The Willet house was a large, white-clapboard Cape with a brick chimney rising from the center of its roof. Behind it was the barn whose cupola I’d seen from the Highsmith place. The gravel driveway widened into a turning circle in front of the barn, and large sliding doors suggested that the building was now being used in part as a garage. There were dusty windows in the barn through which I could faintly see what looked like a small school bus. The walkway leading to the front door of the house was lined with early summer flowers, some of which were beginning to droop for lack of water.
The kitchen door of the house, which was closer to the driveway and barn, was clearly the door of choice for the family, as is often the case in New England, where formal front doors are routinely ignored by most people. I guessed that there had been and still might be a mudroom just inside the kitchen door, since the custom of ignoring the front door has its roots in olden times when family and visitors alike had to tramp through mud to get to the house and didn’t want to dirty the parlor or living room with their boots. Thus, the kitchen door and the mudroom. Only formal guests would use the front door, and then only on fine days.
I wasn’t formal, so I knocked on the kitchen door. There was no answer and I’d expected none. Still, the mowed lawn and generally well-kept look of the place suggested that a caretaker had been at work recently, and I hoped he or she might still be around.
I circumnavigated the house and shouted a few hellos, but no one appeared. I considered using my lock picks, but wasn’t nosy enough to actually do it. I’d gotten the picks years before at a yard sale given by a woman who was getting rid of her deceased husband’s things and who had no idea at all what the picks were. I hadn’t enlightened her, but I had wondered if her husband had been more than the simple carpenter he was known to have been.
Normally I kept my picks at home, but today they were in my pocket and would remain there, for the likelihood seemed dim indeed that I might find some hint in the house about why the Willets had broken relations with the Highsmiths or maybe even had planned a murder and carelessly left the plans behind on the living room table. I didn’t mind breaking the law, but I preferred to do it for a good reason, and I didn’t have one now.
So I didn’t explore the house and returned to my truck, where Joshua and Diana were waiting. But then curiosity got the best of me.
I let the kids out and pointed at the meadow on the hill behind the barn.
“If you go up to that field,” I said, “I believe you’ll find the trail you saw at the other house. I think the trail runs between the houses. You go explore and tell me if I’m right.”
They thought that was a good idea and ran up the hill while I went to the barn. The big doors were padlocked, but by squinting I could see enough through the cobwebbed windows to note that what I had thought was a school bus was in fact an elderly yellow, short-wheel-base Mitsubishi Pajero, an early-bird entry in the now wildly popular SUV market. My guess was that it was the Willets’ island car; too beat up for mainland use but just fine for Vineyard beaches and back roads and for teaching your daughter and her friends how to drive in your meadow. I understood that reasoning well, since my father had taught me to drive in a neighbor’s field. My opinion of the Willets went up a bit.
I turned and took in their view of the Vineyard hills and green pastures and of the distant sea. It was a fine one, but I could not imagine a worse fate than the death of one’s child, and I wondered if Heather’s drowning would ever allow the Willets to enjoy this beauty again. The Buddha might still be able to smile, but neither I nor the Willets were the Buddha.
I walked up the hill and agreed with my children that the trail clearly led from the Willet meadow to the Highsmith house but vetoed the idea of continuing on to the Highsmiths’.
We got back into the truck and I drove down-island, full of fuzzy impressions and questions. In Edgartown, I took a left on Pease’s Point Way, a right onto Morse, and a left onto Fuller Street, where, amid the street’s lovely white houses, I came to Manny Fonseca’s woodworking shop. Manny’s shop was one of my children’s favorite dangerous places and I had worked hard to teach them to stay clear of the saws and other woodworking machines and tools.
Manny Fonseca, the Portagee Pistoleer, lived, breathed, dreamed, bought, sold, and fired guns, pistols in particular. He was a crack shot, a member and loud defender of the NRA, and Zee’s pistol instructor. He had, in years past, been an equally loud and public critic of the local Wampanoags who lived up in what was then Gay Head but was now the town of Aquinnah, accusing them of being “professional Indians” since they had made a big effort to be recognized as an official tribe only when there was some money to be made from it. Then, to the amusement of many, including me, Manny had discovered that an ancestral romance legally qualified him to be a Wampanoag, and thereafter he had turned his only partially good-humored criticism toward the non-Indian invaders of the nation in general and the island in particular.
