First Light (20 page)

“Are they different men?”

“Oh, my, yes. Many different men.”

“But you've never met any of them.”

She shook her head.

“Could you describe any of them?”

“Lord, no. I never pay any attention.”

I wondered how she knew they were different
men, then. But I let it pass. “What about their cars? Those who come to pick her up, have you noticed what kind of cars they drive?”

“No. I wouldn't know one car from another anyway.”

“Has Molly ever talked about any of these men?”

“Heavens, no. I've made it perfectly clear that I have no interest whatsoever in her, um, private life.”

“Does she ever talk about anything that's bothering her or worrying her? Does she strike you as nervous or fearful?”

Edna removed her glasses, polished them on a handkerchief, then fitted them back on her ears. “We don't have those sorts of conversations, Mr. Coyne. The truth is, we don't have many conversations at all. She works all day and carouses all night, and it seems that she only comes home to change her clothes. She expresses no interest whatsoever in my affairs, and I assure you, I have no interest in hers.” She frowned. “Why are you so interested in Mrs. Wood? Are you one of her young men?”

“Me?” I shook my head. “Oh no. Not me. Sarah Fairchild is my client, as you know. Molly Wood is her nurse. Sarah is quite fond of her, and she's very upset that Molly no longer takes care of her. Sarah's concerned about Molly, so …”

“So you're playing detective, eh?”

“Detective?” I smiled. “Hardly. I'm just trying to get some answers for Sarah. This business with Molly is distracting her from some important matters she needs to think about. The sooner I can put Sarah's mind to rest about Molly, the sooner we can take care
of those other matters.” Matters such as the sale of the Fairchild property to the Marshall Lea Foundation, I was hoping to suggest.

Edna Paul seemed to get my suggestion, because she sat back in her chair and nodded. “I do hope you get your answers, then. You don't think something's happened to Mrs. Wood, do you?”

“I don't know. What do you think?”

“I surely don't know, either. But I haven't seen hide or hair of her for three days and three nights now.”

“Has she ever done that before?”

“What, not showed up for three days?”

I nodded.

“No. Never before.” She shrugged. “But it's her life. I'm not her keeper.”

“It's odd,” I said slowly, “but I have a rather different impression of Molly. She seems like a very nice person. Not wild at all. Sad, actually. I think she misses her husband.”

Edna Paul blinked a couple of times.

“Is she really that wild?” I said.

“I didn't say she was wild.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I guess I misunderstood.”

Edna looked past my shoulder to the wall of old photos. “I get lonely sometimes,” she said softly. “Sometimes I have unrealistic expectations.”

“You hoped Molly would be your friend?”

Her eyes came back to me. “A companion, perhaps. Mrs. Wood—Molly—she's a good tenant and, yes, she is a nice person. I suppose she spends many more nights alone up in her room than she does going out.

Sometimes I think I hear her crying up there. And I sit down here wishing she'd come down and talk to me about it. Share with me. And then when she goes out, I feel—I don't know. Betrayed. Angry.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I do hope she's all right,” said Edna. “I truly do.”

“Edna,” I said. “I wonder if I might take a peek at Molly's room.”

She looked at me and frowned. “That Mr. Jackson, he tried to talk me into letting him into her room, and I told him that he had no business in there whatsoever. Then a policeman came around asking a lot of questions. He wanted to look in her room, too. I asked him if he had a search warrant, and he did not but insisted he could get one. I let him go in and look around, but I told him in no uncertain terms that without a warrant he could take nothing away with him. I don't think he liked that very much, but I know the law, Mr. Coyne. So I suppose I could let you in there. But I can't let you take anything, you understand.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said.

She led me up a narrow flight of stairs. The second floor consisted of two small bedrooms separated by a bathroom. One of the bedrooms, Edna told me, she used for storage. She herself slept in the back bedroom on the first floor. The room that Molly was renting was small, square, and quite pleasant. A large window looked out on to the street where I had parked, giving her a good lookout for young men arriving in automobiles. A twin-sized bed was pushed against one wall, and a chest of drawers stood against the opposite
one. There was a closet with a full-length mirror on the door. Another door opened into the adjacent bathroom.

