Murder at Teatime (24 page)

“Nothing,” said Tracey. “But I don’t think he’ll cause any more trouble. He’s had the living daylights scared out of him.”

“How’s that?” asked Tom.

“The State police really put him through the wringer this morning. They thought he might know something about the murder.”

“I feel sorry for him,” said Kitty. “He must be a confused boy.”

“I can’t say that I disagree with you there, Mrs. Saunders,” Tracey concurred. “The problem is that he hasn’t got anything to occupy his time. His father doesn’t pay any attention to him, and his mother’s still so torn up over the other boy’s death that she isn’t able to.”

“Maybe he should get a summer job,” said Kitty, who could always be depended on to look for the bright solution.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking into that,” said Tracey. “I’ve asked a friend of mine who does some lobstering to take him on as bait boy. I’d ask Wes Gilley, but he’s already got his girls helping him out. Some honest work won’t do Kevin any harm, and it might just do him a lot of good.”

As Charlotte was getting ready for bed she stood looking out at the cove. A full moon hung above the black tips of the spruces on Sheep Island, bathing the room in its soft light. She felt as if she could walk out to the island on the flickering silver path of its reflection. She loved the cozy room, with its lovely view, its antique furnishings, and its wide plank floors; it was gracious and unassuming, like the people of Maine. Tracey, for instance. How many police chiefs would have taken a juvenile delinquent under their wing? The people of Maine were often like that, noble and generous. She thought of them as natural aristocrats. They had little, but they were rich in spirit—the legacy, it was said, of the days of the great sailing ships. The sailors of that era had visited hundreds of ports in a lifetime, and knew that the world was bigger than their own little towns. Their wide horizons lived on in their descendants. Of course Maine, like anywhere else; had its share of bigots and backbiters, but it was nevertheless remarkably free of the narrow-minded prejudice typical of other rural populations.

Still another appeal of Maine, she thought as she snuggled under the antique quilt, was its belief in the old-fashioned values, values like pride in workmanship, self-reliance, and perseverance. Looking up at the rafters, she could see the marks left by the adze that the barn builder had used to hew a square beam from a round log. He had been just a simple craftsman putting up a functional building. But he had created a structure with such dignity of form and purity of line that it was as beautiful a hundred and fifty years later as on the day it was built. She was not a believer in genius. Like Edison, she believed that genius was ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. She had been taught from her youth to do her job well and to do it with humility; it was a lesson that had brought her tremendous success. With the years, she had come to see that it was the same in any profession. The greats were great because they were always the first on the job in the morning. Like the barn builder, they were dedicated craftsmen whose creations withstood the test of time. Things were different today: nobody wanted to pay their dues. The bright young stars expected to start at the top and often did, but what they failed to recognize was that their so-called genius would wither away unless it was nourished by skill, effort, and diligence.

Thornhill had paid lip service to the Yankee values, she reflected, her thoughts shifting back to the murder. He had professed to be a man of plain living and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, in the best New England tradition. But he had betrayed those values: he had wanted the books, and he had wanted them now. He hadn’t been willing to wait to acquire them honestly. She remembered Felix’s taunting words at the herb luncheon: “It is not the yielding to temptation that oppresses me, but oh the remorse for the times I yielded not.” Perhaps the betrayal had cost Thornhill his life.

Soft, fitful puffs of fog blew in through the screen, dampening her pillow. The fog bank that had hovered offshore all day was creeping toward land. Before long, the moon would be swallowed up. In the distance, she could hear a foghorn; its hoarse, haunting call sounding base to the clanking rhythm of a bell buoy, like a tin can being kicked along an empty street.

She had just drifted off to sleep when she was suddenly awakened by heavy pounding on her door. “What is it?” she called, her heart beating wildly.

“It’s Tom,” answered an urgent voice.

She sat up in bed, alarmed. Her clock dial read eleven thirty.

Tom opened the door, and stood silhouetted in the light from the stairwell, one hand on the doorknob and the other on the doorjamb. “It’s Daria,” he said. He was out of breath. “She’s missing. She went out in the runabout to paint the island by moonlight. She was supposed to meet me in the parlor at Ledge House at ten, but she hasn’t come back.”

