From the hospital I headed to Edgartown. I was remembering how Nate had accosted me and my intrepid band of Marshall Lea Foundation members with a shotgun, and how, when I told him I intended to speak to Sarah about the matter of bringing potential buyers onto the property, he’d sneered and said, “I doubt that.”
Nathan’s response to his mother’s stroke was I doubt that.
Now she was in the ICU, semicomatose, asking for him.
Bastard.
I still had a couple of hours before cocktails on the Jacksons’ balcony, so I followed J.W.’s directions and finally found Summer Street and, near the top of the hill, Edna Paul’s house. It was a pretty white clapboard bungalow surrounded by a chest-high stockade fence to separate its yard from its neighbors’. Most of the other dwellings on Summer Street were larger than Edna Paul’s, but hers was as trim and tidy as any of them.
I parked on the side of the road in front, got out, and went through the gate. An oldish Volvo wagon was parked beside the house, and potted geraniums hung on the porch that spanned the front. The geraniums had grown a bit leggy but were still bravely producing some late blooms.
I walked around the side of the house and peeked into the backyard, where a clothesline was stretched between a couple of beech trees. A skimpy two-piece bathing suit hung on it. It was neon pink.
J.W. had told me that Edna Paul was a retired grammar-school teacher. I wondered if she wore pink bikinis.
I returned to the front of the house, climbed the three steps onto the porch, and rang the bell.
A moment later, the inside door opened, and an angular woman with steely hair and rimless glasses peered at me through the screen. Definitely not the bikini type. “What is it?” she said.
“Mrs. Paul?”
“It’s Miss Paul, young man.”
I smiled. “My name is Brady Coyne. May I talk with you?”
“About what?”
“Your boarder. Molly Wood.”
She pursed her lips, then pushed her glasses up on her nose as if to get a better look at me. “What did you say your name was?”
“Coyne. Brady Coyne.” I took out my wallet and found one of my business cards. I held it up for her. “I’m a lawyer.”
She pushed open the screen door, took the card, and let the door snap shut between us. She squinted at my card, then looked at me. “I know who you are,” she said. “My friends Millie and Roberta told me all about you. How you stood up to that awful Nathan Fairchild. You’re with the Marshall Lea Foundation.” She smiled and pushed open the door. “Please. Come in, come in.”
I went in. “I’m not actually with the Marshall Lea Foundation,” I said. “I represent Sarah Fairchild.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s what I meant.” She took my arm and steered me into her living room. It smelled vaguely of Lysol. “You’re arranging the sale of the Fairchild property to the foundation. How wonderful! That is a beautiful property, and the Marshall Lea Foundation is my favorite cause. I’m delighted to meet you. What about some iced tea?”
“That sounds lovely.”
Edna Paul disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me standing in her living room. It was small and cramped with overstuffed furniture. One entire wall was covered with framed black-and-white photographs. They appeared to be class pictures. Each one depicted a couple dozen children lined up in three rows with a woman standing in the middle of the back row, towering over the kids. The woman was Edna Paul. She had been an angular, no-nonsense young woman, and as the photos progressed through the years, she grew into an angular, no-nonsense school marm. She was smiling in none of the pictures.
There were no other photographs—family or otherwise—in the room.
She came back with two tall glasses of iced tea. “My children,” she said, jerking her chin at the wall of photos that I was looking at. “Forty-two years’ worth of children. Nowadays I walk down the streets of Edgar-town and I run into bald men with potbellies and gray-haired women with lined faces. They stop me and say, ‘Good morning, Miss Paul.’ I’d like to say I recognize all of them, but of course I don’t. I say, ‘My, how you’ve grown.’ And they always tell me I still look the same. I retired three years ago. I wish I hadn’t.” She stared at the photographs for a minute, then shrugged and handed me a glass. “Please sit down, Mr. Coyne.”
I sat on a pillowy armchair with dark floral upholstery. Edna Paul took a wingback chair beside me.
“Miss Paul—”
“Why don’t you call me Edna?”
I smiled. “Fine. Edna. I guess you know that your boarder Molly Wood seems to have disappeared.”
