Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  “Are you aware,” Merry asked him, “that witnesses saw your dinghy explode at approximately eight-forty-f ive p.m. Sunday night, seriously damaging the neighboring vessel and triggering the f ire that engulfed the wharf within seconds?”

  For the f irst time, Field looked disconcerted, but he recovered quickly with a characteristic shrug. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “I wasn’t near the boat all day. After you released me, Detective, I went home, had a shower, and fell asleep, since I didn’t catch a wink in that cell all Saturday night. Aunt Jen can swear that I was in my room until dinnertime, when I got up and ate with her. Afterward we saw the movie at the Dreamland, which let out at ten-f ifteen. You can check all of that.”

  He was right, of course. She couldn’t arrest Joshua Field. She had no proof that he’d built or placed a bomb in his uncle’s dinghy. It was just possible someone else had noticed it was the most derelict craft at the Town Pier, perfect for sabotage, but how had the bomber known the dinghy wouldn’t be used that day? Was the bomb placed at random a few minutes before exploding? It was far more plausible that Field had done it. But until she could prove it—

  “Thank you, Mr. Field,” she said. “That will be all for today. Please stay on-island and be available for police questioning.”

  “Don’t worry, Detective. I’m not likely to run from you. Or your father.”

  “That little twerp tell you anything?” John Folger asked as she walked into his off ice a few moments later.

  “Not much. Says the boat’s his, but the bomb isn’t. We’ve got nothing so far to link him to it. I’m going to tell Jim Hayes in case he wants to check Field’s clothing for explosive residue.”

  “Do it. The crime lab in Boston just called. They’ve identif ied the body. It’s the Harbor Master, Mitch Davis.”

  “Mitch?” Merry was bewildered. “Scottie Flanagan said he hadn’t come in yesterday, but I didn’t know he was actually missing.”

  “His wife has been calling the emergency center every hour on the hour. She got us his dental records a little while ago. That’s all the crime lab needed.”

  “Ralph said the body had been burned in a boat,” Merry said.

  “After he was dead.”

  She stared at her father. “What?”

  “Mitch was murdered, Meredith. Boston found a thirty-eight slug in the back of his skull.”

  Chapter 12

  Adelia Duarte pulled the dark green sweatshirt over her head and reached back to f lip her long hair free. She could hear the faint tolling of the Unitarian Church’s curfew bell drifting over town from Orange Street, and out of long habit, she counted the f ifty-two strokes. Nine o’clock on a Wednesday night. Early for bed, but she and Sara were both worn out, and Rafe would be knocking on her door at seven. She was tired tonight with something deeper than physical exhaustion. She had ignored her grief for her father for too long, and the strain was beginning to show.

  A faint breeze stirred the threadbare curtains at her window and sent the ancient shade slapping against the glass. She turned and sniffed the air, wondering if a storm was kicking up; but the scent of the wind was clean. Good weather brought breezes to Nantucket at this time of year; it was when the rainclouds descended that the world seemed to hold its breath.

  Del was fresh from the bath after a day spent cleaning house. She had begun with her father’s “snug” and its bulging rolltop desk and worked her way to the attic shelves. Joe Duarte’s lifetime accumulation of junk had been sorted, packed in boxes, and set out back near the trash cans for disposal. Less easily discarded were the collections of mounted f ish, the decades-old photographs of trolling buddies long gone, and the carefully stored memories of her dead mother. These last had given her pause.

  She found the simple white cardboard box high on a shelf in the guest-room closet, its ancient and exuberant script proclaiming it to be from Filene’s. For Del was written on the lid. Her mother’s wedding dress. Had he forgotten it was there? Or kept it in the hope she’d retrieve her respectability someday and walk down the aisle on his arm? Del opened the box.

  Resting on top of the yellowed silk was a photograph of Joe and Agnes, freshly married and posed on the steps of St. Mary’s. She raised it to the window, wanting to see more clearly in the fading afternoon light. All that her parents could not have known was written on their hopeful faces. No sense of the back-breaking work, the stormy nights her mother had spent in fear, the in­evitable disappointments, her early death.

