Poison Ivy

 

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FOR
DIONIS COFFIN RIGGS,
POET
1898–1997

 

C
HAPTER
1

The season was still too new to be considered fall, but the sky was that brilliant autumnal blue, the air was crisp and smelled of the salt sea, and this was a fine day for Victoria Trumbull. At ninety-two, she was about to launch a new career as adjunct professor. She had been invited to teach a course in poetry at Ivy Green College.

Adjunct professor, she thought, smoothing her hair. A fine title, a peaceful occupation, and she intended to show her colleagues and students that experience mattered.

She had dressed carefully in her green plaid suit and soft white blouse with its self-bow at the neck, had clipped on the earrings that matched the suit, and had even dabbed on a touch of lipstick.

She stowed the papers she'd worked on for the past several weeks—a syllabus, a reading list, lecture notes, and her own and others' poetry—in her cloth bag along with the baseball hat she always carried.

Gold stitching across the front of the hat read W
EST
T
ISBURY
P
OLICE,
D
EPUTY
. Victoria had earned the hat and the title.

Elizabeth, Victoria's granddaughter, drove her to the campus of Ivy Green College, a few blocks from the Vineyard Haven library. The college consisted of three buildings: two former houses and between them, a two-car garage. One house served as the administration building, the second as the classroom building, and the garage had been enlarged into a lecture hall.

The founder of the college greeted her. “Delighted to have you on our faculty, Mrs. Trumbull.”

“Thank you, Thackery,” said Victoria, shaking his extended hand.

Thackery Wilson was in his early sixties now, his eyes almost hidden by thick lenses in a heavy tortoiseshell frame. He was tall and lean, just as he'd been as a fourteen-year-old. Victoria could remember when he'd played summer softball in the field behind the Grange Hall. Over the years he'd assumed an air of dignity overlain with superiority that didn't entirely suit him. Nevertheless, she'd always admired Thackery. And the fact that he was bringing higher education to the Island was certainly in his favor.

“We'll have an orientation for new faculty members this morning, Mrs. Trumbull. Classes begin after lunch. I see you're all ready.” A nod to her bulging cloth bag.

He looked off to his left and scowled. A pear-shaped man, also in his sixties, was rolling, rather than walking, toward them. He was short with narrow shoulders, a round belly, and plump buttocks. He had stringy gray hair, gray face, stained gray cotton trousers, gray work shirt. Even his shoes were gray.

“You know Walter our groundskeeper, of course,” said Thackery.

“Good morning.” Victoria shifted her cloth bag to her left hand and extended her right. “Nice to see you, Walter.”

“You teachin'?” Walter said, jerking his head toward the former garage.

Thackery answered. “Yes. She'll have a class of eleven in Catbriar Hall in an hour and a half. Have you set up the seats?”

“There's only one of me,” said Walter, who'd ignored Victoria's extended hand. “Want me to drop everything?”

“If you would, please.” A muscle in Thackery's jaw twitched. “I want to show Professor Trumbull her classroom. Is the door unlocked?”

Walter withdrew a long chain with a ring of a dozen keys from some pocket, and with a deep sigh rolled his way toward the new lecture hall.

Thackery said to Victoria, “I'll provide you with a list of your students, Mrs. Trumbull. You'll find you know many of them.” He walked slowly, apparently to let Walter get far enough ahead to open the door.

Walter, for his part, had stepped up onto the wide porch and was fumbling with the keys, searching through the jangling key ring, apparently to let Thackery know that he wasn't about to be told what to do.

That meant that when Walter eventually opened the door, all three of them were treated to the stench that poured out of the building in a nauseating cloud.

Victoria stepped away from the door and waved her hand in front of her great nose.

“Walter,” said Thackery, his face taut. “What have you done now?”

“Obeying orders,” muttered Walter. “Mice. You told me to get rid of them.”

“Surely dead mice can't smell that horrid,” said Victoria, holding a napkin that she'd hurriedly fished out of her pocket to her nose.

“Drop everything, and clean up this place. Immediately,” said Thackery.

Walter unlatched his ring of keys and the long chain connected to them from his belt and tossed them onto the porch flooring. “I can only do so much. Do this. Do that. Set up chairs. Take them down. Clean up the mice yourself, you want them cleaned up.”

“You can't quit again,” said Thackery. “Not now.”

“Oh no?”

“Professor Trumbull has a class to teach.”