“Well, that awful Mr. Jackson tried to ask me about her, and then a policeman came by asking questions. They didn’t get anything out of me, I’ll tell you. I’m not a gossip.”
I smiled and took a sip of iced tea. “Umm, delicious,” I said. I put the glass on a cardboard coaster on the table beside me. “Gossip?” I said.
She shook her head. “Oh, I could tell you stories, believe me. But as I always told my children, if you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all.”
“Is Mrs. Wood a good tenant?”
Edna tightened her lips. “I would’ve expected a recent widow to live a quieter life, I don’t mind telling you. Oh, she is neat and polite and all, and I suppose she’s responsible at her job. She’s a visiting nurse, you know.”
I nodded.
“I figured, a widow lady, a nurse. Ideal tenant.” She shook her head. “I don’t brook any hanky-panky, Mr. Coyne. Not in this house.”
“Does Mrs. Wood indulge in hanky-panky?”
“Like I said, not in this house. She knows better.” Edna leaned toward me. “She attracts men, Mr. Coyne.”
“She’s an attractive woman,” I said.
She frowned.
“Who are these men, do you know?”
“Oh, I try to keep my nose out of where it doesn’t belong, don’t you know. And they never come into the house. That’s against my rules. Don’t even come to the door to call on her, the way a proper young man ought to. They pull up in front, toot their horn, and she flounces out of here in her little short skirts, all perfumey and … well, you catch my meaning. Sometimes, she goes off to meet them by herself in her own car. Imagine!” She clicked her tongue against her dentures.
“Are they different men?”
“Oh, my, yes. Many different men.”
“But you’ve never met any of them.”
She shook her head.
“Could you describe any of them?”
“Lord, no. I never pay any attention.”
I wondered how she knew they were different men, then. But I let it pass. “What about their cars? Those who come to pick her up, have you noticed what kind of cars they drive?”
“No. I wouldn’t know one car from another anyway.”
“Has Molly ever talked about any of these men?”
“Heavens, no. I’ve made it perfectly clear that I have no interest whatsoever in her, um, private life.”
“Does she ever talk about anything that’s bothering her or worrying her? Does she strike you as nervous or fearful?”
Edna removed her glasses, polished them on a handkerchief, then fitted them back on her ears. “We don’t have those sorts of conversations, Mr. Coyne. The truth is, we don’t have many conversations at all. She works all day and carouses all night, and it seems that she only comes home to change her clothes. She expresses no interest whatsoever in my affairs, and I assure you, I have no interest in hers.” She frowned. “Why are you so interested in Mrs. Wood? Are you one of her young men?”
“Me?” I shook my head. “Oh no. Not me. Sarah Fairchild is my client, as you know. Molly Wood is her nurse. Sarah is quite fond of her, and she’s very upset that Molly no longer takes care of her. Sarah’s concerned about Molly, so …”
“So you’re playing detective, eh?”
“Detective?” I smiled. “Hardly. I’m just trying to get some answers for Sarah. This business with Molly is distracting her from some important matters she needs to think about. The sooner I can put Sarah’s mind to rest about Molly, the sooner we can take care of those other matters.” Matters such as the sale of the Fairchild property to the Marshall Lea Foundation, I was hoping to suggest.
Edna Paul seemed to get my suggestion, because she sat back in her chair and nodded. “I do hope you get your answers, then. You don’t think something’s happened to Mrs. Wood, do you?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I surely don’t know, either. But I haven’t seen hide or hair of her for three days and three nights now.”
“Has she ever done that before?”
“What, not showed up for three days?”
I nodded.
“No. Never before.” She shrugged. “But it’s her life. I’m not her keeper.”
“It’s odd,” I said slowly, “but I have a rather different impression of Molly. She seems like a very nice person. Not wild at all. Sad, actually. I think she misses her husband.”
Edna Paul blinked a couple of times.
“Is she really that wild?” I said.
“I didn’t say she was wild.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I misunderstood.”
Edna looked past my shoulder to the wall of old photos. “I get lonely sometimes,” she said softly. “Sometimes I have unrealistic expectations.”
“You hoped Molly would be your friend?”
