Death in Vineyard Waters (12 page)

8

“The mountain has come to Mohammed,” she said. She was wearing summer shorts, shirt, and sandals, and there was a scarf holding her hair back out of her eyes. She looked about seventeen, which was a couple of years older than I felt. I carefully pinned a shirt on the clothesline.

“Care for a beer?”

“No, thanks. How are things going with the job?”

“Didn't the professor tell you?”

“I haven't seen him today. Are you mad at me?”

I thought I probably was. “Why should I be mad at you?”

“Because of Ian.”

“You're a big girl. You get to choose your friends.”

“I thought you were one of them.”

I hung up a sheet. It was the last item in the clothes basket. “I am,” I said, picking up the basket and the smaller basket of clothespins and starting to the house. “I'm going to have a beer. Sure you won't join me? It's Watney's Red Barrel.”

“ ‘Gee,' she said, ‘you should have said that in the first place.' Okay, I'll have a beer.”

I brought two bottles and two glasses out and put them on the lawn table. I like to drink beer from a glass, especially when it's good thick English beer. I sat down and Zee took another chair.

I felt quite awkward and rather hard inside. I wrapped my feelings with my mind. “Cheers,” I said and drank. The beer was cool and smooth and yeasty.

“You haven't called me once since John Skye's cocktail party.” Zee's voice was neutral.

“I figured you were probably busy.”

“We haven't talked together once.”

“What would we talk about? Ian McGregor?”

“No! Fishing, us, the things we always talk about.”

“Doesn't McGregor talk about things?”

“Not in the same way. He talks about . . . Well, he likes to talk about himself and his work. And he can be very witty and funny. He tells good stories. . . . He can make you feel very good about yourself and about him. He's quite charming.”

I wondered what it would be like to be quite charming. I did not count charm among my virtues.

“And,” said Zee, “he's quite bright.”

“Quite,” I said.

“But . . .” Her voice trailed off. My ears perked up. I felt less sour, but not yet sweet.

“Handsome, too,” I said. “Quite handsome. And quite the athlete, too. Quite.”

“You don't like him.”

“As a matter of fact, I don't. I find him quite charming, quite handsome and fit, quite bright, and quite wealthy. He gave me quite a big sum of money, which I quite like, and I quite intend to earn it. But quite frankly, if you really want to know, I don't quite like him having you. I would probably like him quite a lot more if it wasn't for that.”

Women like confessions of weakness. They make them feel somehow more secure, more in the presence of fellow human beings. Thus the popularity of gossip and confidential chats. Zee drank her beer. “You know, there is something not quite so nice about him.”

“I'm quite delighted to hear it. What's his imperfection? Does he fall off his surfboard sometimes? Does he have a cracked fingernail?”

“Maybe it's nothing. It's just that he likes stories where people are shown to be stupid. I told him that I thought one of the stories he told me was cruel. He apologized. But later he told another story like it.”

Much humor is cruel. All of it, maybe. I advanced this theory.

Zee shrugged. “It seemed to me that it was rooted in a kind of vanity that I didn't expect in Ian.”

“Intelligent people are often vain. They're famous for it, I understand. Marjorie Summerharp was vain and cruel, too. Maybe it's an academic syndrome. Did your Professor McGregor tell you about his skinned knuckles while he was telling you other tales?”

She looked down at her beer. “He's not
my
professor. Yes. He said something about a dispute with a man. He made light of it.”

“Who brought it up? You or he?”

She raised her eyes. “He did. Do you know what happened?”

“When the professor dropped the girl before you, her boyfriend decided to teach him a lesson. But the professor taught the lesson and the student flunked the test. Or so my spies inform me.” She drank some beer and shook her head. “It's manly stuff,” I said. “Mere women can't be expected to fathom it.”

“Men. Good grief.”

“Being a manly guy myself, I naturally appreciate the subtle nuances that are manifest in bloody fists and broken faces. I'd be glad to explain them to you, but you'd probably accuse me of pontificating.”

“That would bother you? Ha! You can pontificate with the best of them!”

“But I do it in a very modest way.”

Her smile made me ache. Her teeth were so bright that they seemed to glitter in the sun. “How are the tides?” she asked. “I've lost track, I'm afraid.”

“The fish will be waiting for you about six tomorrow morning.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I thought you were on the night shift.”

“I am. But I'll be off at four in the morning. Do you want to go?”

“What about Ian McGregor? Won't he feel left out?”

“Never mind Ian! Do you want to go fishing in the morning?”

I finished my beer. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

Then I had another thought. “Why not this afternoon? We could take the dinghy over to the Cape Pogue gut.”

She looked into her glass. “I'm sorry. I can't.”

“Ah.”

“He's teaching me how to surf sail.”

“Over at Mothers' Beach.”

“Yes.” She looked at her watch. “I have to go home and change.” She stood up. I stood up.

“Maybe I'll spy on you from my balcony. Check out just how great a teacher this guy is.”

She gave me a little smile. “I'll meet you tomorrow morning in the Katama parking lot. Five o'clock?”

