Dead In The Hamptons (28 page)

I held out a conciliatory hand.

“Now wait a minute, Mrs. Dowling. Please don’t do anything you’ll regret. Can we talk about this?”

“Talk!” she spat. “All you city people do is talk!”

She half crouched and shifted the knife in a weaving motion, like a street fighter looking for an opening. I tried to push Barbara behind me without taking a step forward, which Mrs. Dowling might find threatening. Barbara wouldn’t go. She gets all feminist at the worst moments. But I admit I found the warmth of her sturdy tanned arm against mine comforting.

“So it’s your turn now, and that’s okay,” Barbara said in her counselor voice. “Go ahead, we’re listening.” Damned if she didn’t cock her head to one side like an inquisitive bird. She’d told me once her own therapist did that to encourage a client to fill the silence.

“Don’t you take one step toward me,” Mrs. Dowling warned, “or you’ll be sorry. I’m getting out, and you can’t stop me. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”

Barbara spread her hands, palms outward, and relaxed her body backward. We were backed up against the side of the boat already. I flattened myself as best I could. The gunwale dug against the backs of my thighs. I hoped we wouldn’t go overboard.

“You’re a Dedham,” Barbara said. “The farm was yours.”

“My family settled here in sixteen eighty-three,” she said fiercely. “We fished and clammed and made the land so rich we grew the best corn and potatoes on Long Island. The land means everything to me. What did Ben Dowling care? His father was born in Center Moriches and his grandpa came from New Jersey. New Jersey!” Her voice dripped contempt. “He worked the land with me, but he didn’t love it.”

“What did you have against Clea?” I asked. I tried to meet her eyes, even though the knife had me mesmerized. “She was against development. She tried to get people interested in keeping the land the way it is.”

“That tramp! She bewitched Ben Dowling, that’s what she did!”

Oh.

“I know what you think!” Her glance darted from my face to Barbara’s and back again. “To you he’s nothing but a grim old farmer, the handyman, the funny old bayman who digs your clams and sets the traps for your lobsters. She set a trap for him all right! He was an old fool, but he was my old fool, and that little slut couldn’t rest until she’d stolen him out of my bed into hers.”

Barbara said with extreme gentleness, “You were angry.”

Duh. She pulled that one out of her bag of counseling tricks. Reflection, if I remembered right. I thought it would piss Mrs. Dowling off. It did whenever she tried it on Jimmy and me. But it worked. Mrs. Dowling calmed down some.

“I didn’t mean to make her drown. I just wanted her to leave us alone. He went sneaking off to her all last summer. He’d tell me he was going fishing, knowing I’d have to stay and mind the stand. Fishing! But I thought it was over. Then in the spring he started getting shifty again. When I spotted that mop of hair of hers in town, I knew they’d started up again.”

“You met her on the beach.” I borrowed Barbara’s method and didn’t make it a question. I wanted to keep her going until I figured out a safe way to jump her and get the knife away. Or maybe once she got to tell her story she’d see reason and take us back to shore. I didn’t care what she did after that. Run or surrender, whatever she wanted.

“She had the nerve to come up to me at the stand and ask for a pint of strawberries. Who did she think she was! We knew each other, all right. I’d been a fool too, telling her all about my family and how Dedhampton used to be Dedham, named for us and the town we came from.”

So that’s what Jimmy meant. Barbara dug a surreptitious elbow into my ribs.

“I told her we needed to talk. She said she’d meet me on the beach. I didn’t tell her then that I knew what she was up to. I let her think I’d give her another interview. We made it early because I said I didn’t want Dowling to know. I didn’t have to say much, because she already knew he was planning to sell the land. The old fool told her. If she was such an environmentalist, she should have kicked him out. She wanted him because she could have him, and for no other reason.”

“But if the land belonged to you,” Barbara said, “how could he sell it?”

“How could I work it if he left?” she demanded bitterly. “You think I could hire someone to plow and plant and harvest? Nobody wants to be a farmer any more.”

“So you went to meet her on the beach,” I prompted.

