The Body in the Lighthouse (15 page)

She told Ted about it as they went outside.

“I wish you would. The chicken wings and egg rolls at China Hill are some good. I can demolish a bagful.”

“Well, let's think Italian now.”

“Do you think Romeo ate pizza? I mean, did they have it back then? Sure, they must have had spaghetti and meatballs, but what about pizza? Think he had a slice in his hand when he climbed up to the balcony?”

“Why not?” Faith answered. “The Romans ate lasagna, and supposedly the Etruscans, who came before them, had macaroni. This was all long before Shakespeare was around. I doubt if he was familiar with the cuisine, though. The English have always been a little slow to adopt food that isn't cooked for several hours, like their veg
etables. As for pizza…well, something like it—toppings spread on dough—has existed virtually since early man started cooking with fire.”

“I'll have a thick-crust mastodon, double cheese, to go,” Ted quipped. He really was very cute, and Faith had no trouble seeing why Becky was so attracted to him. And he to her. What a mess it all was, and how stupid their families were being. The surest way the Prescotts could drive Becky into Ted's arms was to object. Forbidden fruit.

Juliet herself arrived after her stint at the inn and flopped down on the grass. Faith rehearsed them both, feeling very much like a third wheel, but, in this case, essential. Much as she would like to give them some time alone together, she agreed with Roland's warning to Becky. It wouldn't even have to be a family member driving by. That the two were alone on the lawn of the elementary school would reach Prescott and Hamilton ears like wildfire and the whole production could go up in smoke. Reflecting that a little more supervision of those long-ago Verona teens would have prevented a lot of unhappiness, Faith, the duenna, stood her ground.

 

Another house site was torched Tuesday night. And this time, no one appeared on the scene to save the construction. Fire departments from up and down the coast fought to keep the flames from spreading to the acres of woods surrounding the lot, which had been cleared for extensive
landscaping. Roland and others in the cast were members of Sanpere's volunteer fire company. After dropping the kids off at camp Wednesday morning, Faith found a note postponing the rehearsal until the afternoon.

“They're exhausted,” said Becky, who came up behind Faith. “They worked all night. I didn't think we'd have a rehearsal until later, but I thought I'd check.”

“It's horrible. Who can be doing this?” Ursula and the Fairchilds had gotten the news before they went to bed, and Tom had left grim-faced this morning.

“Those jerks. The KSS people.” Becky was very definite. “Earl will get them.”

Linda. Linda was a KSS member. How could she be involved in arson? She didn't even kill mosquitoes. Maybe in her mind, property was different.

“You know the funny thing?” Becky continued.

Faith always wanted to know the funny thing, because used in this manner, it didn't mean ha-ha.

“What?”

“The guy who's building the place took down every tree for I don't know how many acres. Had all the rocks dug out, made a long wall with a big iron gate. We've all been joking about ‘the palace.' He wanted to be able to pick apples, so he had an orchard of full-grown trees ordered. Ready to go in this week. If he hadn't done all that, the fire would have spread and burned every bit of forest on that whole point. It stopped at the dirt.”

It
was
ironic. His destruction of the environment had saved it.

“Can you believe that, though?” Becky shook her head. “I mean, planting full-grown apple trees, so you can pick the fruit right away? I think God meant for people to have to wait and watch them grow, but that's just my opinion. I wouldn't mind having the money those trees cost. Well, I have to get to work. See you.” She jumped in her car, an ancient Valiant. When it came to cars, the island was a veritable
Kelley Blue Book
Who's Who.

With a morning suddenly free, Faith decided to go make sure the paint on the walls looked the same as the color on the chips. Ted or no Ted, she was sure they could always add white—or Oslo.

On the way, she thought about those apple trees. She felt sorry—more than sorry—for the person who had just lost a summer's worth of work on a new house. She had heard about “the palace,” but not about the apple trees. The whole notion gave her a slightly sick, “Let them eat cake” feeling—Marie Antoinette and her buddies dressing up as milkmaids to mimic the peasantry, cavorting in an immaculate barn, cows beribboned, sterling-silver milk pails. Becky was right: In nature, you were supposed to wait for the harvest, even if that meant you didn't always get to see it. You planted trees for tomorrow, not today. She had a vision of a couple in knife-creased khaki shorts and Lauren Polo shirts, skipping through their full-blown orchard, an apple basket woven to their specifications in hand.

