Even the Wicked Read online

  “Yes, darling,” he said. “It makes me very sad.” He clutched her to him suddenly, holding her fiercely, feeling fresh pain, squeezing his eyes shut tightly. She drew away from him slowly and then looked into his face with the wide-open candor of a very young child.

  “Why did we come here, Daddy?” she asked.

  And because there was honesty on her face and in her eyes, and because he had never lied to his daughter in the short nine years of her life, he held her eyes with his own and whispered, “Because I think your mommy was murdered, Penny.”

  3

  The red-and-black car pulled into the parking area while Zach was making lunch. It carried a Massachusetts license plate, the first three digits of which were 750. He did not know at the time that the 750 digits were given to year-round residents of the island that year. Nor was there anything about the man who stepped from the car which could have identified him as a native. He was tall and blond, and he moved with lithe familiarity toward the house. Watching from the kitchen window, Zach saw the man glance at the Plymouth, rub a hand across his chin, and then start for the house.

  He stopped just outside the kitchen door. He didn’t knock. He put his face close to the mesh of the screen and said, “Hi.”

  “Hello,” Zach answered.

  “You Zach Blake?”

  “Yes.”

  The man opened the screen door and stepped into the kitchen. “I’m Pete Rambley,” he said.

  The way Rambley walked into the house without being invited annoyed Zach. He looked more closely at the man. There was a trace of a smile on Rambley’s mouth, a touch of sardonic humor in his blue eyes.

  “What’s on your mind?” Zach asked.

  “Your rental.”

  “What about it?”

  “Seems to be a little confusion down at the Dubrows. Shame Carol ain’t here because she’d clear it up in a minute. Anne’s got no head for business.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Rambley stared at him, the blue eyes still mildly amused. “I’m afraid we rented this house to somebody else, Mr. Blake.”

  “I’m afraid I heard this story before,” Zach said.

  “Mmm, well maybe you didn’t listen too close the first time around.”

  Zach put down the skillet he was holding and turned from the stove. “Meaning?” he said.

  “Meaning I think you’ll have to get out, Mr. Blake.”

  Zach did not answer for a moment. Then he said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I paid for this house and—”

  “But you didn’t, Mr. Blake.”

  “I wired $500 to Mrs. Dubrow yesterday morning. Even if they’d sent it by carrier pigeon, it’d have got here by now.”

  “We didn’t get any money, Mr. Blake.”

  “Then call Western Union. It’s probably been waiting there since—”

  “I already did.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Zach said flatly.

  Rambley shrugged. “Call them yourself. You got a phone here?”

  “I don’t have to call them,” Zach said. “I know I sent the money. Suppose you just get out of my kitchen, Mr. Rambley.”

  Rambley planted his feet wide and clenched his fists, as if he were preparing for a battle. Then, calmly, he said, “I guess I’ll have to get the police.”

  “I guess so,” Zach said tightly.

  “Nice meeting you, Mr. Blake,” Rambley said, and he walked out of the house. Zach watched him start the car, back around, and drive up the road, a cloud of dust swelling up behind the vehicle. He waited until both dust and automobile had vanished. Then he went to the telephone and dialed the operator.

  “Get me Western Union,” he said.

  He waited.

  “Western Union,” a voice said briskly.

  “My name is Zachary Blake,” he said. “I wired $500 from New York yesterday morning to Mrs. Carol Dubrow in Chilmark. Can you tell me whether or not that money was claimed?”

  “Yesterday morning, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “One moment, please.” Zach waited. The voice came back. “Yes, sir. Mrs. Dubrow collected on that wire late yesterday afternoon.”

  “Mrs. Dubrow herself?” Zach asked.

  “I don’t know her personally, sir,” the woman said. “But whoever collected was required to show identification.”

  “Thank you,” Zach said. He hung up and went to the back porch. Penny had already collected two dozen shells from the beach and was arranging them on the wooden desk like British infantrymen.

  “Want some lunch, honey?” he asked.