“I was desperate. All I wanted was for her to leave us alone. She had all the young men she wanted. She didn’t need Ben Dowling who’d been mine since high school. I begged her to let him go, and she laughed at me. I was so mad I went after her with my bare hands. I don’t know if I meant to slap or strangle her. I chased her into the water. I stood there with the ocean coming up around my ankles and my shoes sinking into the wet sand, and I screamed at her. She wouldn’t stop laughing. I screamed, and she laughed at me, and then she had some sort of fit. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and her body jerked, and she went under. And I stood there and let the ocean take her.”

She fell silent. For a minute we all stood there. I had chills up the back of my neck. Barbara clutched my hand tightly. The boat rocked from side to side. The ruined fort lay behind us. As far as I could see, the bay was empty. No birds, no churning waters alive with fish. No other boats to get us out of this.

“I found her little recording doohickey and threw it in after her. I didn’t play it. I didn’t want to hear her voice again.”

“Her things were on the beach, all neatly folded,” Barbara said.

“You think that slut left them that way?” She gave a raucous laugh like a crow’s caw. “I folded them myself. I wore my gardening gloves. Had ’em right in my pocket.”

“Please, Mrs. Dowling, put the knife down,” I said. “We’re sorry for what happened to you. Please take us back, and then you can do what you like.”

“I’ve made my plans,” she said. “I’ve got a full tank of gas. I can be long gone when they come after me.”

I thought we’d heard as much of Mrs. Dowling’s story as she would tell us. If she started up again, she might work herself into another rage. She had already killed three people, maybe four, if Dowling was dead too. But Barbara always feels impelled to ask another question.

“Did Oscar Ainsworth see you on the beach that morning? Is that why you had to— to do something about him?”

“Ainsworth!” The ferocity in her voice startled both of us. She hated the developers. But if one went down, two more sprang up in his place. Had building McMansions gotten Oscar killed? She couldn’t kill them all.

“He was another of the same kind. A beast— immoral. He killed my daughter.”

I had forgotten the photo I’d seen at Oscar’s. The luminous laughing girl with the expressive eyes. He’d seduced her, and she’d fallen in love with him. He’d turned her on to drugs, and she’d OD’d. Corky’d said he’d tried to get her into recovery once he got clean himself. Maybe. If I’d been her mother, I wouldn’t have been grateful either.

“I’m so sorry about your daughter,” Barbara said.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I saw her picture. She was a beautiful girl.”

“He killed Amelia,” she said, “and didn’t think twice about it. The only reason I let him live is that I wasn’t a killer. But after that girl drowned, I thought, now I am, so what’s the difference?”

“How did you come to be there?” Barbara asked.

“I told myself I’d give him one more chance to show some remorse. I went to see him. There was a party. I saw them all prancing around buck naked on the beach. Disgusting!”

Beside me, Barbara tensed.

“I came back later. They were all leaving. I made sure that no one saw me.”

“You tried to reason with him,” Barbara said.

“He got on his high horse,” Mrs. Dowling said. “He said he couldn’t take responsibility for another human being. She had choices, he said. He’d given up drugs and offered to help her. Help her! He’d ruined her! My beautiful girl.”

A tear ran down her cheek. I watched her knife hand, hoping she’d raise it to wipe the tear away, but she ignored it. My arm would have been aching if I’d been holding up a knife this long. But we already knew how strong she was.

“I just wanted to get him away from me. I couldn’t bear standing that close to him for another second. I pushed hard at him with both hands.”

I could picture her ramming at his chest in rage and grief, doing a kind of horizontal pushup with those muscular arms.

“I caught him off balance, and he tripped and tumbled down the stairs. He looked surprised.”

I bet he did.

“And then Phil tried to blackmail you. We know he had a notebook of Clea’s.”

“He said he knew I did it. She’d written about Amelia and about my husband’s hanky-panky. And she had notes about my family history, things I was stupid enough to tell her three years ago, and Ben Dowling must have told her more. He wanted money. Money! Farmers don’t have money. Everything we own is in the land. And our boats, of course. We’re baymen too, and cash flow is a bayman’s problem as much as it is a farmer’s. That’s why we’re a dying breed. We go into debt, and then there’s a bad year, the government makes up one more rule against us, and then we bleed until we die. I’ll lose the land anyway now.”

So she had figured that out. Whether she ran and got away or ended up in prison, those fields were lost to her. I wondered if she thought she’d run Phil over by accident too. But even Barbara had too much sense to ask that particular question.

