Fishermen's Court

by Andrew Wolfendon

  As for my research: Edgar Goslin, yeah, apparent douchebag. Wife/girlfriend had a restraining order on him at the time of the accident. Accusations of battery. Arrests for drunk and disorderly, both before and after the accident. A “friend” set up a charity fund in his name to collect donations to help with his medical expenses, but something fishy happened; the person was hiring hookers with the funds, something like that. Friends in low places.

  “Interesting,” I say, after we finish sharing notes. “Both of these guys—Abelsen’s father and Goslin—might have major axes to grind about the accident, even all these years later.”

  “True. Abelsen lost his son, granddaughter, and daughter-in-law all at once.” Again, a wave of guilt washes over me like hot oil. Miles is right about one thing: when this storm is over, this crime is going to have to be owned. “You never get over something like that.”

  “Another thing about Abelsen,” I add. “He has money. Those guys who came to my house were pros, not local juvies. They were working for somebody, or so they said. It can’t be cheap to hire hit men.”

  “Goslin, for his part, suffered long-term injuries in the accident,” Miles says. “He seems like the type who might bear a longstanding grudge. Pissed-off dude.”

  “Right. But a guy like him would want to do the revenge stuff himself, don’t you think? My guess is he wouldn’t hire professionals, even if he could afford to.”

  “You’re assuming those guys really were hired.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They might have been lying about that. Maybe one of them was Goslin himself.”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Possible,” I grant. “Whoever it was knew all about me, that’s for sure. Including the fact that I was connected to that god-forsaken bottle I wish I’d never laid eyes on.”

  “Right,” says Miles, scratching his cheek stubble abstractedly. “How did Goslin—if it was him—link the bottle to you if the cops couldn’t? And why wait eighteen years to act?”

  “Back to that question again.”

  Miles leans back in his nine-hundred-dollar Herman Miller office chair, laces his hands behind his head, and stares at the ceiling (no cobwebs in this house).

  At last he sets his chair back down, stares at his phone and says, “I didn’t want to go this route, but...”

  He scrolls through his contacts list and punches a number. “Hi, Jim. Hey, I want to thank you again for your help, and, listen, I hate to do this, but I need to ask one more favor.”

  Chapter 17

  Miles wraps up his call and turns to me. “Jim says he prefers the kind of thank-you that comes in a bottle. He and his wife like the Louis Jadot Pinot Noir they carry at the marina.”

  “My treat,” I say. “So...?”

  “He says if the accident took place on an interstate highway—which it did—the Mass state police had jurisdiction. He knows some people within that bureau, so he might be able to find out some things. Might take him a while, though.”

  “That’s awesome, Miles. Meanwhile, I guess we keep looking into the scotch bottle ourselves, see what we can learn?” Miles shrugs agreement. “If someone knows it was me who bought that booze, they must have talked to the merchant who sold it to me.”

  I’m googling liquor stores in the Wentworth/Bridgefield area and jotting down phone numbers when I hear the kitchen door jingle and Beth shout, “Wipe your feet!” at the kids.

  “I wasn’t expecting them back so soon,” Miles says, then calls out, “Finn and I are in here, hon.” Warning her I’m in the house. Subtle, bro.

  Beth pops her head into the study, greets me with a way big smile, and says to Miles, in a faux-casual tone, “I didn’t know you guys were hanging here today.” (Read: I thought you’d agreed to keep him safely off the premises, Honey.)

  Miles explains the Internet situation to her and asks how her party was.

  “Pretty small. No one’s on the island this weekend. Even the Gustafsons didn’t show. Tons of food, though.” She shoots Miles a freighted look and says, “Can I steal you for a sec?”

  I can see she’s trying to wangle some privacy—a regular Edgar Cayce I am—so I tell Miles I’m going to take a walk and pick up that wine for Jim.

