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CHAPTER 1
The Ghost of Christmas Past
Nantucket, November 1997
It had all started with the Winthrop deal. They had a chance to buy the building next door on Main Street, expand the business, and become a serious force in the town's economy. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — property values would never be this low again. The island's marathon of development was just beginning.
If they didn't buy the building, someone else would. Blum liked to say that Main Street real estate was gold, but in fact, it was more valuable than gold. The world had vast supplies of that shiny mineral; piles of it filled the vaults in the Federal Reserve building and Fort Knox. But store-frontage on Nantucket's Main Street? That was a limited resource, like the eighty-thousand-dollar bottle of 1858 pre-phylloxera cognac in his liquor cabinet.
Coddington didn't get it. "Nantucket is finished," he liked to say. "They've ruined this place. They've killed the Golden Goose." It was never exactly clear who "they" were — immigrants from various countries, tourists, developers, millionaires and billionaires, or all of them together.
*
Jackson Blum stared down at his partner's corpse, clutching the murder weapon in his hand, chanting silently, "I am not a killer, I am not a killer, I am not a killer."
He gaped stupidly at the gun — he didn't even remember picking it up — and then dropped it like ... like — he remembered, years ago, carrying his old French bulldog outside to do his business and the ancient creature releasing a turd directly into his palm. This gave his stomach the same queasy twirl of disgust and horror. He staggered back a few steps. Throwing the gun down was pointless. He had to pick it up. He couldn't leave it here. And he had to bury the body. The bullet lodged in that skull would match his pistol if it was ever dug out, if the corpse was ever found.
He should dig it out himself. He shuddered. That was grotesque, unthinkable. To puncture Ted Coddington's skull with his penknife? Was that even possible? And then burrow into the brain, gouging and pulling the interior as if he was scooping out a pumpkin? No, no, no, absolutely not. He could barely stand to look at the body; he dreaded moving that surly inert weight — dead weight, that was the term — shoving it into a shallow grave.
The rasping engine of a motorcycle snapped him alert. He was far out of sight of the Madaket Road but a dirt track ran through this wedge of moorlands. If someone were to drive by ... He stood frozen in place as the Harley growl faded away toward town. He was safe for the moment. But the urgency remained. He was lucky in one way: along with the yearly series of off-road driving permits that decorated the rear bumper of his Ford Excursion, like a line of commemorative stamps in a binder, testifying to his seniority on the beaches of Wauwinet and Coatue, he stowed the legally required boards, towrope, and, most importantly, the shovel. So he had the tool he needed to bury the body.
But it would take time. And he had no alibi for his presence here — he had rushed out of the store fearing the worst, after Coddington bailed on their meeting with the Winthrop people. Coddington had sounded crazed and shaky on the phone and Anna had no idea where he'd gone. She was off-island — she had answered her cell in Pain D'Avignon. And she wasn't worried, not yet anyway. Coddington liked his long walks on the beach and his solitary bike rides in the moors.
Blum clenched his fists and his jaw in a motionless seizure of self-disgust. He should never have called Anna. His neutral inquiry would look suspicious in retrospect. If she'd picked up on his worry and guessed he was cruising the island searching for her husband, that would be worse than no alibi — it was the anti-alibi! A virtual confession of guilt. I found your husband on the afternoon of the day he was planning to wreck all our plans for the business....
And he happened to be dead!
And he happened to have my gun in his hand!
With one of my bullets in his brain!
Anna had overheard some of their arguments. The loudest and most combative one had broken out at 21 Federal on a busy Saturday night with the bar packed three-deep and every table taken. Chick Walsh himself had escorted the two of them out the door. Slim, elegant Chick Walsh — the least likely bouncer on the whole Eastern Seaboard. But they had submitted to the controlled rage on Chick's face and stumbled out like chastened schoolboys being marched off to the principal's office.
So there would be plenty of witnesses to testify at the murder trial.
"You were dining at the restaurant 21 Federal on the night in question, September twenty-first, 1997?"
"That's right."
"And you heard the defendant arguing with Mr. Coddington?"
"I'll say!"
"Just answer the questions, please."
"Sorry. Yes. Yes, I did."
"And did Mr. Blum threaten Mr. Coddington with bodily harm at that time?"
"Yes, he did. He said, 'It would be easier just to kill you.'"
"So Mr. Coddington was in fear of his life?"
"Objection! Calls for a conclusion."
"Sustained."
"I'll rephrase that, Your Honor. Did Mr. Coddington do or say anything on that occasion that made you feel he might have feared for his life?"
