Indian Pipes by Cynthia Riggs Page A

main road. He returned her wave before he disappeared from sight.
    The parking area was utterly different from what it had been two nights before. Today the area was packed with cars and people. The Aquinnah patrolman was holding up traffic for people to cross the road to the short flight of steps that led toward the top of the cliffs. People were every possible age and shape, dressed in everything from flowing long skirts to embarrassingly small bathing suits. Most were wearing sunglasses, including the scads of small children that hung from parents’ hands.
    Victoria fell in line behind a family, two harried young parents with three small children. One held his father’s middle finger with an obviously sticky hand while sucking his thumb, the other dragged a woebegone teddy bear by its ears. The father shook loose the sticky paw long enough to lift a baby stroller up the steps. The sleeping baby’s head lolled.
    “Would you like a hand, too?” he asked Victoria, good-naturedly.
    “No, thank you. You have your hands full.” She grasped the iron railing tightly as she went up the concrete steps. At the top there were a dozen or more small shacks selling souvenirs—T-shirts and Indian headdresses and caps and tomahawks and postcards. Beyond the lines of shacks a restaurant overlooked Vineyard Sound to the north, the ocean to the south. She paused in front of the restaurant to catch her breath, and then continued up the hill to the fenced- in place where she and Elizabeth had stood in the fog two nights before.
    By day, in bright sunlight with children in gay colors shouting and laughing, Victoria had a difficult time imagining anything had ever seemed sinister. What was she doing here? she wondered. She felt as though she’d been foolishly stubborn, rather than bravely determined, in telling Casey she was going alone to Aquinnah.
    To her right, the Gay Head light sent its red and white rays far above her, pallid in the strong sunlight. She stood next to a five- or six-year-old boy with short hair and thick glasses who was standing on tiptoe beside the chain-link fence.
    “Do you see anything?” Victoria asked him, bending down so she could match his height.
    “Yeth,” he said. “Boath.”
    He was right. The sound was speckled with white sails. Powerboats streamed rooster tails of spray behind them, fishing boats headed toward Georges Bank to set their nets, windsurfers and jet skis dodged each other. Victoria looked up and saw, high in the sky, a man or boy in a black bikini hanging from a parasail. She traced the line from the boy in the sky down to a small boat.
    She scanned the slope below that led to the top of the sheer cliff. She could see the rosebush, an undistinguished plant that clung to the edge of the cliff. From here, in daylight, she could see that theground around the bush was scratched up. That was where Jube Burkhardt had stopped in his death throes. That was where Hiram and the stretcher-bearers from the fire department had disturbed the thin soil on top of the clay.
    “Mrs. Trumbull, ma’am.”
    Victoria turned to see a uniformed policeman standing behind her. His shoulder patch read AQUINNAH POLICE DEPARTMENT.
    “I suppose Chief O’Neill sent you?” Victoria said with some asperity.
    “No, ma’am. My chief did. Chief O’Neill called him. Asked us to extend whatever reciprocal privileges we could to her deputy. That’s you.”
    Victoria nodded and looked in her bag to make sure her baseball cap was still there.
    “Patrolman VanDyke, at your service, ma’am.”
    The small boy at the fence stared at the patrolman, his beaky nose, dark skin, straight back. The boy’s eyes were huge behind his glasses. “Are you a real Indian?”
    “Yes, sir.” Officer VanDyke saluted the boy, who saluted back with a cupped hand and a grin that showed missing teeth.
    “Are you Patience’s younger brother?” Victoria looked up into his gray eyes.
    “Her first cousin, Obed’s brother. How can I