  I step out the door and strike off through the storm toward the new marina complex. When I get there, I suppress my gag reflex and enter North Atlantic Charcutiers. It’s a pretty nice fucking store, hate to admit. Hell of a lot better wine selection than the Mercantile—and they actually dust their bottles. Dandy-looking desserts and pheasant sausages too. I buy half a case of the Louis Jadot pinot for Jim.

  I arrive back at the house ten minutes later to find Miles bouncing off the walls. He’s cleaning the study as if the Dalai Lama, the Pope, and Oprah are about to drop in for a visit.

  “What’s up?” I ask him. “You seem a little...”

  “Nothing, I just have to deal with some stuff right now.”

  Right. Message received. We can’t continue our work anyway, what with Beth and the kids home, so I leave the wine for Jim, grab my phone, and tell Miles and Beth I’ll see them later. They’re heartbroken over my departure, I’m sure.

  . . . . .

  The moment I enter my room at Harbor House, I can tell something’s off. The space doesn’t feel as empty as it should. I sense the dense proximity of other humans. I freeze in place for a moment and hear the creak of a floorboard. I bend to take a darting glance under the bed. Nope, no one there. But I know I’m not imagining this—someone is nearby or has just departed the room, and the floor is resettling in their absence.

  I hear another creak. It has a weightiness to it; the sound of a body, a present body, shifting its position. I realize it’s originating from the “unoccupied” room next to mine. I grab the drinking glass from its doily on the dresser-top and put it up to the thin wooden wall. Yup, the ol’ cup-to-the-wall trick. No technophobe am I.

  I hear the muffled tones of a baritone voice. Can’t make out the words. A higher voice replies to it, also hushed and muffled. It’s the voice of Trooper Dan, I’m sure of it.

  Well, sure is a strong word. I listen again. Okay no, it’s a woman’s voice. One thing’s for certain, though. There’s a clandestine vibe to the chitchat.

  I look around my room. For a man who’s feeling lethally endangered, I am alarmingly light on weaponry. I notice a two-inch-thick wooden dowel, maybe fifteen inches long, leaning on the inside of the window casing. The sash cord must be broken; the dowel is for propping the window open. Nice touch, JJ. I snag the dowel and, wielding it like a club, step out of my room.

  Suddenly the doorknob two doors down from mine turns. That room’s supposed to be unoccupied too! Out steps Daughter Bean, squinting her eyes like she just woke up from a nap. Damn, she is one agreeable-looking individual.

  “Oh, hey,” she says. “Thought I heard something.” Her eyes go to the cylindrical piece of wood in my hand. “What are you doing, um, rolling pie crust?”

  “Yes,” I say without missing a beat, “but I prefer lard to butter. Do you have any?”

  “Lard?” she deadpans, slapping her body in a couple of random spots. “Nope, all out. Might have some cream of tartar, though.”

  I laugh. I like this gal. She’s funny and she’s got the kind of Emily Blunt vibe that makes my chromosomes do backflips. I’m wishing there was a parallel me who wasn’t in fear for his life and wasn’t still in love with his ex who could spend this stormy holiday weekend trying to coax young Ms. Bean, of the Beans of Maine, into his private chambers.

  “You have neighbors now,” she says, referring to herself and her family. “Hope that’s okay.” She expla
ins that her parents’ room had a ceiling leak from the storm, so they asked to be moved. The two rooms next to mine were the only side-by-side ones available.

  “Welcome to floor three,” I say, “where the elite come to meet. And cheat. And... bleat?”

  We chat for a minute, flirting with the edge of flirting, and I learn her name is Leah. I finally pull myself away from her gravity field, saying maybe I’ll catch her for a drink later.

  Back in my room, I realize, with a slap to the forehead, that the hushed conversation I heard though the wall minutes ago was the sound of a middle-aged couple—Leah’s parents—trying to have a little afternoon delight while their adult daughter napped in the next room.

  Finn Carroll, ace detective.

