Dead in Vineyard Sand (4 page)

Years before I obtained the video, my father had let me stay up late to watch the film on television. It was a shining memory, and what better gift could I now bestow upon my children than showing the movie to them at the beginning of summer? Great art is timeless, after all.

Still, in spite of John's advice to put my encounter with Highsmith behind me, I kept the Chief 's advice in mind, and during that last school week when I was downtown and feeling imaginative I felt eyes on me and heard whispers behind my back: J. W. Jackson, the guy who hates bikers and beats them up: J. W. Jackson, the guy who deserves a beating himself.

Once, shortly after a group of lean, healthy cyclists was going down Main as I was walking in the opposite direction, I thought I heard a voice say, “Hey, guys. That's him! Jackson!” And I had to force my feet to walk on.

But when I wasn't fantasizing I heard and saw nothing truly threatening. I wondered if other people played such odd mind games with themselves and guessed that they did. After a few days, I willed the games away; life was peculiar enough without my making it even more bizarre.

What, for instance, could be stranger than me playing golf again the coming weekend? Two golf games on successive weekends after playing only one previous round in my entire life?

Glen Norton was all enthusiasm.

“You'll never have a boring day, and you'll always have something to talk about. You'll meet new people, and you can play until you've got one foot in the grave. It's the greatest game ever invented!”

I already had very few boring days, and I could always talk about things with Zee. I met as many new people as I needed to meet and sometimes more—Henry Highsmith, for example—and I expected to keep fishing at least as long as Glen Norton was swinging a golf club. But I had let myself be talked into golfing. So much for the life of reason.

“You're not the only mystified mortal,” said Zee when I pontificated about life's paradoxes as we prepared supper. “There are some other puzzled people up in the ER.”

Emergency room medical personnel know all about the dark side of Vineyard life, as do its social workers, cops, schoolteachers, ministers and priests, and the other underpaid people who tend to the injuries—physical, mental, and spiritual—of the wretched refuse of the island's teeming shores.

“ER people are always dealing with the island's incomprehensible events,” I said. The chamber of commerce may pass the Vineyard off as paradise, but the ER people know that it's just as close to chaos.

“In this case,” said Zee, “the puzzle may be of interest to you. Abigail Highsmith came into the ER today sporting the effects of a bicycle accident. She said she hit some gravel up near Lamberts Cove Road. Nothing broken, but she lost some skin and banged up a shoulder. Fortunately, she was wearing a helmet.”

The police scrape-up crashed bicycle riders all summer long, and a good percentage of the accidents are due to skids caused by sand or gravel. Most of the riders survive with abrasions and bruises, but some also suffer broken bones and there are occasional fatalities, usually from encounters with automobiles.

“I seem to remember that Abigail is Henry's other half,” I said, “and I'd expect a Highsmith to wear a helmet.
Wherein lies the mystery? Or are you and your medical colleagues perplexed by the idea that a Highsmith can take a tumble just like anybody else?”

“Even Lance Armstrong can take a tumble,” said Zee. “No, the mystery is that Abigail claims that she fell all by herself, but the Samaritan who brought her in says she was driven off the road by a beat-up old SUV. The Samaritan stopped to help her but the SUV hightailed it on out of sight.”

Odd, but not impossible to explain. Maybe the offending driver never realized what had happened and had innocently driven on. Maybe Abigail Highsmith had whacked her helmeted head hard enough to be confused about what had happened.

“Did anyone report the accident to the police?”

“We did,” said Zee, “but I doubt if they can do much more than talk with Abigail and the Samaritan. Abigail's injuries are minor and she says it was her own fault, so I can't see the police doing much.”

“So what's the problem?”

Zee frowned. “The problem is that most of us believe the Samaritan and we can't understand why Abigail insists that the accident was her own fault. If it was me, I'd be mad as hell about being run off the road, and I'd want the driver who did it arrested and hung!”

Zee was actually an opponent of capital punishment and of violence in general, so I knew she was exaggerating. But I took her point.

