Murder With Puffins

Chapter 15

The Agony and the Puffin

Okay, we allowed ourselves a brief distraction from the original purpose of our visit to the garden shed. But--call me unromantic if you like--there are limits to how successfully I can be overcome with passion when I'm sopping wet and shivering in an unheated shed that I'm half-convinced won't survive the next strong wind.

"I hate to spoil the moment," I said, "but could you move a little to the left? There's a croquet mallet digging into my kidney."

"If I move to the left, I'll probably drown; the leaks are much worse over there."

"Sorry," I said.

"So much for my hopes that we'd found a hideaway suitable for romantic trysts," Michael said, shoving aside several life jackets and a lobster pot to clear a space for us to sit on a stack of old magazines in the driest part of the shed. "You wanted to talk about something? Or was that just an excuse to get me alone?"

"No, there was something. Here," I said, handing him the map as I perched beside him. He turned on his flashlight and peered down at the paper.

"Your dad's map of the island," he said. "Does this mean you've got some idea where he is?"

"Unfortunately, no."

"Then what's the big deal?"

I took a deep breath.

"I found it down on the shore. Near where we found Resnick's body."

"Damn," Michael said. He closed his eyes and leaned against the side of the shed. "The police will find this very suspicious."

"The police!" I said, startled. "We can't give this to the police!"

"Meg, we can't not give it to them," Michael said, sitting up again. "That would be concealing evidence."

"Evidence that would make my dad the primary suspect in Resnick's murder. You saw how Jeb and Mamie reacted when they heard Dad had disappeared. For some stupid reason, everyone thinks Dad has some kind of grudge against Resnick because he used to date Mother fifty years ago, before she even met Dad. You heard them. The map will clinch it."

"That doesn't give us the right to conceal evidence. You do realize that, don't you?"

I sat staring at him. I felt betrayed. I'd trusted Michael with something that could hurt Dad, and here he was threatening to squeal to the authorities.

"Meg," Michael said, gently taking my hand. "I don't believe he did it any more than you do. But you have to see that we can't help him by concealing evidence. I mean, for all we know, that map could be what the police need to find and convict the real killer."

I sighed. I didn't like it. I didn't know the local police, wasn't sure I trusted them to find the real killer. But much as I hated the idea, I had to admit he was right.

"Okay," I said. "We'll turn in the map. But to the police, when they get here. Not to Constable Jeb or Mayor Mamie or anyone else on the island when Resnick was killed."

"That's sensible enough," he said.

"Which gives us a day or two to find the real killer," I said.

"You know, you're more like your dad than you want to admit," he said, grinning. "Never pass up a chance to play detective, right?"

"Michael, this is serious," I said. "We've all heard about cases where the police find a likely suspect and don't look any further. We can't let that happen to Dad."

"Of course not," he said. "Though I'm curious how we're going to find the killer in the middle of a hurricane. Not to mention--well, never mind."

I suspected I knew what he hadn't said: that right now, finding Dad--alive--was more important than proving his innocence.

"I'll keep this safe for now," Michael said, folding the map and taking out his wallet.

"Don't trust me not to destroy it?" I said.

"I wasn't thinking that at all," he said. "But you can't keep carrying it around in your pocket; it'll turn to mush. And we can't just leave it lying around where someone could get hold of it prematurely, and, unlike your purse, my wallet almost never leaves my body."

"Well, that makes sense," I said, slightly mollified by his tone.

"Shall we go back in?" Michael asked. "Much as I'd enjoy being alone with you under other circumstances, this shed's getting colder by the minute. And damper," he added as a large drop of water splattered his nose.

"Hang on a second," I said, opening up my knapsack. "As long as I'm confessing to my crimes against humanity, I may as well make a clean breast of it. I found an envelope in Resnick's yard after we put his body in the shed--tripped over it, actually. It didn't seem wet enough to have been there long, and I wondered if it fell out of his jacket while we were moving him."

"Let's have a look at it, then," Michael said.

I pulled out the envelope and we both pointed our flashlights at it. It was an ordinary nine-by-twelve brown clasp envelope, with no markings on the outside. Inside we found an inch-thick sheaf of papers held together with a giant binder clip as well as a smaller Tyvek envelope.

The top sheet of the papers held a title, centered, in all caps: VICTOR S. RESNICK: UNHERALDED GENIUS OF THE DOWN EAST COAST. A BIOGRAPHY. By James Jackson.

"Wonder who James Jackson is," Michael said, flipping to the next page.

"I don't know, but the Tyvek envelope is addressed to him," I said. "In care of General Delivery at the Rockport Post Office."