  “I’m starved,” Penny said. “How do you like my army?”

  “Little girls shouldn’t think of armies,” Zach said.

  “Girls are braver than boys, didn’t you know that, Dad?”

  “I hope they’re hungrier, too,” he said. “Scrambled eggs coming up in five minutes. I’ve got to make a phone call first.”

  “Okay,” Penny said, and she went back to arranging her shells.

  He went through the house and into the pantry off the kitchen. The telephone rested on a shelf there. He drew a stool up to the shelf and then opened his wallet and took out the letter.

  The letter had been mailed from the island four days previously. It had been sent by air, and had been addressed to him at Resignac Broadcasting in New York. He had not received it until yesterday morning. He had dialed information, and then placed a call immediately to the sender, a woman named Evelyn Cloud. Her voice on the telephone had bordered on the narrow edge of terror. She refused to discuss the letter. She refused to discuss Mary. She would not tell him anything except face to face. He told her he would come to the island instantly, and then he phoned Mrs. Dubrow and arranged for the rental of the Fielding house.

  He had deliberately chosen the house he and Mary had shared the summer before. He had deliberately chosen it because Evelyn Cloud’s letter had reopened a closed issue—and if there were any truth at all to her words, perhaps the Fielding house would serve as the logical base of operations.

  He spread the letter open on the shelf and read it again. It had been written in a hurried, uncertain scrawl.

  Gay Head, July 10

  Dear Mr. Blake,

  My conscience can not be still no longer.

  Your wife Mary did not drown accident.

  Evelyn Cloud

  He read the words once more, and then again. And then he flipped over the letter to where he’d written the woman’s number when he’d got it from Information in New York. Hastily, he dialed.

  “Hello?” It was the voice of a young boy, and Zach felt momentary annoyance.

  “May I please speak to Evelyn Cloud?” he said.

  “Who’s this?” the boy asked.

  “Zachary Blake.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want Evelyn Cloud.”

  “That’s my mother,” the boy said. “Why do you want her?”

  “Would you call her to the phone, please?”

  “She’s getting ready to go out on the boat.”

  “Well, get her before she leaves,” Zach said.

  “Just a second.”

  Zach waited. The pantry was small and hot. Impatiently, he drummed on the shelf.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Cloud?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Zachary Blake.”

  “Who?”

  “Zachary Blake.”

  “I don’t know you, Mr. Blake,” the woman said.

  “You sent me a letter,” Zach answered. “I spoke to you on the phone yesterday, remember?”

  “I didn’t send you no letter. I didn’t talk to you.”

  “Mrs. Cloud, it’s about my wife Mary. You said—”

  “I don’t know your wife Mary,” the woman said.

  “But you wrote me—”

  “I don’t know how to write,” the woman said.

  “What is it?” Zach asked. “What are you afraid of?”

  “
I ain’t afraid of nothing. I don’t know you, Mr. Blake.”

  “Can’t you talk? Is someone there with you?”

  “Just my son. I don’t know you, Mr. Blake.”

  “Do you want money? Is that it?”

  “I don’t want nothing.”

  “I’m coming to Gay Head, Mrs. Cloud. Right now. I’ve got to—”

  “Don’t come. I’m going out on the boat. I won’t be here.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “I don’t know you, Mr. Blake. Good-by,” she said, and she hung up.

  “Mrs. Cloud, wait a—”

  The line was dead. He hung up and tried the number again. He got a busy signal. Either Evelyn Cloud was talking to someone else, or she’d taken the receiver off the cradle. He slammed down the phone, looked up Cloud in the local directory, and found a listing for John Cloud in Gay Head.

  He went out to the back porch then and said, “Come on, Penny.”

  Penny saw his eyes and did not question his sudden command. She scrambled to her feet, took his hand, and left her scattered shells on the porch.

  4

  It was almost impossible, Zach discovered, to find a house on the island without specific directions concerning its location. He should have remembered that from the previous summer when invitations for cocktails were accompanied by the most elaborate back-road instructions.

