A Show of Hands Page 7

  Crisp wheeled his bicycle across the sidewalk and propped it against the whitewashed sill of the hardware store window.

  “Well, you heard what happened?” asked Fossie Bergstrom. He’d been sitting in Winston’s seat near the door. He started to get up. Barring an epidemic, Fossie wouldn’t be eligible for Crisp’s chair for a few years yet. There were others ahead of him. But some day it would come down to him and Mont Billings. He thought it best to keep the inside track.

  “Sit, Foss. Sit. I can’t stay,” said Crisp. “What happened? I’ve been up at the other end of the island.”

  “You ain’t heard, then?” said Drew, dangling the information for a moment. “Well, that’ll teach you to leave town.”

  “What happened?” Crisp repeated, still breathless from his ride.

  “This big old Coast Guard helicopter landed over in the parkin’ lot ’bout forty-five minutes ago,” said Petey, dispensing the details like fine wine. “And that coroner from over to Rockland got out’ve it with this other fella, some state troopers—”

  “Two of ’em,” said Drew.

  “. . . two of ’em,” Petey continued.

  “And Luther Kingsbury,” Stump added.

  “. . . and Luther Kingsbury.” Petey nodded. “He had his siren on, lights flashin’ and everything.”

  “Looked like the Fourth of July out there,” said Stump.

  “Some wind that thing kicked up,” said Fossie. “I’d forgot that parkin’ lot was paved. Sand and dirt blowed everywhere.”

  “Why?” said Crisp, his breathlessness increasing.

  “I guess they must’ve found out who them fingerprints b’long to,” said Petey. “S’what we figured.”

  “Most likely,” Drew agreed stoically. “I don’t guess they’d come out here after ferry hours ’less it’s somethin’ pretty important. They must know who done it.”

  “. . . and come out to pick ’im up,” Petey concluded.

  “Pick him up,” echoed Stump Adams.

  “Somebody’s in for it,” said Petey.

  Crisp was already reaching for the door. “Where did they go?”

  At that moment an old green Chevy pickup with stripes of

  fluorescent orange and lime green down the sides flew by. Its plywood side boards, posted to the bed with two-by-fours, flapped in the wind like the wings of a fallen angel fleeing Judgment.

  Drew spat out a crisp epithet, which the rest silently “amened” with gasps, wheezes, and wide eyes.

  Excitement propelled Petey to the window with a speed his appearance belied. “Kilby Miller,” he said. He leaned over the display ledge as far as physics and his aged equilibrium would allow. “Where in heck you s’pose he’s goin’ in such a hurry?”

  “Don’t know,” said Stump, “But that truck’s gonna fall apart b’fore he gets halfway there if he don’t ease up!”

  “Somebody must haveta have their septic tank pumped out awful bad,” said Drew with a wry smile. “Anyways,” he continued, “them others went the same way.” He pointed over his shoulder in the direction so emphatically indicated by Miller’s truck. “Had half the town in tow.”

  Crisp immediately made that half the town plus one. The once-weary sinews of his legs, revived by an injection of adrenaline, propelled his bicycle through the street and up the hill at a clip that would almost have done a schoolboy proud. The others looked after him.

  “Sometimes you forget he’s from away,” said Drew.

  At the top of the hill Crisp stopped to refill his lungs.

  Five roads emanated from the large oval occupied by the new bandstand. Crisp stared down each of these as far as his old eyes and the gathering gray of twilight would allow. Whichever way the procession had gone, no sign of its passing was immediately evident. There was, however, some commotion at the far end of School Street, near the old ball ground. With one leg he pushed himself a few yards in that direction and squinted. He could make out a little knot of women that had tethered itself to the wooden rail of Sadie Mitchell’s porch. As he coasted down the hill toward them, he could see that their delicate sensibilities had been animated by something.

  The Creator had endowed Sadie with a chest that acted as a natural amplifier for her singsong voice. As a result she was incapable of speech at anything approaching a subdued volume. This peculiar attribute, combined with her tendency to make every sentence an exclamation, made her, Crisp thought, distinctive.

