Fishermen's Court

by Andrew Wolfendon

  Miles charges out the door behind me.

  “Finn!” he shouts. “Stop! God damn it, I am ordering you to stop.”

  Ordering me? That’s a new one. I keep walking. Miles catches up but walks two paces behind me.

  “Classic Finn. Charging off with your head up your ass instead of facing reality.”

  The wrong thing for Miles to say to me at this particular juncture. I wheel about and face him, my neck flushing with heat. “Me face reality? You don’t know fuck-all, Miles! And you never have. You live in your little world of…” I stop myself there.

  “Say it, Finn. Come on, get it off your chest.”

  I have something on my chest, all right, but it’s not what he thinks.

  “Come on, Finn. Clear the air. Say what’s on your mind. Because it’s been poisoning our friendship since freshman year of—”

  “Friendship? Is that what you call this? ‘Cause that’s not what it feels like right now.” I walk on, my feet slapping the mud.

  Miles follows. “Finn, come on...”

  “I need a real friend today, Miles, not a social worker, not a cop, not a—”

  “Then convince me, god damn it!”

  “Of what?”

  “That you’re not out of your god-damn mind!”

  My gait falters for a hitch, but I don’t stop. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “Then let me get you some help and together we’ll—”

  “I can’t do it because I would have to tell you things… I’m not able to say.”

  “What are you talking about?” He draws up abreast of me and clasps my jacket sleeve. “Finn. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Before cooler heads can prevail, I blurt out, “I didn’t tell you the whole story of what happened to me, because I didn’t want to burden you with it. I was... protecting you. As usual.” I reach the road and keep walking. Miles stays glued to me, awaiting more. “There’s a reason those men came to my house,” I say. I turn and notice Jim following us, several yards behind. I lower my volume. “And it has everything to do with you.”

  Jesus, what am I hearing from my own mouth? Only yesterday I swore I would never share my awful secret with Miles. But now it seems like the only path forward.

  “Me?” says Miles. “You’d better explain yourself, Finn.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “I can’t!”

  But we both know there’s no stopping this train now.

  Chapter 14

  Miles and I sit side by side on a pew in the island’s tiny non-denominational chapel. I didn’t want to talk at his house, or in a public restaurant, or outside in the driving rain. There’s no one else using the chapel on this rainy Friday morning, and the setting seems fitting for the confessional work at hand.

  “Those guys at my house?” I say, hushing my voice for no good reason. “That really happened. Not just in my mind. I’m not crazy, Miles. Someone tried to kill me. When they left me for dead, this was showing on my computer.” On my phone, I pull up the suicide note.

  Miles reads the text, his face a stone sculpture.

  “But you wrote this, right?” he asks.

  “No. I know it sounds like my words, but no I didn’t.”

  If Miles wants to challenge me on this point, he doesn’t. “It says you were alone in the car that night.”

  “Right. Why would I write that? Or some of this other crap?”

  “Okay, so what’s this big incident that’s being alluded to? What’s all the drama and guilt about?”

  “People died, that’s what.”

  “Died? What do you mean?”

  “That Glenmalloch bottle? We didn’t toss it on the roadside, Miles.”

  I pause before delivering the coup de grace, knowing that what I tell him next can never be taken back. Doubt rears its head again. What right do I have to dump this stuff on him? To torpedo his career and his family? His actions that night were careless, not evil. He has no real moral stain. Not yet, anyway. Not till he knows.

  I suddenly see another option, a way to tell him almost the entire truth by changing one little detail. In this way, all the major implications will remain the same, but Miles can be spared the actual guilty hand.

  “We needed to get rid of the bottle,” I say. “We were driving over route 495, but... you told me it was the Merrimac. You were drunk, you didn’t know. I grabbed the bottle from your hand and threw it over the bridge without thinking. It was only when we got to the next bridge that I realized we’d made a mistake. I had thrown the bottle onto the highway, not in the river.”

  Miles tenses, waiting for more.

  “I thought I heard crashing sounds from below,” I continue, “but I wasn’t sure. You had passed out by that point, and I couldn’t wake you, so I couldn’t talk to you about it. I didn’t know what to do. So I just drove off, told myself it was nothing.”

  “And...?”

  “It wasn’t nothing.” I show him the old Globe article from 1999 that I emailed myself. He reads it. His face visibly drains of blood, and his breath becomes shallow and audible.

  “Jesus, Finn,” he says, unconsciously pressing his palms together like praying hands. “How long have you known about these deaths?” Suddenly I’m not crazy anymore.

  “Only since I clicked the link in that ‘suicide’ note. The day after graduation, I avoided reading the papers or watching the news. I left for California a day later.”

  “Jesus, Finn,” he repeats. “Jesus.” A sheen of perspiration has blossomed on his forehead.

  “Now do you believe me? Now do you see why someone might be upset enough to want to hurt me? Now do you see why I can’t be staying at your house?”

  But Miles doesn’t seem to hear me. He stands up and walks out of the church with his mouth hanging open and a benumbed look in his eyes. I start to follow him, but he warns me off with a sweep of his hand.

  . . . . .