“Are you especially perplexed because Abigail's a Highsmith, and the Highsmiths are death on SUVs?”

Zee nodded. “You'd think she'd be more than glad to nail that driver as an example of the kind of people who drive SUVs. But she didn't. It just doesn't make any sense to me.”

I gave her my theory about the banged head, but she
didn't buy it. “There was nothing wrong with her head. She landed on her shoulder.”

“Maybe the Samaritan was imagining things.”

“I don't think so. She'd been following the SUV for quite a while and saw everything very clearly.”

“Maybe she hates SUVs and made up the whole story.”

“She drives an SUV herself. What do you think about that?”

“Maybe she's filled with guilt and self-loathing about driving an SUV and was really trying to purify herself. Did you ask her if she's been reading Dostoyevsky?”

“Slice that onion and be serious. Don't you think it's odd that Abigail Highsmith denies being run off the road?”

“If that's what happened. It could be that she hit the sand as the SUV was passing her. She fell and the Samaritan misinterpreted it as the SUV driving her into the ditch.”

Zee added my sliced onion to her salad bowl and I began to mix up a dressing. “I suppose that's possible,” she said, “but I don't think that's what happened.”

“Why not?”

She stopped working and looked up at me. “Because when I listened to Abigail, I knew she was lying, and when I listened to the Samaritan, I knew she was telling the truth. And so did most of the other staff.”

Cops and doctors and others who deal with people in trouble expect some of them to lie about their problems, and they get pretty good at smelling falsehoods. Freud probably had a theory about such lies and liars, but if he did I never read it.

When I was a cop, I learned that almost anyone would lie when the truth was to his disadvantage. I also met some who habitually lied to me out of a
primeval fear of authority figures. Lies are commonly told to protect loved ones. There was never a murderer who didn't have friends and relatives who would extol his virtues and swear that he was home with them helping a sweet little child with her prayers when in fact he was two miles away cutting someone's throat.

Of course, one of the reasons I understood lies so well is that I lie myself for the same reasons other people do. I ration mine and try to tell them carefully, but I do tell them. My own favorite ploys are to use ambiguity and half-truths as camouflage.

Zee, I knew, was good at recognizing a fib when she heard it.

“You're sure,” I said. It wasn't a question.

“Yes.”

Hmmmmm. I stirred the olive oil, vinegar, and spices together, then capped and shook the bottle. The dressing sloshed and swirled. I uncapped it and sniffed. Delish.

I thought of the world's accepted liars: golfers, fishermen, politicians. Why not bicyclists? I posed this notion to Zee.

“All I can swear to is that nurses never lie,” she lied. “We're the good people.”

“When you take off the white uniform and pick up a rod, your fish stories have raised a skeptical eyebrow or two.”

She sampled the dressing and found it satisfactory. “I don't have a white uniform, and fish stories are supposed to raise skeptical eyebrows.”

True on both counts. Zee wore civvies to work, and fish were expected to grow longer and heavier as they starred in stories.

“Well,” I said, “maybe the truth about the Highsmith bicycle wreck will one day be told. Meanwhile, though,
I believe I'll concentrate my energies on my upcoming golf match.”

She put the salad in the fridge and checked on the marinating bass fillet that I'd soon be grilling. “Carry your own clubs and walk all eighteen holes. That's all I ask. I'll believe whatever you tell me about your score.”

I hadn't told her that when I'd played with Glen the Sunday before, we'd shared a golf cart. “History suggests that it will be 108,” I replied.

“That's a good number,” said Zee, patting me on the shoulder. “I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't stick to it.”

I looked at my watch. Sure enough, somewhere the sun was over the yardarm. “How about a little something up on the balcony while we wait for the kids to come home?”

“You have good ideas, Cornelius. When I'm queen, you may have my bonnet.”

I got the drinks and she got the nibblies and we went up.

“Nice,” she said, looking out over our favorite view.

“Indeed.” Part of me admired the water, the distant boats, and the afternoon sky. At the same time another part of me was thinking it something of a coincidence that Professors Henry and Abigail Highsmith had both experienced violent incidents within a week and that neither had seemed quite rational in his or her reaction.

