Death in A Mood Indigo, page 11
“Pete’s got a few minutes.” This from a man Cecil did not recognize, a blond-headed, stern-looking sailor whose hands gripped the Wayward’s rail. Cecil’s stomach clenched. A few minutes. And Nan—
But at that moment the curling waves broke more whitely than ever, and Nan’s rescuer surged skyward. His lips were the color of a bruise, and he was shuddering visibly from the cold—but his arm was locked around Nan. At the sight of him the blond sailor at the rail called out and heaved a life preserver into the water. Nan’s rescuer ignored it, however, and made quickly for Cecil and the dory. The swimmer thrust Nan over the gunwale. Cecil reached for her, terrified that she was dead; and as he did, Nan coughed up a mouthful of seawater and opened her eyes.
“Throw me a line!” her rescuer called to the Wayward.
“Get out of the water, you idiot!”
“Just throw me the goddamn line!”
The blond man shook his head but tossed a coil of rope toward Cecil. The dark-haired man caught it and quickly tied what even Cecil knew was a pretty good sailor’s knot around the iron ring in the dory’s prow. “Hi,” he said, looking up at Cecil. “I’m Peter. Take your sweater off and wrap it around your sister, okay?”
Cecil simply stood like a statue, unable to speak or move. Disaster filled his lungs and throat with an aching, fluid pressure.
“Now, pull the dory in!” Peter called, and like everyone, the blond sailor obeyed him. Hand over hand he hauled on the painter, and within minutes the dory bumped against the bigger boat’s side. Cecil had just enough presence of mind to fend it off with his shaking hands. Then strong arms reached to pull him aboard, and he sobbed from weakness and relief.
Below him he heard the dark-haired swimmer’s labored breathing as he crawled toward safety through the cold springtime Atlantic.
“What did you think you were doing?” Merry Folger asked Cecil, in some exasperation. “Replaying Trafalgar?”
They were sitting companionably in the Wayward’s main cabin, making all possible sail for Nantucket Harbor, with cups of steaming hot chocolate prepared by the wonderful Alice. Merry had helped Nan remove her sodden clothing and had wrapped the child in her own oversize sweatshirt, with a pair of thick socks and a blanket for good measure. Cecil still felt peaked and spent; but Nan was holding her mug contentedly enough, as though her brush with a hypothermic death had been nothing more than an August dip in the waves.
“We were running away,” she piped up now, oblivious of Cecil’s warning look.
“My sister and I did that when we were about your age.” This from Peter, who sat across the table. “There was a house we loved across Oyster Bay—we called it the Sultan’s Castle, because that’s what it looked like—and one morning when we were feeling particularly unappreciated, we took some sandwiches and our dory and set out to join the harem. We had a vague idea they would take children.”
“But weren’t you really scared?” Cecil asked. Fear had seized him from the moment he’d lost the oar, only a few hundred yards offshore; and fear still fluttered like an unquiet bird in the pit of his stomach. He pushed his hot chocolate aside.
“Not at first,” Peter told him, “but after a while, when we realized that rowing was hard work and we couldn’t quite control the current, things began to seem a bit more complicated. We kept our oars, though, and got farther than you did. It took our folks a couple of hours to catch up with us.”
“Were they mad?” Cecil dreaded facing his mother’s anger. When it reached a breaking point—as it would when she heard what he’d done—she turned bitter and silent with fury. As though she hated him. As though her life and all its unhappiness were entirely Cecil’s fault. One look was like a stab from a knife. Maybe, he thought, if she never wants to see me again, I can stow away on the ferry tonight. Get off when it’s safe in Hyannis.
“They were furious,” Peter answered comfortably, bringing him back to the present, “but in that respect, my sister and I weren’t as fortunate as you two.”
“How come?”
“We faced our parents alone. You, on the other hand, have us.” He looked at Merry and smiled.
“Good,” Nan said. “‘Cause Mummy’s going to kill us.” And, remarkably, she giggled.
Cecil swallowed hard and looked down at his hands. He’d gnawed his fingernails to the quick. “Maybe she won’t have noticed,” he suggested faintly. “That we were gone, I mean. Do we have to tell her?”
