Nantucket Penny by Steven Axelrod

Author:Steven Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Stalkers

Mark Toland stepped out of the nimbus of shadow, into the spot-lit glare. He flipped a coin to Haden, who caught it reflexively. “Thanks for the magic silver dollar,” he said. “Worked like a charm. Didn’t it, Mr. Peanut?”

—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog

As we reconstructed the incident later, Roy Elkins met the three o’clock Hy-Line fast ferry at Straight Wharf and followed Marcia Stoddard home to her cottage on Bank Street in the Codfish Park section of ’Sconset.

First, he followed her on foot to the town parking lot, and he must have had to scramble when he realized she was heading for her car. We have to assume his own vehicle was nearby, most likely at the harbor Stop & Shop, where he was lucky to find a space even in the early fall. I could visualize him watching as she unlocked her battered old Subaru, racing back for his own ride, picking her up on Orange Street, probably a few cars back, tracking around the rotary and east on Milestone Road. There was a fair ration of luck involved—the devil’s luck because Roy Elkins was as close to the devil as anyone I’ve ever known. Circumstances just break well for bad people, it seems…until they don’t. The most intelligent and cunning bad people make mistakes, and Roy made a catastrophic one that day, for himself and for Marcia Stoddard, whose only crime was bearing a superficial resemblance to my fiancée.

He must have felt things were going well as he rolled on after watching her pull into her tiny driveway. He probably parked on Beach Street and walked back uphill around the corner to Marcia’s house. It had to be a short walk—the next-door neighbor heard the shot something like two minutes after she heard Marcia’s car pull in. This was Edie Kyle, aged sixty. Her husband, Arthur, had driven into town, so no vehicle indicated a human presence in the house. Roy most likely thought the little street was deserted, another lucky break.

Did they speak after he entered the cottage? Perhaps a few words, but this was an efficient gangland-style execution: two in the chest and one in the head.

Roy had fled by the time the frantic, whispered 911 call was transferred to my cell. I dropped Jane off at the Darling Street house and tore out to ’Sconset, lights flashing and siren blaring. I got to Marcia’s door in a record-breaking twelve minutes, leaving a string of panicked drivers in cars scattered across the grass verge of Milestone Road behind me.

I stepped into Marcia’s house. The last time I’d been there, she was under suspicion for murder, having quit her long-standing job as production designer for the Nantucket Theatre Lab, and she’d been planning to leave the island for good—embattled, bitter, already in exile.

Since then, she had been cleared of the murder charge, gotten her job back, and rejoined the island community with a heartwarming flurry of activity—sets and costumes for Sebastian Cruz’s play Fundamental Attribution Error,

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