'The what?' Jim asked.
' 'Who could have predicted this event, at once so joyous and so tragic?'' I quoted.
' 'Who can calculate the import this occurrence would present upon his life and art?'' Michael added.
'If that's one of those word games, I don't get it,' Jim said in a voice that suggested he didn't much care, either. If he wasn't the biographer, he was a phenomenal actor. Ah, well. I tried another angle.
'Before the storm. You could see what went on at Resnick's, right?'
'Yeah, I guess.'
'Was he really electrocuting birds?'
'Yeah, but he wasn't killing them.'
'Then what was he doing?'
'Running a low-voltage current through some of the metal struts in his roof. Give 'em a hotfoot, scare 'em away so they'd stop crapping on his glass. Town made him stop, though.'
'You mean he actually did what they asked?'
Jim snorted.
'Yeah. Well, he wouldn't have, except that it didn't really work anyway. Gulls just sat on the glass. Funniest thing you ever saw, watching him jump up and down in his yard, yelling at the gulls. Couldn't throw anything without breaking the glass.'
'When did he stop?'
'May, maybe June. Before the tourist season anyway.'
That made sense; the puffin could have still been in breeding plumage in May or June, as far as I could tell from the bird books. Maybe puffins were more sensitive to a hotfoot than gulls. Or maybe Resnick had experimented with higher voltages before the town pulled the plug on his bird-control program.
'Have you seen your brother recently?' I asked finally.
'Fred? Yeah, he's down in the village somewhere, I guess.'
From the tone of voice, I got the feeling there was no love lost between the brothers.
'No, I actually meant Will.'
Jim frowned but said nothing.
'Monhegan's own candidate for America's most wanted,' I went on. 'You haven't seen him around recently, have you?'
'No, not since--' Jim began, then stopped.
'Not since when?' I asked.
'Not since before they got arrested,' he said slowly. 'What does he have to do with anything? Will wasn't even on the island when…'
His voiced trailed off, as if something had just occurred to him.
'Well, if you find out he's on the island, tell him to see his lawyer,' I said.
'Even if he didn't do it,' Michael said.
'Especially if he didn't do it,' I added. 'Do you think the police will look far for another suspect if they find someone right under their noses with a prior history of whacking people over the head?'
At least I hoped that's what the police would do. I must have sounded pretty convincing. Jim frowned.
'I have to get back to the generator,' he said, and strode off.
'Okay, I'll bite,' Michael said. 'What was last bit all about?'
'I'm not sure,' I said. 'I'm hoping if Will Dickerman is on the island, Jim will go and see him.'
'To warn him, or to give him hell for jumping bail and jeopardizing the power plant?'
'Either one will do,' I said.
'Shouldn't we do something? Like maybe follow him?'
'He knows every inch of the island; I think we'd be slightly conspicuous?'
'So we stir things up and then just sit around and wait to see if something happens?'
'No. Like I said, we get the rope and burgle Resnick's studio.'
But before we got to the cottage, Winnie and Binkie came hiking briskly up behind us. Predictably, after we exchanged greetings, they asked if we'd heard any more news about the murder.
About ten seconds after we told them about Mrs. Peabody and the puffin, Michael and Winnie were deep in conversation about digital cameras. Binkie and I fell in step a little behind them.
'I have the awful feeling I'm going to hear a great deal about digital cameras over the next few months,' I said with a sigh.
'Dear me, yes,' Binkie murmured. 'And, if your young man is anything like Winnie, spending a great deal of time saying, 'Yes, dear, that's a lovely picture.''
I shuddered. I had no doubt she was right.
'Speaking of pictures,' I said, 'what do you think of Resnick's painting ability?'
Instead of answering, Binkie looked over her glasses at me and frowned. Was I just imagining things, or had I touched a nerve?
Chapter 24
'Resnick's painting ability?' Binkie asked warily. 'Why, what's that got to do with his death?'
'I don't know that it has anything to do with it,' I said. 'Unless you know of a reason.'
'No, of course not,' Binkie said. A little too quickly perhaps? 'Well, anyone on Monhegan can tell you about Victor Resnick. He's probably the most distinguished local landscape artist--'
'The real scoop, not the Monhegan Chamber of Commerce spiel.'
She looked over her glasses at me. I tried to look innocent, earnest, and discreet. Apparently, I pulled it off.
'Second rate, at best,' she said. 'A shame, really. He showed such early promise, but then he never developed.'
'I'm no art critic,' I said. 'His paintings seem pretty good to me.'
'Oh, they're good, of course,' she said. 'But they're no better today than they were fifty years ago. In fact, they're not the slightest bit different. Not the style, not the technical skill, not even the subject matter.'
'Always landscapes, yes,' I said.
'Always Monhegan landscapes,' Binkie corrected.
'I thought he'd spent most of the last twenty years in the south of France,' I said.
'Yes, and did nothing the whole time but paint pictures of Monhegan. What kind of artist could live for twenty years on the Cote d'Azur and never once paint the Mediterranean?'
She frowned and shook her head. I followed suit, while privately thinking that it might take more strength of character than I possessed to pick up a brush at all if I were living on the Cote d'Azur.
'Maybe he was homesick,' I suggested.
'If he was homesick, why didn't he come home a little more often, then?' Binkie said. 'Lazy, more like. Did it from snapshots, of course. Only came home when he wanted more snapshots. If he were still alive, you'd see him running around with that Polaroid of his right now, taking pictures of the storm.'
I had a sudden vision of Victor Resnick standing in his expensive greenhouselike studio, ignoring the glorious view as he peered at a curling Polaroid clipped to his easel.
'And honestly,' Binkie went on, 'if I have to look at one more painting of those eerie, foreboding, calm- before-the-storm skies… well, I suppose now I won't have to.'
'You'll probably think I'm a total philistine for saying this,' I said, 'but I bought a book of his paintings down at Mamie's store largely because of those skies. I thought he did them rather well.'
'Oh, he did do them well. Superlatively. It's just that he did them all the time. He figured out the technique early on, dazzled everybody, and couldn't let it go. Flip through that book of yours and see. Every other painting's got that same gray-green sky. That or the gnarled tree.'
