17 17 Zee had picked Joshua and Diana up at school and she had a fire going in the living room fireplace. It felt good. Kisses from her and the kids felt even better, and a glass of Luksusowa on ice, adorned with a jalapeño-stuffed olive, improved things still more. She and I sat side by side on the big couch and looked at the fire. From the kitchen came the aroma of spaghetti sauce being warmed for supper.
Diana, nose busy, approached. Whatever else she was doing, Diana was always food conscious. If she was lucky, she would inherit her mother’s genetic propensity to eat like a horse and never show it.
“I like this house, Pa,” said our daughter.
“So do I, Diana.”
“John has even more books that you do. He has a whole library.”
Our computer was in the library, sitting on the big table that served as John’s desk. Diana and Joshua used the rest of the table to do their nonelectric homework.
“It’s my favorite room in the whole house,” I said.
“Me, too. I like our computer, but I love books more.”
Like father, like daughter.
“Pa?”
“What?”
“Are we going to have our Christmas tree here? If we stay here, I think we should have our tree here, too. Christmas isn’t very far away, you know.”
“I don’t think we need to have a tree here,” I said. “We’ll be in our own house very soon.”
“How long, Pa?”
“I’m not sure, but not long.”
“Can Santa find us if we don’t have a tree?”
“Absolutely. But by Christmas we’ll be back in our own house and we’ll have a tree for sure. I know just where to look for one in our woods.”
“Pa?”
“What?”
“Christmas is my very favorite holiday!”
“Mine, too. Now go finish your homework.” I sipped my vodka. Maybe I should leave a nip for Santa, in case it was a chilly night when he popped down the chimney. I didn’t like having the solstice season intruded upon by the Easter Bunny or whomever it was who had killed Samuel Arbuckle. Just as in Longfellow’s day, hate was strong and mocked the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.
“I heard about Samuel Arbuckle,” said Zee, staring into the fire after little Diana had gone back to the library. “I’m glad we moved the kids here before it happened. But all I got was gossip; what’s the real story?”
The Edgartown hospital is one of the island’s greatest rumor mills, in part because when bad things happen on the Vineyard, the results turn up in the ER and word gets around fast. Fortunately, good news circulates almost as fast. If you want to know what’s happening, in reality or someone’s imagination, just talk to somebody who works at the hospital.
I told Zee about everything but Kate’s hopes for a union with me. “By now,” I concluded, “the DIA guys, the state police, and all ten editions of the local cops are on the case.”
“Which means that you can step away from it.”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re getting too old for adventures.”
“You’re right. No more adventures for me.”
We watched the flames dance just as our cave-dwelling ancestors must have done tens of thousands of years before as they sat in front of their fires.
“You have a cloud on your forehead,” said Zee after a while. “What are you thinking about?”
I tried to evaporate the cloud. “Nothing,” I said. I gave her a smile.
“You’d better stick to penny-ante poker,” she said, “or we’re liable to lose the farm.”
“Nonsense. My face is stone.”
“A less kindly person than I might say that you’ve confused your face with your brain. Why the brow?”
“I was just wondering where the Bunny is staying between murders.”
“I thought you just agreed to step away from whatever it is that’s going on. Besides, Arbuckle said it’s not the Easter Bunny.”
“That’s right, but I have to call the killer by some name or other, so I’m going to keep calling him the Bunny. I’ll leave off the Easter part.”
“Monty Python had a man-killing bunny in one of their shows.”
“Wasn’t that the Holy Grail movie? Anyway, this is a different rabbit, and he has to be living someplace on the island while he goes around murdering people. I wonder where.”
Zee thought for a while. “A lot of the B-and-Bs and hotels are closed for the season. If he’s staying in a place that’s still open, the police will probably find out pretty fast, don’t you think?”
“I imagine they’ll give it a try. Any stranger will get their attention, for sure.”
“And what about a car? If he’s from off-island, he either brought his own car or he’s rented one or stolen one since he got here.”
Great minds. “The police are probably checking that out, too,” I said.
