Dead in Vineyard Sand Read Online Free PDF Page A

have a long tradition of producing oddball family members. They’re probably one reason so many people think professorial types are wacky, in fact.”
    â€œIs his wife one of the Mad Hatters?”
    â€œNot that I’ve ever noticed, but I don’t live with her. Anyway, I don’t think you should dwell on your scuffle. Go home and play with your kids.”
    â€œThey’re still in school.”
    â€œNot for long. Go prepare a celebration for the upcoming summer vacation.”
    â€œAn excellent thought.”
    I knew just the thing: I would give my children a showing of my priceless video of Tarzan and the Leopard Woman. The film had been one of my father’s favorites, and by what was surely a miracle, a guy I knew who ran a small movie theater in Maine had somehow gotten the original reels and had made video copies of the movie.They were, as far as I knew, the only such videos, and I had one of them.
    Years before I obtained the video, my father had let me stay up late to watch the film on television. It was a shining memory, and what better gift could I now bestow upon my children than showing the movie to them at the beginning of summer? Great art is timeless, after all.
    Still, in spite of John’s advice to put my encounter with Highsmith behind me, I kept the Chief ’s advice in mind, and during that last school week when I was downtown and feeling imaginative I felt eyes on me and heard whispers behind my back: J. W. Jackson, the guy who hates bikers and beats them up: J. W. Jackson, the guy who deserves a beating himself.
    Once, shortly after a group of lean, healthy cyclists was going down Main as I was walking in the opposite direction, I thought I heard a voice say, “Hey, guys. That’s him! Jackson!” And I had to force my feet to walk on.
    But when I wasn’t fantasizing I heard and saw nothing truly threatening. I wondered if other people played such odd mind games with themselves and guessed that they did. After a few days, I willed the games away; life was peculiar enough without my making it even more bizarre.
    What, for instance, could be stranger than me playing golf again the coming weekend? Two golf games on successive weekends after playing only one previous round in my entire life?
    Glen Norton was all enthusiasm.
    â€œYou’ll never have a boring day, and you’ll always have something to talk about. You’ll meet new people, and you can play until you’ve got one foot in the grave. It’s the greatest game ever invented!”
    I already had very few boring days, and I could always talk about things with Zee. I met as many new people as I needed to meet and sometimes more—Henry Highsmith, for example—and I expected to keep fishing at least as long as Glen Norton was swinging a golf club. But I had let myself be talked into golfing. So much for the life of reason.
    â€œYou’re not the only mystified mortal,” said Zee when I pontificated about life’s paradoxes as we prepared supper. “There are some other puzzled people up in the ER.”
    Emergency room medical personnel know all about the dark side of Vineyard life, as do its social workers, cops, schoolteachers, ministers and priests, and the other underpaid people who tend to the injuries—physical, mental, and spiritual—of the wretched refuse of the island’s teeming shores.
    â€œER people are always dealing with the island’s incomprehensible events,” I said. The chamber of commerce may pass the Vineyard off as paradise, but the ER people know that it’s just as close to chaos.
    â€œIn this case,” said Zee, “the puzzle may be of interest to you. Abigail Highsmith came into the ER today sporting the effects of a bicycle accident. She said she hit some gravel up near Lamberts Cove Road. Nothing broken, but she lost some skin and banged up a shoulder. Fortunately, she was wearing a helmet.”
    The police