  Ah well, time to get back to work. I fish out the list of liquor-store phone numbers I jotted down at Miles’ house and flop down on the bed to plan a “strategy.” Ha.

  Both of the booze vendors Miles and I remembered—Bridgefield Package Shop and Academy Liquors—are still in business, according to my earlier Google research. There’s also an old standby in Wentworth, the Cordial Shoppe, that’s been around forever and claims to have “the region’s best selection of single malt scotches.” I’d forgotten that one. So, what should I say when I call these places? I doubt any of them have sales records going back to 1999, or that they’d share them with me even if they did, or that their records would tell me anything anyway. I doubt I’ll find any employees who were around back then, either.

  My best tack might be to try talk to the storeowners themselves, find out if they owned their store back in 1999, and if so, ask them whether they remember anyone, police or otherwise, questioning them about a bottle of Glenmalloch. That might stick out in someone’s mind, even twenty years later.

  The task would be a lot easier if I could remember where I bought that damn bottle. The memory should be a clear one, but it isn’t. True, it was eighteen years ago, but still, it’s not every day you drop a C-note on a bottle of booze. I’m still drawing a blank, though.

  I go to grab my phone, and that’s when the odor hits me. That low-tide smell of rotting sea life. It’s a common perfume on the island, one you become nose-blind to after a while. That’s probably why I didn’t notice it sooner. I sniff around the room. The windows are closed; maybe it’s drifting up from the kitchen on the first floor. (If so, remind me not to order the Catch of the Day.) No, it definitely seems to have a nearer, and rawer, source.

  I tear open the dresser drawers. Empty. I grab my backpack and unbuckle its flap.

  “Yaagh!” I cry, dropping the bag to the floor.

  There’s a dead fish in my pack. Two-pound cod, I estimate. About twenty-four unrefrigerated hours old. Damn. Someone has been in my room. I wheel about, my pulse racing, fully expecting to be jumped. But no one is here.

  A quirky thing about Harbor House: the room locks are the original, nineteenth century, skeleton-key type. Room keys are essentially ornamental, interchangeable with one another. Musqasset is an honor-system place, through and through.

  I bend down and pull the fish out of my pack by its tail. A nail has been pushed through its head, eye to eye. There’s a note wrapped around the fish, written in Sharpie on brown paper. My heart does a drum solo as I read it: “Your next asshole.”

  I assume the piscine gift is not meant to be a replacement anus for me, so I’m guessing what the author intended to write was, “You’re next—comma—Asshole with a capital A.” The clumsy punctuation irks me. Trooper Dan seemed to be, if nothing else, a verbally sophisticated fellow. This doesn’t feel right coming from him and his troop. Also, there seems to be no practical value in sending me threats like this; they just serve to make me more pissed off, more vigilant, more likely to seek help. Clearly the sender is more invested in making me squirm than in playing his cards skillfully. Which, again, points to a vengeance motive. Something personal.

  Trooper Dan and company, on the other hand, were clinical and detached in their approach. But maybe that was all an act. And what’s the alternative theory? That two separate groups of psychos have followed me from Wentworth, Mass, to Musqasset Island, Maine, in the middle of a nor’easter? Right.

  I’m feeling confused and off-balance. Which is probably my stalkers’ intention.

  I wander down the hall and knock on my new friend Leah’s door. She opens it and laughs when she sees the fish I’m carrying by the tail. “So we’ve established it’s seafood pie you’re making,” she says, then notes the lack of jocularity in my aura. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Don’t mean to be nosy, but have you guys been in these rooms long?”

  “Hour and a half, two hours, I guess. Why?”

  “Did you hear anyone go into my room before you talked to me?”

  “Just one person, like, ten minutes ago, but that was probably you.”

  It was. Shit. I go downstairs, still carrying the cod by the tail, and ask JJ, the manager, if he’s seen anyone unfamiliar in the building. He replies, “No. Why? Something fishy going on?” Everyone’s got an HBO special.