“I think we do,” Merry replied. “I think she ought to know that Nan fell into the water, for one thing, in case Nan gets a bad cold. And I’m sure your mom will have noticed you’re missing by now.”
“No.” Cecil said it decisively. “She never notices anything. ‘Specially lately. She just sits in her chair, playing her record and smoking cigarettes. One after the other, like she’s eating potato chips. That’s why we left,” he added falteringly. “She’s stopped hearing us when we talk to her. She never answers anymore.”
Peter and the detective once again exchanged glances; and Merry gave a small shake of her head.
“Cecil,” she asked thoughtfully, “where did you think you were going?”
“To England. To make my fortune.”
“Don’t you know how far away that is?”
“Of course,” he snapped. “I know all about England. I’m English.” His shoulders squared and his head came up. “I was looking for a ship. A British one. To pick us up and sail us there.”
“I see. So we’re taking you in the wrong direction.”
“That’s okay.” Cecil’s burst of confidence flagged, and he looked away. “After we lost the oar, I started wondering if it was such a good idea. We were pretty cold and scared. And then when Nan fell in—” He shuddered. “I used to have dreams about it. Drowning. Because of my dad.”
“Weren’t you very young when he—sank his boat?” Merry asked.
“Three,” Cecil replied. “I don’t really remember him, except when I’m asleep. Then I see him so clearly, and he’s terrible. Sinking, with his hands out like Nan, and I can’t reach him. Sometimes he pulls me in after him.” He glanced up at Peter, abashed by his own weakness. “You were wonderful out there today. You didn’t even think. Or at least you didn’t stop to think.”
“No,” Peter said, amused. “Sometimes I manage to do two things at once. But it takes practice.”
Cecil studied him with a painful concentration. “And does practice make you brave, too?”
“It doesn’t seem like you planned this very well,” Merry interposed. “No extra clothes, no food.”
“Oh, we had food,” Nan said. “We just ate it right away. But I’m glad you found us. I miss Satchmo. Cecil says dogs don’t like to travel on boats, so we had to leave him. But he was sad. He came out into the water after us and barked.”
“We didn’t want to take the clothes in case our mum noticed,” Cecil explained. “We told her we’d be playing on the beach.”
“What made you decide to take this boat? And where did you find it?”
Cecil looked at Nan. “It’s been sitting in the dunes at the foot of the bluff for a while,” he said in a small voice, “like nobody loved it. So we thought they wouldn’t mind.”
“I see.” They had stolen the dory, probably one belonging to the large summer houses sitting high on the Sconset bluff. “We’ll have to make sure the owner gets another oar, okay?”
Cecil nodded. “1 was going to pay him back once I made my fortune,” he said solemnly.
It was nearly noon by the time they moored the Wayward, shipped the dory that had been trailing in its wake, and loaded it onto the roof of Peter’s Range Rover. They bundled Nan, still wrapped in her blanket, into the car and headed out of town toward the Milestone road.
The Markhams lived not far from Lenny and Ruth Schwartz, as it happened, on the corner of Jefferson and Codfish Park roads. It was a house, Merry decided, that deserved to sail out to sea in another season’s storms, so neglected was its air; but the building was set back far enough on the corner lot that it would probably survive. Merry wished, suddenly, that Mabel Johnson could exchange places with Julia Markham. The elderly woman would have known what to do with the gift of this house, as Cecil’s mother clearly did not.
Weeds had submerged what had once been a garden. No Trespassing signs were tacked to the garden gate. The picket fence enclosing the property was dingy with years of exposure to the salty wind and weaved precariously up the path like a misstepping drunkard. At the door climbing roses still wrapped a sheltering trellis close, but their canes were dead and lifeless. The house itself might once have been charming—a traditional one-story Sconset cottage, hugging the ground and shingled in gray; but the windowpanes were clouded with dirt, and a number of slats were missing from the shutters.
The haunting strains of a jazz melody filtered from somewhere at the rear of the house. What was it? Familiar as an anthem from a vanished age, and yet Merry could not place it.
