Death in A Mood Indigo, page 7
“Hello,” someone said at her elbow. “You looking for me?”
She turned in surprise toward the slight man beside her. “You’re Tucker Enright?”
“Yep.” He extended a hand in greeting.
He was probably around fifty, Meredith knew, from his year of graduation at Harvard Medical School; but he looked much younger. A compact, athletic body in jeans and a wool sweater the color of the sea; Birkenstocks and socks on his feet. Receding blond hair, a narrow Irish face with a prominent nose; cool and assessing eyes a pale shade of blue. His smile belied the expression in those eyes, being easy and warm—a smile that instantly engaged Merry and made her complicitous in Tucker En-right ‘s life from the very moment of meeting him. He held a small black leather bag in one hand, and a furled magazine in the other. Golf Digest.
She took his outstretched hand and said, “Detective Meredith Folger, Nantucket Police.”
“Ah. You’re the one who oversaw the skeleton’s removal. The police chief’s daughter, right?”
“How did you know?” Merry asked, surprised.
En right shrugged. “I spent an hour this morning in Barnstable talking to the DA. He filled me in on the local force. He has only good things to say about you—I guess you handled a pretty major arson case here last summer. Shall we go?”
“Of course. My car’s not far. The arson thing was really the state polices problem—”
“Until you stepped in and saved their asses, right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“No. You wouldn’t.” Enright’s tone was as teasing as a kid brother’s, and Merry flushed.
She led him to her car, conscious not to help him with the black bag, or to be too solicitous for his comfort. She was a fellow law-enforcement officer, not a female acolyte, and it would be helpful to make the point early. “Where did you want to go first?” she asked.
“Siasconset,” Enright replied, pronouncing it correctly; and Merry obliged.
Cecil and Nan Markham did not avoid the beach forever, although Merry was correct in thinking it was several days before the children ventured back to their familiar haunts. Cecil, at least, had tossed and turned for three nights running, his sleep banished by a familiar dread, a persistent sense of anxiety that had been his constant companion since infancy. When sleep did come, it brought only nightmares. In one of them he was hard at work on his castle’s battlements, when bony fingers reached up out of the sand to suck him down. He woke up screaming, trapped in a snare of blankets, his mother’s face looming palely over his own.
“Cecil,” she had whispered fiercely, “Do shut up, you silly sod. You’ll wake Nannie.” Her face gleamed like a skull in the moonlight.
The oppression of the Markham household was a poor rival for the strengthening spring calling from beyond the window, and a love of the sea is impossible to thwart for many days together. The two children returned to the beach that Friday after Daffodil Weekend—returned in some trepidation, although neither expressed their fears to the other, and Nan forbore reaching for Cecil’s hand as they made their way along the shore.
The sea, happily, is a great renewer; and the freshly washed sands, kneaded and smoothed by a week’s worth of tides and several intervening storms, looked untouched by grief or memory. Only a fluttering yellow square of police tape around what had been an open pit served as reminder of the gruesome discoveries two weeks earlier.
Cecil swallowed hard to summon his tenuous courage. “Should we go look, Nan?” he asked, as though she were the elder; and Nan glanced at him scornfully.
“You’re such a baby, Cecil,” she said. “I’m much braver than you.” And she took off across the sand.
After a moment Cecil followed.
They crouched under the yellow tape and peered over the edge of the pit, Satchmo at their rear, his tail wagging, and noticed how little remained of the pirate’s grotesque treasure. A protective tarpaulin had been thrown over the hole, but despite this Cecil could see that salt water had poured in and out of the pit. The marks of their digging, and the police’s subsequent sifting, were blurred.
“There’s a full moon tonight,” Nan observed. “The tide will be nearly up to the road.”
Cecil nodded and looked out at the sea, which was heaving and curling under the influence of a brisk May wind, sunlight glinting whitely on the crests of the waves. He stood and brushed off his pants, then ran pell-mell down toward the water. Satchmo came after him more slowly, and where the boy halted at the surf line, bending down for a striated scallop shell upturned in the wet sand, the aged dog walked on. Head up, tongue out, thick matted coat turning dark with the wet, he breasted the incoming waves purposefully until the sand beneath his feet dropped away, and he was swimming.
Satchmo in particular had missed their daily walks to the beach.
“Cecil!”
He turned and looked for his sister, who was calling and waving from beside the pit. Two adults stood next to her. Cecil narrowed his eyes, shading them with one downturned palm. He recognized the detective; but who was the man in the faded jeans, his sparse hair whipping in the wind?
Chapter Six
“There’s not much to see, is there?” Tucker Enright straightened up from the pit. He glanced around at Cecil Markham and smiled. Cecil looked doubtfully back, although the detective had made a proper introduction of her doctor companion and he should be all right. Cecil still wasn’t sure whether he wanted this man on his beach—but there was the problem. It wasn’t exactly his beach. He could tell that Nan felt equally uncertain. His sister stood stirring the sand diffidently with one red-sneakered foot. This spot in the dunes had been her special place, after all; and now the whole world came to gawk at it. Cecil watched her sneaker, which was making a careful pattern of curved lines like the arcs of a rainbow, and saw that she had a hole in the canvas right above her big toe.