  I deposit the fish in the compost bin behind Harbor House, then come back around to the front porch and plant myself on a rocking chair. Sitting out there in open view, I feel as if I have a sniper’s laser dot on my forehead. What’s my play here? It seems like every move I make is being watched.

  Again, the message my stalkers seem to be sending me is: we can take you whenever we want, Sunny Jim, but we will do so at the time and place of our choosing. In other words, Finnian Carroll, you are powerless in this thing.

  I refuse to accept that. Though the dead cod has me duly alarmed, I am still feeling more energized than I have in years, and nowhere near ready to roll over. I conclude, once again, that if I possess even the tiniest seed of an advantage in this game, it resides in my ability to figure out who wants me dead and why. That knowledge might turn the tables in my favor.

  It remains a fish-scale-thin hope, but it’s the only one I have. Fuck these guys.

  I return to my room with fresh resolve—I know I’m not safe here, but at least I’ll hear an attacker approaching, thanks to the inn’s astonishingly loud wood floors. As I grab my phone to start calling those liquor stores, I notice my battery level is oddly low. Then I realize why: that damn VoxFox app is still running from when I was at Miles’ house. I forgot to shut it off.

  Hello. That means I left the recorder running when I went to buy the wine for Jim. Intrigued, I stop the recording and press Play. My earlier conversation with Miles plays back through the tiny speaker. I move the slider bar ahead until I locate the spot where Beth entered the scene and I excused myself to go buy the wine.

  I let the sound file play.

  No sooner do I hear the recorded sound of the kitchen door jingling from my own exit than the recorded voice of Beth says to Miles, “So what have you two been up to here?”

  Chapter 18

  There’s an audio version of a voyeur, did you know that? It’s called an ecouterist. That’s someone who likes to listen to other people’s intimate encounters. I feel every inch the ecouterist as I eavesdrop electronically on Miles’ and Beth’s private conversation. But the face-burning shame I feel is not quite enough to make me tap Stop.

  What must have happened when I left to buy the wine was that Beth joined Miles in the study and sat down right at the desk where I left my phone. It’s obvious neither of them was aware my phone was capturing their words in crisp digital clarity.

  “I thought we had agreed it would be best to keep him away from the house,” says the digitized voice of Beth, “now that we know what state he’s in.”

  “We invited him out to the island, Beth,” says Miles’ voice. “To our home. It w
as your idea. We can’t just abandon him. We have some responsibility here.”

  Beth’s idea? Didn’t see that one coming.

  “I only suggested it,” says Beth, “because I thought it was an olive branch you could offer. You didn’t tell me he had just broken out of a psych hospital. I had to learn that from Jim.”

  “He didn’t ‘break out.’ He discharged himself. If the staff had thought he was a danger, they would have kept him under lock and key.”

  “But you do agree he’s out of his freaking mind? Right? Jim certainly thinks so. Wandering around the island with a knife in the middle of the night.”

  “I agree he’s having some mental issues.”

  “So why are you encouraging him?”

  “I’m not. I was just trying to help him figure out if there might be some... external triggers for his fears. Some real-world stuff that’s been playing into his delusions.”

  “He’s crazy. You can’t fix crazy.”

  “But that doesn’t mean there’s no basis whatsoever for his—”

  “Crazy, Miles.”

  “As a screen door on a submarine. No argument from me.”

  “And you think it’s safe for him to be around the kids?”

  “No. I don’t. That’s why I waited till you and the kids were gone. I thought you’d be at the club all afternoon. Finn understands the situation here. Notice how he made himself scarce the minute you guys showed up. He needs a friend right now, Beth.”

  “He needs a syringe. Loaded with Haldol.”

  This from a woman who just yesterday at dinner was explaining to me, with a perfectly straight face, how the words we say and think “with focused intention” can alter the nature of physical reality itself, thanks to The Power of Words. And yet I’m the crazy one. Okay.