The Paperwhite Narcissus Read online

  “Welcome on board,” said Fieldstone. “What better name for a boating golfer?” She took his hand and clambered gracefully over the transom.

  “I’ll stow your gear below,” Fieldstone said. “Did you have any problem getting away?”

  “I’ll never understand that man,” she said, after they’d climbed down the ladder and were below decks. “The world revolves around him. I could run naked down Main Street and he wouldn’t notice.”

  “A lot of other people would,” said Fieldstone, holding out his arms to her.

  She snuggled against him. “And you?” Her voice was muffled in his shirt. “What did you tell Audrey?”

  “The truth. That I was going out for the weekend with a fishing buddy. She’s in Boston.”

  “I like that. ‘Fishing buddy.”’ She laughed. “Was I supposed to bring worms?”

  “For this weekend, I have high-tech lures.”

  She broke away from him with another laugh. “I’ll help with lines, or will you handle lines and let me run your boat?”

  “I’ll take her out of the harbor. Then you can steer.”

  “I can run your boat as well as you can.”

  Fieldstone put an arm around her again. “Probably better. But I want to take her out.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He laid a chart book on the navigation table. She looked over his shoulder as he paged through the charts. He glanced at her. “How about Block Island?”

  She held her hair away from her face as she leaned over. “Can we get there and back in three days?”

  “We’ll see how far we get.” He left the chart book open on the table and went above to the wheelhouse, where he started up the engines, one after the other. The diesels cut in with a rumble.

  She undid the stern lines and the spring lines from the boat, flipped them neatly onto the dock, hung the bow lines on the pilings with the boat hook, turned and saluted him. “Lines off, Captain.”

  While Fieldstone and his fishing buddy were leaving the Oak Bluffs harbor, Candy Keene, who’d just moved into her new house in West Tisbury, pranced into Town Hall in a haze of perfume. She confronted Mrs. Danvers, the town secretary.

  Candy Keene, who was pleasingly plump and a well-preserved forty-something, had bright blond hair permed in a way that had to have been done off Island. She was wearing high-heeled boots and jeans faded in an oddly unnatural way with a pale starburst that drew attention to her crotch.

  Mrs. Danvers looked up from her computer screen, her mouth drawn down. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Miss Keene, and I’d like to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

  “I know who you are.” Mrs. Danvers stood, a tall, reed-thin woman. She examined Candy Keene from her boots to her jeans to her hair, and then to her carefully made-up face. “I’m the one in charge,” she said.

  “How do I file a complaint?”

  Mrs. Danvers paused before she answered. “It depends on the complaint. A dog attacking your chickens goes to the animal control officer. Oysters and clams to the shellfish warden. Bad smells to the health department.” She sniffed, then opened a desk drawer and extracted a form. “Fill this out. I’ll see that it gets to the right person. Exactly what is your complaint?”

  “I want that gas station out of there. We don’t need a gas station in a residential area. Right next door to me.”

  Mrs. Danvers folded her arms over her chest and stared, her eyes magnified by her glasses. “That gas station has been there for seventy-five years. Before then it was a blacksmith shop catering to horses. Same family. Same idea.” She handed the form to Candy Keene, who stuffed it into her purse but didn’t move.

  Mrs. Danvers looked down at her. “Is there something else?”

  “Somebody’s shooting in the field next to me.”

  Mrs. Danvers sat down again and turned to her computer. “That goes to the chief of police, Mary Kathleen O’Neill.”

  “A woman?”

  “A chief of police,” Mrs. Danvers replied. “She’s at the police station. Will that be all?”

  Candy Keene shrugged, swiveled on her heels, and headed for the door. She checked her face in the glass door panel, wiped lipstick from the corner of her mouth with the little finger of her right hand, opened the door, and went down the brick steps to the paved area in front of the building.

  As she started across the road, a car slowed to let her pass, then turned into the gas station. She made a face at the back of the car and scowled at the man who was pumping gas. He lifted his hand to her with a smile, but she thought she detected a wiggle of his middle finger.