"My God, listen to this," Michael said. " 'In this tome will be related the story of a great man whose genius has gone largely unappreciated in our century, a century in which the degradation of artistic taste has led to the exaltation of lesser artistic talents and those whose talents lie less in art than in publicity and the pursuit of notoriety, while alone, at the head of a small contingent of artists who still adhere to the tradition of representational art and the tenets of artistic quality that have prevailed, until now, since the Renaissance, Victor Resnick holds back the bulwark against the barbarians of popular culture and the deliberate obfuscations of an outworn academic community; unsung, unheralded, unappreciated, in recent years largely neglected, Victor Resnick nevertheless--' Arg!"

"Was that really all one sentence?" I asked.

"No, only about a third of one," Michael said. "I'm not sure which is worse, James's writing or his blatant toadying."

"I'll give you odds this is the authorized biography," I said.

"Definitely authorized," Michael said. "Our friend Victor has begun making some rather pungent comments on the first couple of pages. 'Small contingent of artists' used to be 'small contingent of artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.' Jamie boy might have crossed out the names himself, but only Resnick would scrawl 'Stupid! Don't mention those clowns!' Speaking of odds, I'll give you odds no one ever publishes it unless Jamie boy does a lot of rewrites."

"Looks like he already has," I said. "We've got draft seven, according to the footer. Oh my God!"

"What's wrong?"

"Jackson's got a time/date stamp in the footer--he printed this yesterday at six p.m. The ferry had stopped running by that time. He's on the island!"

"Lucky him, then; not every biographer gets a ringside seat at his subject's murder."

"We've got to find him."

"Why?" Michael asked. "To give him our editorial comments?"

"He's Resnick's biographer; he must know everything about bis life," I said. "He'll know better than anyone who might have it in for Resnick."

"We've already decided that's a long list."

"Well, Jamie boy can tell us who's at the head of it. For that matter, we can probably get some ideas from the biography."

"Of course to do that, we'll have to read it," Michael said.

We both stared down at the manuscript in Michael's lap. I flipped over a page. Someone--Resnick, I suspected--had crossed out a paragraph with such violence that his red pen had torn the paper, and he had scrawled, "No, no, no!!!" in the margin.

"My sentiments precisely," Michael said.

"You know, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that James Jackson is a suspect, too," I said.

"He's lucky he wasn't the victim," Michael grumbled. "Writing this badly ought to be a capital offense."

"Maybe Resnick finally realized that the guy can't write and so decided to fire him, or unauthorize him, or whatever you'd call it when you stop cooperating with a biographer.

And Jackson saw his years of hard work go down the drain, and he lashed out and killed Resnick."

"We'll keep it in mind," Michael said. "Meanwhile, I guess we should start reading. I'm sure it's no worse than some of my students' papers."

I read over Michael's shoulder for the first twenty or thirty pages. Okay, I confess, I skimmed a lot. When you chucked out the excess verbiage--was the man paid by the word, or only by the adverb?--and untangled the convoluted sentences, Resnick's story was really pretty simple. He'd grown up in a small midwestern town, a sensitive, misunderstood child, the butt of every bully and jester in town, until the day he first picked up a pencil and began to draw. At which point, to judge from James Jackson's account, the earth trembled, comets were seen in the skies, three-headed calves were born, and wise men came from the east bearing gifts in the form of a scholarship to study art at the Boston Conservatory. By the time we reached the detailed description of the physical ailments that had kept him, despite his intense patriotism, from serving in World War II, my head was spinning.

"I need a break," I said. "I think I'll see what's in Jamie boy's mail."

"It's a federal offense to open mail!" Michael protested.

"Well, I know that," I said, in exasperation. "It's already opened, and I've never heard it was a federal offense to read stuff that people leave lying around in their yards. So there."

"Sorry," he said. "Must be the demoralizing effect of Jamie boy's prose. Carry on."

I opened the envelope, to find another sheaf of papers--slimmer, fortunately, and not written by James Jackson. The first sheet was a cover letter to Jackson from a Boston private investigation firm, dated a few weeks earlier, stating that the information he had requested was enclosed and that if he required any other assistance, he should contact them.

I turned to the next sheet. A list of names, all with birth dates and some with dates of death. Some of them were people I knew--Mary Ann ("Mamie") Dawes (Benton). Elspeth ("Binkie") Grayson (Burnham). Lucinda Hart Dickerman. Others sounded vaguely familiar. Old island names, many of them. All women, born between 1925 and 1940. Some were crossed out in bright red ink. Others had question marks or checks beside their names. No clue what the list was for.