“What happened to the notebook?” she asked instead.

“I took it off him as he lay there in the road. And now it lies in twenty-five feet of water around behind Gardiner’s Island, where no one ever goes. If you’d been watching, you could have seen it go.”

“That’s probably the best place for it,” Barbara said.

For a moment, we all breathed together in a silence that held an odd kind of communion. Then Mrs. Dowling kind of shook herself and settled the knife more firmly in her grip.

“But now you both know everything that was in the notebook. I can’t let you go. I want you to turn around, both of you, with your backs toward me. And stay close together.”

A fillet knife is not an Uzi. She realized that if we moved apart, she could only cover one of us.

“You don’t have to do this,” Barbara said.

I wouldn’t have bothered. In the movies, it was what the victims always said right before the murderer killed them anyway.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Mrs. Dowling said. “Now turn around!”

I felt Barbara’s muscles tighten. If we exposed our backs to that wicked knife, at least one of us was a goner. My shoulder blades turned to water just thinking about it.

Mrs. Dowling reached behind her with her free hand and came up with a spool of fishing line. Damn. She’d thought of tying us up first. If she was smart, she’d have one of us truss up the other.

“No more shilly-shallying,” she barked. “Move!”

It was now or never. We moved, but not the way she’d ordered. I lunged toward her. At the same time, Barbara leaped to one side, freeing the trap door we’d been standing on. As I made a flying tackle for Mrs. Dowling’s legs, Barbara flipped back the trap, scooped up a bluefish, and flung it straight at Mrs. Dowling’s head. It hit her shoulder and bounced off. She stumbled and went down. The spool of line went rolling across the deck. But she held onto the knife.

Barbara threw another bluefish. It hit the back of my neck as I grappled with Mrs. Dowling. In my peripheral vision, I could see her arm starting to come down. I had her pinned with one knee, but that left my back exposed. Not good. I grabbed her knife arm and hung on. We rolled over. The deck pressed into my back. Her arm pushed downward. Mine pushed up to fend her off. My muscles trembled. Hers felt steady as a rock. I had to hold her off. I clawed at her face. She jerked up and away from me without releasing the pressure on my arm. The knife started to sweep downward, overcoming my resistance.

Emitting a howl like a barbarian warrior, Barbara launched herself onto Mrs. Dowling’s back. This time she didn’t throw the bluefish. She clutched it like a dagger and stabbed it into Mrs. Dowling’s neck. Mrs. Dowling yowled with pain as the thrashing fish chomped down on the curve where her neck met her shoulder. Blood sprang up under the onslaught of those rows of little sharp teeth. At the same time, Barbara bared her own teeth and sank them into Mrs. Dowling’s forearm.

The knife clattered to the deck. The pressure on my chest released enough for me to throw her off me and grab her other flailing arm. I twisted it behind her back and pulled her around till she lay face down. I dug my knees into the backs of her legs to keep her there. She jerked her chest up backward, trying to butt me with the back of her head. But she couldn’t reach me. Barbara and the bluefish still hung onto her by the teeth like a couple of terriers.

“Enough! Barbara, enough!”

She opened her jaws and released Mrs. Dowling’s arm. The bluefish fell to the deck and stopped twitching. It had reached its limit for survival out of water. I yanked the woman’s other arm higher and ground my knees into the backs of hers. I had to keep her immobilized until we could tie her up.

Barbara looked dazed.

“I went berserk,” she said hoarsely.

“Let me go!” Mrs. Dowling said. The commanding tone had degenerated into a whine. “I’ll take you back to shore.”

“Too late,” I said, bearing down harder as she bucked and squirmed under me.

“Barbara, get the knife and the spool of line. We’ll have to tie her up.”

“Don’t hurt her, Bruce,” Barbara said as she collected them. Pretty good for someone whose toothmarks were darkening into purple bruises on our captive’s arm. She handed me the knife. I held it to the nape of Mrs. Dowling’s neck. She stopped struggling. I was careful not to prick her. I didn’t know if I could have used it even in the heat of battle. But as a deterrent, it worked fine.

Barbara scooted over to the trap, which was still open. On her knees, she reached in and selected another bluefish. She’d found her weapon of choice.

“If you try anything, this one goes right into your face,” she told Mrs. Dowling.