6

I would up heart, were it not like lead.

Moby Dick

It happened just the way Homer had said it would. By eleven-thirty on Monday morning Kitty was free. She hobbled out of the Town and County Building on Broad Street with Homer’s hand on her elbow, her legs and back stiff from the hard bed in the lockup, her skin trying to grow a rind of toughness, a horny carapace, to protect it from the looks on the faces that stared at her. A flash exploded in her eyes as she stepped outside, and Kitty put out one hand as if to ward off a blow. For the first time it dawned on her that she was public property. She dropped the hand into her pocket, which was lumpy with a talisman, the broken shell of the whelk.

In the front seat of Homer’s Scout she fingered the sharp edges of the shell and watched him struggle with the truck’s unfamiliar mechanism, cursing the obscenity gears and the obscenity fools on the sidewalk. Chief Augustus Pike was knocking on the window of the truck. Kitty rolled the window down, and he looked past her and spoke to Homer. “You understand about the dates, Mr. Kelly? The hearing is next Monday, the grand jury probably a week or so after that. And unless I miss my guess, you must be sure to have her back here on the island for trial on September second. Fifty thousand dollars bail is no joke.”

“I understand,” said Kitty. But Chief Pike ignored her and waited for Homer’s reply. The chief was an honest man of action, and he was leery of Kitty. The strange whims and tumultuous passions of errant womankind alarmed and puzzled him. He preferred to deal with her attorney as man to man.

“Well, of course I know it’s no joke,” said Homer angrily.

“I think you’ve got your emergency brake on,” said Chief Pike kindly.

“Well, of course I know I’ve got it on,” snarled Homer. He released the brake and the truck bucked forward, plunged down Broad Street and squealed around the corner.

“Where are we going, now?” shouted Kitty.

“Airport. I’m going to see you safely home to Cambridge. And I want to take a look at that apartment of yours and see what they’ve turned up.”

“Turned up? You mean they will have been there?”

“Oh, sure.”

Kitty thought about the top of her desk, the contents of her drawers, certain boxes of papers and letters and pictures. She looked at the broken shell in her hand. I am like the shell, she thought. Smashed and broken into. But then she ran her fingers over the microscopic honeycomb that coated the inner surface, and smiled with grim vanity. Yes, she was like the shell, broken and exposed, but she was still coded, still secret in some ways and unreadable.

Her car was parked at Logan Airport. Kitty picked out its friendly shape from far away. “Here,” said Homer. They gave me back your keys.” Inside the small car he loomed up gigantically. “Listen. Suppose I asked you what the prosecutor will ask you. ‘At the time of Mrs. Green’s death, were you still in love with her husband?’ What would you say?”

“What would I say?” The car descended into the dirty melancholy of the tunnel under Boston Harbor, and Kitty thought it over. It was easy enough to decide to speak the truth But the trouble was, it got lost in the telling. There it would be flowing forward from the mind, an urgent incoherent mass, carried swiftly into the mouth by the eager breath—but look what happened to it there, on the very brim of expression. It had to be chopped up into words and offered up bite-size, and somehow it was no longer altogether true, but dangerously misshapen, if not actually false. Kitty glanced cautiously at Homer. “I would lie,” she said.

“Well, all right. But do you think you left anything lying around in your apartment that might indicate you still had any feeling for Joe Green?”

“Oh—yes. Yes, I did. A sort of ballad. I’ve been worrying about it. It wasn’t even any good.” Kitty laughed unhappily. “If they’re going to convict me I’d rather the evidence against me scanned.”

Homer laughed too, and Kitty felt again that rude aboriginal power that had comforted her before, as if sheer physical strength could pull and jerk and haul and lift her out of this hole she had fallen into. “You mean you don’t mind being convicted for being a murderer,” said Homer, “as long as nobody calls you a bad poet. Christ, how vain these scribblers are.”

Kitty’s apartment house was a sunny building on Cambridge Street with small rocks set in among the bricks. Her basement room was a funny mixture of heavy old Morgan Memorial furniture and new wicker chairs, with a lot of fire-engine red scattered here and there. It amused her the way it always did, and she was surprised how happy she felt to be back in it again. She went straight to the long table against the wall. “It’s gone,” she said. “That poem.” She opened a drawer. “Picture’s gone too.”

“A picture of Joe Green?”

“Yes. I don’t know what I kept it for. Damn-fool thing to do.”

“Did you have a picture of Helen Green?”

“No.” Kitty’s face brightened. “So how could I have known who that woman was?”

“Oh, they can get around that. Her picture was probably in the Boston Globe. Maybe The New York Times. ‘Bride of rising young novelist.’”

“It was. I saw it in the Globe.”

“There, you see. What else did they get?”

Kitty ran her finger along a shelf. “I think they may have taken one of my books. I had six or seven copies left. I’m not sure exactly how many.”

Homer drew out one copy of Kitty’s book of poetry and stroked the raised letters of the gold prize seal on the glossy purple cover. “Pretty good for a kid like you,” he said. “Joe got one of these prizes too, didn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s right. For his first novel. Oh—look. That’s gone too. My copy. And there was something written on the flyleaf.”

“You mean your own personal copy of his first novel? Humpf. Did you read the second one? The one he wrote on the island?”

“No. The reviews said it was inspired by his wife. It was supposed to be a sort of epithalamium, a celebration of a wedding. I just didn’t ever get around to—well, I didn’t want to read it.”

