Deadly Nightshade (6 page)

Back in the shack, she told the man how to find the Laundromat, informed the couple about where they could take a shower, and directed the woman with children to the carousel.

Domingo stepped out onto the deck, where Victoria was still sitting, and leaned his back against the rail, facing her. He took a deep breath and let it out again. He put the limp cigarette back in his mouth. “How're you doing, sweetheart?”

“What a rude man.” Victoria looked down the catwalk to the parking lot and Meatloaf 's van. A breeze flicked the ends of her yellow hat ribbon. A seagull mewed. “I hope you're not going to tell me I'm supposed to know who he is.”

Domingo laughed and took out his Zippo. “You mind? Your granddaughter won't let me smoke.”

Victoria shook her head. “Go ahead.”

“How's the writing?” He lighted the cigarette and inhaled deeply, held the smoke in.

She nodded.

“Finding that body was heavy stuff. Sorry you had to go through that, sweetheart.” He let the smoke out slowly and leaned back, both elbows on the railing.

Victoria again looked toward the parking lot, where Meatloaf's van was pulling out of its space. “Who is he? I've never seen him before.”

“Meatloaf Staples. He's fairly new to the Island. He's on the Harbor Advisory Committee.”

He took another drag on his cigarette and threw it into the water, where it went out with a hiss.

“I couldn't help overhearing. Why is he accusing you of harassment?”

Domingo paused before he answered. He leaned back again, resting his elbows against the railing, and looked over at the osprey nest across the channel. The osprey returned with a fish in its talons. The chicks set up a shrill peeping. “I'm not sure yet. Something's going on that involves town officials—the selectmen, the Harbor Advisory Committee, the Oak Bluffs police. I haven't sorted it out.”

“I know you think someone has been skimming money off the harbor receipts.” Victoria watched him quietly, her hooded eyes shaded by the straw hat.

“Money they were skimming off the harbor receipts is small potatoes compared to something bigger that's going on,” he said.

“A hundred thousand dollars, small potatoes?” Victoria reached into the pocket of her lavender jacket with her gnarled hands, brought out a used paper napkin printed with fluorescent frogs, and dabbed at her nose.

“Yes, small potatoes,” Domingo repeated. “You don't understand the scope of what we're dealing with.” He turned, facing the Harbor House at the head of the harbor, his back to Victoria, elbows on the railing, hands clasped. “Someone is not pleased with Howland's computer program.” He turned to face Victoria again, one elbow still on the railing. “The more loopholes I close up, the more frantic someone is getting.”

“Who?”

Domingo shrugged.

On the shore, another set of tour buses pulled up to the Cuttyhunk's dock; these passengers got off the buses, boarded the ferry.

“But you're doing such a good job.” Victoria tugged the brim of her hat to shade her eyes as she looked up at him.

“You don't understand, sweetheart. They don't want me to do a good job. They want me to go along with them. If I don't go along with them, who knows what they'll do?” He looked intently at Victoria, who was watching him, her hand on her hat brim.

Inside the shack, the phone rang. Elizabeth answered. A small sailboat came in the channel under sail. Domingo waved.

“How you doing, Cap'n?” he said to the small girl who was at the tiller. She grinned, big front teeth bright in the sunlight.

He looked at his watch. “Your granddaughter will be off in fifteen minutes. Tell her to be careful, will you? She's on duty again this evening, eight to midnight.”

“Domingo's car has leather seats,” Victoria said as she settled onto the frayed pink towel that covered the exposed foam of the passenger seat in Elizabeth's VW convertible. The car had been parked in the sun in front of the gingerbread houses, and the black surfaces of the dashboard and armrests radiated heat.

“His car is a Rolls-Royce,” Elizabeth said, as if that explained it. She straightened the pink towel on the driver's side, sat, and swiveled her legs into the car. “At least my seat covers match.”

The ferry's engines revved up and the whistle sounded. The crew ratcheted the gangplank back. A crew member lifted the hawser off the bollard and tossed it aboard, and the ferry moved out of the channel.

“They'll probably try to blame last year's missing money on Domingo.” Elizabeth turned the key, and the engine caught with a metallic rattle. “Probably say he bought his car with the harbor money.” The engine coughed and the convertible shook.

“Domingo's car is much quieter,” Victoria said.

