Westfarrow Island

by Paul A. Barra

  Tagliabue had fitted a rubber mat designed for a pickup’s bed to the floor and covered it with a thick layer of straw. Jesse stayed in the stall with his drugged filly while Tagliabue and Agnes Ann secured the winch and made the vessel ready for sea. They had less than an hour before the sun went down.

  They set off into the gloaming on a falling tide, Maven rolling easily on long, reaching swells. When Tagliabue turned his cell back on he saw two messages from a sheriff’s detective in Bath, both asking him to call. The second seemed a bit more testy in tone than the first. He saw the blinking lights of a small plane heading into the regional airfield on Westfarrow and wondered if that could be sheriff’s investigators. Calling the number on his cell, he left a message saying he was at sea and would call in at the sheriff’s office when he put ashore, about midmorning.

  Agnes Ann went aft to check on her son and her horse. She was smiling when she returned.

  “Both of them sleeping the sleep of the innocent,” she said. “Ain’t life grand?”

  “Amen, sister.”

  Hours passed. Tagliabue kept the throttles moderated so the noise and motion of the boat were easy. He and Agnes Ann took turns napping in the conning chairs. It was unsatisfactory sleep, often interrupted and uncomfortable. Neither wanted to go below to a bunk.

  When the sun came up to a clear cool morning, Jesse scuffed his way into the wheelhouse scratching his unruly curls. The sedative was wearing off, he said. Francine was beginning to move around. He ate the remaining two sandwiches for breakfast while the adults smiled and settled for a third pot of coffee.

  “How long before we put ashore?” Agnes Ann asked.

  “Maybe an hour.”

  Armed with that estimate, she and her son went back to the stall to give the horse another shot, one that would last through the offloading procedure. Leaving Jesse with the horse, Agnes Ann went farther aft and stood on the fantail, watching the churning wake Maven carved through the pool of molten bronze made by the early sun. Tagliabue saw her standing there and wondered to himself what she was thinking.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AGNES ANN

  I was thinking of the long night voyage from Westfarrow, the way my mind wandered during the hours while Tony drove the boat, needing nothing from me but my company. It’s as if I can relive the time in the present, it’s so real to me.

  Sitting in the wheelhouse of Maven as she plows through the dark sea in the hours after we left the island, the motion of Tony’s old boat a steady roll and drop as she lumbers along, the rumble from the engines already part of my consciousness, I start to drift into a state halfway between wakefulness and sleep. It’s the cadence of the sea and the infinite absence of color that makes a person’s mind drift away on a long night voyage, according to Tony. My mind drifts into a haze of sensuousness.

  I remember the session with Tony in the bedroom before Jesse got home from school, the bright sun brightening the edges of the pulled drapes, his big hands on my skin, hot and slick from the shower, my body taking on a motion of its own, rolling and dropping like the boat. The thought brings me back awake. I squirm to upright in the seat.

  “What’re you smiling about, Aggie?”

  “Oh, just some pleasant dream is all.”

  “You can go below if you want to sleep. The bunks are fairly clean. There’s a blanket on one of them.”

  Joshua’s body had been on one of them. I know he died from an explosion, had no disease and had not been aboard long enough to rot, and I am not some silly girl who lets her imagination run off with her mind. Even so, I don’t want to sleep where his body had been so recently.

  When I was still in high school my father told us kids a story of his navy days, how a sailor went over the side during a refueling operation at night and drowned. When they recovered his body from the frigid ocean, the boatswains wrapped it in canvas and placed it in the walk-in freezer. Since they’d been at sea for a few weeks by then, there was a space empty of food. They sailed for two days back to Norfolk. When they made port, the ship’s pork chop (the navy’s delightful idiom for a supply officer) had to give all the frozen food on the vessel to other ships in the squadron because the sailors on my father’s ship refused to eat anything that had been in the locker with the dead body, even though the body had touched nothing and was itself soon frozen solid.

  “And there was nothing wrong with the sailor’s body, except that it was dead,” my father went on. We thought he was making a joke, so we laughed. But he was making a point instead.

