Cape Cod (79 page)
Honk. Hoooonk!
And Tom left with his cousin.
Johnny looked at Aggie, and Aggie looked at the pie. “Can I have my bite now?”
Johnny handed her the whole piece.
Then they heard, from somewhere on the beach, a slap.
“Uh-oh,” whispered Clara. “Teddy’s gettin’ fresh.”
Their attention was turned from the frightening world of grown-up affairs to the more interesting, though confusing, world of older kids kissing in the shadows.
It seemed that Teddy Bigelow had taken his spoonin’ too far, and Aggie’s big sister had taken exception.
Dorothy jumped up and started down the beach, but Teddy caught up to her, said something, and kissed her. This time she kissed him back.
Then they disappeared arm in arm into the night. A moment later, another man came down out of the woods. Johnny could not tell who he was. He seemed to be following Dorothy and Teddy, perhaps spying on them, but his limp made it hard for him to keep up.
iv.
On a windy night a month later, long after all the summer guests had left the Hilyard House, Rake was awakened by the sound of a shotgun blast.
Then he heard the most terrifying cry of all. “
Fire!
”
By the time he and his family rushed through the woods, the flames were dancing in the windows of the hotel and licking at the eaves.
Elwood and the remaining hotel staff were fighting with bucket brigades and hand-pump hoses. But the Hilyard House, a honeycomb of long, drafty hallways and high ceilings, was going up like a driftwood pile on the beach.
Johnny heard his father say, “We might just as well spit on it, but let’s see if we can help.”
Then, from the room off the kitchen, there came the sound of an explosion.
“That’ll be Tom’s linseed oil goin’ off,” said Zachary, and he called to his brother, “Where’s Tom?”
“We got him out,” shouted Elwood, “he’s in the gazebo.”
But Tom was not in the gazebo. He was nowhere to be found until the fire was out and the Hilyard House was a smoking pile of ashes. What there was of him lay in his room, with his exploded paints and ruined canvases.
No one ever knew why he went back, though Charles Bigelow suspected that it was the book that drew him.
As for the fire, there was no doubt that it was set, and most people thought that crazy Tom himself had done it. A can of linseed oil was found near the veranda where the fire was thought to have started, along with the footprints of a man who limped, a man with a hole in his shoe. Tom limped. Tom had holes in his shoes.
But who had fired the shotgun to awaken those who might have died by this act of arson? The shell casings found at the edge of the beach were Remington twelve-gauge bird shot. Charles Bigelow knew that this was the ammunition his father used. But his father was found the following morning, in his house on the west side of the island, in his bed, in his nightshirt, with his shoes on his feet, sleeping soundly. So soundly in fact that he would never awaken.
Charles Bigelow removed his father’s shoes, dumped out the sand, and put his finger through the hole in the sole.
July 16
“Whenever I go to Provincetown,” said Agnes, “which isn’t too much, what with all those queer folk—”
“
Gays,
” Geoff said.
“Strange word… Well, whenever I go there, I always smell b.o., and it’s not the
gays
. It’s Taft. Huge man in a dark suit, sweatin’ to beat the band. And whenever I taste blueberry pie, I always think of that hotel, glitterin’ like a jewel.”
Geoff had forgotten his hangover, but confusion kept his head pounding. “Who set the fire? Did they find out?”
She shook her head. “Wooden hotels were like wooden ships, very susceptible to flame.”
“Did you wonder about Charles Bigelow, after what you heard in the gazebo? Would he have burned the hotel to burn the log?”
“Of course not. That’s a plug-ugly lie.” Agnes sat back for a moment and started to hum. She always kept a little tune going in her head, if only to hold off the silence.
“Did anybody investigate Tom’s fall at the State House?”
“What was there to investigate? He went to Boston to see Charles about a painting and fell down the stairs. He cracked his skull and had some kind of cerebral hemorrhage. The brain surgeons weren’t too good then. Neither were the lawyers, because he didn’t get much of a settlement.”
“But the fire? Rake must have told his father what Charles said.”
“The idea that Charles Bigelow would torch the Hilyard House was beyond anyone. He’d financed it after Tom’s accident. And he made his father sign the subdivision plan when Elwood wanted to build a cottage colony all around it.”
