Nantucket Grand (14 page)

“This was fun,” I said. “The one bright spot in a bad week.”

She slipped her arm around my waist. “You could have a breakthrough any time. Just stay alert!”

She went up on her tiptoes and our lips brushed in an awkward kiss. I turned my face away, thought better of it, and then she did the same. Then I slipped on a wet paving stone and she grabbed me to keep me from falling.

“Well—good night,” she said as I started away from the house.

“Good night. Hey, listen—”

A last smile before the door closed. “Don't worry,” she said. “We'll do better next time.”

And we did, though neither of us wanted to rush things.

The impasse with my cases continued through that dismal winter and Jane's notion of some sinister criminal conspiracy looked more farfetched and confabulated every day: a novelist's daydream, worlds away from the stubborn random mundane truth.

But the murders kept coming.

Part Two: Shoulder Season

Chapter Eighteen

Spring Swell

“Learn from the ocean,” Billy Delavane said. “It has a lot to teach you.”

He stood next to Oscar Graham, the sand wet and cold under their bare feet. The wind blew steady out of the northeast. Oscar shivered, staring into the booming cauldron of crosscurrents.

Billy worked for Pat Folger, but Pat wasn't expecting him to show up this morning, with the first pulse of waves from a deep Atlantic storm pounding the south shore. For Oscar, it was different. He had a plum job, with guys no better or worse than him lined up to step into his shoes, as his boss loved to point out. Phil Holdgate, the most hated man at Island Resorts. When he said “Clock in by nine,” he meant be in uniform and ready to jump by eight forty-five. Oscar glanced at his watch: eight o'clock. He closed his eyes against a lash of sand carried on the wind. He shouldn't even be here. But a chance to surf with Billy Delavane was too good to miss.

He turned to face the older man. “Okay, what exactly can you learn from the ocean?”

“You surf. You tell me.”

Oscar shrugged. “Weak swimmers drown? Saltwater makes you puke? I knew that stuff already.”

Billy put a hand to his stubble, rubbed his chin. He had a long bony face and deep-set brown eyes. He used them as a weapon. Oscar had seen him close down bar fights at the Chicken Box with nothing but that steady “it-would-be-messy-and-inconvenient-for-everyone-if-I-had-to-kill-you” stare.

“Come on, Oscar. Dig a little deeper.”

Oscar shrugged. “Physically fit people have more willpower? Panic is dangerous? Things always look scarier when you're in the middle of them?”

Billy smiled. “Not bad. But you learn that last one the first time you work on a roof. They never seem that high from the ground.”

“And the surf always comes up when you paddle into it.”

“Yeah, ain't that weird? But there's more.”

“So tell me.”

A big set rolled through and they paused to watch it. You could barely see the last waves through the screen of wind-whipped spray.

“Sounds like a thunderstorm,” Billy said. “God repeats himself. But I like that about him. Makes him more approachable.”

“So what are the other lessons?” Oscar prompted.

“Okay. You got to move toward what scares you. You got to duck under the bad stuff and let it go by. You got to lean forward into the thing you flinch back from. You can do any stupid shit you want, but usually just once—like breathing under water. You got to enjoy life even when it's beating you up. Then there's the most important one: You got to watch the horizon and wait.”

Oscar nodded. The wind gusted hard. “You going out?”

“You betcha.”

Oscar stared out into the silt-gouged water, the dense brown swells reaching up and curling over as the wind streamed giant fans of spray from their crests. It was daunting, but he was eighteen years old and he wasn't going to stand on the beach watching the old man paddle out. You have to pick your humiliations. Maybe that's another lesson from the ocean, he thought sourly. It now offered a full curriculum in the weaknesses and limitations of the body and spirit.

Billy was strapping his leash around his ankle. “Let's go.”

Before Oscar could answer, Billy charged across the beach and into the water up to his knees, flung himself onto his board and started paddling. Oscar knew if he didn't move fast he'd be hopelessly far behind, caught inside by big waves as Billy paddled over them. He picked up his board and followed. It was mid-May, a balmy morning, air in the mid sixties, water frigid as winter when it sluiced into Oscar's five-mil wetsuit.