Her eyes came back to me. “A companion, perhaps. Mrs. Wood—Molly—she’s a good tenant and, yes, she is a nice person. I suppose she spends many more nights alone up in her room than she does going out.
Sometimes I think I hear her crying up there. And I sit down here wishing she’d come down and talk to me about it. Share with me. And then when she goes out, I feel—I don’t know. Betrayed. Angry.”
“I understand,” I said.
“I do hope she’s all right,” said Edna. “I truly do.”
“Edna,” I said. “I wonder if I might take a peek at Molly’s room.”
She looked at me and frowned. “That Mr. Jackson, he tried to talk me into letting him into her room, and I told him that he had no business in there whatsoever. Then a policeman came around asking a lot of questions. He wanted to look in her room, too. I asked him if he had a search warrant, and he did not but insisted he could get one. I let him go in and look around, but I told him in no uncertain terms that without a warrant he could take nothing away with him. I don’t think he liked that very much, but I know the law, Mr. Coyne. So I suppose I could let you in there. But I can’t let you take anything, you understand.”
“I understand perfectly,” I said.
She led me up a narrow flight of stairs. The second floor consisted of two small bedrooms separated by a bathroom. One of the bedrooms, Edna told me, she used for storage. She herself slept in the back bedroom on the first floor. The room that Molly was renting was small, square, and quite pleasant. A large window looked out on to the street where I had parked, giving her a good lookout for young men arriving in automobiles. A twin-sized bed was pushed against one wall, and a chest of drawers stood against the opposite one. There was a closet with a full-length mirror on the door. Another door opened into the adjacent bathroom.
I went into the room. Edna remained in the doorway, vigilant lest I try to steal something.
A bottle of perfume, a comb and brush, a plastic pin-on plaque that read AMELIA WOOD, RN, and a little jewelry box sat on top of the bureau. I resisted the temptation to look inside the jewelry box or to open the drawers and paw through Molly’s underwear. I figured Edna would peg me as a pervert.
I did open the closet door. It was a small closet full of cheerfully colored blouses, skirts, jerseys, shorts, sweaters, dresses, and pants, along with a couple of white tennis outfits, all neatly aligned on hangers. A pair of matching suitcases sat on the shelf, and several pairs of shoes and sneakers and sandals, along with two tennis rackets, were on the floor. No golf clubs.
I peeked into the bathroom. A toothbrush and tube of Pepsodent lay on the back of the sink, and a black cosmetics bag sat on the shelf under the mirror.
I saw nothing that hinted at what might’ve happened to Molly.
I wandered back into the bedroom. A tattered copy of Sense and Sensibility sat on the table beside the bed. Jane Austen. Sure. Women love Jane Austen. I guess plenty of men do, too, but I’m not one of them.
I picked up the book and flipped it open. It had been inscribed: “For Molly, who has more sense and sensibility than any woman alive, with love from Ethan.” He had dated it “Christmas 1995.”
Ethan, I guessed, was her dead husband, and I felt a pang of sadness at the image of Molly lying in this lonely little room on this island at night, separated by ocean and time and life itself from her husband, reading a book given to her by her beloved Ethan, the memories of Christmases past it must have sparked for her, the fact that Ethan had chosen this book for her, that he had known her intimately enough to know she’d cherish it, that he had written in it, and that he had died in a bed beside her.
As I flipped idly through the book, it fell open to a folded piece of notepaper that might have been serving as her bookmark. I turned my back on Edna Paul, who remained in the doorway watching me, and pretended to gaze out the window as I unfolded the note.
It read: “It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”
The words had been printed in masculine block letters with a black felt-tip pen. The note was undated and unsigned. Not even an initial.
“Break, my heart.” A jilted lover?
“I must hold my tongue.” A jilted secret lover?
“It cannot come to good.” A jilted, secret, unsuitable lover?
The words seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place them. A quote from somewhere.
I thought of slipping the note into my pocket and turning it over to the Edgartown Police. But it occurred to me that this note could turn out to be evidence, and if it did, my filching it could render it inadmissible in court.
So I memorized the words, slipped it back between the pages of Molly’s book, and returned the book to the table.
