Westfarrow Island

by Paul A. Barra

  She smiled in admiration at her son’s growing maturity as she drew in deep breaths and shucked her jacket. Tagliabue tried not to look at her body. In less than a half hour they were finished. Tagliabue retrieved a heavy line Jesse had rigged to a tree. He tied it off to a bollard on the bow of Maven and started the port engine. He backed her away slowly from the dock. He dropped an anchor over the stern and eased the boat forward as Jesse took up the slack in the hawser until the boat ran aground. Steadying her with the engines, Tagliabue tightened the aft anchor line and heaved a rope ladder over the side. He killed the engines and climbed down. They left the boat like that, tied off forward and anchored astern.

  Agnes Ann said. “You’ll soon be stranded on the beach, Tony. You’ll have three or four hours before you can refloat her.”

  “That should give me enough time.”

  “Us.”

  “How’s that, lady?”

  “Us. I’ll be helping you with repairs.”

  Tagliabue nodded as Jesse drove off to unload in the barn. He would do that himself while his mother and her friend had coffee in the kitchen. They walked up the dirt path to the house. The island hadn’t seen rain for five days so the ground was loose. They went through the blue door to the kitchen, the man leaving his boots in the mudroom and ducking under the lintel. Agnes Ann pushed the button on a Bunn. They sat at an enameled table.

  “The hay smelled good. What kind were you able to get?”

  “Fescue and timothy mix.”

  “Oh, that’s perfect. Decent price too after last week’s warm spell. That should do us for a while.”

  “Yeah. We’ll be getting spring grass next time we need to load up,” Tagliabue said.

  “If there is a next time.”

  He looked at her. “You thinking you might stay on the mainland for the season?”

  “Well, you know . . .” She reddened a touch. “Francine could do well at Saratoga. A couple of decent finishes there and at Aqueduct would pay for a lot of feed.”

  “I guess it would.”

  “Old Mr. Hammet will take care of the other horses for as long as I want him to.”

  They sat quietly. Tagliabue knew this was the time to tell her about Joshua’s death and the explosion that had holed his boat. But her features softened as she thought of something entirely foreign to death and destruction. He caught the look and said nothing yet about his mate. He reached across the table, put his hand in her hair, and kissed her lips gently. She closed her eyes and returned the kiss. Agnes Ann got up to pour. With her back to him, she asked: “Will you stay awhile, Tony?”

  “We need to get off before dark.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” She smiled as she put the mug down in front of him. She combed stray strands of hair from his forehead with her fingers before she turned to her chair.

  “No new gray ones.”

  He smiled this time, teeth showing bright against his sun-darkened skin. They drank coffee and took care of the cargo business. Jesse came in with a burst of salt air and youthful energy.

  “Francine doing all right?”

  “Yessir. She’s feisty now. We keep her away from the other horses in the morning, so she don’t get hurt bossing them around. Been like this since the weather turned. Ready to run, I guess.”

  “Nobody ever recognized her?”

  “Nossir. We exercise her early, about now in fact. People around here don’t carry stopwatches with them anyway. They know she’s a thoroughbred and a looker, but I don’t think anyone realizes how fast she really is.”

  The man turned toward the boy’s mother. “Why is it so important to keep Francine a secret?”

  “Well, first there’s Jack, y’know. I can’t get free of the suspicion that he still might try some devious trick to get her back, whether it’s a legal ploy or something else. I know that sounds paranoid. Besides that, we don’t want the filly to have a reputation for being fast before she even gets to the racetrack. We’d like to kind of sneak up on the opposition.”

  “How fast is she?”

  “She breezed four furlongs in forty-seven and change Monday.” She sounded like a proud mother, her body taut with controlled excitement.

  “That’s a half-mile, right? And that’s a good time.”

  “Real good,” the boy said, “especially this early in the year. She’s going to astound folks in Saratoga this summer. Including your grumpy friend Joshua White.”

  Tagliabue kept his face bland and didn’t look at Agnes Ann. He would have to tell them about Joshua’s death soon. Not yet. Tagliabue couldn’t see any reason to darken the teen’s ebullient mood before he had a chance to show off his racing filly. Jesse moved about the kitchen, not doing anything, just moving, fiddling with the Bluetooth headset and mic he would wear under his helmet. He wanted to exercise the horse, Tagliabue knew, show his mother’s friend how well she ran. Tagliabue pushed his chair back. The boy headed for the door.