He dug into the surging foam, crested a few small waves and then hit his first wall of white water. He tried duck-diving under it but these were storm waves. They were much too strong for that technique. His board was yanked away and by the time he had pulled it back by the leash, two more waves had tumbled over him, forcing him back toward shore while the cross-rip pulled him toward Madaket. The water felt dense and heavy and stubborn, charged with a malign new energy.

Billy was almost out of sight on his nine-foot longboard. Oscar paddled again, though he could see a steep choppy gray wall massing in the distance, beyond the foamy shore break-swell he was cresting. The big one broke and the horizontal avalanche tossed him off his board again, under the dark violent water. Cold scalded the tiny oval of his face not covered by his hood. It plucked the air out of his lungs. When he struggled to the surface after a few breathless seconds, an even bigger wave was breaking.

He gulped air and dove for the bottom.

He could feel the battering surge above him and the sharp tug of the leash against his ankle. For a second he thought either it would snap or his ankle would. Then he was sputtering to the surface again, wallowing onto the board and paddling. Miraculously, the water was clear and in a few minutes he was bobbing beside Billy, dizzy and panting.

“You made it,” Billy said.

“Barely.”

“Barely's good enough. That's another thing you can learn from the ocean, kid. Barely's just fine.”

Before Oscar could answer, the old man was paddling for another wave. Oscar didn't mind. The rudeness was built into the sport. Conversations in the surf were fragmentary. If the waves were consistent enough, conversations never got started at all. Oscar tracked the top half of Billy, appearing and disappearing above the lip of the wave as he rode almost all the way into shore.

He paddled back out a few minutes later, wild-eyed and grinning. Oscar understood why the surfers used the word “stoked”: someone had thrown a few logs on Billy's fire—or maybe doused it with gasoline. He was burning up. “That was great,” he called out. “Did you see that?” A wave wasn't half as good if no one saw you ride it—even a jaded waterman like Billy was a little kid that way.

“It's all about decisions,” Billy said when he'd caught his breath. A few more guys were paddling out into the lull. “Decision is action, that's the point. You grab a wave and stand up, you don't have time to think about it. Just like real life. Like now: your girl is in trouble. So you want to help her. But you're scared.”

“What does the ocean say?”

“The ocean says, make up your mind.”

They straddled their boards, floating on the low swells. The sky was clearing to the west. It was going to be a perfect late spring day: bright pristine sunlight, mild and dry.

Oscar knew he had to do something, with the argument he had overheard still playing in his head. But what? The problem wasn't new—it had been poisoning his life for more than six months. He couldn't help Jill—she was still in a coma and might never emerge from it. He had jumped her new boyfriend—and drug connection—Sam Wallace, screaming and kicking and punching him after a Whalers' game, but the other team members had dragged him off and Sam had broken his nose with one punch. No one had pressed charges and Oscar refused to explain the attack—the truth would only get Jill in more trouble, if she ever came back to the world. He let everyone think he was a hot-headed jealous ex-boyfriend. It was easier. The police never got involved, but Bissell wanted to expel him—and would have, if not for Ms. DeHart, who got his punishment knocked down to a three-week suspension.

Jared Bromley and Alana Trikilis had spoken to him during one of those long days at home. They were doing the detective work. They would find out what was really going on.

But they hadn't. And nothing had changed.

Until last night.

Again and again the question spiraled back at him: What was he supposed to do? Confront one of the most powerful men on Nantucket? And say what? Threaten him? But Oscar had nothing to back up a threat and you could tell that, just looking at him. Shame the guy? Trick him, somehow? Manipulate him into making a confession? But Oscar wasn't tricky. He had thought Ms. DeHart would help him, but he didn't know what to think of Ms. DeHart anymore.

He was stumped.

“Heads up,” Billy said.