  Del closed the box and set it back on the shelf, smoothing the aged cardboard gently with her f ingertips. She was not ready to explore fur­ther. Or to examine the emotions that had plagued her for three years. Even now the memory of that morning—she queasy with morning-sickness, unable to stand the smell of tobacco that clung to her father’s shirt and hair, and Joe’s face blank with disbelief—made her feel like vom­iting. She’d been unable to come back or pick up the phone, waiting for some sort of bridge she could not build herself.

  Now that Joe was gone, Del could push aside the memory of his stub­born pride and rejection. Even his legacy to Jackie Alcantrara. Her sense of loss and guilt was stronger than anger.

  Without me, your dad would’ve been f inished months ago. Jackie’s words rang in her mind. Had her absence hastened Pop’s drift toward old age? Had pain worn away at his mental strength, his drive for liv­ing—dulled the edges of his f isherman’s sixth sense? Was this why he had died?

  She did not know what his f inal days were like. And the not knowing was a large stone she stumbled over whenever he came to mind. She had cleaned the house partly in the hope that she would f ind something—a letter, perhaps, addressed to her in his crabbed hand. But there was noth­ing. Pop was gone. He was past explanation or redress, past anger or forgiveness, past being hugged or told that he was loved.

  If she could f ind his murderer and avenge his death, maybe she’d feel less like she’d killed him.

  Del looked around the room, at the walls grayed with neglect, at the windows crying out for cleansing, at the familiar candlewick bedspread her mother had bought in Hyannis thirty years ago. There was at least this house, the one thing Joe had left her. Del chose to see it as a sign: He wanted me to come home.

  A faint sound, like a cat mewing, and Del stiffened. One ear was always cocked for her daughter, even when she slept. She turned from the guest room—she preferred it to her father’s bedroom, still haunted by his smell, his lingering presence, perhaps even his ghost—and crossed the hall to her own childhood bed.

  Sara’s face f loated like a small f lower against the pillow, one f ist tightly curled around the neck of a stuffed toy. Not that it had a neck, exactly; it was a whale Ralph Waldo had bought her at the Whaling Museum’s gift shop. Ralph would spoil her unmercifully this summer, and Del was inclined to let him. Sara had gone too long without a grand­father.

  Del smoothed the child’s cheek, and her eyelashes f luttered. No sign of fear or discomfort; the mewing must have been part of a dream. On occasion she wondered what a two-year-old dreamed of; one more thing she would never know, and Sara could never tell her.

  The doorbell rang.

  Del turned swiftly and ran down the stairs. She had left her cell phone at the Folgers’ house Sunday night and wanted it back, but hadn’t wanted to bother Merry until the Town Pier investigation was a bit more under control. Maybe this was Merry now, cell phone in hand. But as Del opened the door, her brows knit in confusion. She stepped back.

  “Hello,” she said, surprised. “I didn’t expect you at this time of night.”

  Rafe da Silva was no stranger to the dawn hour, and normally he took his time as the f irst light of f ive-thirty stole up from the shoreline to the east, enjoying the way it picked out the drops of dew glinting among the green cranberry vines. He’d drink his coffee, watch the sheep, and think about very little.

  Today
, however, he was hurrying through his duties with Peter’s f lock of merinos, intent upon the prospect of swordf ishing with Adelia Duarte. Felix Harper had seen his way clear to renting her the Praia under a simple contract with Joe Duarte’s estate—much as he had determined she could stay in her father’s house free of rent or further obligation, as long as she paid the utilities. Big of him, Del had said, with a disgusted snort; it was galling to have to ask a perfect stranger if she could sleep in her own bed, or take out the boat she’d handled since she was a teenager. But that’s how things were, and Felix, Rafe ref lected, wasn’t all bad; he might think about writing a will with him himself one of these days. Or would, if he knew where he and Tess stood. She still wasn’t talking to him, and if the marriage was off, he didn’t much care what they did with his things once he was gone.

