Death Will Extend Your Vacation (27 page)

“Okay if I sit up in the bow?” I asked. I waggled the pack to indicate why I wanted to. The roof of the cabin formed a forward deck surrounded by a thin metal rail. It wasn’t designed for sitting. But I wouldn’t fall off.

“Suit yourself,” Mrs. Dowling said. “Crouch low and hold onto the rail. If you go overboard, I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to get back up.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I could see what she meant. The boat rode fairly high in the water. And I couldn’t see anything like a ladder down the side. I tried to picture Mrs. Dowling and Barbara hauling me back on board, and only succeeded in imagining my arms being wrenched out of their sockets.

“Be careful, okay?” Barbara said.

“I will.”

I made my way cautiously around the windscreen and established myself with my back against it, knees up and elbows on my knees. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it felt stable. I tapped a cigarette out of the pack and snapped my lighter. I heard shrill cries as a flock of terns whipped up the sky to my right, following the school as it moved on.

Mrs. Dowling kept the engine purring low enough that I felt in no danger of getting jolted off my perch. I heard her say something, and Barbara answered, but the breeze whipped their words away. I closed my eyes and let my head drop back. The midday sun baked my eyelids, cheeks, and forearms. I tossed the smoldering butt of my cigarette into the bay and fell into a meditative state.

That lasted about five minutes. The spiritual awakening they’d promised me in recovery was taking longer than Rip Van Winkle’s. I still got restless fast. I remembered my cell phone and pulled it out of my back pocket.

“Yo, Jimmy. How’s it going, dude?”

Apart from a few crackling electrons, Jimmy’s voice came through clearly.

“Are you having fun yet?”

“Believe it or not, I am. Fishing is kind of addictive. And Barbara is having a blast. I hope you’re prepared for fish for dinner. Maybe several dinners. What are you doing?”

That would have been a dumb question if I’d meant “Are you online?” Jimmy was always online.

“I’m reading Clea’s articles on the environment and how the developers could kill Long Island. Did you know the Nature Conservancy calls Peconic Bay and Great South Bay one of the Last Great Places?”

“No, Jimmy, I didn’t know that,” I said in the bright, deliberate tones of a straight man on educational TV. In my own voice, I asked, “Did you find anything personal?”

“Reading between the lines, I’d say I did,” Jimmy said. “I’m going back three or four years to when she was just getting started. She was only in her twenties, you know. I think you can plot the course of her affair with Oscar by how she wrote about him in these stories.”

“How do you mean?”

“She started mentioning him by name a couple of years ago. They could have met in AA, or maybe she interviewed him for a story.”

“Maybe both,” I said. “Sparks can fly when two people who are attracted keep running into each other.”

“Could be. First she started mentioning his name a lot. Let’s call that a sign that romance was brewing. Then she started going out of her way to make him look good.”

“How did she do that? The guy was building McMansions.”

“With one hand. With the other hand, he was donating money and tradeoff land to outfits like the Nature Conservancy.”

“Tradeoff land?”

“They call it real estate donation. You donate your property, not what they call preserve quality land, any property. The organization sells it and uses the proceeds to fund their programs. That made him an enlightened developer.”

“You’re saying he stayed enlightened as long as she was sleeping with him?”

“Yep. In the more recent articles, he figures as just another bad guy.”

“Developers are in it to make money. Bottom line, literally. Did she simply sour on him, or did he stop giving to environmental charities?”

“I’m working on that,” he said. “She attacked him in a couple of pieces. It got personal, all right. At least one editor thought it would sell papers. Oscar wasn’t only a developer. He was a big party guy around here before he got clean and sober, and he still knew everybody. He struck me as a guy whose reputation mattered to him.”

“I agree. Okay, he had a motive to kill Clea.”

“He had opportunity. She was killed at his back door. All he had to do was get out of bed, walk down the steps, and shove her in the ocean.”

“He could have done it. But why now?”

“Maybe she was planning to expose some dirty business dealing of his. She could have had notes on it in the missing notebook or even in the papers the cops got.”

“If he dumped her, she had a motive to kill him. But she died first.”

“It’s just as likely she dumped him.” I could hear Jimmy tapping the keyboard and a ballgame in the background. Always multitasking. “They were both sexual predators. And she wasn’t an ecoterrorist. Why kill him when she could skewer him in print?”