  He drove into Gay Head on the South Road, passing Turnaround Hill and the painters looking over their easels to the gray-shrouded view of Quitsa and Menemsha Ponds. He passed Clam Point Cove, and then the Gay Head town line, and then he began stopping at every mailbox on the highway. He could not find one for John Cloud.

  When he reached the Gay Head lighthouse and the colored clay cliffs dropping to the sea at the end of the island, he didn’t know where to go next. He parked the car and started up the steep incline to the cliffs. Penny held his hand tightly. Two old Indians were sitting behind their counters of souvenirs. One, a white-haired man wearing khaki trousers, a sports shirt, and a feather in a band around his head, smiled at Penny.

  “Are you an Indian?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “A real Indian?”

  “An Algonquin,” the man said, smiling.

  At the next counter, the second Indian sat with his arms folded across his chest. A sign Scotch-taped to the counter read:

  YOU NO PAY 50¢

  YOU NO TAKE PICTURE.

  Zach took his chances with the first Indian.

  “Good afternoon,” he said.

  The Indian smiled. “Souvenir of Gay Head, sir?” he asked.

  “How much is the tomahawk?” Zach said.

  “One dollar,” the Indian answered.

  “Do you want a tomahawk, Penny?”

  “Is it a real tomahawk?” Penny asked.

  “Made by Gay Head Indians,” the man said.

  “I’ll take it,” Zach said. He hefted the tomahawk from the counter. A heavy flat stone, gaily painted, served as its striking head. A piece of wood had been split to form a handle for the stone which was lashed tightly to the wood. “Don’t hit anybody with that,” Zach said, and he handed it to Penny and paid the Indian.

  “Thank you, sir,” the Indian said.

  “I’m trying to locate somebody in Gay Head,” Zach said. “How do I go about it?”

  “Ask,” the Indian said.

  “Her name’s Evelyn Cloud.” The Indian nodded. “Do you know her?”

  “Yes. She’s an Indian.”

  “Where do I find her?” Zach asked.

  “Go back the way you came,” the man said. “You’ll pass a yellow mailbox about a half-mile up the road. Take the next dirt road after that. John Cloud’s house is at the end of that road.” The Indian paused. “He may not be there now. He’s a swordfisherman. It’s calm today, good for swordfish. He may be out in the boat.”

  “I’m not looking for him. I’m looking for Evelyn Cloud.”

  The Indian shrugged. “She goes with him sometimes. Sometimes the boy goes, too. Little Johnny.”

  “Thank you,” Zach said.

  “Thank you, sir,” the Indian answered.

  At the next counter, the Indian with his no-pay sign looked at Zach stoically. Penny noticed the look and said, “Well, we haven’t even got a camera, you know!”

  She whipped her ponytail saucily, and then went down to the car.

  They passed the yellow mailbox and turned off onto the next dirt road. The sand had rutted itself into two tracks on either side of a grass-and-rock mound which scraped at the low-slung bottom of the Plymouth. Driving slowly, certain the entrails of the car were being ripped out piece by piece, Zach continued up the hill. At last he saw a smear of gray showing through the pines and scrub oak. The smear lengthened into the gable of a house, and then the house itself as Zach wheeled around a curve and came into a clearing.

  He pulled up the hand brake and opened the door on his side of the car. The gray gauze of the sky was tearing off to reveal patches of blue. It was going to be a nice day, after all.

  “Can I come with you, Daddy?” Penny asked.

  “All right,” he said.

  He waited for her to climb out of the car, and then they started up towards the house together. The front porch of the gray structure was covered with paint cans, brushes, and flat stones of varying sizes and shapes, each painted brightly with would-be Indian symbols and left on the porch to dry. Penny made the connection between the stones and the tomahawk in her hand instantly.

  “Was it made here?” she asked.

  “Probably,” Zach said. He knocked on the screen door. There was no answer. “Mrs. Cloud,” he called. He knocked again, and then tried the door. It was locked. “Do you have a nail file in your purse?” he asked Penny.

