Death in Vineyard Waters (6 page)

That night I could smell the fragrance of Zee's hair on my pillow, so I got up and went out into the living room of my house and read until I was too sleepy to know what I was looking at. My furniture is comfortable but old and sagging, mostly stuff my father bought long ago and some that I've salvaged from the world's champion discount store, the Big D, a.k.a. the Edgartown dump, where every bargain comes with an absolute money-back guarantee. Edgartown is a summer home for a lot of very wealthy people who throw away housefuls of perfectly good stuff just because they may be tired of it or too busy or lazy or unimaginative to fix some simple malfunction in it. Other year-round islanders and I take the stuff home and use it. We are dump pickers
because we like finding things and fixing them up and because some of us have thin wallets. Maybe if I win the Megabucks I'll forego dump picking, but until then I won't.

After finally staggering back to bed and sleeping badly with the scent of Zee in my dreams, I was up again at three and back at Wasque Point at four to catch the last two hours of the tide as it fell away to the west. The fish were there, as were three other four-by-fours full of fishermen, and when we were not too busy reeling in bluefish to do so, we watched the red sun climb out of Nantucket Sound and bring another fair summer morning to the island. Wasque is one of the loveliest places in America from which to watch a rising sun. The sky brightens slowly, and if there are clouds they become touched with reds and yellows and whites and odd shadows; then, like something out of a Japanese painting, the round sun rises, newborn once again, and the world is fresh and clean in the singing light.

And when the bluefish are in, it's even better. I have a market for my bluefish, so I do not mess around. I fished hard until, about a half hour before six, the bluefish decided to go off somewhere else. I got a final one with a diamond jig far out in the last of the rip, and then there weren't any more for us shore fishermen. Far out beyond our casts, early morning boatmen were still doing nicely, thank you. They could follow the fish wherever they went, of course, and I thought again about somehow buying myself a good, simple boat that I could use for fishing during the summer and fall and scalloping during the fall and winter. Something strong and stable that would get me out there and back again reasonably quickly. I didn't need a speedboat, but I didn't want to take forever getting out to the shoals or coming home afterward. The winds can brisk up pretty quickly around Martha's Vineyard, and I wanted to be able to get back to harbor without delay, if need be.

But right now my dinghy was the only boat I could afford, so until someone left a bigger one in the dump, I was a
shore fisherman. It could be worse, I thought, as I watched the sun climb into the sky and wash light over land and sea.

While I was drinking coffee and listening to a country and western station from Rhode Island on the Landcruiser's old but good radio, John Skye drove up, took one look, and sighed.

“All gone, eh?”

“Perfect timing, Professor.”

“Serves me right. Too much party last night. I overslept this morning. Oh, well. I'll pick up some quahogs instead. Sorry you had to leave so early last evening.” He squinted at me and poured himself some coffee from his jug. “Woman trouble, I take it. Ian's got the touch, whatever it is. For what it's worth, his women don't normally stay with him long. He's easily bored, they say, and some say he has a temper. You might keep that in mind in case he points it at you. Still, most of his ladies keep right on thinking highly of him after they go their separate ways. It's amazing.”

“Yeah, amazing.” A guy on the radio was singing that he had a funny feeling that he wouldn't be feeling funny very long. I had to smile.

“He's got what they call charm,” said Skye. “Even Marjorie likes him, and she doesn't like anybody very much.”

“How is your sweet-tempered lady professor friend? Still as cheerful and loving as when last I saw her?”

“Marjorie? Just the same. She gets sourer every year, but I just ignore it. She's okay in my book. She may not be politic, but she's smart and she's honest and she hates a phony, and that's good enough for me.” He nodded toward the west. “You'll probably see her car parked at the end of the pavement when you go back. A beat-up Chevy Nova. She'll be taking her six
A.M.
swim.”

“People shouldn't swim alone, they say.”

“I'll let you tell her that, J. W. She's been doing it for sixty years, and she's not about to change her ways now.”

