Vineyard Chill (15 page)

“Do you have any names?”

“Yes. Do you want them?”

“Yes.”

She gave me three names I'd never heard of and addresses to go with them.

“Are these guys still on the island?”

She shook her head. “I haven't the slightest idea. I interviewed them almost a year ago.”

“Tell me about them.”

She looked at her notes again. “Three guys in their twenties, two working in the construction business, putting up these mansions people are building everywhere. Both college grads who told me they were making more money as carpenters than they could as schoolteachers or bottom-level execs. I think they were probably right.”

I thought so, too. When Joshua gets older I'm going to try to get him to learn how to be a plumber or an electrician while he's going to college. It always pays to have a trade, and on Martha's Vineyard it pays a lot. I'm not sure it's really a joke when people say there are more millionaire plumbers on the island than there are millionaire doctors.

“What about the other guy?” I asked.

“Oh,” said Susan, “he's a deputy sheriff. You may remember him. A couple of years back he was a cop in New Bedford who shot a kid holding up a liquor store. The kid was unarmed and he was shot in the back. Cop said it was self-defense and he was cleared but resigned anyway because of the uproar. Came over here and now he works for the County of Dukes County. He was hot for Nadine and when they interviewed him, he said the feeling was mutual.”

“I presume the cops talked with these guys.”

“I didn't ask them, but I'd presume that, too.”

“What did you think of the deputy when you talked with him?”

“I thought he looked like a straight Rock Hudson. My little heart went pitty-pat. If Nadine had the hots for him, I could understand why.”

“Did he strike you as the murdering sort?”

“Ask the people in New Bedford.”

“Did any of these guys have run-ins with the boy who went to Scottsdale?”

“If they did, they didn't tell me.”

“You know anybody else I might talk to?” I asked.

“Well, you might sit there awhile and talk with me.”

“Sorry,” I said, rising. “You married another man and hurt my feelings. I'm still getting over it.”

She laughed. “What a fraud you are. I don't know how Zee stands it. Get out of here.”

I got.

At home I got out our phone book and looked up the names Susan had given me. Two of the three wooers were listed as living in the same places they'd been the year before. If nothing else, that meant that those two, at least, hadn't been spooked away by the attention they'd gotten from the police. I figured the young men were probably at work, but there was a good chance the landlord and the woman who'd called the cops were at home, so I drove to the Oak Bluffs Camp Meeting Grounds.

The Camp Meeting Grounds is owned by an association, so the colorful, privately owned houses all stand on leased land. It's a charming place of small parks, walkways, and narrow, winding streets built around a tabernacle that was originally only a large tent. The camp meeting area was established in 1835 during the Methodist revival when preachers expounded from stumps and believers came from the mainland to combine religious joys of the spirit with vacation joys of the flesh.

The tents that were the first habitations of the congregations were gradually replaced by prefabricated gingerbread cottages brought over from the mainland, and the large tent that served as a church was replaced by the wood and metal tabernacle that is still the center of the neighborhood and provides a stage for musical, religious, and other summer events. The Island Community Chorus officially opens the tabernacle season with a concert in early July and activities don't taper off again until September. Principal among these is Illumination Night, which takes place in mid-August when, following a community songfest in the tabernacle, thousands of Chinese lanterns are lit and hung from the porches of surrounding cottages to be ogled by mobs of admirers who parade past them.

The houses are mostly empty in the winter but are quick to fill in the summer. They're brightly painted, often in four different colors, the most famous and most often photographed of them being the Pink House on the corner of Butler Avenue and Jordan Crossing, which looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. The community is often studied by students of Victorian architecture because, though there were many such meeting grounds built up and down the East Coast at about the same time, none is so well preserved as the one in Oak Bluffs.

Gordon Brown lived out on Clinton, about as far from the tabernacle as you can get and still be in the Camp Meeting Grounds. At that end of the community the houses aren't painted as brightly as those closer in and are set a little farther apart. The house that Nadine and her beau had rented was not far from Brown's, and the lady who had notified the police lived only a bit farther on.

