4

It was almost impossible, Zach discovered, to find a house on the island without specific directions concerning its location. He should have remembered that from the previous summer when invitations for cocktails were accompanied by the most elaborate back-road instructions.

He drove into Gay Head on the South Road, passing Turnaround Hill and the painters looking over their easels to the gray-shrouded view of Quitsa and Menemsha Ponds. He passed Clam Point Cove, and then the Gay Head town line, and then he began stopping at every mailbox on the highway. He could not find one for John Cloud.

When he reached the Gay Head lighthouse and the colored clay cliffs dropping to the sea at the end of the island, he didn’t know where to go next. He parked the car and started up the steep incline to the cliffs. Penny held his hand tightly. Two old Indians were sitting behind their counters of souvenirs. One, a white-haired man wearing khaki trousers, a sports shirt, and a feather in a band around his head, smiled at Penny.

“Are you an Indian?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“A real Indian?”

“An Algonquin,” the man said, smiling.

At the next counter, the second Indian sat with his arms folded across his chest. A sign Scotch-taped to the counter read:

YOU NO PAY 50¢

YOU NO TAKE PICTURE.

Zach took his chances with the first Indian.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

The Indian smiled. “Souvenir of Gay Head, sir?” he asked.

“How much is the tomahawk?” Zach said.

“One dollar,” the Indian answered.

“Do you want a tomahawk, Penny?”

“Is it a real tomahawk?” Penny asked.

“Made by Gay Head Indians,” the man said.

“I’ll take it,” Zach said. He hefted the tomahawk from the counter. A heavy flat stone, gaily painted, served as its striking head. A piece of wood had been split to form a handle for the stone which was lashed tightly to the wood. “Don’t hit anybody with that,” Zach said, and he handed it to Penny and paid the Indian.

“Thank you, sir,” the Indian said.

“I’m trying to locate somebody in Gay Head,” Zach said. “How do I go about it?”

“Ask,” the Indian said.

“Her name’s Evelyn Cloud.” The Indian nodded. “Do you know her?”

“Yes. She’s an Indian.”

“Where do I find her?” Zach asked.

“Go back the way you came,” the man said. “You’ll pass a yellow mailbox about a half-mile up the road. Take the next dirt road after that. John Cloud’s house is at the end of that road.” The Indian paused. “He may not be there now. He’s a swordfisherman. It’s calm today, good for swordfish. He may be out in the boat.”

“I’m not looking for him. I’m looking for Evelyn Cloud.”

The Indian shrugged. “She goes with him sometimes. Sometimes the boy goes, too. Little Johnny.”

“Thank you,” Zach said.

“Thank you, sir,” the Indian answered.

At the next counter, the Indian with his no-pay sign looked at Zach stoically. Penny noticed the look and said, “Well, we haven’t even got a camera, you know!”

She whipped her ponytail saucily, and then went down to the car.

They passed the yellow mailbox and turned off onto the next dirt road. The sand had rutted itself into two tracks on either side of a grass-and-rock mound which scraped at the low-slung bottom of the Plymouth. Driving slowly, certain the entrails of the car were being ripped out piece by piece, Zach continued up the hill. At last he saw a smear of gray showing through the pines and scrub oak. The smear lengthened into the gable of a house, and then the house itself as Zach wheeled around a curve and came into a clearing.

He pulled up the hand brake and opened the door on his side of the car. The gray gauze of the sky was tearing off to reveal patches of blue. It was going to be a nice day, after all.

“Can I come with you, Daddy?” Penny asked.

“All right,” he said.

He waited for her to climb out of the car, and then they started up towards the house together. The front porch of the gray structure was covered with paint cans, brushes, and flat stones of varying sizes and shapes, each painted brightly with would-be Indian symbols and left on the porch to dry. Penny made the connection between the stones and the tomahawk in her hand instantly.

“Was it made here?” she asked.

“Probably,” Zach said. He knocked on the screen door. There was no answer. “Mrs. Cloud,” he called. He knocked again, and then tried the door. It was locked. “Do you have a nail file in your purse?” he asked Penny.

“I think so,” she said. He waited while, womanlike, she dug into the contents of her small purse. She handed him the file in its blue leather case, and he stuck the narrow sliver of metal into the crack where door met jamb. Shoving upwards, he released the screen door hook from its eye, and opened the door.

“Mrs. Cloud!” he called.

“I don’t think she’s home,” Penny said.

“Let’s go in, anyway.”

“That’s impolite,” Penny said.