I turned and smiled at Edna. “It’s a nice room.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
I spread my hands out. “I didn’t take anything.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
I followed her back down the stairs, thanked her for the iced tea, and started for the front door. Then I stopped and said, “Oh, by the way, I noticed a bathing suit on your clothesline. Is that Molly’s?”
She pressed her lips together and frowned for an instant. Then, surprisingly, she smiled. “It certainly isn’t mine.”
I sat in the front seat of Sarah’s Range Rover for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette and gazing up at Molly Wood’s bedroom window. Aside from the interesting note in her book, I had noticed nothing that might suggest what had happened to her.
I figured one thing that had not happened was that she had decided to take an unannounced vacation. There were two suitcases and no empty hangers in the closet. Her treasured copy of Sense and Sensibility, her jewelry box, her cosmetics, and her hairbrush had all been left behind. I figured even on the spur of the moment, no woman would go away for three days without bringing at least some of those items along.
Something else was gnawing at me, too, and I’d pulled out of Summer Street and onto Pease’s Point Way before I realized what it was. Molly’s black nursing bag, the bag I’d seen her carrying the first time I met her at Sarah’s, the bag I assumed went everywhere with her, had not been in her room.
Okay, she probably kept it in her car. Or for all I knew, visiting nurses left their bags at the VNS headquarters when they weren’t out making house calls.
I glanced at my watch. It was a little before five. I had an hour before cocktails on the Jacksons’ balcony.
I found a phone booth beside a gas station, and directory assistance gave me the number for the Visiting Nurse Service. I called it, was told that somebody would be there for another hour, and got directions.
It was in Oak Bluffs right across the street from the high school. It took me fifteen minutes to find the shingled two-story building that housed the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, which included the Visiting Nurse office. Here on the island, I noticed, they called it the Visiting Nurse Service, not Association as they did everywhere else.
When I told the receptionist I was a lawyer representing one of the Visiting Nurse patients, she stared at me for a moment, then buzzed somebody on her intercom.
A moment later, a middle-aged woman wearing a long yellow skirt and a white blouse bustled out from around a corner. She introduced herself as Mrs. Sadler, the intake supervisor.
I told her that I was a lawyer, Sarah Fairchild was my client, and Amelia Wood was Sarah’s nurse. Mrs. Sadler nodded. She didn’t seem at all worried that I might sue her. She steered me into an empty office, closed the door behind us, and said, “So how can I help you, Mr. Coyne? Does Mrs. Fairchild have a complaint about her care?”
“No. Not at all. She’s very fond of Mrs. Wood.”
Mrs. Sadler frowned. “You know—”
“Mrs. Wood has gone missing,” I said. “I know. I wondered if you had any thoughts about that.”
She smiled quickly. “The police asked the same thing. I told them I had no thoughts about it whatsoever, aside from being very concerned, of course. Molly has been with us for only a few months, but she’s always been absolutely reliable. I can’t understand it. She’s a lovely person. It’s very worrisome.”
“When did you first realize something might be wrong?”
“Monday morning at eight o’clock,” she said. “That’s when she was supposed to check in and get her calendar.”
“But she didn’t check in.”
“No. I called her pager at about eight-fifteen, and when another fifteen minutes passed and she didn’t call in, I tried her home. There was no answer. I waited awhile, figuring maybe she’d had car trouble or something and had left her beeper somewhere. Finally, I reassigned some nurses to her schedule.”
“And you never did hear from her?”
Mrs. Sadler shook her head. “I kept trying her all morning. Home, her beeper. I even called her patients’ homes, just to be sure that for some reason she hadn’t done her rounds without checking in.”
“Did you check with all of them?”
She nodded. “She missed them all. I was reluctant to try her emergency number. I didn’t want to upset anybody.”
“Did you finally try it?”
She shook her head. “I intended to. But when I looked in her file, I saw that she’d left the space for an emergency contact blank. That slipped by us, I’m afraid. Someone should’ve noticed that. Look,” she said, “is Mrs. Fairchild unhappy with the new nurse we’ve assigned?”
“Actually,” I said, “Mrs. Fairchild is in the ICU at the hospital.”
Mrs. Sadler nodded. “That’s right. I remember hearing that. How is she?”
