First Light (24 page)

I nodded. “What can I do?”

He let out a big sigh. “Wish I knew,” he said. “All I know is, Horowitz said you were pretty good at snooping and you knew how to cooperate with police officers. Jackson's a pretty good snooper, too, and he knows everybody down here, though he's not that good at cooperating. I guess all I wanted to say to you was, go ahead, snoop your asses off, both of you. You come up with any bright ideas—even a dim idea would be okay—you share them with me.” He cocked his head. “Got any?”

“Any what?”

“Ideas.”

I held up my hands, palms up. “Nothing you don't know. Like I told you, I just met Molly the night before she disappeared.”

He fished out a business card and put it on the table. “Just call,” he said. “Anytime.”

I took the card. It had his home and office and cellular phone numbers on it. “Okay,” I said.

He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. He gathered up the photos and slid them back into the envelope, which he then tucked into his armpit.

I started to get up, but he waved me down. “Relax,” he said. “I know how to get out of here.”

It wasn't until I'd heard his car pull out of the driveway that I remembered the note I'd found in Molly's book. It's what happens after a measly four hours of sleep and only one mug of coffee. So I tried Agganis's
cell phone, and when he answered, I told him about the note.

“Shakespeare, huh?” he said. “Whaddya make of it?”

“I don't know,” I said, “but if you guys haven't gotten a warrant to search her room, maybe you ought to. If an amateur like me can find something as interesting as that note, who knows what a bunch of experienced law enforcement professionals might turn up.”

“Yeah, interesting,” he mumbled. “Fact is, we got the warrant this morning, and I'm on my way over there as we speak. Not gonna be fun. That Edna Paul is a pisser and a half.”

“Oh,” I said. “So I didn't help.”

“Good try, though,” he said.

Then I called the hospital and asked to be connected to the ICU, where a garrulous nurse—perhaps the large one I'd met there—filled me in on Sarah's condition.

Given the natural tendency for medical people to be upbeat and positive, I hung up gravely worried. Sarah had shown no signs of improvement. The doctors considered her stroke a serious one, and her chances of recovery, given the already ravaged condition of her body and the low level of her resistance after months of chemotherapy, appeared to be slim.

The nurse didn't say it, but it sounded like a death-watch, and there wasn't much anybody could do about it, least of all me.

All I could do was try to carry out her wish, which was to sell her estate to somebody suitable before it
fell into the hands of her heirs—who, she believed, were distinctly unsuitable.

So I made two phone calls, one to Lawrence McKenney, the lawyer for the Isle of Dreams Corporation, and the other to Gregory Pinto, the banker who was in charge of the Marshall Lea Foundation. Each had secretaries who were protective of their time. Each connected me instantly when I told them who I was and what I wanted.

I told each of them the same thing: Time was of the essence, negotiations had ended, and I wanted their responses to the conditions I'd specified, their final best offer, plus a good-faith check in my hands by Sunday noon. I would then exercise my power of attorney on Sarah Fairchild's behalf to accept the most attractive offer or to reject them both. If I rejected them, all bets were off. They would have no opportunity to resubmit until or unless Sarah either recovered or died. If she died, they'd have to deal with Eliza, Nate, and Patrick. I didn't need to spell that scenario out to either of them. They'd each done their homework.

O
n the way home for lunch, I stopped at the state police barracks on Temahigan Avenue. The building had been painted bright blue in days gone by but was now cedar-shingled in the best Vineyard tradition. Dom Agganis wasn't there, but Officer Olive Otero was.

Olive gave me a sour look. “Well?”

I showed her a toothy smile. “A message for Dom. Tell him I talked with a woman who works at the Tin Roof who knows Shrink Williams and says that he has a habit of following his ex-dates around after they stop going out with him. Tell him the woman thinks she saw Molly Wood with a guy while Shrink was snooping around within the past two days. Tell him I said to ask Phil Fredrickson exactly when he dated Molly Wood, and to ask Fredrickson and Luis Martinez if they've seen her with a man in the past week or so. Maybe he can get a description of the man or a name. You get all of that, Olive, or should I say it over again, only slower this time?”

