Reprisal (17 page)

"I hope you do, Mrs. Reed."

... Out on the street, and standing in sunlight that now seemed too bright, Joanna thought how Frank would have enjoyed hearing the discussion in the chief constable's office. He would have made some remark about inevitable handcuffs, if she kept on. If she kept on. ...

A soft late-morning breeze had begun drifting off the sea, stirring her dress's skirt against her. The green dress again, and not particularly successful with the chief constable. The old man, apparently used to deference and cautious respect out on the islands, was not to be won by a summer dress and fairly good legs.

... And might the constable be right? Perhaps be dealing only with a shocked and foolish woman, a woman poet--deep truths her business, but now unable to accept the truth of loss? ... It certainly might seem so to anyone who never knew Frank Reed, never went out sailing with him. And might seem so, too, to anyone who'd never seen Louis Bernard fuss and fiddle with his cabin stove-selecting his twists of newspaper for starters, then carefully his sticks of tinder, then the perfect quarter logs--all ritually arranged in the Franklin stove. Then lit with one Blue Tip match, and the two small iron doors swung smartly shut, and latched.

A husband and father, both careful men, though otherwise so different. The wrong men for their accidents.

But what reason ... what possible reasons could there be for anything but mischance? To begin with, what reason for a boy--or perhaps a slight man who might have looked, from a distance, like a boy-to sail out with Frank Reed and somehow manage his drowning?

Reasons: Hate. Love. Money.

Not hate. Another man, perhaps, but not Frank. There had been nothing in him dark enough to provoke it.

Love ...? Only a little more likely. A few women must have loved him, been very fond of him, no doubt. Susan Thom, and probably one or two others through the years. Perhaps even now, another faculty wife ... a student. Perhaps one of his athletes--some young man, gay, might have loved Frank, might have been the boy in a red baseball cap. ... But all so improbable.

--And no man had approached her, at least not for years, in such an obsessed and furious way that murder might seem possible. Men had asked ... had suggested. Some had always done that, making their pass at the Poet--because of the poetry perhaps, or her very minor celebrity. Perhaps for her legs, her ass, or her single breast and its foam twin. Perhaps dark eyes had sparked them, a Mohegan nose. ... But none of those men had been frightening, none seemed to have loved so that no husband--perhaps not even a father--could be allowed to live to share her.

Michael Jaffrey, drunk, had exposed his modest penis to her in the den during Lianne's party, almost two years ago. "Please," he'd said, his chinos unzipped, holding it up in display. "I'm desperate for you."

"Sorry," Joanna had said to him. She'd come to the den for the silver ice bucket. "Sorry, Michael; it's just too small."

A phrase she'd regretted afterward. So much better to have simply kept her mouth shut, and walked away. Later, miserable Michael had vomited on Lianne's carpet runner--and on Monday, in Lufton Hall, had come up to Joanna and said,

"For God's sake, tell me what I think happened at the McCreedys' didn't happen."

"Sorry," she'd said.

"Oh, jumping Jesus. ..."

"And it isn't too small," Joanna had said. "It's perfectly okay. Looked very sturdy."

No ... not likely Frank was murdered by a jealous professor of physics.

Which left only money. ... But where could money be found in Frank's death?

His insurance would be enough to pay off the mortgage on the White River house, and that was about all. No serious money would come to anyone from his death--not nearly enough to reward a carefully planned murder. And if not from Frank's death ... then from what, the wreck of the Bo-Peep?

What insurance had there been on that small boat? Surely not much. ...

Joanna walked back on Strand, threading through tourist families wandering, and turned up Slope Street. The sea wind, rising, gently assisted ... pressing cool, soft, and salty against her back as she climbed to the cottage.

She walked down the driveway, went around back and up the steps to the kitchen. No Mr. Moffit. His window frame still leaned against the wall.

Joanna walked through the hall and went up the stairs. Perhaps because of the light--streaming sunlight that stirred and slowly rippled across white-painted pine walls as if the sea were reflecting everywhere--the upstairs seemed emptier than the rooms below.

She went into the bathroom, peed and wiped, then stood at the cabinet mirror, washing her hands. Looking into a widow's face. A widow's face, already seeming older, preparing to be older still. "Middle-aged," Joanna said to her reflection, and wasn't answered it wasn't so. Her reflection stared at her like a stranger, a person who'd had bad news.