Aside from his firearms expertise, Manny was also a first-class finish carpenter who was constantly kept busy by the mansionizers who were energetically buying properties, tearing down whatever buildings were already on the land, and building houses that were bigger and better than any previously known to the island. Manny limited his contracts and charged absurd amounts for his work, in part, I thought, so he would have more time to play with his beloved guns and to coach Zee for her pistol competitions. For Zee, a dedicated opponent of violence, had, with Manny’s enthusiastic help, discovered that she was, ironically, a natural with a handgun and that she greatly enjoyed competitive shooting. I had once been a policeman, but Zee could shoot circles around me.
We went into the shop, inhaling the sweet smell of woods and oils, and I repeated my traditional warnings to the kids about dangerous tools and machines.
“We know, Pa. We’ll just look.”
I kept an eye on them anyway, as they walked and looked, eager to touch but keeping their hands to themselves.
Manny was at a workbench, fitting together the pieces of a custom bureau. He glanced over his shoulder then turned back to his work, clamping one board to another. When the work satisfied him, he again turned to me and smiled.
“Hi, kids. Hello, J.W. What brings you to my humble Native American shop? Do you have some trinkets you’d like to exchange for my property?”
“Sure, if you’re willing to trade.”
“We’ve smartened up since 1626. No more Manhattans for twenty-four dollars’ worth of knickknacks.”
“Too bad. I could resell this place for a lot more than twenty-four bucks. I might even make enough money to live on Nantucket for a week or two.”
“I don’t know if you’d get that much, but you might manage a midweek two-day rental in the off-season. Your wife is shooting better and better, by the way. She tell you that I told her she should try out for the Olympic team?”
“No. Did you?”
“Yeah. I got myself a Feinwerkbau a while back, so she can practice for the air pistol competition, and I’m getting a Walther O.P. for the rapid fire. I think she can do real good in either one or both if she sets her mind to it. She is a genuine natural. She’s already getting better than me.”
High praise. “I’ll talk with her about it,” I said. “It’d be nice to have an Olympic athlete in the family, but it might depend on how much time she has to train. She doesn’t like to be away from the hospital too long. Remember how they wanted her to go out to Hollywood? She said thanks but no thanks.”
“I remember,” he said. “Those folks who made that movie here a few years back wanted her to go west so they could make her famous, but she told them she’d rather be a nurse than a movie star, and besides, she had a family to take care of. What brings you downtown, J.W.? Come summer, you usually hang around up there in the woods until after Labor Day.”
I got right to the point. “You used to shoot with the father of the Willet girl who drowned up at Great Rock. Were you and he friendly or was it just a casual acquaintance?”
He shook his head, then, as people often do, answered a question that hadn’t been asked. “Terrible thing, that young girl drowning like that. I haven’t seen Ed since just after it happened. Hear that he and Geraldine left the island right afterward. She and the girl were there in the house together, you know, and Ed would come down weekends. I guess they both wanted to get away from the place after the drowning. Don’t blame them a bit.”
“Neither do I. How’d you happen to know Willet?”
He leaned against the workbench and thought back. “I met Ed at the Rod and Gun Club pistol range several summers ago. He likes to come down and plink with his twenty-two. Shoots an old Colt Woodsman when he’s here on weekends. We hit it off pretty good, and I showed him a couple of things he didn’t know. I guess I’m sort of what they call a father figure for him, him being that much younger than me. He’s from out in Michigan originally. Used to shoot as a kid and just kept it up. Nice guy. Met Geraldine a few times. Nice woman. Their girl was a wild one, I guess, but Ed didn’t complain too much about her. More the doting-father type, if you know what I mean.”
“Up in Chilmark he lived next door to a family named Highsmith. They were friendly for years and their kids played together. He ever talk about that?”
Manny eyed me. “Highsmith’s the one who got shot, isn’t he? And his wife too, they say. I hear that you and him scuffled a few days earlier. That true?”
I gave him my version of the encounter and told him about being on the golf course when Highsmith’s body was found.
“I didn’t know you’re a golfer, J.W.”
“I’m not. I got talked into playing by Glen Norton. Now there are some people who add my scuffle with Highsmith to me being there when we found the body in that sand trap and think I might have something to do with his death. I’m trying to get clear of that idea.”
