Fishermen's Court

by Andrew Wolfendon

  “Google,” I reply. I count off the names on two fingers: “Woodcock... Goslin... The two men who have been blackmailing you for years, Beth. Both dead from ‘accidents’ within the same twenty-four-hour period. Kind of a mammoth-ass coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I certainly would,” Beth allows. “But this is as big a shock to me as—”

  “Now throw in the fact that someone tried to off me at the same time, and I’d say that shifts it from coincidence to monkey-randomly-typing-Lord of the Rings.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Beth says to me. “Finn, get serious. You and I have had our differences over the years—I’ve wanted to kill you a few times, God knows—but there’s no way in hell you seriously think I’m capable of...?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so two hours ago, Beth. But now...? The three people who have the dirt on your husband get killed—or almost killed—the same day? And, just to tie the whole package up with a neat ribbon, one of them conveniently pens a suicide note in which he confesses to causing the old accident himself.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” says Miles, as if coming out of a fog. “I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

  “I didn’t ask you, Miles.” I continue to press Beth. “And all of this comes at a time when your husband is about to be thrust into the public eye in a very big way. Just like you’ve always wanted.”

  Beth stammers, “That’s just so.... That’s just so...” Her eyes roll from side to side like an overwound cat clock’s as she searches for a rational explanation that doesn’t include her.

  “Someone is responsible for these killings and attempted killings, Beth, and who else on the face of the planet—”

  “Alleged attempted killings,” she says. “Alleged. Alleged. By you.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Beth. No one really tried to kill me; that’s just a paranoid delusion. I’m clinically insane. A locked-ward psychotic. Right?”

  “I never said that!”

  “Isn’t what you’ve been trying to convince Miles of since I got here? Since before I got here? ‘Finn is out of his mind, you can’t believe anything he says. He’s talking banana salad, he’s dangerous, he shouldn’t be around the kids...’”

  “Where the fuck are you getting this crap?” she says.

  “From here,” I say, holding up my phone. “I have you on tape. Both of you.” That gets her attention. And Miles’. “The other day, when I went to buy that wine for Jim, I left my phone recorder running on the desk by mistake. I heard everything you said.”

  Beth’s face blanches again. She can’t argue with what the recorder captured. “You did just get out of a psychiatric hospital,” she attempts, weakly.

  “Right, Beth. It’s also a mighty handy way for you to discredit everything I have to say. So nothing can land on you.”

  “It was my idea to invite you to the island! If I felt personally threatened by what you had to say, why would I do that?”

  “Maybe to finish the job that didn’t get done in Wentworth.”

  Her head literally jolts from the blow of what I’m suggesting.

  “I won’t say what I really want to say to you right now, Finn. You know why? Because words have power. But I am done with you. After twenty years, I am so fucking done with you.” She slams her glass down and storms out of the room.

  “When’s the last time you saw Edgar Goslin?” I shout after her. She keeps walking. I follow her out to the kitchen where she punches her arms through the sleeves of her windbreaker. “When was the last time?”

  “Last time?” she snaps. “I only saw that asshole once. The day he came to our door, back in 2000.” She zips up the jacket and steps into her rain shoes.

  “That’s a lie, Beth. You expect me to believe you’re totally clean here,” I say, “but you keep lying to me, so why should I?”

  “I don’t care what you believe, you crazy fuck. You and Miles can stay here all day, working on your conspiracy theories. I’m going to go round up the children so they can see their grandparents. Here in the real world.”

  Beth exits, slamming the door.

  I open the door and shout after her, “I know Edgar Goslin came to Musqasset a couple of weeks ago.”

  “And Bigfoot was on the grassy knoll with the second shooter!”

  “Are you going to try to tell me Goslin didn’t contact you at all?”

  She doesn’t try to tell me anything.

  . . . . .

  By the time Miles and I find our shoes and make it out the door to follow her, she is already out of sight. Miles runs up the walkway. I’m right at his heels. He looks both ways on the road, doesn’t see her. Neither of us says a word; it’s as if we are under a spell of silence that can’t be broken until we find Beth and wring the final truth out of her.

  Miles runs to the back yard and starts down the trail Jeannie led me down a few nights ago. He veers onto a side path leading to a couple of neighboring properties. I hang back as he bounds up to a neighbor’s house. A woman answers the door and I see Kelsey, Miles’ daughter, in the background. The woman shakes her head no.

  Miles runs back to his house and jumps into his golf cart. I follow him and jump in too. Thinking Beth may have taken the trail to the marina, Miles drives around to the spot where he and I parked the other day, the knoll from where you can view the whole marina property. Beth isn’t anywhere to be seen. Miles drives off, crackling with nervous energy.

  He heads through The Meadows on its winding main road, checking out all the properties. We spot Dylan shooting hoops in a driveway with another kid, but no Beth. Miles turns onto the road to Lighthouse Hill, drives to the top. I jump out of the cart before it’s fully stopped and run to the path leading down to Table Rock. Miles is right behind me.

