First Light (15 page)

One of those men. “Do you know which one?”

“No.”

“Do you know any of them or any of their names?”

“Can't say as I do. The girl goes out pretty often for a widow woman who just lost her husband, though. One of them brought her home a few days ago, and the two of them were outside for a long time, sitting in his car. I didn't get a good look at him, but I don't want any hanky-panky at my house, so I flicked the porch light a couple of times and they got the idea. He drove off and she came in and went up to her room.”

“What kind of a car was it?”

She shrugged. “They all look alike to me.”

I have the same problem. “New or old?”

“It looked pretty new.”

“What color?”

“It was night. I couldn't tell.”

“What did the man look like?”

“Could have been young or old. I don't stare at people, like some others I know.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

“Doubt it.”

“Did you mention him to Molly afterward?”

“I don't pry.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“Maybe he was here one other time. It was night again. I only saw the back of his car when he drove off.”

“No long talks in the car that time?”

“I couldn't say. I was coming home from a meeting and I pulled in just as he drove off.”

“Do you mind if I take a look at her room?”

“I most certainly do.”

“I won't take anything. You can come with me to make sure.”

“You can't go in there. My guests have complete privacy.”

“The police may want to look in there.”

“They have a warrant, they can go in. They don't, they can't.”

“Molly Wood is missing, Edna. We're trying to find her.”

“Well, you won't find her here.”

“If she comes home or calls, please tell the police.”

She thought, then nodded. “Yes. I will.”

I thanked her, and she shut the door in my face.

I rewarded the kids with ice cream, and by the time it had been eaten and hands and faces had been wiped free of the overflow, I knew what I needed to do. So we drove to the police station, and I told the Chief about Molly Wood's disappearance and what I'd learned from Edna Paul, which wasn't much.

“That's because she doesn't like you,” said the Chief, who had been scribbling notes while he listened.

“I know,” I said. “I think she knows a lot more than she told me. She said the walls are thin, but that she doesn't listen through them. I'll bet she does. She said she doesn't keep tabs on what her tenants do, but I doubt that. She claims she can't describe the men Molly dated, but I'll bet she can. I came by to ask you to wave your badge and a search warrant at her, so
she'll talk with you and give you a look at Molly's room.”

“Once again, your simpleminded police department is indebted to a citizen of the town, telling us how to do our work. I'll send Tony D'Agostine down to have a chat with Edna. He won't have a warrant, but I'll bet he gets into Mrs. Wood's room without one.”

“If you learn anything, will you let me know?”

“Maybe. How many more missing women do you expect to be looking for in the next day or two? If you tell me now, I can start looking for them right away.”

“Two is two more than enough, as far as I'm concerned.”

“Amen. Now, if you don't have any other earth-shaking ideas, why don't you run along and let me do my work, which right now is making some calls around the island and to the mainland to see if your new missing lady is still here or went back to Scituate.”

As we left, he was frowning and reaching for the phone.

Joshua and Diana wanted to go home and work on the tree house.

“No,” I said. “We're going for a drive. We're looking for the red car that Molly was driving when she came to our house for supper. You two can help. If you see a red car, tell me.”

“There's one!”

“That's not the right one, but keep pointing them out.”

“There's another one!”

It was going to be a long day. I hadn't even gotten out of town before my bright-eyed children had proven that there were a lot of red cars around. Unfortunately, none of them was a Honda Civic belonging to Molly Wood.

I figured that the island's ten different police forces were probably cruising where they normally cruised, and that people living at the ends of private driveways would have reported any strange cars on their property, so I decided to cruise where the police didn't usually go and to ignore private drives.

I didn't have much hope of finding Molly's car, but you never know, so I spent the last of the afternoon driving the back roads that wander through Edgar-town's forests and scouting every housing development I could find. There are a lot of these, and more in the making, thanks to the ever-increasing popularity of Vineyard living. I followed roads I'd never been on before and saw houses I'd never seen. I was both impressed and depressed, and I found myself waxing nostalgic for the good old days, before things had gotten so crowded. Of course, when my children were grown they would be nostalgic for days like this one, when life was simpler and there weren't so many crowds.

I didn't find Molly's car, and both children went to sleep in the backseat while I was searching. Nap time waits for no one.

When I'd driven every back road I could find in Edgartown, I moved my search up to Oak Bluffs and repeated the process there. As in Edgartown, there were lots of roads, both paved and unpaved, to be
explored, and a lot of new houses. I drove many miles but saw no sign of Molly's car.

Then I thought of the purloined letter. People could say a lot of things about me, but they couldn't deny that I was slow. If you're naked and you don't want people to notice, you go to a nudist colony. If you want to hide a book, try a library.

If you want to put a car in some inconspicuous place, you put it in a long-term parking lot.

After Labor Day, there are more parking spots available than there are in the summer, and the cops are much more lax about enforcing parking limits. Still, there aren't too many places where cars can be parked for several days without being noticed and ticketed. Most towns have a few such places, and the local police probably didn't pay too much attention to them.

I took a look at Oak Bluffs twenty-four-hour parking areas and found nothing. I drove back to Edgar-town and tried there. Nothing again. I started for Vineyard Haven but then realized I didn't have time for that, since Zee would be coming home at any minute. I felt impatient and frustrated, as though an unjust fate was keeping me from almost certain success, although I knew that was nonsense. I drove home, where I woke up the kids and had just enough time to put the martini glasses in the freezer and get supper going when the phone rang.

It was Zee. Her voice was filled with anger and fear. “Jeff, something's happened! Come up here right away. I'll meet you in the parking lot.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. Please come.”

