Dark Nantucket Noon Page 2

  “No,” said Kitty. “It was the moon, you see. The moon did it.”

  The third man had his camera out. He was taking her picture. The woman was crying, her hand over her mouth, her horrified eyes looking at Kitty. Now the man with the camera was bending down, pointing at something in the sand. He wasn’t a man, after all, not a grown man. He was a young student of Kitty’s, Arthur Bird. “Hello, Arthur,” said Kitty.

  Arthur’s face was pale. Usually it was pink, Kitty remembered, with boyish red patches on his plump fair jowls. “There’s the knife,” he said.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Kitty. “That’s mine. It fell out of my bag.” She picked it up. It had fallen point down and nearly buried itself in the sand.

  The three men and the woman all recoiled, staring at her. Then Arthur lifted his camera and took another picture.

  “No, no,” Kitty said. “You don’t understand. I didn’t kill her.” She dropped the knife back in her bag. “It was the moon, don’t you see? The moon did it.”

  2

  “Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?— Dost not think of murdering the officers

  when thou gettest to sea?”

  Moby Dick

  They overpowered her then. There was nothing, really, to overpower. The man who was not Joe Green or Arthur Bird merely walked around the body of the dead woman and took Kitty’s arm. He asked her politely for her bag, which she surrendered promptly, and then he asked, please, would she mind getting in the jeep? Well, certainly, she’d be glad to. She didn’t really want to walk back. And now she was shivering so dreadfully, so uncontrollably, that she was glad to climb into the warm enclosed car and sit down, pulling her bare feet up under her.

  The man she didn’t know reached across her and took the key out of the ignition. Kitty sat alone on the front seat of the tipped jeep, her shoulders hunched high, her body canted a little to one side, and stared out to sea.

  The daylight seemed almost normal now. The shore birds were pattering back and forth at the edge of the water once again, and the herring gulls were back at work—ho hum, no rest for the weary. Kitty tried to compose her mind with a mental exercise, an example of poetic imagery for her freshman class in versification. My mind is a library, you see, class, and when I open a book, all the pages are blank. Kitty rested her straining head for a moment on the thought of an empty page, then slammed the book shut again because there were wet red splashes of blood on the white paper.

  What were those people doing? She craned her head around to look. Joe was standing away from the others, his back to them in a crooked posture of grief. The others were talking, glancing in Kitty’s direction. She looked back at the water, feeling her face flood suddenly with guilt and misery. A sense of appalling disaster hung in the air. Her disordered intellect was beginning to be restored by the sunlight to the normal rational processes of commonplace reckoning. She had done something dreadful, she understood that now. Instead of running away from Joe Green, she had been drawn to him, sucked, pulled, like the tides by the moon. Running from him, yet she had raced after him, followed him, chased him, sought him out on this remote corner of the world to which he had fled, backed up against the sea. How he must have winced to see her, and what must he think now? The dead woman had been his wife. She, Kitty, had not been just an irritating presence from the past. She had destroyed him. Kitty beat her fist against her forehead. Why couldn’t she have gone to that observatory along with everybody else? If she had, she would be on her way home right now.

  She looked in the rear-view mirror. They were lifting the dead, woman’s body, carrying it to the pickup truck, wrapping it in somebody’s coat, putting it down in the back of the truck. Joe was starting to climb in beside it, but the others were pulling him back, leading him to the cab, helping him in. Arthur Bird was getting into the driver’s seat. The other man opened the driver’s side of the jeep, folded the seat forward so that the woman could climb into the back, and climbed in himself behind the wheel. He waved to Arthur, and Arthur started the truck, backing and turning, heading along the narrow beach past the lighthouse and then driving up onto the high sand and following the churning tracks the two vehicles had left behind them on the journey out. Kitty’s driver revved his engine and started after the truck. They were off, murderer safely deposited in one car, murderee in the other. Kitty grimaced and suffered, watching the wrapped body bound a little up and down with the jouncing motion of the truck, seeing the stoop of Joe’s shoulders through the rear window.

