those years I visited once a month as a nun. We sat on the deck in the cool sea breeze and I felt very lucky that Melanie hadn’t been able to use her uncle’s house, that this enormous luxury had dropped in our laps.
It was cool this evening, cooler than it had been since our arrival, a sign of the fall to come, and there were few people below us on the beach. A couple of hours ago Tina’s body had been wheeled on a gurney to the bay, where it had been placed on a boat belonging to the sheriff’s department. Marti had come by earlier to tell us.
We had brought out a tray of coffee and cake and a glass of brandy for Jack, who was enjoying the last days of his first vacation in a long time. Monday he would head back to the Sixty-fifth Precinct in Brooklyn and resume his job as detective sergeant. And next week I also would return to my job of teaching poetry at a local college not too far from where we lived. In other words, summer would be more than officially over; it would be over in fact. I didn’t look forward to leaving Fire Island. I had never had a vacation as sumptuous and restful as this one, or as inexpensive. I was happy that Jack had been able to spend all these days with his son, to indulge himself. When he returned to work next week he would also return to law school four nights of the week. There would be no more lazy meals, late-night brandies, afternoon naps, reading for pleasure.
“I tried Dodie’s number again,” I said, as Jack poured the coffee. “No answer.”
“She went somewhere else. Or she’s not answering the phone. Looks funny either way. I’d guess Springer’11 have her car in the alarms in the morning.”
“You think Tina killed Ken Buckley?”
“I don’t know what to think. Where’s the gun?”
“She could have taken the ferry back to the mainland and tossed it during the trip. Then came back without it.”
“That’s a possibility. I think we’d’ve found it if she had it in the house.”
“Did you look in the crawl space?”
He thought about it. “I didn’t,” he said. “Maybe Springer did.”
I looked out over the beach. A dark figure with a lighted cigarette was moving towards us. “We may be getting interesting company,” I said.
The figure came closer. “Evening, folks,” a familiar voice called.
“Good evening, Chief.” I stood and went to greet him. “Will you join us for coffee?”
“Gave up coffee a long time ago.”
“Maybe brandy,” Jack said, rising. “I’m Chris’s husband, Jack Brooks.”
“Nice to meet you. You’ve got a lovely wife and a real cute little baby. Now I see who he takes after. What was that you were offering?”
“I’ve got a bottle of brandy here and some pretty good cake.”
“They both sound good.” He settled into one of the chairs. “Nice cool evening. Feels a little like autumn. Guess I’ve managed to clock another summer.”
“You’ve got a lot more, Chief,” I said. “You just took a long walk to get here.”
“I like to walk at night. The beach is empty. It’s quiet. If you haven’t seen the moon over the ocean, you haven’t lived.”
Jack came back with the bottle, a glass, and another plate and fork. He poured the brandy and the chief took a sip and closed his eyes.
“Reminds me of good times,” he said. “These are very bad times right now.”
“They are,” I agreed. “The murder was just down the street from here.”
“That was a nice young lady, a nice girl, if you’ll permit me to use an old-fashioned word.”
“She seemed very nice.”
“A quarter of my age and she’s gone. If I felt terrible when Ken died, how can I even explain how I feel now? Little more than a child and this happens to her.”
“Did you know her, sir?” Jack asked.
“I knew her. Not too well, but I knew her.” He put his glass down on the little table next to him and looked straight at me. “I lied to you, Chris,” he said. “I told you I didn’t know Tina, but I did. Knew her since July.”
I felt a tingle in my arms that was not from the cold night air. He had come to tell me what I had been trying to get out of him since Tuesday. “Will you tell me about it?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you now that it’s too late. I’ll tell you what I know but it ain’t much. She came to me one day in July, can’t tell you exactly when, a weekend probably. That’s when you see the groupers mostly. Said she was renting a big house with a group of young people but she wasn’t here for the sunshine and the beach. She was here because someone in her family disappeared a long time ago and the last time anyone knew where he was, he was supposed to be going out to Fire Island.”
“There are a lot of places on Fire Island he could have come to.”
“That’s just what I said to her, but she was sure it was Blue Harbor. Said her mother or someone in the family had heard him say where he was going. And he never came back.”
“Or if he did,” Jack said, “he didn’t let his family know.”
“That’s what I told her. We think the same way, you and me. Just because someone comes out here, doesn’t mean he didn’t go back on the ferry and then disappear.”
“When did this happen?”
“Well, she’s about twenty-three, twenty-four now. She was a little girl of eight when ‘Uncle Bill’ got lost. That’s what she called him. Uncle Bill. Last name, ‘James,’ or something like that. So that would make it—what? Fifteen years ago? That’s a long time ago to be trying to find someone.”
