Death in Vineyard Waters (11 page)

“It looks like a cryptogram,” I said. I pointed at the initials BNYPL.

“That stands for the
Bulletin of the New York Public Library
” he said. That's the volume number and the year and the page reference right behind it. The New York Public Library collects literary forgeries and employs experts in the field. They lock up the forgeries so they can't escape, but allow scholars to examine them as they try to test the authenticity of other documents by comparing them with the NYPL's known fakes.

“These initials are J.P.C. They refer to one of the world's champion Shakespeare forgers, a guy named John Payne Collier who lived back in the 1800s. He was so interested in
having things known about Shakespeare that he not only made a lot of stuff up and published it as fact, but he also got into libraries and tampered with books and manuscripts. A strange case, but not the only one we studied.”

He ran his finger over the page, resting it here and there upon initials or scribbled lines. “N.T., here, is Nahum Tate and here's D.G., that's David Garrick. Neither of them was a forger, really, but both of them ‘improved' Shakespeare's writing until it was almost unrecognizable. Garrick was an actor, of course, so we can guess that he wanted juicier lines than Shakespeare gave him.”

I saw a familiar set of initials: W.I. I touched them. “William Ireland?”

Ian McGregor put a hand on my shoulder. “None other. I'm impressed. Zee, your old friend is more than just a fisherman. I know now that I've got the right man for this job.”

Was there condescension in his voice? I remembered Marjorie Summerharp saying that all good teachers had a bit of con in them and that a lot of them were vain, petty, sloppy, and deceiving. Feeling McGregor's hand on my shoulder and looking down at the pages of initials and scrawled writing, I thought she might be right. His hand felt heavy and I was relieved when he removed it.

According to Ian McGregor, the marquis of Halifax once said that scholarly curiosity “hath a pleasure in it like that of wrestling with a fine Woman.” But after spending the remainder of that afternoon looking at Marjorie Summerharp's papers, I was not persuaded. Give me a fine woman every time. Such as Zee. But Zee had left to wash her hair, an incredibly time-consuming experience for women who, I suspect, have failed to conquer the world precisely because they don't have time to do that and wash their hair, too. McGregor expressed sympathy for my fatigue.

“Someone said that the test of a vocation is a love of the drudgery it involves. That's certainly true of this sort of work. You have to be a little wacky to do it.”

He'd worked with me all that afternoon, answering questions, explaining things, once in a while scratching his head in perplexity when some scribble's meaning eluded him. But there was nothing in the papers I examined that gave me any useful information about Marjorie Summerharp's death. Everything had to do with Shakespeare, scholarly documents, and individuals I'd rarely heard of.

“Ah,” Ian McGregor would say, “J.H. That's Joseph Hall. He lived back about the time Shakespeare died and kept a Commonplace Book where he wrote down excerpts from other books. Little truisms and that sort of thing. Collier, the forger I mentioned earlier, got hold of Hall's book and forged a tremendous number of ballads in the blank pages.”

“How can you forge a ballad?”

“By pretending that the one you just wrote is a couple of hundred years old. Collier apparently found references to ballads that had long since been lost and then just wrote them himself. He was a funny duck.”

“Who is this J.W.?”

“That's John Warburton. A sad case indeed, especially for such as Marjorie and me. Back in the 1700s he owned a book that's now in the British Museum. What's left of it includes three old plays and part of a fourth, but it also contains a listing from Warburton of fifty or sixty other plays that were originally in the book, including three that he says were Shakespeare's. One was titled
Duke Humphrey,
another was
Henry I,
and there was a third, unnamed one. At the end of the list Warburton wrote a note saying that through his own carelessness he'd entrusted the manuscripts to a servant who used them under pie bottoms!” He shook his head in what I took to be genuine rue. “Can you imagine more than fifty plays by writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe being lost that way? We don't know her real name, but we call his servant ‘Betsy Baker.' If we could get hold of her neck, we'd wring it! Marjorie and I often wondered if the unnamed play could have been the same one we found. We'll never know.”

