I knew who had murdered Roger Vauclain.
When I came into the house I saw him sitting out on the sun deck, just sitting there motionless with his hands flat on his knees, staring out to sea. Or out to where Smuggler’s Island sat, shining hard and ugly in the glare of the dying sun.
I didn’t go out there right away. First I went into the other rooms to see if anybody else was home, but nobody was. Then, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I got myself ready to face it and walked onto the deck.
He glanced at me as I leaned back against the railing. I hadn’t seen much of him since finding the body, or paid much attention to him when I had; but now I saw that his eyes looked different. They didn’t blink. They looked at me, they looked past me, but they didn’t blink.
“Why’d you do it, Pa?” I said. “Why’d you kill Vauclain?”
I don’t know what I expected his reaction to be. But there wasn’t any reaction. He wasn’t startled, he wasn’t frightened, he wasn’t anything. He just looked away from me again and sat there like a man who has expected to hear such words for a long time.
I kept waiting for him to say something, to move, to blink his eyes. For one full minute and half of another, he did nothing. Then he sighed, soft and tired, and he said, “I knew somebody’d find out this time.” His voice was steady, calm. “I’m sorry it had to be you, Verne.”
“So am I.”
“How’d you know?”
“You left a cake of white beeswax out there,” I said. “Fell out of your pocket when you pulled the gun, I guess. You’re just the only person around here who’d be likely to have white beeswax in his pocket, Pa, because you’re the only person who hand-carves his own meerschaum pipes. Took me a time to remember that you use wax like that to seal the bowls and give them a luster finish.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Couple of other things too,” I said. “You were in bed yesterday when Jennie and I got home. It was a clear day, no early fog, nothing to aggravate your lumbago. Unless you’d been out someplace where you weren’t protected from the wind — someplace like in a boat on open water. Then there was Davey’s Sportliner starting right up for me. Almost never does that on cool days unless it’s been run recently, and the only person besides Davey and me who has a key is you.”
He nodded. “It’s usually the little things,” he said. “I always figured it’d be some little thing that’d finally do it.”
“Pa,” I said, “why’d you kill him?”
“He had to go and buy the island. Then he had to decide to build a house on it. I couldn’t let him do that. I went out there to talk to him, try to get him to change his mind. Took my revolver along, but only just in case; wasn’t intending to use it. Only he wouldn’t listen to me. Called me an old fool and worse, and then he give me a shove. He was dead before I knew it, seems like.”
“What’d him building a house have to do with you?”
“He’d have brought men and equipment out there, wouldn’t he? They’d have dug up everything, wouldn’t they? They’d have sure dug up the Revenue man.”
I thought he was rambling. “Pa...”
“You got a right to know about that too,” he said. He blinked then, four times fast. “In 1929 a fella named Frank Eberle and me went to work for the bootleggers. Hauling whiskey. We’d go out maybe once a month in Frank’s boat, me acting as shotgun, and we’d bring in a load of ’shine — mostly to Shelter Cove, but sometimes we’d be told to drop it off on Smuggler’s for a day or two. It was easy money, and your ma and me needed it, what with you happening along; and what the hell, Frank always said, we were only helping to give the people what they wanted.
“But then one night in 1932 it all went bust. We brought a shipment to the island and just after we started unloading it this man run out of the trees waving a gun and yelling that we were under arrest. A Revenue agent, been lying up there in ambush. Lying alone because he didn’t figure to have much trouble, I reckon — and I found out later the government people had bigger fish to fry up to Shelter Cove that night.
“Soon as the agent showed himself, Frank panicked and started to run. Agent put a shot over his head, and before I could think on it I cut loose with the rifle I always carried. I killed him, Verne, I shot that man dead.”
He paused, his face twisting with memory. I wanted to say something — but what was there to say?
Pa said, “Frank and me buried him on the island, under a couple of rocks on the center flat. Then we got out of there. I quit the bootleggers right away, but Frank, he kept on with it and got himself killed in a big shootout up by Eureka just before Repeal. I knew they were going to get me too someday. Only time kept passing and somehow it never happened, and I almost had myself believing it never would. Then this Vauclain came along. You see now why I couldn’t let him build his house?”
“Pa,” I said thickly, “it’s been forty-five years since all that happened. All anybody’d have dug up was bones. Maybe there’s something there to identify the Revenue agent, but there couldn’t be anything that’d point to you.”
“Yes, there could,” he said. “Just like there was something this time — the beeswax and all. There’d have been something, all right, and they’d have come for me.”
He stopped talking then, like a machine that had been turned off, and swiveled his head away and just sat staring again. There in the sun, I still felt cold. He believed what he’d just said; he honestly believed it.
I knew now why he’d been so dour and moody for most of my life, why he almost never smiled, why he’d never let me get close to him. And I knew something else too; I wasn’t going to tell the sheriff any of this. He was my father and he was seventy-two years old; and I’d see to it that he didn’t hurt anybody else. But the main reason was, if I let it happen that they really did come for him he wouldn’t last a month. In an awful kind of way the only thing that’d been holding him together all these years was his certainty they would come someday.
Besides, it didn’t matter anyway. He hadn’t actually got away with anything. He hadn’t committed one unpunished murder, or now two unpunished murders, because there is no such thing. There’s just no such thing as the perfect crime.
I walked over and took the chair beside him, and together we sat quiet and looked out at Smuggler’s Island. Only I didn’t see it very well because my eyes were full of tears.
A Taste of Paradise
Jan and I met the Archersons at the Hotel Kolekole in Kailua Kona, on the first evening of our Hawaiian vacation. We’d booked four days on the Big Island, five on Maui, four on Kauai, and three and a half at Waikiki Beach on Oahu. It would mean a lot of shunting around, packing and unpacking, but it was our first and probably last visit to Hawaii and we had decided to see as many of the islands as we could. We’d saved three years for this trip — a second honeymoon we’d been promising ourselves for a long time — and we were determined to get the absolute most out of it.
Our room was small and faced inland; it was all we could afford at a luxury hotel like the Kolekole. So in order to sit and look at the ocean, we had to go down to the rocky, black-sand beach or to a roofed but open-sided lanai bar that overlooked the beach. The lanai bar was where we met Larry and Brenda Archerson. They were at the next table when we sat down for drinks before dinner, and Brenda was sipping a pale green drink in a tall glass. Jan is naturally friendly and curious and she asked Brenda what the drink was — something called an Emerald Bay, a specialty of the hotel that contained rum and crème de menthe and half a dozen other ingredients — and before long the four of us were chatting back and forth. They were about our age, and easy to talk to, and when they invited us to join them we agreed without hesitation.