Vineyard Stalker A Martha's Vineyard Mystery

Chapter One Zee and the kids had gone to America to visit Zee's parents in Fall River, so I was having breakfast in the Dock Street Coffee Shop listening to Chad Martin trying to decide just which of Martha's Vineyard's public institutions was the most maddening. "You could make an argument for the Registry of Motor Vehicles," said Chad between bites of sausage and eggs, "but lately the Registry seems a bit more rational than it was in the old days. Remember when we used to say that in order to work there you had to take an IQ test and fail it?" "Yep." I nodded and kept eating. "Well, nowadays you can say the same thing about those saps at the PO and the Steamship Authority." "Oh, I don't know," I said. "The people I deal with at the counters seem pretty nice." "Sure," said Chad, "but the bigwigs you never see are either dumb as sticks or they've dedicated their lives to ineptitude." I gave him an admiring look. "Ineptitude, eh? That's a pretty impressive word for you to be throwing around this early in the morning." Chad waved his fork. "You take the PO, now. You can start with the parking lot. The parking places are laid out so crazy that you have to park every which way and, when you try to leave, the poor damned pedestrians never know where a car's coming from and have to look every direction at once to keep from being run over. It's a miracle nobody's been killed yet." "I'm not sure the PO owns the parking lot," I said. "And because of that rotten drainage system," Chad went on, "whenever we get a good rain, half the lot turns into a pond a foot deep." Lake Po was the popular name for it. It eliminated half the parking spaces in a lot that was already too small. "And it's worse inside the building," said Chad, wiping his plate with the last of his toast. "You get other people's mail, they get yours; you get your packages back, sometimes two or three times, because somebody thinks the 'from' addresses are the 'to' addresses; you get yellow slips and after you stand in line for a half hour you find out there's no packages; or there's packages and no yellow slips; you get letters months after they were mailed, and some poor bastards have to pay penalties on overdue bills because they never got their bills at all!" He looked at his own breakfast bill, dug out his wallet, and put money on the counter. "The lines are so long that people cheer when they don't get a yellow slip in their boxes. The poor bastards in the line talk about bringing somebody in there to sell coffee and doughnuts in the morning and martinis in the afternoon, and how somebody could make good money being a substitute line stander. They say they're going to have a contest about how to improve the service at the Edgartown post office, and the winner will get a PO box in West Tisbury. You want me to go on, J.W.' "I think that's enough for now." "Next time we can talk about the Steamship Authority," said Chad. "Now there's a beast without a head. See ya later." He walked out. "The trouble is," said the waitress, as she took away his dishes and silverware, "that he's right." "It's an imperfect world." I glanced after the departing Chad and saw a woman sitting at the far end of the counter looking at me. She was eating a bagel and an egg. I didn't know her and was surprised to see her pick up her cup and plate and come and sit beside me on what had been Chad's stool. I guessed her to be about fifty, although it's hard for me to tell women's ages these days when mothers sometimes look younger than their daughters. She was wearing a skirt and a summer shirt, and was a good-looking woman. "You're J.W. Jackson," she said. "I'm Carole Cohen. I'm a friend of Zee's." She put out her hand and I took it. "She has a lot of friends," I said. She got right to the point. "I have to be in the office later this morning, so ICraig, Philip R. is the author of 'Vineyard Stalker A Martha's Vineyard Mystery', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743270458 and ISBN 0743270452.