  “Compare that with the tale I read of whalers back in the nineteenth century. Two years into a three-year journey, the captain of one of the whaling ships died in his sleep one night. No one on board knew what killed him. Since he was part owner of the ship the crew put him in a tun of rum to preserve his body for burial ashore. When they got back to Nantucket a year later, the cask was empty of liquor. When the other rum on board had eventually run out on the long voyage, the men had drunk the rum from the barrel with the captain’s pickled corpse inside.”

  Dad thought the story was about the force of need overcoming imaginative fears. I thought he was telling us not to be ninnies. I always try hard not to act like a ninny, but I don’t want to nap in the bunkroom where my friend Joshua had lain dead. Although I said nothing to Tony, he seemed to understand. He didn’t go below to nap on a bunk either.

  I put my feet up on the bulkhead in front of me. I think about Joshua’s death and the way Tony was able to control the urge to tell me about it until he thought the time was right. He’s a deep man, my Tony, making it hard to know him. In some ways, intimate ways, I know him better than anyone ever has, but he has a depth I’ll never plumb. Not that I need to. I am willing to accept him as he is, accept that he has a life apart from mine, and accept that everyone has a right to a private inner being.

  So I wasn’t surprised that he kept his mate’s murder from me temporarily or that he didn’t appear to overtly grieve for him. Tony’s life has been difficult. He has probably seen other friends die. He has probably killed other men. I don’t know for sure, but if he doesn’t want to talk about the things he’s done and seen, that’s okay with me too. Whatever he is internalizing doesn’t seem to have an impact on his integrity or his stability. I can abide the strange scars on his body, the long ones and the small punctures. I don’t fuss over them; I don’t ask about them. He offers no explanations, although he might if I did ask.

  Tony was gone from Bath for my formative years, first off to college and then into the navy. He was one of the older guys who we teens found so intriguing, but nobody ever seemed to know much about him. And it sort of stayed that way. Just before I really met him, for instance, when I came back to Westfarrow, he was doing something overseas that he never talks about. He never talks about his parents either, so I really don’t know him all that well.

  I know him well enough to believe that he is what he seems to be: a hard-working, bright, and generous man who means well and treats me as his partner and lover. I do hope to marry him someday. The impediment to marriage is mine. I need to annul the sacramental covenant I agreed to many years ago with Jack Brunson, to free myself morally to enter into another one, binding this time, with Anthony Tagliabue.

  The problem with my marriage contract with Jack Brunson is that I was ignorant. Jack was all he seemed to be at first, a vibrant, popular, and handsome third-year at UVA Law when I got to the university as an undergrad. We married too early—it is obvious to me now—but he seemed to love me and was so attentive that I probably overlooked some of the subtle signs of his shallow nature. When I turned up pregnant in my junior year, the subtlety disappeared as soon as my belly began to appear. Some men find a pregnant woman attractive. Jack liked his women slender. There were many of them, I found out, so we separated before I gave birth, when he was in private practice. After Jack left me, my mother hired a man who took photos of Jack with his mistresses, not that his infidelity was hard to prove. When I confr
onted him with what I knew, and told him never to touch me again, he laughed and poked at my huge belly. But he moved out. He saw his son only once, when he came to what had been our apartment in town to tell me that he was no longer able to pay the rent for me to live alone. I took my sheepskin and Jesse and went home to momma. She was widowed by then and we settled into a comfortable life together on her horse farm near Bath, more like close friends than mother and daughter. I worked the stock as she grew old. We needed each other.

  I didn’t divorce Jack until fourteen years after my college days, when I had uncovered a new dimension to living in the person of Tony. By that time, Jack Brunson was busy making a sumptuous living as a partner in Gaines, Livvy, and Brunson and might have been meaning to wrangle a divorce from me eventually. Or he might have thought I was never going to seek redress for the wrongs he had done to me. I had never asked him for money in those fourteen years, so really, he never had any motivation to seek a divorce. He was obviously not meant for marriage and was just as obviously enjoying his bachelor lifestyle. When I finally did hit him with papers, it turned into some nasty divorce proceedings. He was forced by the filings to recall how I had thrown him out. Jack Brunson wasn’t used to being turned away. He was used to winning.

