Vineyard Enigma by Philip R. Craig Read Free Book Online

powerful interest in the eagles. And where powerful interests are at work, it’s always possible that they’ll leave some traces of their labor behind.
    The questions were just who that person or those persons might be, and why murder, which always attracts the attention of the authorities and is therefore usually a last resort in thoughtful problem solving, had seemed a necessary solution to some dilemma.
    Of course it was possible that there really was no hook between Matthew’s death and Mahsimba’s arrival, and that the cops were probably right to put their money on something much more mundane: a dispute over a woman or money or drugs, or one of the other commonplace causes of killings. For murder’s motives are usually as simple and crude as are the weapons and some or all of the actors in the drama. As more than one person has observed, murder victims don’t get poisoned in the conservatory by rare venom from some obscure snake native only to the upper Amazon; they get bashed in the head by a brick in an alley. And some drunk, like as not a close friend or relative, did it, not the vicar of Christ Church, who feared that an ancient, forgotten scandal might prevent him from becoming archbishop.
    Al and Barbara Butters lived with their dog, Jake, an aging golden retriever, out near Trapps Pond, not far from the beach. If you looked northeast from their wraparound porch you could see Cape Cod on the far side of Nantucket Sound. If you looked northwest you had a good view of the pond. Lately, as money rolled over the island like a tidal wave, huge new houses had been built in the neighborhood, so that the Butters house, which had once seemed large and comfortable, now seemed almost small.
    Not so small, however, that claustrophobia made Al and Barbara feel like moving. Their place was plenty big enough for them, Jake, and for their collection of Africana, which they’d bought during the years when they’d lived in Johannesburg, where Al had finished his career in the import-export business.
    I hooked left at the Triangle and drove through the parking lot in front of the Your Market liquor store and Trader Fred’s emporium, where you can always get good stuff cheap. I took another left on the Oak Bluffs–Edgartown road, then turned right into Cow Bay and took the dirt road to the Butters place. Almost immediately I had to pull over to one side to let Miguel Periera’s small, refrigerated truck pass.
    Miguel had been a wild island boy, who in his youth was, as they say, “known to the police,” and had spent a little time in the gray-bar hotel, but who had then managed to straighten himself out and find his niche in respectable island society. Miguel had done this by creating Periera Food Service, a firm that catered to Vineyarders who rebelled against outrageous island prices and paid him to go off-island and buy them groceries and liquor on the mainland. Periera Food Service now seemed to be doing just fine, thank you.
    When both of us had been in our teens, Miguel and I had briefly shared an interest in a girl named Rose Shaw. Rose was another of those young islanders who had not gone off to college after high school but had stayed home instead. Rose, whose prospects were limited at best, had married Jim Abrams, a young neighbor who had almost immediately been drafted and killed in a training exercise, leaving her with his insurance money. She had used it to study art in Boston before returning to the Vineyard and, a few years later, moving in with Miguel without benefit of clergy.
    Now Miguel stopped his truck and rolled down his driver’s-side window. I did the same. He was a stocky, good-looking guy who looked younger than I knew him to be.
    “How ya doin’, J.W.?”
    “Okay. How’s business?”
    He gestured at the closest new summer house. “Picking up now the season’s coming. Be better as soon as these places start filling up. Not too many people around right now. Season’s just getting