After a late lunch of tomato soup and toast, she drove down to Strand, then turned left out Beach Road through sunny afternoon, past Trudie's and on along Asconsett's northern coast. A two-mile coast, the island's weather side, and dotted with half-million-dollar beach houses stilted twelve feet high on tarred telephone poles over sand and sea grass. Houses with Land Rovers, Jeeps, and dune buggies parked alongside, and bright banners and flags--many the American flag's candy colors--fluttering from their several decks, their carports. There were three ... four fishing boats in line far out on a whitecapped ocean.

The sea wind wandered through the Volvo's open windows as Joanna drove. She was driving left-handed, her right hand resting over along the passenger seat, so she could pretend Frank was sitting there, thoughtful, silent, holding her hand.-And he might be, if she didn't glance that way.

Asconsett's roads were minimal, narrow blacktop tracks with sea-bleached sand sweeping over here and there. Roads that dipped and broke where the wind or winter storms had blown dune from beneath their edges, so the car rose and fell in rhythmic memory of those storms' striking. Everything here was by the sea's permission, and with its mark.

A spark flashed on the road ahead ... flashed again and became the sunstruck windshield of a Jeep coming toward her ... rising and falling with the road.

It rose out of a dip, came to her on the left, and buffeted past, going fast.

It left an impression of youth behind it--four or five tanned grinning boys and girls in bathing suits. Packed in, merry and traveling fast-heading for South Beach, its small marina, and shallower slightly warmer water. Children of money and good times--descendants, most of them, of old mainland families grown rich dealing in the spoils of a continent and the sea.

Beautiful careless young people. Joanna had seen them in town, cruising through the wandering summer tourists, yachts passing barges.

... She drove another half mile, saw the tilted signpost for Willis Street on the left, and slowed for the turn. Willis was Asconsett's only cross-island road, and it was narrow, pavement often broken and half buried in sand as it went along. Low dunes, furred in sea grass, rolled away on either side.

Mid-island sand was too unstable to build on. There were no houses on Willis Street for almost a mile; the island's center had been left a state bird sanctuary. Plover and terns due to come kiting along the New England flyway later in the season.

Willis Street went southwest, and ended at the island's original settlement, the sandbarred reach where the first fishermen had built driftwood homes four hundred years before. The stretch of coast, like the street, had been named Willis, and had been the island's village capital until whaling and a deeper harbor had created Asconsett Town.

The Willis people had been the island's first fishermen, lobstermen. Joanna supposed Mr. Moffit's family were Willisers.

The bird sanctuary ended in a handsomely carved sign--a tern in flight--and the first sheds and shacks appeared at once, all on the left side of the road, all facing west to the mainland channel. The mainland was too far across to see.

Shacks, sheds, and wind-worn cottages set into sand, each with a battered pickup truck or car or brace of rust-spotted motorcycles resting in the sun beside it. Most trucks held clouds of green trawler net.

Willis ran on for a stretch, to a small gas station, bait shop, and closed ferry dock. Only the distance from the mainland, only the slow ferry's successive stops at inshore islands, had kept this ancient settlement from transformation into massive ranks of time-share condos and strip stores.

Joanna took her hand from what should be Frank's, and slowed to read the mailboxes along the road's left side. The name was Wainwright. Murray Wainwright had leased the Bo-Peep to Frank--he and his boat suggested by the marina office. ... Wainwright had been elderly and crippled, squatting fat in his wheelchair on the Willis dock. A cheerful old man, missing several front teeth, which loss had given his singsong down-east speech an occasional flatulent accent. ...

The mailboxes in Willis were damaged goods, apparently targets for passing boys. Joanna, driving slower and slower, was able to read Cabot, Lindsay ..., Shallowford, Wilson. ... Then two mailboxes destroyed. Then Wainwright.

Their cottage was set farther back from the road than most, seemed to rest on a double sandy lot, and was fenced with rusty chain-link five feet high. ...

Joanna pulled over to the left, half onto the road's soft shoulder, and parked.

There was one of Asconsett's rare trees--a molting, lean, and knotty pine--in the Wainwrights' wide front yard. A thick rope was attached to its largest limb, a car tire was suspended from that, and a medium-sized red dog hung from the tire. The dog seemed content to have the tire's heavy rubber in its jaws; it dangled clear of the ground, relaxed, still, and smiling.

