When the ambulance carrying Spencer Murphy had pulled out of the crushed quahog-shell drive, Laney said to Andre, “Dad’s going to talk about the funerals now, I know it. And if he does, I’m going to scream.”
She was leaning against one side of the doorway, while he propped up the other. They had both felt the need to watch the gurney slide into the cavernous mouth of the truck, schooled by the precise hands of the EMTs. It seemed wrong to let Spence go with strangers. The others hadn’t been able to face it. Or hadn’t bothered. Andre wasn’t sure which.
“I should call Roseline,” he said. “She should know. Before she hears it on the news.”
“Dad’s been talking about that, too,” Laney said. “How Grandpa’s a reporting icon. How his death will have to be ‘managed’ for the public. How we should expect calls from reporters. He’s sitting at the dining room table with his laptop open, drafting a press release.”
“I know it makes you crazy,” Andre said gently. “But Dave’s right. The New York Times will be all over this. Spence won a Pulitzer for them, back in the day.”
“Because of Laos,” Laney said. “Because of his story of torture and survival and death. I read it—In the Cage of the Pathet Lao. It was on the syllabus of one of my college classes. It’s a horrible story, but I was really proud of the way he told it, you know? He said once that he rewrote and rewrote the text to make sure it was free of self-pity. He wanted the brutality to move people. That, and the fact that he could forgive his captors.”
“That’s what made the movie so powerful,” Andre said. “Forgiveness. I wish I’d talked to him more about his work.”
Laney shivered suddenly, although the day was warm. “Last night he said something weird. That he’d made money off a lot of lies. Do you think he could have had . . . some sort of PTSD?”
Andre frowned. “If he did, I never saw it.”
“Wasn’t he hallucinating when he was found Friday night?”
“I think that was probably due to his dementia. What’s on your mind, Lane?”
“I’ve just been wondering lately if Grandpa was sort of . . . trapped by that book,” she said slowly. “People expected him to stand for things he never really chose. Things that just happened to him. Like human rights. And authentic journalism. He wasn’t allowed to just be a guy who liked bumming around the world with a camera telling stories anymore.”
“That’s different from post-traumatic stress,” Andre pointed out.
“I know,” she said unwillingly. “I’ve been looking for the reason he ended up alone on an island. Isolated from everybody. Living in his version of the past. Maybe he really was scarred. And that’s why he killed himself.”
“You believe he did that?”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course not,” Andre said.
“Hello, Meredith. Did you get soaked by hoses this morning?”
Ralph Waldo was lounging on the cedar deck behind the Folger house on Tattle Court, well within view of his vegetable garden, a straw hat on his head and a glass of iced tea at his elbow. It was a few minutes past two o’clock. Spencer Murphy was lying in a steel drawer in the tiny Nantucket Cottage Hospital morgue. Clarence Strangerfield was attempting to lift fingerprints from a sheet of notebook paper that might or might not be a suicide note. He had found no marks of impact or bloodstains on the railings of the staircase below Step Above.
Joe Potts and Nat Coffin were still searching for a boulder capable of killing someone, buried in the scrub.
Merry had been on her way back to the police station when, on impulse, she had cut from Orange Street over to Fair in search of a wiser chief than Bob Pocock. She was on the verge of tears, the careful control she had maintained in front of the Murphys crumbling like sand under a rogue wave. Did I drive Spencer Murphy to suicide?
A fragile man roughly Ralph Waldo’s age, who had probably loved his kids and grandchildren as much as Ralph did—who had lived a tumultuous life, and probably made mistakes, some of which he had buried under lies. A confused and fading man whose foibles would never be exposed to the world, now, because she—Meredith Folger, the embodiment of the Law—had triggered enough fear in his mind that he had thrown himself off a cliff.
Dear God. How would she live with herself?
She felt a spurt of anger toward Bob Pocock. Shock tactics, he’d said. Shock tactics. When she had told him that Nora’s death was probably accidental. She should never have gone against her instincts about how to handle this case. What had she been thinking—that Pocock would value her work if only she did as she was told?
And the burden on her, now, and for weeks to come, would be this: she would never truly know if her questions about Laos had inspired Murphy’s leap into death or not. Her effort to discredit his suicide note this morning was revealed, even to herself, as a pathetic attempt to avoid his sons’ blame.
Confession was supposed to be good for the soul. Ralph was a Wharf Rat and Spence’s friend. Would he absolve her?
“Spencer Murphy is dead,” she said, pulling a bench from beneath the picnic table that dominated most of the deck. She had been catching splinters from this bench her entire life. It still needed sanding. “I’m sorry, Ralph. I know you liked him.”
