“Of course she’s not here. It doesn’t matter; we have a search warrant. Just go on in, bet it isn’t locked.”
Joe opened the door, calling out, “Anybody home? Sheriff here.” Inside, they stared at the shelves of her menagerie.
“Ed, lookit all this stuff. It keeps goin’ in the next room yonder, and on down the hall. Looks like she’s a bit off her rocker. Crazy as a three-eyed rat.”
“Maybe, but apparently she’s quite an expert on the marsh. You know she published those books. Let’s get busy. Okay, here’re the things to look for.” The sheriff read out loud from a short list. “Articles of red-wool clothing that might match the red fibers found on Chase’s jacket. A diary, calendar, or notes, something that might mention places and times of her whereabouts; the shell necklace; or stubs from those night buses. And let’s not mess up her stuff. No reason to do that. We can look under, around everything; don’t need to ruin any of this.”
“Yeah, I hear ya. Almost like a shrine in here. Half a’ me’s impressed, the other half’s got the heebie-jeebies.”
“It’s going to be tedious, that’s for sure,” the sheriff said as he carefully looked behind a row of bird nests. “I’ll start back in her bedroom.”
The men worked silently, pushing clothes around in drawers, poking in closet corners, shifting jars of snakeskins and sharks’ teeth in search of evidence.
After ten minutes, Joe called, “Come look at this.”
As Ed entered the porch, Joe said, “Did ya know that female birds only got one ovary?”
“What’re ya talking about?”
“See. These drawings and notes show that female birds only got one ovary.”
“Dang it, Joe. We’re not here for a biology lesson. Get back to work.”
“Wait a second. Look here. This is a male peacock feather, and the note says that over eons of time, the males’ feathers got larger and larger to attract females, till the point the males can barely lift off the ground. Can’t hardly fly anymore.”
“Are you finished? We have a job to do.”
“Well, it’s very interesting.”
Ed walked from the room. “Get to work, man.”
TEN MINUTES LATER, Joe called out again. As Ed walked out of the small bedroom, toward the sitting room, he said, “Let me guess. You found a stuffed mouse with three eyes.”
There was no reply, but when Ed walked into the room, Joe held up a red wool hat.
“Where’d you find that?”
“Right here, hangin’ on this row of hooks with these coats, other hats, and stuff.”
“In the open like that?”
“Right here like I said.”
From his pocket, Ed pulled out the plastic bag containing the red fibers taken from Chase’s denim jacket the night he died and held it against the red hat.
“They look exactly the same. Same color, same size and thickness,” Joe said as both men studied the hat and sample.
“They do. Both of them have fuzzy beige wool mixed in with the red.”
“Man, this could be it.”
“We’ll have to send the hat to the lab, of course. But if these fibers match, we’ll bring her in for questioning. Bag and label the hat.”
After four hours of searching, the men met in the kitchen.
Stretching his back, Ed said, “I reckon if there’s anything else, we would’ve found it by now. We can always come back. Call it a day.”
Maneuvering the ruts back to town, Joe said, “Seems like if she’s guilty of this thing, she woulda hidden the red cap. Not just hung it in the open like that.”
“She probably had no idea fibers would fall off the hat onto his jacket. Or that the lab could identify them. She just wouldn’t know something like that.”
“Well, she might not a’ known that, but I bet she knows a bunch. Those male peacocks struttin’ around, competin’ so much for sex, they can’t hardly fly. I ain’t sure what it all means, but it adds up to something.”
35.
The Compass
1969
One July afternoon in 1969, more than seven months after Jodie’s visit, The Eastern Seacoast Birds by Catherine Danielle Clark—her second book, a volume of stark detail and beauty—appeared in her mailbox. She ran her fingers over the striking jacket—her painting of a herring gull. Smiling, she said, “Hey, Big Red, you made it to the cover.”
Carrying the new book, Kya walked silently to the shady oak clearing near her shack, searching for mushrooms. The moist duff felt cool on her feet as she neared a cluster of intensely yellow toadstools. Midstride, she halted. There, sitting on the old feather stump, was a small milk carton, red and white, just like the one from so long ago. Unexpectedly, she laughed out loud.
