Deadly Nightshade (10 page)

Victoria got to her feet and checked the soil in the philodendron in the west window.

“I'll water it.” Elizabeth filled the teapot and watered the plants until they dripped onto the floor.

“Would you please move my pocketbook?” Victoria said.

“Sorry.” Elizabeth took a paper towel out of her pocket and wiped the water spots off Victoria's leather pocketbook and put it on the table.

“Then Winthrop stopped by after work, had a cup of coffee and a muffin. Angelo joined us. Then Junior Norton.”

“How weird.” Elizabeth took the teapot back into the kitchen and put it on the counter next to the stove. “Do you have everything we need on the list? Bananas. We always need them.”

When Victoria finished the list, they went out through the entry to the car. A long shelf in the entryway was covered with treasures generations of children had brought back from the beach. Victoria took her wide-brimmed straw hat from a nail next to the windows. The black-eyed Susans she had stuck in the ribbon hatband the day before had dried to brown crisps. She tossed them into the garden at the top of the steps, where the well used to be.

“Maybe they'll seed themselves. They'd be pretty against the shingles.”

The convertible's top was down, and a brown leaf had drifted from the Norway maple onto the seat. Elizabeth shook out the towel seat covers, and then Victoria got in and slammed her door shut.

Elizabeth backed the car out of the spot under the tree and headed out the driveway, past the iris and peony border they had not finished weeding. Brown pointed tips of the iris leaves marked the close of the dry summer. A vee of Canada geese flew overhead. They passed the west meadow with its ancient lilacs, so old and so large, they were more trees than shrubs.

They drove under the ailanthus tree Victoria's grandfather had brought back from China in a pot 150 years ago. “Tree of Heaven,” he'd called it. Every year, the tree produced hundreds of offspring, and when Elizabeth and her sister were children, her grandfather would pay them a penny for each seedling they uprooted.

“With the president about to visit, traffic will be awful in Vineyard Haven.” Elizabeth checked the road to the left. A van with a dish antenna on its roof was coming toward them.

“They're going much too fast.” Victoria watched the van as it disappeared down the small hill to their right. “Ever since they widened the road, it's been like a speedway.”

“CBS News,” Elizabeth said. The van left a stream of dust swirling in its wake.

“When is he due?” Victoria tied her hat ribbons under her chin as the brim of her hat flopped in the breeze from the van.

“Next week, I think.” Elizabeth pulled into the road and turned left. “The Oak Bluffs Harbor is in a dither.” They passed the police station, the small shingled building that had once been a one-room school. Victoria waved at Junior, who grinned back. They passed the old mill on the left, now the home of the garden club, the mill pond across the road from it.

“The Coast Guard came into the harbor to check out places to keep their cutters,” Elizabeth said.

“Cutters! Imagine that,” Victoria said.

“They're bringing in two cutters. A state police boat came in yesterday. The marine conservation officer will be in the harbor the whole time he's here. The Secret Service are all over the place, dressed the way they think Vineyarders ought to look, thinking they'll blend in, only they've forgotten to take off the price tags. They all have microphones in their lapels.”

“Why do they need all that security in the harbor? He's not staying in Oak Bluffs, is he?” Victoria put her hand on top of her hat as Elizabeth turned right past the mill pond and the breeze eddied from another direction.

“He's staying in Edgartown. But I guess they need to be ready for anything, from a plane crash to a fishing trip.”

“That poor man. What a life, having someone watching you all the time.”

“Hmm,” Elizabeth said. “Yeah.”

The siren whooped once as the ambulance backed up to the hospital entrance, its beeper warning anyone behind it. The EMT in the passenger seat opened her door, dashed around to the back of the vehicle, and yanked open the doors.

“Is he still with us?” she said to the technician inside, who was sitting next to a stretcher with a figure laid out on it like a corpse, hands folded over a large belly.

“He's still breathing.” He unstrapped the stretcher from the ambulance floor. “Can you hear me, sir?” There was a moan from the stretcher. “It's okay, sir. We're at the hospital.”

A hospital tech flung the emergency room doors open as the EMTs wheeled the stretcher with the limp figure out of the ambulance and hurried him inside.

A small gray-haired man in a pink-and-blue-plaid shirt and open white coat came from behind the admitting desk, where he'd been filling out paperwork. He took a pair of glasses from his pocket, put them on, and inspected the man on the stretcher.