“If Oscar killed Clea, then who killed Oscar?”

“Hmmm. Somebody who loved Clea?”

“I don’t know who that would be,” I said. “Not Phil. Lewis wasn’t in love with her either. He told me so.”

“Ted?”

“He thought he was,” I said. “In a fatal attraction kind of way. But when he gets past the denial, I bet he’ll feel relieved.”

“Slept with all, loved by none,” Jimmy said. “What an epitaph.”

“How about Jeannette? Do you believe she really hit a deer?”

“Hard to imagine her giving that hard a shove,” Jimmy said. “He was a big guy. Besides, she had as much reason to hate Clea as to love her. Maybe they canceled each other out.”

“She had the same reason to hate Oscar. More. And as far as the cops are concerned, she didn’t have an alibi for either him or Phil.”

Nobody had loved Phil, I thought. Maybe someone who loved Oscar had killed Phil. Corky. Or Shep, who seemed to be in love with Corky. Or somebody Clea had mentioned in the notebook. Phil’s compulsive gambling had left him with a chronic need for money.

“I can see him as a blackmailer,” I said. “Anybody could have done it.”

“If they had a car,” Jimmy said, “And weren’t already dead. The three deaths were different, but it’s hard to believe there was more than one murderer.” He lowered his voice. “How about Dowling?”

I glanced over my shoulder. The wheel was untended, the motor off. Mrs. Dowling and Barbara were fishing off the stern. We rocked gently at a distance I couldn’t gauge off what must be the dark side of Gardiner’s Island, the side you couldn’t see from land. An abundance of green topped pinkish sand cliffs and scallops of deserted beach.

“Motive?”

“One of Clea’s articles focused on what she called collaborators: local landowners who sell out. She saw it as collusion with the developers and betrayal of the land. If Dowling was thinking of selling, he might have wanted to shut her up.”

“He can’t be the only farmer being offered big bucks to sell,” I said. “But how many farmers did she know?”

“She knew all the big developers,” Jimmy said. “She wrote about them.”

Like Morton Day, the guy who’d been celebrating his success at the party. He might think it would be a lot easier to outmaneuver Corky than Oscar in his bid to suburbanize the Hamptons. He wouldn’t have liked Clea’s pro-environmental snooping any more than Oscar did. He might have thought he could cut a better deal with Corky than with Oscar.

Maybe Corky saw Phil push or chase Clea into the water. That whole house had a potential front-row view of Clea’s murder. Maybe Corky didn’t love Oscar as much as everybody thought she did. Maybe she wanted to inherit all that property. She could have figured since Phil really did kill Clea, it would be easy to pin Oscar’s death on him. Maybe Shep had done it for her. Maybe he wanted to marry all that property.

“Are we sure that Corky inherited?” I asked. “She’s acting like she did, but what you said about donations makes me wonder. He could have left it all to save the Last Great Places. He couldn’t take it with him, so why not?”

“The trouble is the three deaths were all so different,” Jimmy said. “The killer had to have a reason to want all three of them dead. On the other hand, the murders were opportunistic. They could even have been accidents.”

“Only if the person was bullshitting himself,” I said, “at least after the first time. Read what she wrote about Day again. And find out what you can about other farmers.”

“Will do. Go catch a fish.”

I flipped the phone closed and stuffed it back in my pocket. My knees felt stiff, and my lower back throbbed. I’d been sitting in one position for far too long. I stretched first one leg, then the other, out in front of me. I could hear the joints creak. My left foot had gone to sleep. I waited for the pins and needles to subside, then swiveled around and knelt facing the stern. I held onto the windscreen with both hands. I’d need it to push myself up.

Barbara turned, a squirming silver-blue three-pounder clutched in one hand and a fishing rod, its barbed hooks neatly tucked into their loops, in the other. Her dark curly hair caught the breeze and flew straight up over her head. Her cheeks were flushed.

“This is exhilarating!”

“Glad you’re having fun,” I said.

“What did you do, fall asleep up there?”

“No, I was talking to Jimmy on my cell.”

“What did you talk about?” Barbara always wants to know what Jimmy and I talk about.

I stared pointedly at Mrs. Dowling’s back. She was fully engaged in reeling in a lively fish, maybe an exceptionally big one, because her rod was bent almost double.

