Indian Pipes (4 page)

Victoria was silent.

Hiram repeated himself. “Just that one word, ‘Sibyl.’ “

“Do you know anyone named Sibyl?” Victoria asked.

“I don’t. Do you?”

Victoria shook her head. “It’s not a common name. That was what the ancient Romans and Greeks called their oracles—Sibyl. Go to the police, Hiram.”

“I’ll go to the police when we find something concrete that will clear me.”

Victoria felt a presence behind her and turned to look out the window. A dark form skirted around the side of the house. “We’ve got a caller,” she said.

Hiram, too, looked. The visitor, dressed entirely in black, had ducked into the entry. Hiram stood abruptly. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you around five this afternoon. I have something else I have to tell you.” He slipped out through the rarely used east door rather than the usual entry door to the west.

“What’s his problem?” Elizabeth muttered.

There was a rap on the door that Hiram hadn’t used, the door opened, and a figure stepped inside.

Victoria leaned forward and saw a tall man wearing a black muscle shirt and black jeans. He had a huge black beard and a wild mop of curly hair with a bent osprey feather protruding from it as if from an untidy nest. His eyes were dark irises floating in red-rimmed white seas. His feet were bare and dirty.

Victoria got up from her chair with a broad smile.

He greeted her, his right hand lifted.

“Dojan!” Victoria went toward him. “You’re back!”

C
HAPTER
4

While Dojan and Victoria were standing in the doorway discussing the torments of his life in the nation’s capital, Joe Hanover, the plumber, was making a U-turn in front of Alley’s store. He parked his pickup truck under the dying elm across the road. It was almost lunchtime.

“Stay here, Taffy. Good girl.” Joe ruffled the hair of his golden retriever and slammed the door shut. Taffy rested her head on the window frame, her mouth open. Joe waited for an old red Volvo to pass, and crossed to the store.

The gang was on the front porch under the overhanging roof. Donald Schwartz sat on the bench next to Sarah Germaine. Lincoln Sibert leaned against the storefront, moving his shoulders back and forth, scratching his back.

“What’s up, Sarah?” Joe shifted the wad of Red Man in his mouth, and spit discreetly off to one side, where customers usually didn’t step.

Donald sat with his hands on the knees of jeans that were blotched with fiberglass resin from the boatyard. “She wasn’t going to tell us until you got here.”

Joe lifted his once-tan baseball cap, scratched his head, and settled the cap back again. Printed across the front was
DRAINS R US.

Sarah wrinkled her nose. She had a part-time job at Tribal Headquarters and was still dressed in her working clothes—black slacks and bright blue T-shirt imprinted with a portrait of a chieftain wearing a feathered bonnet.

“That ain’t no Wampanoag.” Joe pointed his thumb at Sarah’s chest.

Sarah looked down.

Lincoln moved his shoulders against the storefront. “It’s not polite to point at a girl’s boobies,” he said.

“Woman’s,” Sarah corrected automatically.

“Okay, okay, don’t keep us in suspense.” Donald turned his head so he could look at Sarah’s Indian chief.

“They voted for the casino?” Joe asked.

“Nope.” Sarah shook her head.

“They found Jube Burkhardt’s car,” said Lincoln.

“Nope.” Sarah smirked.

“I’m gettin’ me a cuppa coffee.” Joe reached for the handle on the screen door. “This shit is making me thirsty. Anyone else?”

“Dojan’s back,” Sarah said abruptly, and folded her arms over the Indian’s jutting chin. The feathered headdress lifted with her breathing.

“No shit!” Joe dropped his hand from the screen door, stepped back, and turned toward her.

“I thought they buried him in some Indian agency in D.C.,” said Lincoln. “Rumor was he killed some guy.”

Joe laughed. “Island rumors are as good as gospel.”

A motorcycle went past the store followed by a second and a third.

“All
right!”
said Joe. “Some fancy bikes.”

“We’re gonna have to put up with that for the next week.” Donald indicated the passing motorcycles.

Sarah put her hands over her ears. The bikes roared by. The first, a bright metallic purplish-blue, was driven by a biker wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with a grinning skull on the back. The two following bikes were black with shiny exhaust pipes that ran almost their entire lengths.

“Can’t hear yourself think.” Donald shook his head as if to clear the noise out of his ears.

“You know what those bikes were?” Lincoln’s voice had a touch of awe.

“Harley-Davidson,” said Joe. “Can’t miss ‘em.”