  She was not going to walk to the police station in these boots. She got into her BMW, drove the quarter-mile to the tiny station house on the other side of Mill Pond, and parked in the oyster shell area in front.

  Casey, which was what everyone in town called Chief O’Neill, was typing something into her computer when Candy entered. Casey turned away from her work and lifted her coppery hair away from the collar of her uniform shirt. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you the police chief?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Casey. “And you’re Ms. Keene, aren’t you?”

  “Miss Keene. Someone’s shooting in that field next to my house.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We know about that. A father and son. They’ve got permission from the landowner, they’re shooting into an approved target, and they’re the required distance from any dwelling.”

  Candy stepped closer to Casey’s desk and pounded a soft fist on the desktop. “I want you to put a stop to that shooting. I don’t feel safe.”

  “Won’t you sit down?” Casey indicated the wooden chair where her deputy usually sat. Candy looked at the chair and wiped the seat with her handkerchief before she sat down.

  Casey hid her smile with a slight cough.

  “It’s outrageous to have gunmen right in the middle of town like that.”

  “You’re entitled to file a formal complaint if you’d like.” Casey opened a desk drawer.

  “Formal, schmormal. All I’m getting in this supposedly friendly town is a runaround,” Candy said. “I moved here for peace and quiet. Now I find I’m living next to a shooting gallery.”

  Casey took a blank form out of the drawer. “I understand your concern. But I’ve checked out the father and his son. They practice for only an hour, two at most, on Thursday afternoons after school.”

  “Give me that form, then.” Candy snatched the paper out of Casey’s hand, filled in the blanks quickly, and tossed it on the desk. Each i was dotted with a circle.

  “If I don’t get action, you’ll hear from me.”

  “I’m sure I will,” said Casey.

  CHAPTER 3

  The phone was ringing the next morning when Victoria came into the house from her garden, her arms full of purple iris and pink peonies. She dropped the flowers into the sink, and left her secateurs on the table. The caller was Colley.

  “Very funny, Victoria.”

  Victoria brushed the dirt off the knees of her gray corduroy trousers and sat down in her chair in the cookroom, the small room next to the kitchen. “What are you talking about now, Colley?”

  “Your clever little obituary.”

  “What obituary?”

  “You needn’t play dumb with me, Victoria. It doesn’t become you.”

  “Colley Jameson, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Get yourself in here and I’ll show you,” and with that Colley slammed down the phone.

  Victoria arranged her flowers in the two amber glass vases on the parlor mantelpiece, emptied the compost bucket onto the compost heap, and straightened up the kitchen. She scribbled a note for her granddaughter Elizabeth, who was at work, gathered up her cloth bag and walking stick, and went around to the front of the house where she stood by the road, intending to hitchhike into Edgartown. The bus came along first and stopped for her. The driver was a man from church whose name she could never reme
mber.

  “Mornin’, Miz Trumbull. Nice day. Going to the paper?”

  She nodded. She was about to drop four quarters into the coin box, but the driver held his hand over the slot. “Over sixty, you ride free. You’re over sixty, right?”

  Victoria smiled weakly at the intended compliment, thanked the driver, who was quite an elderly man, and sat up front, where she could imagine she was driving.

  “I hear you saved the editor’s neck the other day. Almost got chewed up by the press, did he?”

  “News travels fast,” said Victoria.

  “Can’t keep a secret on this island.”

  Victoria was the only passenger until they reached the youth hostel, about a half-mile from her house. Two young women lifted their rental bicycles onto the bike rack on the front of the bus, climbed on board, and sat behind the driver, across the aisle from Victoria. They unfolded a map and she could hear them discuss the best bike routes.

  She leaned over to them. “Is this your first time on the Island?”

  “This is the first time we’ve stayed overnight. We live in Hyannis,” the dark-haired girl closest to her said. “We’re here looking for summer jobs.”

  “The restaurants need a lot of summer help,” said Victoria.

