Death in A Mood Indigo, page 13
Jack Osborne had called not half an hour before Peter’s arrival for dinner, and agreed to make some time available for Merry.
“I’m flying to Boston and I’ll probably stay overnight,” Merry argued. “My father made a point today of reminding me how tight our off-island travel budget is. I can’t justify the expense of adding Seitz to the bill.”
“You could add me,” Peter said. “I’d pay my own way.”
Merry stiffened. “That would be mixing business and pleasure in a decidedly unhealthy manner. Besides, I don’t need a bodyguard. I’ll take my gun, if it’ll make you feel better. Frankly,” she said, reaching for some Parmesan, “I doubt a Harvard law professor is likely to murder a police officer in his own home.”
“Why not? He’s got a bunch of colleagues ready to defend him. But, seriously, Merry,” Peter said, “you have to let me come. Tomorrow’s May sixth.”
“So?”
“So it just happens to be May sixth”
“And should that date mean something to me?” Merry turned to the oven and pulled open the door. A wave of heat and rosemary wafted into the room. The lamb chops were not quite done. “Obviously it should.”
“Obviously.”
“Let’s see … it’s not a national holiday. Or a religious one, as far as I can remember. Could it be the start of the Nantucket Looms preseason sale?” Her face lit up at the thought, and Peter took a brutal satisfaction in extinguishing her joy.
“No. You missed that one in March, if I recall.”
“It’s not our anniversary.”
“Do we have one?”
“Which means—oh, lord, Peter, your birthday! It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”
“You missed that, too, I’m sorry to say, way back in November. I sulked for a week.” He lifted a section of newspaper and waved it emphatically. “Think, Meredith. May sixth.”
“I can’t think. I’m cooking.”
Peter sighed deeply and got to his feet. “All right. You give up. May sixth is the New England Genealogical Society’s open house, from five to seven P.M. I intend to go. I want to learn more about my roots.”
“Your roots are deeply embedded in green,” Merry said acidly, “the kind that buys and sells empires daily. Your family founded Nantucket along with mine. Those histories were written long ago.”
“I realize that,” Peter said mildly, “but most of them happen to be stored on the society’s open shelves. I intend to browse. To wander among the landscape of my forebears. To find out which Masons married what Folgers however many years ago. I’ll take notes on Newbury Street while you ask questions on Marlborough. Then we’ll meet halfway between and have dinner. At the Ritz, perhaps.”
“The Ritz is not halfway between.”
“But it has a view of the Boston Public Gardens. We can gaze out at them while comparing my newfound knowledge of Great-great-aunt Letitia and your suspects appearance of guilt.”
“I don’t know,” Merry said. She leaned across the counter that separated her kitchen from her living room and took the genealogical-society ad from Peter’s hands. “It’s breaking our rule. I’d be seeing you on a weeknight. And it’s hardly the most professional thing I’ll ever have done….”
“Consider it a birthday present,” he replied, “and long overdue.”
The Inky Mirror, Merry discovered, had devoted quite a bit of column space to Elizabeth Osborne’s strange disappearance. It was Emily Teasdale, the object of Ralph’s Daffodil Weekend gallantry, who steered Merry in the proper direction. Emily was a volunteer—a librarian emerita, in fact—who spent numerous hours each week in the reference section of the newly-renovated library.
“Elizabeth Osborne,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Yes, yes, my dear. We have any number of requests for information about her. Quite a Nantucket mystery.”
Emily left Merry sitting in a chair before the reference desk and returned a few moments later with several squares of microfiche. All were issues of the newspaper from eight years back.
Merry began with the issue immediately following the report of Elizabeth’s disappearance. Because the Inky Mirror was a weekly, and appeared every Thursday, this was two days after the events of September 13; but the time lag had a hidden advantage. The reporter had profited from his leisure by turning the story into several articles. One detailed the specifics of the doctor’s disappearance—the shoes, the passport, the husbands distress—and the other profiled her life as a third-generation Nantucket summer resident.
