First Light (21 page)

I thanked her for her time, and she walked me back out into the reception area. When she held out her hand to me, I took it and said, “By the way. Where do your nurses keep their bags?”

“You mean when they're not on duty?”

I nodded.

She shrugged. “At home, or perhaps locked in their vehicles. They're supposed to keep their bags secure. They carry expensive medical equipment in them.”

“What about drugs? Do they carry drugs in those bags?”

“No, no meds. Our nurses routinely administer medication, give shots, and so forth. But the patients have their prescriptions with them.”

“What about syringes?”

She nodded. “The nurses carry a supply in their bags.”

“They don't leave their bags here, then?”

“Here? In the office?” She shook her head. “No. The nurses are responsible for their bags.”

It was nearly six o'clock when I climbed into the Range Rover. I pointed it back to Edgartown and decided it was time to start thinking about fishing.

Well, first I'd try to give some thought to putting my feet up on J.W.'s balcony railing and sipping one of his martinis and gazing out over the treetops toward the sea.

But all the way over there Molly Wood's smile kept flashing in my mind, and I could almost hear the tinkle of her laugh in my ear and feel the warmth of her hand and the soft promise of her lips.

*    *    *

Diana and Joshua greeted me in the driveway when I got to J.W.'s place. They probably figured I'd become a permanent suppertime fixture at their house, and whatever shyness they'd shown me earlier had been replaced with aggressive friendliness. Each of them grabbed one of my hands and dragged me out back to show me all the progress they'd made on their tree house.

I was standing there admiring it when J.W. came around the corner. He held his martini glass aloft. “Started without you.”

“Diana and Josh are pretty good carpenters,” I said.

“Pa helped a little,” said Diana.

“Brady's going to come up to the balcony now,” said J.W. “We have adult things to discuss.”

I followed J.W. up the stairs to the balcony. Zee was slouched in a chair with her feet up on the railing and a martini glass resting on her belly. Her eyes were closed.

When I took the chair beside her, she looked at me, smiled, and said, “Gonna be some weather tonight.”

“Weather,” in the parlance of those who live on the edge of the sea, means “bad weather.”

“I've always admired you native types,” I said. “Living close to the land and sea, intimately attuned to nature and her mysterious ways. I suppose you wet your finger and stick it up in the air, take a deep breath, sniff the air, check out the aches in your joints, and make your predictions.”

“No,” she said, “I watch the news on television. Hurricane Elinore is heading for the Carolina coast.
South Beach could be hot.” She glanced at her watch. “High tide's around ten. I'd like to be there about an hour before that, fish the whole tide.”

“Low tide around four,” said J.W. “All-nighter, huh?”

“Weather's coming,” said Zee.

He shrugged and nodded, as if that explained it all.

Zee pushed herself up and went down to the kitchen. J.W. plopped himself into her chair. “Molly,” he said. “Looks grim.”

He told me about his conversations with the police and the various other people he'd queried, and I told him about my visit with Edna Paul and the note I'd found in Molly's copy of
Sense and Sensibility.
I shut my eyes for a minute, then quoted it for him: “‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.'”

J.W. gazed up at the sky. The stars were beginning to wink on. “I've heard that somewhere.”

“I think I have, too,” I said. “But damned if I can place it. From a poem? The lyrics to some song? It's got that ba
-bump
-ba
-bump
beat to it. You could dance to it, you know? What the hell is that? Iambic pentameter?”

J.W. lifted both hands and shrugged. “I should've paid better attention in Mrs. Warbuck's English class.” He stared off toward the salt pond, where darkness was gathering. “That note was probably written by some admirer, huh?”

“I dunno. Maybe it was from Ethan. Her husband, I'm guessing, who gave her the book.”

He shook his head. “‘It cannot come to good'? Doesn't sound like something a loving husband would write.” He frowned for a minute, then suddenly he slapped the arm of his chair and stood up. “Wait here.”