  “We were hoping to, like, find work on a newspaper or magazine,” the dark-haired girl continued. “I want to be a writer, and she,” pointing to the blonde next to her, “wants to get into advertising.”

  Victoria thought for a moment before she decided to tell them about the Enquirer. “The editor often uses summer interns,” she said. “In fact, I’m going to the paper now to talk with him. He doesn’t pay much.”

  “Actually, we mostly want the experience.”

  The other girl, the blonde, said, “We just need enough to, like, pay for a place to stay.”

  Victoria nodded.

  The bus followed the straight-as-an-arrow West Tisbury-Edgartown Road that Wampanoag Indians had established as a trail long ago. Every couple of miles, the road dipped into one of the valleys that drained into the Great Ponds lining the south shore.

  The bus driver slowed at the outskirts of Edgartown and turned right onto Main Street. He spoke over his shoulder. “You girls watch yourselves around Colley Jameson.” He pulled the bus over to the side, got out, and helped unload the bicycles. “Here you are, ladies. Take care, now.”

  The three of them walked the block and a half to the Enquirer, the girls wheeling their bicycles along the brick sidewalk beside Victoria. They leaned the bikes against the picket fence, releasing a sprinkling of rose petals, and went into the building with her.

  Victoria told Faith that the girls were looking for jobs, and the receptionist gave them forms to fill out. “You can sit at the desk in the other room. Mr. Jameson will be with you after he meets with Mrs. Trumbull.”

  Victoria went upstairs, past the reporters, and into Colley’s office. He beckoned her to the seat in front of his desk.

  “What obituary are you talking about, Colley?” Victoria demanded.

  He shifted some papers from under the beach stone and pulled out a letter typed on heavy cream-colored deckle-edge paper. He flipped it across the desk. “You want to explain this?”

  Victoria picked up the letter. A neatly drawn black border framed the text.

  She looked from the paper to Colley. “This is the obituary you called me about?”

  “You know damned well it’s the obituary.”

  Victoria glanced at it. The text began: “The body of Colley Jameson, fifty-five, editor of the Island Enquirer and well know bon vivant, was found by a reporter last night, hanging by his school tie from a beam in the newspaper’s morgue …” Victoria laughed. “So, I’ve been writing my column for fifty-five years, not forty-nine.” She set the obituary back on Colley’s desk. “Shaving a few years off your age, Colley?”

  “Very funny, Victoria.” He pointed at the letter. “I suppose you thought that would alarm me?”

  “Alarm you? What are you talking about? Surely you don’t think I wrote that. Is this why you called me in?”

  “Same kind of notepaper you use.”

  “Everybody on this Island uses deckle-edge paper for condolences and thank-you notes.”

  “Typed?” said Colley. “You’re the only person on this Island who still uses a typewriter.”

  Victoria pursed her lips. “I’d never use my typewriter for a social note. When did you get the letter?”

  “In this morning’s mail.”

  Victoria folded her arms over her chest. “Have you shown the letter to the police?”

  “An obituary isn’t a threat.”

  Victoria reached across the desk and picked up the letter. “It’s either a threat or a bizarre practical joke. Who’s upset with you? Besides me, that is.”

  Colley took the letter and slapped the back of his hand against it. “You didn’t write this?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You called me in here just to accuse me of writing that note?”

  “I couldn’t imagine anyone else,” Colley said.

  “We might have settled this over the phone. I had nothing to do with it.” Victoria rose from her chair. “What do you intend to do now?”

  “Nothing,” said Colley. “Bill me for your carfare.” He slung the obituary into his wastepaper basket.

  “May I?” Victoria reached over and reclaimed it.

  “Suit yourself.” He added, “You will anyway.”

  Victoria tucked the cream-colored note into her cloth bag, left the editor’s office, marched between the reporters’ desks, and headed down the narrow stairs.

  The two girls, both fresh and pretty and awfully young looking, stood as she went by the receptionist’s desk.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Trumbull,” the dark-haired one said. “Keep your fingers crossed for us.”

