Authors: James Brady
A rescue party had started out when the weather began to break, climbing from camp three through four and on up to the Col. Only one member of the group was able to get that far without bivouacking for the night. He found Wales's party. But not Wales. He passed around his oxygen and headed down again, promising to be back in the morning. By which time the storm would be over.
He was as good as his word. So too the others. By noon a colonel of the Nepalese army successfully landed a chopper on the Col and began to take people off, one at a time. Harsh words were exchanged, people pushed and shoved for advantage at the head of the line, an actual fist fight took place. The chopper came back again and again until all the survivors were at base camp far down at the foot of the mountain.
Eight were dead.
The tantalizing thing about all this? In the accounts carried by various on-line services, no one ascribed blame. They'd climbed the mountain, the weather had gone sour, people died, others survived. No one's fault, just rotten luck. But what of that fist fight in the Col when the chopper began its heroic shuttling of people to safety? No one mentioned that again. No one even noted that to have a fight of any sort, at least two persons are required. No one was to blame for that, either, even when it required at least two people to take up hostilities. Who was it who fought? I wondered. No word on that, either.
Just rotten luck.
Three guides, a couple of Sherpas, three clients were dead. Among the survivors, Hannah Cutting and Pam Phythian. A fund was gotten up. Ang Thwat, the hero martyr, was mythologized as having given his life for the two memsahibs. Pam was the driving force behind the fund, which was to help educate Ang's children. If any; no one seemed quite sure. She put up ten thousand dollars.
Hannah Cutting, always prudent when it came to giving her money away, sent a check for fifteen hundred.
And, as a reminder of what they'd been through, and been spared, it was Hannah who kept their climbing rope, souvenir of that terrible moment when it parted and Ang fell. While Pam and Hannah were saved. How it was that Hannah ended up with the rope when it was Pam who was closest to the hero Sherpa, the on-line services had no explanation.
And ever since the Everest tragedy, two women who'd been if not close friends, neighbors and colleagues back in East Hampton, had mutually and cordially despised each other.
TWENTY
Claire, in a white Speedo tank suit, was on the ski â¦
Alix and I, on the other hand, were getting along well. In the morning I tried to improve still further the tenor and pace of our relationship. Was I rushing it? She looked adorable over coffee, hair shining and face bright and the silk robe skimming lightly over that long, lovely body. Take her out in a canoe, I thought (such was the manner in which my mind worked!); show her East Hampton from a different vantage point. A Sloane Ranger from London, let Alix see how other folks lived. Even how deftly I handled the canoe. Might impress her, loosen her up, get her telling me things about Hannah Cutting's book I wanted to know. Or things about herself.
I'd conveniently overlooked the fact of her double first at Oxford and being the Earl's daughter and that she tended to make up her own mind about what she'd be doing. On September mornings like this or any time.
“That's all very well, Beecher, but I've got errands first. Mr. Evans requires answers and I've supplied bloody few. He's expecting daily E-mails and getting none. I really ought to go by and try again to talk my way in to meet Hannah's staffâthe Kroepkes are they?âand ask a few questions myself.” What else she did I don't know but she was back before noon. She hadn't gotten much out of the Kroepkes, she admitted. But at least this time they'd talked with her, having been charmed, I was sure. Alix charmed everyone. And she'd bought several new outfits in local boutiques that looked even better on her than on the window mannequins. She was also proving to be the sort of dogged young person who persevered and wasn't permanently out of sorts when someone chased her off. She just went back again. And she was back in time for us still to go out on the water. Wearing a bikini bottom and an Oxford crew T-shirt and salty-looking sneakers. I'd not seen so much of her legs before. Even in ratty old sneakers they were nice legs. I know it's demeaning of me to make such shallow judgments or to think things like that. But I do.
Alix helped me (really did; she was handy and pretty strong) get the canoe on the roof of the Blazer and stow the paddles and line and other gear inside. But when I attempted to explain to her about her PFD, the personal flotation device the Coast Guard required out here, Alix Dunraven said, and very politely, “Well, you see, I've been in small boats before. I cox-ed the varsity against Cambridge on the Thames my second year at Oxford.” She paused. “We won by a boatlength and a half.”