Her lip curled as it usually does when she speaks to
me. “I don't think Sergeant Agganis gets paid to do what you think he should be doing, Jackson.”

“Just give him the message, Olive. And remember, we civilians pay your salary, and your job is not only to protect and serve us but to be polite while you're at it.”

I beat it out the door before she could get her mouth open.

At home, Zee was about to leave for the hospital. “I'll be home for supper. Maybe we can do a little fishing before it gets dark. Any news about Molly?”

I told her about my morning. She frowned. “She never told me much about the men she dated, but maybe she told somebody else. I'll ask around.”

She gave me a kiss and drove away.

The children and I ate lunch, and then we spent the afternoon finishing the tree house. When the last nail was in, we admired our work. There was a center room about six by six with windows and a railed porch, and two small attached rooms on adjoining branches, one for each of the house's inhabitants. There was a ladder leading up through a trapdoor in the porch floor, and you could keep out pirates and other villains by shutting the door and securing it with a hasp. There was even a rope tied to a high branch that you could use to swing down to the ground. Tarzan would have been proud.

I said, “Your job whenever you're up here is to be very careful so you don't fall and break your necks.”

“We'll be careful, Pa.”

“It's like being on the boat. You don't take chances and you don't goof around.”

“Okay.”

Joshua and Diana climbed in and out and around the house, and up and down the ladder, and swung down on the rope.

“Can we sleep up here, Pa?”

“We'll have to rig up some safety belts so you won't roll out of bed, and it'll be pretty uncomfortable, but I guess you can.”

“Good! Can we do it tonight? Can we eat supper up here? Will you sleep up here with us?”

“Not tonight, because I have to get up before sunrise and go fishing with Brady. Maybe tomorrow night, if I can fit into the living room.”

“Can we have a dog?”

“No. No dogs.”

I watched them climb and play and felt happy and fretful, the way parents do when their children are having fun on the edge of danger. But I could remember when my sister and I were kids, full of confidence and attaching no significance to our father's worries about our welfare, so I kept my mouth shut.

When Zee came home, Joshua and Diana took her out to the tree house and gave her the tour.

“We're gonna have supper and sleep here tomorrow night. Pa's going to sleep with us.”

“Is he, now?”

“You come too, Ma!”

“Thanks. I don't know if there'll be room.”

“You can sleep with me, Ma.”

Zee squinted at Diana's little room. “I don't know if there's space for two in there, sweetheart. We'll see.”

“You want to swing down on the rope, Ma?”

“Why not?”

Zee swung down and threw the rope back up. I swung down and put an arm around her waist. “Me Tarzan, you Jane. Them Boy and Girl. How about a martini and then supper and then an hour of fishing?”

“Only an hour?”

“I'm going out with Brady at first light and I need my beauty sleep.”

“All you pretty boys think of is your looks.”

I slipped a hand down over her hip. “Not quite all.”

After supper, while the kids played on the beach behind us, we fished at Metcalf's Hole until it was too dark to see, but we never bent a rod. No matter. Fishing and catching are two different things, and both are fun.

At home in bed, feeling Zee's warm sleeping body against mine and listening to her gentle breath, I thought about Molly Wood and how she played tennis but not golf. Tennis but not golf. I didn't play either game, but maybe the man she dated played both. Maybe it made more sense to think that Molly joined him on a tennis court rather than on a golf course.

Then Frankie Bannerman's voice came floating out from wherever it had been stored in the far corners of my mind, saying that her mother had written that she had been playing tennis with some guy and that there had been a tennis racket in the belongings that Elsie Cohen had shipped back to Connecticut. Her mother must have liked the guy, Frankie said, because before she went away she had never played tennis in her life and always said it was boring.

I was suddenly wide-awake, and I stayed that way for a while, thinking new thoughts.

I didn't know how many tennis courts there were on the island, but there were quite a few. I also didn't know who got to play on them or how many were still open after Labor Day. It was probably un-American to be so ignorant of the sport.