I went into the room. Edna remained in the doorway, vigilant lest I try to steal something.

A bottle of perfume, a comb and brush, a plastic pin-on plaque that read
AMELIA WOOD, RN,
and a little jewelry box sat on top of the bureau. I resisted the temptation to look inside the jewelry box or to open the drawers and paw through Molly's underwear. I figured Edna would peg me as a pervert.

I did open the closet door. It was a small closet full of cheerfully colored blouses, skirts, jerseys, shorts, sweaters, dresses, and pants, along with a couple of white tennis outfits, all neatly aligned on hangers. A pair of matching suitcases sat on the shelf, and several pairs of shoes and sneakers and sandals, along with two tennis rackets, were on the floor. No golf clubs.

I peeked into the bathroom. A toothbrush and tube of Pepsodent lay on the back of the sink, and a black cosmetics bag sat on the shelf under the mirror.

I saw nothing that hinted at what might've happened to Molly.

I wandered back into the bedroom. A tattered copy of
Sense and Sensibility
sat on the table beside the bed. Jane Austen. Sure. Women love Jane Austen. I guess plenty of men do, too, but I'm not one of them.

I picked up the book and flipped it open. It had been inscribed: “For Molly, who has more sense and sensibility than any woman alive, with love from Ethan.” He had dated it “Christmas 1995.”

Ethan, I guessed, was her dead husband, and I felt
a pang of sadness at the image of Molly lying in this lonely little room on this island at night, separated by ocean and time and life itself from her husband, reading a book given to her by her beloved Ethan, the memories of Christmases past it must have sparked for her, the fact that Ethan had chosen this book for her, that he had known her intimately enough to know she'd cherish it, that he had written in it, and that he had died in a bed beside her.

As I flipped idly through the book, it fell open to a folded piece of notepaper that might have been serving as her bookmark. I turned my back on Edna Paul, who remained in the doorway watching me, and pretended to gaze out the window as I unfolded the note.

It read: “It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”

The words had been printed in masculine block letters with a black felt-tip pen. The note was undated and unsigned. Not even an initial.

“Break, my heart.” A jilted lover?

“I must hold my tongue.” A jilted
secret
lover?

“It cannot come to good.” A jilted, secret,
unsuitable
lover?

The words seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place them. A quote from somewhere.

I thought of slipping the note into my pocket and turning it over to the Edgartown Police. But it occurred to me that this note could turn out to be evidence, and if it did, my filching it could render it inadmissible in court.

So I memorized the words, slipped it back between
the pages of Molly's book, and returned the book to the table.

I turned and smiled at Edna. “It's a nice room.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

I spread my hands out. “I didn't take anything.”

“I didn't think you would.”

I followed her back down the stairs, thanked her for the iced tea, and started for the front door. Then I stopped and said, “Oh, by the way, I noticed a bathing suit on your clothesline. Is that Molly's?”

She pressed her lips together and frowned for an instant. Then, surprisingly, she smiled. “It certainly isn't mine.”

I sat in the front seat of Sarah's Range Rover for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette and gazing up at Molly Wood's bedroom window. Aside from the interesting note in her book, I had noticed nothing that might suggest what had happened to her.

I figured one thing that had
not
happened was that she had decided to take an unannounced vacation. There were two suitcases and no empty hangers in the closet. Her treasured copy of
Sense and Sensibility,
her jewelry box, her cosmetics, and her hairbrush had all been left behind. I figured even on the spur of the moment, no woman would go away for three days without bringing at least some of those items along.

Something else was gnawing at me, too, and I'd pulled out of Summer Street and onto Pease's Point Way before I realized what it was. Molly's black nursing bag, the bag I'd seen her carrying the first time I met her at Sarah's, the bag I assumed went everywhere with her, had not been in her room.

