Vineyard Prey Read Free

would soon be home from the second grade and kindergarten. I wanted to talk with Zee before they arrived.
    Zee had the last of the scallops in the fridge and was working on supper. Scallops, of course. Her plan, I saw, was to fry them up with garlic butter and serve them over rice with broccoli on the side. A winning meal, for sure.
    I washed up and prepared the broc for the microwave. We were becoming very twenty-first-centuryish, what with our microwave, our cell phone, and our computer. The next thing you know we’ll be getting a color TV.
    While I worked, Zee told me we’d gotten a call from Professor Buford Oakland, who wanted me to open up his Oak Bluffs house for family members who would be making a pre-Christmas trip to the island. I added his house to the list of several others I also had to open for the holidays, and told her about Joe Begay’s visit to the shed.
    She frowned. “He said that he sent Toni and the children away? I called her yesterday and got her answering machine. I was wondering why she never called back. What do you suppose is going on?”
    â€œI’ll tell you when I know.”
    â€œI don’t like it so far. I wonder where Toni is.”
    â€œI don’t like it either,” I said, “but maybe there’s nothing to worry about.”
    â€œWhere are Joshua and Diana?” asked Zee, glancing at the wall clock. “They should be home by now.”
    â€œThe bus doesn’t get them here for another ten or fifteen minutes,” I said in my soothing voice.
    â€œAre you sure Joe had a pistol in his pocket?”
    â€œIt looked that way to me.”
    â€œI don’t like it. Should we call the police?”
    â€œIf Joe wanted the police I think he’d have called them.”
    The cats, Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, came into the room and suggested that it was time for theirafternoon snack. I gave it to them. A quarter of an hour later Joshua and Diana strolled down our long sandy driveway right on schedule.
    Everything at the Jackson house seemed normal, but to Zee and me everything had changed.

  2 
    I took our mainland shopping list with me when I went over to Cape Cod the next morning, because normal life doesn’t stop in abnormal times and when you live on Martha’s Vineyard, you never come home from America with an empty car. You fill it full of stuff that you can buy for a fraction of what it would cost on the island, and you always fill your tank with mainland gasoline before catching the ferry home.
    Since most Cape Cod stores are open at nine and it can take an hour to drive from the Woods Hole ferry terminal to Hyannis, I’d reserved an early-morning trip from Vineyard Haven so I’d have a couple of hours to shop before meeting Joe Begay at the mall at noon. I drove Zee’s little Jeep since it was less conspicuous than my antique Land Cruiser.
    On the way to the ferry, though, I stopped at two of the houses I look after during the winter. Since I have no regular job, I stretch out my meager disability money by fishing, doing odd jobs, and care-taking several houses. I close them in the fall, check on them during the winter, and open them again in the spring or whenever their owners want them opened.
    In this case, both of my stops were to open houses for Christmas. This included turning up the thermostats and making sure that all windows and doors were locked and that there were no signs of illegal entry or other problems. In the Oakland house I lingered awhile in the library, which was a room I loved.
    Professor Buford Oakland was a friend of my friend Professor John Skye, who had recommended me for the job with the Oaklands. John was a medieval lit man at Weststock College, up north of Boston, and Oakland was a historian with a focus on the Civil War. He taught somewhere in Virginia and was, I guessed by his name, a Southerner himself, since no one but a Southerner would be named Buford. He was a Yale man,