A big set was rolling in, steep walls of water. They were raw and aggressive, they wanted to drown you. That was Oscar's ocean: not a benign guru, but a pig-eyed bully who wanted to dunk you at the public pool.

He scratched over the first couple of waves. His arms were tiring and the ocean ahead was scooped into deep valleys and rising cliffs of brine. The water itself felt heavy, surly, unwilling to let him pass. The final wave was the biggest and he couldn't crest it. He abandoned his board and dove as deep as he could. Again, rolled and twisted underwater, clamped in the iron chill, he felt the tug on his ankle. The pain stopped suddenly. He felt a moment of stupid animal relief, then he realized his leash had broken.

He came up to the surface, trying to gauge his distance from the shore. Billy was paddling out, pushing Oscar's board along beside him.

“Lose something?” He slid it over across the gray water.

“You're nuts.”

“And you're taking off on the next wave. Or what's the point?”

Before Oscar could answer, Bill shouted, “Here comes one! Start paddling.”

“Billy—”

“Now!”

Oscar pulled himself onto the board and started paddling as hard as he could. The wave loomed behind him. When the moment came, the water felt utterly still. He was paddling but not moving, caught in an elemental trance of balanced forces, sucked back as he thrust forward. He windmilled his arms through the water—these last strokes were the most important. The wave picked him up and he felt the jolt. When you plugged into that live current, that band of pure energy moving through the water, when you were jabbed outward into the swirling roar of the abyss and started skimming across it, the thrill was an explosion of colliding opposites that made your heart burst: death and immortality, flight and free-fall, terror and joy.

Oscar jumped to his feet, leaning back away from the vertigo of the gray gulf in front of him: just what Billy had warned him against. He could feel himself falling backward, the board shooting ahead of him. Then the wave jacked up vertical and he plummeted down the face.

It took him half an hour to swim and body surf back to land. His board was waiting for him, forlorn as a beached porpoise. He picked it up and started the long walk back to the bluff where he had parked. He felt thrashed and humiliated. He should have felt miserable and frustrated. He'd felt that way often enough, crawling out of the surf. But not this morning. He actually felt good, despite the humiliation. He was on dry land; he had tried for the biggest wave of his life and caught it. He had wiped out, but he hadn't drowned.

It gave him perspective and clarity. When things are clear, decisions are easy. You know what's going to happen next because it's up to you, not someone else. At some point, struggling back to shore, it all became clear to him.

He would go to the police. Chief Kennis was a good man. He would know what to do. And now he would have the power to do it.

Oscar started jogging through the soft sand. Right now the most important thing was getting to work. They would fire him if he got there late, and he couldn't afford to lose this job.

***

Oscar took the day to think about the situation, alighting on it from time to time throughout his hectic day, like a bird on a statue. But nothing changed, no new options occurred to him, and by the time he clocked out at five o'clock, he had settled the matter. All he needed was a little time to organize what he had to say, and a good night's sleep to fortify him. He'd make his notes, go to bed early, and show up at the police station first thing in the morning.

After work, he was out on the water again. The surf had subsided a little and the wind had dropped to a faint breeze. The ocean was tame and docile. He caught a couple of easy waves and then the swell seemed to die out completely. He blew out a long breath, kicking his rubber-clad feet through the icy water. Tomorrow, this would all be done.

He turned his back to the shore and applied himself to the ocean's most valuable lesson: face the horizon and wait.

Chapter Nineteen

A Probable Homicide

Oscar Graham's body was found floating in the saltwater marsh that edges Nantucket harbor in the early evening of May 24th, 2015.

I was attending a fundraiser at a mansion overlooking Polpis Harbor when I got the news. Normally, Kyle Donnelly would have handled the situation and filled me in on Monday morning—or Tuesday, in this case. But I knew Oscar Graham. I knew his family. We had become friends over the previous winter. Kyle knew how I felt about them. So I was the first call he made that evening, before the State crime-scene techs, before the ME, or the ambulance crew, before anyone. I respected him for that.