“Did she say what he was coming out here for? Was he visiting someone?”
“I got the feeling there was a girlfriend with him.”
“I don’t suppose she told you who that was.”
“I don’t know if she knew,” the old man said. “The first thing the family thought was that he’d drowned. It happens. It’s happened here. Not this year, not last year, but we’ve had our troubles. She thought maybe he swam out too far or went swimming at night and got swept away.”
“Did he know how to swim?”
“She said he was a good swimmer. Bein’ a good swimmer never stopped anybody from drowning.”
I told him I agreed with him. It was the people I knew who were good swimmers who sometimes took chances because of their belief in their own ability to cope with high waves and possible undertows. The less able were often less secure and took fewer chances. “Were there any bodies washed ashore fifteen years ago?”
“Not in my memory and not in the police files. Course, not every body washes ashore.”
“Did she check with Chief Springer?”
“It was before his time. I checked the files, what there was of them. Nothing that year, nothing the year before, nothing the year after. So,” he said, anticipating my next question, “I called up my old buddy Jerry O’Donnell, the last police chief before young Curt. He didn’t remember anything about a drowning or a body swept ashore or anybody missing in his last coupla years as chief. One big, fat dead end.”
“Did she look into anything else? A fight, maybe?”
“Well, I went through those police records myself and I couldn’t find anything. There are always fights, especially in summer, young fellas boozin’ it up, don’t know when to stop. I couldn’t find a Bill or a William who got himself in trouble those years. So what do you think?”
I knew what I thought. I just wasn’t sure whether I should say it. “I think she started thinking about fires and she went to see Ken Buckley.”
“Now that’s good thinkin’,” the chief said. “Because she asked me about fires. There was that big one I told you about, but no one was hurt in that one. There were a few smaller ones, but no one got hurt in those either. So who knows?”
“Did she talk to Ken?” I asked.
“I can’t say for a fact that she did. She asked me who the chief was and where the firehouse was and where he lived. But she never came out and said she’d talked to him.”
“There’s some speculation she killed Ken,” I said.
“Well, that’s just dumb. She had a gun and she went over and shot him? And then what? Set the house on fire? You really think somethin’ like that happened?”
“It’s what people are saying,” Jack said. “Chris and I think there’s more to it. Is there anything else you know that could help us?”
“She thought she was getting close,” the chief said, looking beyond both of us. “But that’s all I know.”
“Chief, I did see Tina at the Buckley house fire. And she saw me, although she denied it later. She had a fireman’s coat over her back and head. Jack and Curt Springer searched the house she was living in and the jacket wasn’t there. Did she leave it at your house?”
I sensed he didn’t want to answer that, but I thought he would. He had come here to tell us what he knew. Finally he said, “Yeah. She gave it to me to hold for her.”
“When?”
“Must’ve been Monday night. Labor Day.”
So it was already gone when Curt Springer and Jack went through the house. “Is it your coat, Chief?”
“No sir, not mine. Never saw it before.”
“Don’t they have names in them? So the firemen take the right one?”
“We do that ourselves here in Blue Harbor, write our names somewhere in that indelible black ink. This one—well, someone had inked over the name good and heavy. I couldn’t tell you whose it was. But it wasn’t mine, I promise you that.”
“Maybe she grabbed it off the truck,” Jack said.
“Truck wasn’t nowheres near the house. It was on the beach. They run the hose from the pumper truck but that truck’s too wide to go through any street except Main Street. You didn’t see a truck there, did you?”
“Now that I think of it, I didn’t.”
“So Tina went to the Buckley house with someone’s jacket, or she found one at the Buckleys’ and grabbed it. When she got home, she inked out the name inside because she knew I’d seen her and she’d have to get rid of it.”
“That’s good thinkin’,” the chief said. “Glad to see young folks with a brain. You hear some a that stuff they call music nowadays, you wonder if they got anything up there.”
“It’s funny,” I said, more to Jack than to the chief. “If you have a gun, you can toss it overboard from a boat, but if you have a thick coat stuffed with puffy, heat-resistant material, it’s not easy to get rid of it in the water. And you can’t dig a hole in Blue Harbor to bury it without hitting water pretty quick.”
“Makes it hard to get rid of a body, too,” the chief said, “just in case you were thinking of burying one.”
“That should keep the murder rate down on this island, but right now it isn’t working. Do you still have the coat?”
“I got it.”
“I think you ought to give it to Chief Springer. It may be evidence in a homicide.”
“I guess you’re right. But it won’t bring that poor little girl back, will it?”
Jack insisted on walking the chief home, and, after his brandy was topped off, the chief relented. I cleared the dishes and went inside as the men started off along the dark beach.