Here I was telling her about life preservers and she'd been coxswain of the winning crew in a historic boat race more celebrated than the America's Cup.
“Oh,” I said, not very cleverly. Not for the first time I thought I was too easily put down. Especially by beautiful women.
We drove up Three Mile Harbor Road past the little farm where a handwritten sign advertised “Priscilla & Elvis,” the 600-pound sow and the huge old goat that lived in a corral outside the faded red barn where the curious pulled their cars over and kids got off their bikes to gawk. “What's that?” Alix asked. “Local joke,” I told her. She knit her brow over that, not quite sure about our American sense of humor. There was almost no wind (a good thing; wind is the enemy of the canoeist), and when we got the boat launched, she said:
“It's been my experience the butler very rarely does it. Usually it's the wife. Or the husband. Or one of the children. Don't you agree?”
“I haven't had that much experience solving murders.”
Which was my way of asking, without actually doing so, just how much experience
she
had.
“I mean, theoretical rather than empirical, through reading mostly. Hercule Poirot, Holmes, Miss Marple, Le Carré, Raymond Chandler. All those chaps, especially John Buchan. Devilishly clever, don't you think? It was Buchan taught me the use of simple code, six-number groupings in cipher, signed with the name of a winner of the Derby, just as Sandy Arbuthnot, Master of Clanroyden, used to do whilst foiling The Hun as he communicated with Dick Hannay, the South African mining engineer turned general who⦔
Of course, I said, not knowing where this was going nor just what the devil she was talking about. Six-number groupings? Cipher? And who was General Hannay?
“You know⦔ she began a bit vaguely, “how I keep in touch with Mr. Evans.” And then, not vaguely at all, “Do you suspect the same person that killed Hannah also broke into the pool house? Or had a confederate who may have done so? Is there a link at all? Or do we have two malefactors entirely, one murderer and one burglar? Perhaps more than two, an entire ring?”
I issued the usual protestation that I was writing about Hannah's life and not her murder. Alix smirked. “Oh, that's a given, Beecher. Go right on.” She tolerated my line while clearly dismissing it. There was no shortage of suspects, I had to admit. I told Her Ladyship about various celebrated local feuds involving Hannah that erupted over beach-driving permits and whether to set aside a protected beach for nesting plovers and terns and if striped bass limits were sufficient. She nodded distractedly, not much of a dedicated naturalist herself. The wind was so calm and the water so flat, I didn't stay inside of Three Mile Harbor as I usually did, but steered the boat out through the channel into Peconic Bay, paddling smoothly, Alix in the bow and I in the stem, working up a nice rhythm, setting up the boat well, which lulled me as the canoe usually did on a calm day. Hell, why not just enjoy ourselves and think of the missing manuscript as a game. Paddling about with a pretty girl on a nice day, I might well have been punting on the Thames (or the Isis or whatever that river is that flows through Oxford, where undergraduates picnic on cucumber sandwiches and chilled wine out of wicker hampers). Hannah Cutting's dead and gone and no one seems forlorn. If Random House can find the manuscript they've got a big best-seller and hooray for Her Ladyship. If I find it first, I've got a good piece for Anderson at
Parade.
Alix wins or I win or neither of us wins and the damned thing's gone forever. But no one really gets hurt. Or so I thought.
It was precisely then, in the midst of my facile, complacently shallow philosophizing, that a sleek, electric blue cigarette boat, coming up apparently out of nowhere, raced past the canoe not fifty yards away and pulling a water-skier. There were rules in the harbor. No jet skis, no water skis, five miles per hour maximum speed. But out here on broad Peconic Bay, only the usual maritime rules of the road, and the cigarette must have been doing forty! Jesus! Alix, without being told, joined me in paddling so that the canoe spun to face the speedboat's wake, bow on, letting the wake slide under us rather than hit us broadside and maybe dump us into the water.
“Are people supposed to do that?”
“No, dammit, not that close to a canoe they're not.”
She was surprised and I was sore. We were safely through the wake now but before I could say more, or really do anything, I could see, half a mile off, the cigarette boat turning and starting to head back toward us. This wasn't skylarking now; this was menacing.