It was the last that held Merry’s attention. For there, dramatic and stark in the microfiche’s black and white, was an image of Elizabeth Osborne. She leaned forward, laughing, her arms folded across a tablecloth in the midst of what appeared to be a riotous party. Four other people huddled with her, smiling for the camera.
One of them was Julia Markham.
A younger, prettier, lighthearted Julia Markham, with a highball glass clutched in the same hand as her cigarette. Her eyes were flashing, her mouth was parted in laughter, and her free hand gripped her neighbor’s affectionately.
Merry scanned the lengthy caption below. Marked for misfortune? it read. Elizabeth Osborne and Ian Markham in happier days. From left: Osborne, Markham, Jack Osborne, Sylvia Whitehead, and Julia Markham celebrate A Mood Indigos win in the 1988 Opera House Cup. Markham was presumed drowned in the sinking Monday night of A Mood Indigo, a thirty-six-foot single-hulled wooden boat.
“Whew,” Merry said aloud, and did a mental calculation. Ian Markham’s boat sank the same night that Elizabeth Osborne disappeared. Coincidence? Disaster? Or murderous design?
She studied the photograph again, looking with renewed interest at the man to Osborne’s left. He was laughing with her, his eyes narrowed and his teeth flashing whitely in a deeply tanned face. A blunt-fingered hand, callused like a laborer’s, trailed in the picture’s foreground; the other rested on Elizabeth Osborne’s sleek shoulder. And across the distance of time and death, Merry Folger sighed. Ian Markham’s personality leaped off the microfiche negative. A powerful force, without question; sensual, abrupt, not to be denied. What currents had swirled among the people joined in victory? And why had death swept them apart so irrevocably?
Perhaps Jack Osborne could tell her. But would he?
Chapter Ten
“It should feel like a relief,” Jack Osborne said to Merry, “but, oddly, you know, it doesn’t.” He gazed toward the corner of his elegant office, at approximately the level of the egg-and-dart ceiling cornice, and stroked his neatly trimmed beard. A professorial gesture, Merry thought, entirely in keeping with the house and Osborne’s gray flannel trousers, with the atmosphere of academic calm. Only the occasional blare of a horn from Marlborough Street intervened to break the stillness. “If Betsy has been lying in the Sconset sand all those years, it raises more questions than it answers.”
“How so?”
“Well—” Osborne uncrossed his legs, smoothed his trousers, and looked directly at Merry. “It shoots my theory of what happened completely to hell, now, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know, Professor Osborne. What is your theory? It appears nowhere in our files.”
He laughed sourly. “No, I don’t suppose it does. I was very careful about what I said to that idiot—pardon me, to your colleague—from the Nantucket police.”
“And do you intend to be equally careful with me?” Merry asked. “I’d like to know at the outset.”
“So you can change your tactics?”
“So I can catch the last plane back to the island. I’m not particularly fond of wasting time.”
“Neither am I—one reason I was so annoyed with your colleague. He was the very last person likely to find my wife, and I knew it.”
“So did you seek outside help?”
“Hire an investigator, you mean?”
Merry nodded.
“No,” Jack Osborne conceded. “I never did.”
“I’m surprised.” The impassive comment hung in the air between them, rife with implication.
Osborne looked away again, as if suddenly uncomfortable with Merry’s steady gaze, and again his hand went to his chin. The beard was a goatee—distinguished on this man, where it might appear subversive on one half his age. Jack Osborne looked the very picture of breeding, and intellect, and measured behavior—an unlikely person to strike a woman in anger. “Because a husband should do everything to find his wife, right?” he said finally.
“A husband who hoped his wife was alive, yes.” Again Merry let the unspoken question hang in the air.
“Are you suggesting I murdered Betsy, Detective?” The law professor’s voice was quietly amused. “I’m not sure that would be wise.”
“Wisdom isn’t really at issue, here, is it?” Merry replied. “It’s the truth that concerns me.”
Osborne sighed. “You’re rather young, aren’t you? Do you even remember the late eighties on Nantucket? You must have been in high school.”
