Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (24 page)

C
rystal, Jellyroll, and I watched them leave from the porch. Hawley had volunteered to take Edith to his parents’ place on the other side of the island. His boat turned right at the mouth of the cove and vanished behind Dog Island. Sheriff Kelso’s, with Earl at the helm, turned left for the mainland to continue. The wakes sluiced with a whispering sound back and forth in the round dark stones along the shore and then fell silent. We were alone again. I was feeling woozy and disoriented. Maybe Crystal was feeling the same, because we stood there for a while staring out across the cove. Maybe Jellyroll felt woozy, too. He sat on his haunches staring out and did not chase the chipmunk.

I brooded about the Jesus people. I tried to imagine them not as a faceless flock in windbreakers, white socks, and plaid polyester peering up at the fungus, but as individuals each with personal hopes and dreams, memories, a childhood. What had they expected when they came here? Roxanne Self had called them pilgrims. But that implied a specific objective. Would it suffice simply to glimpse the face in the lichens? Or did the Savior actually have to show up and make their lives beautiful for their pilgrimage to be fulfilled? I wished I had actually seen the face. I could understand their pain and their anxiety easier than I could their faith. Maybe I would know better what they’d come for if I’d looked on the face.

Crystal had been brooding about Clayton. “Do you think it works that way? The mind. Could Clayton have killed his father
with a hatchet when he was ten and not remember it for the rest of his life?”

I didn’t know.

“And instead of remembering, he starts killing strangers at random with hatchets. Do you think that’s possible?”

“For all I really know, he’s been killing people with hatchets all his life,” I said.

“You don’t really think so, do you?”

“No, I don’t, but it makes me nervous that Roxanne did… Things have gotten complicated around here.”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking of calling Calabash again. Instead of asking him to come here, maybe we’d go there. It’d be hot on Poor Joe Cay in August, but nobody would find us.”

Jellyroll was watching us, looking one to the other, as if understanding every word.

“Do you want to see Calabash?” I asked him.

He loves Calabash. His head pivoted side to side, expecting Calabash’s instantaneous arrival. Expectancy again. It’s not fair of me to do that.

“Artie, I don’t want to keep running.” Crystal stared out with a sad look on her face. “Coming here wasn’t exactly running, it was more like a little vacation. But if we have to start actually running…”

“Yeah.” We would live a shadowy existence in an angular urban landscape. It would rain all the time, gutter grates smoking, rubbish tumbleweeding down dead streets discordant with shrieks and sirens, plastic bags blown against our shins. We’d deal in cash and promises with men holding toothpicks in the corners of their mouths.…But what could we do but run if there really was a determined stalker? I feared the necessity. So did Crystal. Life on the run would not nurture our relationship. I guessed we could kill him. I wondered where Sid Detweiler was.

A rumbling speedboat rounded the point. We heard it before we saw it. This was not a local boat. It even sounded different from the local boats. It was a long, lean Cigarette boat about forty feet long with a fire-engine red hull, a high, sharp bow to sever the waves, and a menacing black wraparound windshield. We couldn’t see the driver, or even if there was one. The boat approached dead slow, at a swimmer’s pace. Crystal, Jellyroll, and I watched motionlessly. Fear of strangers would quickly turn a person into an eccentric hermit.

Someone climbed out from behind the black windshield and stood on the deck. I put the binoculars on him. Dressed completely in black, silk shirt buttoned up around his throat, crease in his black jeans, black pointy cowboy boots with upcurled toes, this guy was as out of place as his boat. Wait, I’d seen him before! Yes, in Micmac, looking down at me from the dock. He’d asked me about Jellyroll. It was just after the murder…

“I think they’re going to hit the sunker,” I said.

“Can you warn them away?”

“Fuck ’em.”

“Now we don’t want to get like that, Artie. Besides, if they sink, we’ll just have to rescue them. I mean, you couldn’t stand up here and watch them drown like rats, could you?”

I wasn’t absolutely certain. Maybe I’d avert my eyes. But still, Crystal had a point. I didn’t want them around even if they weren’t stalkers. I started signaling urgently, waving my arms, to indicate a left turn. Crystal joined in.