“Sleeping Beauty,” Peter murmured. He was holding the swaddled Nan in his arms, as her tennis shoes were too wet to wear and he refused to let her walk in her bare feet; and for a moment Merry thought he referred to the child. But after a look at Peter, who stood studying the lines of the house wistfully, Merry understood. The Markhams’ cottage seemed to have died nearly a decade ago with its owner.
Julia took several minutes to answer Merry’s knock. The four of them stood listening to the plaintive record and waiting uneasily.
“Someone sure likes Duke Ellington,” Peter observed. “That’s ‘Mood Indigo.’”
“My dad’s favorite song,” Cecil offered. “He named his boat after it. Mum plays it over and over until it runs through your head all day long.”
Merry knocked again, more forcefully.
“Maybe she’s out,” Cecil said, despite the music; but now they heard the unmistakable sounds of stirring from within. Cecil edged perceptibly closer to Merry. She took his hand.
“Yes?”
The opening between door and jamb was a matter of inches. Julia stood concealed behind it, as though unwilling to admit her existence.
“Mrs. Markham?”
“What do you want?”
“It’s Meredith Folger, Nantucket Police.”
“Oh, God. The children aren’t here.” Julia moved as if to shut the door, but Peters free hand thrust hard against it, forcing it open.
“I’m surprised you have any idea where Cecil and Nan might be,” he said harshly. Merry reached involuntarily for his arm, as though to restrain him. Peter rarely lost his temper—but when he did, it could be ugly.
Julia stepped backward into the dimly lit hallway, her hand still firmly on the doorknob, and scowled. “Who the bloody hell are you?”
“Peter Mason. And in case you’ve forgotten, these are your children.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone and got yourselves into trouble again!” Julia exclaimed, and clutched at Cecil’s shoulders. The boy’s pale face drained a shade whiter, and he bit his lips convulsively. “What have you done?” his mother demanded. “Broken a window? Taken something you shouldn’t have? Well? Out with it!”
“They were adrift in a borrowed dory,” Merry cut in, “about a mile off the Sconset shore.”
Julia’s face went blank. “How—?”
“We happened to be sailing by and towed them into Nantucket Harbor.” Peter said, his anger dissipating. “But your little girl here fell into the Atlantic before we could get to them. She’s had a shock and a drenching in water I’d guess to be right around fifty degrees.”
At that Julia seemed for the first time to take in her daughter’s bedraggled condition—her snarled red curls, the pallor of her face, the unfamiliar blanket Peter held close to her small body.
“Nan!” she said with a rare note of tenderness. “Dear baby Nan!” and she reached out to take the child from Peter’s arms. He seemed to give her up unwillingly.
Julia clutched her daughter close, swaying back and forth as she murmured unintelligible words, a strangely agonized expression on her face. And then, as they watched, she crumpled and slid to the doorstep itself, her black head bowed over Nan’s shoulder.
“She’s all right, Mum,” Cecil interposed anxiously. His eyes were enormous in his tense little face. “It was all my fault, but Peter saved her.”
“She’s not all right,” his mother replied bitterly. “We’re none of us all right, then, are we?”
Later, after Julia had opened a can of soup and set the children to eating it in her cluttered kitchen, she stood stiffly in the cottage’s living room, glaring at Merry and Peter. They had not bothered to take a chair, as there was none available; the room’s seating was filled to capacity with stacked books, discarded clothing, and ashtrays brimming with crumpled cigarettes. Many, Merry noticed, had barely been lit before being stubbed into ash. The smell of stale tobacco was overwhelming.
“Tell me what they thought they were doing,” Julia said to Merry. “In that boat. Having a lark?”
“They were running away.”
Julia’s lips tightened. “That bloody Cecil,” she said, beginning to pace rapidly in front of her sofa, “and his headful of nonsense.”
“I don’t think he understood what he was doing,” Merry began.
“I did the same thing as a boy,” Peter added, “and I can tell you I hadn’t the slightest idea of the gravity of my actions. I might have killed my sister, too.”