I finished scanning the first page and flipped to the second, shorter page. Along with the crossed-out, checked, and question-marked names, one was circled heavily in bright red pen: Margaret Hollingworth (Langslow).

What the devil was this list, and why was Mother on it, so prominently singled out?

I went on to the rest of the papers. A series of reports from the detective agency on the whereabouts of the women on the list during their teenage years.

How odd.

I scanned the reports, fascinated. Binkie had gone from a posh boarding school to an equally posh women's college, and from there to Harvard Law School. Not what James Jackson wanted, apparently; he'd crossed her name out on the main list. Several other names had similar histories--summer people, I noticed; their lives contrasted starkly with those of the year-round island residents, many of whom were married and had had several children by the time their wealthier counterparts graduated from whichever of the Seven Sisters they'd chosen.

I came across Mother's sheet, finally, and double-checked it. The private investigator had his facts correct, as far as I knew. Right address, and the dates she'd stayed on Monhegan seemed consistent with what Mother always related of her vacations on the island. High school and college data correct. And in the center of the report, the beginning and end dates of the two years she'd spent in Paris, living with Aunt Amelia, attending a French school, taking art and music lessons, and achieving a level of poise and sophistication I knew, even as a toddler, I'd never match.

I had sometimes wondered how different Mother's life (and mine) would be if when she was fifteen Grandfather hadn't finally given in to her pleas to see Paris. If instead he had, for instance, sent her to stay for a few months on Cousin Bathsheba's farm, learning to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That first trip to France was undoubtedly the watershed event in Mother's life.

So why had the private detective circled it in red? And printed five little exclamation points after it?

And why had the biographer clipped a Polaroid of Mother to the back of the page--the present-day Mother, stepping off the Monhegan ferry, wearing a scarf I'd given her three months ago?

I had a bad feeling about this.

"Michael," I said.

"Mmm?" he replied absently. I glanced up. He was lost in the manuscript.

"The biographer's style must be improving," I said.

"What's that?" he said, looking up with obvious reluctance.

"What's so fascinating? I thought it was a lousy book."

"Oh, it is! The writing anyway; but the contents--You've got to hear this. Wait a second; let me get back to the beginning of this chapter."

He flipped back several pages and began reading.

"'It was at this formative stage of his life that young Victor Resnick underwent an experience, the impact of which would last for the rest of his life, an experience that, while producing no outward change in his demeanor or his countenance, would nevertheless affect the sensitive young artist in the most profound and permanent fashion imaginable. Who could have predicted this event, at once so joyous and so tragic? Who can calculate the import this occurrence would present upon his life and art? Who can possibly discern…' Well, you get the idea. It goes on like that for about another page and then Jamie boy finally gets around to dropping a few actual facts. Apparently, young Victor fell in love."

"Don't tell me; I know what's coming. She told him to get lost."

"No, apparently the attraction was mutual."

"That's a little hard to buy."

"According to this, young Victor was quite a hunk and a rising star of the art world to boot."

"According to the biographer, who we already decided was telling Resnick's decidedly one-sided version of events."

"Well, I suppose," Michael said, running his finger down the page. "Here we go: 'She saw beneath his gruff exterior the sensitive artist whose soul had been blighted by calumny and neglect; she alone appreciated not only the force of his artistic genius but also the inner light that he had previously shown only through his brushes, and, bravely scorning the rigid strictures of her upbringing, daringly risking the calumnies and slings and arrows of outraged society that would be flung at her if discovered, she at last surrendered to their mutual passion.'"

"Ick," I said. "So she slept with him. I suppose there's someone for everyone, even Victor Resnick."

"And no matter what the boomers may think, sex wasn't invented with the pill. Anyway, we now have several pages about the progress of the affair, a little light on concrete details, but heavy with descriptions of things heaving and throbbing--the sort of stuff that might be mildly titillating if better written."

"Let me see that," I said, looking over his shoulder.

"Be my guest," Michael said. "And if you should find any of it inspirational…"

"You can forget the rerun of the From Here to Eternity surf scene," I said as I scanned the text. "It's vastly overrated, even on a tropical beach."

"You know this from experience?"

"I know this from common sense," I said. "And do you have any idea how rocky the Monhegan beach is, not to mention the subarctic temperature of the water?"

"So we won't be doing Burt and Debbie this trip?"

"More to the point, I doubt Victor Resnick and his lady love ever did."

"We take this passage with a grain of salt, then. Want to bet the writer learned his--or, more likely, her--trade writing romances?"

"No--most romances are far better written. And most romance writers have a better grasp of reality; that, for example, is anatomically impossible," I said, pointing to one particularly florid paragraph.

