Scott Mariani - The Sacred Sword

The chit-chat was plainly over. Ben paid for his goods and they left the store with a nod.

‘There are ways of finding things out,’ he said as they walked back down Circuit Avenue towards the car. ‘That’s not one of them. Next time, keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking, all right?’

‘What was all that crap about wanting to come and live here with your non-existent family?’ Jude retorted.

Ben flipped through the guidebook as he walked, refusing to let it show that Jude’s words had stung him. ‘Thanks to our friend back there, we know that nothing’s happened on the island lately that might not have hit the news yet. Such as no murders, no robberies.’

‘And no dead billionaires found on the beach this morning. I get it.’

‘So if Wesley Holland is here at all, chances are he’s safely tucked up somewhere in his house by the ocean. Now we just need to locate it.’

‘How big is the island?’

‘Eighty-seven square miles.’

‘And just how does the great detective propose to find this one house in all of that coastline?’

‘The tower of light,’ Ben said simply. When Jude looked puzzled, he explained, ‘Remember what Hillel told us — how Wesley loves to spend time looking out at the waves and the tower of light shining across the water at night? Come on, you’re an ocean kind of person. What does that sound like to you?’ They’d reached the car. Ben bleeped the locks and got behind the wheel.

‘A lighthouse,’ Jude said as he climbed into the passenger side. ‘It sounds like a lighthouse.’

Ben skimmed the guidebook onto Jude’s lap. ‘And according to this book, there are only five of those on the island. Wherever Holland’s place is, it’s got to be within easy reach of one of those five locations.’ He started the engine.

‘You’re the guy. Where do we begin?’

‘We already passed two out of the five on our way in here on the ferry, flanking the mouth of the harbour. They’re called West Chop Light and East Chop Light. Let’s go and check them out.’

Within a few minutes they were driving along East Chop Drive and within sight of the first lighthouse. Built in 1877, according to the guidebook, its first keeper had been a character by the name of Captain Silas Daggett. The eighty-foot whitewashed conical tower stood away from the road, behind a neat white picket fence with a gate and a sandy path that led right up to it.

They got out of the Jeep, walked around the broad base of the lighthouse and scanned the land horizon in all directions, searching for any sign of a billionaire residence with tall windows from which the great man liked to drink in the majestic ocean view. The only houses within sight were fairly unostentatious wooden buildings that nobody would have been ashamed to call home, yet wouldn’t have been the abode of choice for a man of Holland’s limitless wealth. Compared to the Whitworth Mansion, even a comfortable family home for lesser mortals would have seemed like slumming it.

‘This is weird,’ Jude muttered. ‘I feel kind of like a stalker or something.’ After a couple of beats he said, ‘What’s that place over there?’ Ben gazed in the direction he was pointing, and saw a white house through the trees that, from where they were standing, looked larger than the other homes within sight and appeared to offer a view of the waterfront and the lighthouse.

Jude seemed hopeful. ‘Looks promising, wouldn’t you say?’

Up close, the house was obscured from the sea by thick foliage. As they turned into the gate they saw that it was a traditional white-painted wooden nineteenth-century farmhouse with a broad, low veranda over the front porch. There was paint peeling off some of the window frames and the barn roof was rusting in places. Quaint rustic living, low on glamour.

‘Doesn’t look like it to me,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s move on.’

‘Wait. What’s the harm in asking? Maybe somebody here knows him.’ Jude climbed out of the car and walked up to the house. Ben stayed behind the wheel, going through his time-honoured Zippo-and-Gauloise ritual as he watched the house door open and a squat woman with pigtails come out to spend a few moments talking to Jude before shaking her head and returning inside.

‘Told you,’ Ben said as Jude climbed back into the car.

‘At least I tried,’ Jude muttered, brushing his windblown hair out of his eyes. They sped off westwards along Beach Road, skirting the harbour with the Lagoon Pond to their left, before turning north.

The second location was situated on the northernmost fork tip of the island, on the opposite side of the harbour mouth from East Chop Light. They found the lighthouse beyond another neat white fence. Nearby was a pretty wooden house with a U.S. flag hanging from a pole on the neat lawn. It had a balcony facing the sea, with the perfect view of the lighthouse.

‘Possible?’ Jude asked.

‘A little cosy and twee,’ Ben said. ‘But possible. Maybe.’ They parked the car and walked up to the front door together. Ben knocked. An old man answered, and for the briefest instant Ben thought he was standing face to face with the billionaire himself. ‘Mr Holland?’

‘Who?’ the old man asked, gurning up at Ben toothlessly. A dog started yapping from inside. An old woman appeared in the hallway behind her husband. Her legs were swollen and bandaged, and she needed to lean heavily on two crutches to stay upright. ‘Who’s there, Frank?’ she quavered.

‘We’re looking for-’ Jude began.

‘Forget it,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go. I’m sorry we disturbed you, sir,’ he said to the old man.

Two down, three more to go. It wasn’t time to worry, not quite yet. The next point on the map was the Edgartown Light Station, a few miles to the southeast along the coastal road in the island’s main town. By the time they reached it, the afternoon was already wearing on. The rising, bitterly cold wind from the ocean had dispersed the mist, and the sun was shining.

The Edgartown Light was situated within the harbour itself. As Ben could see through his binoculars, there were many beautiful and expensive-looking homes within sight; but as he scanned around him in a slow arc, taking in every house, every balcony, every window, he thought about what he knew of Holland’s lifestyle and preferences, and his gut instinct told him that this was wrong.

‘He wouldn’t like it here,’ he said, lowering the binoculars.

Jude looked at him. ‘So you know him that well, all of a sudden.’

‘The man’s a known recluse. He’s camera shy and spurns publicity. Why pick a house that didn’t provide the kind of seclusion he needs?’

‘Fair enough,’ Jude grunted. ‘Where next?’

The next spot on the itinerary was about as remote as things got in the Vineyard. The isolated Cape Poge Lighthouse stood on the neighbouring tiny island of Chappaquiddick, which a major storm in 2007 had separated from the main body of Martha’s Vineyard by a narrow strait of water. Ben and Jude were lucky to catch what seemed to be one of the very few ferries just as it was leaving. The barge-like craft was able to carry only one or two cars across at a time to the islet.

‘Didn’t a Kennedy get shot or something here, years and years ago?’ Jude asked semi-curiously, as if Kennedys getting shot was a routine occurrence throughout history.

‘No, but maybe he should have,’ Ben said. ‘The story goes that he crashed his car off a bridge into the sea and hot-footed it away from the scene. A girl drowned in the wreck.’ The moment it slipped out, he bitterly regretted his words. Jude just nodded quietly, said nothing and gazed out of the window as they rolled off the ferry and onto Chappaquiddick Island.

In the wintertime, the place seemed utterly dismal and barren. When Ben and Jude drove up the sandy track close to the lighthouse they found a forlorn, wind-battered beach where the only other living things were the screaming seabirds circling the lonely shingled tower. ‘I don’t see any houses at all,’ Jude said. ‘Let alone the kind we’re looking for.’