By early evening, I had seen more references to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and writings than I'd expected to encounter in a lifetime, and I had barely tapped the spring. But I had learned nothing except what I'd already known—that Marjorie Summerharp appreciated but loathed a fraud and had put her own discovery to every test.

I got up. My neck was stiff and my eyes were sore. No wonder the stereotyped scholar was bent over and spectacled. Ian McGregor, of course, was neither bent nor blind, but was more in the mode of an Olympic skier. How did he manage it?

“I'll come back again. I don't expect to find anything, but I'd like to look some more, just in case.”

“Sure.” He got up. “Just give me a call first. I keep this place locked pretty tight when I'm not here.”

Outside, he shook my hand with his firm grip. No hint of a contest this time. His eyes were on a level with mine. “Keep me informed of everything, will you?”

“That's what you're paying me for.”

I got in the Land cruiser and drove to Oak Bluffs. In the Fireside bar, I had a couple of beers.

The faint smell of marijuana was mixed with that of tobacco and spilled beer, and in the mirror behind the bar I once caught a glimpse of a small white packet being passed beneath a table. The bar was full of a youngish, working-stiff crowd mixed pretty much fifty-fifty with the college types who come down to the Vineyard every summer to work at the hotels, to pay exorbitant prices for rooms, and to party. The working stiffs were mostly year-rounders, people who build the endless new houses that are beginning to clutter up the island; the collegians were pure summer folk, who for the most part didn't expect to actually make any money but hoped maybe to break even before Dad and Mom financed their way back to school again in the fall. The only summer employees who really saved any money were the often-illegal Irish and other foreign workers who, with the cooperation of their employers, slaved away, lived like spartans,
and kept one jump ahead of the U.S. Immigration people whose job it was to keep cardless aliens from making a buck. There were a couple of them in the bar, carefully spending their hoarded dollars.

The Fireside was the bar where the fights used to start on Martha's Vineyard. Whenever there was a brawl, it was started there. I thought of starting one now. Zee was at work across town at the hospital. If I could manage to get myself punched out a little bit, I'd have an excuse to go to the emergency ward and see her. If I was bleeding, I knew I'd get quick service, for blood on the emergency room floor is anathema to the workers there; a bloodless emergency, on the other hand, usually only lands the patient in a waiting room chair for an eternity or two while the lady at the desk takes down a folio of information.

I decided not to try it and had another beer instead. Maybe Zee would for some reason just happen to walk into the Fireside right now, and the guy sitting next to me would get up and leave just in time for her to sit down. I drank my beer slowly, but it still hadn't happened by the time I finished it, so I went home.

The next day I drove down to South Beach at five in the morning. The sky was red in the east. Sailor take warning? I had rods on the roof rack, just in case the big fish were in. You can't be too prepared; it would be a lifelong bitterness to recall being on the beach without a rod the day the really big fish came in. But I wasn't fishing; I was looking for early beach walkers.

I ignored the signs saying that no vehicles were allowed on the section of the beach south of the paved road and drove west along it anyway. The signs were to keep four-by-fours from running over the sunbathers, swimmers, and kite fliers who flocked to that most excellent beach during the day, but there were no such people out at five in the morning, so the signs deserved to be ignored and were. I drove slowly, looking for anyone I could find: early walkers or
illegal overnight sleepers or daybreak swimmers or leftover beach partyers—anyone who might have been on the beach the morning that Marjorie Summerharp died. It was a long shot but one worth taking, since some people are on the beach fairly early, fairly often. But not today. Nobody. I drove west to the end of the public beach and then drove on toward the entrance to the Edgartown Great Pond. Nobody was there either, not even a fisherman trying his hand at the opening. To the west I could see the beach reach past West Tisbury and Chilmark and curve out toward Squibnocket ten miles away. I turned around and drove to Edgartown.