I made my apologies and slipped out of the house. In ten minutes I was at the creeks. Oscar Graham's body had been hauled up onto the pier that fronted the harbormaster's shack. Dave Fronzuto nodded to me; he had called in the discovery. I stood on the dock, breathing the low tide aroma. The marsh cordgrass and sea lavender shivered in the gentle breeze. I stared down at the young Jamaican boy. He had been so proud to take the citizenship test, when was it? Four months ago. He had just turned eighteen.

I remembered him grinning at me when he got his papers, saying “I bet I know more about America than you do now, Chief! I know who wrote the federalist papers! Do you?”

I did, but I didn't want to spoil the moment. “Tell me.”

“Alexander Hamilton and James Madison! And John Jay.”

Most people forgot about John Jay. I smiled, shook Oscar's hand. “I'll take your word for it, kid.”

That huge, face-splitting grin was what I remembered now, looking down at the vacant features. Those wide excited eyes. They were open this evening, but Oscar was gone. Elvis has left the building. I felt tears coming on like a chill. I crossed my arms against my chest, and ground my teeth together. The spasm passed.

“Looks like a drug OD, Chief,” Kyle said. He was standing just behind me.

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

“The ME's flying in from Sandwich tomorrow. We'll know then.”

“Barry Tupper?”

Kyle nodded. “He needs to test the hair follicles. They show the history of drug use. If he was clean until today…”

“Then he got a bad load on his first try.”

I stared down at Oscar's body, thinking of the easygoing kid who had insisted on driving me around town the day he got his license, finishing with a parallel parking display on India Street. That had been a little nerve-wracking. I felt the burn of tears rise and subside again.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe someone killed him.”

I walked away from the others and stood at the edge of the dock, watching sunset gild the harbor, the clutter of boats, almost every mooring taken already. Two stand-up paddleboarders negotiated the still water between the fingers of swamp grass.

It seemed like an immense distance from that lavish Polpis mansion to the gray planking of the town pier, from those animated pink-and-white faces nibbling blue fish pâté and sampling Spanky's Raw Bar to the body of the Jamaican boy behind me, pulled from the harbor. But maybe Jane Stiles was right. This was small-town America and every person and event seemed to touch every other one somehow. Everything that was going to happen that summer, and so much of what had occurred the winter before, had been manifest at the ProACKtive party that evening, like the landmarks in an unfamiliar city.

I remembered returning to Los Angeles as an adult, finally getting to know that immense urban sprawl. So many places I loved—the Nuart Theatre, Griffith Park Observatory, Will Rogers State Park, the Fat Burger stand in West Hollywood, Santa Monica pier, Book Soup,
The Burghers of Calais
at the Norton Simon Museum, El Cholo and La Barca, all seemed to exist as separate islands, disconnected from each other and the rest of the city. Much later, when I could follow Santa Monica Boulevard from the pier to the 405 freeway entrance a block away from the Nuart, drive south to the 5, get off at Vermont Avenue and roll south to La Barca, or north over the pass into the Valley and then east on the 134 to the Norton Simon, when everything fitted neatly into the grid I had learned from my Thomas Brothers maps, after I'd sat stakeouts on those streets, chased criminals through them, canvassed them door-to-door looking for eyewitnesses to a hundred crimes, I could still close my eyes and feel the city as an unknowable swamp, with the places I had loved since childhood floating unmoored, spot-lit in the mist.

That's how it happened on Nantucket that summer, as the case that dominated my life began to unfold. I was lost in an alien world, but everything I needed to see was right there in front of me, like the dome of Griffith Park observatory or the Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel. Los Angeles was just a scatter of small towns lashed together with freeways; that's what someone from Nantucket could never understand. Cities, finally, aren't all that different from small towns, and neither are people in them. It's just easier to hide in the city.

Or so I thought. I'll lay these new landmarks out for you. Maybe you'll find your way between them better than I did. Or at least more quickly. Quick would have been good that summer.

It would have saved some lives.