Vineyard Chill (9 page)

Dom frowned. “You brought her here?”

Bonzo nodded and looked up at Dom with his wide eyes. “Yeah, I did. Just that one time. She liked the old house and the meadow and the birds. She said she didn't know you could be so alone on a crowded island like Martha's Vineyard. I told her there was lots of places you can be alone and that I'd show them to her if she wanted to see them, and she said that would be good, but then she went away and I never did show her them places.”

Dom studied him. “Are you sure you never came here with her again?”

Bonzo seemed to shrivel before his gaze. “I never did. I was only here with her that once. You believe me, don't you, J.W.?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe you.”

But Dom was a cop and cops are careful about what they believe. They have to be, because they live in a land of liars.

Two days later I got a call from Dom as Clay and I were having morning coffee in my kitchen. “Just thought I'd call and see if you're interested in being a member of a search party,” he said. “The lab confirms that those red hairs are human, so we're going out this morning to see if we can find where they came from.”

“Can I bring a friend?”

“As long as he's got good eyes. Be there in an hour.”

“Yes.”

I told Clay what was happening.

“I need a break from the boat,” he said. “I'll be glad to join you.”

The skies were still clear, but there was a north wind bringing chilly air down from the mainland. When we got to the No Trespassing sign, we found the sides of Barnes Road lined with cars and had to park quite a ways from where we entered the woods.

There were forty or fifty people gathered in the meadow, including officers from many of the island's police departments. Because of ancient traditions and rivalries among the six island towns, Martha's Vineyard has ten different police agencies, and it's not unusual for them to view one another with scorn. Thus, the sight of them cooperating in this search was a little surprising and was due, I suspected, to Dom's careful cultivation of good relations with all of the island's other law enforcement agencies.

Other state cops were known to consider town officers to be a lesser breed and to cut them out of certain crime investigations, especially those whose profiles were high. This attitude naturally only encouraged the local cops to view the state cops with suspicion and hostility. Much valuable information and talent were thus never shared between agencies supposedly charged with common work.

These small rivalries and their consequences were, of course, only lesser examples of the larger and more famous and infuriating ones among the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and almost all of the other national and international criminal investigating and intelligence-gathering agencies, rivalries that were almost certainly responsible for the success of many criminal activities.

But Dom Agganis had, for today, managed to assuage island enmities and form a group of searchers who were, at least in part, trained in such work. He took the time to tell them what they were doing and why.

“There isn't much to go on,” he concluded, “but the hair in the nest is long, red, and human, and it came from somewhere not too far from here. Work slowly and be patient. It's easy to miss things in the woods, and it's been almost a year since the girl disappeared, so it's hard to guess what you might find. Let's go.”

With so many searchers involved, we could work closer together and cover the area more thoroughly. We turned up our collars against the wind and moved slowly through the trees, alert to anything unusual. But the layer of brown, fallen leaves on the ground hid much, and though we discovered the sort of human debris that is found in the wildest of places—pieces of torn plastic, deflated balloons, unexplainable pieces of paper and cardboard, all stuff that escaped its origins and was carried away by the wind—we found no sign of Nadine Gibson.

I was not an experienced searcher and wasn't sure I really wanted to find the remains of the woman. The robin that had found the long strands of red hair so useful when building its nest had had no such qualms, of course.

But I was moved by a sense of duty, so kept my course, wading through the leaves, pushing aside the grasping branches of undergrowth, ducking under and around tree limbs, trying but failing to see anything useful until, at last, we seekers gathered together once again on the edge of the meadow. We were united in both disconsolation and fatigue, and like survivors of a battle, felt the comradeship of shared discomfort.

“That'll do for now,” said Dom, as we grouped ourselves around him. “It was a long shot at best. If we give it another try, I hope some of you will help out again.” There were murmurs of assent as he dismissed us, and the searchers wandered back down the meadow toward the road.

