And there were other benefits as well. Lunch, served under a striped awning on the Mooncussers’ terrace, was a luscious, amply portioned, rosy-pink lobster salad with tarragon-mayonnaise dressing. All, yes, she thought, plumping herself and her well- filled plate down next to Peg, she would bear up just fine.

  “What do you think?” Peg asked. “How ‘s it going so far?”

  Lee stuck her fork into a tender nugget of lobster tail and grinned at her friend. “Piece of cake, Peggy, my girl. Piece of cake.”

  ***

  Back at Quonochaugachaug for the afternoon round, Jackie divided the attendees into two threesomes: Stuart, Bert, and Peg in one, and Darlene, Ginny, and Frank in the other. Malcolm, true to his word, had remained at the inn.

  Lee, in a charitable mood brought on by positive thinking and lobster salad, decided that it was partially her own fault that she’d gotten off on the wrong foot with Darlene, and in hopes of making amends, offered to go around with Darlene’s group. It was, after all, only nine holes, and short ones at that, and there would be two other people along to keep things friendly.

  What could happen?

  Chapter 7

  Frank Wishniak cupped both hands over his mouth. “Fore!” he bellowed toward the far end of the fairway, where Stuart Chappell was just finishing up on the green. Inasmuch as the far end of the fairway was some two hundred twenty yards away, and Frank’s longest drive so far had been eighty-five yards (including bounces), it seemed to Lee that he was being somewhat needlessly careful. But that, she was learning, was Frank for you—not a man to have his optimism dimmed by a few little failures.

  “Frank,” she said mildly, “I think you can probably go ahead and swing. I don’t think Stu’s in very much danger.”

  “You never know,” Frank said. “I feel good. I could really belt this one.”

  Ginny laughed. “Frank, I hate to tell you this, but you’re living in a fantasy world here.”

  Frank’s big belly jiggled with a soundless chuckle. “Young lady, if I didn’t have a fantasy life I wouldn’t have a life.”

  A huge, impatient sigh came from Darlene. “Could we get on with it, please? I’m going to forget where my ball is.”

  Frank grumbled good-naturedly, tugged at the crumpled fisherman’s hat he wore to protect his bald head from the sun, and set himself over the ball. “Just you watch,” he said, working the dead cigar stub into the corner of his mouth and waggling himself into position. “Just you watch. Here we go, now.”

  Frank was one of those players who talk themselves through their swings, a habit capable of driving many fellow golfers around the bend. Unfortunately Lee was one of them, but today she found it easy to keep her mind tranquil and her spirits high by silently repeating a simple, relaxing mantra whenever he was at the tee: “A thousand dollars a day, a thousand dollars a day …

  “Okay, now,” Frank told himself, “this is going to be good.” Another whole-body waggle. “Toes lined up … check. V’s pointing at the right shoulder … check. Elbows close in . .

  “This is going to take forever,” Darlene muttered in that flat, challenging voice of hers. “I’m going to forget where my ball is.”

  “… check,” continued an unperturbed Frank. “Head down… check. Weight distributed … check. And now for the swing.”

  “God be praised,” said Darlene.

  As usual, Frank practically turned himself inside out with that lurching swing of his, sending the ball skittering twenty yards through grass directly to his right. A worm-burner.

  “Mulligan!” he yelled immediately, the duffer’s appeal for a free shot when the first one has been boggled. Among friends, informal etiquette usually allowed for one per round, the philosophy being that everybody was entitled to one mistake. This was Frank’s third of the day. And it was only the fourth hole.

  Darlene was steaming. “This is impossible! We’re going to be here all damn day. On this hole, I mean! I’m going to go find my ball.” And off she stomped toward the left rough as Frank pulled a ball from his pocket, set it just so on the tee, and happily started all over again. “Toes lined up . .”

  Darlene had teed off a couple of minutes before, hitting her usual shot, a solid, generally competent drive, but with a tendency to tail off to the left over its last seventy or eighty yards. In other words, a hook. On the previous hole Lee had tactfully suggested that she might want to open her stance and weaken her grip a little to correct it, but Darlene, unsurprisingly, had resisted help and Lee had let it drop, concentrating instead on Frank and Ginny, who wanted (and needed) all the help they could get.