“She’s unconscious. She had a stroke.”
She tsk-tsked and shook her head.
“I’m worried about Molly Wood,” I said. “I, um, well, I had a date with her, and she didn’t show up.”
“She’s a very attractive woman.”
“Yes, I agree. And it’s not that I’ve never been stood up by an attractive woman, but it does seem that something’s happened to Molly.”
“How can I help?”
“I don’t know.” I fished out one of my business cards, scratched the Fairchild phone number on the back of it, and gave it to her. “That’s where I’m staying. If you think of something or hear anything, I’d appreciate it if you’d call me.”
She took my card, glanced at both sides of it, and tucked it into her skirt pocket. “The police asked me to do the same thing,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “They’re the important ones.” I gave her my best, saddest smile. “Me, I’m just somebody who cares.”
Mrs. Sandler reached over, touched my hand, and nodded sympathetically. I’d hit a soft spot. “Anything I hear, I’ll call you, I promise,” she said.
I thanked her for her time, and she walked me back out into the reception area. When she held out her hand to me, I took it and said, “By the way. Where do your nurses keep their bags?”
“You mean when they’re not on duty?”
I nodded.
She shrugged. “At home, or perhaps locked in their vehicles. They’re supposed to keep their bags secure. They carry expensive medical equipment in them.”
“What about drugs? Do they carry drugs in those bags?”
“No, no meds. Our nurses routinely administer medication, give shots, and so forth. But the patients have their prescriptions with them.”
“What about syringes?”
She nodded. “The nurses carry a supply in their bags.”
“They don’t leave their bags here, then?”
“Here? In the office?” She shook her head. “No. The nurses are responsible for their bags.”
It was nearly six o’clock when I climbed into the Range Rover. I pointed it back to Edgartown and decided it was time to start thinking about fishing.
Well, first I’d try to give some thought to putting my feet up on J.W.’s balcony railing and sipping one of his martinis and gazing out over the treetops toward the sea.
But all the way over there Molly Wood’s smile kept flashing in my mind, and I could almost hear the tinkle of her laugh in my ear and feel the warmth of her hand and the soft promise of her lips.
* * *
Diana and Joshua greeted me in the driveway when I got to J.W.’s place. They probably figured I’d become a permanent suppertime fixture at their house, and whatever shyness they’d shown me earlier had been replaced with aggressive friendliness. Each of them grabbed one of my hands and dragged me out back to show me all the progress they’d made on their tree house.
I was standing there admiring it when J.W. came around the corner. He held his martini glass aloft. “Started without you.”
“Diana and Josh are pretty good carpenters,” I said.
“Pa helped a little,” said Diana.
“Brady’s going to come up to the balcony now,” said J.W. “We have adult things to discuss.”
I followed J.W. up the stairs to the balcony. Zee was slouched in a chair with her feet up on the railing and a martini glass resting on her belly. Her eyes were closed.
When I took the chair beside her, she looked at me, smiled, and said, “Gonna be some weather tonight.”
“Weather,” in the parlance of those who live on the edge of the sea, means “bad weather.”
“I’ve always admired you native types,” I said. “Living close to the land and sea, intimately attuned to nature and her mysterious ways. I suppose you wet your finger and stick it up in the air, take a deep breath, sniff the air, check out the aches in your joints, and make your predictions.”
“No,” she said, “I watch the news on television. Hurricane Elinore is heading for the Carolina coast. South Beach could be hot.” She glanced at her watch. “High tide’s around ten. I’d like to be there about an hour before that, fish the whole tide.”
“Low tide around four,” said J.W. “All-nighter, huh?”
“Weather’s coming,” said Zee.
He shrugged and nodded, as if that explained it all.
Zee pushed herself up and went down to the kitchen. J.W. plopped himself into her chair. “Molly,” he said. “Looks grim.”
He told me about his conversations with the police and the various other people he’d queried, and I told him about my visit with Edna Paul and the note I’d found in Molly’s copy of Sense and Sensibility. I shut my eyes for a minute, then quoted it for him: “‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.’”
J.W. gazed up at the sky. The stars were beginning to wink on. “I’ve heard that somewhere.”