But Clay didn't wander far. Instead, he paused and looked at the ruins of the old farmhouse. Dom and I stopped beside him, followed his gaze, and exchanged glances. Then the three of us walked to the broken foundations and looked down into the debris-filled cellar. Cracked timbers and rotting floorboards vied with fallen foundation stones and weeds for possession of the pit.

Clay gestured toward the rubble and said what I was also thinking.

“If the girl really died somewhere near here, and if she died accidentally or of natural causes of some kind, she could be anywhere. But if she was killed here, the person who did it was stuck with a body he needed to hide in a hurry. It's pretty unlikely he would have carried it farther than we searched just now. That leaves this place.”

Dom studied the ruins. “Where were you last March?”

Clay smiled faintly. “Out on the West Coast. My mother will swear to it, if necessary.”

“Your mother lives out there?”

“Actually, she lives in Wichita, but she'll swear I was wherever I tell her I was. You know how mothers are.”

Dom grunted, but not in surprise. In police investigations, mothers are known liars who will swear that their criminal children were home reading their Bibles when the crimes went down.

“Well,” he said, “since I'm the only cop here, I guess it's my job to go down there.”

For all of his bulk, he was fairly nimble as he climbed and slid down into the cellar.

Our advice followed him: “Watch out for rusty nails and broken glass.”

He nodded, found a steady spot amid the rubble upon which to stand, and looked around. He took hold of a section of fallen floor and tugged at it. It moved a bit, and he shoved it to one side. There were rotting pieces of timber beneath it. He studied them, then pulled one out and put it aside.

“We should get a machine in here to lift this crap out,” he said.

Beside me, Clay was studying the cellar.

“If the woman's down there,” he said to Dom, “the guy who put her there didn't have a machine to help him. I'm coming down.” And before Dom could object, Clay was sliding down to join him. They stood side by side with Clay pointing to the far wall.

“Over there,” he said. “See where that section of foundation has fallen in? Most of the rest of the foundation is at least partly in place, but not that section. And it didn't fall too long ago, either. The stones are lying on top of those floorboards.”

They picked their way across the cluttered floor and gazed down at the fallen stones that were scattered over the rotting wood. Suddenly Dom knelt and put down a hand, then rose and held out his find to Clay. I couldn't tell what it was, but I could guess.

“We're done here for now,” said Dom. “We need a crime-scene crew and a machine to lift off the lumber and rock. Let's go.” He and Clay returned across the cellar floor and climbed out where they'd gone in. Dom showed me his find. It was a strand of tangled red hair.

“Bonzo is going to be pretty unhappy,” I said.

“Don't talk to Bonzo,” said Dom. “I want to talk to him first.”

“Is this a good time to discuss my First Amendment rights?”

Dom's big jaw went out a little farther than usual. “You stay away from Bonzo.”

“Bonzo wouldn't hurt a fly and you know it.”

“He brought the woman here once and maybe he brought her here twice. Who else would have brought her here? It's a stretch to think somebody else would have come here with her.”

“How should I know? All I know is that Bonzo didn't do this.”

“Maybe not.”

“He shouldn't even be on your list.”

“Everybody's on my list. Even your pal's mother, the old lady in Wichita.”

“I knew I shouldn't have mentioned her,” said Clay. “Now I'll have to swear she was on the West Coast with me last March.”

“If you guys don't mind doing something useful for a change,” said Dom, “you can stay right here and keep stray people and dogs away from the site until I get back with my yellow tape and reinforcements. Maybe I can catch some of the Oak Bluffs guys before they get too far. I shouldn't be long.”

“We'll be here,” I said.

We watched him walk out of sight.

“Well, well,” said Clay. “I've done a lot of things, but I never guarded a crime site before.”

“Maybe it wasn't a crime,” I said. “It could be that the woman died a natural death or an accidental one, and whoever was with her at the time panicked and hid the body so he wouldn't be suspected of anything.”

“What do you think of Dom putting Bonzo on the suspect list?”

“Not much, but he's a guy Dom has to talk with. Bonzo brought the woman here once to listen to the birds. And if she's under those floorboards, somebody put her there.”

The wind was rising and the air was cooling. Clay pulled his cap down over his ears. “Was there a boyfriend? A husband?”