  She tried to talk to the man at the wheel. But he shook his head and moved his hand in a gesture that meant Don’t. The woman in the back seat said nothing, only whimpered a little. She had Kitty’s bag in her lap. She was guarding it, but when Kitty asked for her shoes, the woman groped in the bag and pulled them out, and Kitty put them on, struggling awkwardly as the jeep wallowed in the tracks that made a sort of road along the middle of the narrow neck. Before long the sea on both sides had disappeared, and they were traveling between scrub growths of trees. At last they reached the place where Kitty’s car was parked, but when she said it was her car, the man beside her merely shook his head and drove around it. On the paved road Arthur Bird stopped his truck beside an air hose and got out to fill up his tires. Then Kitty’s driver pulled up in front of him to take his turn. Everybody got out of the two vehicles except Kitty and Joe. Looking back at what she could see of him, Kitty was depressed to discover that the shape of Joe’s bowed head still affected her in a way she didn’t want.

  They all climbed back in. The fields and woods and at last the outskirts of the town of Nantucket went by Kitty’s window, and she looked out at them but saw nothing. One of her pockets hurt her. She pulled a big shell out of it and held it in her hand. It was a great smashed and broken whelk. The jeep slowed down and stopped. The pickup truck was stopping too, parking beside a small gray-shingled building. It was the police station, a charming little cottage.

  Kitty’s driver got out, walked around the front of the car and opened Kitty’s door. Silently Kitty climbed down, walked ahead of him, stood still while he opened the door of the police station, then turned at the last minute to cast one panic-stricken glance at Joe Green. For a brief second their eyes met. He dropped his instantly. How he must hate her. How he must loathe her.

  The police officer at the desk was busy on the phone. Kitty’s guide waited patiently. Then the redheaded young man with the fresh red face put down the phone and said, “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’m afraid something terrible has happened.…”

  After the hurried arrival of the Nantucket chief of police and his hurried departure, after the matron’s search, after the waiting around, after the psychiatrist, after the reappearance of the chief of police, after his questioning, Kitty was led down a little corridor past a row of empty cells, and shut into the last one. The small room was windowless and lined with tin. “If you want to use the bathroom,” said the young officer with the red face, “just call me. It’s right across the way. My name is Sergeant Fern.”

  Kitty sat down on the bunk bed. After a while she could hear the men in the office changing shifts. She could hear them kidding, exchanging the time of day, their voices hushing to talk about what had happened at Great Point, about the girl in the last lockup. She could feel the vibration of their big frames moving about. She got up and stood at the barred door.

  “Sergeant?” called Kitty. “Could you come here a minute?”

  The voices stopped. There were heavy footsteps and then the sergeant appeared. He thought she wanted to go to the bathroom.

  “Might I have a pencil and some paper?” said Kitty.

  The young sergeant paused, looking at her. “Well, sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not.” He disappeared, then came back with a pencil and a pad of lined yellow paper and a paper bag. The bag contained her shells. “I don’t see why you can’t have these back,” he said.

  “Tha
nk you,” said Kitty, smiling at him. He had a nice face with a high color.

  She sat down again on the hard bed and emptied the bag out on the blanket. Some of the shells were sticky with dried blood. Kitty took the big broken whelk out of her pocket too, and held it up to the light of the bare bulb in the ceiling. Then swiftly but painstakingly she began scribbling a description of it on the pad of paper:

  A great shell, twisted, half smashed, turning spirally inward according to some Grecian law of harmony and proportion, the inner surface coated with a microscopic honeycomb, a colony of some infinitesimal sea animal, some form of coral, the outside crusted here and there with sandy pebbles and tiny shells in the hollow clefts of the spiral turnings. And here are some pieces of sponge called dead man’s fingers, narrow thumblike growths. And fragments of sand-colored grassy seaweed, the color of hemp, the color of hair. Whose hair is just this color?

