First Light (5 page)

I looked over my right shoulder. Nate Fairchild was standing about twenty yards down the beach from me. He was cranking on his twelve-foot surf-casting outfit, and his lure had snagged my line.

“Nate, dammit,” I said. “It's me. Brady Coyne.”

“Oh, yeah. Mama's lawyer. Well, get your ass off my beach.” His lure had run down my line and snagged my fly. He reeled it up, then reached down with a knife and cut my fly off.

Nate wore one of those fore-and-aft fishing caps with one bill over the back of his neck and another over his eyes, along with cutoff jeans and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. Pale curly
hair grew thick on his legs and arms and poked out from under his cap, and in the shadow of his visor I could see that he wore dark sunglasses and had a bushy sun-bleached beard.

“Gimme my fly,” I said.

“Screw you, lawyer. Just get the hell offa my beach.”

I reeled up my line, then went over to where he was standing. He stood there glowering at me. He was holding his long surf rod in both hands like a lance. I wondered if he intended to run me through. My slender fly rod was no match for his heavy weapon.

“For Christ's sake, Nate, grow up,” I said. “This beach belongs to your mother, not you. I have her permission to fish here, and I intend to do that.”

He stepped close to me. “Yeah? Well, she's up there dying in her wheelchair and I'm standing right here. So what're you gonna do about that?”

“I'm going to keep fishing. There's plenty of room for both of us on this beach.”

He pushed his face close to mine. “I don't share my beach with nobody, never mind some goddam lawyer who wants to sell it off. So if you don't—”

At that moment I heard a shout. When I turned, I saw J.W. coming down the sandy path toward us.

I was glad to see him.

T
he Derby started at midnight, and I made my first cast about ten seconds later, laying my Robert's Ranger out through the darkness toward the horizon I could not see. I was shoulder to shoulder with other angling hopefuls, each of us quite willing to catch a champion fish on the first day of the Derby. But, like everyone else on the beach, I caught only some smallish blues, the biggest of which I dutifully took to the morning weigh-in.

The day's winners all came in from somewhere else, unspecified spots such as “the South Shore,” “the North Shore,” or “Chappaquiddick,” for it is one of the curiosities about fishermen that they are secretive about where they catch fish. Of course, the reason for such closed lips is that the fishermen don't want anybody else to know where the big fish are.

However, on Martha's Vineyard there are only so many places where you can fish, and everybody knows where all of them are, so there are no secret spots. Moreover, yesterday's fish may well not be there today, so even if you had a secret spot, the chances of more giant blues or bass being there the next time you
go are fairly dim. Still, most fishermen feel obligated to lie about where they caught yesterday's fish. It's an honored tradition.

I annoy my fishing friends by telling everyone where and when and with what lure I managed to catch my fish.

Tony D'Agostine, sergeant of the Edgartown Police, had planned, I knew, to be out on the beaches at midnight with the rest of us, but after I got to the morning weigh-in at the shed that used to be the Edgartown Junior Yacht Club and learned that my nice little five-pound blue wasn't going to be a contender, I went out into the parking lot and ran into Tony. He was looking as red-eyed as I knew I looked.

“Well, at least you got a fish,” he said. “I didn't even wet a line.”

“You're probably smart not to play with the big boys,” I said. “After all, what chance would a mere small-town cop have competing with world-class anglers such as me?”

“A kid went missing last night,” said Tony. “Wandered off with his dog while Mom was hanging out clothes. Dog came home when he got hungry, but the kid didn't. So much for man's best friend. Half the cops and civilians on the island hunted for the boy all night. They found him this morning about a quarter mile from home. People looking for him must have walked right past him a dozen times, but I guess he was sleeping. Anyway, he's fine. Good thing it wasn't cold last night.”

“Maybe it's something in the island air,” I said. “I
met a guy yesterday who's looking for a missing wife. Does the name Bannerman ring any bells?”