Maybe I'd been asking the wrong people to tell me about Kathy Bannerman and Molly Wood. Tomorrow, after catching the prizewinning bass at Fairchild Cove, I'd do some exploration of the island's tennis courts. I might find somebody who had seen Molly or Kathy whacking the ball around with a man who had a known name.

I sank into uneasy dreams only to be rousted out of them by my alarm clock at 4
A.M.
I slapped it silent as Zee stirred.

“Go to sleep,” I whispered. “It's just me getting up to go fishing.”

“Lucky you,” she said in a sleepy voice, and snugged back down under the covers.

A half hour later, munching on a bagel with a stainless steel thermos of hot coffee on the seat beside me, I drove up our long sandy driveway through a darkness made darker by mist and splats of rain, and headed toward the North Shore. My headlights cut through the night. Behind me, off toward Nantucket, the sky was trying to brighten as the great ball that was Earth rolled eastward. The leading edge of the hurricane was brushing the fringes of our island. It would get worse before it got better. Rotten weather is
thought by some to be great for both duck hunting and fishing. I hoped they were right.

Up on Vineyard Sound, just before six, the tides and the rising sun were going to converge in a perfect harmony at first light and create a rare ideal moment for fishing. Fish, of course, bite when they feel like it, so the ideal moment might end up being as fishless as any other moment. But it offered Brady and me as good a chance for a big fish as we were likely to get. Knowing this, I was filled with anticipation in spite of weariness from a night of restless dreams.

At the Tee in Vineyard Haven, I turned left and drove up-island, feeling—or perhaps imagining—a gradual thinning of the darkness. Above and ahead of me, beyond the slap of my windshield wipers, the fall sky was dark and starless.

I turned into Sarah Fairchild's driveway and then forked off onto the narrow lane that led down to the cove. The gate was closed and locked. I had my key and used it, working in my own headlights. Then I drove through and parked and listened to a country-and-western station from Rhode Island. Garth was singing a sad one about the beaches of Cheyenne. Maybe I should invite him to join Pavarotti, local girl Beverly Sills, Willie Nelson, Emmy Lou, and me in a sextet. Garth was young, but he could probably hold his own.

I decided that when we finished fishing I'd call Dom Agganis and give him my tennis thoughts.

After a while, I poured myself a cup of coffee.

A little later I found my flashlight and used it to
look at my watch. Brady was twenty minutes late. Probably overslept. I thought of going up to the house and rousting him, but that would involve waking up everybody else in the house, too. No good. I waited another ten minutes, looking through the mizzle at the slowly brightening sky. Some unformed memory was niggling at the edges of my mind, but I couldn't get hold of it. It was small and it wanted my attention, but I couldn't get my sights on it.

Maybe Brady was already down at the beach. Could be he'd forgotten that we were going to meet and had gone on down alone. I looked at my watch again, wondering whether to be worried about Nate being on the beach, but instead feeling irrationally happy that he might be. There is a beast within us all, and mine had red eyes.

I decided to go on down. If Brady was there, fine. If Nate was there with him, I wanted to be there for Brady, but even more for myself.

If Brady had gotten a late start, he'd probably figure that I had gone on ahead, and he would come down and find me. Besides, if I waited much longer I was going to miss the magic moment, and I couldn't think of a good reason to do that even if Brady stayed in bed all day.

So I put the old Land Cruiser in gear and drove down toward the cove. The empty stone cottage was dimly white against the far trees as I passed it, and from the corner of my eye I saw what I thought was movement in the darkness on its far side. A deer, probably, or perhaps only a product of imagination, for when I turned my head and looked again I saw
nothing. In the faint wet light of morning I drove on until I came to the beach.

Nate's pickup was there ahead of me.

I got out and looked around, but saw nobody. I climbed into my waders, strapped on my utility belt, laden with leaders, lures, a plastic bag of eels, pliers, and fish knife, and got my eleven-foot graphite rod off the roof rack.