“The 1904 subdivision was a Hilyard’s idea?”
“It was
Elwood’s
idea. He had some big dreams. But after the fire, he lost interest. He took the insurance money and built himself the house they use now for the sailing camp. He said it was time to
respire
like a gentleman. A fool, that Elwood. Silver-plated fool. Zachary preferred work, like a man. I could never see how the same soil that nurtured your grandfather grew Elwood.”
Geoff couldn’t see how the soil that nurtured Aggie had grown her son Dickerson or her grandson Douglas, and her granddaughter Janice was beginning to bother him, too, but he didn’t say so. Even if he had, Agnes might not have noticed, because her mind was now traveling down the highways to the two-lanes to the crushed-shell roads of her youth.
“They’d gotten around to building a canal in Sandwich, after three hundred years of talking about it, and a lot of Cape schooners were hauling granite for the breakwaters. Your grandma was pregnant with your father.” Agnes laughed. “Pregnant at forty-five. Some woman. So Zach, he decided to get in on the hauling, make some diaper-pin money. Last anyone saw of Zach’s old schooner, Zach, or his three eldest sons, they were off Cape Ann, wobblin’ along with a deck load of rocks halfway to the mast.”
“The sea has taken a lot of Hilyards.”
“Bigelows, too. My sister and Teddy Bigelow took their honeymoon trip to England and came home on the
Titanic
. My sister came home a widow.”
Though she rambled, every path led to another, which led to another, which led ultimately to the log.
It was Agnes’s sister Dorothy who had been handed
Murder on the Mayflower
in 1911, who later married one of the Coles of Orleans and had three daughters, two of whom never married, one of whom moved to California and had four children, none of whom cared more for the Orleans home they inherited than to auction it and its contents, among which was a painting found in the attic, which hinted at the identity of the first murderer in America, which could not be proved without the log, which had inspired Tom Hilyard, who had died in the hotel fire, which satisfied Rake for eighty years that the log was gone, until the arrival of the woman named Carolyn Hallissey, who paid sixteen thousand dollars for the painting and somehow inspired Rake to start looking for the log once more.
Whew
.
“Did you and Rake ever talk about the log after that night in the gazebo?”
“A few times. I remember a Sunday morning, July of 1918 it was. I was visitin’ my sister in Orleans, mostly so I could be close to Jack’s Island. You know, Rake was just about the handsomest boy on the Lower Cape. Black hair, blue eyes to make you melt, and—gals weren’t supposed to notice these things—he was spun like steel cable.” She stared off again…
hum, hum
.
Geoff waited silently. Downstairs, the grandfather clock in the foyer chimed twice.
“Rake picked me up in Elwood’s carriage. He brought me a bouquet, simple old snapdragons and a few strands of marsh grass. Most romantic thing a seventeen-year-old girl could ask for…” She looked out the window at the cars whizzing past on 6A, then continued down this sandy old path.
“We rode through the Barleyneck dairy field to Nauset Beach. It was deserted, of course. Everyone was at church, praying for an end to the Great War. The only thing out on the water was an old tug pulling a string of coal barges.
“We went a ways toward the inlet, just to be sure no one would spy on us. Then he pulled off his shirt and sat on a big piece of driftwood to take off his shoes. I just stood there, feelin’ my dress blowin’ against my bare legs and fidgetin’ with my bouquet. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was a little scared.”
“That was kind of scandalous then.”
“An unchaperoned boy and girl strippin’ down on a deserted beach—we thought we were the first rebellious generation but—”
“Every generation thinks that, Aggie.”
“—I was a good Methodist and a very reluctant rebel. I didn’t know
what
I’d do if he decided to kiss me.”
Geoff was back there with her, in the heart of her youth. He could almost feel the hot sand burning his toes, hear the roll of the surf.
“I was still afraid to let him see my bathing bloomers. Compared to today, they were a suit of armor, but I thought if I made a joke, he might laugh and forget whatever was on his mind. The driftwood log he was sittin’ on gave me an idea. ‘Jump up,’ I said. ‘I think you’re sittin’ on the log of the
Mayflower.