“In that case, you might suggest to her that South Beach
may not be the safest place for solo swimming. There's a good tide there sometimes, and sometimes the breakers get pretty rough. She doesn't look too strong to me.”

“I gave her that sermon when she first came down here. That's probably why she's swimming there instead of up at the bend between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs where I recommended she go. She's got a stubborn streak that's close to perverse.”

The independent sort. “Tell me,” I said, “is she sick?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

“It's none of my business one way or the other, but I saw blood on her handkerchief after she coughed.”

He looked thoughtful. “I don't know. She never mentioned it.” He paused. “But then she wouldn't.”

“She said she was retiring. Maybe her health is one of the reasons.”

“It's more than that,” said Skye. “She's over seventy and she's been hanging on to her job a long time past normal retirement age. There's pressure to move her out. Young bucks want the old-timers out so they can find tenure slots for themselves. Can't blame them, really. And there's the fact that Marjorie hasn't produced much writing for quite a while. This Shakespeare thing will send her out with a bang, which will please her just because it will annoy the harpers who think she's all done as a scholar. And finally, the simple truth is that a lot of people just plain don't like Marjorie very much. She doesn't smile at administrators, she laughs at people and ideas her colleagues take seriously, she says what she means at faculty meetings, and she doesn't take to the idea that her classrooms are democracies. She figures that her job is to teach her students what she knows and test them on that whether they like it or agree with it or not.

“Oh, she'll be wined and dined and given a chair with a Weststock logo and she'll get a plaque and maybe she'll even get a bookshelf in the library named after her, compliments of some alum the president will nail for a financial contribution
for her memorial. But she will be retired, no doubt about it.”

I felt mean and therefore nosy. “What's with her and Tristan Cooper?”

Skye squinted at me then shrugged. “He was department chairman when she joined Weststock. Gossip has it that they had something going together before he packed it in and moved down here to protect his rocks and work on his theories of early European and African encounters with the New World. She became Renaissance chair. He was always a controversial guy, I'm told. Divorced twice, rumors about other women. The Brilliant but Decadent Professor tales. I heard them when I joined the faculty just after he resigned.”

“Under pressure?”

“I've heard various stories, but you should know that academics are great gossips. Marjorie says they live such boring private lives that they have to make up tales about their colleagues just so they can continue to think of themselves as interesting people. Could be.”

“You met him down here?”

“At a cocktail party. We're not friends, but we've had some good conversations and he's showed me the stones on his property. Maybe we get along because I'm the type he expected to scoff but I didn't.”

“Speaking of gossiping, do you know why Marjorie Summerharp loathes the Van Dams? I got the impression that words had passed between them before I arrived and was introduced.”

“Ah. Well, Marjorie detests religion for profit in general and quasi-mystics in particular. As you might guess, the Van Dams are perfect targets for her arrows, and she'd fired a few just before you joined us. A few remarks equating certain religious hypocrisy with sexual perversion, as I recall. She's mentioned that theory to me before, and she's surely not the only one to advance it. The Van Dams have excellent stage
presence and never batted an eye. They just tried to look lovingly sorry for her. Bill Hooperman was not so cool.” He finished his coffee. “By the way, thanks for stopping Bill before he did something stupid. He'd been into the gin, I think, and Marjorie got to him. I'd never seen him pop his cork before. He phoned apologies this morning.”

“Passions run high within the ivy walls.”

“I think he's permanently mad at Ian McGregor, and since he can't take it out on Ian because Ian would make mincemeat out of him, Bill let loose at Marjorie. My own ten-cent psychology. You get it free.”

“Why's he mad at McGregor?”

“A woman—what else? Helen Barstone, if rumor has it right. Bill fancies himself her man when her husband's not around, but Ian took her, kept her, and only gave her back when he met a sweet young thing from up island. That was a couple of weeks ago. Bill took it hard. Helen was more realistic. Women usually are.”