  So by the time he had pulled within fifty feet of the group, he was almost fully aware of the situation, at least from Sadie’s perspective. Nevertheless, as there remained a few gaps in his knowledge, he applied the hand brakes, dragged his feet, and careened to a graceless stop against the walkway.

  “Professor!” yelled Sadie, who had just managed to get out of the way in time to be of no use to him as a cushion. “For half a second there, I thought you was some kid!”

  In response to the squeal of brakes, Ginger Foster had hoisted her substantial person halfway up the railing. “Gosh sakes, Crisp. You scared me half to death!”

  Emily Minot stood as still as Lot’s wife, with her hands crossed over her breast. She blinked once. She blinked twice. “I ’bout had heart failure,” she sighed finally.

  “One thing right after the other this afternoon!” Sadie proclaimed. “You shoulda seen Kilby Miller go flyin’ past here a minute ago.”

  “He came this way?” said Crisp breathlessly. He extricated the bicycle’s front wheel from the walkway, where it had punched a notch in the punky wood, and tugged at the handlebars in an effort to straighten them.

  “Like the devil was after him,” said Ginger. She dropped both feet daintily to the boards. “Up towards the point.”

  “That’s where the rest of ’em went,” said Emily.

  Crisp liked island women—honest, strong women who said what was on their minds, took life at face value, and responded in kind. He especially liked Emily Minot. Her story was a long litany of tragedy that would have put Job in a blue mood. But she lived on, uncomplaining, not merely surviving but thriving. He smiled at her, but she wasn’t looking.

  “What d’you suppose is goin’ on, Professor?” said Sadie. “We was wonderin’.”

  Ginger studied the gathering darkness. “Nothing up there but Robert’s cemetery,” said Ginger.

  “The cemetery,” Crisp repeated. Two and two were coming together. “Kilby Miller—he’s the grave digger up there, isn’t he?”

  Ginger and Emily nodded. Sadie proclaimed, “But he wasn’t flyin’ through here at ninety miles an hour to bury somebody, Professor.”

  “Maybe somebody trying to get out,” said Ginger with a smile.

  Sadie laughed. “You don’t think it’s old Bruce Bennett, do ya? Found out them summer people painted his house pink. That’d do it!”

  Clouds had begun to gather when Crisp left the north end of the island. Now the sky had draped its thick gray petticoats over the treetops and was fat and heavy with rain.

  “Maybe I’ll just take a ride up there and see what’s going on,” he said casually.

  Sadie looked at the sky. “You’ll get wet.”

  “Radio said we’re s’posed to get a good blow,” said Emily. “Winds up to forty-five knots. Rain, hail, the whole works.”

  “You’d be better off up to Matty’s, Professor,” said Sadie. “I don’t think it’d be too smart to have you out plowin’ down god knows what on that bicycle durin’ a drivin’ nor’easter, not at your age.”

  Crisp had no objection to being mothered. Something about him had always invited it, and he’d resigned himself to it long ago. He simply tended to bring out the mother hen in women. Even Miss Flyguard.

  Matty, most of all.

  “Oh, I think I’ll be all right, Sadie,” he said, adding an “aw shucks” kick at the grass. “I guess I’m just too curious for my own good.” He smiled at the ladies. “Couldn’t sleep without knowing what’s going on, you know. Good day, ladies.”

 
He pulled the corner of his stocking cap, disengaged himself from the little group, hopped to the roadside, and pushed off down the hill. The women watched after him.

  “He’s a nice old man,” Sadie remarked. “You’d think him and Matty’d get married, wouldn’t you?”

  “She’d jump at it,” Ginger speculated.

  Sadie laughed. “I would too, if I was about a hundred years old.”

  Their eyes followed him a moment in silence.

  “Funny man,” said Emily.

  “Worked for the gover’ment,” Sadie explained.

  The ladies nodded.

  By the time Crisp had pedaled two miles, it was fully dark. The sparse hem of houses that rimmed the dirt road had given way to an ancient canyon of evergreens and undergrowth that towered on either side. Now and then the black clouds would pulse with lightning, making everything, for half a second, bright as midday.