When she was gone, I felt both good and bad. I climbed up onto my balcony and looked across toward the beach I call Mothers' Beach. It's the state beach between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, where the young mothers take their babies and little children. The beach is close to the road, so the mothers don't have to lug their chairs, cribs, umbrellas, and their tons of other gear too far. The wind is usually offshore, and the water is shallow and safe for young ones. The mothers can watch them and not worry too much while they get mothers' tans: tanned backs and shoulders and tops of thighs, along with white fronts and calves. This because they sit with their backs to the sun so they can watch their kids in the water and can't turn their backs on the water long enough to get their fronts tanned. The white-bellied young mothers remain two-toned until their children are grown a bit.

Zee, like me, was tanned all over.

Mothers' Beach is also a good place to practice surf sailing. The waves are small and the offshore wind makes for
little or no surf. All summer long I can see the bright sails of the surf sailors racing back and forth beyond the road. Later, when they are bolder, the surf sailors take their boards to South Beach and try their hands when the wind is high and the surf is boiling. I imagine that in Hawaii they seek out the monster surf. I think I read about a guy surf sailing all the way across the Atlantic and about another one trying to surf sail to the North Pole. Everyone to his own madness, I say.

I couldn't really see the beach well enough to watch Zee or anybody else surf sail. Besides, I had other things to do.

I phoned John Skye's farm, got Ian McGregor, and told him I wanted to go over Marjorie Summerharp's papers some more. He hummed and then said sure, so I drove over.

His MG's removable hard top still held up the surfboard and sail I'd earlier seen at John Skye's cocktail party. McGregor was wearing swimming shorts and a shirt that said “You can trust me, I'm a doctor.”

“I'm afraid I can't be here to help out this afternoon,” he said. “I have to be someplace else.”

“Zee told me,” I said. “I thought I'd bring you up to date and then work here for a while.” I told him about my morning drive and my talk with the chief.

McGregor listened, then nodded. “I didn't see any boat of any kind that morning, although I guess the trawlers were working offshore somewhere. I don't think you can see the beach from the parking lot, so I guess there could have been a boat.”

“I don't know if there was one,” I said.

“What other explanation is there?”

“None that makes sense so far. Maybe I'll find something here.”

“I hope so, but I can't imagine what it might be.”

We went to the library and he unlocked the door. I told him that I'd lock up again when I was through, and he said he'd see me later then. I watched through a window while he got into his snappy refabricated little car and went buzzing
off. It was the perfect picture of a sophisticated vacationer: sports car, surfboard, a tanned Apollo at the wheel, heading off to meet a beautiful woman at a golden beach beneath a bright blue summer sky. Romance!

I sat down and went to work.

I found names and initials I'd seen before, along with others that were totally new. I came across what appeared to be telephone numbers and wrote them down on a piece of paper, so I could check them out later. I studied microfilmed copies of elderly documents and pages of scribbles. A remarkable number of the documents had to do with frauds, fakes, phonies, and the people who had been taken in by them. Experts, it was clear, have been conned by slickers down through the ages, and Marjorie Summerharp had not, it seemed, proposed to be another such sucker.

And apparently had found nothing fraudulent about the play in question. As I came to her later notes, it seemed that she had become almost persuaded of the quarto's authenticity. Almost, but not quite. I remembered her craggy face and the toughness of her voice and wondered if she ever absolutely believed in anything. Likely not, I suspected. If it could be doubted, she would doubt it.

Bored, I had a perverse desire to see the final draft of the paper, but McGregor's desk drawers were locked. I knelt and looked at the drawers. Not hard to jimmy, really. I mean, how sophisticated are the locks on desks, especially old ones like this one of John Skye's?

I left the library and went upstairs. I got a coat hanger from a bedroom closet, came back down, went to the kitchen, found the junk drawer every kitchen has, and took the pliers I knew I'd find there. Back in the library, I straightened then sharply bent the end of the coat hanger and slipped it into the keyhole of the center desk drawer.

Bingo. The lock clicked and the drawer slid open.

The third drawer I opened contained the manuscript. I sat down at the desk and began to read it.

It consisted of four parts: a narrative of the discovery of
the document and the circumstances that had led up to it, a description of the document and a photocopy of three of its pages to illustrate that description, a description of the tests that had been applied to the document, and, finally, a commentary on the origin and merit of the play itself.

It appeared that the article was to be accompanied by photographs of the book in which the document Wad been found, of the library where it had been discovered, and of McGregor and Marjorie Summerharp.

The play, in quarto form, had been found bound with other seventeenth-century documents in a book in the library of a family named Pavier, descendants of Thomas Pavier, a bookseller in London at the time of Shakespeare's death. McGregor had gained access to the library some years before by dint of having been teacher to a Miss Genna Pavier, granddaughter of the library's owner, when she was doing graduate work in America. She had prevailed upon her grandfather to allow her teacher to examine the library in search of materials in the area of his specialization, seventeenth-century English drama. The old man, it seemed, had until then followed a family tradition of not allowing scholars into the library, the origin of this policy being unclear but presumably due to some real or imagined insult or event in the eighteenth-century or before. McGregor had charmed the old man just as he had charmed the granddaughter and had worked there a portion of each summer since, examining the books for material pertaining to his work, particularly his interest in a trio of playwrights I'd never heard of, three guys named Dekker, Marston, and Middleton.