When the Bough Breaks (34 page)

“There,” he said, languidly, and pointed to a spot at the south end of the room.

There was an oak card catalog and I found Gretchen Chaplain’s thesis listed in it. The title of her magnum opus had been
Brindamoor Island: Its History and Geography
.

Theses by Frederick Chalmers and O. Winston Chastain were present, but Gretchen’s rightful place between them was unfilled. I checked and doublechecked the Library of Congress number but that was a fruitless ritual: The Brindamoor study was gone.

I went back to Plaid Shirt and had to clear my throat twice before he tore himself away from a piece on Billy Al Bengston.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for a specific thesis and can’t seem to find it.”

“Have you checked the card file to make sure it’s listed?”

“The card’s there but the thesis isn’t.”

“How unfortunate. I would guess it’s been checked out.”

“Could you check for me, please?”

He sighed and took too long to raise himself out of his chair. “What’s the author’s name?”

I gave him all the necessary information and he went behind the checkout counter with an injured look. I followed him.

“Brindamoor Island—dreary place. Why would you want to know about
that?”

“I’m a visiting professor form UCLA and it’s part of my research. I didn’t know an explanation was necessary.”

“Oh, it’s not,” he said, quickly, and buried his nose in a stack of cards. He lifted out a portion of the cards and shuffled them like a Vegas pro. “Here,” he said, “that thesis was checked out six months ago—my, it’s overdue, isn’t it?”

I took the card. Scant attention had been paid to Gretchen’s masterpiece. Prior to its last withdrawal a half year ago, the last time it had been checked out was in 1954, by Gretchen herself. Probably wanted to show it to her kids—Mummy was once quite a scholar, little ones …

“Sometimes we get behind on checking on overdue notices. I’ll get right on this, Professor. Who checked it out last?”

I looked at the signature and told him. As the name left my mouth my brain processed the information. By the time the two words had dissolved I knew my mission wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the island.

24

T
HE FERRY
to Brindamoor Island made its morning trip at seven-thirty.

When the wake-up call from the desk came in at six it found me showered, shaved and tensely bright-eyed. The rain had started again shortly after midnight, pounding the glass walls of the suite. It had roused me for a dreamlike instant during which I was certain I’d heard the sound of cavalry hooves stampeding down the corridor, and had gone back to sleep anyway. Now it continued to come down, the city below awash and out of focus, as if viewed from inside a dirty aquarium.

I dressed in heavy slacks, leather jacket, wool turtleneck, and took along the only raincoat I had: an unlined poplin doublebreasted affair that was fine for Southern California but of uncertain utility in the present surroundings. I caught a quick breakfast of smoked salmon, bagels, juice and coffee and made it to the docks at ten after seven.

I was among the first to queue up at the entrance to the auto bay. The line moved and I drove down a ramp into the womb of the ferry behind a VW bus with Save the Whale stickers on the rear bumper. I obeyed the gesticulations of a crewman dressed in dayglo orange overalls and parked two inches from the slick, white wall of the bay. An ascent of two flights brought me on deck. I walked past a gift shop, tobacconist and snack bar, all closed, and a blackened room furnished wall to wall with video games. A waiter played Pac Man in solitude, devouring dots with brow-furrowing concentration.

I found a seat with a view at the stern, folded my raincoat across my lap and settled back for the one-hour ride.

The ship was virtually empty. My few fellow passengers were young and dressed for work: hired help from the mainland commuting to their assigned posts at the manors of Brindamoor. The return trip, no
doubt, would be filled with commuters of another class: lawyers, bankers, other financial types, on their way to downtown offices and paneled boardrooms.

The ocean pitched and rolled, frothing in response to the surface winds that drag-raced along its surface. There were smaller craft at sea, mostly fishing boats, tugs and scows, and they danced in command, curtsying and dipping. For all the ferry moved it might have been a toy model on a shelf.

A group of six young men in their late teens came aboard and sat down ten feet away. Blond, bearded in varying degrees of shagginess, dressed in rumpled khakis and dirt-grayed jeans, they passed around a thermos full of something that wasn’t coffee, joked, smoked, put their feet up on chairs and emitted a collective guffaw that sounded like a beery laugh track. One of them noticed me and held up the thermos.

“Swig, my man?” he offered.

I smiled and shook my head.

He shrugged, turned away and the party started up again.