“I know. And don’t you ever do it.” He took her hand and walked into the house. Something was on the stove cooking. He could not place the smell. It boiled furiously in a big aluminum pot. “Think she’d go out and leave something boiling on the stove?” he asked.

“Mommy never did,” Penny said.

“No.” He stood in the center of the kitchen and called, “Mrs. Cloud!” and his voice echoed through the stillness of the house. A door was closed at the opposite end of the kitchen. He started for the door with Penny at his heels. He opened the door, began walking into the other room, and then stopped abruptly.

“Stay where you are, Penny,” he said.

“Why? What—?”

“Stay there!” he said, and his voice carried the unmistakable ring of parental command. Penny stopped dead in her tracks. Zach entered the room and closed the door behind him. A fly was caught against the screen door leading out to the back of the house, its buzz filling the living room.

A woman lay on the floor in the center of the room.

Her hair was black, and her skin was bronzed. She was no older than thirty-eight. The top of her skull had been brutally crushed so that the blood poured onto her forehead and down her face, streamed over her neck and stained the pale blue flowered house dress she wore. Her mouth was open in what must have been the trailing end of a scream. Her eyes, wide and brown, splashed with rampant blood, stared up at the ceiling of the room. There was terror in the lifeless eyes, a terror captured and then frozen by death.

He was suddenly covered with sweat.

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and then he stared down at the dead woman, incapable of speech or movement, fighting the tight nausea in his stomach. With conscious effort, he clicked his mind shut like a hair-trigger trap, and the nausea vanished to be replaced by a violent, unreasoning anger.

The room came into sharp, clear focus.

There had been a struggle. A lamp had been knocked from one of the end tables, and a straight-backed chair had been overturned. A dish towel was on the floor next to the woman, so he surmised she had come into the living room from the kitchen, walking into an ambush. He went to the back door. The screen there was unlocked. Three steps led down to the sloping sand and then into the woods. He glanced through the screen briefly and then came back into the room.

The weapon rested some three feet behind the woman’s shattered skull. Its stone head was smeared with blood, as was its wooden shaft. A souvenir tomahawk, a close twin to the one Penny held in her hand outside. He did not touch it. He stooped down close to it and looked at it, but he did not touch it. He saw the medallion then. It was a thin bronze circle, and he might have missed it had he not stooped to look at the tomahawk. He picked it up and studied it.

A link from a chain was still caught in the metal loop at the top of the medallion. Had the woman torn this from her attacker’s throat? The medallion carried the raised stamping of a sailboat. Above the boat were the words THIRD PRIZE 1947 in a semicircle. Below the boat, forming another semicircle along the bottom edge of the medallion, were the words TAXTON CLUB REGATTA, MIAMI. Zach put the medallion in his pocket and then stooped close to the woman again.

Her right hand was clutched tightly. He lifted it. It was still warm. She could not have been dead very long. Clutched in the hand were a number of long blond hairs. Even if he had not seen the torn roots he’d have automatically surmised the hairs had been ripped from her attacker’s scalp. A silver signet ring on the woman’s hand caught his eye. He turned her fist gently, looked at the ring, and felt sudden despair and hopelessness.

He had known it all along, he supposed, from the moment he’d opened the door on the woman’s body, had known all along who she was, and that death had sealed her mouth and rendered meaningless the words in her letter. But the ring corroborated the knowledge, presented a plain and inescapable fact from which there was no retreat.

The initials on the ring were E. C.

The dead woman on the living-room floor was Evelyn Cloud.

Gently, he lowered her hand. He stood up. He supposed he had known all along, too, that he would not report this to the police. He certainly would not have pocketed the medallion if he’d intended calling the police. He knew instinctively that involvement in a homicide would keep him from accomplishing what he’d come here to do. He could not waste time clearing himself with the police. And he also knew instinctively that the death of Evelyn Cloud was inextricably connected with the drowning of Mary. And so he turned his back on the body, wiped the inside knob of the living-room door with his handkerchief, opened the door with the cloth covering his fingers, closed it, and wiped the outside knob.

“What are you doing?” Penny asked.

“Shhh,” he said. “Did you touch anything in here?”

“No. Is someone dead?”

He looked at her, surprised for a moment, and then remembered the educational facilities of television. “Yes,” he said. “Someone’s dead.”

Penny nodded. “Who?”

“The woman we came to see. Let’s get out of here.”

He opened the screen door, let Penny out, and then wiped the knob clean. As they drove out to the main road, he wondered if his tires would leave tracks in the packed sand.