  I’ve rented a room on the third floor of Harbor House—to distance myself from Miles’ home and family. Ordinarily there would be no vacancies on Musqasset on a holiday weekend, but because of the storm there have been numerous cancellations. I asked JJ, the manager, for a quiet room away from other guests, and he was able to put me in 313, in the back corner of the third floor, with no one occupying the next two rooms.

  I’m under no illusion that I’m safe here, though. If Trooper Dan and company were able to find me in the pitch dark last night, in a storm, in the middle of an island unfamiliar to them, then I assume, going out on a limb, they can find me in a public inn. But what can they do about it? That’s what I’m pondering as I sit here on the edge of the bed, biting furiously at a hangnail. Would these guys really dare make a move on me here, in this old wooden inn where noise carries like electric current? Or in any public spot on the island?

  Or will they need to isolate me somewhere, far from the madding crowd?

  But they had their perfect opportunity last night in the woods, and they didn’t act on it. Why? I haven’t a clue. That’s because I have no idea who these guys are or what their motivation is. So how can I gain better clarity? I decide to give mind-mapping a whirl. It’s a visual brainstorming technique I sometimes use for developing creative ideas in games. I’m digging in my backpack for my notebook when there’s a knock at the door.

  Suicidally, I turn the knob and peek out.

  It’s Miles. He pushes the door open. Carrying a laptop computer, he strides purposefully into the room. “Let’s assume everything you said is true,” he announces without preamble. “
Who could possibly know about that night, and why would they care?”

  I have no idea what has caused this sudden shift of attitude, but Miles plunks his laptop down on the room’s small desk, tosses his rain jacket onto the bed, and rolls up his sleeves as if he’s ready to work. “Let’s start by going over what we know for sure,” he says. “See where that leads us.” His energy is all business.

  Fine, I’m game.

  We convert my room into a makeshift “war room,” using the desk as a table and snagging an extra chair from down the hall. We both agree that my only real hope of thwarting my purported stalkers is to figure out who they are and what they want. We know the odds of our being able to solve this puzzle from the remote location of Musqasset Island, in a storm, on a holiday weekend, with two rank amateurs at the helm, are slim, to put it wildly optimistically. But slim beats nonexistent.

  Miles tells me he has already put out feelers to all the inns, asking if any suspicious-looking men traveling in twos or threes have checked into their establishments, but that has yielded no results. No shocker there. The bad guys, after all, are probably not wearing bandit masks and carrying violin cases. Besides, we have absolutely no authority to question anyone, even if we suspect them. And the “facts” we possess, at least at this point, are far too sketchy to bring Jim into the picture. So for now it’s Miles and me against the world.

  “Before we go any further with this,” says Miles, booting up his computer, “I want to state something ‘for the record.’” Oh joy. “I’m choosing to believe you, and I want to help you, but… here’s my dilemma. Now that I know what happened that night, I can’t unknow it. And the more information we unearth, the harder it’s going to be to pretend I can. What I’m trying to say is: in my position, I can’t be guilty of covering up… misdeeds.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Miles. I’m prepared to step forward and accept complete responsibility for my actions at the appropriate time.” It’s true. I am.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod. He nods. We lock eyes across the table for several long seconds.

  “Then let’s do this.”

  I go to turn on my phone recorder to capture our conversation—a habit of mine from work meetings—but before I touch the phone, it “wakes up” as if a text or call has come in. Nothing shows up on the screen, though. Whatever message was snaking through the ether, trying to find me, has been lost in the storm. I tap “record” on the VoxFox app.

  “The most fundamental question we need to ask,” says Miles, “is who besides you and me could possibly know about your connection to that accident? No one else was there.” He leans back, flaring his palms out. “Possibility number one: you or I told someone. Since I had nothing to tell until now, that kind of eliminates me.” Miles drills his eyes into mine, doing his lawyer thing. “Over the course of the last eighteen years, have you told anyone what happened in that car? Anyone at all?”

  Easy answer: “No.”

  “Are you sure? Anyone at all, under any circumstances? Think. A confession to a priest...” Right. “A night in a bar... pillow talk with Jeannie or someone else?”

  “Nope, absolutely not. I’m a hundred percent sure.”

  “Ever write about it in a journal or diary someone could have read?” I shake my head. “Or mention it to a shrink in a hospital, or a therapist?”

  “No, Miles. I told you: I couldn’t even admit it to myself. I moved to the far end of the continent just so I wouldn’t have to know if there had even been an accident.”

  “So we didn’t start the fire. Possibility number two,” he says, “there was an eyewitness. Someone saw what happened, maybe got your license plate number, traced it back to you.”

  Given the conditions that night—dark road, late hour, unpopulated location—we quickly rule out that possibility.

  “Which leaves the cop, then,” says Miles.

  “Right.” The cop is the only possible candidate for eyewitness. “Here’s the thing, though. I was watching for him like a hawk. I had my eyes glued to the rear-view mirror at the time that I”—I almost say “you”—“threw the bottle. He wasn’t behind us then. I’m sure. It wasn’t till a short while later he started tailing us. …Besides, if the cops suspected me of anything, why wouldn’t they have followed up?” Miles ponders that obvious question. “Why wait eighteen years to come after me, and why get thugs involved? Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Right. Which brings us to possibility number three. If neither of us told anyone, and there were no witnesses, including the cop, then someone pieced something together from evidence found at the scene of the accident.”