“Just out of the police academy,” Merry corrected him, “and watching a good friend’s trial for rape and double murder in New Bedford. None of which he’d committed.” That episode in Rafe da Silva’s past was one everyone tried to forget; but Merry never saw Peter’s foreman without the most vivid memories rising unbidden before her eyes.
“And was he acquitted?” Osborne sounded intrigued.
“Yes. But, you know, sometimes that doesn’t really matter. A man’s reputation can be tainted by crime, whether he’s responsible or not. Take yourself, for instance, and this disturbing business with your wife.” Merry looked at Osborne deliberately, letting him feel the weight of her stare. To judge from his placid expression, it was none too heavy. “Have you ever returned to Nantucket, Professor Osborne?”
“No. I shut up the house and practically threw away the key. Too many memories, I guess—and, eventually; too much work for me to spare the time.”
“Really. And yet you’ve never sold your house. That’s a valuable piece of real estate sitting idle. The taxes alone must be considerable.”
“Fifty thousand a year,” Osborne said easily, “but it’s Betsy’s house, Detective, and until yesterday I thought it was just possible Betsy might come back one of these days and want that key.”
“There must have been a lot of talk on the island after Dr. Osborne disappeared. About your marriage, for example.”
“I’m sure there was.” This man would be adept in a deposition, Merry decided; he said only what was necessary; and very little that was helpful.
“I notice Halloran—the detective assigned to your case—believed suicide was a possibility,” she prodded.
Osborne smiled thinly. “Never. With Betsy, never. Unless, of course, she discovered that she had a terminal illness—pain was something my wife found difficult to bear. But I’m not surprised by talk. Talk followed Betsy wherever she went, Detective. She ignited it like a match brings a flame.”
“How did you feel about that, Professor Osborne?”
“I understood it.” His expression did not alter.
“Understood it—no anger? No jealousy? No—desire to strike out?”
Another laugh—supercilious, condescending, to Merry’s ears. “I’m not a terribly possessive man. And marrying Betsy was like purchasing a coveted objet d’art. Ownership is merely an idea in such cases, Detective; a temporary state at best. You probably never saw Betsy—but she was beautiful in the way that only very intelligent women can be. Her features were always alive with some emotion, the force of thought, an impulse awaiting action. Simply by breathing, she compelled people to notice her. She never waited for life to come to her: she went forward, always, to meet it.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t much care how she lived, or what gossip followed you both.” Merry peered at Osborne over her half glasses, her pen suspended above her notebook.
“What are you driving at, Detective?”
“Did you love your wife, Professor?”
“Does love presuppose jealous possession?”
“I don’t enjoy the Socratic method,” Merry said easily, “and I’m not, after all, one of your students.”
“Very well,” Osborne conceded tightly. “Yes, I loved my wife.”
“So, tell me. What do you think happened the night Elizabeth disappeared?”
He studied Merry’s face an instant, apparently debating within himself. Then he shrugged slightly. “What can it matter? They’re both dead, after all. I thought my wife had run away with her lover, Detective. And that they had come to a disastrous end.”
“Because Ian Markham sank Mood Indigo.”
Osborne started, as if surprised by the extent of her information, or perhaps her leap of faith. “Exactly. I thought it probable that Elizabeth was on Markham’s boat when it went down.”
“Why? Had she given you any reason to think she would leave you?”
Osborne tilted his head wordlessly from side to side, in the age-old expression of ambivalence. “Not explicitly, no. But I had already left her in a way, Detective. I spent the 1987—88 academic year in Paris, as a visiting professor at the Sorbonne. Teaching American constitutional law. Betsy chose not to accompany me. She pleaded the demands of her own position at Harvard—but when I got back to Boston and saw what was going on, I knew that it was Markham who had kept her here.”
“So you assumed she had simply left.”
“Yes. And there were the things she’d left behind. They suggested flight, rather than death.”
“The shoes and the passport.”