  There she is. Standing on the edge of Table Rock, in the slippery moss and seaweed. No waves are washing over the bare slab of slate right now; either because the tide is out or the storm has weakened, but still... One slip of the foot or errant wave will wash her out to sea.

  We scramble down the steep, rocky path toward her.

  “Beth!” shouts Miles. “Move back!”

  She takes a step forward. For a moment I am sure she is going to toss herself into the ocean, but then she turns and regards us, almost like strangers. She looks back at the sea one last time, then slumps her shoulders and shuffles, in resigned fashion, toward higher ground.

  By the time we reach her, she is sitting on a dry rock safely above sea level.

  In a voice barely above a whisper, she says, “Edgar Goslin and Clarence Woodcock came to our house two weeks ago.”

  Miles and I wait for more.

  “I let them in. What choice did I have? I didn’t ask for this responsibility.”

  “Tell us what happened, Beth,” I say in the tone of a friend. “Please.”

  She looks out into the middle distance and lets the scene form in her mind. “They sat at our kitchen table. Woodcock said to me, ‘It might surprise you to know, we read the papers.’ He threw down a newspaper with one of those op-ed pieces—the ones Daddy paid to have written—suggesting that you”—Miles—“might be a great choice for that Senate seat if Aldridge stepped down. Then he said, ‘Now that your husband’s career is about to get a shot of Viagra, this might be a good time to renegotiate our terms.’ And he slipped me a piece of paper with his new and improved ‘fee’ on it.”

  More puzzle pieces are linking up, one by one.

  “He was expecting me to be cowering and meek. I guess he just picked the wrong day to mess with me. Something came over me. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve had seventeen years to bu
ild up hatred for these guys. Paying their hush money every month, knowing they had the power to sink our future anytime they chose. God! I’ve been seeing that smug red face of his in my sleep my entire adult life!”

  She stares, unseeing, into the harsh Atlantic.

  “Long story short, I told Woodcock to go fuck himself. ...He didn’t see that coming, let me tell you. He says, ‘You’re forgetting what I have sitting in a plastic bag in my office, lady.’

  “‘I’m not forgetting,’ I said. ‘A stupid piece of glass.’

  “‘With your husband’s fingerprint on it.’

  “‘So you claim,’ I said.

  “‘Oh, lady,’ Goslin pipes up, ‘You do not want to test us on that.’

  “For some reason—impulse, really—I decided to call his bluff. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want to do,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe that glass is from the accident, and I don’t believe you have my husband’s real fingerprint. And I don’t want to deal with you anymore until I have proof.’

  “Woodcock gets all sputtery and says, ‘Even if it wasn’t real, which it is, I’ve got records of you making payoffs to me going back seventeen years. Deal with that.’

  “‘Records cut both ways,’ I said. ‘Extortion is a crime. Now get the hell out of my house and don’t ever, ever come to my door again.’

  “He stands up, gets in my face, and says, ‘I better see that new fee show up on the fifteenth. Or there will be dire consequences. Dire.’

  “‘You’ll be lucky to see the old fee,’ I told him. And then...” She lowers her face into her hands—a bit melodramatically, if you ask me. “I wasn’t planning to say it; it just came out. I said, ‘If you ever do one thing to threaten me or my family again, I will send people to your home who will fucking kill you.’”

  Miles and I wait, in frozen suspense, for the final shoe to drop.

  “Those were literally the last words I said to them before they left.”

  She hangs her head as if finished. Miles grants her a moment, then says, “So... what did you do next?”

  “Do?” she replies foggily. “I didn’t do anything. I was bluffing. I don’t know any ‘people’; you know that. But those were the last words I said to two human beings before they turned up dead in just the way I spoke. Don’t you think that means something?”

  Means something? Yes, I thought it meant she was about to confess to the killings.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I say, trying to wrap my head around what’s going on here. “Are you actually saying—and I just need your honest answer here, Beth, for once in our god-forsaken lives—you had nothing to do with the deaths of those men or with what happened to me?”

  “Not directly. I didn’t make a phone call or hire some hit men. But clearly, words have power. Look what happened to those men! They’re both dead!”

  Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me. She actually thinks she’s cosmically guilty of killing these guys because she wished it on them with her words. And she says I’m the crazy one?

  Given the facts at hand, it is almost impossible to believe she had nothing to do with Goslin’s and Woodcock’s deaths, but, looking at her drained face and sunken eyes, it is equally impossible to believe she is lying. I had no idea this woman was such a nutjob.

  Beth stands up, and we all regard one another mutely.

  My phone rings, nearly jolting me off the rock I’m standing on. The caller ID shows, oddly enough, JJ, the manager at Harbor House. I step up to a higher rock to answer the call.

  “Hey, Finn, sorry to bother you,” says JJ, “but Pete called from over at the bar. He’s trying to get hold of you, says it’s kind of an emergency.”

  I call the number JJ gives me, and Pete picks up. “Finn,” he says, “Have you seen Jeannie?”

  “Not since this morning. Why?”

  “She’s gone. Disappeared. In the middle of her shift. Went out back to get a keg and no one’s seen her since.”