"Are you sure?" Michael said, quirking one eyebrow.

"Positive, as I'll happily demonstrate later. He's obviously unreliable about the details--probably embroidered them over the years. This only tells us that some poor woman had the bad taste to sleep with Resnick, and he remembers her fondly, perhaps because that kind of thing was a rare event in his life. And then she came to her senses and broke his heart, or, more likely, dented his ego."

"It's a bit more than that," Michael said. "According to this, she was underage."

"Well, I'm not surprised," I said, fishing out my Gatorade and opening the bottle. "No woman old enough to have any sense could possibly fall for him. How underage?"

"Fifteen. Just barely."

"He's scum."

"Resnick was twenty-five," Michael added.

"Pond scum."

"And her parents forced them to part, then packed her off to Paris to get over her broken heart. And then--Meg, are you all right?"

"I'm fine; you can stop pounding my back," I said, wheezing, once I'd finally cleared enough Gatorade from my windpipe to speak.

"You're not fine; I can tell," Michael said. "What's wrong?"

I handed him the detective's reports and sat back to cough a little more while he scanned them.

"Oh, damn," he said when he got to Mother's sheaf.

"He thinks Mother was Victor Resnick's secret love."

"Obviously," Michael murmured. He picked up the biography again and nipped over a few pages, frowning.

"It's ridiculous," I fumed.

Michael didn't say anything, and his eyes remained ostentatiously glued to the manuscript "Okay, it's not ridiculous; it sounds plausible enough. I certainly don't believe it, but people would if they heard it and as long as Victor Resnick was alive, or even if he died of natural causes, the odds are no one would ever publish this travesty. But with his murder, they're going to want to drag all the skeletons out of his closet."

"Including a few that just might belong to your family."

We sat there for a few minutes, with me staring at the wall, trying to absorb what I'd read, while Michael continued to read the manuscript.

"Oh, bloody hell," he said suddenly.

"What's wrong?"

"Here," he said, handing me the manuscript and indicating a paragraph with his finger. "Read this."

I tried, but between the biographer's tangled grammar and his overly florid style, I couldn't make heads or tails out of the passage. Something flowery about a token of love, lost many years ago, that Resnick had sought ever since.

"I don't get it," I said. "What's this token thing anyway? Some kind of locket or something?"

"Sorry," Michael said. "It's a little hard to follow out of context. Back up and start reading a couple of pages sooner."

"I'd rather not," I said. "Since you've already suffered through it, why don't you give me the gist?"

"Okay," Michael said. "The biographer thinks Resnick fathered a child with his underage girlfriend. And she went to Paris to conceal her pregnancy."

"Impossible," I said.

"Impossible how?" Michael asked.

I knew what he meant. Impossible for Resnick to have fathered a child with his girlfriend? No. These things happened, even circa 1950. But impossible for the girlfriend to be Mother? Yes, if you asked me. I remembered all the tales Mother told of her years in Paris--the art and music lessons, the exhibitions, the galleries, the fashion shows, the opera, the ballet, the midnight meals in bistros, the flirtations in cafes. How could even Mother talk so blithely of that time if she'd spent the first nine months of it waiting out an unwanted pregnancy?

"I still don't believe it," I said. "But if he publishes that damned book, someone will believe it. Think of the embarrassment."

"Oh, I don't know," Michael said, the corners of his mouth twitching. "I'm not sure your Mother wouldn't like a wild unsubstantiated rumor that in her youth she was the mistress of a famous artist."

"She'd eat it up," I agreed. "But Dad would be mortified. And the cops would have yet another reason for suspecting him of Resnick's murder."

"True," Michael said. "Look, it's freezing out here; can't we finish reading this inside?"

"What if someone sees it!" I protested.

"I'll pretend it's a master's thesis from one of my students," Michael said. "I won't let anybody else read it, and I'll hide it in my suitcase, under the dirty socks, where no one would want to touch it even if they found it."

"Oh, all right," I said, smiling in spite of myself. "I have to admit, I'm not sure I can take much more of this cold."

And is Dad out in this cold? I wondered as we walked back to the house. Or has he hung on to his knapsack, with the chemical hand warmer and the body heat-conserving blanket? Is he curled up warm and dry somewhere? Is he…

No, I'd worry about that tomorrow.

When we arrived back in the living room, Rob had disappeared. Michael settled down with the manuscript. I picked up the photo albums and leafed through them until I found the pages that showed Mother and the young Victor Resnick, and brooded over the smiling black-and-white images.

Mrs. Fenniman appeared occasionally with plates of food, sighed when she saw our third helpings of everything were untouched, and clomped back out into the kitchen without speaking.