“The first was a Harley. The other two were Indian Chiefs. Antiques, probably ‘47 or ‘48.”

“Yeah?” Joe squinted at the receding bikes. “When’s the rally begin?”

“Not until this weekend, but a bunch of them arrived early.” Lincoln moved back against the shingles.

“The rally’s giving a lot of money to Island charities.” Sarah looked around at the other three.

“I’ll believe it when I see it.” Donald shifted in his seat and crossed his legs. “Where are they staying at?”

“All over the place,” Lincoln said. “Place I caretake, they already have half a dozen tents set up in the field.”

“How come Dojan’s back?” Lincoln asked Sarah.

“Peter Little called him in Washington, had him drop everything to fly here.”

“What was the hurry?” Joe put his hands in his pockets, bent his knees, thrust his pelvis forward, and rocked back and forth from his toes to his heels.

Sarah shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Peter sent for him?” Donald asked.

“Chief Hawkbill told Peter to call Dojan,” Sarah said.

“What did what’s-her-name say about all that?” Joe rocked up and down, toes to heels.

“Patience VanDyke? What could she say? She’s not about to go against the chief.”

“If I was her, I wouldn’t trust that slime,” Joe said.

“You mean Peter Little?” asked Lincoln.

“He’s after her job, believe you me,” Joe said.

“Well, I wouldn’t trust
her,
neither,” Donald said. “All she cares about is money, money, money.” He rubbed his thumb and third finger together. “ ‘Poor, indigent tribe!’ she says, ‘poor me, all I can afford is this old pickup truck,’ and all the time she’s buying another half-million-dollar property.”

“What’s she got now, three parcels?” Joe asked.

Sarah nodded.

“All up-Island?”

Sarah nodded again.

“When did Dojan get here?” Lincoln asked.

“Yesterday. He hitchhiked from the MV airport.”

Joe grinned. “They didn’t send a limo for him?”

“He land on-Island before that engineer got himself killed?” Donald asked.

Sarah nodded.

“Wasn’t no accident. Someone gave him a shove.” Joe looked from Lincoln to Donald to Sarah. “So Dojan the killer flies in from D.C. and—bingo—the tribe gets rid of a little bitty nuisance. Pretty convenient timing, I’d say.”

“How long will you be here, Dojan?” Victoria asked the tall, shaggy man. Dojan and she were still standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the cookroom.

He shrugged, and the broken feather bobbed up and down.

“I understand you’re doing a good job,” said Victoria.

“Come on in, Dojan,” Elizabeth said. “My grandmother’s tired of standing up.”

“Ah!” said Dojan.

Elizabeth led them back to the cookroom, and Victoria sat in her usual chair.

“I wear shoes,” said Dojan, when he’d seated himself. “And a suit.”

Victoria looked thoughtfully at the Wampanoag. “You won’t have to stay there much longer. Another two years?”

“I should be setting lobster traps now.” He grinned suddenly. “With your help, my friend.”

Victoria smiled. “I’ll be ready. Two years will go quickly. I hear you’re living on a boat on the Potomac River?”

“A plastic houseboat,” Dojan said with disgust. “At a yacht club. On the Washington Channel, a backwater.”

Elizabeth laughed. “You mean, it’s not saltwater.”

“That’s better than living in a high-rise apartment building with an elevator,” said Victoria.

“Are you here because of all the casino talk?” Elizabeth asked.

“Chief Hawkbill told me to come.”

“Did you get back before that man was killed?”

“Killed?” said Dojan.

“They say he fell from the top of the cliffs,” said Elizabeth.

“Who was it?”

“Jube Burkhardt,” said Victoria. “Did you know him?”

Dojan opened his eyes wide, and his dark irises seemed to float in bloodshot white.

Victoria changed the subject. “Are you staying on your own boat while you’re here?”

Dojan nodded, and without another word, got up from the table, walked silently to the door, and slipped out.

“He’s weird,” said Elizabeth, after he’d left.

“Don’t underestimate Dojan. He’s different, but he’s not stupid.” Victoria looked at her watch. “We’d better get going, if we hope to do our errands.”

“I feel sorry for him,” Victoria said, after they’d put the top down on the convertible and were on their way to Vineyard Haven.

“I suppose the tribe is paying his yacht club fees and dockage?” Elizabeth said. “Not bad.”

Victoria frowned. “Washington is Chief Hawkbill’s idea of punishment.”

