At 9 a.m. on July Fourth, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were read aloud at the Unitarian Universalist church on Orange Street.
At 9:45, the Cyrus Peirce Middle School music teacher sang the national anthem from the steps of the Pacific National Bank at the top of Main Street. The crowd was invited to sing “America the Beautiful” with her afterward, and many of them did. By that time, thousands of people were strolling through the center of town, which was closed to vehicle traffic, and the Orange Street church was poised to strike ten o’clock.
This was the signal to open the dunk tank stationed at the corner of Union Street and Main. People lined up to toss bean bags at it and drown their neighbors.
The watermelon eating contest was staged on tables lined up around the Nantucket Fountain, at the foot of Main Street. Further up, on opposite sidewalks, were face painting and the pie eating contest. A puppet show was scheduled at ten-thirty on the steps of the Methodist church at Main and Centre Streets, and at eleven o’clock the bike decoration contest, including tricycles and wagons, would be judged at the corner of Federal and Main.
But the culminating quarter-hour of the morning’s festivities, from eleven-forty-five until noon, was the real point of Nantucket’s Fourth of July. During those fifteen minutes, an epic water fight roared out between the Nantucket Fire Department’s hoses—using an antique hand-pumper and a modern ladder truck—and the Boynton Lane Reserves, wielding a LaFrance firetruck dating from the 1920s. Spectators were invited to bring water pistols of their or own, or, alternatively, umbrellas. The entire street party got soaked.
This was Meredith’s favorite summer ritual. She’d been dancing under the hook-and-ladders from the time she could walk. But this July she was fated to miss the show. She was assessing the bike decorations critically with Peter when her cell phone rang.
“Detective Folger?”
“Yes, sir?” she said. There was no mistaking Bob Pocock’s voice.
“Get out to Lincoln Ave right now. There’s been another one of your accidents.”
She found Clarence Strangerfield at the foot of Step Above’s stairs, to the left of the boardwalk that led across the fifty feet of heather and scrub that separated the cliff from the beach’s barrier dunes. The crime scene chief was kneeling in groundsel, wavy hairgrass, sumac, and bayberry. He had wrapped bungee cords around his pants legs to keep them tightly cinched. Clare was deadly afraid of tick-borne diseases. And the corpse might well be crawling with them.
Nantucket was overrun with white-tailed deer, which offered blood meals to legions of ticks in the 50 percent of the island that was conservation open space, as well as the 50 percent that was roads and well-tended backyards, where deer were dismayingly just as plentiful. Adult ticks laid eggs that hatched into baby ticks that became hosts of destructive bacteria—not from deer, but from the mice they infested in their larval stages. Lyme disease was the most obvious illness, but there were others less well-known, like babeosis, which attacked the spleen and was life-threatening and increasingly virulent on the island. Public service flyers distributed on the ferries and in airplanes during the summer season warned of the tick danger, sending steady streams of vacationers into the emergency room.
Clarence’s brother-in-law had been flown to Boston with acute babeosis last year.
Merry stepped off the boardwalk into the scrub and picked her way toward the scene. Clarence was photographing the body, which was sprawled facedown. Summer Hughes was kneeling opposite the crime scene chief, a pair of calipers in her hand, positioned over the base of the skull. They had arrived well before Merry—presumably Bob Pocock had dispatched them before calling her. Beyond the two crouching figures Merry glimpsed Nat Coffin, Clarence’s assistant, and Joe Potts—both men wearing protective gloves and booties. They were systematically searching through the underbrush for anything that might be evidence.
“Hey, Merry.” Summer’s eyes drifted past her to the EMTs who were clattering down the steps with a collapsed gurney and body bag.
Clarence glanced over his shoulder. “You want to see him in situ?”
She walked forward and crouched down.
Spencer Murphy had bled from a blow to the base of his skull. His sparse silver hair was singed with crimson just above the C-vertebra of his neck. This was bonily visible and poignantly weak with age under his mottled skin. His shoulders were slumped in defeat and awkwardly positioned where he had fallen in the scrub. His legs were doubled beneath him.
His feet, she noticed, were bare.
“Strange posture,” she said.
“A-yeh,” Clarence agreed. “He landed on his knees.”
“Why no shoes?”
“Maybe he didn’t like sand in ’em.”
Merry frowned at Clarence.
“The family thinks he tried to walk down to the beach in the dark. He’d talked recently about wanting to be here by the water. Asked his granddaughter to help him. He said he didn’t trust the railings on his own. I gahther he’s not been too steady of late.”
“What does it look like to you, Clare?”
