Back in Menemsha, at The Bite, we had the island’s best fried clams for lunch and afterward had ice cream for dessert. It was a proper Vineyard summer meal, and it was shared by others who came to the counter in a steady stream.
Above us, the sun hung high in the blue sky that arced from horizon to horizon, and out beyond the parking lot, the small beach was filled with sunbathers. Beyond them Vineyard Sound glittered over to the Elizabeth Islands, on one of which, long ago, a leper colony had existed. Now that island was a school for troubled boys just a short slide from jail, where they got a last, tough chance to learn to fly right. I admired the people who ran the school but had often wondered how its graduates fared once they got back to their old neighborhoods. Jesus had reportedly observed that the poor would always be among us, and I suspected the same was true of criminals.
One of whom was operational on this side of the sound.
On the way back down-island, my son, who had been patient all morning, spoke.
“Pa?”
“What, Joshua?”
“How come you’re looking in the mirror so much?”
“Oh, just checking. When you drive, you check in all directions so you don’t hit anything and nobody hits you.”
“What, Diana?”
“Are we going to work on the bridge today?”
It was a fair question.
“Sure.”
So I put crime on a back burner and we spent the rest of the afternoon making great progress on the bridge. Tarzan would have been proud of us.
Zee was too, when she came home from the hospital and she and I were admiring our handiwork over martinis on the balcony.
“Another day or two and we’ll be done,” I said. “Then the kids can have their choice of trees: the beech or the oak.”
“It’ll be almost as good as a real jungle. I hope nobody falls out of a tree and breaks something.”
It was a universal and eternal fear of all parents who lived near trees, and one to which I was not immune, although I tried to keep my concerns in check since it was my view that kids had to be allowed to take reasonable chances and to suffer a certain amount of hurt when they fell or ignored warnings. It was, I knew, an old-fashioned idea, but one that I liked better than forbidding them activities that included an element of danger.
I considered telling Zee not to worry, but that advice has never, to my knowledge, kept anyone from worrying; just the opposite, in fact. So I contented myself with pointing out details of the day’s construction and at bedtime was satisfied that no one had fallen out of the trees that day. Parenting is a day-by-day phenomenon.
The next day was Zee’s day off, and I asked her how she’d like to spend it. The answer was: First she’d like to go to the beach, taking along a couple of rods, of course, in case there were any stray bluefish swimming by. Then she wanted to wash her hair. Both the children and I thought those were proper plans, so I loaded the Land Cruiser with beach gear and put rods in their roof racks while Zee packed a cooler with food and drink.
We drove down to Katama, then shifted into four-wheel drive and headed east over Norton Point Beach. On both sides of us the water danced in the sun.
We found a spot on East Beach, about halfway to Wasque, and spread ourselves out. It was a lovely summer day, with a small southwest wind blowing warm air over the sand and sea. While Joshua and Diana tested the water and dug in the sand, Zee and I took turns sunning ourselves on the big bedspread we used as a beach blanket and wandering down the beach, lazily casting for fish that showed no interest in our lures.
When the fish are biting, you have to keep your mind on what you’re doing, but when they’re ignoring you and you’re just casting and reeling in because you like the feel of doing it, you can think of many other things.
I thought about Glen Norton, Gabe Fuller, and Jasper Jernigan.
I believed I knew Glen well enough to exclude him from my list of murder suspects, but I also knew that more than one citizen has been shocked to discover that his mild, helpful, good-natured, churchgoing neighbor is actually a mass murderer with a backyard full of buried bodies. Still, Glen’s expression when he’d uncovered Highsmith’s hand and his shaky demeanor afterward suggested that his shock was real. Of course it was possible that he’d killed Highsmith but that someone else had buried the body where Glen had found it. The scenario was unlikely, but would account for Glen’s reaction. True crime is generally more straightforward than that, however, so for the time being I set Glen to one side of my mental list of suspects.
Jasper Jernigan and Gabe Fuller were other breeds of cat. I considered Jasper.
On the golf course, he had been a pleasant, lighthearted companion, but I’d seen his letters in the paper and they bespoke a temperament capable of deep resentment and towering passion. He identified so closely with golf that he considered an attack on the proposed Pin Oaks course to be an attack on him personally. I knew political, religious, and other ideological zealots who also took any criticism of their beliefs as an assault on them, and whose passions threatened to run high enough to kill. Sports fans were often such people, which is no surprise since “fan” is short for “fanatic.” Many a soccer ref has had to run for his life, and more than one hockey dad has been killed by another as their sons played the game.
I wanted to know more about Jasper, but the person who really interested me was Gabe Fuller, the taciturn man who carried a short-barreled rifle in his golf bag.
As I thought back to those three-plus holes that we’d played, it seemed as clear now as it had then that Gabe was doing double duty as Jasper’s bodyguard and golfing pal. I remembered those eyes constantly looking here then there, ahead then back, into the woods then out on the fairway, always moving; I remembered how he rarely strayed far from Jasper, how he never drove too far from where Jasper’s errant strokes sent his ball.
Wealth and power breed enemies, and Jasper thereby might need a bodyguard, especially taking into consideration his hot-tempered and acid-tongued attacks on the anti-golf crowd. If those letters were typical of his response to other adversaries, I suspected that there might be a lot of people out there who would not weep at the news of Jasper’s demise or who, indeed, might be glad to assist in that consummation.
If so, Gabe was just the man for Jasper: a capable bodyguard who was at the same time a pleasant and capable golf partner.
