A Fatal Vineyard Season (3 page)

Her hand was warm and firm and lingering. “There are a lot of Jacksons in this world,” I said. “Too many, some might say. There's no reason you'd tie Zee to me.”

“Well, tell Zee that I want to see her. Tell her to call me and that if I don't hear from her, I'll call her.”

“I'll do that.” I got my hand back and picked up my toolbox. I looked at Julia Crandel. “To repeat myself, if you need anything, let me know. I can be here in fifteen minutes. It might be a good idea to keep the downstairs doors and windows locked, just in case some drunk forgets where he lives and tries to get into your house by mistake.”

Julia nodded. “Thank you. We will. Come on, Ivy. You can have the big room I usually use, because you're the guest of honor. I'll sleep next door.” I thought the lightness in her voice seemed feigned.

I went out and drove home, wondering why she was so nervous, and whom they didn't want to meet. I thought of stopping by the Oak Bluffs PD and asking the guys to keep an eye on the women, but on second thought realized I didn't really have any reason to ask them to do that. Besides, two women who looked as good as Julia Crandel and Ivy Holiday would soon be under police observation anyway, along with observation by most other males who saw them.
If I were still single, I'd have joined the observers, in fact, but I was a married man who had two women at home who took up all of my girl-watching time.

I did think a bit of Ivy, though. The Ivy I'd seen, slender and a bit of a flirt, didn't look like the Ivy I'd read about, the one who'd bared her bosom to the world and pontificated against pornography. But as the jazzman said, one never knows, do one?

At home, the other members of my family were out in the yard, sopping up some September sunshine.

“Ivy wants you to get in touch,” I said to Zee, taking Diana the huntress out of her arms. “She says if you don't call her, she'll call you.”

“Oh, good. How long is she going to be on the island?”

That I did not know, but I did know that she was probably in the Crandel house even as we spoke.

“I'll call her right away,” said Zee. “You are the kid herder for the nonce.”

“Does that make me a kidboy?” I asked Diana. “Do I get to wear a big hat and spurs?”

Diana drooled at me, and Zee rolled her eyes and went into the house, as Joshua, who was still a bit jealous of his sister, came across the yard to claim a share of my attention.

“Well, Josh,” I said, “do you know yet when your mom's movie is going to be shown here?”

Joshua didn't know any more about it than I did. I knew it was going to be shown later in the year, but no one local seemed to know quite when.

“Are the stars going to be there to dazzle the crowd?” I asked.

Josh thought they might be. More important, he thought he should be up on my chest where Diana was. It seemed like a reasonable request, so I shifted Diana to one arm and picked him up with the other. We strolled around the yard, admiring the remaining flowers in their boxes and hanging pots, and the remains of the vegetables in the raised beds.

Zee came out of the house and lay down on the as-good-as-new lounge we'd gotten for a pittance at a yard sale. “I've invited them down for cocktails tonight,” she said, stretching and yawning. “Meanwhile, I think I'll take a nap. Wake me up when they get here.”

They weren't going to get here for several hours, but Zee had had both kids all morning and deserved a break, so she could nap if she wanted to. I looked at her lying there in her shorts and old blue shirt. With her sleek body and blue-black hair, she reminded me, as she often did, of a jungle cat, a dark leopard. Even her deep, dark eyes sometimes had a feral quality to them, especially since the births of her children. It was the look of a lioness, a creature whose cubs you'd best leave alone.

“You snooze,” I said. “I will take the offspring for a ride.”

“I'll come, too!” She jumped up.

“I thought you were going to take a nap.”

“Later. Ride first, nap second. The best of all possible worlds. Where do you plan to go?”

“I plan to go to Oak Bluffs and let my children ride the Flying Horses. I figure on standing in the middle and holding a kid on a horse on each side. You're never too young to ride the Flying Horses.”

“Or too old!” said Zee.