“Oh, my Cecil knew exactly what he was doing,” Julia spat viciously. “He was getting out. Getting as far away from me as he possibly could. I can’t even find it in me to blame him.” She came to a sudden halt and looked blankly around. “Now, where the hell are my cigarettes?”
“Mrs. Markham—”
“I know what you think.” Julia shoved aside a magazine and scrabbled beneath the sofa cushions frantically. Her hands came up with a plastic lighter and a crumpled packet of Camels. “You think I’m an unfit parent.”
“I didn’t say—”
“You bloody well didn’t have to.” She wrestled a cigarette from the packet and shoved it between her lips. “It’s written all over your sanctimonious faces.”
“Children don’t attempt to run away for no reason.” Peter spoke evenly.
“Oh, really? The voice of bloody experience. And what was your reason, Mr. Mason? Unhappy at home? Parents at each other’s throats? Or was your mother a certified looney, like Cecil’s?”
“Insane—or indifferent, Mrs. Markham?” Peter’s voice was very quiet, a warning Merry instantly recognized.
“Sometimes I think they’re the same,” she said curtly, and flicked her lighter. She took a moment to inhale deeply and blew forth a cloud of smoke. “You’d have to be bloody insane to be indifferent to children like mine.”
They stood silently for a moment after that.
“Can’t we—help you?” Merry asked at last. “Isn’t there something we could do?”
“You’ve done it,” Julia replied, with the briefest of smiles and a nervous flicking of her ash. “You’ve brought my children back when they could be dead in the ocean, like their father. It’s a sharp slap across the face when I least expected one.” She turned away, as if burned by the flame of her own intimacy, and crossed to the door.
“Now, get out, please,” she said as she opened it, and jerked her head to the street. “I feel an almost desperate need to be alone.”
“What a bizarre woman,” Merry said thoughtfully as she settled herself next to Peter in the Range Rover and glanced back up the path toward the Markhams’ door. “She knows what she’s doing to those kids, doesn’t she?”
“And yet she seems incapable of change,” Peter replied. “She’s a strange mix of anger and self-absorption.”
“And despair. Don’t forget the despair. As if she’s continuing to exist only through force of habit. Did you notice? The house?”
“How could I do otherwise? My God, the way some people live!”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’m forgetting. Tattle Court is hardly a model of order.”
“Peter!” Merry exclaimed, hurt. “Tattle Court is absolutely lovely.”
“When you’ve managed to step over the back issues of the Atlantic and the Inky Mirror stacked in the doorway,” he teased.
“At least it’s scrupulously clean,” Merry argued, “and there’s not an ashtray in sight. But I was talking about what wasn’t there.”
“Ah. The curious fact of the dog in the night,” Peter said.
“Incident, not fact, and it was in the nighttime,” Merry said absentmindedly. “There wasn’t a stick of sculpture anywhere in the place.”
“Sculpture?” Peter’s brow knit.
“Ian Markham. The man was a fairly significant talent, from everything I’ve heard. So where’s his oeuvre? Where’s the shrine to a great life tragically cut short? I didn’t even see a snapshot of the happy couple perched on a convenient piano.”
“Much less a piano,” Peter pointed out helpfully.
“Do you think she’s had to sell it all? Could they be that hard up?”
“If she did, she probably made a fortune.” Peter downshifted as he slowed to take the Pleasant Street turnoff. They were bound for Tattle Court and a Saturday-night dinner with Merry’s family. “Enough to get the house trim painted, at least. There’s nothing like death to send an artist’s reputation sky-high.”
“I wonder how we could find out,” Merry mused.
“Nothing easier,” Peter said as they drove gingerly through the narrow passage of Hiller Lane. “Just drop by the Markhams and have a spot of tea with Julia.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious.” He pulled up before the entrance to Tattle Court off Fair Street. “I know you’ll want to check on those kids. Make that an excuse. And then profess an interest in their father’s work. Julia’s starting to like you.”
“Oh, yeah. About as much as she likes a visitation of the plague,” Merry shot back, and thrust open the car door.
