Paperwhite Narcissus by Cynthia Riggs Page A

you want, but you can’t do it officially.” She stood up. “I’ve got a meeting in Chilmark. Call if you need me.” She held up her cell phone.
    Victoria, too, got to her feet. “On your way, drop me off at the Grackle office, if you will, please.”
     
    Botts was at his desk working the keys of his old Underwood with two fingers when Victoria reached the loft.
    Victoria studied him thoughtfully. “How many people on this Island still use typewriters?”
    “A half-dozen. You, me, and a few others.”

    “Where do you get your typewriter repaired?”
    “I don’t,” said Botts. “It never breaks down.”
    “What about ribbons?”
    “I order them on the Internet.”
    Victoria sat. “Casey’s fallen prey to bureaucracy,” she said. “Therefore, it’s up to us to investigate.”
    “What’s this ‘us’ business?”
    “You’re publishing a newspaper, aren’t you?”
    Botts took off his glasses. “I want to publish a one-page broadsheet in my retirement. Not a newspaper. What are we investigating now, the death of Fieldstone?”
    “What do you think?”
    He put his glasses down beside his typewriter. “Where do you intend to start?”
    “At the Oak Bluffs Harbor. With the two girls Fieldstone took out on his boat. What are you writing?” Victoria stepped over to his desk and looked over his shoulder. She read a few lines. “A romance? A bodice ripper?” She laughed.
    “Pays the bills,” said Botts.
    “What name do you go by?”
    Botts pulled the sheet of paper out of his typewriter. “Tara Waterstreet.”
    “I’ll look for her in the library.”
    “You won’t find her,” said Botts. “Let’s go.”
    Once down the rickety stairs, Victoria hoisted herself into the passenger seat of Botts’s pickup truck and they headed for Oak Bluffs. On either side of the road new bright green beech leaves sparkled among the new pink oak leaves and dark pines.
    In Vineyard Haven, storekeepers were painting the fronts of stores, cleaning windows, and arranging fresh displays. Window boxes were bright with geraniums, petunias, and ageratum. When they reached the shipyard they waited while two shipyard workers, a man and a woman, wheeled a boat on a trailer across the road. Everywhere there were signs of people getting ready for summer.

    The drawbridge that spanned the cut into Lagoon Pond was open. Botts waited while a sailboat motored out of the pond into Vineyard Haven Harbor. He passed the entrance to the hospital and parked at the head of the Oak Bluffs Harbor. In another week, he would not be able to find a parking place. He set a milk crate on the ground for Victoria to use as a step and held his arm out for her.
    They walked along the boardwalk that skirted the harbor to the harbormaster’s shack, a small building that perched over the water on stilts. When they squeezed through the narrow door, Chuck looked up from the computer.
    From the window that faced the harbor entrance, Victoria could see an osprey sitting on its nest. The nest was built on top of a telephone pole, and was a collection of sticks and fish bones that grew larger and more untidy every year.
    A few minutes after they arrived, the harbormaster, Domingo, joined them. He was a short dark man with large dark eyes. Victoria introduced Botts and explained what she wanted. Domingo wet his thumb and shuffled through a sheaf of papers in a clear plastic box nailed to the wall, took one out, put on the glasses suspended from a cord around his neck, and studied the paper.
    “Your granddaughter was on duty that afternoon. I was off Island. Chuck was here.”
    Chuck looked up. “Yessir. Curtis and me.”
    The harbormaster went to the door of the shack, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. A short, dark-haired high school boy appeared on the catwalk that led to the shack, hiking up his unbelted trousers.
    “Both of you were here when Fieldstone took off, weren’t you?”
    “Yessir,” said Curtis.
    “Tell Mrs. Trumbull whatever