“What happened?” he asked. “Did his heart just give out?”
“He was found near the foot of his stairs down to Steps Beach,” she said, “with a fractured skull.”
“Was it an accident?”
“The family is arguing suicide.”
Ralph’s white brows shot up. “That’s odd. Most people are at pains to prove exactly the opposite.”
“I know. That’s why I came to talk to you. His son thinks I drove Spence to kill himself.”
Ralph rose from his seat. “Want some iced tea?”
“Love some.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and reemerged a half-minute later with a glass and two pitchers grasped in a single large hand. “Brought some lemonade in case.”
She mixed herself an Arnold Palmer and took a long draught. “Spence left a note on his desk that could be read as a farewell. I think the sons are hoping he killed himself because that explains two things—their father’s death, and Nora’s.”
“The cyanide in the coffee,” Ralph said. “They figure Spence was responsible for the mix-up.”
“Yes. And if Spence thought or knew that was true—that he’d mixed up the coffee and the poisonous apricot seeds—he might have felt enormous guilt. And thrown himself off the cliff.”
“I can see how that would settle the whole mess nicely for the rest of the Murphys,” Ralph observed.
“Yes. It’s tidy as hell. They can hold two funerals and send the police on their way.”
“While divvying up a fortune. But you’re not convinced? Is that why the son is blaming you?”
“David Murphy is furious because yesterday I sat down with Spence and asked him whether his book, In the Cage of the Pathet Lao, was based on a lie.”
“Meredith! Of course it wasn’t!”
“I have an outline on Nora Murphy’s laptop that suggests otherwise.”
Ralph stared at her. “But I remember when he escaped! It was on all the news!”
“Made a great story, didn’t it?” She reached for more lemonade. “He won a Pulitzer for the Times, published a bestseller, sold the film rights. He must have made millions.”
“He did,” Ralph agreed. “And continued to write great books long after that. He wasn’t a one-shot wonder.”
“What if this first book—the whole survival story—was fiction?” Merry asked.
“I’d be shocked.”
“And so would the rest of the world, who cared about the story.”
“You mentioned an outline. For what?”
“An exposé Nora planned to write. She’d gone back to Laos and researched her parentage, Ralph. She figured out that her father was supposedly Spencer Murphy’s Hmong interpreter, a man named Thaiv Haam, and her mother was his wife, Paj. Only there’s a major problem with that. Nora was half-white. She was really Murphy’s child. He may even have arranged the ambush that killed Thaiv in order to run off with Nora’s mother.”
“You mean, he was never taken prisoner by the Pathet Lao?”
“Not according to Nora.”
“And you asked him about all this?”
“In front of his son. David Murphy asked to be present as his father’s lawyer. Today he accused me of driving Spence to suicide.”
Ralph looked as though his drink had turned sour. “Oh, Meredith. What a wretched situation.”
“I’m sorry, Ralph. I should have known that with dementia like his, he wouldn’t be able to answer my questions.”
“With dementia like his, he ought to have forgotten them almost immediately,” Ralph countered. “I’m sorry his son accused you like that. You were only doing your job.”
“Thanks, Grandpa,” Merry said. Her voice trembled slightly, but Ralph ignored it.
“Did Nora tell her father what she knew? And could she prove any of it?”
Merry shrugged. “We’ll never know. The answers to both questions died with her.”
“Oh, God,” Ralph said suddenly. “Meredith—” He removed his gardening hat and twisted it unhappily in his hands. “If she did confront him, and he didn’t want his past exposed—a sane man would have a motive for murder.”
“Yes. How sane was Spence, Ralph?”
He sighed. “It varied. A month ago, he still knew John by name—but Friday morning when we ran into him at the Wharf Rats, Spence didn’t recognize him at all. Once we were on the boat, he functioned perfectly well. He may have asked the same question once or twice. Acted like he’d never seen Tuckernuck before when we stopped to drop our lines. That’s the upside of dementia, you know—the familiar world is constantly surprising.”
“Trust you to find an upside.”
“I have to, Meredith Abiah. I’m in my high eighties.”
“A month ago, roughly, Nora disappeared,” Merry mused, “and Spence’s memory fragmented.”
“A shock sometimes does that—precipitates a mental decline,” Ralph said.
“The timing raises a question. Could he have been pretending to forget more in recent weeks, Ralph? Is it possible his memory—his confusion—wasn’t as bad as Spence made them seem?”
“Dementia being a great storyteller’s last lie?”
“And an alibi for murder.”
“I’ve got the clothes for your aunt Nora,” Kate said to Laney as she entered the kitchen. “Would you help me pick out something for Grandpa?”