"Yes. He lurched back in his chair, knocked it into my wife's chair, in fact. She was sitting with her back to their table. And he shouted, 'Get away from me!' I thought Mr. — the defendant — I thought he was going to attack Coddington right then and there."
Oh, yeah, that would go over well. That was a first-class ticket to Cedar Junction. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not inherit your business from your dead partner. Blum squirted out a high-pitched laugh, clamped it to silence. He sounded crazy, even to himself.
He had to take charge. This was a manageable situation. That was what he did best. That was how he had made his fortune — managing situations, finding solutions and implementing them. Problems seemed hopeless because you took them up all at once, in a single unwieldy slab. They had to be deconstructed, broken down into bits, and the bits taken care of, one at a time.
The first bit: bury the body.
This was Land Bank property — "forever wild," as they liked to say. No one would ever find the grave and Coddington's disappearance would remain a mystery — was he a middle-aged runaway? Had a secret crime from his past come back to haunt him? Had he eloped with an old lover, disappeared into the Witness Protection program, slipped away to join a monastery? All that stuff happened. People did those things and more. People went crazy. People snapped. Anything was possible.
As long as they never found the body.
That was the conundrum — it buzzed around his head like angry yellow jackets: if he dug a grave and the grave was found ... Blum wasn't faking anything, he wasn't trying to cover up a murder, but that was how it would look.
Bodies don't bury themselves.
Still, leaving the body where it was, in full view of any stray hiker or birder was foolhardy, idiotic — with a bullet from his gun lodged in Coddington's brain? Absolutely not.
He crashed back to his car, lifted the tailgate, grabbed the shovel, and trudged back. With the first stab of metal blade into soil he realized the chore he'd set for himself. The ground was a tangle of roots and vines, pitted with rocks of all sizes. He stamped down hard on the back of the shovel with his boot, felt metal cutting the webbed gristle under the surface. He lifted the weight of dirt, flung it aside. He had thrown out his back the year before, after the big blizzard, perversely determined to shovel out his own driveway — refusing to pay off some money-grubbing teenage hustler.
This would be much worse.
"The whole plan is crazy!" Coddington had shouted at him that night in the restaurant. "It's financial suicide. You're digging your own grave! And mine, too."
The words came back at him now. Was he doing that? Burying both of them in the moors? It certainly felt that way. How had it all happened? He was a business prodigy! Forbes magazine said so! The Wall Street Journal called him a visionary in their profile last year! He'd spent hours watching the sycophantic little geek from the paper scribble down every word he said. Days.
And what if that fawning punk could see him now? Visionaries were supposed to anticipate the future, grasp events taking shape before everyone else.
He kicked the nose of the shovel into the ground again.
He hadn't seen this one coming.
Or was it that he'd seen it perfectly well and just didn't want to look? Denial, that most despised human weakness, the puny foible he ridiculed in others — demanding that his wife have that lump checked (it turned out to be benign), that Coddington investigate that ominous whistle from his car's engine (yes, some belt or other had to be replaced and it was a good thing they did it before that old Volvo broke down on the highway!).
Well, he hadn't been in denial about Coddington's suicidal tendencies. No one could have predicted this act. The people who talked about it rarely did the deed; and the actual depressives kept things buttoned up so much that even their closest friends were surprised when they found the body, baffled when the read the note.
The note!
It was probably sitting on Coddington's desk at home right now. It was only a matter of time before Anna walked in and saw it: one of those pale blue envelopes he used for personal correspondence, with her name scrawled across the front.
Coddington would never confess the real reason — but somehow he'd still make it sound like everything was Blum's fault, evil Jackson Blum who had turned poor Coddington's life into a nightmare. She'd buy it, too — people committed suicide for a million different cockamamy reasons, and Anna had always hated Jackson anyway.
Thinking about it as he jabbed the rusty shield of the old gardening spade into the hard ground, sweating through his shirt even after he'd pulled his jacket and his sweater off, he realized that Coddington's suicide note was his insurance policy of last resort. Better they should never find the body, never know what happened; but if they ever did, the dead man's last message to the world would go a long way toward clearing Jackson of a murder charge.
He made the list in his head: finish the grave, clean up, get the suicide note, take the gun home and stash it back in its box. He couldn't just ditch it, unfortunately. It had significant value — a Ruger Standard, one of the first ones ever made. The certificate it came with and the serial number on the barrel made it worth thousands of dollars to the right collector. But that had nothing to do with the weapon's real worth. The gun meant too much for him to just dispose of it like a hunk of trash.