“I didn’t read it either, matter of fact. Say, you haven’t got a drop of something around this place, have you?”

Kitty took a bottle of bourbon out of the cupboard under the sink and a couple of glasses from a shelf. She banged some ice out of a refrigerator tray. She handed Homer a glass and got some cheese out of the refrigerator. They sat down in her wicker chairs. Solemnly Kitty sliced through the red wax of the cheese with a paring knife, watching the serrated edge bury itself cleanly over and over again in the plump flesh. “Homer,” she said, her voice sepulchral, “are you sure I didn’t do it? Sometimes I wonder if I did it and didn’t know it.”

“Well, you know, Kitty Clark, when I walked into that police station and talked to Pike, I’ll have to admit I wondered what in God’s name had got into that clever young woman whose work Mary and I had been running into lately, here and there. But when I talked to you—well, I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Green, but I’ve decided in my heart and brain that you didn’t do it, if that’s any comfort to you.”

“But unless all those people are lying—Mr. and Mrs. Roper and Arthur Bird and Joe—then it couldn’t have been any of them. They were all up at the top of the lighthouse together the whole time. And they didn’t see another soul.”

“It was dark, don’t forget. For two or three minutes it was almost as dark as a moonless night. That’s a long time. Anything could have happened. And the people up at the top of the lighthouse were further blinded because the light turned on. That little room up there was flooded with light.”

“The light turned on?” said Kitty. “You mean the lighthouse light?”

“Yes. It’s operated by an electric eye, and turns on automatically when the sky gets dark. So naturally at the instant of totality it turned on. The people in the same room with the light had a poor view of the eclipse, because the pupils of their eyes were suddenly so constricted.”

“But I should think a tremendous light like that would have blinded them! Wasn’t it dangerous?”

“Oh, no. There’s a lot of candlepower in the thing, but it’s concentrated by the lens system to throw a narrow beam way out to sea. Up close it doesn’t seem bright. That’s what they tell me.”

“It’s funny I didn’t notice it was on.”

“Well, you were looking the other way. And immediately afterward there was enough light in the sky so the light turned off.”

“Homer,” said Kitty, hit by a sudden stroke of genius. “You don’t suppose she killed herself?”

“Killed herself? Stabbed herself somehow? Well, how did she stab herself and then hide the knife while she was expiring? For God’s sake, girl, don’t cringe like that. What did you say?”

“I said it was the moon.”

“Well,” said Homer gloomily, rolling a piece of red wax in his fingers, “that’s as good an explanation as any of the others that come to mind. By the time I got there yesterday the place was one mess of sand, as if an army of little children had been digging with giant buckets and shovels. But Chief Pike made two things very clear, getting there as quickly as he did in that amphibious vehicle of the Coast Guard’s before the tide came up again. Nobody—nobody walked up out of the water anywhere around that point, because the marks of their feet in the wet sand would have been distinctly visible, and there weren’t any around that whole end of Great Point above the Gauls—that’s what they call that long narrow place where it’s all one beach, you know, that place where the water was rolling over and you got wet. The sand was undisturbed. Except for the car tracks and your little tootsies, naturally. They’ve got pictures of your footprints galloping up. And the other thing Pike said was that Helen’s movements were plain. She came a couple of steps out of the lighthouse and dropped in her tracks. Died almost immediately. Couldn’t have bled for more than four or five minutes before her heart stopped pumping.”

Kitty was sinking deeper and deeper into despair, her head drooping in her hand. Homer looked at her, then thumped his glass down on the table and picked up a quarterly review. “Say,” he said, “isn’t this the one with your thing in it? The one with all the q’s? Yes, here it is—‘Quit me no quits.’ And all those queries and quixoticisms and querulousnesses. That’s the one.”

“Oh, did you like that?” Kitty smiled. “I had fun with all those q’s.” She sat up suddenly. “Two things, Homer. First. I’ve got a lot of my salary saved up, and I can pay you more money anytime. How about right now?”

“Oh, Jesus, no. I’ve been well enough paid already. If I want more, I’ll tell you. For God’s sake, shut up.”

“Well, all right, but I’m not a charity case. I’m going to pay you what’s right and proper. Second. I’m going back to Nantucket. I’ll miss my classes for the rest of the year, but I know Dr. Winter will take over for me, and the university would probably be better off without an embarrassing person like me on its hands anyway.”

“But Jesus Christ, what are you going back there for?”

“I’ve got to find out what really happened to Helen Green.”

“You don’t trust me.” Homer stood up, offended. “My God, you get hired and fired pretty damned fast by some people.”

“No, no, Homer, it isn’t that.” Kitty stood up too and grinned at him. “I just have this feeling that it’s not just a matter of finding blood on things, and so on. If I knew a little more about the island, maybe I could help you.”

“I see. You might discover that the moon makes a habit of falling on Great Point once a week. Okay, girl, I know what you mean. And I’d be grateful for that kind of help. Every police department ought to have an officer in charge of spiritual investigation. Serious deficiency in law enforcement and citizen protection throughout the land. I wish you could stay with the Doves, where I am, but they’ve only got the one spare room. I’m crowded in with old scallop dredges and fishing rods and lobster pots and boat hooks and rubber boots and nautical charts and coils of rope, and sometimes I even expect to feel the tide rising around my bed. But you won’t have any trouble finding a place to stay. It’ll be easy. After all, it’s off season.”