For one drowsy minute, Charlotte wondered why Tom was meeting Daria at ten o’clock, but then she remembered that he had spoken with her that afternoon. They had probably made a date then. The rest took a little longer. The channel! The current was most treacherous in the hour before low tide. She made a quick mental calculation. The tide had been out just before ten, when they had set off for Wes’s. Which would mean that the current would have been at its strongest around nine, just as Daria was about to come in. And the moon was full. Ordinarily the tidefall was twelve feet, but with a full moon it would be a couple of feet more, making the tidal current all the more swift.

She threw aside her covers and sat up, groping for the pair of trousers that was draped over the back of a chair. The room was dark—the light of the moon had been extinguished by the advancing fog. She glanced out the window—a wall of white. How would they ever find her? “Damn. Did you call Tracey?”

“Yeah,” he replied briskly. “He’s going out in the police launch, and he’s calling the Coast Guard. I already stopped by the gardener’s cottage. Lewis is going out in Donahues’ boat, and I thought I’d go out with Wes. I’m headed over there now. Can you and the Saunders search in their boat?”

Charlotte nodded.

“Thanks,” he said as he turned to leave.

“Did you search for her on the Ledges? Maybe she fell down and hurt herself on the path or something.”

“Yeah. All the way down to the landing. She wasn’t there.”

14

The fog smothered the island in a shroud of white. It was an unearthly world—cold, wet, and strangely dark. A world of no bearings and no dimensions. A world of ships crashing on hidden ledges. A world without comfort or safety, in which the senses were heightened to danger, the eye more keen, the ear more sharp. Even the sea birds spinning out of the mist seemed like sinister emissaries from the underworld.

Charlotte rubbed her hands together. Her skin was cold and clammy. She had been out all night in the Saunders’ boat, searching for Daria. At daybreak, Stan and Kitty had dropped her off to search the shoreline, on the chance that Daria had managed to swim ashore. She couldn’t see anything: the fog obscured everything outside of fifty yards. “So thick you could stick your knife in it to mark the passage back,” Tracey had said. She had circled the island once and was now on her second circuit, just past Ledge House where the road opened up onto the headlands that marched out to the point at Donahues’. She had never realized that the sea had so many voices: the deep, angry roar of the breakers as they crashed upon the rocks; the rumbling of the rounded rocks on the shingle beaches as they were sucked back into the sea; the undertone of hoarse gasping. Occasionally, there was a sound like a pistol shot as a big wave slapped against a granite bluff, sending a plume of foam skyward. From the edge of the cliff came the slow, steady hiss of the wind that carried the fog toward land. What was it she was listening for? she wondered. A cry, a moan, the thud of an oar? The sound of an empty boat splintering against the rocks?

At the side of the road ahead emerged the silver, skeletal shapes of a forest of dead trees; it was the
dri-ki
, the word the Indians used for the trees that die when a beaver dam raises the level of water in a pond. They stood like an army of ghosts, their bones clothed in a miasma of fog, their feet rotting in the dark, fetid water. She was reminded of a leg-end Kitty had told her about the seamen who’d lost their lives in shipwrecks on the ledges surrounding the island: their ghosts were said to haunt the island when the fog was thick. “Cobweb-shaped creatures,” Kitty had called them. She imagined she could hear them moaning, but it was only another of the sea’s many voices. She hastened her step; the place made her uneasy. In a minute, she had left the
dri-ki
behind in the fog. She walked in a trance, her thoughts dwelling vaguely on the death that was omnipresent in the wind, the fog, the sharp rocks; the death that demanded the sacrifice of the youngest, the most fair. By turns, she fought off the succession of feelings—outrage, impotence, poignant sadness—that are left to the living when youth and beauty are taken before their time. Thornhill, yes, he had lived his life, but not Daria.

