Cape Cod (93 page)
“They called them the Bog People,” offered George, who now perched on the edge of a sawhorse.
Rains popped up from the hole. “The artifacts of the Bog People survived because they were buried in anaerobic marsh mud. No oxidation.” Then he dropped back like a bearded animal protecting its burrow.
Geoff admired the axe. “Bill thinks that if something of great weight buried this axe—”
“What? A steamroller?” demanded Dickerson.
“Who knows?
Something
, and sank it into the mud at just the right moment, it might have survived since, say, the time of the Vikings.”
Janice shook her head. This was too much for anyone to believe, but then, so was the story of the log.
Rains popped up again. “Those are ballast stones. Somebody used them to build that cellar. That’s all I can say. But this”—he wiped his hands on the front of his shirt, then took the axe reverently by the handle—“this is the key. If these letters are the same as those on the Bourne Stone, which apparently came from this foundation, I’m going to recommend that the whole island be surveyed for Viking artifacts.”
Janice watched the color drain from her brother’s face.
“You can’t do that,” said Douglas, “except within a hundred feet of wetlands.”
“Don’t tell me the law.” Rains lifted himself out of the hole and stood toe to toe with Douglas. He might have been an amateur archaeologist and ecologist, but it was the strength of some small towns that amateurs ran for the commissions, learned the laws, took them seriously, and gave a damn.
“We can’t stop you from developing,” Rains continued, “much as we’d like to. You’ve got your rights. But we’ll find out what’s here before you start.”
“A survey might take nine or ten months,” mused Nance, looking up at the ceiling.
Why did this make him so happy? Geoff wondered.
Rains mopped his brow. “The chances of finding anything can’t be very good. When we’re done, we’ll probably all laugh that we ever thought it was Viking. But we have to look.”
“Hey,” said George, “maybe we’ll be able to open a theme park.”
“Welcome to Viking World,” said Nance.
Carolyn Hallissey laughed. “No competition with Old Comers, please.”
Janice wanted to smack her, lay her right out in her denim skirt and cowboy shirt and fancy silver jewelry.
Then Nance asked for his axe back. His demeanor seemed to be changing. He was doing what he did naturally—taking over.
“If you should need it, call.” He looked into the hole. “Amazing, isn’t it? My own great-grandmother was down there. ‘God bless the good Bigelows, God damn the bad, and God bless our baby.’ ”
“God damn you,” growled Doug.
“Easy, Doug.” Nance looked at Geoff again. “Does Miss Hallissey get the log now, or must we come back for it?”
He couldn’t have done a better job of shocking everyone, if he had dropped a cherry bomb into the root cellar.
George clutched so hard at the box, he almost fell off the sawhorse. Jimmy and Massy both raised their guns and pointed them at Nance.
He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket, hooked the thumb over the outside, and struck a pose. “You boys are too damn jumpy.”
“Besides, we have details to iron out,” Carolyn explained.
“We can’t just sell the log to them,” said George.
Geoff kept his eyes on his wife. He knew her suspicions were spinning so fast inside her head they were making her dizzy. “Carolyn and I made a deal. We’ll stick by it.”
“I’ll bet you drove a hard bargain,” said Janice.
Nance reached across the hole and offered Geoff his hand.
Geoff looked at it as though it might have fangs. But he was still winning. So he shook it.
“A pleasure doing business with you.” Nance’s capped teeth seemed to grow in the middle of his tan. “And it will be a pleasure to be your neighbor.”
Geoff felt the fangs sink in and hold. With Nance still clamped to his hand, Geoff looked at Douglas. “You put up your half of the island as collateral, didn’t you?”
Douglas stepped back into the shadows.
“Well, what else would the Bigelows have that I would want?” Nance released his grip.
“The company,” grunted Dickerson, eyes on the floor.
Nance was getting downright cheerful. He slapped Dickerson on the back. “It takes a son of a bitch to know how one thinks. That’s right. The
company.
”
“My son gave you a second mortgage on all our properties, didn’t he?” Dickerson rolled his eyes toward Douglas, who sank to the floor and drew his knees up against his chest.
“I was the only investor ready to save another overextended real estate company from Chapter Eleven.” Nance walked over and stood beside Douglas. “So Doug did what he had to. But if the Jack’s Island subdivision isn’t approved, he has nothing here but raw land. Without permits, it isn’t worth anywhere near enough to liquidate my loan.”