“No,” Detective Folger said now, in answer to Enright’s question. “Certainly nothing worth a flight out to Nantucket.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“You’ve found something?” Her black eyebrows lifted.
“What is it you’re looking for, mister?” Cecil crouched down once more at the edge of the shallow hole. The protective tarpaulin had been shoved aside by the detective and her companion, and Cecil noticed how the sand was several colors at once, and how the fragments of scallop and quahog shell gleamed with a separate coolness.
“Nothing you can see with your eyes,” Enright replied. “I’m looking for what isn’t here.”
“The curious fact of the dog in the night,” Merry said.
“Exactly.”
Cecil looked from one to the other, knowing that they were speaking the way grown-ups so often do, confident that their words flew over a child’s head; and so he said, somewhat defiantly, “That’s from Sherlock. Only you’ve got it wrong. It should be ‘the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.’”
“Bravo.” The thin man looked at him then, rather intently, with his pale-blue eyes. “And in what story did he say that?”
Cecil thought for an instant. “‘Silver Blaze.’”
“Got it again.”
“I’ve read all the Holmes stories exactly seven times,” Cecil told him proudly.
“Are you going to be a great detective when you grow up?” Detective Folger asked.
Cecil shook his head and looked away. Should he tell them? Or would they laugh? “I’m going to be an explorer.”
“If there’s anything left to explore,” Enright said, his eyes meeting Merry’s. “We’re running out of world at a spectacular rate.” He was being exclusionary again, as though a conversation with Cecil was meaningful only if it operated on two levels. Laughing at him, in fact.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Cecil said airily, quoting Enright from memory. “I don’t intend to explore this world.”
“What about you, Nan? What do you want to be?” Merry Folger had seated herself several feet from the yellow-taped police square and was letting warm sand run through her fingers. She was pretty, Cecil thought, with her blond hair and green eyes, the crisp way her khaki pants met the striped cotton sweater. Not like his mum, who wore the same things almost every day and never seemed to notice how awful they smelled from cigarette smoke. And at that thought he looked around instinctively for his sister. A few months earlier Cecil’s class had discussed secondary-smoke inhalation, and the dangers it posed to everyone; and Cecil worried about Nan. She coughed sometimes at night, waking him, but his mother never seemed to hear. Nan was like some fairy sprite—heedless and vulnerable as she danced on the sunlit sand; and, watching her, Cecil saw with relief that her memories of the buried bones were gradually wearing away. He hoped they never returned to trouble her nights, as they haunted his. But if they did? He couldn’t really help Nannie. He couldn’t even help himself. It was only as Lord Cecil of Trevarre—the powerful knight, the intrepid post captain, the stalwart chief of a desperate band—that he managed to combat his nightmares.
Nan turned now, flopped down onto her stomach near the detective, and said matter-of-factly, “I’m going to be an artist, like my daddy. Did you know that he was a great artist? Only he’s dead. Or I’ll be a gardener like Mrs. Schwartz. She let me plant some seeds in a corner of her backyard, because I promised not to tell.”
“Not to tell?”
“Mummy. If Mummy knew, she wouldn’t let me.”
“Were you gardening here?” the man called Enright suddenly asked. “When you found the bones?”
Nan’s cheerfulness faded. “It was Satchmo, not me.”
“Their dog,” Merry Folger supplied. “The one in the water. Satchmo’s got a nose for bones, it seems.”
‘We were having a tea party,” Nan added. “With sand for tea. Only Satchmo wouldn’t play. He was too busy digging.”
“Do you always play here?” Enright hunkered down to Nan’s level, quiet and purposeful.
“Sometimes. Sometimes we go down to Low Beach,” she added, gesturing in the opposite direction, “when Cecil’s pretending to be a commander in the Royal Navy. Or sometimes we stay close to Gully Road.”
“And yet your dog never smelled the bones before. He just happened to find them there that particular day. I suppose stranger things have happened.”
“I’m not sure they were here all that long,” Merry Folger objected. “But we can talk about that later.”
Cecil heard the signal the detective was sending Enright—not in front of the children—and looked uncomfortably out toward the water. Satchmo’s black nose lifted gallantly above a wave, his forepaws churning. A woman Cecil did not recognize was walking along the shoreline, and as he watched, she stooped and clapped her hands. Satchmo struggled out of the surf, a stick triumphant between his jaws, and padded up to her. He dropped the stick at her feet and, after a fractional hesitation, shook out his coat roundly, showering the stranger with icy salt water. She laughed and patted his head.
So that was what kept the dog in the water so long today—the age-old game of loss and retrieval.
“What did the bones look like, Nan?” Enright asked.
“Like twigs,” she said. She was avoiding Enright’s gaze, intent upon furrowing the sand with a razor clam’s shell, and Cecil could feel her distress from several feet away. “I didn’t know they were bones until we found the skull.”
“And they were just—loose?”
Nan nodded.
“You didn’t find anything else?”
“Like what?”
Enright shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. A ring, maybe, or a piece of clothing.”