“Seems to me that some PIs were asking about a woman by that name a while back. We get missing persons reports every year. Some college girl goes off with one of the local Lotharios and doesn't make it home by two, her roommates call the cops. She's shacked up someplace, and finally shows a couple of days later, but meanwhile we all get stuck with an extra shift.”

“Gee, Tony, I never knew you read Nicholas Rowe.”

“You don't know a lot of things, J.W. Anyway, the lost kid is home and I'm headed home myself to get some sleep. Not much happening at Wasque, you say?”

“Five- or six-pounders. No big winners that I know about. I'm taking mine home so I can smoke them.”

“Where's Zee? Even if you can't catch any real fish, she usually can.”

“She's home taking care of her children, like a normal wife.”

“Zee is not your normal wife. I'm surprised that she's home and you're out fishing. I'd have thought it might be the other way around.”

“The decision was a democratic one. She lost the coin toss. Tonight she'll be out there on the beach and I'll be home with the tots. You, of course, will be back on the street protecting and serving.”

“Wrong. I'll be fishing tonight with your wife.”

He walked away, and I went to the Dock Street Coffee Shop for a cup of coffee, then climbed into my old Toyota Land Cruiser and went home. There,
behind the shed in back of the house, I scaled and filleted my fish and put the fillets in plastic bags. Then I put the bags in the freezer. Fresh bluefish is best for cooking, but, for reasons that elude me, frozen bluefish smokes better than fresh bluefish. It is another unsolved mystery of the sea.

Inside the house, Zee was getting ready to go to work at the hospital. During Derby time, by dint of strategic deals made with nonfishing nurses, she arranged to keep working, but at odd hours and never when the tides were best. Once the Derby was over, she'd go back to normal shifts. Zee loved being a nurse, but had recently been wearing her
I FISH, THEREFORE I AM
T-shirt.

She kissed me. “I'll be back at six, and I plan to be at Wasque not much later. Don't forget to pick up Brady and get him registered and bring him here. You'll be the love of my life if you have supper waiting for us in a little cooler, so we can take it with us.”

“It shall be done, madam. I'll include a thermos of coffee and another of vodka in case you want cocktails. When can I expect to actually spend some time with you again?”

“In about a month. Unless I land a sixty-pound bass, that is. If I get her tonight, I'll quit fishing and stay home alone with you.” She looked up at me and batted her long lashes. “Of course, that means that if you want to stay home with me you'll have to stop fishing, too. But you won't mind, I'm sure.”

“I'll see you in a month.”

“What a man. And they say romance is dead.”

She went out and climbed into her Jeep and drove away.

Joshua and Diana came in. “Pa, will you build us the tree house today?”

I actually liked the idea of a tree house. Tarzan had a good one, according to the old Johnny Weismuller movies. It would be nice to have one like his, complete with Cheeta and Jane, but that was probably beyond my scope. Something smaller, maybe.

“Let's go look at the tree,” I said.

We went out and stood beneath the big beech tree in the backyard. It was huge and old and had many branches, some of which swept the ground.

We circled the tree and commented upon possible places to build our tree house. After a while we zeroed in on what seemed to be the right spot. Then, with me giving the children a hand and trying not to grit my teeth too hard as we got higher, we climbed up to our chosen branches and viewed them at close hand. They still looked good.

We inched down to the ground. Why is it that parents are afraid to have their kids do what they themselves used to do fearlessly when they were kids? As the poet said, down we forget as up we grow.

Like a lot of people who were raised without too much money, I keep a supply of stuff that I don't really need right now but might need some day. I store my collection in a corral out by the shed. Included is my private lumberyard, which is made up of scraps of good wood left over from jobs or salvaged from somewhere or other.

We scouted the lumber pile, then had lunch, and then worked for two hours, sorting boards and timber, until it was nap time for Joshua and Diana.

While they slept, I thought about Katherine Bannerman.