  Jack had been wolfing up piles of money in his law practice and was not happy with the settlement my lawyer negotiated. He had begun treading in some dark alleys and I was happy to be shed of him. He had tricked me, he thought, with another sleight of hand move that eventually worked against him: he bought a weanling filly at a sale in Kentucky, hoping to race her. First she needed to mature and be trained, so Jack had a friend of his pretend to be her owner and bring the horse to my farm to be raised and broke to race, thinking no doubt of the extra insult to my pride when she turned out to be a champion running under his silks. It was the kind of nasty ploy Jack Brunson would try to work on a person who had rejected him. He acted as if he had never loved me, not even in our college days, as if he only married me to get me into bed with him. Marriage to him was just another legal rule to be exploited with his genius.

  I didn’t know Francine belonged to Jack until my lawyer found out during the discovery phase of my divorce trial months later. By then I had come to like the animal and could see her potential, so I insisted she be part of my settlement. Maybe I was being vindictive. Jack hated losing the horse more than anything. It wasn’t as if he loved her, any more than he loved his son, but he was a man committed to having his vengeance and wanted still to punish me for throwing him out.

  Deep in my belly I am afraid that he works every day to figure a way to get even with me.

  In the immediate aftermath of the divorce, though, I had other scary visions ruining my sleep. Mom became weak and dizzy suddenly and within weeks was no longer able to tend the farm. By the time the specialists diagnosed a high-grade brain tumor called a glioma, it was too late to stem its progress and she was dead in a few months. Those months and the ones just after were as bleak and soulful as any I had ever experienced. The stock dispersal sale was the low point. I kept only Francine, two older geldings we used for riding, and two mares I hoped to breed.

  We carried my stock and my teenage son (and a bundle of Jack’s money) to sea on the Maven one calm, sunny day and moved to our family summer home on Westfarrow Island. I named the acreage Seaside Stables, since it sits on a small cove in the Atlantic off the coast of Maine. Part of the name was for subterfuge purposes—for I hoped to keep the talents of my filly secret for as long as possible so that Jack wouldn’t plan some ugly scheme to get her back. A stable gave me an excuse for erecting a training track—and part was because that is my ultimate goal, to have a breeding farm on the island. Tony visited often. We kept our sex life away from Jesse, a decision that caused us both to exercise a good amount of constraint—and probably didn’t fool my sharp-eyed son for a minute. I learned a lot about Tony on Westfarrow.

  Now we are sailing back to Bath for some new adventures. My filly is ready to go racing, but mostly we have to find out who killed Joshua on Maven and why. Was the boat supposed to sink? None of these questions make sense on the surface. I realize as I roll with the seas on our long slow voyage to the mainland that I am about to find out things I never suspected, and that is okay with me. It’s an anticipatory pleasure, expecting to learn more about Anthony Tagliabue, an opportunity to look further into his character and uncover talents and maybe even secrets of the man I love. There is no dread apparent in my anticipation, nothing to worry about. That can’t be true, of course. The cops in Bath would be looking for answers, and looking for someone to blame. How is Tony tied up in this murder and bombing? That alone should worry me, but it doesn’t. Not yet, at least. Maybe I’m still immature, but I feel excitement in the air as Maven slows where the Kennebec River pools into the great ocean. It’s first light.