“I think I have, too,” I said. “But damned if I can place it. From a poem? The lyrics to some song? It’s got that ba-bump-ba -bump beat to it. You could dance to it, you know? What the hell is that? Iambic pentameter?”
J.W. lifted both hands and shrugged. “I should’ve paid better attention in Mrs. Warbuck’s English class.” He stared off toward the salt pond, where darkness was gathering. “That note was probably written by some admirer, huh?”
“I dunno. Maybe it was from Ethan. Her husband, I’m guessing, who gave her the book.”
He shook his head. “‘It cannot come to good’? Doesn’t sound like something a loving husband would write.” He frowned for a minute, then suddenly he slapped the arm of his chair and stood up. “Wait here.”
J.W. disappeared down the stairs, and a few minutes later he came back lugging a book about the size of an unabridged dictionary. He sat down and opened it. I craned my neck and read the title. The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
“I figured you were more the Captain Marvel type,” I said.
“Wile E. Coyote is my favorite,” he muttered. “Now shut up.”
I lit a cigarette and shut up, and a few minutes later J.W. snapped his fingers. “Got it. ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.’” He poked my arm. “That’s what you said, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Hamlet, act one, scene two,” said J.W. “The poor prince is all upset because his father the king just died and his mother the queen is screwing his uncle. He’s really pissed at both of them. He thinks it’s incestuous, and he thinks his mother is amoral and his uncle is just using her. This quote comes at the end of a soliloquy. Sort of a foreshadowing of all the bad things that will happen in the rest of the play.”
“So what do you make of it?” I said.
“We figure out who wrote it, we can ask him.” He shut the book and put it on the table. Then he picked up the martini pitcher and topped off both our glasses. “So did you notice anything else?”
“Something I didn’t notice,” I said. “Molly’s bag.”
“What bag?”
“Her nurse’s bag. She had it the first time I met her at Sarah’s. It wasn’t anywhere in her room at Edna’s, and it wasn’t at the VNS headquarters. Was it in her car, did you notice?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see it. The cops didn’t mention finding anything but that golf glove. It might’ve been in the trunk, I guess. Cops can’t be counted on to tell you everything.”
“Can you check on it?”
“I guess so. You think it’s relevant?”
“Could be. The woman at the Visiting Nurse place said they keep syringes in those bags.”
“Yeah? What about drugs?”
“No, the patients have their own drugs. But the nurses sometimes do the injections.”
“So you’re thinking … ?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m thinking. Just, if the bag’s missing, where the hell is it?”
“A motive to hurt her?” said J.W. “Someone thinks she’s got drugs in it, whacks her to steal it?”
“Or maybe just for the syringes,” I said.
“Hmm,” said J.W. “I can see mugging her, maybe. Giving her a shove, grabbing the bag, running away. But Molly’s been missing for three days.”
“Guy sees her getting into her car. Or out of it. Sees the bag, tries to snatch it, she resists, he panics, hits her or … or stabs her or something …”
“Some random guy,” said J.W. “Hurts her worse than he meant to.”
“Could be, right? You got any cokeheads on the island?”
He laughed. “You kidding?”
“Guys willing to hurt people to get hold of some narcotics?”
“Guys and gals as well,” he said.
“Pardon my political incorrectness.”
“Most offensive,” he said with a grin. “Shocking, in fact.”
After dinner, I helped J.W. clean up the kitchen while Zee read stories to the kids. I washed and he dried and put things away, and while we worked he told me about all the people he’d been interviewing. The golf glove they’d found in Molly’s car had led him to Eliza Fairchild’s two lapdogs, Luis Martinez and Philip Fredrickson, both of whom worked for the company that manufactured the glove, which also happened to be a major backer of the Isle of Dreams Corporation, which wanted to buy Sarah’s property.
“So what’s the connection?” I said. “I mean, it could be some jealous-lover thing, but Molly didn’t even play golf, so I don’t see how it could connect to the business end.”
J.W. shook his head. “I don’t know. Those two were all over Eliza, you said.”
I nodded. “You’re thinking Martinez and Fredrickson had ulterior motives? You’re thinking they were pawing Eliza because they were looking for information?”