I drank coffee and had ham and eggs at the Dock Street Coffee Shop, where you can not only get a great meal cheap, but where the cook has magic hands and is a joy to watch, proof that when a man does anything really well, it's beautiful to see. Food and superb entertainment for less than five bucks. Who'd have thunk that you could find that on Martha's Vineyard? I am so impressed that I sometimes bring guests to have breakfast at the cafe just so they can watch the cook and eat his food.

When the time was right, I walked up the street and found the chief. He was in his office for a change, which only meant that most of the stores downtown weren't open yet, so there wasn't any traffic for him to direct.

I asked him if he'd learned anything from the coast guard or anybody else. He gave me a sour look.

“She'd had to have swum out from shore a long way to the west if her body was to wash back to where it was found in six hours. The tide's nothing like it is in Vineyard Sound, but it's pretty strong.”

“Maybe somebody picked her up in a boat and took her out there.”

“Maybe the moon is made of green cheese. How many small boats have you seen off that beach? Boats don't go there. It's too far from the inner harbor and the launch
ramps. Oh, when the family and I have been down there for a picnic on a good day, sometimes I'll see a powerboat full of kids bouncing along. And lately people have taken to surf sailing and Sunfishing more than they used to. But that's all sunny day stuff. It was raining the night before Marjorie Summerharp died, and it was still raining that morning. She went swimming and there were some joggers out on the bike paths, but I don't think there were any pleasure boats off the beach at that time of day.”

“Maybe she arranged to meet somebody.”

“McGregor didn't mention seeing any boats.”

“Would he have seen one from the parking lot where she left the car? I think the dune is high enough to cut off any sight of the beach.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “Do you really think she hired a boat to meet her and take her out to sea so she could drown herself?”

“No. I'm just trying to think of everything. Did anyone see her on the beach that morning?”

“It was a rainy morning. I've asked around, but so far nobody's said they saw anything. A case like this, people who saw anything are usually ready and willing to talk about it. It makes them feel involved. They tell their family and friends and
they
tell other people. They like their names in the paper. But so far, nothing. I'm going to put a notice in the
Gazette
asking people to come forward if they saw her or anything else that might relate to her death.”

“Anybody see anything at all?”

“A couple of people saw her driving down there that morning. They remember her because she was wearing that white bathing cap. And like I said, there were some joggers out that morning in spite of the rain—those people are too dedicated for their own good, if you ask me—and a couple of them saw McGregor running along the bike path between six and seven, headed home. But nobody saw her at the beach.”

“The paper said they found her robe and towel in her car, and that she was wearing her bathing suit and cap when she was found. Is that right?”

He dug out his pipe. I wondered if he ever smoked it when I wasn't there to suffer while I watched him. He stuck it in his mouth and sucked on it. “That's right,” he said. “She was a tough old lady, they say, but she had one of those robes with bright stripes. Red and yellow and purple or some such combination. Not the sort of robe you'd have expected her to wear. Women.”

If Freud couldn't understand them, how could I expect the chief to? I clenched my teeth on an imaginary pipe and ran everything through my mind. Then I told the chief what I was doing for McGregor.

He raised an eyebrow slightly, as great a sign of interest as the chief ever makes. “You don't say. Well, why not? But what's it gotten you so far?”

“So far, it's gotten me nothing. But I have a few more days to nose around. I'll let you know if I find anything.”

“You're very kind,” said the chief. And to prove that he wasn't, he scratched a match and lit up right in front of my nose.

The bank was open, so I stuck McGregor's money in my checking account. Then, since life goes on even for ace investigators such as myself, I went home and did the laundry, using the machine I salvaged from the dump ten years ago and have kept running since using parts from the same store. I also have an equally good dryer, but I only use it in the wintertime. In the summer I use my solar-powered dryer. I string everything on a clothesline and let the Vineyard sun do the job.

As I hung things, clothespins in my teeth, I was surprised to hear a car coming down my drive. Two cars in a single week? Most unusual. A door shut and Zee came around the house.