Okay, she probably kept it in her car. Or for all I knew, visiting nurses left their bags at the VNS headquarters when they weren't out making house calls.

I glanced at my watch. It was a little before five. I had an hour before cocktails on the Jacksons' balcony.

I found a phone booth beside a gas station, and directory assistance gave me the number for the Visiting Nurse Service. I called it, was told that somebody would be there for another hour, and got directions.

It was in Oak Bluffs right across the street from the high school. It took me fifteen minutes to find the shingled two-story building that housed the Martha's Vineyard Community Services, which included the Visiting Nurse office. Here on the island, I noticed, they called it the Visiting Nurse Service, not Association as they did everywhere else.

When I told the receptionist I was a lawyer representing one of the Visiting Nurse patients, she stared at me for a moment, then buzzed somebody on her intercom.

A moment later, a middle-aged woman wearing a long yellow skirt and a white blouse bustled out from around a corner. She introduced herself as Mrs. Sadler, the intake supervisor.

I told her that I was a lawyer, Sarah Fairchild was my client, and Amelia Wood was Sarah's nurse. Mrs. Sadler nodded. She didn't seem at all worried that I might sue her. She steered me into an empty office, closed the door behind us, and said, “So how can I help you, Mr. Coyne? Does Mrs. Fairchild have a complaint about her care?”

“No. Not at all. She's very fond of Mrs. Wood.”

Mrs. Sadler frowned. “You know—”

“Mrs. Wood has gone missing,” I said. “I know. I wondered if you had any thoughts about that.”

She smiled quickly. “The police asked the same thing. I told them I had no thoughts about it whatsoever, aside from being very concerned, of course. Molly has been with us for only a few months, but she's always been absolutely reliable. I can't understand it. She's a lovely person. It's very worrisome.”

“When did you first realize something might be wrong?”

“Monday morning at eight o'clock,” she said. “That's when she was supposed to check in and get her calendar.”

“But she didn't check in.”

“No. I called her pager at about eight-fifteen, and when another fifteen minutes passed and she didn't call in, I tried her home. There was no answer. I waited awhile, figuring maybe she'd had car trouble or something and had left her beeper somewhere. Finally, I reassigned some nurses to her schedule.”

“And you never did hear from her?”

Mrs. Sadler shook her head. “I kept trying her all morning. Home, her beeper. I even called her patients' homes, just to be sure that for some reason she hadn't done her rounds without checking in.”

“Did you check with all of them?”

She nodded. “She missed them all. I was reluctant to try her emergency number. I didn't want to upset anybody.”

“Did you finally try it?”

She shook her head. “I intended to. But when I
looked in her file, I saw that she'd left the space for an emergency contact blank. That slipped by us, I'm afraid. Someone should've noticed that. Look,” she said, “is Mrs. Fairchild unhappy with the new nurse we've assigned?”

“Actually,” I said, “Mrs. Fairchild is in the ICU at the hospital.”

Mrs. Sadler nodded. “That's right. I remember hearing that. How is she?”

“She's unconscious. She had a stroke.”

She tsk-tsked and shook her head.

“I'm worried about Molly Wood,” I said. “I, um, well, I had a date with her, and she didn't show up.”

“She's a very attractive woman.”

“Yes, I agree. And it's not that I've never been stood up by an attractive woman, but it does seem that something's happened to Molly.”

“How can I help?”

“I don't know.” I fished out one of my business cards, scratched the Fairchild phone number on the back of it, and gave it to her. “That's where I'm staying. If you think of something or hear anything, I'd appreciate it if you'd call me.”

She took my card, glanced at both sides of it, and tucked it into her skirt pocket. “The police asked me to do the same thing,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “They're the important ones.” I gave her my best, saddest smile. “Me, I'm just somebody who cares.”

Mrs. Sandler reached over, touched my hand, and nodded sympathetically. I'd hit a soft spot. “Anything I hear, I'll call you, I promise,” she said.