It was a relief to pull into her own cottage's dusty drive, which was rutted from the various workmen's trucks going in and out. No apple trees.

“Faith! Glad you're here,” said Tom. “I thought they'd cancel rehearsal. Roland was out there all night. Lyle, too. It's just Kenny and me. He went home at four, but he says he's not tired.”

“Do you want me to paint?” Having done scenery, and with vestiges of her Home Depot mind-set still in place, Faith was ready to tackle a wall or two or three.

Tom looked slightly shocked. Faith? Working on the house? His project…He made a quick recovery. “Honey, that would be great. Maybe later. But when I got here this morning, UPS had left a package for Freeman and Nan mixed in with our delivery. Could you take it over to them? It may be important.”

Kenny appeared. He still smelled like smoke. She hoped it wasn't getting into the paint.

“Hi, Kenny,” she said. “Are you sure you're not too tired to work?”

“Hi. Nope. I'm okay,” and, blushing, he went back into the house with the can of paint he'd come to get.

“I'll bring lunch back for you both,” Faith promised.

Tom gave her a kiss. “That would be terrific, sweetheart. Take your time.”

“Don't worry,” Faith looked him in the eye. “I'm not going to invade your turf. Paint away.”

He had the grace to look sheepish.

 

“Well, Mother will be darned pleased. It's her new Crock-Pot. She's been lost since her old one gave out on her and the Sears folks said they couldn't fix it,” Freeman said, taking the package from Faith. “Thanks for bringing it round.”

Faith wasn't surprised. Although Nan Marshall fried her fish in her great-grandmother's iron skillets, made her beans in her grandmother's bean pot, and mixed her batter in her mother's Pyrex mixing bowls—ranging from the big yellow one to the little blue one—the Crock-Pot was her own addition to the family
batterie de cuisine
. She'd often extolled its virtues to Faith: “I plug it in, turn it on, go fishing with Freeman, and when we come back, there's beef stew—finest kind.” “Finest kind” was the highest compliment possible in Maine, used to describe the very best in everything from fried clams to a gas station. Faith had been impressed with Nan's description, yet not enough to trade in her own stew pot, a
marmite,
lugged back from Dehellerin, the Paris restaurant-supply house.

“It was no bother. I'm glad I could drop it off,” she told Freeman. Faith was always happy to pay a call on the Marshalls. “Besides, Tom doesn't really want me at the house until it's all done. I guess then he'll break a bottle of champagne against a door, carry me over the threshold, and cry his eyes out.”

Freeman nodded. “Nothing like building your own home. We had to live in a tent, then with Nan's
mother—and believe me, I'd have stayed in the tent, 'cept the snow kept piling up and collapsing it—but it was worth it.” He looked back over his shoulder at their snug little house—the house where they had raised four children and now regularly entertained their grandchildren for overnights and longer.

“Is Nan around?” Faith asked. If she was inside canning, Faith could give her a hand. Everybody seemed to have a purpose, except for Faith herself at the moment. Freeman had been mending traps when she'd arrived.

“Gone to help her sister put up zucchini relish. Told her not to bring even one pot back, unless she intended to eat it herself. Nasty stuff. You give me some bread and butter pickles—or watermelon ones, if you want to get fancy—any day.”

“The zucchini seems to be the only thing growing in this drought. I guess they're trying to use them any way they can.”

“Shouldn't plant any in the first place,” Freeman said decisively. “Never could understand the point of planting stuff that grows well but you don't want to eat. Nan says I'm foolish. If not wanting zucchini every day, disguised on my plate to look like something tasty, is foolish, then so be it.”

Sharing his opinion that a little zucchini goes a long way, Faith said good-bye and turned to go.