“Written on a one-year note, I assume?” asked Jimmy.
“I can’t afford to have six million tied up for longer than that. Debt service costs money.”
“Why do you think I’ve been pushin’ so hard?” Doug’s voice sounded distant and disembodied, coming from the dark corner.
“Doug believed that the 1904 plot plan guaranteed success,” Nance said. “I didn’t. So he secured my loan with the rest of the company—appraised at twenty million dollars’ worth of assets, mostly in unsold real estate, my favorite medium of exchange. It’s worth less today. But the wheel will turn, like it did in the eighties. And I can wait.”
“You wanted this development to fail all along,” said Janice softly.
“Smart girl.” Nance slipped the rose from his lapel and offered it to her. “Maybe you should have gotten power of attorney, instead of Douglas.”
“Now I know who tried to bribe me,” said Bill Rains. “Just to turn me against this project.”
“And who spray-painted George’s shack so I’d turn against the Bigelows completely.” Geoff felt as if he was about to be dropped into the hole. For eternity. He looked at Rains and tried to backpedal. “You know, this Viking stuff could be exaggerated. Maybe there’s no need to survey the whole island.”
“Once this news breaks in the paper,” said Nance, “you’ll have no choice. I’ll see to it personally.” He took Carolyn by the arm and led her toward the limousine. “You’ve got eight months to meet the note, and you’ve got nothing else to mortgage, Dickerson. You’re done.”
Janice whirled so angrily on Geoff she nearly fell into the hole. “You and your questions. If you hadn’t pushed for this, and done your pushing with Ralph Lauren’s sister, here—”
“Congratulations, Geoff,” said Nance.
Dickerson brought his hand to his chest, as if to hold down the pain. He turned and staggered out into the yard.
“Dicker?” Emily rose from her lawn chair. “Are you all right?”
“Dad, do you want me to call the doctor?” Janice came after him.
“Screw the doctors.” He lumbered across the yard like an old bull whale looking for a place to die. He stopped and leaned on the lawn table, knocking Emily’s cigarettes to the ground. Then his eyes fell upon Ma Little’s pump-action Remington.
She picked it up and slapped it into his hand. “Shoot him, Dicker. None of us’ll tell.”
“Dad, be careful with that thing.” Douglas came out of the barn.
Dickerson pointed the gun at the sky, as if to chase away the darkness. But the blue must have been too bleak, because after a moment, he lowered it.
And Nance moved calmly across the clearing, sidestepping Dickerson and offering his condolences to Emily.
Like he owned the whole place already, thought Geoff.
“I’ll call on you when your mourning is over, Mrs. Burr,” said Nance. “And we can discuss the sale of the camp.”
Emily sucked on her cigarette and blew the smoke in his face.
Nicely done, thought Geoff.
But Nance didn’t miss a beat. He turned to Dickerson one last time. “Payback, Pilgrim, thirty years later. I learned the American way from a real American. The Pilgrim Portagee learned from the original Pilgrim himself. Now
I’m
the original American. I come from the Pilgrims, from the bastard of a slave owner and his slave mistress, from a Portagee fisherman—old blood, mixed blood, immigrant blood—and now, I want my piece of the future.” He jabbed his finger into Dickerson’s big, broad chest. “Deal with it.”
Dickerson just stood there, the shotgun at his side.
And Nance turned his gaze to Geoff once more. “Keep your piece of the island pristine. Once all this foolishness is over, we’ll need some green space between the condo units.”
“Condos!” cried Rains. “You’ll never get condos in here. We won’t let you.”
“I have very deep pockets, and I’m very patient,” said Nance. “Just ask Dickerson.”
Geoff had never seen anyone gloat so well. But the winner had the right. The doors of the limousine slammed shut, and Nance rode off with Carolyn Hallissey. A cloud of car dust flattened out in the air above the clearing.
And Geoff noticed a strange thing—the sweet, damp smell of pine needles, as thick as the shock.
He looked at Janice, but she looked away.
Her concern now was for her father. She put an arm around him and twined her fingers into his beard, which no longer gave him the look of a seafarer but of an anachronism. When she gave the whiskers one of her traditional little tugs, he didn’t make a sound. And she could think of nothing comforting to say.