“Did Dojan really kill that man?”

Victoria nodded.

“That’s why he was so prickly when I mentioned Jube Burkhardt getting himself killed. I guess if it weren’t for the chief, Dojan would be in prison?”

“If it weren’t for Chief Hawkbill, Dojan wouldn’t have been punished at all,” said Victoria.

“Because of the tribe’s sovereign nation immunity?”

“Exactly.”

Elizabeth steered around the sharp turn by the cemetery, and the yellow ribbons on Victoria’s straw hat fluttered around her face.

“Dojan looks awfully pale,” said Elizabeth. They were on the straight road that went past the new Ag Hall.

Victoria smiled. “Now we can read the inscriptions on his tattoos.”

They stopped in North Tisbury and bought sandwiches and clam chowder. Victoria held the paper bag in her lap while Elizabeth drove through the late summer traffic, down the hill into Vineyard Haven, where they came to a standstill at the end of a line of cars.

“Hey, Mrs. Trumbull!” A teenager crossed the street between Elizabeth’s convertible and the car in front, his baseball cap on backward, his jeans drooping around his feet, the braces on his teeth sparkling in the sunlight. He slapped the hood. “Pretty sporty car.”

“Hello, Jed,” Victoria said. “Looks as if you’ll get there before we do, wherever you’re going.”

“It’s August.” Jed dodged among the shoppers who were ambling along Main Street and disappeared up Center Street.

On the outskirts of town, four or five blocks and ten minutes later, they turned down the steep hill to Owen Park, and carried their lunch to a bench overlooking the harbor.

Below them the ferry from Woods Hole rounded the jetty, entered the harbor, and moved into its slip. Partway around the harbor, just this side of Packer’s wharf, was a high-tech vessel shaped like a gargantuan grapefruit seed.

“Look at the way that deck slopes,” said Elizabeth. “No one can possibly stand on it.”

Two broad stripes ran from bow to stern, the lower one turquoise, the one above it lime green.

Victoria studied the vessel. “It must be speedy.”

“Fifty knots.” Elizabeth shaded her eyes with her hand. “Who wants to go that fast in a boat?”

The vessel’s name,
Pequot,
was spelled out in three-foot-high letters that slanted backward to add to the illusion of speed.

Victoria opened her container of chowder and spooned it up as she spoke. “Do you know who owns the boat?”

“That casino in Connecticut.”

“Pequot
was an Indian word for ‘destroyer.’ “

“Destroyer as vessel, or as wrecking people’s lives,” Elizabeth said. “I wonder if they know how apt that is?”

“A bit of gambling can be fun,” Victoria said. “I wouldn’t mind taking a ride to Connecticut at fifty knots, visiting the casino, and winning some money.”

Elizabeth shook her head.

The captain of the casino ferry, wearing a dazzling white uniform, greeted passengers. Gold stripes on his shoulder boards glittered in the noon sunlight.

“Isn’t that Patience VanDyke?” Victoria pointed to a large woman in a purple muumuu who was walking sedately up the gangplank.

“It’s hard to tell from here.” Elizabeth studied the passengers. “The man behind her looks like Chief Hawkbill.”

“And Peter Little,” said Victoria, tugging down the brim of her hat to shade her eyes from the glare off the water. “Practically the entire tribal council.”

“Is that Hiram behind the rest?”

Victoria tilted her head. “I don’t think so. Hiram didn’t mention anything this morning about a boat ride. In fact, he said he’d call me around five.” She looked at her watch. “I want to be sure to be home by then.”

“I suppose the tribal council is checking out the casino,” said Elizabeth. “What’s Hiram calling about?”

“He started to say something before he left suddenly.”

“When Dojan showed up. What’s Hiram got against Dojan?”

“I have no idea,” said Victoria.

The woman in purple reappeared and moved back down the gangplank. “There’s Patience again,” said Elizabeth. “With Peter Little right behind her. Guess those two aren’t going after all.”

As they finished lunch, the
Pequot
slid away from the dock, slowly rounded the jetty, then lifted partway out of the water on what looked like skis.

In the harbor, children buzzed around in an outboard motorboat, trailing a long wake. A boy dived off the dock in front of them and swam out to an anchored sailboat. The
Pequot
rounded West Chop and disappeared from sight.

As they were leaving their picnic spot, a stream of cars debarked from the three-thirty ferry. Elizabeth took the back road past the waterworks to avoid traffic. They crossed the town line into West Tisbury.