“I’ll tell you later.”

I had just taken up my rod again when the fish all decided to swim away. The birds followed them.

“Off to bluer pastures,” Barbara said. She secured the hook and slotted her rod neatly into one of the rod holders. “Wow, that was fun!”

“Are you having a good time?” Mrs. Dowling asked gaily. What had happened to American Gothic? She had a febrile energy that sat oddly on her habitual dourness. Maybe fishing pumped her up, and we were seeing the real Mrs. Dowling.

Behind her back, Barbara mouthed the word “manic” at me, holding up a thumb and forefinger half an inch apart, as if she were playing charades. “A little manic.”

I shrugged.

“What now? Do we follow the school?” I asked.

“If you want to,” Mrs. Dowling said. “But it’s getting crowded out here.”

I looked around. Three other fishing boats had been drawn to our hot spot. Now they all started their engines up and moved slowly in the direction the wheeling birds had taken. I guess that passed for crowded on the open water.

“I’d love to take another look at the ruined fort,” Barbara said. “Maybe we can get in closer. We’re as likely to find blues there as anywhere, aren’t we?”

“They feed around the Rip,” Mrs. Dowling said. “Though wherever you find fish, you’ll get company. We can circle the fort and then head out toward Plum Island.” She took the wheel, powered up, swung the boat around, and headed away from traffic.

“I’ve heard about Plum Island,” Barbara said. “Doesn’t the government do mysterious research there?”

“Not so mysterious,” Mrs. Dowling said. “Animal diseases. Homeland Security took it over a few years ago.”

“That sounds creepy,” Barbara said. “Islands, islands everywhere, and not a place to land. But that’s okay. It’s beautiful out here. I don’t care where we go, as long as I get to catch a few more fish before we go back.”

“We’ve already got a binful down there,” I objected. “Who’s going to clean them all?”

Barbara didn’t answer. That meant not her. Probably me. I remembered that Karen had said Mr. Dowling was usually willing to clean the catch. I noticed Mrs. Dowling didn’t volunteer to wield the knife. Barbara slid down onto the deck with her back against the side in much the same position I’d taken on the bow. I sat down next to her. She raised her face to the sun and closed her eyes. I slumped back against the windscreen and did the same.

The ring of a telephone woke me. It sounded weirdly domestic above the roar of the engine. The source of the ringing seemed to be Barbara’s cleavage. She extracted her cell from the bikini top she’d stripped to at some point in the trip. She checked the caller ID and flipped it open as mine started ringing too. I struggled to extract it from my pocket, where it was tightly wedged.

“Hi, baby.” Barbara stuck a finger into her other ear. Now that the motor was running, it was hard to hear anything else. “Can you ask Mrs. Dowling to slow down?”

Getting up would free my phone, which still shrilled in my pocket. My foot had gone to sleep again. I held up one finger to tell Barbara she’d have to wait, slid back down, and started to massage the foot. Barbara went on bellowing.

“What?” Barbara screeched. “Dead what? Something about Dedhampton,” she said to me. “Dedham, okay, I heard that, what about it? Sirens where? No, I can’t hear sirens in the background, I can hardly hear you.”

The fizzing in my foot subsided. I tried again to stand. As I hopped on the other foot, Mrs. Dowling cast a quick glance over her shoulder. Then I saw her deliberately push the stick not back, but forward. The motor responded with a burst of speed. We flew through the water. The white foam of our wake stretched out behind us like a bride’s train as it would look if the bride was late and sprinting down the aisle.

“Oh, my God!” Barbara said. “She what? Oh, no! Oh, my God! Listen, I’m getting off. I have to tell Bruce. Do something! Call someone! Call the Marine Patrol!”

“It’s her!” Barbara clutched the phone to her chest. “She killed all three of them!”

“What are you talking about?” I leaped to my feet.

“They found her husband over at the farm,” Barbara babbled. “He’s bleeding to death! She’s dangerous! What do we do?” She clutched at me, and the cell phone clattered to the deck.

Mrs. Dowling jerked the gearshift back into reverse and cut the engine. The boat halted so abruptly that spray flew over the side. I braced myself, grabbed Barbara’s hand, and pulled her up. Mrs. Dowling whirled to face us, snarling. In her hand, she held a knife with a thin, curved blade. She looked ready to gut and fillet us.