Osborne nodded. “That morning, when I heard about Mood Indigo sinking, Elizabeth’s absence suddenly made terrible sense. The passport dropped carelessly, the shoes discarded on the beach … she might have slipped them off to wade out into the water, to meet Markham in the boat, perhaps. Maybe they intended to head for the Caribbean. Her money would have made it possible for both of them to start a new life. Only they hit bad weather and worse water fifty miles south of the island.”
“Why wouldn’t she have driven into town with Markham and boarded the boat at the dock?”
Osborne lifted his hands in supplication. “I don’t know. I admit that would have made more sense.”
“And you never shared a word of this with the police. Not to Halloran or anyone.”
“No. I probably should have. In retrospect, I know I should have. But I felt that the fact of Ian’s drowning was enough for Julia to bear. Why burden her further with the public examination of her husband’s affairs? The woman was eight months pregnant at the time. It seemed inordinately cruel.”
“Despite the fact that your wife was missing, and possibly drowned as well.”
Osborne did not reply.
“And you never requested divers in the area—to attempt to locate the boat, look into the cabin, find out whether two bodies were on board?”
A faint smile played around the law professor’s lips. “Do you know where Mood Indigo sank, Detective?”
Merry shook her head. “My information about Mark-ham’s death is confined to a few phrases in articles about your wife’s disappearance. I didn’t have time to research the story of the boat’s sinking.”
“I see.” Osborne clasped his hands around his knee, the picture of calm. “From a distress call Markham made just before the boat keeled over, we know that he went down beyond the edge of the continental shelf, not far from where the Andrea Doria lies. That’s roughly two hundred fifty feet below the surface of the Atlantic. The effort to send divers in pursuit of Mood Indigo seemed excessive, especially given the possibility that one or both of the passengers might have been washed overboard as the boat sank. In such cases searching for two bodies is rather futile.”
Merry merely nodded, as though unimpressed by his level of certainty. She made a show of adding to her notes, letting the silence build. “And now we know that Elizabeth wasn’t on board anyway,” she said finally, fixing Osborne in her green stare.
“Yes.” He unclasped his hands and stretched his fingers, as if easing some tension. “She was lying there all the time, as those fifty-odd volunteers walked the beach calling her name. You see what I meant when I said this news raises more questions than it answers.”
Merry might have told Osborne that she doubted his wife’s bones had been buried in the sand all those years—their bleaching surely suggested otherwise—but she refrained from sharing the information. If Osborne had indeed killed Elizabeth, there was no point in furnishing him with the precise degree of police knowledge about the crime.
“I’ve been wrestling with those questions for days,” she said with an air of frankness. “Perhaps you can help me answer them.”
Jack Osborne glanced at his watch. “I’ve a class in a little over an hour, and I’m afraid traffic between Back Bay and Cambridge forces me to leave forty-five minutes ahead of time. I can give you twenty minutes.”
That should be more than adequate. When did you first meet the Markhams, Professor Osborne?”
He pursed his lips and frowned, as if lost in thought. “It must have been through Sylvia Whitehead.” The third woman in the newspaper photo. “Sylvia owned a gallery that showed Markham’s work, and Elizabeth collected art. It was her passion. She simply extended it to the artist, in this particular case.”
“And you knew them how long?”
“Four or five years. I got Markham hooked on sailing, in fact—and helped him barter for Mood Indigo before he bought it. We won the Opera House Cup together. Do they still run that race?”
“Yes,” Merry said shortly. The Opera House restaurant, the original sponsor of the wooden-boat cup, had been an island landmark for over forty years. The restaurant’s doors had closed by the time Ian Markham had won his race, as she was certain Osborne knew. But the professor’s association with the Opera House Cup and the wooden-boat sailors symbolized a rarefied world for Merry, one of off-island money and privilege and free hours spent near the sea. Peter’s world. Not hers. She was instinctively wary of it, and she felt now that Jack Osborne was using his familiarity with that world—his charm, his ease, his elegant handling of conversation—to divert her questions.