  But this hook had been a total disaster, starting off a little to the right of center, then curving across the entire breadth of the fairway and into the rough, a tangle of black alder and bayberry bushes, where it had ricocheted off one of the island’s few trees and rocketed backward thirty or forty yards before being swallowed up by the foliage.

  “Oh, gosh,” Ginny said, watching Darlene plunge into the tangle, “look at that, she did forget where her ball is.”

  “No, she just didn’t see it hit the tree and bounce back,” Lee said. “Well, she’s sure never going to find it where she is. I’ll go help her. It’s pretty much on the way to my ball anyway.”

  “No hurry,” Ginny said with a sigh, gesturing at the statuelike figure concentrating so intently over the ball. “We’ll be here a while yet.”

  “Weight distributed . .” Frank was saying.

  Lee strode loosely along the edge of the fairway, easily lugging her lightweight practice bag with a mere six clubs in it. It had been a couple of days since she’d had any exercise, and it did her good to get her legs going, and feel the clean, cool salt air flowing over her face, and hear the clubs chinking rhythmically on her shoulder. So much so that she lost track of where she was heading and thought she might have overshot the area of rough into which Darlene had disappeared.

  She stopped and called. “Darlene? Your ball’s back a ways.” No answer; just the soft rustle of leaves. “Darlene?”

  For no reason she could name, the hairs on the back of her neck rose. A shivery tingle curled down the middle of her back. “Darlene? Are you all right?”

  She took a club from the bag, put the bag down, and began to retrace her steps along the edge of the rough, peering into dark bushes, pushing branches aside with the club. “Darlene?”

  At a sudden, alarmingly close explosion of sound she caught her breath and stiffened. Something was in there, something frenzied, something big. Branches were splintering, hooves—hooves?—were thrashing. She froze, her heart in her throat, not knowing which way to run even if she’d been able to move, and clutching the club in both hands with a grip that outdid Ginny’s. Good gosh, what kind of animals did they have here? Wild boar? Moose? Rhinoceros?

  None of the above. What burst out of the bush directly in front of her was an agitated, red-faced Darlene Chappell in mid- bleat.

  “Halp! H—”

  At which point she caught her toe on a breadbox-sized boulder, one of the scattered remnants of the old stone wall that had once run along the edge of the fairway. “Yi—!”

  “Watch—” cried Lee too late, holding up both hands but unable to ward off the careening Darlene. An instant later they were sprawled on the grass staring at each other.

  “Darlene—what—”

  “Lee!” the flabbergasted Darlene yelped. “I … thank God…” She looked frantically back at the bushes. “He . he tried to … he was.…”

  “Who?” Lee shrieked back, staring, understandably bug-eyed, into the foliage as well.

  The answer provided itself. Clumping out of the brush with a ferocious churning of leaves and branches came a man the size and shape) of a heavy-duty home freezer, who promptly ran into the same rock that Darlene had, was catapulted into a squealing somersault (“Whoowhoowhoo!”), and landed with a thunderous “Whuff!” on the seat of his pants, his eyes squeezed shut.

  When he opened them he was patently astounded. “Huh…?”

  If Lee hadn’t been frightened half out of her wits she would have laughed. There the three of them were in the grass, after all, sitting on their fannies in a circle, close enough to share a bowl of chips and dip if one had been there, and goggling at each other, all of them obviously dumbfounded. The hulking newcomer wore Bermudas and a tank-top shirt that revealed a pale, hairless chest and freckled, blubbery, pink-splotched shoulders. He was wearing about the worst wig she’d ever seen, a jet-black, plastic-fibered thing that looked as if it had come from the drugstore Halloween racks and that now sat askew on his head. Under it Lee could see some close-cropped, almost colorless hair. His jaw was heavy, his nose flattened, his expression definitely of the dim-bulb variety. He looked, Lee thought, an awful lot like one of the Three Stooges, the one that was always getting poked in the eye by the guy with the pageboy.

