John Skye’s place was off the Edgartown–West Tisbury road. He and his wife, Mattie, and their twin daughters summered there when they weren’t summering in southwest Colorado, on his old family ranch near Durango. I closed down their island farm in the fall, looked after it during the winter, and opened it up again in the spring, making whatever minor repairs were needed, turning on the water, raking the lawns, airing the place out, and laying in basic supplies. Over the years, Zee and I had gotten quite close to John and Mattie.
John taught at Weststock College, north of Boston, during the winter. His current literary project was the writing of a definitive book on swordsmanship and fencing, a subject that had taken his fancy far back in his undergraduate days when he’d been a three-weapon man. His battered collegiate saber, foil, and épée were now triangulated behind his rusty mask on a wall of his library, my favorite room in his old farmhouse.
As I drove into John’s yard I could see the twins, Jill and Jen, riding past the barn and corrals, headed for the bridle path in the woods beyond their far fence. They were now college women, but had been horse lovers since childhood. There has been a lot written about the love of girls for horses, but the love is a lot more certain than the arguments explaining it. Equine power, beauty, size, and speed, combined with female sexuality, are elements in most of the theories, and I was not about to argue. What I knew for certain was that an amazing percentage of women and girls loved horses. My own Diana was already showing signs of such affection, in fact. If there was a Tarzan and the Horse Woman movie, she’d probably want to watch it every day.
The twins recognized the old Land Cruiser and waved but didn’t stop. Why should they? They could see me anytime.
I parked in front of the house and checked things out. All seemed well and as I walked to the door, Mattie came around the corner of the house, pulling off gardening gloves. She smiled, glanced at the truck, and gave me a kiss.
“Where’s Zee?”
“At home with the kids. Is John in? I’d like to talk with him.”
“I keep telling him that on a day like this he should be outside getting some exercise, but instead he’s in the library staring at his computer, doing research for that book of his.” She became conspiratorial. “Do me a favor and take him for a walk while you talk. Can you do that?”
“I can try.”
John, in fact, was ready for a walk. “You could spend forever on the damned Internet! Ruin your eyes! I can use a break. Let me get my stick.”
He found a floppy hat and the crooked walking stick he favored when he strolled the island’s many trails, and we set out, walking in the direction his daughters had taken earlier.
“They used to call a walk like this a constitutional,” he said. “Maybe they still do. Good for what ails you, whatever it’s called.”
“How’s the book coming?”
“The research is fun. I’m still trying to outline the book itself. People have been using swords for war and sport for a long time, so there’s a lot of information and I need to organize it in a way that makes it easy to get at. I hate these damned tomes that have information that you can’t find without a research assistant.”
“I thought the first requirement of scholarship was the love of drudgery.”
He threw me a smile. “Well, there’s something to that. Digging around in dusty old boxes and books has a certain appeal. But I don’t see any point in writing a definitive work that’s hard to read if I can write one that’s easy.”
“So it’s still going to be the definitive work, eh?”
“Absolutely.”
John had actually already written one definitive work: a new annotated translation of Gawain and the Green Knight. It hadn’t earned him much money, but it had been well received in the learned journals. What he really wanted, he said, was for people to read the wonderful poem, but it was looking increasingly doubtful that even his fine translation was going to lead thousands of new readers into the delights of Arthurian romance.
So things go in the academic writing game.
We passed through the gate that divided his land from the bridle path that led through the forest beyond. Above us, thin white clouds were floating east across a pale blue sky and at our feet were the tracks of the twins’ horses.
“Fine day,” said John. “What brings you here when you could just as easily be fishing? Come to think of it, why am I here when I could just as easily be fishing?”
“Mattie might suggest that you could as easily be doing a little weeding in the garden.”
“She’s probably right, but one of the advantages of being an official intellectual is that we get credit for just thinking about things; we don’t actually have to do them. I’ve offered that argument to Mattie a number of times over the years when she points out that there’s work to be done.”
“And how does she take it?”
“Not well at all, I must admit. But you’re not here to discuss escaping from chores.”
“No. A while back you said something about Henry Highsmith being married to a Hatter, and that the Hatters were famous for being wacky. I’d like to hear more about that.”
“Are you involved in that case? I thought you promised Zee to stay out of trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble.”
“I know you had that little wrestling match with Henry just days before he was killed, and that you were one of the people who found the body. And now you’re nosing around trying to find out who killed him. If you’re not in trouble, it sounds like you’re trying to be.”
“Some people think I did him in. I didn’t, but I’d like to prove it.”
“Do you really care what people think?”
“Not as much as some people, but I think that ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind’ idea is a pretty good one. Besides, I have a wife and kids who might catch grief because of what people think about me. If I was a hermit, things might be different.”
He grunted assent. “Donne was right about none of us being islands. So you want to know something about the Highsmiths that might point you to whoever killed him and shot her, eh? Why don’t you tell me what you know, so I don’t cover the same ground all over again.”
So I did that, telling him again what had happened in the fish market and then what had happened on the golf course, and what I’d done since: where I’d gone and whom I’d seen and what I’d heard and read. As I spoke, I tried to listen to what I was saying as if the words were coming from someone I didn’t know and concerned a subject about which I knew little or nothing. I tried to detect false notes, errant reasoning, confusions between facts and guesswork, between truth and desire, between conviction and suspicion.