Maybe the anti-intellectuals of the world were right to maintain that pointy-headed college professors were in fact wackier and dumber than their less erudite critics, and to sneer at them for using hundred-dollar words for ten-cent ideas.

Could be.

After supper, on the kids' last day of school, Zee went off to work the eight-to-four shift, but the rest of us sat down together and celebrated by watching
Tarzan and the Leopard Woman.
It was a smash. The summer was off to a grand start.

“I hear you punched out that damned Henry Highsmith!” said Jasper Jernigan, giving me a firm handshake and a manly grin. “Good for you! I'll punch him myself if he ever crosses me in person! Damned do-gooders like him ruin the world for the rest of us! Damn 'em all, I say!”

I wondered if Henry Highsmith had ever before been thrice damned in a single paragraph.

“Rumors of that encounter have been greatly exaggerated,” I said. “There wasn't any punching out.” I extracted my hand from Jernigan's grip.

Jasper was one of our golfing foursome. I'd never met him before, although I'd read his passionate and often angry letters supporting the island's newest golf course proposal: a plan to build Pin Oaks, a championship course in West Tisbury.

Such golf course plans came up regularly on the Vineyard and were recurring subjects of controversy between the pro– and anti–golf course factions. The latter consisted mostly of conservation organizations, citizens with property near the proposed courses, and individuals such as Henry Highsmith, who were self-proclaimed defenders of open space and simpler lifestyles. The defenders of the proposals consisted of golfers, for whom there could never be too many golf courses, and shrewd financial operators, who saw the island as a potential goose laying golden golf balls. The
impression I'd gotten from Jasper Jernigan's letters was that he was both financial entrepreneur and passionate golfer.

Now, hearing my dismissal of the reports of exchanged blows between me and Henry Highsmith, Jasper said, “Sure,” and gave me a wink and fake punch at my shoulder. Apparently he mistook my arrival at the practice green with Glen Norton as evidence that I shared his own negative views of the anti-golf factions.

I thought briefly of clarifying my position by claiming neutral ground, since I was as sympathetic to both sides of the argument as I was unsympathetic to the pious vitriol of either side's louder voices, but instead I decided to say nothing, hoping to avoid an argument I didn't want to join.

Jasper Jernigan wore green pants and a pink shirt with a popular golfing emblem over its small pocket. The shirt, like mine, had a collar, since Waterwoods held that collarless shirts were, for reasons that eluded me, inappropriate for its players and guests.

Jasper's green cap was adorned with yet another golfing emblem, his bag was full of clubs, and he looked every inch the weekend player. Actually, as I'd learned from Glen Norton when we'd driven together to the course that morning, Jasper played several times a week: mostly in Florida in the winter and on the Vineyard and Nantucket in the summer, but also on famous courses elsewhere, both in America and abroad.

“Jasper is a junkie,” Glen had said. “He lives, breathes, and dreams golf. He was probably putting in his mother's womb, and he's been playing ever since. When he got out of college, he got a job working for a guy who designed golf courses, then he got started designing and building and developing courses on his
own, and he's gotten rich. He's one of the few really happy people I know. He's spent his whole life doing what he wants to do and getting paid for it.”

“His letters to the editor don't sound too happy,” I'd said. “They sound like he'd like to wring Henry Highsmith's neck.”

Glen had nodded. “I doubt if he'd cry if Henry got hit by a truck.”

“That's exactly what happened to Abigail Highsmith,” I said. “Does Jasper drive an SUV?”

Glen hadn't heard that story, so I told it to him. When I was through, he grunted and said, “If Jasper has an SUV, it's probably over on Nantucket, where he lives, but I'd better watch my mouth before I get him in trouble.”

On the putting green I clearly hadn't improved my stroke. The best I could do on long putts was to try to stop my ball within three feet of the hole and hope that I could sink it from there. Three putts were my norm but fours were more common than twos.