  At the thought of Tess he felt a familiar ache. He did not know how to reach her, other than to quit f ishing, and everything in him rebelled at the idea. But he doubted whether a swordf ish was worth trading for happiness, even as he loaded his gear into the back of the Range Rover.

  He’d make an appointment with Felix Monday.

  Rafe whistled for Ney, the big half-breed working dog both he and Peter adored, and the shaggy mutt’s ears swiveled in his direction. He made the sign for bringing in the sheep, and Ney went into action, turning and wheeling among some sixty ewes with breathtakingly silent ferocity. Of all Mason Farms’ inmates, Ney enjoyed his work the most.

  And what about me? Rafe wondered. Do I enjoy mine? A question his father would never have had to ask; f ishing, for all its backbreaking labor, its poor pay, its cold and wet and exhaustion, was a way of life, not work.

  And that’s the difference, he thought. I work here, and it’s f ine. I can’t think of a much better way to make money, or a fairer guy to work for than Pete. But out on the water, I’m living the life I was born into, the only one that feels as natural as breathing. How to make Tess understand?

  “Did you see this, Ralph? They’re saying the Nantucket police are dragging their feet on the worst case of arson in the island’s history. As if we’ve been sitting out on the beach all week working on our tans!”

  Merry Folger snapped the Inquirer and Mirror in irritation and bent over the article for a second time.

  “Be glad they haven’t got that fellow Field for an exclusive interview,” Ralph Waldo said mildly.

  “Oh, they have—that story is the sidebar to this one. He fed them a whole line about police persecution of political activists. Do me a favor, would you?”

  “Hide the paper?”

  “At least until I’m gone. Dad sees this, and I’ll get another lecture over breakfast about the importance of public relations, particularly dur­ing tourist season, and I don’t think I can listen to that today.”

  “Feeling beat?” He set a bowl of blueberries on the scarred oak table and pulled out a chair.

  “It’s been a long week, whatever the paper says.”

  With the discovery of Mitch Davis’s murdered body, John Folger had turned the arson investigation over to the state police at the order of the Barnstable DA. To make Merry feel better, he appointed her li­aison with the state police, and she had to scramble between South Beach and the police station and the state post out on Liberty Street. No link was found between Joshua Field and the f ire. But the arson expert, Jim Hayes, thought he had f igured out the bomb.

  The device was enclosed in a bait box, which Tim Potts had found on Thursday in blasted pieces, and the detonator, Hayes informed her, was triggered by a curious apparatus he’d never encountered before. After twenty-four hours of study and attempts at reconstruction, he hit upon its mechanism by pure chance as he dangled it from the side of a sub­stitute dinghy at the water’s edge.

  The trigger was encased in waterproof plastic and suspended straight down in the water from the mooring line, probably at high tide. The mooring line had detonator cord twined along its length that ended abruptly in the hinge of the bait box. As the water receded throughout the day, the boat lowered toward the bottom, until the trigger touched sand at mean low tide and blew the detonator. The cord in turn ignited what Hayes believed was several pounds of plastic explosive—it was the only form of nitroglycerin stable enough to use in a rocking boat—and fed on gasoline sprayed onto the dock by the exploding out­board motor.

  “Very clever,” Hayes said. “The boats in these f irst few slips are in f ive, six feet of water at the low, and a good bit of their lines are dragging on the bottom. With a dinghy as small as that one, it’s way below the level of the dock even at high tide. Not the sort of boat anybody’s going to study for very long, if they even notice. And no need for a timer, no need for remote control; just a guy with a tide table and an alibi some­where else.”

  The timing of the tides suggested the bomb had been set up in mid-afternoon, a few hours on either side of the 2:54 p.m. high.