John kept silent and when I was done he said, “You told me that you went online and looked up the Highsmiths. My impression is that you paid more attention to Henry than to Abigail. Is that right?”
I thought back. “Yes. I was looking for anything that might suggest that he was a controversial character who could have enemies. Academic ones, maybe, or some ongoing feud with some person or group. But I didn’t find anything. When I looked at Abigail’s entry, I didn’t see anything there, either. But you say she was a Hatter. What are you getting at?”
He waved his crooked walking stick. “The Highsmiths are both well known in the academic world. Henry wasn’t the first of his people to go to Harvard, but his grandfather and father were businessmen, not scholars. Henry was the first of his family to make his name in university circles. Henry has—had—the reputation of being a brilliant guy who lived a very conservative and traditional private life, who taught tough, very traditional classes, but who supported liberal causes.”
“Like opposing another golf course on the Vineyard, and advocating bicycles instead of SUVs.”
“Like that. A personal and professional conservative but a public liberal. His critics might have said he should make up his mind, but he didn’t need to. His father and grandfather were the same way. It was in the blood. In any case, there was nothing that I know about Henry Highsmith that made him a logical target for murder.” John batted a small rock off the bridle path, using his stick as a golf club.
“I figure that a golf zealot might have done it.”
He nodded. “Zealot is the key word there. Fanatics don’t need logical reasons to do what they do. Maybe a golf fanatic did shoot him then bury him in the place he’d have most hated being buried. It’s crazy, but it’s possible. Did you ever meet Abigail Highsmith?”
“No.”
“I’ve seen her at a convention or two. An astonishingly beautiful woman. One of those people who seems to walk on air, with her feet not quite touching the ground. A woman you might be afraid to touch for fear that she was made of mist and your hand would go right through.” He glanced at me. “She looks like a faery’s child.”
I said nothing, but found myself again seeing Belinda Highsmith, holding tight to her brother’s arm and gazing at me with those haunting eyes and that Saint Anne smile.
“Of course,” said John, “Abigail is actually anything but ethereal. She’s a very strong, very physically fit woman, very bright, very ambitious, very driven. She’s personable and can be charming, but she runs a tight ship.”
“As her husband did.”
“Maybe that was one of the attractions between them. But as alike as she and Henry were, they were different in one respect. Do you know anything about the Mad Hatters?”
“I know about the one in Alice, and I’ve read that real hatters used to go mad because of the mercury in the solutions they used to make felt hats.”
“This is a different family of Hatters. There’s some speculation that maybe some early members of the family actually were in the hat business, but the generations that I know about were all in the literary-academic-scholarship professions. University professors, publishers, deep thinkers, and the like.”
A little door opened in my memory. “I remember now reading that Abigail Highsmith was Abigail Hatter when she met Henry at Harvard.”
“Right you are. Abigail was indeed a Hatter, and she was far from the first in her family to attend The World’s Greatest University. Her ancestors had been at Harvard and Radcliffe for generations. They were famous for their brilliance but . . .” He swung at another pebble and bounced it only a few feeble feet. He advanced upon it and swung again, this time driving it into the trees. “Bogie. Drat. Where was I? Oh, yes . . . They were brilliant but they were also mad as March hares. Not all of them, of course, but so many that they became known as the Mad Hatters. If you hired a Hatter, you couldn’t be sure whether you were getting a genius or a potential opium addict or duelist or babbling idiot. Hatters could be violent or the fanatic protectors of ticks and toads. Some of them were accused of having sexual relations with their dogs and horses, others attacked their dearest friends with sticks and swords and pistols; some of them went to jail, others went into mental hospitals and never came out.
“Of course, most of them weren’t strange in any way but were famous lecturers or produced wonderful publications. Sometimes a whole generation would pass without producing a single Mad Hatter. But then, just when you were beginning to relax, Professor Hatter would run naked across the college green waving a cavalry saber and chasing the dean, or would be found crouched under a rosebush babbling that the Martians had come to take him away.” John looked at me. “There are several Hatters, most of them apparently very sane, at work as we speak at respectable jobs at major universities and publishing houses and elsewhere. Abigail Highsmith is one of them.”
“Do you think the Hatters’ madness has something to do with the shootings?”
“I have no idea,” said John. “But I think it’s something you should consider. You’ve been spending most of your time trying to discover a logical suspect in the case, someone who had a strong reason to kill the Highsmiths. You’ve also given thought to the possibility that a fanatic of some kind might be responsible, a fanatic golfer, for instance. Well, even a fanatic usually has a reason for his behavior, no matter how bizarre that reason might seem to someone else; but if your killer is a madman, he doesn’t need a reason. All he needs is an impulse.” He glanced at me. “The lawyers call it temporary insanity and they can usually find a psychologist who’ll testify to it under oath.”
“Whoever is behind these shootings had a purpose,” I said, “and he remembered it long enough to shoot two people a few days apart. It wasn’t a momentary impulse.”
John shrugged. “Even madmen sometimes have their reasons.” He gestured ahead with his stick. “Beware the fresh horse manure, J.W., or you’ll be cleaning your sandals before you get back to solving this crime.”