My time with Jasper and Gabe had been brief, but long enough that I’d gotten the impression that Jasper’s trust in Gabe was near total; Gabe’s loyalty to Jasper, on the other hand, was harder for me to assess, for while Jasper showed his emotions, Gabe’s face had revealed little.
Just how loyal was Gabe? Was he one of those soldiers who would step between his employer and a gunman even as the trigger was being pulled? Was he one who would not reason why, but would ride into the valley of death, sabering the gunners and charging an army while all the world wondered?
And would he go farther? Was he one who would, without hesitation or question, assassinate his master’s enemies, who wouldn’t spare a sigh though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie?
If so, was Jasper so mad at Henry Highsmith that he’d sent Gabe not only to shoot him but to bury him in what Henry might have equated with a pit of excrement, a final insult even after death?
I reached back in my memory and recalled Jasper following the discovery of Highsmith’s body. Glen had been quite distressed, but Jasper had shown much less reaction initially, and had seemed totally collected by the time the police had arrived.
Hmmmm.
Gabe had shown no emotion at all, although he’d assured Glen that he, too, had been rattled. I hadn’t believed him then and I didn’t believe him now.
Another thought: maybe Gabe had killed Highsmith without being ordered to do so, motivated by what he took to be the unstated wishes of his boss, or by a loyal wish to silence an enemy before he became more dangerous. A preemptive strike, as it were; such strikes were, after all, quite popular these days in very high war-making circles, and Gabe might have felt that what was good for the nation was good for Jasper.
Or maybe Gabe had misunderstood some remark Jasper had made. It wouldn’t be the first time a crime had been committed because of a misunderstanding. I thought of an earlier Henry’s four loyal knights and of Becket.
I changed my redheaded Roberts for metal, put my back into a cast, and sent my lure far out into the dancing sea. Maybe there was a stray blue chugging along out there and I’d hit him on the nose. Fishermen spend a good amount of time changing lures, usually to no avail. Sometimes, however, the trick works, and instead of reeling in empty lines, you start to catch fish.
Not this time.
I made another half dozen casts in vain, and walked back to the truck.
“No fish, huh, Pa?”
“No fish, Diana.” I put the rod on the roof rack and got a Sam Adams out of the cooler. It was still morning on Martha’s Vineyard but somewhere the sun was over the yardarm. The beer was cool and good and I once again considered the idea that God is, among other things, a brewer.
I admired Zee as she lay, bikini clad, eyes closed, on the beach blanket, and with my imaginary camera took an imaginary photo of her and stored it away in the mental file that held many other such pictures. Then I finished my beer and took a quick swim as a substitute for a cold shower.
Family-loaded SUVs moved along the beach, and gradually, to the north and south of us, umbrellas went up, blankets and chairs came out, and the water filled with old and young bodies. By noon the beach was lined with worshippers of sun, sand, and water much like ourselves.
Lunch was chicken salad sandwiches, potato chips, and half-sour pickles, with homemade chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Drink was sodas or beer. My children, superior specimens though they might be, had the soft drinks. At home they’d long since had sips of beer and wine upon request, but neither fancied alcohol when sodas were available.
Afterward I lay beside Zee, pleasantly full-bellied and feeling lazy. I took her hand and held it, listening to our children’s voices as they played nearby and feeling Highsmith’s tragedy slip away as I slid into a semi-sleep.
But then, in that sleep, I half dreamed of Highsmith’s killer and wondered if Neptune’s great oceans had washed clean his hands or if those hands had turned the oceans red; if he smiled or groaned during his days; if his murder had murdered his sleep.
I woke up feeling discontent, with sweat covering my body. I had another swim and felt better, and started thinking about the Willets.
In spite of Manny Fonseca’s confidence that Ed Willet couldn’t be a killer, if the reports I’d gotten were true, both Ed and his wife were logical suspects in the shootings of the Highsmiths. They had broken off relations with the Highsmiths, and had forbidden Heather to have any more to do with the Highsmith children. Heather Willet’s drowning had occurred when she had gone off with Gregory and Belinda Highsmith; someone had run Abigail Highsmith off the road shortly after the drowning, and soon after that both Henry and Abigail Highsmith had been shot; Ed Willet owned and practiced with a .22 pistol, the caliber of gun that had been used to shoot both Henry Highsmith and his wife.
The motive would be revenge, with one or both of the Willets blaming the Highsmiths for their daughter’s death in the forbidden company of the Highsmith children. The irrationality of that idea didn’t make it less possible, because murder is often an irrational act triggered by next to nothing: a spilled drink, the last piece of pie, an imagined slight. Cain killed Abel; Smerdyakov committed patricide; Abraham would have killed Isaac as a religious duty. It doesn’t take much to provoke a killing.
Zee’s voice recalled me to the present.
“It’s almost two. I think we’ve had enough sun for the day, and if we leave now there shouldn’t be much of a line at the ferry.”
Her words made me conscious of my heated skin and that the temptation of paradise is to linger in it too long.
We sent the kids into the water for a last swim as we packed up, then wrapped them in their big towels as we drove home. We returned by the Chappy ferry, where, sure enough, the waiting line was short since most people were still at the beach.
Two of the little three-car On Time ferries were crisscrossing between Chappy Point and Edgartown, and sail- and powerboats were going in and out of the harbor through the channel. To our right the beach at the foot of the Edgartown lighthouse was alive with sunbathers, and far out on distant Cape Pogue, the tiny white lighthouse could barely be seen. It was a scene distantly removed from murder.
At home, I chose to be last in the outdoor shower. While the others washed off their salty skins and Zee washed her long black hair, I made a call to Dom Agganis and asked if I could come by in a half hour or so.
Dom said yes, and that Olive had some news for me.