“And what about a map?” asked Zee, getting into the spirit of the chase. “If he’s a stranger, how does he know his way around? This island isn’t very big, but it’s big enough to make it hard to find where people live. How does this guy know where to prowl and keep from being noticed while he prowls? Does he ask people where to find places and other people? It seems to me that if he does, the people he asked would remember him and could tell the police what he looked like.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Maybe you should give up nursing and join the Edgartown PD. They need a keen investigative mind like yours to think of things they never would have come up with on their own.”
She snugged closer. “I’m pretty sure the Chief and Tony D’Agostine and Dom Agganis and most of the other Vineyard cops have already thought about all the things I’ve come up with.”
True. “And maybe the Bunny has come up with them, too,” I said.
She screwed her head around and looked up at me with those deep, dark eyes wherein I’d so often happily lost myself. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if we can think of these things and the cops can think of them, the Bunny can think of them, too. In fact, he probably thought of them first, since he planned this business before putting the plan into action.”
“Of course.” She paused. “But how did he make a plan for a place he’s never been? All he knew was that Joe Begay lived on Martha’s Vineyard. Even if he knew approximately where Joe and Toni live, he wouldn’t have known exactly.”
“It isn’t a secret,” I said. “Kate found the house without any trouble. All she had to do was flutter her eyelashes and ask any Aquinnah cop.”
“You never mentioned her eyelashes before.”
Not for the first time, my mouth was right here and my common sense was way out yonder. I tightened my arm. “Hers are absolutely no challenge to yours, my sweet.”
“Good. Is that how she found Joe’s house?”
“Actually, I don’t know how she found it, but it probably wasn’t hard. And unlike the Bunny, she didn’t have any reason to care whether or not she was remembered because she wasn’t out to murder Joe. The Bunny would have to be more careful.”
“Unless he planned to hit and run so fast that he’d be long gone before the police heard about him.” We sipped our drinks and then she said, “What else have you thought about since you agreed not to think about this anymore?”
“The shotgun that killed Arbuckle. The Bunny had a shotgun. That makes me wonder if part of his plan was to take advantage of shotgun hunting season. It makes me wonder if he’s a deer hunter.”
“Don’t they have a bow-and-arrow season first, then a shotgun season, and then a black-powder season? How long does the shotgun season last?”
“Only a week or so. It’s almost over.”
“Do you think he timed his arrival to correspond with the shotgun season?”
“He got close enough to Arbuckle to kill him with a shotgun. I doubt if he could have done that outside of hunting season. It could be that he was wearing an orange hunting jacket and cap. Even so, Arbuckle must have been either unsuspecting or awfully careless. His own coat wasn’t even unbuttoned.”
Zee thought some more, then said, “If he came down here pretending to be a hunter, do you think he bought a hunting license as part of his cover, just in case he got stopped by a warden for some reason?”
“I doubt if he’d have used his real ID to get one, but if he had fake papers, maybe so.”
“He’d have used the same fake ID to rent a room or a car, wouldn’t he?”
“I imagine.” But I couldn’t really imagine the Bunny renting either a room or a car when he got to the island. It would be too easy for the now-swarming police to find him or at least get a description of him, fake name or not.
“I think it’s time for me to cook the spag,” said Zee, rolling to her feet. “The water’s already boiling. Din’s in ten.”
I followed her into Mattie Skye’s kitchen. The aroma of the spaghetti sauce filled my nostrils. The old family recipe. Delish. I got the Parmesan out of the fridge and put it on the table, which was already laid, and opened the red wine.
“What I think,” said Zee, “is that this bad bunny planned a very quick kill and escape, but that something went wrong. I think that Arbuckle interrupted him and that after the Bunny killed him to shut him up, he may have abandoned his plan and already be off of the island. That would be sensible, wouldn’t it? Your cover is blown, so you abort the mission and save your own hide?”
“That sounds like what I would do. The other possibility is that he’s still here and sticking to his plan.”
She stirred the spaghetti sauce. “But where is he, then? Where’s he staying? What car is he driving? How does he know how to get around the island without being noticed?”
Good questions.
“I’ll call the kids,” I said, but that wasn’t necessary. Diana’s nose and ears had led her to supper, and her big second-grade brother was only a step behind.