The ferry’s horn sounded, the rumble of its engines reverberating through the floorboards, and we started to move.

Halfway through the trip I walked over to where the six young drinkers sat, now slumped. Three of them slept, snoring open-mouthed, one was reading an obscene comic book, and two, including the one who’d offered me the drink, sat smoking, hypnotized by the glowing ends of their cigarettes.

“Excuse me.”

The two smokers looked up. The reader paid no attention.

“Yeah?” The generous one smiled. He was missing half of his front teeth: bad oral hygiene or a quick temper. “Sorry, man, we got no more Campbell’s soup.” He picked up the thermos and shook it. “Ain’t that right, Dougie?”

His companion, a fat boy with drooping mustaches and muttonchop sideburns, laughed and nodded his head.

“Yeah, no more soup. Chicken noodle. Ninety proof.”

From where I was standing the whole bunch of them smelled like a distillery.

“That’s all right. I appreciate the offer. I was just wondering if you could give me some information about Brindamoor.”

Both boys looked puzzled, as if they’d never thought of themselves as having any information to give.

“What do you want to know? Place is a drag,” said Generous.

“Fuckin-A.” Fat Boy nodded assent.

“I’m trying to find a certain house on the island, can’t seem to get hold of a map.”

“That’s ‘cause there ain’t any. People there like to hide from the rest of the world. They got private cops ready to roust you for spittin’ the wrong way. Me ‘n’ Doug and the rest of these jokers go over to do groundswork on the golf course, pickin’ up crap and litter and stuff. Finish the day and head straight back for the boat, man. We want to keep our jobs, we stick to that—exactly.”

“Yeah,” said the fat one. “No shootin’ for the local beaver, no partyin’. Workin’ people been doin’ it for years and years—my dad worked Brindamoor before he got in the union, and I’m just doin’ it until he gets me in. Then, fuck those hermits. He told me they had a song for it, back in those days: Heft and tote, then float on the boat.” He laughed and slapped his buddy on the back.

“What you interested in findin’?” Generous lit another cigarette and placed it in the snaggled gap where his upper incisors should have been.

“The Hickle house.”

“You related to them?” Doug asked. His eyes were the color of the sea, bloodshot and suddenly dull with worry, wondering if I was someone who could turn his words against him.

“No. I’m an architect. Just doing a little sightseeing. I was told the Hickle house would be of interest. Supposed to be the biggest one on the island.”

“Man,” he said, “they’re all big. You could fit my whole fuckin’ neighborhood in one of them.”

“Architect, huh?” Generous’s face brightened with interest. “How much school it take to do that?”

“Five years of college.”

“Forget it,” the fat one kidded him. “You’re an airhead, Harm. You got to learn how to read and write first.”

“Fuck you!” said his friend, good-naturedly. To me: “I worked construction last summer. Architecture’s probly pretty interestin’.”

“It is. I do mostly private houses. Always looking for new ideas.”

“Yeah, hey, right. Gotta keep it interestin’.”

“Aw, man,” chided Dougie. “We don’t do nothing interestin’. Clean up goddam garbage—hell, man, there’s fun going on there at that club, ‘cause last week Matt ‘n’ me found a couple of used rubbers out by hole number eleven—and we’re missin’ it, Harm.”

“I don’t need those people for my fun,” said the generous one. “You want to know about houses, mister, let’s ask Ray.” He turned and leaned across one sleeping boy to elbow the one with the comic book, who’d kept his nose buried in his reading and hadn’t looked up once. When he did, his face had the glazed look of someone very stupid or very stoned.

“Huh?”

“Ray, you dumbshit, man wants to know about the Hickle house.”

The boy blinked, uncomprehending.

“Ray’s been droppin’ too much acid out in the woods. Just can’t seem to shake himself out of it.” Harm grinned, his tonsils visible. “C’mon, man, where’s the Hickle place?”

“Hickle,” Ray said. “My old man used to work there—spooky place he said. Weird. I think it’s on Charlemagne. The old man used to—”

“All right, man.” Harm shoved Ray’s head down and he returned to his comic book. “They got strange names for streets on the island, Mister. Charlemagne, Alexander, Suleiman.”

Conquerors. The little joke of the very rich was evidently lost on those who were its intended butt.

