Death Will Extend Your Vacation (8 page)

“Come on, it’s not far,” Barbara chirped. “The farm stand is our next door neighbor.”

“The next door neighbor is our handyman. Mr. Dowling. Cindy and I met him the other day.”

“That’s them,” Barbara said, “Mrs. Dowling makes great pies and runs the farm stand. Mr. Dowling is a farmer and a fisherman and a bayman and the guy we call if the toilet won’t flush or a squirrel gets into the house. He also does the yard work. We might as well establish relations.”

“Don’t expect them to fall on your neck,” Jimmy warned. “The locals here need the summer people, but they don’t like them much. City folks in the Hamptons have so much money and such a different agenda.”

“I’m glad to hear that nobody expects me to plunge the toilet or catch the squirrel,” I said.

“Karen says it’s hard for locals like them to make a living these days,” Barbara said. “Up island, she says, developers are buying up land that nine or ten generations of a family like the Dowlings has farmed and putting up McMansions. If they don’t watch out, in twenty years the whole East End could be suburbs.”

“Get uprooted or go broke, huh? Tough for them.”

“Oh, look, Jimmy.” Barbara took a couple of skipping steps and waved her hand at a field of low, bunchy plants studded with dull white flowers. “Are those potatoes?”

“How should I know? I’m a city boy, remember?”

Barbara grinned at him.

“I don’t know— by the pounding of your ancestral Irish heart, maybe. I’m sure I’m right, though. Long Island grows potatoes and corn, and those plants don’t look like they could be as high as an elephant’s eye by the middle of the summer. Anyhow, I know what a cornfield looks like. Oooh, I’ve never dug a potato, could we try?”

“If you want to start off on the right foot with the Dowlings,” Jimmy said, “don’t begin by stealing their potatoes.”

“I guess you’re right. I was thinking they’re in the ground— the potatoes, not the Dowlings— waiting for us to dig in and pull them out.” She waggled her fingers. “It’s hard to think of dirt as property.”

“It’s called land, pumpkin,” Jimmy said.

“It might not even be time for new potatoes, anyway,” Barbara consoled herself.

“If it is, they’ll have them at the farm stand,” Jimmy consoled her. “Or maybe there’s a pick-your-own-potatoes season.”

“It doesn’t turn you on even a little?” she asked. “Plunging your fingers in the soil, feeling the weight of this smooth, round, mealy miracle of nutrition that fed your grandparents?”

“My grandparents left Ireland so their descendants wouldn’t have to do that,” Jimmy said.

The cough and growl of a motor broke the quiet. I saw a tractor on the far side of the field. John Deere green with yellow wheels. I’d had a toy one just like it as a kid.

“There goes Dowling,” I said.

“And there’s the stand. Good morning!” Barbara called.

Mrs. Dowling nodded as she lifted baskets of strawberries from the bed of a pickup truck and set them on the shelves. She was tall and angular, with a high forehead and dull brown hair pulled back into a wispy bun. The frown stamped on her brow and mouth looked like it didn’t come off easily.

“What beautiful strawberries!” Barbara exclaimed as we neared the stand. “Did you grow them yourself?”

Mrs. Dowling glanced at the field that stretched away behind the stand. I made a sound that was one nostril short of a snort. A corner of Jimmy’s mouth quirked. Barbara babbles when she’s ill at ease and a lot of the time when she’s not.

“I hope you’ve got plenty left for us to pick ourselves. Oh, what gorgeous petunias! I’d love to get some for the deck if you’ve got some planters we could buy.”

“Planters in the back,” Mrs. Dowling said. “Strawberry baskets too. Three dollars a pound, weigh when you’re through. You can eat ’em, but don’t pick the green ones.”

“Thank you.” Barbara retreated to the back of the stand. “Oh, look, guys, the planters are old whiskey barrels! Aren’t they cute? Let’s get a couple and put flowers on the deck.”

Jimmy and I followed her around the stand. The old wooden barrels would look kind of perky filled with the bright orange marigolds and pink and purple petunias arrayed in flats to one side of the stand.

“We’d have to leave them at the end of the summer,” Jimmy cautioned her.

“They cost thirty-four ninety-five each.” Barbara picked up the wooden sign, which had fallen to the ground. “Do you think it’s too much?”

“No, no, petunia—” Jimmy hesitated.

I grinned.

“It’s okay, marigold, knock yourself out.”

“Shut up, you.”