“Must’ve missed the stairs, Marradith, and stumbled off the cliff in the dark.”
“How does a man who’s lived here for decades miss his own staircase?” Merry demanded. “There’s a trellis arch marking the top landing! It wasn’t foggy last night.”
“No,” Clarence agreed. “But if he tripped on the steps I’d expect him to be lying on ’em. There are four different landings between here and the top, for heaven’s sake. But he came to rest in the scrub, all the way at the bottom.”
Merry peered at the wound. She didn’t have to probe it to know that the skull was fractured.
“Doctor? Could this be caused by impact with a wooden railing?”
Summer pursed her lips. “I’d be more inclined to think it was a rock. A chunk of granite hidden by the scrub.”
“Which further argues against him going down the stairs,” Merry said. “We’ll examine the railings, of course—but have Potts and Coffin search the cliff slope for instruments of death, Clare, would you?”
“A’ carse.”
“Any thoughts about time of death?”
Summer reached for Murphy’s arm and attempted to lift it. “He’s cool and stiff. In warm weather like this, rigor will have begun to set in pretty fast—say, within two to three hours of death. This rigor is well-advanced, meaning he’s already stiffened throughout his body—so I’d estimate he’s been dead at least eight hours, possibly twelve. What time is it now?”
Merry pulled out her phone and glanced at it. “Time for the water fight.”
“Eleven forty-five,” Clarence explained.
“Okay. So if we take conservative parameters for both onset and duration—meaning three hours for rigor to set in, and at least eight hours’ duration, possibly twelve right now—I doubt he died much before nine p.m. last night, or was alive much past one a.m. this morning.” Summer rose to her feet.
“In the wee small hours,” Merry said thoughtfully. “I guess he was a night-wanderer.”
But that was before Elliot Murphy showed her Spence’s suicide note.
He intercepted her as, in a superfluity of caution, she was sealing off Spencer Murphy’s bedroom for Clarence to examine. The French doors to the deck that Murphy apparently had left open were still propped ajar so that Nat Coffin could dust the knob and edges for fingerprints when he was done searching the cliff face. Merry was stretching yellow crime scene tape across that part of the deck, blocking access. She had done the same in the interior hallway leading to Spencer Murphy’s bedroom door. This was still locked from the inside. She would leave it to Clarence’s team to dust the interior room knob there, as well.
“Why are you doing this?” Elliot asked in puzzlement. “He didn’t die here.”
“It could be helpful to examine the last room he was in,” Merry said blandly.
“That was probably his den,” Elliot replied. “I found this note from Dad there, propped against his typewriter. When we couldn’t find him this morning I checked the den first.”
He handed Merry a sheet of paper. It had been torn from a ringed notebook—probably like the one she’d found in Spencer Murphy’s car, with drawings of birds and notes about sightings. On the top right corner was a sketch of what looked like an osprey. There was usually a nest each summer, Merry thought vaguely, out near Madaket. In the middle of the sheet were a few sentences in the same spidery handwriting she’d seen before. David says I poisoned Nora. How could I do something like that? I can’t go on like this anymore.
She glanced at Elliot. “Your brother told your father that he poisoned your sister?”
“That sounds like a Spanish grammar drill,” Elliot retorted. “Yes, I did not eat the food of the brown cat. Dad overheard us talking about the cyanide Saturday night. It was an accident.”
“They seem to happen all the time in this house.” Merry studied the note again. “I noticed Mr. Murphy wrote things down when he needed to remember them. Appointments, people’s names, days of the week. Do you think he wanted to remember that David thought he’d killed Nora?”
“I don’t know!” Elliot cried. “What does it matter, now? He’s gone.”
Merry fluttered the notebook page. “The point is why these words were written. As a declaration of intent—I’m so appalled at what I’ve done that I’m going to throw myself off the cliff—or as a jog to memory: David says I poisoned Nora. This piece of paper doesn’t prove suicide.”
“Not explicitly. But he certainly left it here last night and he’s dead this morning. I wish so much I’d talked to him before bed—maybe I could have stopped him—”
The skin around Elliot’s eyes was inflamed and rubbery. He had been weeping.
“When did you last see him?” Merry asked.
“At dinner. I wanted him to watch the fireworks afterward with us, but he’d already gone to bed. When Andre checked on him around nine-twenty, he was asleep.”
“He actually saw him?”
Elliot hesitated. “No. He knocked on his bedroom door. Dad didn’t answer and the room was dark, so Andre just came back out to watch the fireworks.”