  “She’s already tacked up.”

  Agnes Ann smiled and went with them, shrugging on her barn coat as she walked. Francine was waiting, tied to a verandah post, head and ears up, muscles rippling under her glossy red coat in the early sun. The boy vaulted into the small saddle and walked her out to the training track as the two adults followed on foot along a weeded-over trail. The chestnut pranced and blew and shook her head, as anxious as her rider to run.

  “She looks good, Aggie.”

  “Yeah, she’s in great shape, eating well and training well.”

  The horse and rider moved ahead of them.

  “You hearing anything?” Tagliabue asked.

  “Only an e-mail confirming my registration for an $80,000 maiden race on July 29th.”

  “Nothing from Jack?”

  “No. Thanks be to God.”

  The boy warmed up the filly on the dirt oval.

  “Joshua didn’t show up this morning at Cronk’s.”

  Jesse took her up to a slow canter, her feet scooping sprays of the dry track behind her.

  “Oh, my. I hope he’s not in the drunk tank again.”

  “He’s not.”

  Francine ran by them for the first time, still throwing her head as her rider kept a hold on her. Agnes Ann smiled at Jesse. When the horse was past and the pounding sounds of her gait had abated, she turned to Tagliabue for the first time since they’d taken up their positions at the track fence.

  “Have you heard from him, you mean?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Her smile faded at her friend’s tone.

  “What’s wrong, Tony?”

  “He’s dead, Aggie.”

  “Oh, God.” She shut her eyes. Tagliabue figured she was saying a prayer for his mate’s soul. She did things like that. The filly was stretching out by then and came by in a blur of thundering hooves that rattled the fence rails.

  “The poor man,” she said into the silence that followed the horse. “What happened, do you know?”

  “I’m not sure what happened. I think someone killed him.”

  “You mean murdered?” Her mouth was open slightly as she looked up at his weathered face, crow’s feet outlining blue eyes that avoided hers as they looked out at the running animal. She took his jaw in her hand and turned it to her.

  “You’d better tell me what you know.”

  “As soon as we’re finished this training session. Let Jess have his moment.”

  Agnes Ann accepted that wisdom with a quick nod. They watched Jesse and his horse circle the track again at speed, the beast’s muscles bunching and stretching as she ran in long strides, the boy’s lips cracked open at the pleasure of it all. Jesse slowed Francine and walked her one more lap.

  Agnes Ann left Tagliabue at the rail. She walked out to the middle of the track and gave instructions to her son as he close-hauled the panting, prancing filly around her. Horse and rider set off again in a light canter. Trainer and rider spoke to each other on their electronic devices. Agnes Ann gave instructions, the boy talke
d about the horse’s breathing, her stride, her attitude. When the animal started showing signs of tiredness, they moved to a two-stall starting gate and practiced loading her into the contraption, the boy sitting quietly on the filly’s back. Agnes Ann closed the back flaps of the gate and let the filly stand in the enclosed space. She climbed in and led the horse out again, then back in. After three times doing this, she said to Jesse: “Tomorrow we begin with some fast starts.” He tapped his helmet in a one-fingered salute and rode off slowly toward the barn.

  She came back to Tagliabue: “He’ll be a while brushing her down and feeding her. Come to the house.”

  Seated again at the kitchen table, Agnes Ann asked about the death of Joshua White.

  “We were supposed to meet at one forty-five. He didn’t show. I was pissed. I was out to sea an hour or so, the bilge pump lit off. When I went below to find the leak I found Joshua’s body. His chest is a mess.”

  Agnes Ann spoke in a small voice: “We’d better look, do you think?”

  “Aye. We’ve got some decisions to make.”

  They walked down to the beach to find the boat grounded forward, its stern still afloat. They climbed aboard. The cabin deck was mostly dry although they could hear the pump kick on once in a while as it cleared water from the aft bilge. Agnes Ann walked over to Joshua White’s body and looked without touching it. Tagliabue pulled a coarse blanket from another bunk and handed it to her. She covered the corpse.