I piled the kids into the car and was at the hospital parking lot in ten minutes.

Zee was standing beside her Jeep, holding a piece of paper in her hand. I went right to her.

“What is it?” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, but look at that.” She pointed. A tire had been slashed. “And this was under the windshield wiper.” She thrust the paper at me.

It was crudely lettered, but plain enough. “Tell your husband to keep his nose out of places it doesn't belong.”

I felt a red fury rise inside me. “Somebody must have seen this happen.”

She shook her head. “I've asked. Nobody saw anything. What does that note mean? Who did this?”

The red anger flamed. “I don't know,” I said, though I thought I might. “You take the kids home in the truck. I'll change the tire and be right behind you.”

“All right. But we should tell the police.”

“Good idea. Stop at the OBPD on your way and give them the note and a report.” That way I'd probably be home about the same time she and the kids were. I didn't want them there alone.

I hurried with the tire and was home waiting for them when they drove in. By then my anger was the cold kind.

Zee looked tired. “The police are going to talk with people and try to find a witness. They wanted to know what you were doing that might make somebody mad. I couldn't tell them. They want to talk with you.”

“All right, I'll get in touch with them.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “The note wasn't addressed to anyone, so there's a chance the guy mixed your car up with somebody else's. Maybe it's just another example of OB politics. It's not the first slashed tire in that town.”

“Maybe.” She looked doubtful, although everyone on Martha's Vineyard knows that everything in Oak Bluffs is political and passions run high.

While she changed out of her uniform I took the chilled glasses from the freezer, sloshed a bit of dry vermouth in each of them, tossed it out, then got the Luksusowa out of the freezer and filled each glass. Two black olives went into Zee's and two green ones stuffed with hot peppers in mine.

Perfect martinis. Different but equally delish.

When Zee came out of the bedroom, I handed hers to her and we went up to the balcony. “Leftover St. Jacques for supper,” I said.

“Fine. I don't know how to think about my tire, so I'm not going to talk about it anymore. I'm more interested in Molly. I know they haven't found her, because you'd have told me that right away. What are they doing?”

I was also glad not to talk about the tire, although I'd been thinking about it pretty hard. So I told her about my conversations with the Chief and Edna Paul and about my fruitless hunt for Molly's car. “I've got a very slim chance of finding it, but the police are looking for it, too, so between us we may locate it. And if we do, maybe we can learn something.”

“It's totally unlike her to go off and not tell anyone. I know something's happened to her.”

“The cops are hunting for her both here and on the mainland. If they can find the car, that could help.”

She brushed back a strand of black hair that had strayed over her forehead. “I did want her to meet Brady. He needs a good woman as much as she needs a good man. I'm very worried.”

“Come down and have some supper. Afterward I'll call the station and see if they've learned anything. If there isn't any news, we can drive up to Vineyard Haven and look around. We probably won't find the car, but at least we'll be doing something. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

Reheated Coquilles St. Jacques is, like most casseroles, even better-tasting the second time around, but worry kept Zee and me from enjoying the flavor of the meal. The children, not sharing their parents' anxieties, gobbled theirs right up.

We washed and stacked the dishes in the drainer, and then the four of us piled into the Land Cruiser and drove to Vineyard Haven, where there are several places you can park a car if, say, you need to go over to America for a couple of days. I started on Causeway Road. We found no red Honda Civic parked there under the trees.

“This is hopeless,” said Zee.

“Do you want to go home?”

“No. Let's keep looking.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Sisyphus,” I said.

Diana laughed. “That's funny, Pa. Say that again!”

I said it again.

More laughter. “That's hard to say, Pa.” Joshua and Diana had a fine time saying it over and over.

At the fourth place we looked for the car, we found it. It was right there in plain sight at the rear of a church parking lot off Franklin Avenue.

Zee was out of the Land Cruiser in a flash. I barely had time to say, “Don't touch anything,” before she was beside the red Honda peering in through the windows.

“Stay here,” I said to the kids. I went over and made my own visual examination of the car. I saw nothing amiss. No signs of violence, nothing unusual. I was turning away when something on the floor in front caught my eye. It was a glove, and there was something slightly unusual about it. I pointed it out to Zee, who put her nose near the glass and studied it.

“It's a golfer's glove,” she said. She looked up at me. “I don't think Molly even plays golf.”

“I'll stay here and make sure nobody disturbs anything. You go tell the police that we've found the car.”

She ran to the Land Cruiser and drove away.

I peeked again at the glove on the floor. It looked like a very nice, expensive glove. Too big for a woman. A clue, maybe, though many of the people who visited the Vineyard played golf. If this was a clue, it didn't narrow down the field very much. The Isle of Dreams crowd came to mind. I didn't know any of those people, but Brady did. Brady and I were scheduled to fish tonight. Maybe he'd have a name or two for me.

I felt like a hound on the scent.

P
atrick looked like he was about to burst into tears.

“What about your grandmother,” I said. “What's happened?”

“She's in the hospital,” he said.

“Oh, shit.” I turned, got back into the Range Rover, and started up the engine.

Patrick ran down the steps and climbed in beside me. “I'll go with you.”

On the way to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs, Patrick told me that when he'd gone in to check on Sarah sometime in the middle of the morning, he'd found her lying on the floor. He'd taken a quick check of her vital signs, and—

“You know how to check vital signs?”

“I'm an EMT down in Hilton Head,” he said.

“I didn't know that,” I said. “I thought all you did was play tennis and golf.”

“Very funny,” he said. “You're thinking of my mother. Sometimes I play tennis and golf, and sometimes I save people's lives.”