  “And the only possible evidence was the bottle itself. If they could somehow trace that.”

  “Right.”

  “But wouldn’t it have shattered into a skillion pieces?” I ask.

  “Maybe, maybe not. It was a pretty thick bottle, as I recall.”

  An idea light bulb turns on over Miles’ head—yes it does; sue me—and he types “Glenmalloch” into the Google search box. He hits the search button, nothing happens. “Shit,” he says. The Internet, it seems, has chosen this moment to desert us. “This place has satellite,” Miles says by way of explanation. “We’ll try again in a few minutes.”

  Internet on Musqasset is a crapshoot even on a sunny day in June. The concept of broadband is like time travel here. Video streaming is a joke. There are a few DSL lines, but the signal is weak this far offshore. Satellite Internet is popular—that’s what Harbor House uses—but its reliability varies wildly from location to location and in bad weather. Some of the B&Bs don’t even bother to offer Wi-Fi. They hawk this as a feature: “Unplug, relax, and enjoy a taste of Maine island life off the grid.” Quite a few residents still have dial-up Internet, believe it or not, and many people use their cell-phone service for Web access, but cell reception sucks outside the village, where the only cell “tower” (not a tower) is located. Even email is spotty. Texting is probably the most dependable means of communication, but that, too, can be funky. Texts can show up at random times, or not at all.

  “Okay,” Miles continues, “Let’s just stipulate for now that someone has connected you to the accident—they obviously have; we’re not sure how yet. So what’s the next most obvious question?”

  “Why would they want to kill me? ‘Motive,’ as the cop shows say. And why wait eighteen fricking years?”

  “That’s two questions, but right. Let’s look at motive first. Why would someone want you dead? Not for any apparent gain, it seems. There was no attempt to blackmail you or make demands. Right? Someone just wanted you purged from the census report.”

  “So that would point to what? Vengeance or ‘justice,’ I suppose. Someone is pissed off at me and wants me to pay for my... crime.”

  “Possibly.” Miles thinks for a moment. “Or maybe you’re perceived as a threat to someone. Are you?”

  “Not unless bad computer-game art is a malign force in the universe. Which is a distinct possibility.”

  “Do you have any enemies, though, Finn?”

  “I can think of a few people who might want me crossed off their Christmas card lists, but not off the planet. And even if they did, why stage my death to look like a suicide?”

  “Um, so there wouldn’t be a murder investigation.” Duh. “Plus, the suicide note comes in handy if someone wants to tell the world you did it. It’s a flat-out confession.”

  “True.” I’m still confounded by the fact that the suicide note sounded so much like me, and tapped so uncannily into my feelings of guilt, but I don’t want to get into that right now. “Again, though, why wait eighteen years?”

  “Who knows? Maybe a new piece of evidence surface
d. Maybe someone just got out of prison after a long stint.” Miles Sutcliffe, Hollywood Screenwriter. “Without knowing who’s responsible, we’ll never figure that part out. Let’s stay with the who. Someone wanted justice... revenge?... for themselves or a loved one. So who were the parties affected?”

  Together we scan the newspaper article and Miles types the names of the victims, as well as the involved motorist who was uninjured, on the laptop:

  Paul Abelsen

  Laurice Abelsen

  Ashley Abelsen

  Edgar Goslin

  Jeremy Halsey

  Seeing the names in stark black font on that plain white screen brings into sharp relief the fact that real human beings died that night in 1999. People who will never have children or grandchildren or taste another spoonful of strawberry ice cream. I feel a burn of shame and grief.

  Miles, gleaning my thoughts, says gently, “You didn’t know, Finn.”

  “Because I didn’t want to know. Because I avoided knowing.”

  Miles waits a respectful beat, then says, “The Abelsens—we need to talk bluntly about this—all died. But they might have friends or relatives who are seeking payback. Edgar Goslin, he was hospitalized with serious injuries. We don’t know if he lived or died. If he lived, he might have a score he wants to settle. Halsey only had car damage; we can probably rule him out.”

  “So task number one,” I say, “is to find out whatever we can about the Abelsens and Edgar Goslin. And that pricey bottle of scotch.”

  “All without a working Internet,” grumbles Miles. No sooner does he say this than a list of results from his “Glenmalloch” search pops up on Google. “Hey, we’re back in business, for the moment anyway.”

  Miles clicks on the URL for the Glenmalloch.com site. The website assembles itself in piecemeal fashion. It’s an elegantly designed, hi-res site replete with polished wood grains and vessels of gleaming amber liquid. You can almost smell the barley mash. Miles tools around and finds a page called “Special Release Malts.” It shows a pictorial history of all the unique whiskies the company has released over the past few decades. Scrolling through the years, Miles stops abruptly when he sees a product released in 1999 called “Single Barrel 16, Anniversary Edition.” The text describes a “premium Islay-style whiskey matured in a single aging cask and offered in a hand-numbered, decanter-style bottle to honor the distillery’s 150th anniversary.”