It was left for Ma Little to voice the first opinion. “That Nance was a son of a bitch fifteen years ago, and he’s a son of a bitch today.”
Then Emily said, “I have a mind not to sell at all.”
“What?” said Janice.
“Arnie thought that I should, but…”
And for the first time all morning, Janice felt as if she could do something. If she could, she always
did
something, even if it was the wrong thing. When she couldn’t turn her husband away from a fantasy, she took the kids and left. And now she pulled out something that had been burning a hole in her purse since it went in there.
She handed it to Emily and told her that this might change her mind.
“Your mother wrote that,” said Janice.
Emily’s eyes scanned the will, through cigarette smoke and rising tears. “Christ, she hated us that much?”
“She loved the island that much,” said Janice. “Maybe you should think about this.”
“Maybe I should.”
Geoff was reading, too, over Emily’s shoulder, shocked by what he saw. “A handwritten will and you kept it hidden?”
“It would never have stood up in court,” said Jimmy. “It isn’t legal.”
“Think of the
spirit
of the thing.” Geoff was furious with her.
“Like the spirit of your deal with Carolyn,” snapped Janice.
The distrust was growing between them, right there in the sand. In ground so well fertilized, it could not wither.
“If you hadn’t gone chasing after that log—”
“If you had stayed by me—”
“Stop it!” Douglas grabbed the shotgun and fired it into the air. “I’m to blame. I wanted to push us ahead, and I put us in the crapper.”
“We all have to gamble sometime. Just too bad you lost the whole pot,” said Dickerson, “to Nance.”
Geoff turned away from the Dickersons’ defeat, Douglas’s guilt, his new anger at his wife, and the betrayal on the faces of his friends. He took the path behind the barn and went toward the beach. He thought if he moved, he would not feel so paralyzed.
Within a few strides, the pine woods surrounded him. A bobwhite whistled off in the thicket. The wash of the waves on the shore was almost musical. He felt the peace of the island all around him.
And down there on the beach, his kids were running and playing. The future belonged to them, he thought, and they to it. But John M. Nance would soon take a piece of their future by taking the peace of this island. All because their father had found the log. The irony almost made him laugh out loud.
And in the quiet of the pines behind Rake’s barn, Geoff realized what he had to do. There was only one way to stop John M. Nance. He turned and hurried back up the path. “Hey, Douglas, how big is the note, again?”
“What?”
“The note? How big?”
“Why, six million.”
Geoff looked at Janice. “Watch.” Then he turned to George and slipped the metal box from his arms. “You’ll like the poetic justice in this one, Georgie.” He looked at Jimmy. “You and Ma will like the sentiment.” And he held the box in front of Douglas.
Douglas looked at it as though it might explode.
“Leverage, Doug, in here.” Geoff kept his eyes on his brother-in-law, though he felt Janice moving closer to him. “Nance’s money buys the log from me. You agree to leave your side of the island open, unless and until we agree on development. Then you liquidate Nance’s note with Nance’s money.”
“That simple?” said Douglas.
“Simple and beautiful.” Dickerson let out the kind of gusty laugh that no one had heard since the glorious Fourth, when he wanted everyone to believe he was back in control. Now he grabbed the shotgun from Douglas and fired it into the sky.
“Grampa! Grampa!” Keith and Sarah came running up the path from the beach. “What are you doing?”
“Savin’ a little bit of this island, kids, and sealin’ a deal.”
Janice went over to her husband, so that he was the only one who could hear her. “Geoffrey, sometimes you surprise me.”
That didn’t sound very good, she thought, and the anger in Geoff’s answer even surprised him.
“If what I just did surprised you,” he said, “we have a long way to go.”
“Maybe so, but thanks.”
“As somebody once said, ‘The book of history will set us free from the evil that bricks us up.’ ”
Autumn
Geoff saved the Bigelow company, but it seemed that Geoff and Janice could not save their marriage. Too much damage had been done.
Janice went back to Boston with the kids.
Geoff stayed on Cape Cod and saw them on weekends.
Apart, they tried to understand what had happened to them together. Disagreement bred misunderstanding which became distrust and bred anger. It had begun long before the Fourth of July traffic jam.