J.W. disappeared down the stairs, and a few minutes later he came back lugging a book about the size of an unabridged dictionary. He sat down and opened it. I craned my neck and read the title.
The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

“I figured you were more the Captain Marvel type,” I said.

“Wile E. Coyote is my favorite,” he muttered. “Now shut up.”

I lit a cigarette and shut up, and a few minutes later J.W. snapped his fingers. “Got it. ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.'” He poked my arm. “That's what you said, right?”

“Exactly.”

“Hamlet,
act one, scene two,” said J.W. “The poor prince is all upset because his father the king just died and his mother the queen is screwing his uncle. He's really pissed at both of them. He thinks it's incestuous, and he thinks his mother is amoral and his uncle is just using her. This quote comes at the end of a soliloquy. Sort of a foreshadowing of all the bad things that will happen in the rest of the play.”

“So what do you make of it?” I said.

“We figure out who wrote it, we can ask him.” He shut the book and put it on the table. Then he picked
up the martini pitcher and topped off both our glasses. “So did you notice anything else?”

“Something I didn't notice,” I said. “Molly's bag.”

“What bag?”

“Her nurse's bag. She had it the first time I met her at Sarah's. It wasn't anywhere in her room at Edna's, and it wasn't at the VNS headquarters. Was it in her car, did you notice?”

He shrugged. “I didn't see it. The cops didn't mention finding anything but that golf glove. It might've been in the trunk, I guess. Cops can't be counted on to tell you everything.”

“Can you check on it?”

“I guess so. You think it's relevant?”

“Could be. The woman at the Visiting Nurse place said they keep syringes in those bags.”

“Yeah? What about drugs?”

“No, the patients have their own drugs. But the nurses sometimes do the injections.”

“So you're thinking … ?”

I shrugged. “I don't know what I'm thinking. Just, if the bag's missing, where the hell is it?”

“A motive to hurt her?” said J.W. “Someone thinks she's got drugs in it, whacks her to steal it?”

“Or maybe just for the syringes,” I said.

“Hmm,” said J.W. “I can see mugging her, maybe. Giving her a shove, grabbing the bag, running away. But Molly's been missing for three days.”

“Guy sees her getting into her car. Or out of it. Sees the bag, tries to snatch it, she resists, he panics, hits her or … or stabs her or something …”

“Some random guy,” said J.W. “Hurts her worse than he meant to.”

“Could be, right? You got any cokeheads on the island?”

He laughed. “You kidding?”

“Guys willing to hurt people to get hold of some narcotics?”

“Guys and gals as well,” he said.

“Pardon my political incorrectness.”

“Most offensive,” he said with a grin. “Shocking, in fact.”

After dinner, I helped J.W. clean up the kitchen while Zee read stories to the kids. I washed and he dried and put things away, and while we worked he told me about all the people he'd been interviewing. The golf glove they'd found in Molly's car had led him to Eliza Fairchild's two lapdogs, Luis Martinez and Philip Fredrickson, both of whom worked for the company that manufactured the glove, which also happened to be a major backer of the Isle of Dreams Corporation, which wanted to buy Sarah's property.

“So what's the connection?” I said. “I mean, it could be some jealous-lover thing, but Molly didn't even play golf, so I don't see how it could connect to the business end.”

J.W. shook his head. “I don't know. Those two were all over Eliza, you said.”

I nodded. “You're thinking Martinez and Fredrickson had ulterior motives? You're thinking they were pawing Eliza because they were looking for information?”

“Most likely they were pawing Eliza because Eliza is eminently pawable. Still …”

“But it could be all about money,” I said, “and they were using Eliza. And you're thinking they could've also been using Molly.”

J.W. shrugged. “Suppose Sarah confided something to Molly. You said the two of them were very close.”

“Humph,” I said. “Sarah didn't confide anything worth killing about to me.”

He looked sideways at me. “You sure?”