True. The Flying Horses in Oak Bluffs are said to be the oldest continually operating carousel in the United States. I've often wondered if there are other carousels making the same claim. Maybe there are Oldest Continually Operating Carousels in lots of places, just like, I'm told, there are dozens of England's Oldest Pubs in Britain. In any case, the Flying Horses are old enough, and Joshua and Diana were old enough to ride them if they wanted to.

• • •

“Tell me about Ivy Holiday,” I said to Zee as we drove.

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, you don't need to tell me she's beautiful, because
I've seen her in person, and you don't need to tell me she took off her shirt at the Academy Awards, and you don't need to tell me that she's controversial and political, because I've read about her since her striptease. You can maybe start by telling me what kind of an actress she is.”

“She's a good actress. And she's beginning to get good parts. A lot of people think she'd make it big faster if she'd keep her mouth shut about politics, but she won't. And of course she's a woman and she's black, and that makes things even harder. There aren't many good roles for women out in Hollywood, and there are even fewer for a black woman.”

I'd been wondering about the open-mouth part of Ivy's reputation. “Does she have enemies out there? People who'd just as soon she got run over by a truck?”

Zee frowned and nodded irritably. “Of course she has enemies. You can't be famous and not have enemies. She has enemies who envy her success, and enemies who hate her because of her politics, and enemies who hate her because of the color of her skin. There are racists and haters everywhere, and because she's famous, she has more than her share mad at her.”

“Is there anybody in particular who might be giving her trouble?”

Zee looked at me. “What do you mean? Why do you ask?”

I told her what I'd observed at the Crandel house. “Julia seemed especially spooky,” I said. “They were both a little nervous when they came in, and Julia didn't begin to settle down until I went through the whole house with them and showed them that no one else was there.”

“Maybe they were just being careful. Women have to be that way.”

“Maybe.”

“Most men don't understand how cautious women have to be. If I were a young woman alone in a big, empty house,
I'd probably be nervous, too. You're a man and you're big, so you don't know what it's like.”

I had a hard time imagining Zee being afraid to be alone, especially in light of the little row of trophies on the fireplace mantel that attested to her abilities with the customized .45 she used at pistol competitions.

“The point is,” I said, “that they didn't seem to be nervous in that normal sort of way. They didn't kid about it, for instance. Julia especially was serious. And it didn't seem to be a generalized sort of worry about being alone; it seemed pretty specific. As though they had some reason to be nervous.”

Zee sat silent for a while. Then she said, “Well, maybe the stalker got out of jail. Or maybe they were afraid there might be another stalker they didn't know about.”

“Stalker? What stalker?”

Stalkers were everywhere, and they were bad business. They were men, mostly, and their victims were mostly women, often women with restraining orders against the stalkers. Ex-wives, wives, girlfriends, and women who were none of these and didn't want to be. Occasionally the stalker was a woman with a vendetta. And the thing that made stalkers so dangerous was that they often didn't care if they got caught. They wanted to possess or control their victims, and if they couldn't possess or control them, they wanted them dead, and often they killed themselves after killing their victims. Theirs was one of the many forms of love that makes human beings so inexplicably profane.

“There was a stalker after Ivy,” said Zee. “Two years ago. Maybe you read about it. A young guy named Mackenzie Reed who decided she was the woman for him and went after her. You were a cop; you know how it goes. He wrote hundreds of letters to her; he got her unlisted telephone number; he found out where she lived; he knocked on her door; he stood across the street waiting for her to come out so he could accost her; he followed her. She got restraining orders, and
she changed her phone number, and finally she moved in with another young actress named Dawn Dawson. She did everything she could, but he didn't go away, and one day when Ivy was away from the apartment, he slaughtered Dawn Dawson with a knife. Do you remember that?”

I don't pay much attention to faraway crimes. One reason I'd moved to Martha's Vineyard was so that I didn't have to deal with crime at all. Of course I'd rapidly learned that you can't escape the world by moving to an island. But I was still trying.