Joanna got out of the Volvo, went to the cottage's fence gate, and paused. The red dog hung comfortably from his tire, and only rolled an eye toward her. ...

Joanna hesitated at the gate. She couldn't see anyone at the house, only the dog hanging in the yard. It was an odd-looking dog, ginger colored--almost orange --and short-haired, its heavy muzzle and thick shoulders laced with a pale spiderweb of scars. It seemed to have had an accident. ... The dog watched Joanna as she watched it. Its body, a compact cylinder of muscle, was completed by a head as massive, red, and rectangular as a brick block. The dog, its eye considering her, swung very slightly with the sea breeze as it hung.

"Hello ...!" Apparently no one home. "Hello ...!"

And as if he'd waited behind the door for her second call, a stocky young man in ragged jeans and a black T-shirt came out of the house, slammed the screen door behind him, and trotted down the steps. "What do you want?" His hair, cut short, was the color of sand. He had a neat mustache.

He walked fast across the yard to her, short, muscled arms--sunburned dark over complex tattoos--swinging as if he were easing them for a fight. "Well, what do you want?" He had an unpleasant face, an old-fashioned pugged tough-boy's face. He looked like his grandfather--but young, very strong, and less amiable.

"My name's Reed, Joanna Reed. We ... my husband leased Mr. Wainwright's boat."

The young man--a boy, really, barely in his twenties--stood behind the chain-link fence, looking at her. He had pale-blue eyes--round as a child's eyes, but not wondering, not gentle. "Oh, right. Reed. And you wrecked the fuckin' boat. ... Think maybe you owe us for that? I mean, I just wonder if that occurred to you summer people--lose our boat and don't even give us a call about it? What was that, three weeks ago?"

"My husband was drowned."

"Hey, I know that. And if he couldn't sail, he shouldn't have taken her out."

"My husband was a good sailor. Now ... now, is there someone I can talk to--"

"You're talkin' to me, lady. Gramps is sick over at the mainland, and my dad's fishin'."

"Bud ...!"

The boy didn't answer, stood staring at Joanna. She could smell him standing so close, just across the low fence--a pleasant odor of clean young man, tense and lightly sweating. She was surprised how she'd missed the smell of a man.

The pleasure was embarrassing.

"Bud--goddammit!"

Bud turned away, and Joanna saw a woman on the cottage's roofed porch. She was a tall woman, and broad, with no waist. Her hair was iron-gray and loose down her back, and she was wearing a sleeveless light-blue house dress, her pale arms heavy, lumpy with fat and muscle.

"Bud--you get in here."

"Shit. ..." The boy went back into the yard, stood beside the hanging dog, and said, "Get down."

The red dog yawned and dropped from his tire. He landed in an odd, springy undoglike way, and sat. He turned his head to keep watching Joanna, and she saw his right eye was white and blind.

"What do you want here?" the big woman called to Joanna as if she were a hundred yards away.

"Mom, she's the people wrecked our boat."

"You be quiet. I asked you a question." The big woman, so bulky elsewhere, had a man's gaunt face and beaky nose.

"I'm Joanna Reed. I wanted to talk to Mr. Wainwright," Joanna said. Then, thinking the woman might be deaf, called, "--..Joanna Reed. I wanted to talk to Mr. Wainwright."

The apparent Mrs. Wainwright didn't answer, only stood on her porch, watching Joanna standing in the road. The cottage's paint, that had been white, was peeling everywhere off its wood in delicate patterns of curling chips, so standing in shadow, the woman seemed to be nested in old lace. "Granda's gone to the hospital at Post Port," she said conversationally, without shouting.

Joanna, tired of standing in the road, went to the fence gate, opened it, and walked into the yard. "Then I'd like to speak with you," she said--and stopped walking because of the dog.

As she'd come into the yard, the ginger dog had risen and gone to her, so they met in the middle. The animal was not big at all, but looked extraordinarily dense, solid with muscle, and carried a head so massive it seemed to belong to a bigger dog. Its white eye was not troubling, but the other, a light topaz to complement its coloring, had an odd expression--so though the animal hadn't growled at her, or threatened in any way, Joanna stopped and stood still. She wished the boy would call it.