Inside the carton, wrapped in tissue paper, was an old army-issue compass in a brass case, tarnished green-gray with age. She breathed in at the sight of it. She had never needed a compass because the directions seemed obvious to her. But on cloudy days, when the sun was elusive, the compass would guide her.
A folded note read: Dearest Kya, This compass was my grandpa’s from the First World War. He gave it to me when I was little, but I’ve never used it, and I thought maybe you would get the best out of it. Love, Tate. P.S. I’m glad you can read this note!
Kya read the words Dearest and Love again. Tate. The golden-haired boy in the boat, guiding her home before a storm, gifting her feathers on a weathered stump, teaching her to read; the tender teenager steering her through her first cycle as a woman and arousing her first sexual desires as a female; the young scientist encouraging her to publish her books.
Despite gifting him the shell book, she had continued to hide in the undergrowth when she saw him in the marsh, rowing away unseen. The dishonest signals of fireflies, all she knew of love.
Even Jodie had said she should give Tate another chance. But every time she thought of him or saw him, her heart jumped from the old love to the pain of abandonment. She wished it would settle on one side or the other.
Several mornings later, she slipped through the estuaries in an early fog, the compass tucked in her knapsack, though she would not likely need it. She planned to search for rare wild flowers on a wooded tongue of sand that jutted into the sea, but part of her scanned the waterways for Tate’s boat.
The fog turned stubborn and lingered, twisting its tendrils around tree snags and low-lying limbs. The air was still; even the birds were quiet as she eased forward through the channel. Nearby, a clonk, clonk sounded as a slow-moving oar tapped a gunwale, and then a boat emerged ghoul-like from the haze.
Colors, which had been muted by the dimness, formed into shapes as they moved into the light. Golden hair beneath a red cap. As if coming in from a dream, Tate stood in the stern of his old fishing boat poling through the channel. Kya cut her engine and rowed backward into a thicket to watch him pass. Always backward to watch him pass.
At sundown, calmer, heart back in place, Kya stood on the beach, and recited:
“Sunsets are never simple.
Twilight is refracted and reflected
But never true.
Eventide is a disguise
Covering tracks,
Covering lies.
“We don’t care
That dusk deceives.
We see brilliant colors,
And never learn
The sun has dropped
Beneath the earth
By the time we see the burn.
“Sunsets are in disguise,
Covering truths, covering lies.
“A.H.”
36.
To Trap a Fox
1969
Joe walked through the opened door of the sheriff’s office. “Okay, got the report.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Both men scanned quickly to the last page. Ed said, “That’s it. A perfect match. Fibers from her hat were on Chase’s jacket as he lay dead.” The sheriff slapped the report across his wrist, then continued. “Let’s review what we have here. Number one, the shrimper will testify that he saw Miss Clark boating toward the fire tower just before Chase fell to his death. His colleague will back him up. Two, Patti Love said Miss Clark made the shell necklace for Chase, and it disappeared the night he died. Three, fibers from her hat were on his jacket. Four, motive: the woman wronged. And an alibi we can refute. That should do it.”
“A better motive might help,” Joe said. “Being jilted doesn’t seem like enough.”
“It’s not like we’re finished with the investigation, but we have enough to bring her in for questioning. Probably enough to charge her. We’ll see how it goes once we get her here.”
“Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? How? She’s outrun everybody for years. Truant officers, census takers, you name it, she’s outwit ’em all. Includin’ us. We go out there chasin’ her through swamp grass, we’ll make fools of ourselves.”
“I’m not afraid of that. Just because nobody else could catch her doesn’t mean we can’t. But that wouldn’t be the smartest way of doing it. I say we set a trap.”
“Oh yeah. Well,” the deputy said, “I know a thing or two ’bout trappin’. And when you go to trap a fox, it’s usually the trap that gets foxed. It’s not like we have surprise on our side. We been out there knockin’ on her door enough to scare off a brown bear. What about the hounds? That’d be a sure thing.”