“So now McGregor has an up-island girl.”

Skye's face assumed a careful expression. “I understand that she's also been returned to her previous boyfriend, who got a face full of fist when he took issue with Ian's handling of the situation. I'm told it happened right in my front yard, but I wasn't up to see it. An early morning fracas.” He shook his cup upside down. “I guess I'll make a couple of casts, since I'm here. Then I want some big quahogs for chowder. There are a lot of littlenecks along the south end of Katama Bay, but there aren't many big ones. You have any wise advice?”

I told him to try Pocha Pond. There are some nice big growlers out there in the mud. At low tide you can see them with your bare eyeballs. As he got his rod down off his truck roof, I left. Now I understood McGregor's skinned knuckles, at least. I wondered if I should try to stop worrying about Zee.

After gutting the fish at the Herring Creek, I drove on out
to the pavement, and there, sure enough, was an old blue Chevy Nova parked with its nose in the sandbank. Out of curiosity, I stopped and took out my binoculars—heavy WWI German glasses with excellent lenses, found in the Big D on a fortunate day and needing only a half turn on one of the lenses to make them good as new. I climbed a sand dune.

South of South Beach there is nothing but water far thousands of miles. I believe Puerto Rico must be about the nearest land in that direction. It's a long swim. I looked out and saw nothing for a while except the trawlers that had been working the south shore of the Vineyard since early spring. Then, a couple of hundred yards out, I saw a white dot amid the morning waves. I focused and was looking at a white bathing cap with Marjorie Summerharp's craggy face beneath it. Her thin arms were rising and falling steadily and tirelessly. She didn't look like she was in any sort of trouble. I remembered a fisherman telling me that the south shore of the Vineyard was thick with sharks. I didn't know if he was right, but if he was, all of them were leaving Marjorie Summerharp alone. Too tough a morsel to chew, perhaps.

I got back in the Landcruiser, drove to town, and sold my fish. The price wasn't too good because there were a lot of bluefish around. Then I went home and weeded in my garden until the Edgartown Library opened. I still had a bit of the hangover I'd been ignoring, so I drank a bottle of Sam Adams, America's best bottled beer, felt a bit better, washed up, and went back into town, once again surviving the A & P traffic jam and even finding a parking place on North Water Street, where Edgartown's most elegant old captains' houses look out across the outer harbor toward the sometimes island of Chappaquiddick. The library is also on North Water Street. I went in, and after fingering around in the catalog boxes, located books on Shakespeare and King Arthur. I had an hour before Edgartown's industrious summer meter maids would put a ticket on my car, so I found a table and began to read.

I didn't learn much, but at least I had something to do besides think about Zee. I had a little tickle in the back of my brain about what John Skye had said; that Shakespeare hadn't written about King Arthur. I haven't read much Shakespeare, but I have read enough to know I don't like
Lear.
And somewhere in
Lear,
I thought I'd run across something Arthurian. So I looked there first and after a while found it. It wasn't much: in act 3, scene 2, the Fool says, “This prophecy Merlin shall make.”

That was all. I found no further references to the Arthurian tales. After most of an hour of scanning books about the Bard, I concluded that a lot of guesswork had somehow passed as scholarship as far as Shakespeare's private life was concerned. Nobody really seemed to know a lot, although a lot of people had opinions. I decided I wouldn't learn much about him from such books. Leaving the books on the table, I went out, saw a parking space a block down the street, drove and parked there and went back to the library, thus eluding the dread meter maid for yet another hour.

Libraries are treasuries. They're mountains of information in which you can delve for free. They have things to read and places to read them, and you can even take material home with you. And librarians are also treasuries. When you can't find something yourself, they will show you how or else find it themselves. And unlike people at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, librarians
want
to help you.

I told the librarian what I wanted to know: Did Shakespeare ever write anything based on the Arthurian stories other than that one line spoken by the Fool in
Lear?

“Yes, he did,” said the librarian.