I shrugged. “Good question, I guess. So you think whatever happened to Molly has something to do with the Fairchild property?”

He shrugged. “All I think is that I don't know what to think, and I'm trying to keep an open and creative mind about it.”

“If that is what happened,” I said, “then whoever did whatever they did to Molly would most likely also go after somebody else they figured Sarah might confide in, huh?”

He nodded. “If that's what this is all about.”

“Someone like Sarah's lawyer.”

He shrugged.

“You suggesting that I ought to pretend I know something, set myself up as some kind of decoy, try to smoke out the bad guys?” I said.

“What, and endanger yourself?” J.W. held up both hands. “I am offended. I am your friend. I would never suggest that you endanger yourself.”

“You already did,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I think you did that all by yourself.”

“Well,” I said, “if I did that and nothing happened, it would probably mean that what happened to Molly was a jealous-lover thing rather than a money thing or a golf thing. That would narrow it down.”

“It would indeed,” said J.W.

“On the other hand,” I said, “if something
did
happen …”

“Right,” he said. “You gotta think about that.”

By the time Zee and I got to South Beach, a cloud bank had blown in. It obscured the stars and the moon, and the night was so black and moist that even a landlubber such as I could smell the storm in the air.

We cast blindly through the thick air into the dark water that I knew was in front of me only by the sound of the surf out there somewhere and the soft lapping of the waves at my feet. Nothing happened for a long time, but Zee and I kept casting. She stood so close beside me that we could talk conversationally, and I could hear the whirr of line spinning off her reel and the little clank when she engaged the bail on her reel. But the darkness was so enveloping that I couldn't see her. She kept reminding me that the ocean is always changing, that wind and tide keep the water in constant motion, and that bluefish and stripers never stop moving in their insatiable quest for food. The next cast could always be the one that intercepted a Derby winner.

Fishing in the ocean at night is an act of blind faith—or blind folly.

Sometime after we'd been there for a few hours,
the breeze shifted direction. It felt warmer on my face, and it tasted damper, and it became stronger.

Within minutes after I first noticed the wind shift, I heard Zee grunt.

“Fish?” I said.

“Um. Good one.”

I reeled in and fished out my flashlight in time to see Zee backing a very large striped bass up onto the beach.

“Keeper?”

She knelt beside it and measured it against some markings on her rod. “Oh, yeah,” she whispered. “Thirty-seven inches. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho. Derby winner, here we go.”

She lugged the big fish up to her Jeep, and I returned to my casting with renewed enthusiasm.

A few casts later, I felt a hard pull. But I failed to hook the fish.

Zee returned.

“I had a hit,” I said.

“They've arrived,” she said. “Time to get serious.”

And for the rest of the night—I had no idea how many hours passed—we caught fish. We landed eight or ten nice stripers apiece, though none of them matched Zee's thirty-seven-incher and none of mine was a keeper, and we caught about as many bluefish. I kept a blue that Zee guessed would weigh ten pounds, and she kept all of hers, including one about the same size as mine.

First light came so gradually it was barely noticeable. There was no burst of light on the horizon, because the horizon was packed with heavy clouds. It
was, rather, a growing awareness that the sky was a bit less dark than the water, and that I could make out Zee's silhouette beside me, and that on both sides of us up and down the beach there were other silhouettes casting into the sea.

We quit a little after seven-thirty. My shoulder ached and my poor, sleep-deprived head felt like an overblown balloon, and as we drove to Derby headquarters to weigh in our fish, I realized that I'd spent the entire night without thinking a single thought of Molly Wood or Sarah Fairchild or my law practice. My mind had registered nothing except the sea and the sky and the air and the rhythms of fishing.

Anyone who doesn't fish could never understand.

Z
ee and Brady pulled into the yard just before nine-thirty the next morning. In the fish box, awash in the last melting remnants of the ice they'd packed there the night before, were eight or ten nice blues and a keeper bass.

I examined the fish. “Not bad,” I said.