Elizabeth snorted. She looked behind her and backed out of the parking spot.

Victoria braced her hand on the dashboard. “I'm sure he's exaggerating the problem. He has a sense of the theatrical.”

“He didn't exaggerate Bernie Marble's murder.” Elizabeth drove slowly through the crowded street that ran next to the harbor, avoiding mopeds, bicycles, and tourists. “I wonder, by the way, who'll run the Harbor House now. He and Chief Medeiros were partners, but Bernie managed it.”

“He let that wonderful hotel get run-down,” Victoria said after a few minutes. “I remember when my grandparents used to take me there for Sunday dinner, all of us dressed up. It was so elegant. Now look at it.” She indicated the weathered shingles and peeling paint. “And do you remember the time we went to the selectmen's meeting, and some woman said the five dollars he was charging boaters to take a shower at his hotel was too much?”

“I remember,” Elizabeth said grimly. “It is too much. He hassled that woman, made her look foolish. Embarrassed her.”

Elizabeth turned right onto the main road, which went past the harbor. Power yachts fringed the harbor on the right, their sterns facing the bulkhead. Tourists strolled past, viewing the boats; they stopped to talk with boaters sitting on deck chairs in cockpits, drinks in hand, bare feet propped up on transoms.

“Some of the boats that stay here have come a long way.” Elizabeth stopped to let a couple wheeling a baby stroller cross the road. “Bermuda, the Caribbean. They come from all over. They go up to the Harbor House with their toilet-article kits and towels, wanting a hot freshwater shower, and have to pay a fee, on top of what they pay to keep their boat here.” She started up again slowly, watched out for a boy and a girl wobbling next to the road on purple-and-pink bikes. “It's a rip-off.”

On the left side of the road, a row of gingerbread houses faced the harbor, their window boxes full of flowers that matched the pastel trim. Guests sat in rockers on the big front porches, drinks in hand, watching tourists walking along the bulkhead past the boats, watching boaters with their drinks in hand watching them on their porches. Teenagers sat on porch railings, sandy bare feet swinging, sunburned faces, arms, and legs bright against sleeveless T-shirts and faded cutoff jeans. Guests rocked and talked. The women wore floral-print sundresses; the men sported slacks embroidered with whales.

Beyond the row of gingerbread houses, the Harbor House stood by itself, a sprawling gray-shingled Victorian hotel with cupolas, archways, carpenter's lace, balconies, and wraparound porches. Banks of bright blue hydrangea, yellow marigolds, and red salvia lined the front walk.

As they passed the hotel, Victoria said, “Remember how he spoke to that woman? Said he was sick of the females in Oak Bluffs telling him how to run his business.”

“I remember.” Elizabeth slowed the car to let a truck pull out of the parking lot next to the Harbor House.

“And he pointed at all the women there, each and every one of us, including me, and I hadn't said a thing.”

“As I recall, you were carrying a sign that read JAIL, NOT BAIL,” her granddaughter said.

Victoria ignored her and went on. “Chief Medeiros was standing next to him, grinning like a baboon.”

After they passed the Harbor House, they came to the far side of the harbor, next to the liquor store.

“Want to go the long way, around East Chop?” Elizabeth asked, her foot on the brake. “We can eat our sandwiches at the lighthouse.”

“Maybe we can stop by the yacht club's dock, where all the action was.”

“I thought so.” Elizabeth looked over at her grandmother, saw the eager look in her hooded eye. Victoria's nose lifted, as if she would find the perpetrators by sniffing them out.

“It's hard to believe it was only two nights ago,” Victoria said. “It seems longer. There was nothing in the Enquirer.”

“You wrote it up for your column, didn't you?”

“Yes, but Skelly called, said it was Oak Bluffs, not West Tisbury, and edited it out.”

“They don't want to print anything that might mar the luster of this paradise, the president's vacation isle.” Elizabeth turned onto East Chop Drive. The harbor was on their right. “Seems to me that's pretty important West Tisbury news, that the West Tisbury columnist for the Enquirer witnesses a murder.”

“I don't know that I witnessed anything.” Victoria looked straight ahead, her face shaded by her hat, the black-eyed Susans drooping. “I heard a scream, then a car or truck start up.” Victoria looked over at Elizabeth. “I told them that at the police station when they took my statement.”