  “I’d better call Constable Fletcher,” she said in the same small voice.

  “And tell your son.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’ll have to do that.”

  Westfarrow’s sole police presence arrived at the horse farm in forty-five minutes. He was a stout, graying man with a belly and a lugubrious manner. He greeted Agnes Ann with a smile and a peck on the cheek, and he remembered Tagliabue. He seemed in no hurry to view the body.

  Ian Fletcher accepted a cup of tea. They sat in the kitchen, joined by young Jesse, as Tagliabue told of finding his mate’s remains in the cabin of his boat earlier that morning. Jesse seemed quiet but not surprised; his mother had talked to him.

  “His body was jammed up against the hole in the hull, I guess, but I actually did not see it until it had been pushed away by the force of the water when I went to cruising speed. I don’t know why else the boat didn’t flood sooner.”

  “Did you notice anything else when you discovered the poor man?” Fletcher asked. “Any smell, for instance? Any weapon?”

  “No, nothing. We’d been underway for nearly two hours by then. Everything in the cabin had had a good wash.”

  “When was the last time you were on the boat? Before you set sail this morning, I mean.”

  “Yesterday afternoon. The hay truck met me at about two thirty. I’d been through the boat by then. I was looking to be sure everything was dry so the hay wouldn’t get wet. I think I can say for sure that there was no damage at that time, say half past one or so.”

  “Is there anyone you can think of—any of you—who would want to damage the boat?”

  They all looked at the policeman. Tagliabue and Agnes Ann harbored vague suspicions about her ex-husband, Jack Brunson, who lost the filly to her in the final divorce decree and who suspected even then, two years ago, that she might develop into a special racehorse. Their suspicions were unformed and nowhere near ready to be aired to the police. Jesse knew nothing of these suspicions. All three shook their heads at Fletcher.

  “How about Mr. White, the victim? He have any known enemies? Anyone with a reason to want him dead?”

  “Joshua was a rough character. Hung around waterfront bars and did his share of drinking. I guess he had a fight or two, but nothing serious enough to kill over, I don’t think. He was my mate for a decade or more and I never saw or heard any threats.”

  Constable Fletcher sighed once, said: “Well, I guess we better view the body.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They set off, the cop making a call on his cell to the island satellite hospital as they crunched down the beach to the boat. Maven was completely aground. Fletcher and Tagliabue went aboard. Tagliabue hated having to look at his old friend’s corpse again, even though it didn’t much remind him of the man who had sailed with him hundreds of times. Joshua had a snarly voice and a face that moved like an ensign rippling in the wind as he argued or cajoled or laughed, until it finally came to droop as a flag did in calm conditions when he settled in for a glass of scotch at the end of a trip. The body on the Maven’s bunk held no resemblance to Joshua White anymore. His spirit was long gone.

  Fletcher, the Reluctant Cop, as Tagliabue had taken to thinking of him, gestured vaguely with his hand at the blanket covering the body. Tagliabue peeled it back. Fletcher looked at the body, at its ruined chest and wrinkled face, the cop’s Adam’s apple working like a Lilliputian elevator. Standing two feet away from the corpse, he made no move to touch anything.

  “Er, how’d the poor lad come to land on this bunk?”

  “I put him there. When I saw the hole in the hull of my boat and realized he would be in the way of repairs.”

  The two men were speaking in near whispers, even though mother and son were out of earshot. Constable Fletcher took out his smartphone, began snapping some pictures of the body in situ and taking random shots around the cabin. He picked up shards of what may have been some kind of plastic, tiny lengths of wire, and random bits and pieces that lay about the decking and put it all in a large baggie he had pulled from his pocket. They peered at the body some more and then Fletcher nodded. Tagliabue floated the blanket over Joshua’s remains again and they went topside. They waited in the fresh air until an ambulance puttered slowly down to the dock.

  “There’s not a coroner on the island, Anthony. We’ll ship White’s corpse to the mainland.”

  They helped two EMTs move the draped body—Jesse looking on with an ashen sheen to his face—and watched it driven away before Fletcher spoke again.

  “I’ll e-mail a report. They’ll want to visit with you when you get back to Bath.”