  Victoria smiled.

  She caught the bus returning to West Tisbury and got the same driver. He waited until she was seated. “I hear somebody’s been sending Jameson his own obituaries, is that right?”

  “Good heavens! How did you hear that?”

  “It’s in the air,” said the driver. “You want off at your place or at the West Tiz police station?”

  “The police station,” said Victoria, settling back into her seat.

  The bus driver leaned forward and looked up through the windshield. “Looks like we might be in for some weather.”

  Victoria hadn’t noticed the thunderheads that had been building up while she was at the Enquirer. From her seat in the front of the bus she could see the flat anvil tops of the clouds spreading rapidly. Lightning flickered.

  By the time the bus stopped in front of the police station, the wind had picked up. Victoria climbed the steps to the front door and pushed it open. She set aside her walking stick and sat down in the chair Candy Keene had vacated the day before. Victoria unzipped her light jacket, the silky bombardier’s jacket her niece had given her, and fanned herself with the sides.

  “The seat is nice and clean,” Casey said. When Victoria looked puzzled, Casey laughed. “Candy Keene—Miss Candy Keene—needed to dust your chair with her lace hanky before she would sit down.”

  “You know who Candy Keene is, don’t you?”

  Casey nodded. “She bought the Captain Rotch house and has the whole town in an uproar because of the renovation.”

  “Renovation!” Victoria stopped fanning herself. “She tore the house down and built that monstrosity in its place.”

  “She left one wall of the old place,” said Casey. “That makes it a restoration. She claimed the house was in pretty bad shape.”

  “That house was a classic eighteenth-century sea captain’s house. Historic.”

  “Seems like the trend these days.” Casey leaned her elbows on her desk. “Everybody wants four bathrooms and a sauna.”

  “Did you know she’s one of Colley Jameson’s ex-wives?”

  Casey sat up straight and took her elbows off t
he desk. “The Enquirer Jameson? He was married to her? She doesn’t seem his type. The present Mrs. Jameson is classy.”

  “Calpurnia is wife number five.” Victoria settled back in the chair. “His first wife was his college sweetheart. That lasted about five years until he met Candy, who was an ecdysiast in a New Jersey nightclub.”

  “A what?”

  “Ecdysiast. A stripper. Ecdysis is what snakes do when they shed their skins.”

  “How do you learn this stuff, Victoria?”

  “I’ve been around,” Victoria said, fanning herself again. “H. L. Mencken came up with the term ‘ecdysiast’ in the 1940s to describe striptease artists. But that’s not why I’m here.” She handed Casey the obituary she’d retrieved from Colley’s wastebasket. “Colley got this in the mail today.”

  Casey examined the note. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “He thought I’d written it,” said Victoria, sitting forward. “It looks to me like a threat.”

  “It’s not.” Casey flicked her fingers against the note. “This may be somebody’s idea of a joke, but it’s not a threat in the legal sense. He got his tie caught in the press and someone’s making a joke out of it.”

  Victoria sat forward. “It’s not a joke. It’s a threat.”

  Casey sighed. “Even if it were a threat, Jameson lives in Edgartown, not West Tisbury. The Edgartown police have jurisdiction, not me.”

  Victoria retrieved the note and got to her feet. “I see I’m wasting my time here, too.”

  “Where are you going?” Casey pushed herself away from her desk.

  Victoria zipped up her jacket. “To see William Botts.”

  “What does William Botts have to do with this?”

  “He’s the editor of the West Tisbury Grackle, of course.”

  Casey looked confused. “The what?”

  “West Tisbury’s newspaper. A competitor to the Island Enquirer .”

  Casey laughed. “Oh, that.”

  “I wouldn’t dismiss the Grackle, if I were you,” Victoria said stiffly, as she headed for the door.

  “Wait,” said Casey, getting up from her chair. “I’ll drive you there. It’s about to rain and I need to check on something out that way.”