As was true everywhere else on the island, you could get a good deal on a winter rental in the meeting grounds as long as you didn't move in until after Labor Day and got out before Memorial Day, but Nadine and her companion had gotten themselves a nice little house in which to hunker down year-round. Their landlord's house was larger and well kept. Its cedar shingles were in good shape and its well-painted trim was deck gray, a popular Vineyard color from the times when most islanders also owned boats. There was an elderly van parked in the driveway. It bore the logo of a plumbing company.

I parked and saw a window curtain fall as I walked to the door. The man who answered my knock was much as Susan Bancroft had described him: sixtyish, of medium weight and height, losing his hair, bit of a belly pushing at his sweater.

“Gordon Brown? I'm J. W. Jackson.”

He smiled, showing teeth that were too even and brilliant to be real. “Yes. What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”

“You've heard about the body they found…”

His smile was replaced by a frown. “Yes. Terrible thing. The Gibson girl, they say. She was renting a house of mine, you know.” He waved an arm toward the house. “Nice girl. I'd hoped she'd just left the island, but I guess she didn't.”

From inside the house came a woman's querulous voice, “Who is it, Gordon? What do they want? Don't buy anything!”

“My wife,” he said apologetically. “She doesn't trust me to repel salesmen. Says I'll buy anything from anybody who comes to the door.”

“I'm not selling anything,” I said. “I'm investigating the Gibson case.”

He turned his head and shouted, “It's just a man, Gertrude! He's not selling anything!”

“Don't let him fool you!” came Gertrude's voice. “It's not hard to do! I saw him coming up the walk. Looks like a salesman to me!”

Brown smiled without humor. “My wife doesn't leave her room much anymore, and she doesn't trust me out of her sight. Good thing I'm retired and can stay home most of the time.”

“Is that your van outside?”

“Yep. Had my own company for years, but no longer. I should probably take that logo off and sell my tools, but I've just never got around to it.”

“It's been a year, but can you remember whether Nadine Gibson changed her routine in any way just before she disappeared? Whether anyone was visiting her or whether she was staying away from home more than usual? It looks like someone took her or went with her to the place where they found her body.”

“The old Ormstead place, I hear. That's not too far away.”

“The Marshall Lea Foundation owns the land now. Not many people go there. There are No Trespassing signs all around it. They found the body in the basement of the old farmhouse, under some fallen wreckage. She didn't get under that material by herself.”

Brown pulled the door shut behind him and buttoned his sweater against the chill March air. “I don't want to upset my wife,” he explained. “She didn't like those two young people living together without being married. You know what I mean? She's religious. She was glad when they broke up and she wasn't sad when the girl disappeared.”

“What does she think about the body being found?”

“She wasn't surprised and she wasn't sad. The wages of sin, she said.” He shivered.

I repeated my questions about the girl's last days, but he only shook his head. “I think that after the boyfriend left, some other young fellas may have come by, but I don't snoop and I wasn't keeping track. I'm not like Gertrude. Live and let live, I say.”

“Nadine Gibson liked birds. Did you ever see her go off birding with someone?”

“She told me she went off with that weak-minded fellow that works at the Fireside. What's his name? Bonzo? I think they maybe went off together once or twice. She told me they'd gone looking for birds.”

“You talked to her?”

He shrugged and then nodded. “Sure. Not regular or anything like that, but when we happened to meet or when she brought over the rent.”

“She never mentioned going birding with anyone else?”

“No. No, she never did.”

“Do you know the names of any of the young men who visited her after her boyfriend left?”

“No. No, I don't.” He looked at his watch. “I'd better get back inside. Gertrude will be wondering where I am.” He grinned a faint grin and his teeth gleamed. “Sorry I can't be more help.” He backed into his house and shut the door.

I walked up the street, glad that I wasn't married to Gertrude.

The woman who had called the police was a widow named Loretta Aldrich. When she opened her door to my knock and got my name she, unlike Gordon Brown, waved me right in.

“Come in out of the cold. It gets into my bones and it doesn't want to come out.” She shut the door behind me and waved me toward a rocking chair in front of a gas heater with fake logs aflame. “I wanted a fireplace but settled on this. Works just fine. Made in Sweden. You like some tea? I'm having a cup to warm my innards. I'm having a splash of rum in mine. How about you? Good. Sit right there and I'll be back.” She disappeared through a door leading to the kitchen.