“Damned if it's not you, Meatloaf,” he said. I told you this was going to happen if you didn't stop stuffing yourself.”

Meatloaf moaned, eyes slits in his puffy face.

The doctor too his glasses off and put them back in the pocket of his lab coat. “Bring him in here. Might be his heart.”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Erickson,” the tech said.

Dr. Erickson gestured to another tech. “Get the portable cardio machine, stat.” While the techs rushed off, Dr. Erickson unveiled Meatloaf, peeling off the light blanket the EMTs had placed over him, unzipping his windbreaker, unbuttoning his shirt, lifting up his undershirt to expose an expanse of pink belly with a smattering oi hairy curls.

“If it didn't get you this time, it will the next,” Dr. Erickson said unsympathetically. He slapped the side of Meatloaf's belly, and Meatloaf moaned.

A tech wheeled in the portable cardiograph machine and two techs, a nurse, and Dr. Erickson attached the wires to Meatloaf, first rubbing on splotches of jelly at each point where the wires were to be attached. Meatloaf shifted slightly, and the stretcher creaked.

“Don't move,” Dr. Erickson ordered.

Meatloaf made bubbling noises through his pursed lips. His skin was a grayish green. His face sagged like a day-old balloon.

“Start 'er up.” Dr. Erickson motioned like a conductor, and the techs switched on the machine.

“Odd.” Dr. Erickson, his glasses on the end of his nose, held up one end of the paper, which showed regular, even peaks and valleys. “Curiouser than hell.”

“Indigestion?” Noreen said. “Indigestion?” She had pulled her rusted red Volvo up to the emergency entrance of the hospital, where Victoria was waiting, her string bag of poetry books in one hand, her broad-brimmed straw hat in the other.

“That's what I heard as I was going through the emergency room.” Victoria set her books on the floor of Noreen's car and swiveled herself in.

Noreen waited until Victoria was settled. “I heard on the scanner they were stopping at Meatloaf's place. I figured Domingo had jinxed him.”

As Noreen pulled away from the grass strip in the emergency entrance's parking lot, Victoria indicated a lemon yellow pickup truck. “That's the new surgeon's car, a 1956 Jeep.”

Noreen looked it it. “That's the year he was born.”

“He's younger man most of my grandchildren.” Victoria shook her head. “It's amazing what children can do these days.”

Noreen pulled out of the parking lot and waited for a string of cars to pass before she turned onto the main road. On their right, they could glimpse salt marsh, before trees closed in and the road veered away from the water. On their left, stone walls and fences had been moved back from the road to make way for the new bicycle path, and the gray lichen-covered sides of the stones no longer lined up the way they had for a century or more.

“I suppose the road by your house was dirt when you were a girl.” Noreen braked at the stop sign by the fire department.

“It was sandy, with wagon ruts on either side of a high center.” Victoria looked in the side mirror, where the road spun out behind them. “One night, a boy from Edgartown who was courting one of my sisters, and my cousin Leonard from West Tisbury, who was courting an Edgartown girl, both fell asleep on the way home,” she continued. “When their horses met at Deep Bottom, they stopped, nose-to-nose. The boys slept on.”

Noreen laughed. “Imagine that happening today.” She waited for cars coming from her left, then turned right. “It must have taken a couple of hours to go the eight miles or so from Edgartown to West Tisbury.”

“Now we get in a car and think nothing of driving from one end of the Island to the other. We used to go to Oak Bluffs two or three times a year, a great occasion. Now, Elizabeth commutes, drives there every day.”

“Domingo told me Liz Tate accused him of harassing her niece, one of the dock attendants.”

“Domingo's too refined,” Victoria said.

“Domingo, my husband?” Noreen turned to Victoria in astonishment. She swerved and a car horn honked. She moved back to her side of the road. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“He has such courtly manners,” Victoria continued.

Noreen raised her eyebrows. “Are we talking about the same person?” She sneaked a quick look at Victoria.

“And he knows so much about poetry.” Victoria looked straight ahead, her nose lifted. “He appreciates it. Not many people do these days.” She moved slightly in her seat.

“I'll give you that.” Noreen turned into her drive. “Domingo likes Elizabethan poetry because the guys who wrote it were sneaky, plotting, and conniving, and wrote in code.”