They turned right onto the sandy road that led to the dock. “You'd think this would be roped off with yellow tape as a crime scene, the way they do in movies.” Victoria sat up straight in her seat. “I forgot to tell the police I thought I heard an outboard motor right about the same time.”

“You told Domingo, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“They've finished doing whatever they think they needed to do here.” Elizabeth parked the car by the side of the rutted road, next to a hedge of wild roses. “Domingo said they took down the crime-scene tape the day after it happened.”

“So we don't need to worry about destroying evidence,” Victoria said. “Tire tracks or whatever.”

“I don't think so.” Elizabeth got out of the car. “We can walk from here.”

When Victoria opened her door, it pushed aside a branch of wild roses, dropping pink petals onto the ground.

“There've been all kinds of vehicles in here.” Elizabeth pointed at the ground. “That night, there were two police cruisers, the ambulance, and Toby's hearse.” She reached into the backseat and lifted out the lilac branch she had carved into a walking stick for Victoria.

“We may find something that wouldn't mean anything to anyone else,” Victoria said. “Sometimes it's just as well if you don't know what you're looking for.”

Victoria walked around the front of the car, bracing herself on the hood, brushing between the rose hedge and the convertible. Elizabeth handed her the stick.

They walked up the beach toward the yacht club. Victoria flicked over pebbles and bits of seaweed with her stick, shells, driftwood, a piece of glass, a plastic bottle. Elizabeth walked next to her, watching the objects her grandmother uncovered.

They'd gone a couple of hundred feet toward the yacht club when Victoria stopped.

“A boat pulled in here,” she said. “It's not a fresh mark, and it's not where you landed with the body the other night. That was closer to the dock.” She examined the long, straight mark in the sand. “It's well above the high-tide line.” Elizabeth saw the distinctive trace of a keel, footprints that were mere indentations in the sand, leading from the keel mark into the tall grass and wild roses on a slight bluff above the beach.

“No one ever uses this beach,” Elizabeth said. “The yacht club people swim on the Sound side, where the water is deeper.

“I suppose we should look through the shrubbery and see if we find anything. You go.” Victoria sat on a driftwood log and handed her stick to Elizabeth. “You can use this to go through the brambles.”

“Thanks. You're as bad as Domingo.” Elizabeth took her grandmother's stick and stepped up onto the two-foot-high bluff. Pebbles and sand slid down the face. Black roots showed at the top, holding clumps of dark soil onto the top of the sandy bank. “There's a sort of beaten-down way here,” she called down to Victoria. “As if someone has been through here recently.”

“Do you see anything on either side?” Victoria called back.

“No. The rosebushes and grass are thick. It's hard to see through them. I'll look down low, under the tops.”

“I suppose they might have thrown something off to one side,” Victoria said.

“If there's anything here. What am I supposed to find, a knife or something?”

Victoria heard her brush through the growth of wild rose, stiff bayberry, huckleberry, muttering an occasional “Ouch!” as the branches slapped her bare legs.

“Something like that.” Victoria could see Elizabeth moving brush aside with the lilac stick.

“Why wouldn't they have tossed it overboard, instead of dropping it here?” Elizabeth was making slow progress. Branches snapped; dry leaves rustled.

“It's too shallow,” Victoria called back to her. “At the end of the dock, it's only four feet deep, and the water is quite clear.”

“Found something.” Victoria heard her scrabbling through the rosebushes. “Never mind. It's a broken bottle.”

“Bring it out,” Victoria said. “Do you have a paper in your pocket you can handle it with?”

“A paper towel. I'll lay it in the path and keep looking.”

“What does it look like?” Victoria said.

“The bottom is broken off,” Elizabeth said. “It's wicked-looking. Jagged.”

“A whiskey bottle?”

“Rum. Strange brand. Coulibri?”

“Never heard of it,” Victoria called back.

“Me, neither. The top's still got the seal on it. Want me to keep looking?”

“Go to the end of the path, just in case there's something else. But I think we found what we came for.”

Elizabeth carefully carried the broken bottle back to the car, laid it on the backseat, protected it with the pink towel from the driver's seat. Victoria walked slowly along the beach, turning seaweed over with her stick.

“This is interesting.” She bent over to pick something up.

“What is?” Elizabeth went over to her, her face alert.