I tried to remember the stories in the local papers. “A boyfriend, but he and the woman had broken up and he'd left the island before she disappeared.”

“Maybe he sneaked back.”

“Maybe.”

“It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened.”

“No.”

We paced about, trying to stay warm.

“She have another guy on the hook?”

“I wouldn't know. She was a pretty girl, so I imagine she wouldn't have been lonely any longer than she wanted to be.”

In my memory I could see her: a slender young woman with brilliant blue eyes, a bright smile, and all that long red hair. I imagined that every regular at the Fireside had fantasized about her at one time or another, and I remembered how she laughed and would slip easily away from drunken would-be embraces with jokes that left her admirers feeling almost as good as if she'd fallen into their arms.

And she had treated Bonzo with the same respect and humor as she treated everyone else. No wonder he had been so fond of her, and had been so pleased when she'd accepted his invitation to go birding in this meadow.

Had they come here again?

Had something happened here between them?

If not Bonzo, then who? Why?

If I were Dom Agganis, I'd want to talk with the boyfriend again and check out his alibi, if he had one. And I'd want to talk with all of the regulars at the Fireside, not just with Bonzo.

I wondered if the state police would shake free a few detectives to work the case, or whether a long-dead woman wouldn't merit their energies and time.

Years ago, after taking a bullet, which still rested against my spine, I'd left my police job in Boston precisely because I was tired of trying to save the world. I'd moved to the Vineyard to become a fisherman and to avoid involvement in even the pettiest of island crimes. I'd planned to live a quiet life in the woods, in the old hunting camp my father had bought when I was just a kid, and I'd intended to be content with my own company.

But life doesn't leave us alone. I'd fallen in love with Zee, and after that, living by myself no longer had its old charm. I'd fixed up the house and we'd married and started raising a family, and now I led a life that was not significantly different from that of many other year-round islanders. I didn't have a career but I had a lot of jobs that kept me busy, and I had friends, one of whom was Bonzo.

In spite of myself I was
engagé
. I was involved with life.

And now, with death.

After what seemed like a long time, police cruisers crept up through the trees along an overgrown road that once must have been the driveway to the farmhouse. They parked in the meadow and disgorged Dom, his state-police colleague, Officer Olive Otero, and several Oak Bluffs policemen.

“No dogs or people came by,” I said to Dom as police officers began to surround the site with yellow tape.

He nodded and went off to make sure his helpers didn't contaminate the site before the detectives and lab people got there. Already a photographer was taking pictures.

“I believe that ringing silence means we can go,” I said to Clay.

He nodded and we walked down the meadow and through the woods. At the road we found another police car with an officer standing beside it to ward off curious civilians if any paused to find out what was going on. We went on along the road and as we got to the Land Cruiser, a truck pulling a trailer loaded with a large backhoe stopped behind the cruiser. We watched as the driver unloaded the backhoe and drove it out of sight up the driveway.

I was shivering when I climbed into the Land Cruiser, and not just from the cold wind.

“A hot cider in front of your living-room stove sounds good to me right now,” said Clay, reading my mind.

“Yes.”

At home I mulled the cider while Clay added wood to the embers in the stove. Seated in front of the flames, steaming cup in hand, I was aware that the warmth of the fire was psychological as much as physical; perhaps because of some prehistoric, genetic memory we'd inherited from our cave-dwelling ancestors, for whom fire meant the difference between life and death.

“Shalom,” said Clay, touching his mug to mine. “It's barely noon and I already feel like I've put in a full day, but when I finish this, I'll head back to work some more on the boat.”

“The working class makes our country great.”

We drank and stared into the fire, and then he left and I was alone, thinking about Bonzo and about Dom Agganis's understandable suspicions.

I was having a second glass of cider when I heard a car coming down our driveway. I looked out a window and watched as a yellow Mercedes convertible stopped in our yard. It had California plates. Two men wearing what looked like new winter coats got out, studied the house, then walked toward the door. They had West Coast tans but didn't look like movie stars.