  Kitty’s pencil faltered. It was the color of Joe’s wife’s hair. And the dead man’s fingers were …

  Enough of that. Kitty tumbled everything back into the paper bag and turned her attention to the room in which she had been locked up.

  Four walls of tin …

  3

  Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished.

  Moby Dick

  “Your attorney is here,” said Sergeant Fern, looking in at Kitty.

  “My attorney?” Kitty was surprised. She had told them she had no attorney. She had said she was going to think about it. Now they had assigned her one. What if she didn’t like him? She stood up and backed into one corner of the cell as an extremely tall man ducked under the metal frame of the door and stood with his stooped head grazing the ceiling, his big body filling the space, crowding it.

  “I’m Homer Kelly,” he said. “They’ve been telling me about you out there. Now you tell me.”

  Kitty folded her arms and stared at him, as Sergeant Fern came back and created a moment of confusion by trying to get a chair inside. Homer Kelly? Kitty had been reading about Homer Kelly somewhere, ages and ages ago. She had been sitting in her rented car reading the Nantucket paper, and there had been something about Homer Kelly in the paper. He was here on the island for some reason or other, he was doing something about Melville, and she had been surprised to learn that he had been a policeman. A lieutenant-detective. And he must be some kind of an attorney as well.

  His face had a keen severity Kitty liked. “I just came to see the eclipse,” she began slowly, watching Homer Kelly fold himself down onto the chair, which creaked under his weight.

  “Why did you go to Great Point?”

  “Because it looked empty. I mean from the air. And there weren’t any roads leading out to it. It looked to me as if I could be all by myself.”

  “Why did you want to be all by yourself?” The big ugly face was hard, chill, stern.

  “Because I was trying so hard not to run into Joe Green.” Kitty bared herself with a conscious effort of will. “We used to be lovers.” She didn’t know what else to call it.

  “When was that?”

  “Oh, a year ago. A year and a half. Then he changed his mind. He went to Nantucket and met”—what was her name?—“Helen Boatwright. And they got married.”

  “They were married exactly a year ago today, I understand.”

  “They were?” Kitty was surprised.

  Homer Kelly looked at her. Then he crossed one enormous leg over the other, and a chair rung clattered to the floor beneath him. Absent-mindedly he felt around for it. There was a new look on his face. Kitty breathed a little more freely and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Look, my girl, you’re in a whole lot of trouble,” said Homer Kelly. “Now just let me get some things straight. Tell me what happened from the beginning.”

  Kitty took a deep breath and started her story all over again. Doggedly she plowed on to the end, while Homer listened, leaning forward, gazing at the floor, his hands clasped between his knees. When she finished he leaned back and looked at her sharply.

  “Where did you get the map and the newspaper that were in your bag?”

  “At the airport.”

  “And then you drove directly toward Great Point? And parked your car and walked six miles? You didn’t go into town or stop anywhere else?”

  “No, that’s just it. Why would I go directly to Great Point to kill someone, when I didn’t even know that person was going to be there?”

  Homer paused. “You mean you’re telling me you didn’t know Joe Green and his wife would be at the Great Point light?”

  “Of course I didn’t! That’s what I said. I thought I would be all alone on Great Point. All by myself.”

  Homer studied her again with his small sharp eyes. Then he took something out of his pocket. It was a copy of the Nantucket newspaper, the Inquirer and Mirror. “What did you see in this?” said Homer. “What do you remember?”

  “Well, I saw about the people on the front page who were going to be doing things at that observatory, and I decided that was one place I wouldn’t go because it would be so crowded. And then I saw the article about what you should watch for during an eclipse. And let’s see—I read about you. That’s all.”

  Homer opened his copy of the paper, folded it back and tapped an item on one of the inner pages, holding the paper up so that Kitty could see the headline: FAVORITE VIEWING SITES. “Did you read this?”