Noreen stepped outside the car and leaned in through the driver's side to talk to Victoria. “He identifies with that shit. Excuse me, Mrs. Trumbull.” She opened the back door to take out the groceries. “Come in and have a cup of coffee.”

Victoria carried one of Noreen's bags of groceries into the house and dropped it onto the couch. She sat in the wicker armchair in front of the glass-topped table while Noreen brought in the rest. Sunlight filled the large, sprawling room. At one end, opposite the table, a wall of mirrors reflected green plants and sunlight, and the couch with Domingo's harpoons above it. Afternoon light poured through two skylights on either side of a brick chimney behind a large black wood-burning stove.

Noreen stepped up into the kitchen, returned with two mugs of coffee, and sat across from Victoria. Sunlight filtering through the plant-filled window lit up Victoria's face, made her wrinkles stand out in strong relief, hummocks and gullies of time. Her eagle's beak of a nose cast a long shadow on her cheek. Her eyelids drooped over her bright brown eyes. She put a knobby hand up to her face to brush back a loose strand of hair that waved naturally around her face in a white halo.

“You and Domingo have a thing going with that poetry.” Noreen stirred her coffee. “If I didn't know my husband pretty well, I'd worry about you two.”

Victoria looked down modestly. “The best thing about getting old,” she said, “is that you can flirt with the men and their wives don't mind.”

Noreen sipped her coffee and watched Victoria's face. “I'm not so sure about that, Mrs. Trumbull.”

A car pulled into the drive. Noreen pushed the plants aside and looked out.

“Elizabeth. She's early. Domingo must have gone softheaded.” The white Rolls-Royce pulled in next to Elizabeth's car. “And here he is. Wonder who they left in charge?”

Elizabeth pushed the sliding door aside, came in, and dropped onto the couch.

“What a day!”

“Domingo giving you a hard time?” Noreen poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her as Domingo came into the room.

“Thanks.” Elizabeth took the cup and sniffed the fragrance. “No, it's not so much Domingo, for a wonder.” Domingo rolled his eyes. “It's the dock attendants, the treasurer, the selectmen, the Harbor Advisory Committee. The harbor is busy, but that's okay. It's just the whole atmosphere.”

“Did you enter the harbor receipts you were worried about into the computer?” Victoria asked Domingo.

“All done, sweetheart.”

“Except for a bunch we can't read,” Elizabeth said. “We've got enough entered so Domingo can fill out the paperwork and get that cash to the treasurer.”

“You mean,
I
can fill out the paperwork.” Noreen stepped down from the kitchen. “I'm the one he's going to get to do it.”

“You heard what Howland's code word is, didn't you?” Elizabeth looked up at Noreen.

“I'm not sure I want to know.”

“It's your nickname in Spanish.”

“He calls me 'woman' when he thinks he's being cute. What is it, '
mujer
'?” She tugged on a strand of Domingo's hair.

“Ouch!” he said. “You know I love you, honey.”

“You're full of shit.” Noreen gave him a swat with the back of her hand.

“At least one good thing happened today,” Elizabeth said. “Meatloaf Staples didn't show up.” She kicked off her shoes and wriggled her toes in the soft carpet.

“You heard he was taken to the emergency room?” Noreen said. “Suspected heart attack.”

“No!” Elizabeth sat up.

“It was indigestion,” Victoria said.

“Shucks.” Elizabeth leaned back against the couch cushions again. “Since Allison's aunt filed the complaint against Domingo, the dock attendants are acting surlier than usual. Domingo walks by and they put on this big act of being terrified.”

“They ought to be terrified oi him,” Noreen said.

Elizabeth said, “I don't see why Domingo can't fire all of them. We're trying to institute controls on money transactions, and the kids lost one of the receipt books, fifty numbers' worth. That could easily translate to five thousand dollars.”

“How can you lose a receipt book? They're not exactly small.” Noreen picked a yellowed leaf off a plant in the window.

“We designed them so you couldn't slip the book in your pocket and take it home by mistake,” Elizabeth said. “I don't think you do lose them.”

“Here he comes, Mr. America!” one of the lunchtime regulars at the corner table in the ArtCliff Diner sang out as Meatloaf lumbered through the door. The diner was on Beach Road, across from the Mobil Mart and down the road from the ship-ward.