’ ”
“And you know what? He didn’t laugh at all. He just said, ‘
This
isn’t the log, Aggie. I’ll guarantee you that.’
“ ‘It was just a joke,’ I said. ‘The log burned in the Hilyard House fire.’
“He allowed as how it had. Then he said, ‘The book of history will set us free from the evil that bricks us up.’ ”
Geoff was right. Her ramblings
did
lead back to the point, and the past led back to the present, and to the list that he carried in his pocket. “Why did he say that?”
“That’s what his father told
him
when he asked about the log. I’m not sure he knew what it meant, and it puzzled me. Then we heard the first explosion.”
“Explosion?”
“German U-boat. U-156, firing her deck gun. You could barely see it, about a mile offshore, long and flat, with a little tower that looked like nothing more than an oil barrel floating upright on the water. One shot hit in front of the tug, one hit the bluff right above us—blew out a great big chunk. Rake threw me down and threw himself on top of me, and I remember thinkin’ how brave he was, and how happy I was to have his body on top of me but his mind on something else.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“The crew got off the tug. Then the German commenced to sinkin’ her and all the three barges. By now, everybody in Orleans was comin’ out to watch, and it must’ve made the German nervous, because it took him about a hundred shots, which we thought was
some
funny, until he sent a few more at the bluff. Somebody said he was firin’ at the cottages that showed the American flag, but…”
She stared out the window, hummed a bit, then said suddenly, “More than anything else, you know what I remember? How puny that gun sounded. Like the sky couldn’t be bothered with the noise and just swallowed it up. Then we heard the putt-putt of an airplane engine.”
“Navy fliers?”
“Un-huh, but the feller with the key to the bomb locker at the Chatham Naval Air Station was off playin’ baseball. So the plane flew over and dropped a
monkey wrench
at the submarine. And that was that for the only German attack ever on American soil.”
Geoff laughed. “The world sure has changed.”
“Rake thought it changed right then. He said we weren’t safe on our own beaches anymore, and it was time he did something about it. Hitched up for two years, which is a very long time in the life of a young girl. While he was gone, I fell in love with a man ten years older… and a Bigelow to boot.”
Hum, hum
, tuneless, thoughtless, a sound track for the past.
“Rake felt betrayed, of course. We’d written letters, thought we were in love… but he got over it. People get over things. I thought the truth about the log would help you and Janice get over your problems, but an hour ago here she came, snatched up the kids, and away she went.”
After an hour with Agnes, Geoff was ready to believe that everything was related—Rake’s hunt for the log, Geoff’s hunt for what Rake knew, Rake’s anger at Agnes, Geoff’s at Janice. A wheel, coming around again and again.
“Where did she go?”
“She didn’t say.”
Geoff picked at the thread coming loose on the arm of the sofa. “Why didn’t you say anything about the log burning up before?”
“I’m old, Geoffrey. Nobody
asked
me.”
ii.
Geoff wanted to believe Agnes, to free himself of the past that threatened to brick
him
up. But who had ransacked Rake’s house and prowled in his barn? Who were those guys on the boat? Was the Humpster really stupid enough to beat up George? And for what, beyond a little fag-bashing? And, as always, there was the list. Why was Carolyn Hallissey’s name at the top?
If Agnes’s story was true, Janice’s skepticism had triumphed. But Carolyn Hallissey might have some skepticism of her own—for Agnes’s story.
It was five-thirty when he arrived at Carolyn’s little Cape near Arey’s Pond. From somewhere in the house he heard the sound of an afternoon game show. Two hamburger patties were frying on the range, two plates already arranged with sliced buns, ketchup, pickles, chips….
He was surprised at how homey, and homely, she looked, barefoot, in jeans and baggy T-shirt.
And for the first time since they’d met, Carolyn did not seem happy to see him. Nor did she offer any skepticism. “If it’s gone, it’s gone. End of story. Go back to your wife and tell her I’m sorry for spoiling your reunion this morning.”
“One word from Agnes Bigelow and you quit? Why haven’t you interviewed her before this?”
“She’s on the calendar. But I’m less interested in interviews than I am in art—pictures.” She pointed to a picture on the wall. “My little boy did that.”
It was a crudely drawn stick figure with long hair and the words “My Mother.”