Blum's father had brought the pistol back from Germany after the Berlin Airlift — the gun nestled in its red box with the black griffin logo. That gun — it looked a little like a Luger — lying in the dirt at his feet. An ordinary, semi-obsolete handgun, but priceless. His father hadn't left him much. In fact, beyond the Ruger and a pile of unpaid debts, there was next to nothing. Some letters, some handmade furniture, his great grandmother's wedding ring that Marjorie still wore. The gun was his legacy and to Blum's father it symbolized the war — the bombing runs and then the food runs during what he always called Operation Vittles. Dad's whole growing up, in fact. Blum's father became a man during those years and this gun was the totem of that passage. He couldn't just throw it away. And he wouldn't have to. He had never mentioned the Ruger to anyone except Coddington and Marjorie — who, as his wife, couldn't testify against him, even if she wanted to. The Ruger fired standard rounds, and the .22 was the most common bullet in the world. If they ever found the body, they'd just assume the gun had been stolen by scavengers. People wandered the moors with those metal-detector wands all the time, looking for just this kind of loot.
He slagged another load of soil to the side of the pit, felt something shift in his back. He was going to be crippled tomorrow.
His head was spinning, but his plan made sense. Coddington would disappear. People would wonder why, they'd make crackpot guesses about where he went. Everyone loved a mystery. Unanswered questions fueled the Nantucket gossip mill like big dry hardwood logs on a fire. The enigma would keep them warm for years, like that town where everyone disappeared one morning, what was it? The Roanoke Colony, right. Coddington's vanishing act would be like that. No muss, no fuss, lots questions, no answers. That's how Coddington would have wanted it. He just wasn't thinking straight. Well, that had always been Blum's job anyway.
One more spadeful and he was done. It didn't need to be a deep grave. Good thing, because Blum was wrecked. He stood panting, leaning on the handle, letting his heart rate normalize. How had he gotten into such lousy shape? He used to be an athlete.
When he caught his breath, he rolled Coddington into the narrow trench and starting filling it in. The question would remain: how had Coddington gotten buried? But some eccentric Good Samaritan might have taken on the job. That was possible, wasn't it? Nantucket people did Quixotic things all the time — like opening the ponds to the sea — Steve Scannell had done that with Sesacacha Pond a few years before — one guy and shovel, clawing a channel out of the barrier beach! Burying some random corpse was nothing, by comparison. You couldn't just leave the body out in the open, but you didn't want problems with the cops, either. That made sense.
But if the cops somehow connected Blum to the burial ... No, no, they wouldn't, they couldn't. How could they? He was going to give himself a panic attack. He paused, took a couple of deep breaths.
Then he went back to work, filling in the trench. He cut his wrists while ripping the coarse shrubbery to cover the mound of fresh soil. His hands were filthy, so were his clothes. He looked like he'd been rolling around in the dirt, like some burrowing animal, like —
Like a rat. Jesus Christ. Rats!
He was maybe a mile and half from the dump here. Nantucket had more rats than people, and ninety percent of them lived in that trash paradise. They'd smell the decomposing body. They'd come for the fresh meat. That was what they did. That was their job. This grave wouldn't last a month unless he could keep them away.
The endlessly multiplying complications overwhelmed him. He thought he might scream, or break down crying, or vomit. Or all three. And the complications assaulting him now were just the ones he had happened to notice. What about all the other ones he hadn't thought of? This was impossible.
He stood still, letting the icy north wind buffet him.
Rats. He caught some stray scrap of memory about rats. A family of them had taken up residence in his father's vintage Buick Roadmaster while it was in storage at a local garage. They chewed through the wiring, shredded hoses and belts, nested in the engine block. What had Dad done about it? Peppermint oil? Blum remembered something about peppermint oil. But that hadn't worked. How was Blum supposed to remember this stuff? He'd been ... what? Maybe nine years old at the time? That was thirty years ago. They were still living in Schenectady, in the old house on Union Street. The place probably didn't even exist anymore. Still, his dad had figured something out. Some Old World folk remedy.
But what?
Blum felt like a green recruit in an old war movie, holding onto an enemy grenade, paralyzed, waiting for it to go off in his hand.
Throw it, get rid of it, think!
"Even rats know this crap is poison!" That's what his dad had said. Poison, poison — what could be such a terrible poison? What crap was he talking about? Blum could feel his brain bulging with thought, pressing against the smooth walls of his skull like water freezing in a full bottle. Something was going to crack.
Then he gave up, sagged, opened his eyes — relaxation that was somehow a final exertion of the will. And the answer snapped open like a jammed window.
Tobacco!
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nantucket Red Tickets"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Steven Axelrod.
Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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