“Well, aren't you going to tell me about it?” Freeman asked.

“About what?”

“About what's making your face look like it can't decide whether it's going to be mad or sad. Come on, now.” He patted the spot next to him on the bench and she sat down.

But where to begin? Looking out over Penobscot Bay—the sky stretched over the sea in an enormous canopy—gave her a moment to search for the words. It was sunny and clear all the way to Swans Island, which lay far in the distance. Freeman's boat, named for his wife, was bobbing contentedly on the outgoing tide. All should have been right with the world.

Finally, she said, “It's that everything is so different this summer on Sanpere. Not just finding the body.”

“True, that's not all that out of the ordinary for you,” Freeman commented dryly. “But still pretty unsettling, don't you think?”

“Yes, but I was feeling this way before that. The lobster war. The attacks on the construction sites. All these different groups on the island going at one another's throats.”

“Aside from the attacks, business as usual, I'd say.” Freeman looked up from his work. “I don't mean that all this isn't very serious, but a lot of it is stuff that goes on all the time. Summer people—and I'm using the label in the nicest way where you're concerned—think that Sanpere is some kind of Eden. No one looks cross-eyed at anyone else, there isn't a soul on the island who would ever cheat you, and everyone who lives here, from the babes at their mothers' titties to the old
coots like me, is as happy as a clam at high water. Right?”

Faith nodded. It was true that a lot of summer people tended to view the island in Technicolor, music and lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

“So when you go to”—he grinned—“say, a Planning Board meeting, and see some things that aren't very pretty—course I heard about it—or you come to know that two families are quarreling over what seems like a pretty small piece of this great big ocean, you're bound to think all kinds of snakes have made their way into the garden.”

“You're right,” Faith admitted. “But why
are
the Hamiltons and Prescotts feuding? I know it has to do with territory, but surely there's room for everyone's pots? Can't one of them move theirs?” The water in front of them looked infinite.

Freeman put the trap down.

“Mother left a plate of molasses cookies and coffee. Let's get some and I'll try to explain. It ain't easy.”

“How do you know where you can put your traps anyway?” Faith asked once they were inside at the kitchen table, which was set in front of a bay window Freeman had installed as a gift for Nan last year. Her prize African violets marched along the broad sill. A similar platoon, but this one of photographs, was lined up on a shelf to one side of the woodstove. Babies, brides, and graduates.

Faith reached for a cookie and settled back.

“Where your traps are set,” Freeman told her,
“is based on where your family's traps have always been set, going back for several generations, mostly. My son and I fish the eastern side off Isle au Haut, because that's where my father and grandfather had their traps. The whole ocean is carved up that way. Problem comes two ways. You have people who are just plain greedy and don't care about the kingdom of heaven. They'll move in on your territory and cut maybe thirty traps so's they can take over.”

“You mean cut the rope from the lobster pot to the trap? Then when you pull a trap, there would be nothing attached?” Faith was shocked. She knew the kind of financial loss thirty traps meant. The metal traps—not so picturesque for the tourists as the wooden ones—were a boon to the fishermen. They didn't move around on the bottom the way the old ones did, were easier to maintain, and lighter. But they were expensive. Each one cost about fifty dollars, not counting the lines, doughnut, and pot buoy. There was also the catch in each trap—which would be left to rot—to figure in when calculating a loss of this magnitude.

“Yup. They might leave you alone for a week or so after that, then do it again. Most folks move right away, rather than risk losing any more gear.”

“But what about the laws? Isn't there a warden or something?”

“Sure, but how are you going to prove it? Only way would be for the warden to close down the whole area to everyone, and that hasn't happened.”

“But it's a small island. Doesn't it get around who's doing it?” Faith had visions of enlisting the Sewing Circle and ridding the seas of these pirates, latter-day mooncussers.

“Everybody knows, but we're not talking about the boys who won prizes for perfect attendance at Sunday school. People are too afraid of them to band together. There aren't a whole lot of ways to make a living here, Faith, and you've got to protect and provide for your family in the best way you can. Sometimes that means not doing anything.”