Vineyard Chill (14 page)

“Well, I have my father's old double-barreled Browning but you'll be getting a Remington pump that'll hold three shells. Massachusetts, in its wisdom, believes that limiting the size of the magazine makes civilization safer.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “Three should be more than enough. I don't plan on shooting anybody. The gun will be just like a pacifier. It'll make me feel loved.”

“As another sign of love, I'll follow you to Ted's place.”

“No need, but okay.”

He got into the Bronco and drove to Ted's barn, where he parked in back, out of sight.

I turned around and drove home. I didn't see any yellow convertibles of any make.

I fed Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, answered their questions about where I'd been and what I'd been doing, then got out my own Remington 12-gauge pump and a couple of boxes of shells and took the weapon and ammo to John Skye's house. No need, I thought, to insert one of John's weapons into the game we were playing; I'd use my own.

At John's house I put the gun and ammunition in Clay's bedroom closet, then drove to the Edgartown library, where, since it was March and not July, I found a convenient parking place on North Water Street. Bonzo was on my mind. I needed to help him, and the library was a good place to start.

I'm very fond of libraries because they're full of books and are run by people who are smart, who like their work, and who, unlike many public employees, welcome customers. Our family computer can produce all sorts of information, but a library has charm and warmth, two characteristics the computer lacks. Besides, I wanted information I couldn't get, or at least couldn't find, on the computer, being an antigeek with regard to both talent and temperament, to say nothing of my age. Already my ten-year-old son, Joshua, could run computer rings around me, and his little sister, Diana, was not far behind. Both of them, however, were in school that day, so to the library I had come.

Amelia Samson was at the desk. “What can I do for you, J.W.?” she asked.

“A year ago a woman named Nadine Gibson disappeared from Oak Bluffs. There was some newspaper coverage of the case. I'd like to see the local papers from that period.”

“Oh,” she said. “The radio says they've found her body. I remember the original stories. For a few days she was news, but then she wasn't anymore. I guess the police decided there wasn't any reason to pursue it further at the time. Now they will.”

“Yes.”

“It's not like that Brazilian man who disappeared. His roommate cleaned out his bank account and went back to Brazil. The police are still interested in the roommate even though they've never found the body of the missing man.”

I nodded. It was a recent case, but since the United States had no extradition treaty with Brazil and since there was no body, the chances were that the crime, if there was one, would never be officially solved and the perp would live happily ever after.

“Anyway,” said Amelia, “we have old copies of the
Gazette
and the
Times
on microfilm. Do you know how to use our machines?”

“I think I can figure them out.”

I could and did. Sharing the front pages with reports of a March snowstorm were stories of the missing woman. They were brief since no crime had ever been proved and no body had ever turned up. Still, they contained information I'd forgotten, some part of which had been gained from local people who knew her. The
Gazette
reporter was wise enough to include her sources in her story.

Nadine Gibson was twenty-two years old, five seven, and about one hundred twenty pounds. She was considered pretty and personable, and was notable for her long, strawberry red hair. She had lived for a while in the Boston area, had attended Tufts University for a time, and had come to the island the summer before her disappearance, along with several thousand other young people about her age, looking for work. She'd first found a job waitressing in a restaurant where the tips were good and then, after the summer ended and the restaurant closed, had found a winter job bartending and waitressing in the Fireside, where she was a favorite of the mostly male customers who were the regulars there. Her boss liked her and said she was a good, dependable worker.

She had a boyfriend by then, a Harvard student who aspired to be the next Howard Roark and who was taking a year off from his studies to work as an apprentice in a Vineyard Haven architect's office. The two young people lived together in a year-round rental at the west end of the Camp Meeting Grounds, not far from Dukes County Avenue.

She and the boyfriend had a spat and broke up before she disappeared, and the boy had packed his bag and gone home to Newton to lick his wounds. When Nadine disappeared, naturally he was high up on the list of suspects but had a perfect alibi: his sympathetic mother, who was glad to have him free of the grasp of the redheaded bartender, had flown with him to Scottsdale for two weeks so his heart could mend while he visited Taliesin West and other notable architectural sites of interest between rounds of golf with Mom.

A woman neighbor in the Camp Meeting Grounds who was friendly with Nadine had noticed that after the snowstorm there were no footprints leading from the girl's house and, after a couple of days, had inquired at the Fireside and learned that she'd missed work for those days. Alarmed, the neighbor had contacted the police, and not much later, Nadine had officially become a missing person.

She'd last been seen leaving the Fireside after closing hours. She'd been in good spirits and was presumably planning on walking home through the narrow, winding Victorian streets of the Camp Meeting Grounds to her own little gingerbread cottage at the far end. It was her habit to do that, and no one gave it a thought.

And, at the time the stories were written, no one had seen her since.

The police had gotten her landlord to open the door of her house, wherein their most suspicious finding was what seemed to be most of her clothes and goods. No signs of foul play were seen.

The Oak Bluffs police had contacted the Newton police, who had gone to the boy's house and learned from his father that the boy had gone out west several days before and wouldn't be home for several more. The OBPD had then tracked down Nadine's family, using her employment forms as a guide, and learned that they lived in Rhode Island and thought their daughter was still on the island but, because she had an independent streak and didn't always keep them informed about her travels, couldn't guess where she might be now.

The police had gone up and down Circuit Avenue and through the Camp Meeting Grounds asking if anyone knew anything, but no one admitted to seeing the woman that night or had useful information. The owner and employees of the Fireside similarly knew nothing. The girl with the strawberry hair had walked into the March night and had disappeared.