The guy in black pointed to us, then leaned down to discuss it with the person at the wheel. At least I assumed that was what he was doing. He completely vanished behind the smoked windshield. But there was no time for talk. If he didn’t turn immediately—The boat swerved hard to the left. They couldn’t have missed the thing by an inch.

The red speedboat made a slow turn near the boathouse and stopped. Jellyroll pricked up his ears. The guy in black stood up
again. “Rocks,” he said to Crystal and me. “Rocks, rocks, rocks. This place is solid rocks, rocks everywhere you turn, the Land of Rocks.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Kempshall Island, right?”

“Most folks from here call it Teal Island,” I said. “Who you lookin’ for?”

“Are there any other houses around here? I mean, I heard people live on this island. In houses.” He had jet-black hair combed straight back, slicked down with some foreign substance. This guy looked like a lounge lizard from Avenue A. “In tepees, I don’t know, yurts,” he said. “Caves. Where do the people
live
around here?”

“Got several houses on the other side. Who you lookin’ for?”

He didn’t answer.

“I pretty much know everybody in the county. Lived here all my life. The wife, too. She’s lived here all her life. Who you lookin’ for? We’re sure to know ’em.”

The boat continued its turn. The guy in black turned his back on us…Who was this fucker! Some media-wise hipster who meant to kill my dog because his career was on the skids and he could use the publicity?

“Rock!” he shouted at the driver. “Don’t hit the rock! Turn, turn! No, the other way!” The boat swerved away from a nonexistent sunker. “Jesus, you about hit that fucking rock head on…No, you did! I’m tellin’ you! I
saw
it, okay. I’m watchin’ my life flash before my eyes!” The guy in black went back under the cover. We watched him nestle into a white Naugahyde bucket seat beside the driver, an elegant, dour woman with bare shoulders and long, black, shiny hair that cascaded over the seat back onto the deck. The engines roared to the pain level and beyond, and the boat tore out of the cove under a rooster tail of white water.

Was that them? “I hope they hit a sunker and drown like rats,” I said.

“What, you know them?”

“No.”

“You mean just because they’re strangers?”

“Why didn’t they say what they wanted?”

The roar of their engines echoed around the hilltops long after they’d disappeared around the point.

“Look at that!” Crystal pointed seaward.

A mountainside of fog was rolling in. Ledges, plateaus, and pinnacles of fog formed on the fore slope and then were swallowed up in the roiling murk that abolished all in its path.

“Jesus,” Crystal muttered.

First the sea, then the Dogs and the rocky points that marked the mouth of the cove vanished from the face of the earth. The Hampton boat on its mooring went monochromatic before it disappeared altogether. On the porch, Crystal and I stepped back instinctively—a thing that big moving that fast, a thing with the power to wipe away geological features, had to arrive with corporeal impact…

After the fog had avalanched over the boathouse and climbed the hill behind, Crystal and I couldn’t see the water’s edge from the porch. We stood speechless. We could hardly see each other. The air was half water. Fat beads of liquid buzzed around on the gentle breeze. Small animals could drown in air this wet. Jellyroll’s nose was going a mile a minute. He’d never seen fog either, not real fog, anyway, not like this. We were wet in minutes, but we stayed and stared into the opaqueness, fascinated and expectant. The phone rang, and we retreated inside.

It would be Shelly calling, I assumed, with word from Clayton in California, but that wasn’t why he called. “Did Sid get you?” he asked without pausing for niceties.

“No.”

“Sid traced the boat. That
Seastar
boat. It’s registered in Boston, all right—to Kevin James.”

“Kevin James,” I mouthed. The connection. Desmond wasn’t here by coincidence. Kevin was there on Pier Twelve when Clayton invited me. Kevin had said Clayton’s island was “one of the world’s beautiful places.” He’d encouraged me to accept the invitation.

“He’s directing the evil high school principal thing, right?” said Shelly.

“…Yeah.”

“What?” Crystal said. She knew it was going to be bad.

I told her. She sagged onto the couch.

That’s how they knew. Kevin told them. They knew Kevin well enough to use his boat, and he told them, maybe only in passing; there would be no reason to keep it secret. I suddenly felt sick and frightened. I tasted meatloaf bile at the back of my throat.

“What’s it mean, Artie?” Shelly asked.

“Shelly, did Sid talk to Kevin?”

“No. He tried. I tried, too. We left messages.”