She had been missing now for nearly twelve hours. The only explanation for her disappearance was that the boat’s outboard motor had failed. The boat was equipped with oars, but the consensus was that her chance of overcoming the treacherous tidal current was slim; strong men had lost their lives in its grip. “As swift as a mill race,” Tracey had called it. She thought of another local legend related by Kitty, the legend of a schoolteacher who’d been engulfed by a wave while she was reading on the rocks. Her body had washed up on shore a week later, looking as neat as if it had been laid out in a funeral parlor, her bonnet still tied under her chin, her shawl still neatly pinned across her breast. She shuddered, and pulled up the collar of her jacket against the damp. Looking out over the cliffs edge, all she could see was waves crashing on the rocks, and an angry swirl of white foam that reminded her of one of Stan’s paintings: the elemental battle between land and sea. But the sky was brightening: the sun had tentatively begun to shine through the gauze-like fog, tingeing it with a pearly luminescence. She could hear the invisible gulls greeting the morning with their raucous cries … and another sound. She cocked an ear: could it be a groan?

It seemed to come from the channel where she and Tom had watched the seals at play. She walked over to the edge, half believing that her ears were deceiving her, that it was the sound of the sea, the clamoring of the voices in the waves. But it was not: there, on a rock, was Daria, her slim body thrown up on shore like a piece of flotsam. She lay face-down on the slab of granite where the mother seal had sunned herself, the cheerful red of her sweater strangely incongruous in the grim, gray scene. One leg was skewed at an awkward angle, like a rag doll’s, and the rising tide was lapping at her feet.

Slipping and sliding on the seaweed and algae, Charlotte clambered down the cliff. “Please let her be alive,” she prayed. Her hands and shins scraped against the sharp shells of the mussels and barnacles that clung to the rocks, but she barely noticed. Reaching Daria, she gently pulled her dank, fishy-smelling hair away from her face. “It’s Charlotte,” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay.” Daria opened her eyes and nodded weakly in response. Beneath her tan, her face was drained of color, and her lips were an alarming shade of gray.

Removing her jacket, Charlotte draped it over Daria’s slender shoulders.

Once Charlotte had called the police from the Donahues’ house, Daria’s rescue was quick work. A rescue squad plucked her off the rock within half an hour, and she was now resting in the hospital with Tom at her side. Fran’s prognostications had been accurate in one respect: Tom was Dana’s lucky guy. If he hadn’t been there to notice that she hadn’t come back, she would probably be dead. Instead she had a broken leg—a simple fracture—a couple of cracked ribs, and contusions and abrasions, which meant that she had taken a beating on the rocks. But she would be all right. The breeze that had driven the fog inland had been her salvation. Once the tidal currents had eased, the breeze had blown her back toward land. She had been guided by the lights at Donahues’. Thank God Marion was an insomniac. But she hadn’t made it all the way. The boat had been grounded on a ledge exposed by the tide—one of the ledges on which so many ships had met their doom. She had been forced to swim to shore. It was Only through the grace of God that she’d ended up in the channel, where she was protected from the waves. Charlotte had found her just in the nick of time. Another hour and she would have been drowned by the rising tide.

Charlotte was now sitting in Tracey’s office, waiting for him to finish a phone conversation about a stolen piece of lumber.

Hanging up the phone, Tracey asked how Daria was doing.

“Fine,” said Charlotte. “The doctors say she’ll probably be able to go home tomorrow or the next day.”

“Good. I can talk with her then. I was supposed to go over the report on the book theft with her this morning, just to check some facts.”

“Have you recovered the boat?” asked Charlotte.

“Ayuh. Stove all to hell—the prop’s sheared off, the lower housing’s knocked out. Drove on a ledge just east of that little channel. She’s a lucky girl,” he continued. “I thought we’d seen the end of her, sure as shooting. It would have been the end of her, too, if it hadn’t been for that breeze.”

“I wonder if she’s as lucky as you say,” said Charlotte.

“What’re you driving at?” he asked, curious.

“Do you know anything about engines?”

“Depends.”

“She said that the engine ran fine on the way out, but that she couldn’t get it started again when she was ready to come in.”

“Do you think someone might have tampered with it?”

“Maybe.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Tracey, standing up and reaching for his windbreaker. “She’s down to the town pier.”

The sun was shining brightly through the fog as Charlotte and Tracey walked down the steep slope to the town pier.