“Paddle, Alix, make for that beach to the left.”
“Right-oh,” she said. Good girl. Didn't waste breath debating.
The big speedboat buzzed us twice more. Leo Brass was at the helm; Claire Cutting, in a white Speedo tank suit, was on the ski. She curved this way and that, in and out so that the towline actually crossed over the canoe, forcing us to duck. Taut line like that could tip a small boat; line like that might break your damn neck if it caught you. I shook my fist and cursed. I could see Leo's face, split in a grin. Or was it a scowl? At speed, you couldn't tell. He seemed to be shouting at Claire, urging her on or cursing her out. The bastard. The roar of the big engine drowned his words. Big Green Peacer and he's trying to run us down. Or have his girlfriend cut us in two. After the third pass they sped off out into open water toward Gardiner's Island and the ocean.
We paddled back inside of the sheltered Three Mile Harbor, where we beached the canoe and took a breather before getting it back atop the Blazer. Alix said, “Now what was that all about?”
“That's Hannah's daughter and her boyfriend. I've been asking questions and apparently they resent it.”
Alix looked thoughtful. “I wonder, was he steering the boat that close or was she skiing that close? Which of them did the actual menacing?”
I started to say she was splitting hairs and what difference did it make but stopped. It did make a difference. It was Claire's cigarette boat, one of her “toys.” Hannah might have treated her child badly but she gave good allowance. Leo's boat was a big old Hatteras fishing job, a useful boat but not the swift powerhouse a cigarette boat was. Were Claire and Brass a team, and if so, which of them called the plays? Or were they at odds and that was why Leo seemed to have been shouting at her? Why would a guy as fierce as Leo was about wetlands and pristine waters be speeding around in cigarette boats just outside Three Mile Harbor when he had an entire ocean at hand?
I dunno, I said. Then, “You okay?”
“Oh, quite. Nothing quite like a canoe ride to calm the nerves.”
TWENTY-ONE
You must have grand times there, the Queen and all â¦
While we were paddling around and Leo and Hannah's daughter amused themselves at our expense (or may have had more malign intentions), Jesse Maine broke out again. He'd hurt a gas station proprietor in a brutal fight over whether the man was cheating Shinnecocks by watering gas bought by Reservation Indians. Local cops knew the gas station owner was a shifty sort and probably the gas was watered. But you couldn't have Jesse beating people up and sending them to the Southampton Hospital E.R. So he's the Red Indian, Alix said. Yeah. And can be risky to be around.
When I called Tom Knowles he was already at the reservation and I thought I ought to be, too, and when Alix flatly refused to be left behind, we drove down there.
“You gonna arrest him again, Tom?”
“I dunno. Beech,” Knowles said. “I hate to keep arresting Jesse. We get along pretty well until it comes to a matter of laws I'm sworn to uphold and he's determined to break. I wish to hell he'd get married again or go fishing or something and stop raising hell. I know he's got grievances but so has the gas station guy. Who's also got a broken jaw.” Jesse was a pretty good guy but when he got sore, or drunk, he was dangerous. Tom knew that, so did my father, so did I. But Tom was a policeman, my father was fishing in Norway; I was just a reporter.
Even more dangerous than Jesse, hot bloods on the Reservation, who'd gathered at Jesse's house on the shores of Shinnecock Bay, ready to fight to defend their-turf and convinced the cops were picking on Jesse, who, again not wisely, was blurting out that he wished he'd never laid eyes on that damned Hannah Cutting. That she was bad medicine. Everything that happened could be put down to her fault. Ever since she croaked there'd been a hex on him. The whole business had the potential to erupt into a Siege-at-Waco or a Montana Freemen's standoff when a Bill Kunstler-type radical lawyer arrived by limo, issuing high-flown and flowery statements and snarling contempt for a local police force that didn't have a single Native American among its number.
“Oh, shit,” Knowles groaned, “we've only got thirty-six officers and no Shinnecock ever even applied.” But when the attorney, the Manhattan outsider, offered his smarmy services to the easily angered Jesse, assuring him he was being railroaded, the Indian picked him up and threw him bodily into the water.