“How about one thing at a time,” Jimmy said. “We came for strawberries, so let’s pick strawberries.”

“The baskets are over here,” I said. “You want the big ones?”

“Might as well,” Jimmy said.

I handed him a stack of quart containers. They weren’t really baskets, just soft green cardboard with holes in the bottom.

“They’ll fill up fast,” Barbara said. “How are we going to carry more than two each?”

“How many strawberries do you need, pumpkin?”

“Lots,” she said. “It’s a short season. The ones we pick ourselves are bound to be the ripest and sweetest. We can make fruit salad and strawberry shortcake.”

“Just say ‘yes, dear’,” I advised.

“Look, here are some big flat-bottomed baskets.” Barbara stuck her arm through the handle of one and dangled it from the crook of her elbow. “Line up the containers inside this and you’ll still have both hands free.”

“Yes, dear.”

The field started right behind the stand. Barbara led the way toward the far end.

“The plants near the stand have probably been picked over already,” she said. “We can each take a row, once we’re not too close.”

At first I couldn’t see any fruit. I said so.

“Underneath,” Barbara said. She dropped to her knees and parted the powdery green leaves. “See?”

Sure enough, a cluster of bright red pincushions peeked out at us, half buried in a tangle of stems. Barbara plucked the biggest one off its stalk.

“Ahhhhh.” She took a bite. Chewed it slowly. Licked juice off her fingers. “Mmm. This is the real thing, all right, ten times the flavor of the ones you get in the supermarket.” She held it out. “Take a bite.”

“I’ll pick my own, thanks.” I dropped to my knees beside her and teased a berry out from its nest of straw mulch and reddish brown earth.

Jimmy knelt slowly, one knee at a time. He opened his mouth like a giant baby bird. Barbara popped the rest of her strawberry into it.

“Mmm,” we said simultaneously. The strawberry was meltingly sweet.

“So this is what they’re supposed to taste like.” Barbara popped another strawberry. “I’ll take this row. You guys go get your own rows.” She shooed us off.

“There’s enough for all of us, poppet. And don’t forget to put some in the basket.”

“Thank you for sharing,” Barbara said. The program way of telling someone to go to hell. “Go pick a strawberry.”

“Yes, dear,” I said. I dropped a small strawberry down her neck as I inched past her. She yowched and swatted at me. She didn’t really mind.

Being one with the earth felt kind of nice. As the sun climbed higher, my arms and face started to bake pleasantly. The fruity smell of strawberries and baked earth and something even sweeter, maybe wild roses around the edges of the field, tickled my nostrils. Companionable bees zoomed around the plants that were still in blossom. I ate one strawberry for every three or four I picked until my thumb was coated in juice. In the next row, Jimmy filled baskets, a model of industry. Every time I looked over at Barbara, she was chewing.

“How many baskets do we get?” I called to her.

“As many as we can till we get too hot.”

“When my back gives out,” Jimmy said, “I’m outta here.”

“You know, we could have bought them from the stand,” I said.

“What, and miss the experience?”

A faint shout from the direction of the stand made us all look up. I rocked back on my heels. Jimmy pressed his palms against the small of his back and flexed. Barbara popped another strawberry in her mouth and squinted toward the sound.

“It’s Lewis and Karen. Last night I invited her along, but she didn’t seem interested. I guess she changed her mind.”

“Hi, guys!” Jimmy called out, raising his arm to wave. His shoulder cracked audibly.

Karen wore a hot pink tank and pants. A straw hat as big as a market umbrella topped the ensemble.

“Wow, she looks like a strawberry smoothie herself,” Barbara said. “Yoo-hoo!” she yodeled as they marched toward us, Karen in the lead. Lewis carried the baskets. New century, postfeminist world, and men were still the porters.

When they got close enough for conversation, Lewis said, “I got drafted.”

“I want to make jam,” Karen said. “They’ve got the jars and everything in the hardware store in Amagansett.”

“I’ve never made jam,” Barbara said. “I’ll help.”

“We’ll do it this evening,” Karen said, “so we won’t get too hot in the kitchen.”

Clearly experienced strawberry pickers, she and Lewis each took a row beyond ours and started efficiently stripping fruit off the plants.

“How do you stay so clean?” Barbara asked. “I’m covered with strawberry juice.”

Karen laughed.

“Wait till we make the jam. I dress down for that.”