  The road was mostly uphill. Crisp had gotten off his bike and was pushing. He felt like Ichabod Crane entering Sleepy Hollow.

  Some sixty-odd years ago he and some friends had built a tree house in the woods, somewhere off to the left. In a vain attempt to prime the pump of summer, they had decided to stay there overnight. It was April. There was still snow on the ground in places. Much of the night, with only a storm lantern for light and warmth, they’d sat up in their itchy woolen sleeping bags, telling ghost stories, shivering inside and out.

  By midnight they’d worked themselves into such a fright that they climbed, screaming, down the ladder and flew along the narrow path through the woods and down the road to town, and safety.

  Crisp was nearing eighty now. His had been a life of constant peril, spanning every continent. He’d seen uprisings, riots, revolts, revolutions, pogroms, wars. He’d even started some. But he’d never again felt the thrill of that innocent fear.

  He felt it now. He looked back over his shoulder just as a distant lightning bolt flashed and, in that instant, imagined he saw someone behind him on the road—a woman, keeping close to the trees. When the lightning flashed again, there was no sign of her. Even at his age it was easy to imagine things. He smiled, but the smile brought no comfort. The wind dragged legions of lost souls through the trees, and he couldn’t help but wonder whose they were.

  Sweat froze on his brow as he made his way up the last low hill to the cemetery. In the distance he perceived an odd blue light rhythmically pulsing off the underbelly of the clouds.

  “That’ll be Luther,” he said aloud. It was like talking into a pillow. The wind, beating him sharply about his good ear, played pitch and toss with his words.

  Cresting the hill he could see the busy blue light on top of Luther Kingbury’s truck worrying the darkness with mute cries of alarm. There were other lights, too. Headlights, taillights, flashlights. Now and then someone would walk in front of them casting a giant shadow on the trees. The wind had scooped a handful of raindrops from the brooding clouds and was pelting them about indiscriminately.

  “Professor!” yelled a voice from the crowd as Crisp emerged at its periphery from the shadows. “You pedal that thing all the way up here?”

  Though the speaker was no more than a black smudge against the background of lights, the sibilant ss betrayed him. “Stuffy,” said Crisp as he drew within hailing distance. “What’s up, what’s all this?”

  “They’re diggin’ up Andy Calderwood!” Stuffy bellowed above the wind.

  The words halted Crisp in his tracks. “Exhuming!”

  Crisp couldn’t hear the reply at first. The wind was monopolizing his good ear. “What?” he said as he drew abreast of Stuffy.

  Stuffy looked at him sidelong. “The fingerprints they found on that girl was his.”

  The strain of the bike ride coupled with the surprise proved a drain on Crisp. The blood drained from his head as if someone had pulled a chain. He got dizzy and began to lose his sight. Everything went black with the exception of one small, indefinite spot of light in the center of his sight. He staggered back half a step into the fender of a truck and braced himself with an outstretched arm.

  “They’re down,” said somebody nearby. “They’re openin’ ’er up.” Suddenly the whole chaotic scene collapsed into baited silence. Kilby slipped down into the grave, his feet landing on the mahogany casket lid with a dull thud. Even the wind seemed to pause for a peek over his shoulder.

  Crisp was blinking frantically, trying to focus on the faces in the crowd knotted around the grave. He managed to distill Nate Gammidge down to a single image just in time to see him nod to Luther Kingsbury, who nodded to Kilby Miller, who bent down to loosen the screws and open the lid. Crisp became aware of a hand on his shoulder.

  “You all right, Professor?” said Stuffy. “You look like the under-belly of a dead fish. You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” said Crisp. “I guess it’s just . . . I’ve been doing a lot of riding today.”

  “Too much,” said Stuffy. “Comes a time, you know.”

  Sage advice, well taken, thought Crisp. He’d had heart trouble in the past, and his doctor had recommended biking as the perfect aid to rehabilitation. It’s likely, however, he didn’t have the marathon in mind.

  The silence was reinstated as the casket lid was swung open. At once the shadows were fractured by camera flashes that went off like popcorn. The elements seemed to take this as their cue and flew into a reckless dance of the supernatural. The lightning flashed, the thunder crashed, and the swollen belly of the clouds gave birth to a torrent of cold spring rain.