Suddenly, a shower of plaster rained down on our heads. I looked up, to see a large muddy Reebok protruding from the ceiling.

"Oh damn," came Rob's voice from beyond the Reebok.

"Rob? Are you all right?"

The Reebok wiggled slightly, dislodging more plaster. I adjusted my plate to make sure my unwanted coleslaw got its fair share of debris.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Do you need any help?" Michael called.

"No, I'm fine," Rob answered.

The Reebok gyrated wildly for a few seconds, then dropped down another six inches and was joined by its mate.

"Actually, I guess I could use a little help after all," Rob said.

Michael and I abandoned our plates, grabbed our flashlights, and climbed upstairs, where, at the end of the hallway, the trapdoor in the ceiling gaped open and a small rickety ladder led up into the attic.

The attic didn't have a floor, just a rolling meadow of fluffy pink insulation crisscrossed by the two-by-fours that formed the rafters. Here and there, large flat pieces of plywood placed across the rafters formed storage spaces for boxes and trunks. None of them anywhere near the ladder, unfortunately. Evidently, Rob had stepped on a piece of plywood too light to hold his weight. Both feet disappeared into a rough-edged hole in the plywood, while he lay sprawled backward on the pink insulation.

"I see you found the jigsaw puzzles," I remarked. Several cardboard puzzle boxes lay nearby, and Rob lay half-covered by the brightly colored pieces of several enormous puzzles.

"I was looking for something to do," Rob said. "I saw the puzzles up here when I fetched the photo albums."

"You're lucky you didn't fall through," Michael said. "You're in the part of the attic over the living room. It'd be a long way down."

Rob shuddered.

"What's going on up there?" came Mrs. Fenniman's voice.

We extricated Rob from the plywood, helped him back to the trapdoor, and watched as he limped away to be patched up and cosseted by Mrs. Fenniman. Michael was about to follow him, but he turned to see why I wasn't coming.

"I'll be down in a little bit," I said.

"You've found something?" Michael asked eagerly.

"No, but it occurs to me that there's an awful lot of old junk in the attic besides the photo albums," I said. "I'm just going to poke around for a while and see what turns up."

"I'll go down and guard the manuscript," Michael said.

Nothing much turned up in the first dozen boxes I opened. Actually, I'd have found some of the stuff fascinating at another time. Vintage clothes, trinkets, and souvenirs of bygone eras. More photos, this time in boxes. Even letters and diaries. A collection of taxidermy, including a stuffed squirrel wearing a jeweled collar and a wolverine in a Groucho Marx nose and a neon Hawaiian-print shirt. Fascinating stuff, really. But most of it more than fifty years old and none of it relevant. At the bottom of the last box I found about a dozen faded brown manila file folders, tied in a packet with some string. I was struggling to untie the knot when I suddenly heard a commotion down in the main part of the house.

Now what? I thought, tucking the file folders under my arm and carefully walking along the rafters to the trapdoor. I heard Mother's voice wailing.

"I don't believe you; she's lost, too!"

I stuck my head down out of the trapdoor. Mother stood at the edge of the upper hallway, one hand clutching the railing, the other pressed to her forehead, and her eyes raised heavenward. Vintage Sarah Bernhardt.

"How could you let her do it, Michael?" she asked mournfully. "How can you sit there when Meg is out there in the storm, frantically searching for her father?"

"Because I'm not out there in the storm, Mother," I said. "I'm up here in the attic."

Mother turned, looked at me, and blinked.

"Well, what are you doing in the attic?" she asked in an aggravated tone. "Why aren't you doing something useful? Looking for your father, for example?"

I could see her working up to another dramatic scene, and I was tired of the game. I'd been calm, patient, and reassuring the last million times she'd popped out of her room. So by way of a change, while she continued to wail about poor Dad out in the storm, I stuck the folders under my arm, climbed down the ladder, and went downstairs, where I stepped over a pile of croquet mallets, dodged around an upended picnic table, and jerked open the front door.

A gust of wind burst in, carrying with it a half-crushed lobster pot, sending Rob's papers flying like giant snow-flakes, knocking flowerpots and other breakable objects onto the floor, and spraying showers of rain halfway, across the room.

"Damn it, Meg, close that door!" Rob shouted, snatching at his notes. Mrs. Fenniman and Michael tried to grab as many breakable objects as they could and hold them down. Mother simply sighed and limped back into her room.

Having presumably made my point about the impossibility of searching for Dad in the middle of a hurricane, I stuck the folders under the umbrella stand, got a better grip on the door, and began forcing it closed. But suddenly, I suddenly noticed something outside.

There was a body on the porch.