The baskets filled. The sun climbed. Jimmy had a confrontation with a bumblebee. Sweat started getting in my eyes. Barbara handed me a red bandanna, which I tied around my forehead.

I was about to suggest calling it quits when someone called out to us.

“Oh, look!” Karen said. “It’s Oscar.”

Sure enough, Oscar led a little troop of his housemates through the field.

“Surprise, surprise,” Barbara muttered. We had reached the same point in adjacent rows, so I was the only one who heard.

“I hope you left some for us,” Corky said. “We’re going to make jam.”

“So are we,” Karen said.

“I’ve already picked up everything we need,” Oscar said. “Pectin, sugar. And I got plenty of jars. Why don’t we pool resources? Use my kitchen. It’s a lot bigger than yours.”

“What a great idea,” Karen said.

Barbara was practically bursting by the time we got back to the car.

“They planned that!”

“Maybe, poppet, but so what?”

“You weren’t there when she told us Oscar’s affairs were never serious. Summer fling my eye. Right, Bruce?”

I had to agree Karen seemed to be blowing smoke.

“But still, so what?”

“Romance and intrigue, for one thing. People go to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous for that.”

“Oh, come on, not everything is an addiction,” I objected.

“You only say that because you’ve got the one everybody knows about.”

“Why do you care, peanut?” Jimmy asked.

“Because I still don’t think Clea’s drowning was an accident,” Barbara said. “You’d like to think nothing bad could happen in a clean and sober house. But where there’s steam, there’s— there’s hot water. Romance and intrigue and murder— is it so farfetched?”

“Karen and Oscar make a steamy pair,” I said, “I’ll vouch for that. I’m even with you on things we don’t know about bubbling beneath the surface with this crew. But how does it connect with Clea’s death?”

“I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Yet.”

“It’s hard to get information out here,” Barbara complained. “Everybody’s a lotus eater when they’re on vacation, especially at the beach. Nobody talks about anything real.”

“You mean like world peace and improving the economy?”

“No, you clod, like who slept with who last summer and who’s got a motive for murdering Clea.”

“If Clea hadn’t died, maybe they would all be talking about who slept with who last summer,” I said. “I think people are more spooked than they’re admitting.”

We huddled together on Jimmy’s little porch, talking quietly when we remembered. Barbara had a tendency to bounce and get louder when she got a bright idea. The small space bristled with the tools of Jimmy’s trade: laptop, wireless router, coils of cable, adapters, and what he called peripherals. He’d have told us what each one did, but he knew from long experience we didn’t want to know.

“You have to cut them out of the herd,” Jimmy said. His fingers flew on the laptop’s keyboard, and he jounced on his seat to the music in his headphones, of which we could hear only a faint megabass boom. “Who’d be likely to know the most?”

“Oscar and Phil,” I said. “They were her lovers. And this Ted guy if he shows up.”

“Stephanie and Jeannette,” Barbara said. “Women who’ve shared a group house know a hundred times more about each other than any guy would.”

“Sez who?”

“Feminist psychologists,” she retorted. “Women are relational.”

“Meaning?”

“Think about the last five women you slept with.”

“I can only remember two,” I said. “The others, I was still drinking.”

“I can’t remember anyone but you, pumpkin,” Jimmy said. “It’s been too long and I’m getting too old.”

“The five most memorable, then,” she said. “Do you know how they lost their virginity? How many D&Cs they’ve had? How they get along with their mothers and sisters?”

“You know all that about your friends?”

“I know all that about women I’ve sat next to on a plane.”

“You win,” I said. “Let’s say we push harder, talk to all of them: Oscar, Phil, Ted if we can, Stephanie, Jeannette. How about Karen and Lewis?”

“Them too,” Barbara said, “but they didn’t share a house with her last summer.”

“They went to meetings with her.”

“They can’t share what she said in meetings,” Jimmy said. “Anonymity.”

“But she’s dead.”

“It’s still wrong,” he insisted. “They’re our housemates. We’ll be sharing shampoo and tortilla chips with them all summer.”

“The police don’t even think it was murder,” I pointed out.

“Then they won’t get in our way,” Barbara said.

“And if they’re right?”

“So we won’t find anything that proves it was,” she said.

Barbara and I found Jeannette in the kitchen, stirring a double boiler full of crème anglaise.

“You have to stir it and stir it and stir it,” she said. “It’s supposed to thicken, but it hasn’t yet, and my arm is killing me.”