Until now.

I sat back in my chair and thought about what I'd read. I wanted to see the police reports but didn't think I could get my hands on them since the case was now officially open and I didn't have a friend in the department who might be persuaded to slip them to me for a few minutes unofficially.

That left the reporters who had written the stories and who certainly had learned more than had appeared in print. The reporter for the
Gazette
was someone I knew pretty well, although not as well nowadays as I had before I'd met Zee. Susan Bancroft and I had been an item for a while long ago and, though a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then and both of us were now married to other people, we were still friends.

I got up and walked out of the library. As I passed Amelia Samson, she asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Some of it. Thanks.”

Too lazy to walk to the
Gazette
office, I drove there and parked on Summer Street just beyond Davis. Two parking spots right where I wanted them in a single day. It must be winter on Martha's Vineyard.

Susan was at her desk, which was piled with papers stacked around her computer. She stopped pecking at the keys when I appeared.

“We've got to stop meeting like this,” I said. “People will start to talk. How can you find anything in this mess?”

“It may look like chaos to you, but everything is in perfect order. And who cares if people talk?”

“Not me,” I said. “It might be good for my reputation, in fact. I'm becoming known as a hopeless, stay-at-home fuddy-duddy. The bartenders all over the island have forgotten my name.”

“That's what you get for being married and having kids. It happened to me, too; it happens to us all. What brings you here to the inner sanctum of the fourth estate?”

“Information. You heard about finding that red-haired body up in Oak Bluffs?”

Her antennae went up immediately. “The presumed remains of the Gibson girl? I've heard. I've also heard that your friend Bonzo is a prime suspect. Do you know anything about that?”

“A little, but I want to know more.”

She pointed at a chair piled with papers. “Put that stuff on the floor and sit down. You must think I know something you don't. I'll trade you what I have for what you've got, which is…what?”

I sat down. “I just came from the library, where I read last year's accounts of the search for the girl. I want to know what you know that didn't get into the stories.”

“You're in luck. I've been going over that material myself as background for the story I'm writing this week. Before we get into that, though, what have you got for me?”

Ever the reporter looking for an edge on her rival writers. But I wanted her information, so I told her about the call from Bonzo's mother and about what had happened after that. As I talked, she scribbled notes the old-fashioned way. When I was done, she said, “You're pretty sure it was Nadine Gibson's hair in that bird's nest?”

“The lab will determine that, but I'd say it's a pretty sure thing. Not many people have hair like that.”

“And you don't think your pal Bonzo had anything to do with her disappearance?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Mrs. Capone probably had a high opinion of little Alphonse, too.”

“A lot of people say that she did, but she was wrong; I'm right. Now it's your turn. When you were covering the disappearance last year, did you learn anything that didn't get into your stories?”

She dug under some papers and brought out a spiral notebook. She flipped it open and scanned a page or two. “These are my notes. I got a lot of stuff that didn't turn out to be relevant. You always get that, because you can't be sure until later what was important, so you collect the chaff with the wheat. What do you want to know? Or do you even know what you want to know?”

“Who was the neighbor who called the cops?”

“An elderly woman who'd gotten friendly with Nadine. If you think she's a suspect, think again. She's about eighty years old.”

“Was she nosy? Did she see anything suspicious?”

“Not a thing. At least nothing she told me. Her house is full of books and she said she reads a lot. I believe her. She didn't strike me as the type with her face in the window keeping track of her neighbors, but she did notice that there seemed to be no one home at Nadine's house.”

“Did you interview the landlord? What was his name? What was he like? What did he say when you talked with him?”

“You think he did the girl in? I doubt it. He's a guy in his sixties, the grandfatherly type, but not too old to give women the eye, even me; name's Gordon Brown, lives with his wife a couple of houses away from the one the Gibson girl and her boyfriend were renting. Been there for years. Member of the Camp Meeting Association, I think. Used to be a plumber.”

“What's he look like?”

“Not Charles Atlas, if that's what you mean. Going bald, average height and weight, bit of a potbelly. You'd never look at him if you passed him on the street.”

“Any criminal record?”

“Not that I know of. If the cops knew of one, it wasn't important enough for them to ask him more than a few questions: When did he last see the girl? Did he hear anything when she and the boy had their spat? That sort of thing.”

“Did you talk with the boy?”

“No. He never came back to the island.”

“Did you phone his parents?”

“Yes. I talked with his father. He told me his wife and son had gone out to Arizona shortly after the boy had come home and that they were still there.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I talked with a guy on the OBPD who told me that they'd called Scottsdale and the story checked out. The boy and his mother really were there and had definitely been there since their arrival. No quick trips back to the island.”

“What was the spat about?”

“Who knows? There was no one for me to ask. The boy and girl were both gone.”

“People knew they'd had an argument and that he'd left the island. That means she talked about it to somebody. Who?”

She looked at her notes. “She mentioned it to the bartender and to some of the other help. The bartender asked if she planned to leave the island, too, and she said no.”

“That must have made people wonder what happened to her.”

“You'd think so,” said Susan, “but young people can change their minds in a hurry, so nobody thought of foul play until later.”

“She tell the bartender what the fight was about?”

“He said she told him they were just tired of each other.”

“Do you think there was another man in her life?”

“She was twenty-two and beautiful, so it would be a surprise if there wasn't at least a wannabe beau or two.”