“Most likely they were pawing Eliza because Eliza is eminently pawable. Still …”
“But it could be all about money,” I said, “and they were using Eliza. And you’re thinking they could’ve also been using Molly.”
J.W. shrugged. “Suppose Sarah confided something to Molly. You said the two of them were very close.”
“Humph,” I said. “Sarah didn’t confide anything worth killing about to me.”
He looked sideways at me. “You sure?”
I shrugged. “Good question, I guess. So you think whatever happened to Molly has something to do with the Fairchild property?”
He shrugged. “All I think is that I don’t know what to think, and I’m trying to keep an open and creative mind about it.”
“If that is what happened,” I said, “then whoever did whatever they did to Molly would most likely also go after somebody else they figured Sarah might confide in, huh?”
He nodded. “If that’s what this is all about.”
“Someone like Sarah’s lawyer.”
He shrugged.
“You suggesting that I ought to pretend I know something, set myself up as some kind of decoy, try to smoke out the bad guys?” I said.
“What, and endanger yourself?” J.W. held up both hands. “I am offended. I am your friend. I would never suggest that you endanger yourself.”
“You already did,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I think you did that all by yourself.”
“Well,” I said, “if I did that and nothing happened, it would probably mean that what happened to Molly was a jealous-lover thing rather than a money thing or a golf thing. That would narrow it down.”
“It would indeed,” said J.W.
“On the other hand,” I said, “if something did happen …”
“Right,” he said. “You gotta think about that.”
By the time Zee and I got to South Beach, a cloud bank had blown in. It obscured the stars and the moon, and the night was so black and moist that even a landlubber such as I could smell the storm in the air.
We cast blindly through the thick air into the dark water that I knew was in front of me only by the sound of the surf out there somewhere and the soft lapping of the waves at my feet. Nothing happened for a long time, but Zee and I kept casting. She stood so close beside me that we could talk conversationally, and I could hear the whirr of line spinning off her reel and the little clank when she engaged the bail on her reel. But the darkness was so enveloping that I couldn’t see her. She kept reminding me that the ocean is always changing, that wind and tide keep the water in constant motion, and that bluefish and stripers never stop moving in their insatiable quest for food. The next cast could always be the one that intercepted a Derby winner.
Fishing in the ocean at night is an act of blind faith—or blind folly.
Sometime after we’d been there for a few hours, the breeze shifted direction. It felt warmer on my face, and it tasted damper, and it became stronger.
Within minutes after I first noticed the wind shift, I heard Zee grunt.
“Fish?” I said.
“Um. Good one.”
I reeled in and fished out my flashlight in time to see Zee backing a very large striped bass up onto the beach.
“Keeper?”
She knelt beside it and measured it against some markings on her rod. “Oh, yeah,” she whispered. “Thirty-seven inches. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho. Derby winner, here we go.”
She lugged the big fish up to her Jeep, and I returned to my casting with renewed enthusiasm.
A few casts later, I felt a hard pull. But I failed to hook the fish.
Zee returned.
“I had a hit,” I said.
“They’ve arrived,” she said. “Time to get serious.”
And for the rest of the night—I had no idea how many hours passed—we caught fish. We landed eight or ten nice stripers apiece, though none of them matched Zee’s thirty-seven-incher and none of mine was a keeper, and we caught about as many bluefish. I kept a blue that Zee guessed would weigh ten pounds, and she kept all of hers, including one about the same size as mine.
First light came so gradually it was barely noticeable. There was no burst of light on the horizon, because the horizon was packed with heavy clouds. It was, rather, a growing awareness that the sky was a bit less dark than the water, and that I could make out Zee’s silhouette beside me, and that on both sides of us up and down the beach there were other silhouettes casting into the sea.
We quit a little after seven-thirty. My shoulder ached and my poor, sleep-deprived head felt like an overblown balloon, and as we drove to Derby headquarters to weigh in our fish, I realized that I’d spent the entire night without thinking a single thought of Molly Wood or Sarah Fairchild or my law practice. My mind had registered nothing except the sea and the sky and the air and the rhythms of fishing.
Anyone who doesn’t fish could never understand.