She was what, in my childhood, I would have called a skinny old lady. Her hair was white and tied in a frizzy bun at the back of her head, and she wore a comfortable-looking old housedress and floppy slippers. Her glasses were small and round and set about halfway down her nose. Since she had looked at me over the top of them I guessed they were for reading and that she had been reading the book now lying facedown on a small table beside a comfortable chair next to the one I was now seated in. I leaned over and twisted my head to read the title.
The Prince,
by Machiavelli. Was Loretta serving as advisor to the Oak Bluffs selectmen? It seemed possible, considering O.B.'s arcane politics, which were the subject of much head scratching and laughter in other towns

There were many other books in the room; in a bookcase, on top of the bookcase, on a shelf of knickknacks, on the coffee table in front of me, under the coffee table, and on a chair in the corner. I recognized one cover as belonging to
The Sibley Guide to Birds,
an excellent book, a copy of which I had at home but never read as studiously as I probably should. I had a lot of books like that—on mushrooms, trees, butterflies, fish, animals, and edible wild plants. I'd read some of all of them but not all of many of them, which accounted for the large gaps in my knowledge of the natural world.

Loretta Aldrich came back from her kitchen and put cups of tea on the coffee table. They smelled of rum. She sat down in her reading chair and looked at me with sharp blue eyes. I thought she must have driven men wild sixty years ago, and perhaps still did.

“Now, Mr. Jackson, what brings you this way?”

I told her, including my concern for Bonzo.

“Ah,” she said. “You're afraid your friend Bonzo may be accused of a crime, eh? I presume you want to know if I saw anything last year that might prove useful in clearing him of suspicion.”

“That's right. And whether you saw anything that might suggest who the real perpetrator is.”

“The police interviewed me shortly after the girl disappeared,” she said. “I didn't have any information of use to them then, and I don't have any more now.”

She sipped her tea and so did I.

“If you added honey and lemon juice to this,” I said, “you'd have my favorite cold medicine.”

She nodded. “A very traditional remedy. If you don't actually cure anything, you feel better anyway.” She grinned. “In the old days, most of the pink pills and potions for pale people contained good percentages of opium or alcohol. No wonder the ladies always felt better.”

“Circumstances have changed since the police interviewed you last year,” I said, guiding the conversation back to the subject. “Last year the police were just inquiring about a young woman who had gone missing. Now they're looking for a murderer.”

“Are they? I hadn't heard that. I heard they found her body, but the news didn't mention a murderer.”

“I think it will soon. Things that may not have seemed important last year may be important now.”

She cocked her head to one side. “I haven't had much experience being a witness. What sort of things might those be?”

“Well,” I said. “You may not have seen or heard anything at all. I've been told that you're not the snoopy type.”

She gave an amused snort. “Is that what you were told? You mean I'm not one of those old hens who spend all their waking hours peering through their lace curtains spying on their neighbors?”

“Something like that.”

“Goes to show what your informant knows! I may not be glued to the window like Gert Brown, but I'm as nosy as most people. This is my neighborhood and I like to know what's happening in it. I try not to miss too much. What interests you?”

“I'm told you were friendly with Nadine Gibson. What was your impression of her?”

“I liked her. Lovely girl. All that red hair! A very decent young lady, very independent. Not one to let someone else make decisions for her.”

“What did you think of the young man she was living with?”

“Perfectly nice young fellow. I called him Adam the Architect. That was his name: Adam Andrews. I never understood what she saw in him, but that was her business, not mine. He was more interested in architecture than he was in her, as far as I could tell. When they broke up I thought it was for the best.”

“What caused the split?”

“I think she was just ready for someone new. Adam always had his head in some book or in some plans he brought home from the office where he worked. She wanted a little more from a man. I knew just how she felt. He didn't put up much of an argument, he just left.”

“Was there someone new? I've been told that several young men were trying to make time with her.”

My hostess nodded. “After Adam left, I noticed some young fellows come by her house. Don't blame them a bit, either. More tea?”

“Why not?”

She left and came back with refills.

“Did you see or hear anything that looked or sounded like an argument between Nadine and any of these would-be boyfriends?”

“Nope, can't say that I did.”

“Do you know any of their names?”

“Never knew any of their names. Just young guys driving pickups. They brought her home from somewhere or other a couple of times. The movies, maybe, or maybe a bar.”