  Kitty leaned forward and squinted at the headline. “No, I didn’t. What—do you mean that one of the viewing sites was the Great Point light?”

  “Not just that.” Homer reached in his pocket for his glasses, put them on and began reading the article aloud. “ ‘Several parties have made plans to view Saturday’s total eclipse of the sun, our island spectacle, from various vantage points. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Edgeworth will set up a six-inch reflecting telescope at the Old Mill. Professor Randolph Spitz and an astronomical party from Johns Hopkins will gather on Altar Rock with telescopic and spectrographic equipment provided by the Smithsonian. The lighthouse at Great Point will be the site of an eclipse-viewing expedition by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Green of Nantucket.’”

  Kitty sat in shocked silence. Wordlessly she leaned forward and looked at the line of type where Homer’s finger was pointing. Then she looked at Homer and shook her head.

  “You didn’t read that? It’s right under the article about that big boob Homer Kelly.”

  “I see it is. But I didn’t read it. If I had, I wouldn’t have …”

  Homer looked at her. “You’re the poet, aren’t you? Katharine Clark the poet?”

  “Yes,” said Kitty.

  “You said you heard a scream at the same instant that you screamed, when the sun went into total eclipse.”

  Kitty’s face took on a stubborn look. She had been through the screaming problem several times already. She had sounded idiotic before. She would sound idiotic now. Warily she said it again, in a low voice. “It was the universe. The whole universe screamed.”

  Homer reflected. “Well, how many voices did the universe have? Was there just one of them? Or more than one?”

  Kitty tried to remember. “One,” she said. “Just one.”

  “Was it loud? Did it scream with a human voice? Was it a woman’s scream? Was it everywhere? Far away? Nearby?”

  Kitty thought about it soberly. Then she leaned back against the wall, feeling very tired. “It was a woman’s scream. It was her, of course, it was her. It was Mrs. Green. It was near me; quite near, I think.”

  “Good.” Homer tested his footing in another fragile place. “What did you mean when you said, ‘The moon did it’?”

  “Well—did you see the eclipse?”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “Well, then, I guess you know. Or you should know.” Kitty stopped and bit her lip.

  “Oh, come off it. Well—all right, I guess I see what you mean. It was really something, wasn’t it?” He reached over and patted her arm. “Now let’s talk about the knife
. Why do you carry a knife?”

  “Self-protection. I’d carry a gun, except that I’m scared of guns. A knife can’t go off by mistake.”

  “They think it’s not like a woman. I mean, you had an oilstone to sharpen it with, and everything.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” Homer waved his hand. “Why was the knife out of its sheath?”

  “The snap must have been undone. It falls out. I’ve cut myself on it sometimes.”

  Homer shook his head. “Oh, Katharine Clark.”

  “Kitty. You don’t believe me.”

  “Yes, I believe you, Kitty.”

  There was a pause. Homer looked at his shoe. “Let’s be sure we know everything they have. What did they take from your bag? Try to remember everything.”

  “Well, there was a cotton bandanna and a red wool sweater, both of them soaked with blood, and a small purse with about fifty dollars in it. And a hairbrush. And the newspaper and the map. And an exposed photographic plate for looking at the sun. A pair of woolen stockings. And—the remains of my lunch, a small Thermos. My knife, the oilstone, the sheath of the knife. My airplane ticket. A key ring.”

  “Any papers? Identification? Letters?”

  “Oh, just the cards I carry around: driver’s license, Social Security, a university card so that I can park at B.U., a couple of—”

  “That’s where you teach? Boston University?”

  “Yes. And some credit cards.” Kitty clenched her fists. “I’m afraid there may have been a picture. It was down among the cards. I never took it out and threw it away.”

  “Whose picture? Joe’s?”

  “Yes.” Kitty felt strangled. She stood up and waved her arms. “Look, this is all so silly. I didn’t kill the damned woman. I just saw her there after she was dead. When can I go home?”