I tried to think. What did that really mean? Removing fear and any other emotion with the power to deflect us from the literal, what did it mean? Everybody in the business knows everybody else. It could be pure coincidence that Kevin loaned his boat to Dick Desmond and his son, who just happened to be coming up this way. Sure, easy. Stranger coincidences happen every day in New York. Sure. “Where’s Sid now?”

“He’s on his way to you. He’ll be there any time.”

“Good.” What about the fog? “Did you get Clayton in L.A.?”

“I found his place in Santa Monica, left a message. I’m trying to find out where he’s working, if he’s working. He didn’t say, did he?”

“No.”

“Are you okay, Artie?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound okay. What about just getting the fuck out of there? Sid’s got a seaplane somewhere up there. We’ll
get the best seaplane pilot in the region, swoop down, and pull you out, okay?”

“Okay, Shelly. That’s what we’ll do.”

“Also I got an all-points bulletin out on Dick Desmond. People’ll start calling any time now. Then we’ll know better. Okay?”

“Okay, Shelly, thanks.”

“You kiss that dog of mine.”

I promised Shelly we’d call him as soon as Sid arrived. But what do we do until then?

“It doesn’t mean that Dick Desmond and his son are the stalkers,” Crystal said. “It just doesn’t mean that, at least not necessarily.”

“No, it doesn’t. You’re absolutely right.”

“…Just because you and Desmond have a mutual friend with a boat.”

“Yeah.”

We stood silently at the French doors looking out at the nothingness. We couldn’t even see the railings on the porch.

“Scary how quickly it came in,” said Crystal. “Kind of makes you nervous.”

We stared at the water running down the pane of glass nearest to our noses.

“Crystal…?”

“What?”

“Sid’s gun. I was thinking about it.”

“Funny, so was I.”

“Were you thinking about, uh, familiarizing ourselves with it?”

She nodded. “We don’t even know if it’s loaded.”

“I’m gonna go get it, okay?”

“Okay.”

I placed the short black shotgun and the box of shells on the table. We sat down around them as if they were a totem of
empowerment. This was the sort of gun lusted after by crazed paramilitary psychos holed up in stinking hotels wearing Nazi regalia and watching the roaches race across the wall. It was just what I wanted. I picked it up, gripping the snub little handle, avoiding the trigger. The handle was made of plastic. The whole thing except for the barrel was made of plastic. I pointed it vertically, pulled the slide back, and a heavy red shell jumped out, clattered on the table. “It’s loaded.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean it’s now cocked?”

We stared at it. I kept it pointed at the ceiling, wondering. “Maybe we should find out.”

The back door barely cleared the abruptly climbing hillside when full open. Jellyroll squeezed out. Crystal and I stood waiting for him while he peed. He headed off to chase the chipmunk, but the utter absence of visibility stopped him short. He looked back at us, then in the general direction of the woodpile, deciding. He barked once at the chipmunk’s woodpile before he joined us in the doorway. Bangs and explosions don’t bother him, he’s used to them in our neighborhood. Nonetheless, I petted his side and told him it was okay in advance.

I pointed the shotgun at the hillside and pulled the trigger. The gun almost flew from my hands as it discharged its load. Jellyroll froze, so did Crystal. Me, too. The fog swirled around the short, smoking barrel. Our bodies rocked back and forth in the reverberating waves of concussion.

“Christ, look at the hole,” said Crystal.

The sound was still bouncing around the hills as we went to look. There was a hole in the slope you could stick your head in without getting your ears muddy. That’s why it’s so hard to banish guns; they turn the hopeless and the helpless omnipotent. With one of these jewels folded into the crook of your arm, there’s nobody to fuck with your lifestyle. The delusion is easy to cleave to.

“I hope this isn’t like Ibsen,” I said.

“What do you mean Ibsen?”

“Maybe it was Chekhov. One or the other said that if you show a gun in act one, you’ve got to use it in act three.”

“…What act are we in?”

“Good question.”

The phone rang. It was Shelly. “Artie! Artie!”

“What!” My skin crawled with fear when I heard the brittle quaver in his voice.

“I just got a bad call, Artie!”

“Tell me, Shelly!”

“Kevin James! He’s dead! Murdered! In the Boston morgue— they just identified him.”

I told Crystal. Telling took my breath away.