“Charlemagne is an inland road. You go just past the main drag, past the market, a quarter mile—look hard because the street signs are usually covered by trees—and turn, lemme see, turn right, that’s Charlemagne. After that you’d best ask around.”

“Much obliged.” I reached in and pulled out my wallet. “Here’s for your trouble,” I said, taking out a five.

Harm held out his hand—in protest, not collection. “Forget it, mister. We didn’t do nothin’.”

Doug, the fat boy, gave him an angry look and grunted.

“Up yours, Dougie,” said the boy with the missing teeth. “We didn’t do nothin’ for the man’s money.” Despite his unkempt hair and the war zone of a mouth, he had intelligence and a certain dignity. He was the kind of kid I wouldn’t mind having at my side when the going got rough.

“Let me buy you a round, then.”

“Nah,” said Harm. “We can’t drink no more, Mister. Got to hit the course in half an hour. Be slick as snot on a day like this. Bubble Butt here, drink any more, he could fall and bounce down and crush the rest of us.”

“Fuck you, Harm,” said Doug, without heart.

I put the money back. “Thanks much.”

“Think nothin’ of it. You build some houses that don’t need union help, you want reliable construction muscle, remember Harmon Lundquist. I’m in the book.”

“I will.”

Ten minutes before the boat reached shore the island emerged from behind a dressing screen of rain and fog, an oblong, squat, gray chunk of rock. Except for the coiffure of trees that covered most of its outer edges, it could have been Alcatraz.

I went down to the auto bay, got behind the wheel of the Nova and was ready when the man in orange waved us down the ramp. The
scene outside might have been lifted off the streets of London. There were enough black topcoats, black umbrellas, and black hats to fill Piccadilly. Pink hands held briefcases and the morning’s
Wall Street Journal
. Eyes stared straight ahead. Lips set grimly. When the gate at the foot of the gangway opened they moved in procession, each man in his place, every shiny black shoe rising and falling in response to an unseen drummer. A squadron of perfect gentlemen. A gentleman’s brigade …

Just beyond Brindamoor Harbor was a small town square built around an enormous towering elm and rimmed with shops: a bank with smoked glass windows, a brokerage house, three or four expensive looking clothiers with conservatively dressed, faceless mannequins in their windows, a grocer, a butcher, a dry cleaner’s that also housed the local post office, a book store, two restaurants—one French, the other Italian—a gift shop, and a jewelers. All the stores were closed, the streets empty and, except for a flock of pigeons convening under the elm, devoid of life.

I followed Harm’s directions and found Charlemagne Lane with no trouble. A thousand yards out of the square the road narrowed and darkened, shadowed by walls of fern, devil ivy and shrub maple. The green was broken by an occasional gate—wrought iron or redwood, the former usually backed by steel plating. There were no mailboxes on the road, no public display of names. The estates seemed to be spaced several acres apart. A few times I caught a glimpse of the properties behind the gates: lots of rolling lawns, sloping drives paved with brick and stone, the houses imposing and grand—Tudor, Regency, Colonial—the driveways stabling Rolls Royces, Mercedes and Cadillac limousines, as well as their more utilitarian four-wheeled cousins—stationwagons paneled with phony wood, Volvos, compacts. Once or twice I saw gardeners laboring in the rain, their power mowers sputtering and belching.

The road continued for another half-mile, the properties growing larger, the houses set back further from the gates. It came to an abrupt halt at a thicket of cypress. There was no gate, no visible means of entry, just the forestlike growth of thirty-foot trees, and for a moment I thought I’d been misled.

I put on my raincoat, pulled up the collar and got out. The ground was thick with pine needles and wet leaves. I walked to the thicket and peered through the branches. Twenty feet ahead, almost totally hidden by the overgrowth of tangled limbs and dripping vegetation, was a short stone pathway leading to a wooden gate. The trees had been planted to block the entry; from the size of them they were at least twenty years old. Discounting the possibility that someone had
taken the trouble to transplant a score of full grown cypress to the site, I decided it had been a long time since the normal human business of living had taken place here.

I pushed my way to the gate and tried it. Nailed shut. I took a good look at it—two slabs of tongued-and-grooved redwood hinged to brick posts. The posts connected to chain link fencing piled high with thorny spirals. No sign of electricity or barbed wire. I found a foothold on a wet rock, slipped a couple of times and finally managed to scale the gate.