Laney was tossing a tiny ball for MacTavish, who was confined to the house while the police scoured the cliff face and examined Spence’s bedroom. Andre had driven off with Elliot once the body was removed, saying baldly that they needed to get out of the house. She thought they were headed for Sconset, at the opposite end of the island, and a drink at the Summer House bar. David had issued his press release. Since the den was off-limits, he had made the dining room his command-central, taking reporters’ calls there over his cell phone.
The official statement said only that Spence had died as the result of a fall. He was elderly enough that the cause of death would go unquestioned. It was for the police to determine accident or suicide, David said—and Elliot agreed that he was right. If the death was accidental, there would be fewer questions from reporters, less speculation online, and no need to mention that Spence’s adopted daughter was dead, too. The suicide note need not be mentioned. It was enough that the family knew the truth.
David wanted the double funeral held as soon as possible at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which his mother had always attended—she had managed the parish flower committee for years. Nora and Spence would be buried beside her in the peaceful old cemetery below Mill Hill. But there was no funeral home on Nantucket, which meant that Spence’s body would have to be shipped by ferry to Cape Cod, prepared for burial, and shipped back, along with Nora’s remains from the state lab in Bourne. David had arranged for Nora’s transferral from Bourne to a funeral home in Mashpee, which was sending a hearse and driver over to the island for Spence. The funerals could not be sooner than Friday, prolonging everyone’s enforced stay on Nantucket.
And getting suitable clothes to the mortuary on the mainland was a sudden priority.
“Aunt Nora’s being buried in that?” Laney asked.
Her mother was holding a pair of black leggings and a cotton top. “There wasn’t much else but jeans in her luggage. She traveled light.”
“Couldn’t we buy her something more . . .”
“Laney. We don’t have time. Help me with Grandpa.”
She followed her mother down the hall to Spence’s room. MacTavish tagged at her heels, his white head lifted toward the ball she still held in her hands. He was panting eagerly, oblivious to violent death, the only cheerful creature in the Murphy household. Laney stopped short. Spence’s bedroom doorway was sealed with yellow crime scene tape.
“Damn,” Kate said. “I forgot. I’ll have to tell your father.”
“We could go around,” Laney said. “The French doors are open, aren’t they?”
“There’s yellow tape strung across.”
“So I’ll duck under it,” Laney said reasonably. “We’ve got to get his clothes. The police will understand.”
They retraced their steps and went out through the living room doors. Yesterday’s gorgeous weather had given way to clouds and haze, although the July heat and humidity were just as strong. An oppressive day, Laney thought, that even the breeze off the ocean could not dispel.
“Grab Tav,” Kate said urgently. “He’s not supposed to be out here. They don’t want him on the cliff.”
Laney lifted the wriggling terrier around his middle and offered MacTavish the ball. He was content to hold it in his mouth as she ducked beneath the yellow crime scene tape that blocked Spence’s open French doors.
The police had still not been in here; nor were they visible below the cliff. Still hunting for the boulder that had fractured Spence’s skull, presumably. “If we hurry, they won’t even know we were here.”
Kate set down Nora’s clothes on Spence’s bed and opened the closet door. She began to shift through the hangers draped with garments. A few field vests. Some coats. “He has only six collared shirts, Lane. And look at this! The suit he wore to Nana Barb’s funeral! It was twenty years old then.”
She lifted the timeworn dark suit from the rod, shoving the rest of the clothes aside as she did so, and laid it on Spence’s unmade bed. “You choose the shirt, sweetie.”
Laney set down MacTavish and glanced into the closet. So few belongings, for such a long life. There was an upper shelf with boxes of photographic negatives stacked neatly, an ancient fedora, a camera case. Two more suits, equally old and too patterned for dignity. The six shirts. She fingered a striped one, held it out to the light.
“That works,” Kate said. “Is there a tie?”
“Just a navy-blue one, with Nantucket Red whales on it.”
“It’ll have to do.”
MacTavish gave a short bark and darted forward between Laney’s legs. She grasped his tail, which was stiff as a poker, and pulled him back. He came dragging a black wingtip lace-up in his jaws.
“Thanks, Tav, that’s exactly what we need,” Laney said, and reached down to take the shoe from him.
“I remember these from Nana’s funeral, too.” She handed it to Kate. “We should bury him in his Sperrys. That’s what he always wore. Without socks.”
Kate, arrested, was staring at her hand. Laney’s voice died away. Where her mother had grasped the shoe was a rusty smear, arcing from her thumb over her palm.
“Is that mud?”
Kate turned the wingtip over. The soles were clean. But now the stain had smeared both hands.
“No, Laney,” she said. “It’s blood.”