  “I think so,” she said. He waited while, womanlike, she dug into the contents of her small purse. She handed him the file in its blue leather case, and he stuck the narrow sliver of metal into the crack where door met jamb. Shoving upwards, he released the screen door hook from its eye, and opened the door.

  “Mrs. Cloud!” he called.

  “I don’t think she’s home,” Penny said.

  “Let’s go in, anyway.”

  “That’s impolite,” Penny said.

  “I know. And don’t you ever do it.” He took her hand and walked into the house. Something was on the stove cooking. He could not place the smell. It boiled furiously in a big aluminum pot. “Think she’d go out and leave something boiling on the stove?” he asked.

  “Mommy never did,” Penny said.

  “No.” He stood in the center of the kitchen and called, “Mrs. Cloud!” and his voice echoed through the stillness of the house. A door was closed at the opposite end of the kitchen. He started for the door with Penny at his heels. He opened the door, began walking into the other room, and then stopped abruptly.

  “Stay where you are, Penny,” he said.

  “Why? What—?”

  “Stay there!” he said, and his voice carried the unmistakable ring of parental command. Penny stopped dead in her tracks. Zach entered the room and closed the door behind him. A fly was caught against the screen door leading out to the back of the house, its buzz filling the living room.

  A woman lay on the floor in the center of the room.

  Her hair was black, and her skin was bronzed. She was no older than thirty-eight. The top of her skull had been brutally crushed so that the blood poured onto her forehead and down her face, streamed over her neck and stained the pale blue flowered house dress she wore. Her mouth was open in what must have been the trailing end of a scream. Her eyes, wide and brown, splashed with rampant blood, stared up at the ceiling of the room. There was terror in the lifeless eyes, a terror captured and then frozen by death.

  He was suddenly covered with sweat.

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and then he stared down at the dead woman, incapable of speech or movement, fighting the tight nausea in his st
omach. With conscious effort, he clicked his mind shut like a hair-trigger trap, and the nausea vanished to be replaced by a violent, unreasoning anger.

  The room came into sharp, clear focus.

  There had been a struggle. A lamp had been knocked from one of the end tables, and a straight-backed chair had been overturned. A dish towel was on the floor next to the woman, so he surmised she had come into the living room from the kitchen, walking into an ambush. He went to the back door. The screen there was unlocked. Three steps led down to the sloping sand and then into the woods. He glanced through the screen briefly and then came back into the room.

  The weapon rested some three feet behind the woman’s shattered skull. Its stone head was smeared with blood, as was its wooden shaft. A souvenir tomahawk, a close twin to the one Penny held in her hand outside. He did not touch it. He stooped down close to it and looked at it, but he did not touch it. He saw the medallion then. It was a thin bronze circle, and he might have missed it had he not stooped to look at the tomahawk. He picked it up and studied it.

  A link from a chain was still caught in the metal loop at the top of the medallion. Had the woman torn this from her attacker’s throat? The medallion carried the raised stamping of a sailboat. Above the boat were the words THIRD PRIZE 1947 in a semicircle. Below the boat, forming another semicircle along the bottom edge of the medallion, were the words TAXTON CLUB REGATTA, MIAMI. Zach put the medallion in his pocket and then stooped close to the woman again.

  Her right hand was clutched tightly. He lifted it. It was still warm. She could not have been dead very long. Clutched in the hand were a number of long blond hairs. Even if he had not seen the torn roots he’d have automatically surmised the hairs had been ripped from her attacker’s scalp. A silver signet ring on the woman’s hand caught his eye. He turned her fist gently, looked at the ring, and felt sudden despair and hopelessness.

  He had known it all along, he supposed, from the moment he’d opened the door on the woman’s body, had known all along who she was, and that death had sealed her mouth and rendered meaningless the words in her letter. But the ring corroborated the knowledge, presented a plain and inescapable fact from which there was no retreat.

  The initials on the ring were E. C.