  Jesse comes forward—eating the rest of our food—and I go aft to sedate Francine again. She’s calm, munching hay, ears up, and steady. She has learned to trust humans. That’s fine, as long as Jesse and I are there for her to trust. We are entering the river mouth where Jake Collier is supposed to meet us, so I give the horse some more barbiturate and talk to her quietly until she grows sleepy. By then we are docked at Heal Eddy and Tony has the winch in position to offload her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Johnny Coleman was fresh-faced and wiry, dressed in a shirt and tie with the butt of a Smith & Wesson M&P 9 semiautomatic peeking out from a shoulder holster near his heart. It reminded Tagliabue of a moray in its cave, ugly and dangerous. A gold badge, rimmed with “Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office,” was clipped to his belt. Tagliabue thought the detective was trying hard to control his anger about the twenty-four-hour delay in his investigation of the suspicious death of one Joshua Peter White. Detective Coleman scrubbed his hand over the flattop bristle of his fair hair. Tagliabue spoke to release some pressure from the interview.

  “I thought it might be easier for your work if I was here instead of on Westfarrow,” Tagliabue said.

  Coleman grunted at that. He said: “Not bad thinking, all right. I just didn’t expect radio silence for all day yesterday. You coulda called. You coulda called when you discovered the body.”

  “I tried but got a bad 911 connection.”

  “You try again?”

  “No.”

  “This delay makes me think you’re avoiding the police here, Mr. Tagliabue. It makes me suspicious, you get that?”

  “I do. Try to remember I had a stricken vessel on my hands on the high seas. At the time I’m worried more about me than Joshua. Then I was intent on repairing it and getting back here on the mainland where the murder had to have taken place. I’m sorry my phone was off. I often turn it off when I have serious work to do in a hurry.”

  “Those are all bullshit excuses for not calling the police when you discover a body.”

  “We did alert the constable on the island.”

  “There are no forensic people on Westfarrow. I fly a team out and what do they find? The fucking scene of the crime is gone. In the middle of the night.”

  Coleman’s voice was rising. Tagliabue spoke in an even tone.

  “I thought about waiting but the cabin of the boat was pretty well washed out by then. Plus the Westfarrow PD had checked it out and taken some pictures.”

  “Constable Ian Fletcher ain’t hardly qualified to conduct a forensic investigation. He might as well be a rent-a-cop for all he knows about police work.”

  Tagliabue did not argue the point.

  Coleman went on in a softer tone. “I don’t mean that. Ian’s okay. They just don’t get much more than traffic problems and teen drug use on the island, although I gotta say the place does get thousands of visitors a day in the summer. It can get pretty wild. We probably need more of a police presence out there. Having said that, I gotta tell you that I don’t think Ian gets to handle too many homicides out on the island.”

  He paused, probably thinking of the dam
aged relationship with the Westfarrow PD if Tagliabue mentioned his attitude toward Constable Fletcher. He continued, gruff again, “And what about the woman? She’s a witness and she ain’t home. We can’t locate her.”

  “She came with me, figuring the police will want to talk to her.”

  “Okay, okay. What’s her name, address?”

  “Agnes Ann Townsend Brunson, Seaside Stables, Westfarrow Island. You should know also, detective, that she’s my fiancée.”

  Coleman looked at him in surprise. He cleared his throat and said, “You’re gonna marry her. Any other witnesses besides her?”

  “Her son, Jesse Brunson.”

  “They kin to the lawyer Brunson?”

  “Jack Brunson is Agnes Ann’s ex-husband, and Jesse’s biological father.”

  That distinction precipitated some rapid scribbling by Coleman in his little notebook. Along with some indecipherable murmuring. He stuffed the notebook into a pocket and clipped his pen to the same pocket.

  “Let’s get us down to your boat so I can see what’s left of the crime scene. You might as well ride with me.”

  The two of them drove down from the Bath county seat to Cronk’s Boatyard and Marina on the Kennebec River where Maven was tied up. Agnes Ann and Jesse were ten miles away at a horse farm that was boarding Francine. After dropping them off with the owner and his trailer at a boat ramp near the mouth of Heal Eddy, Tagliabue had motored another hour to Bath. He did not stop to eat before he reported in to Coleman. Now he wished he had. His stomach was making a few unhappy noises and he seemed to have lost his energy, the long nights at sea and the hard work on Westfarrow undoubtedly contributing to that. He longed for a lobster roll and a soft bed. It was unlikely either was in the immediate offing.