  Chapter 38

  Miles flips me his golf-cart keys. I run up the steep trail and jump behind the wheel, pulling for breaths. I’m at Pete’s Lagoon within minutes, praying by the time I step inside, Jeannie will have turned up.

  Prayer denied. Pete is standing behind the bar in her place, ineptly drawing a pint of Guinness. “She’s never done anything like this,” he says, a note of accusation in his voice. “All these years, never.” Until you showed up is the obvious subtext.

  “Did she take her stuff with her?” I ask him. He points to a little cubby area in the back room behind the bar, and I see her rain jacket folded up with her shoulder bag on top of it. It’s a sight that scares the ever-loving shit out of me.

  “Has anyone checked the grounds, the bathrooms?” I ask. “She might have fallen and hurt herself.”

  “Franca took a look around. Barb too.”

  I charge off to do my own search of the place. Pete doesn’t stop me. I check the bathrooms, the dark corners of the storeroom. I check Pete’s office. A coat rack has been tipped over and the rug is rumpled. From someone else’s previous search?

  I run outside and check the pilings under the building, the bushes and undergrowth on all sides of the restaurant. I’ve got a terrible feeling.

  I scan the water of the bay. No floating bodies visible from shore.

  Panic rises in me, and I have the impulse to start running around the island screaming Jeannie’s name. Before I can execute on that innovative plan, it occurs to me it might be time to try the police again, now that the storm has abated and the sea is finally starting to settle. Maybe our roving part-time officer can make it over from Monhegan now. Even if he can’t, I still need to talk to someone in authority, tell them Jeannie’s gone missing, get some advice, go on record with my story.

  I find the police number in my contacts list. The call goes through, or seems to. But then, just as with my calls to Angie, it disconnects just as someone picks up. I try twice more and get the same result. I try the state police too. No luck.

  Bloody Musqasset cell-phone service—it has a mind of its own.

  I’ve got to do something. I “speed” over to Jeannie’s house in Miles’ cart. I know I won’t find her there, but I need to check anyway.

  Predictably, she does not answer the door. I look under the raven sculpture in the garden, where she used to hide a spare key. Still there. I tear through the house, calling her name and looking for her in absurd places, like the fridge, even though I’m sure she’s not in the building.

  I jump back into the cart, drive around the corner to Studio Row, and run up and down the footpaths, knocking on doors, shouting in windows, asking folks if they’ve seen Jeannie. No joy.

  I floor it back to the village, wringing every watt of anemic horsepower from the cart.

  I need to talk to anyone and everyone who knows Jeannie. That includes my fisherman “friends.” I start toward Billy Staves’ place when I see Billy himself, standing near the rear of his building where Dennis’s sandwich counter is. He’s talking to Gerry Harper. I hate these two assholes right now, but finding Jeannie is my sole concern.

  I stop the cart and jump out. The men go silent.

  “Jeannie’s missing.”

  “Missing? How do you mean?” says Gerry.

  I give them the seven-second version, and the men seem genuinely upset. Gerry starts off, breaking into a jog. “I’ll get some people together, we’ll turn the place inside out,” he calls out as he goes. Then he stops for a moment, turns back to me, and says, “Don’t worry, man, if she’s on this island, we’ll find her.” I nod, and he rushes off.

  “Dennis and I will take the boat,” says Billy. “Cir
cle the island. See what we can see from there.”

  “Thanks, Billy,” I say. Words I never expected to hear escape my mouth again.

  I run back toward Miles’ cart. “Finn,” shouts Billy, stopping me in my tracks. “I need to say something to you. Real quick.”

  “Another time, Billy,” I reply. “After we find Jeannie.”

  “This’ll only take a sec.”

  I stand and listen, but my mind is racing ahead to next steps.

  “Mike Bourbon was right, out there today. We rushed to judgment. I’m sorry for that. You deserve your say. We owe you that. And I, for one, am ready to hear your side whenever you’re ready to talk.”

  I don’t have time for this conversation. “That’s mighty white of you, Billy,” I say, “but if my friendship meant so little to you, I’m not sure I really want to win it back.”

  “Fair enough. Friends ought to be loyal. In that case, you might want to talk to your own buddy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Miles Sutcliffe was the one who flipped us all against you.”

  I’m itching to move on, but instinct tells me I need to hear this. I lock eyes with my old Scrabble partner. What dazzling word combo is he about to play?

  “We did trust you, Finn,” he says. “We all figured it was Sutcliffe who deep-sixed those letters of ours. So one night, after the vote, Fishermen’s Court paid him a visit. We took him out on the pier to have a little ‘heart to heart.’ But when we questioned him, he swore blue-faced that he’d passed the letters on to his partners. One of our more skeptical brethren suggested that, just to ensure his veracity, we might perform a ‘buccaneer’s baptism.’ He and another fella grabbed Sutcliffe by the ankles, like they were going to dunk him in the bay, and he started bawling like a five-year-old. ‘Okay, it was Finn!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry! I was just trying to protect him. He’s my friend! Don’t hurt him!’