  He straightened the wig clumsily, almost prissily. “Let’s have no trouble, ladies. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Assuming that he was trying to cow them, his high-pitched, nervous voice didn’t help any. He even sounded like Moe, or Shemp, or whichever one it was.

  Darlene and Lee exchanged a glance. There was no weapon in evidence, no gun, no knife. If they both scrambled to their feet and ran, what could he do?

  But he was quicker than he looked, and more formidable. Before they could move, one huge, blunt-fingered hand darted out to clamp onto Darlene’s wrist. She hammered ineffectually at it with her other fist. “You bastard, let me go! What do you want?”

  He stood up, pulling her roughly to her feet, and shook her arm hard, just once. The tremor went through her whole body, like a ripple in a snapped whip. It was enough to quiet her down at once. “All right—okay—don’t hurt me,” she said quickly. She sounded scared to death.

  Lee didn’t blame her; she would have been scared to death too. She was more than scared enough as it was. The guy might look like a bonehead, but he was big, and he was strong, and he was fast. Who knew what he wanted, what he would do? She had jumped up and backed away a few steps while he was manhandling Darlene, just enough to get out of range of his free hand. She had never let go of the club, and now, to her amazement, she found herself brandishing it at him, blocking his way back into the brush, into which he was obviously intending to haul Darlene.

  “You let her go right now,” Lee said, but it was about all she could do to get the words out. There seemed to be no air in her lungs; her arms were watery; her legs didn’t seem to be there at all. “I—I warn you, I’ll use this if I have to.”

  Unfortunately it was somewhat lacking in conviction. Moreover, the club was a wedge and not one of her heavy-duty long irons, and it seemed about as threatening as a matchstick against this bruiser, who was showing no signs of alarm. His only reaction was to change his grip on Darlene, getting the crook of his arm around her neck like a vise. Darlene grew even more still. Her hands tugged weakly at his ham-shaped forearm, but she was no longer really struggling. Her eyes, on Lee the whole time, were enormous and pleading.

  “I gotta go now, lady,” the man told Lee almost apologetically, “so you better get out of my way. I got no quarrel with you. I want her, that’s all.”

  “You want her!” Lee echoed stupidly. “For what?”

  The man stared at her, “Well, not for what you’re thinking!” he exclaimed with every indication of offended propriety, and once again Lee almost laughed.

  At that moment Darlene bit his arm, and when he yelped Lee took the opportunity to swing the wedge at him. He flung up his hand and batted it harmlessly aside, but in so doing he let go of Darlene, and now the Tough Cookie showed her mettle. She was all over him, an avenging Fury, kicking, screaming, cursing, and, when anything came within reach, biting.

  The big man, more annoyed than inconvenienced by all this, raised his hand to cuff her, but an energized Lee managed to hook it out of the way with the head of the club and then came charging in, ducking under his arm and butting him in the ribs with her head, bringing another soul-satisfying whuff. Darlene was on his right, giving it her all, Lee on his left, doing the same. They were like a couple of yipping foxes worrying a big, slow, confused bear.

  “Ow!” he squawked. “Ow, dammit!” He swatted ineffectually at them.

  “Hey you, hey, cut that out! What’s going on there?”

  And here came Ginny running up the fairway toward them. Straggling behind her, gasping and pop-eyed–it was he who had shouted—but galumphing bravely along all the same, was Frank Wishniak, with fire in his eyes.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, can you believe this?” the big man muttered disgustedly. “What is this, a party or something?”

  Like a huge dog just out of the water, he shook his body ponderously, spilling Lee and Darlene onto the grass, then clapped one hand onto the retilted wig, turned, and went crashing back through the brush, grousing audibly to himself.

  The two women scrambled to their feet, glanced at one another again, and without exchanging a word, chased after him. They heard a car door slam while they were still in the rough and ran even harder, but by the time they came out of the bushes onto the quiet country road that bordered the course he was already gunning the engine of a dusty maroon van. The tires spun, squealed, and caught; the van lurched forward in a spray of gravel.

  “Get the license!” Darlene yelled over the noise, but Lee had something else in mind. She still had the wedge, and running alongside the accelerating vehicle, acting on impulse, she thrust it, club head first, into the spinning rear right wheel, hoping that it might stick in there and jam something.