So Spencer Murphy was unaccounted for, really, at nine-twenty. It seemed unlikely he’d hurl himself over the cliff while his entire family was watching fireworks on the back lawn—and the Jetties show hadn’t ended, Merry remembered, until roughly nine-forty-five. “When did you go to bed, Mr. Murphy?”
“A few minutes before eleven,” Elliot said.
“And when did you start to worry about your father’s absence this morning?”
“Laney was up first, around seven-thirty. She went out onto the lawn to look at the ocean. When she turned back, she noticed that the French doors to Dad’s bedroom door were open. She checked to see if he was there—and found the room empty. The bedroom door to the house was still locked. He must have simply walked outside in the dark and gone over the cliff.”
“Was Laney concerned?”
“She knows Spence has been wandering. She knew he was lost Friday. She woke Kate and asked what to do—Kate woke the rest of the house. It was pretty clear Dad wasn’t here. I even checked the roof walk, in case—” He halted. “Then I found this note.”
“What did you do?”
“I showed it to Kate.”
“Not to your brother?”
“David had gone down to the Wharf Rats. He figured if Dad was out and about, he’d head for friends and coffee.”
“On the Fourth of July?”
Elliot grimaced. “Dad wouldn’t remember it was a holiday, and he’d be standing in front of the closed clubhouse door with a bewildered expression on his face, while the entire world milled around Main Street.”
“Understood. So you showed Kate his note.”
“It worried her. She thought we ought to call you right away. She said Laney had been feeling responsible, too. Guilty about Nora’s death and leaving the apricot seeds in this house. She seemed more worried about Laney than Dad. So I went looking for Andre. He’d taken our dog down to the beach—”
Elliot stopped short.
“Yes?” Merry asked.
“It was Tav, actually, who found Dad first. Just like he found Nora.” Elliot smiled faintly. “With that nose, it’s like he’s riding shotgun with the Grim Reaper. I’m starting to feel sorry for the little guy.”
“Of course he committed suicide,” David Murphy said impatiently. He had sought Merry out as she barred the doorway to Spencer Murphy’s den, this time, with yellow evidence tape. She wanted the rest of the desk undisturbed until Clarence’s team could examine the suicide note. “You destroyed his whole world with your accusations yesterday, Detective. My father’s integrity—his journalistic reputation—meant everything to him. The things you said were appalling.”
David’s words hit her right in the gut. She tried not to flinch. “Your father doesn’t mention our interview in this note.”
David rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You were the final nail in his coffin! Of course he was distraught when he understood what he’d done to those coffee beans. Obviously that was a mistake on his part—he’s been getting more confused daily—but he killed his own daughter, for Chrissake. It took us an hour to calm him down, Saturday night. And then you—”
“He’d been forgetting that Nora was dead for days,” Merry interrupted. “He forgot she was even here in May. Why do you think he remembered the fact that she was poisoned—and possibly by himself—and felt bad enough to kill himself?”
“Because you dredged it all up,” David said. “You made him vulnerable, questioning his escape from Laos.”
“He never refers to our conversation about that in this note. And yet it was more recent than the conversation he overheard Saturday night.”
David shrugged. “I don’t pretend to understand the human brain. Talk to Andre about it. He’s the psych expert.”
“I will. I’d like to know whether he thinks Mr. Murphy was capable of remembering, even episodically, that Nora’s death occurred. And capable of feeling personal responsibility for it.” Merry raised the sheet of notebook paper. “Or whether he needed this cheat sheet to do that. Did you suggest he write down these words—David says I poisoned Nora?”
David Murphy frowned. “No. He must have done that Saturday night—right after he overheard us in the hall.”
“After you’d spent an hour calming him down. He wrote about it in a notebook.”
“Yes.”
“How did you calm him down, Mr. Murphy?”
“With a shot of brandy and a Benadryl. I wanted him to sleep.”
“And did he?”
“I suppose.” David was increasingly annoyed. “I don’t quite see what you’re after, Detective.”
“The state of your father’s mind. Did he mention Nora’s poisoning at any time yesterday? During Sunday dinner, perhaps?”
“Not to me.”
“And yet, with his poor memory, he knew he had this phrase written in his notebook, tore it out, and left it on his desk as a farewell, before committing suicide.”
“If he’d already decided to end his life,” David countered, “he would never tell us. He wouldn’t want us to stop him, once he made up his mind.”
“—If he could do that,” Merry persisted. “Make up his mind.”
They were both silent an instant, assessing each other.
“The truth remains,” David concluded, “that he left that sheet of paper propped on his typewriter for one of us to find—along with his body.”
“I’m not sure any of us know the truth about your father,” Merry said.