Thornberry Security was good at its work. If Katherine was easy to find, they'd have done it. But that hadn't happened, so it was probable that one of three scenarios existed: Katherine didn't know who she was, she was dead or incapacitated, or she didn't want to be found.

Although there are cases of amnesiacs living long lives without knowing their own identities or having them discovered, such people are rare. Usually they attract attention and someone figures out who they are. On an island as small as Martha's Vineyard, it was unlikely that an attractive woman like Katherine Bannerman could be suffering from amnesia without someone knowing about it and trying to help her. So I scratched amnesia from my slate.

Because of the island's size, it also seemed unlikely that Katherine had died or become too incapacitated to identify herself without anyone noticing. Since she had spent a summer on the Vineyard, someone would have reported her injury or death to the authorities.

Unless, of course, someone didn't want her death known. That was always a possibility. People dropped out of sight every year, and some of them were at the bottom of the sea. But murder, in spite of the headlines it garnered, was a rare crime. I didn't dismiss homicide from my index of possibilities, but I didn't put it at the top of the list, either.

The third possibility was that Katherine hadn't been found because she didn't want to be found. If that was the case, she might be elusive indeed, especially if she was smart and if she had planned things out ahead of time.

On the other hand, even people who want to disappear often fail because of their habits. They keep their old Social Security card. If they played mahjongg before, they still do. If they were in a particular profession before, they enter it again. If they liked small towns before, they live in one now. Most important, they find it almost impossible to stay out of touch with family and friends. Many a criminal on the run has found himself surrounded by cops because he just had to call Mom or an old pal or a girlfriend.

I opened the Bannerman file and read through it. Thornberry operatives had been on the case since the previous fall, and they'd talked with everyone I would have talked with—James and Frankie Banner-man, Katherine's friends and neighbors, Bannerman's employees, the cops, everybody who might know something or might have heard from Katherine.

James and Katherine had been born and bred just outside of Hartford, where James and Frankie still lived. They had married young and honeymooned on the Vineyard. Katherine worked in a bank and James in a small computer software firm. A couple of years later they started a business on the side, working out of their garage. James was the engineer and Katherine was the bookkeeper and accountant. Before long they were both working full-time at home. They made something I didn't understand having to do with
computers, and after ten years they began to make some real money. They moved the firm out of the garage and into an industrial park and hired professional employees, including some to do the work Katherine had been doing.

That may have been when Katherine began to feel that life had more to offer than a husband who spent all of his time at work. She got a part-time job teaching accounting at the local junior college, and joined a bridge club, and became involved in charities.

She met men and liked being with some of them, but as far as Thornberry knew she had taken no lovers. She tried to interest James in a social life, but he was all business and was making more money every day. He seemed honestly shocked when she left him.

The single postcard to Frankie was the only contact Thornberry knew about. No further communications had come from Katherine to the Bannerman house.

Frankie Bannerman had put up a brave front during the summer but had fallen apart after Labor Day a year ago, so her father had contacted Thornberry Security. Thornberry's operatives tracked Katherine to the Vineyard, where she had sold her car in August. On the Vineyard they'd learned that she'd lived under her own name in West Tisbury, where she had joined a local women's group. They'd talked with some of the women and learned that Katherine had simply gone away on Labor Day weekend, the weekend of the great migration from the island, when the Summer People head back to America.

And that was about it. Thornberry had researched
all of the usual paper trails that lead to persons gone astray, but in vain. Katherine hadn't used her Social Security card or driver's license or credit cards, hadn't been reported dead or injured, hadn't phoned or written to friends or acquaintances. She hadn't, in short, left any signs of where she'd gone or why. She'd sold the car and disappeared.

I went over the report again, then looked at my watch. I only had about an hour before I was scheduled to pick up Brady. Too late to sleuth today, but still time to do some more tree-house building.

I took my long ladder and some tools out to the tree. By the time the tads woke up, I had the supporting timbers in place and had started nailing floor beams across them. By gadfry, the house was already beginning to look like one.