  Stick it did, but not jam. The club was ripped out of her hand and went whap-whapping down the road, caught in the wheel, one whap per rotation. On the fourth one, it came free. In pieces. The grip split and was torn away. The shaft collapsed into a lopsided V. The head broke off and flew into the bushes.

  Her new wedge. Her graphite-shafted, $180 Cobra 60-degree lob wedge that she hadn’t even used in a tournament yet, that she had brought along just so she could practice with it.

  “Did you get the number?” Darlene asked.

  “What? No.” Her brand-new wedge! Why couldn’t it have been that ancient mallet-putter she was thinking of getting rid of?

  “Damn,” Darlene said, and then more vigorously: “Damn!” She rubbed her neck and grimaced.

  “Darlene, are you all right?” Lee asked. She was feeling almost fond of the Grand Czarina, the fondness of one brave and victorious battle comrade for another, And Darlene had been brave. It would have been easy for her to simply run like hell when he had let go of her after Lee had swung the club at him. Instead, she had stayed right there with Lee, lighting into him like a one- woman army.

  Darlene continued to knead the skin at the base of her skull. “No, I’m not all right,” she said with a disagreeable scowl. “My neck’s killing me. It took you long enough to do something. I thought you were just going to stand there and let him choke the life out of me.”

  You’re welcome, Lee thought grumpily. Goodbye, world’s shortest friendship.

  “Although I suppose I should be thankful for what you did do,” the older woman allowed in a Darlenish version of gratitude. She worked her head from side to side. “Oh, don’t look so down in the mouth, Lee, I’m fine.”

  “Great, I’m glad to hear it,” Lee said, taking one last, lingering look at the wrecked shaft lying on the verge of the road like so much discarded trash, before they turned to meet the panting, onrushing Ginny and Frank.

  Chapter 8

  “That it?” asked one-third of the New Shoreham police department, in the person of Chief Arnold Tolliver. The pipe-smoking Chief Tolliver, along with one sergeant and one corporal, constituted the official, year-round police presence on Block Island, which was still technically on the books as the Town of New Shoreham, the name bestowed by the first white settlers, refugees from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1672.

  “That’s about it, I think,” Lee said. “I just wish I’d gotten the license plate number.”

  “Description helps,” the chief said. He finished making the last of his notes, slipped the pad into the pocket of his short- sleeved sport shirt, and relit his stubby, metal-stemmed pipe for about the tenth time. “It’s Curly, by the way—that’s the one you’re thinking of Curly, Moe, and Larry.”

  That was more than anything else she’d been able to get out of him up to now. Chief Tolliver was not what you would call loquacious. If he had opinions, and she had no doubt that he did, he kept them strictly to himself. Although he had the look of a veteran big-city cop—beefy, grizzled, hard-bitten—he spoke with an easy-to-listen-to rural drawl and appeared to approach life with a philosophy that was equal parts there’s-nothing-new-under-the-sun and what-will-be-will-be. If they ever needed anyone to fill in for Andy Griffith as police chief of Mayberry, Arnold Tolliver was their man.

  He buttoned his pocket, got the pipe drawing, and looked appraisingly around him. “Nice place.”

  Lee nodded her agreement. They were on the sloping back lawn of the inn, overlooking the Sound, sitting in white wrought-iron chairs with a frosted pitcher of mango tea on the glass-topped table next to them. To their right, under a sky muted with high, gauzy clouds, the lawn swept prettily down toward a reed-bordered pond with a weathered swimming dock in it, and a pristine beach of white sand just beyond. To the left, at the edge of the flagstone terrace, a portable bar had been rolled out and the female bartender—the same woman who had been waiting tables that morning—was expertly dispensing booze and soft drinks. Given the unexpected excitement of the after noon’s events, the cocktail hour had gotten under way early, and the SRS crowd, mostly on their second drinks by now, were gathered in twos and threes on lawn and terrace in a giddy, almost jolly mood. Only the center of attention, Darlene herself, was absent, having grabbed a double gin and water after her session with Chief Tolliver a few minutes earlier and stomped off with it to unkink in the whirlpool tub.

 

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