“I remember something about it,” I said. “The guy said he didn't do it, but the jury said he did and put him away. I can't imagine that he's out this soon, even with the loony justice system we have these days.”

“Well, maybe the system is loonier than you think. Maybe he is out, and maybe Ivy and Julia know it.”

Maybe. Maybe they didn't even have prisons in California anymore. Maybe prisons were politically incorrect in California. Maybe they let their stalkers and murderers walk free after a couple of weeks of counseling. In California all things are possible. What others call madness, Californians call the norm.

I took a right off Circuit Avenue and a left onto Kennebec and found a parking place on Ocean, on the park, a couple of blocks from the Flying Horses. We got the little ones out of the car and headed for the carousel.

As we walked, I wondered why Julia seemed more nervous than Ivy. Did she know something Ivy didn't know? Or did Ivy know something Julia didn't know? Or was Julia the one with an enemy? Or was I imagining the whole thing?

“Look, Pa,” said Joshua, pointing. “Flying Horses.”

And he was right. We were there. So in we went, leaving Ivy, Julia, and their problems behind.

Joshua was tired and Diana was hungry (what else?) when we got home. We split the kid-changing and -feeding jobs and were surprised when both of our offspring actually went to sleep at the same time.

“Well,” said Zee as we stood in the living room listening to the unusual afternoon silence, “this is a rare moment. What should we do with it?”

It was probably going to be the last of its kind before she got back from her visit to America. “I have an idea,” I said, running a finger down her neck and across her shoulder.

She put her arms up around my neck. “I like living with you,” she said. “Half the time you're totally predictable and the other half you aren't. It's a nice imbalance.”

“Which half is this?”

“The predictable half. Come on!”

We headed for the bedroom.

“The first step in that being fruitful and multiplying command has something to be said for it,” said Zee afterward as we washed each other off in the outdoor shower. “Maybe I'll just ship the kids to Mom, and I'll stay here with you.”

“With both of them gone, we could probably multiply beyond all measure, if we tried,” I said.

More than one young parent has remarked that after you have one child it's often hard to find an uninterrupted moment to have another. The Jackson plan had been to have two, preferably one of each gender, which we had managed, or maybe three just in case we happened, sometime
or other, to be more passionate than prudent, which, with us, was always a possibility.

However, Zee's Genesis reference notwithstanding, she and I were now back in the Chaucerian mode of lovemaking, holding, as did old Geoffrey, that it was more for delyte than world to multiply.

I scrubbed her back and washed her long blue-black hair, and then, while the small fry still slept, the two of us lay out on our lawn chairs and perfected our all-over tans in the thin light of the westing sun. Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, the two cats, joined us and lay in the shade of the lounges.

I wished Zee and the little ones weren't going away, but I didn't plan to go with them. Maria, Zee's mother, was a bit too religious for my tastes, and still, I suspected, wished that Zee had stayed married to her first husband, the doctor, instead of ending up with me. This even though Paul Madieras, M.D., known to me as Paul the Jerk, had gotten the hots for another woman after nurse Zee had worked long to help put him through medical school. I had never actually met Paul the Jerk, but anyone who left Zee for another woman had to have something seriously wrong with him. Maria, however, still loved him because he was, after all, a doctor, and doctors, especially young, handsome Portuguese ones, were next to saints in her pantheon of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Better, all in all, for me to stay at home and tend the gardens and cats.

Zee and I climbed into shorts and shirts and went to tend the tykes.

Julia and Ivy came down our long, sandy driveway a bit after five, as the evening was falling, and parked in our yard.

Ivy and Zee embraced like long-lost sisters, and Ivy introduced Zee and Julia to each other. Then, there being a cool September wind blowing in from the sound, we all went into the house, where the children and the cats were waiting.

After the visitors' obligatory and probably even sincere cooing and oohing over the kidlings, I offered drinks to all.

“Zee and I will be drinking vodka on the rocks with olives,” I said, “but we have all sorts of other stuff, hard and soft, too. What would you like?”