Manny was instantly indignant. “Hell, J.W., anybody knows you, knows you didn’t kill him. What bullshit! Oops! Sorry, kids!”
“That’s okay,” said little Diana, who was nearby, peering at a lathe. “Cow manure is good fertilizer, Pa says.”
“Your pa is right,” said Manny, relieved.
Diana drifted away and Manny turned back to me. I lowered my voice. “A while back there was some kind of falling-out between the Willets and the Highsmiths after they’d been friends for years. I think it had to do with their children but I don’t know any more than that. Did Ed Willet ever talk about it with you?”
“You don’t think Ed Willet shot Highsmith, do you? Hell, Ed and Geraldine weren’t even on the island when that happened. Besides, Ed wouldn’t ever shoot anybody. I think he’s some kind of Quaker, in fact.”
“A Quaker who likes to shoot?”
“Why not? He just doesn’t like the idea of shooting people. Like Zee, for gosh sakes. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Zee had, in fact, ended the career of many a fly, tick, and mosquito, and had once shot a couple of thugs in self-defense, but he’d made his point.
“I’d still like to know what happened to sour the relationship between the Willets and the Highsmiths. It seemed to happen when the kids reached puberty.”
Manny’s face became wary. “You’re putting me in a hard spot, J.W. I’m not sure I want to pass on what Ed said. I might have got it wrong in the first place and you might get it wronger because I got it wrong.”
Good old Manny. A nice guy even though he did belong to the NRA. I said, “I’m in a hard spot myself, Manny. There are people on this island who think I may have cacked Henry Highsmith. I’d like to prove them wrong.”
“But you didn’t kill him.”
“But they think I might have. You said that Heather Willet was a wild one. What do you mean? It must have been something her father said.”
“The girl’s dead, J.W. It’s not right to speak ill of the dead.”
He didn’t like this conversation, but I pushed it. “What ill is that, Manny? You can’t hurt her now. She’s past hurt. If it’s that she might have been sexually active at fifteen, you won’t be telling me anything I haven’t already heard. That night she went off with two boys and another girl, and she was naked when they found her body. Is that it? Is that what made her father call her wild?”
Manny rubbed his jaw and dropped his own voice. “I’m getting to be a stuffy old man. All this modern sex stuff you see on TV seems a little too much to me. Maybe what goes on between grown-ups is okay, but what the kids know and do worries me. I don’t like it.”
“So it was her sexual activity that bothered her father. Is that why he broke off with the Highsmiths? So Heather wouldn’t spend so much time with Gregory Highsmith?”
He seemed to search for words. Then he said, hesitantly and slowly, “Yeah, that was part of it, but there was more, I think. He didn’t like what he saw in the Highsmith kids after they got older. He didn’t want Heather to hang out with them anymore.”
Manny frowned and flicked his eyes toward Joshua and Diana. “I’m not really sure. Ed didn’t say much and he was careful when he talked, but he let things slip out sometimes. I may have heard him wrong or misinterpreted what he said, but one thing I remember is that when he told Henry and Abigail Highsmith that Heather wouldn’t be going over to their house anymore, neither of them seemed surprised or argued. He said it was as if they had been expecting it.”
“But Heather was at the beach party and so were Gregory and Belinda, and she had gone off with the Highsmiths and a boy named Biff Collins when she drowned. That doesn’t sound like a broken friendship between the kids.”
Manny looked at me. “I don’t think Heather wanted to break off the friendship. I think she wanted Gregory. I’d be willing to bet that she sneaked out of the house to go to that party and get together with him. It was her parents who didn’t want her to keep company with the Highsmith kids.”
I thought about that. Four kids sneak out and meet at a beach and a few hours later one of them is dead.
I asked Manny if he could think of any connection between what had happened on the beach and the death of Henry Highsmith and the attack on his wife. He couldn’t. I thanked him for his time, collected my children, and headed for the door.
“Talk with Zee about that Olympic idea,” said Manny, as I left. “I think she can make the team.”
“I’ll tell her you mentioned it.”
“Make sure you do. She’s a natural!”
Outside, Diana the Huntress, who was always on the trail of food, had not forgotten our earlier discussion.
“Pa?”
“We’re hungry. Can we have lunch at The Bite? Can we have fried clams?”
“Why not? Get into the truck.”