  Jesse went off to school while Tagliabue and Agnes Ann gathered material and tools to patch the hull. They worked side by side for almost two hours, speaking only about the work. A thin sun was out and they both began to sweat freely by the time they finished the job. Tagliabue had his shirt off. Flecks of glue and sawdust stuck to his chest. They went back to the house and showered together before spending another two hours in her darkened bedroom.

  Later Agnes Ann sat in the living room wearing a flannel robe and slippers. It was an old house; the thick walls kept it cool in the spring for most of the day.

  “It feels good to just sit. I’m not used to so much work.”

  “Work was it?” Tagliabue asked. He was stretched out on the couch, drowsy from his night at the helm.

  She dipped her head, a hint of color coming to her face. He thought she looked ten years younger, and innocent.

  “I’m talking about the boat repairs, big man, not you ravishing me.”

  “Ravishing?”

  That brought a chuckle from Tagliabue and got him to a sitting position. She giggled into the mug she held in both hands. He stretched and groaned, smiling broadly. The smile slowly faded as reality intruded again. They had another risky voyage facing them, and more work to do. They also had to face the mainland police, bury Joshua, and get Francine safely stabled a long way from her home.

  He wondered, not for the first time, at the vagaries of human nature. Despite the violent death of a friend and danger he had faced at sea—or maybe because of it—he and Aggie had been wanton in their sex. They’d been apart for two weeks, so that may have had something to do with it, but it occurred to him that he should be feeling some guilt at enjoying life so much when Joshua lay in a hospital morgue.

  “Jesse will be home in a minute,” Agnes Ann said. “I’d better get dressed.”

  She walked over to Tagliabue and straddled his lap. She let the front of her ro
be fall open as she held his head to her breast. He felt a stirring, but then she was gone, closing the bedroom door behind her. He shook himself and took the mugs to the kitchen.

  When the boy drove the pickup home from school, and after he consumed what seemed to be as many calories as the horse ate following her workout, they found Maven refloated on the second high tide of the day. They moved her back to the pier and made her ready for the most important voyage of her long career. The Maven was an old Coast Guard buoy tender that Tagliabue had converted to a carrier boat. At sixty feet long and beamy, she had a deck winch and cargo space, drew a bit over five feet and was maneuverable inshore with Tagliabue at the helm in the covered conning station that snugged up against her snub nose. He had built a half-sized makeshift stall in the aft section of the open hold; they had to get Francine into the stall for her journey. The entire evolution had to be done away from public scrutiny. If Constable Fletcher had recognized the stable for what it was he had said nothing. Tagliabue blew out a breath and got ready to face a difficult loading and a secret journey.

  Jesse walked the horse down. Agnes Ann had administered a sedative to her but she was skittish walking out on the worn pier decking. Mother and son calmed her by stroking her face and muzzle, talking in a constant low-pitched flow. The woman slid a blindfold over the beast’s eyes. Tagliabue fit a double-strap harness around her belly, watching her sharp hooves as he worked even though Francine was used to being saddled and handled. She moved her feet but did not otherwise protest. He clipped the harness rings to the winch cable and took up the slack slowly. The filly started when the winch engine cranked up and stood twitching when the straps pulled tight. The humans all kept their distance.

  “She seem comfortable enough, Aggie? If she starts kicking in the air we could have a mess in a hurry. I don’t know how much strain this old rigging can handle.”

  Mother looked at her son, who answered Tagliabue: “Maybe give her another minute, Mr. T. I think she’ll be all right.”

  Tagliabue kept the winch motor running. The horse began to rest against the straps as the barbiturate kicked in. Her head slowly drooped. At Jesse’s signal, Tagliabue worked the winch lever slowly and the horse lifted off the pier. He upped the power and the three of them began to move quickly, mother and son steadying the animal while Tagliabue swung the winch aboard and lowered it. The horse was soon standing on the boat deck. When he slackened the cable, she swayed. Jesse put his shoulder to her flank and took some of her weight. Tagliabue dropped the straps and the three of them forced the horse into the stall, he and Aggie linking hands around the horse’s buttocks and hauling her forward while the boy pulled her by the halter. Dragging her hooves, Francine clopped into the structure and rested against one wall. She nickered softly.