Walter set his feet apart and folded his arms over his belly, his mouth in a tight pout.

“We can sit under the trees, if Walter doesn't mind setting chairs out there,” Victoria said.

“What do you expect from me, Walter? An apology for asking you to do your job?” Thackery stretched himself to his full height, thinning like a rubber band. “You, the janitor? Well, you won't get it.”

“That's it,” said Walter, leaving the keys and chain where he'd dropped them. He waddled away toward home, across the street from the college.

“It's fine, Thackery,” said Victoria, her voice muffled by the napkin. “We can sit on the grass under the trees.” She lowered the napkin. “But Thackery, I know how dead mice smell, and I don't believe that stench is dead mice. You'd better call the police.”

*   *   *

They turned away from the odor funneling out of the open door and headed toward the administration building.

“You've got to keep people from entering the building until the police get here,” said Victoria.

“Mrs. Trumbull,” said Thackery with studied patience, “this is not a matter for the police. It is a matter for a competent janitor, and since we don't have one, I shall call Kerry Scott's cleaning service. We do not need police to clean up dead mice.” He took a steel pocket watch out of his watch pocket and opened it. “Classes start in a little more than an hour.”

“Do you have a cell phone?” Victoria asked.

“Of course not.” Thackery strode toward the building with its discrete black-and-gold sign, W
OODBINE
H
ALL
. Victoria followed.

“I assure you, the smell is not mice,” she said, slightly out of breath from trying to match his stride. “I need to make that call.”

Without replying, Thackery climbed the steps to the front porch and opened the door. Stained-glass panels, a relic of the building's past life as someone's home, framed the door. The late morning light cast blurry purple-and-green images of fruiting grapevines on the entry hall's scuffed wooden floor.

“Where's Linda?” asked Victoria, glancing around the room for Thackery's assistant, Linda Bacon.

“Out sick again,” said Thackery. He made his call to the cleaning service. When he was off the line, Victoria dialed her boss, West Tisbury's police chief, Mary Kathleen O'Neill.

“Casey,” said Victoria, when the chief answered. “I'm at Ivy Green College and there's a dead body in the old garage.” Before Casey had time to respond, Victoria went on. “I know this is state police business, but since I'm your deputy, I thought I should tell you first.”

“Have you seen it?”

“I smelled it.”

“Oh Lord!” said Casey. “That means it's been there a while. I'll call the state guys and the Tisbury cops and get there as soon as I can.” Before she disconnected, she asked, “You okay?”

“Certainly.” Victoria hung up and turned to Thackery. “I'm sorry Linda is sick. I hope it's not serious.”

“It's an advanced case of hypochondria,” said Thackery. “She'll be in tomorrow morning. Late, naturally, because she'll be weak having spent two days in bed. Once she smells the dead mice, she'll leave immediately, feeling faint.”

“Her grandmother was the same way,” said Victoria, sympathetically.

“I'd get rid of her, but no one else would work for what I can pay her. When she is here, she's an excellent worker.”

The two-person cleaning crew arrived within a few minutes and Thackery led them to the garage, now labeled C
ATBRIAR
H
ALL
.

“Phew-eee, mister,” said the stout Brazilian woman who seemed to be in charge. “You said dead mice? Not dead mice. Big animal. We don't do dead animals. You want animal control.” The cleaners left, waving the stink away from their nostrils.

Thackery smacked the side of his head with the palm of his hand. His once-thick dark hair curled around his head in a sort of gray tonsure. “We have less than an hour until classes begin.”

“The police are on their way,” said Victoria. They were standing well off to one side of the former garage. “There's no need to cancel classes. It's appropriate for poets to meet under the trees. The other classes were to meet in the other house anyway.”

“Honeysuckle Hall,” said Thackery.

Victoria glanced up as a state police car pulled up in the parking area.

“Most embarrassing,” said Thackery.

*   *   *

“Morning, Mrs. Trumbull,” said Sergeant Smalley. “Morning, Thackery. What do we have here?”

“I hope it's a false alarm,” said President Thackery Wilson, lifting his nose.

“It's in the garage,” said Victoria.

“Catbriar Hall,” corrected Thackery.

“Let's see what you've got,” said Smalley.

“You'll be able to smell it,” said Victoria.

“If you'll excuse me, I have a college to run,” said its president, and left.

Victoria led Smalley and Tim Eldredge, one of the state troopers, to the open door of the lecture hall.