  It was a scene from a cheap Hollywood movie, but no less chilling for its familiarity. For a minute or two, there was a lot of commotion in the immediate vicinity of the grave. Finally, the lid was closed and fastened by Kilby Miller and his helper, who then climbed out of the muddy hole. The official contingent made their way through the crowd, got into their cars, and drove away.

  “Well?” said Mildred Conway. She was holding a newspaper over her head, but it was no proof against the rain. “What’d they find, Syl?”

  Stuffy shrugged. Crisp looked at him through the waterfall. Odd that he would come so far on such a night and seem so disinterested. Patience, Crisp thought. He had no doubt that there had been at least one pair of eyes that had not missed the glimpse into the grave, one pair of ears that had heard every word. All he had to do was find Leeman Russell. As the crowd began to disperse, he made his way toward the grave. Stuffy followed.

  “What’d he look like?” The speaker was Waymond Webber.

  He was standing in a pile of dirt at the edge of the grave with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his brown corduroys under his bulky Mae West. He was talking to Kilby, who had started filling in the grave.

  “Didn’t look,” said Kilby. Crisp had never seen Kilby Miller without a Lucky Strike in his mouth. No doubt it is this appendage that, over time, had forced Kilby’s voice to detour through his nose. It was a mucusy, cancerous voice. “Only one thing worse’n puttin’ ’em in is takin’ ’em out.”

  He was speaking rhetorically. Kilby knew that Waymond wouldn’t appreciate the emotional dimension of grave digging.

  “Did he stink?” said Waymond. Kilby ignored him. “I don’t smell nothin’.”

  “That helicopter ain’t goin’ back in this weather!” Leeman Russell was speaking. Crisp craned his neck and searched the thinning crowd. Leeman was one of a small contingent that had taken refuge in the shelter of a high-boughed spruce. The others in the group, not interested in information that was up for public consumption, were talking among themselves in hushed tones. Crisp made his way to the crowd and gently amputated Leeman from it.

  Leeman knew more about Winston Crisp than most people on the island, and therefore suspected twice as much. For this reason he held him in the kind of speechless awe that a touch of mystery creates. “Leeman,” said Crisp softly. They began to walk slowly away from the glare of headlights and the hum of voices. “What do you make of all this?”

  �
��Oh, I’m not too surprised, Professor,” said Leeman, unconsciously adopting Crisp’s soft, confidential whisper. “I mean, it’s a shock, and all that. But, when you think about it, somebody had to do it, didn’t they? And why not Andy Calderwood? Just because he’s dead don’t make him a saint, you know. I mean, I don’t want to say anything disrespectful, but Andy just wasn’t a saint

  is all.”

  “Not many are at that age,” Crisp observed.

  Leeman nodded once. Some rain had dribbled down the back of his neck and traced his spine like the cold blade of a knife. He shivered. “Any age,” he opined. They withdrew to the slim comfort of a spruce tree beside the road.

  “Did they find what they were looking for, do you think?”

  “I don’t know what they was lookin’ for,” said Leeman. “All they did was open the lid a half a minute, shine some lights in there, and take all these pictures. You musta seen them flashes go off. They had them professional photographers from the police. Some fast, they was. Automatic winders on them cameras, you know. They had Polaroids, too. Anyway, then they just closed ’er up. I guess whatever it was, they didn’t have to look at too close.”

  The rain, falling with some purpose, had opened up a small rivulet at their feet. They poked at it as they spoke, Crisp with the round toes of his Bean boots, Leeman with the loose rubber flap that had separated from the plastic on his soggy sneakers.

  “I don’t guess anyone got too close a look then,” said Crisp. He dammed the rivulet from one side, Leeman from the other.

  “Couldn’t hardly see nothin’,” said Leeman.

  “Oh, you were there, then? I mean, close enough?”

  Leeman glanced quickly at Crisp. It was as if his professional integrity had been called into question. “Oh, ’course I was close enough. When they opened that lid, I was right there. And when they shined them lights in, I could see clear to Sunday.”

  “You mean, you saw the body?”