“Nope.” Nan said it flatly. “But you know, I was pretty scared once we found the skull. Cecil screamed and ran away, and I ran after him. So we didn’t look too hard for anything. Maybe Miss Folger knows. She looked later.”
Of course, Cecil thought irritably. Didn’t this man know what he was doing? He should have checked with the detective first. The detective knew everything. Or did he think that Nan had stolen something?
“I’m done here,” the psychiatrist said, rising from the sand and nodding at the detective, “if you are.”
“Of course.” Merry stood, too, brushing at her seat, and looked at Cecil. “It was nice to see you two again,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back out on the beach.”
“So’m I,” he replied. “It’s almost summer, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” And at her glad expression of hopefulness as she turned her face to the sun, Cecil felt a surge of something unfamiliar—something like joy. He reached out and took his little sister’s hand. “Come on, Nan. Let’s go throw Satch’s stick.”
“Well,” Merry said as they settled into one of the Second Story’s small tables, “what do you think?”
Enright took a moment to answer, his eyes caught by the line of blue beyond the window. He had requested food and a water view—something more difficult to provide in the off-season than it seemed. Most of the tourist places on the wharves had yet to open for the summer, or served dinner only on weekends; and this was a three P.M. meal they were calling lunch. But the Second Story’s food was great, and from its upstairs room the waters of the boat basin were just visible, curling serenely around the bright hulls moored at the Nantucket Yacht Club.
Enright turned back to Merry and smiled. “I’m sorry. I’ve never been able to resist the Atlantic. Must’ve been a sailor in a past life. You were asking?”
“About the Sconset scene. What you thought. Whether we’re part of the serial pattern or not.”
“It’s probably premature to say, but if you back me to the wall, I think I’d have to go with no.”
“Really? That’s a relief.” The slight tension that had been gripping her since the morning eased and dissipated.
“Is it? You’ve still got a murder victim. That body didn’t bury itself.” The psychiatrist sounded amused.
“True,” Merry conceded, “but there’s something unavoidably nasty about the notion of a serial killer. Particularly on Nantucket.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because this is my home, that’s why. Not to mention my professional turf. Besides, things like that don’t happen here.”
“Things like—strangulation?”
Merry hesitated. “Okay. The woman in Sconset was strangled, I grant you that.”
“So it was a woman.”
“Yes. Didn’t you read the forensics report?”
Enright shook his head and reached for a roll. “I haven’t even read a copy of the file. The state police got in touch with me in Braintree and asked if I’d come right over here. Said they had a case that fit my pattern. So I assumed the victim was female; I just didn’t know.”
“I wondered why you were grilling little Nan about the bones.”
Enright’s face crinkled with mock remorse. “Was I grilling her? And I tried so hard to be fatherly! I’ve never had the right practice, I guess.”
“No kids?”
“No kids. No wife, no lover, no alternative orientation. Just an altar to Old St. Andrews in my hall closet and a fortune in golf balls lost on two continents. So tell me about your bones. Is what Nan said true? Nothing at all was found with them?”
“Right. And they were completely disarticulated, not to mention scrubbed clean. It was as if they had been hanging in a sophomore biology class. Weird, huh?”
“Decidedly.” Enright’s eyebrows shot up, and he reached again for the bread basket. “Have you checked with the local high school? Maybe some teenagers are yanking your chain.”
“I wish they were. There’s the slight matter of the broken hyoid bone.”
“Ah, yes. In an adult woman, undoubtedly strangulation.”
“However,” Merry amended, “I do think it’s possible the Sconset grave is fairly recent. A woman who lives nearby claims to have seen someone she can’t identify digging in that spot one night last January. She says the person dropped something from a sack into the hole and then refilled it.”
“And yet she never went to look?”
“She’s fairly elderly, walks with a cane, and was evacuated from her house the next morning in the middle of a blizzard.”
“January,” Enright mused thoughtfully. “The storm that shut down the whole East Coast? Just after New Year’s?”
“Yes. It tore off a piece of Sconset’s beach, not to mention two houses. By the time it was over, all memory of the late-night digger had gone completely out of Mabel’s—that’s my elderly lady—head.”
“Until you brought up the subject of digging.”
Merry nodded.
“This is great,” Enright exclaimed. “Forget the serial murders—give me a midnight burial any day! I hope the grave digger had a sinister profile and carried a flickering lamp.” He grinned.
“Laugh all you like,” Merry protested, smiling, “but you see the problem. The bones might have come from anywhere. Until we get an identification, we’re lost.”
‘Yes,” Enright said. “That would be a ticklish problem.”
“I just hope the FBI’s people can help us.”
The psychiatrist’s head came up from his bread, and he looked at her intently. “You sent them to the FBI?”
“To the Smithsonian, actually. Their forensic anthropologists sometimes help out the Bureau with random remains. But you know that, I’m sure.”
“I know some of the anthropologists,” Enright said frankly. “Good people. Well, I see why the DA spoke so highly of you, Detective Folger. You’ve got a head on your pretty shoulders. If anyone can help you, the Smithsonian will. You tried dental records, I guess?”