  Merry could envision it all: an average guy—Field or an accom­plice—strolls down the dock, bait box in hand, in the middle of a busy Sunday when most of the boat owners are out on the water. He putters around the dinghy, stows the bait box, checks the mooring line—and takes the opportunity to attach a wire with a trigger mechanism and a deadly leash of detonator cord. Then he goes home to Monomoy, and when the plastic bag and its trigger hit sand that evening, he’s enthralled with two hundred others by the f lickering images on the Dreamland’s wide screen.

  “It hasn’t been a picnic for your dad, either,” Ralph said, breaking into her thoughts. “Remember that the next time he’s yelling at you. Now, what are you doin’ on your day off?”

  “Swimming at Surfside,” she said, stretching luxuriously, “with a mag­azine and an umbrella and nothing else. I don’t want to speak to anybody, I don’t want to run into friends, I don’t want to have to read anything longer than two-syllable words. How ’bout you?”

  “Young Sara is coming to call,” Ralph said, “on account of Del’s f ish­ing. Matter of fact, they’re probably at the door.”

  But it was Rafe da Silva standing on the front step, Sara in his arms, and Merry knew as soon as she saw him that something was terribly wrong.

  “What is it?” she said, her voice as f lat as the look in his eyes.

  “It’s Del,” he said. And that was all.

  Rafe had closed the door of the house on Milk Street, though he’d found it just barely ajar upon his arrival at seven-thirty that morning. Merry made a mental note about his f ingerprints on the knob, knowing he’d have smeared any left by someone else. She wrapped a bandanna around it now—she carried one in the makeshift evidence kit that sat in the back of her Explorer—slipped plastic covers over her shoes, and walked into the Duarte living room.

  She drew a sharp breath and half-swallowed a wail of anguish.

  Adelia Duarte lay sprawled in the middle of her father’s living room, one arm bent under her and her eyes staring at the ceiling. A rich swath of dark hair spilled across the carpet, the last f lag she’d left f lying in the moment of surrender. The ends were smeared red with dried blood. She was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt of dark green that Merry rec­ognized; after-dinner, before-bed clothes she pulled on to watch TV. She’d never gone to bed last night.

  But the most horrible thing, the brutal fact that forced Merry’s breath from her body, was the harpoon canted rakishly in the middle of Del’s chest. The lacquer-tipped f ingers of her right hand were still clenched around the steel shaft, as though she had attempted to wrest it from between her ribs; but her time was too short and the dart had been thrust well home. There was a look of wonder on Del’s face. In her f inal moment she’d understood that the line was set and reeling her in.

  Merry felt Rafe’s f ingers grip her arm. She shook him off and knelt at Del’s side. She couldn’t touch her, couldn’t pull the harpoon from her body, couldn’t close her eyes. She could only say h
er name, Del, Del, Del, while the memory of an old pain swelled in her mind. She had been here before, keening over her mother, over her brother Billy. Keening over blood. She wanted Ralph and her father. She crumpled in a heap and allowed herself to sob.

  “Mer,” Rafe said, low and urgent. “Mer, I’ll call the station, okay?”

  When she didn’t answer, he sidestepped toward the kitchen phone, cursing himself for his stupidity. He’d thought of the Folgers f irst when he’d opened the unlocked door and seen Sara sitting cross-legged in fouled diapers, one thumb in her mouth and the other twirling a piece of hair, by the side of her mother’s body; but he should have called the station. John Folger would kill him when he saw the state Merry was in.

  Chapter 13

  “Darned if I know,” Dr. John Fairborn said to Chief Folger. “She was a strong, healthy woman. Rigor usually begins fairly quickly in that case, and lasts longer. I’d say it’s fairly well established.”

  “Thanks, John,” Chief Folger said in exasperation. “That tells me nothing.”

  “I can’t give you an exact time of death. Only the detective novelists do that,” the doctor said. He stood up from his kneeling position by Adelia Duarte’s corpse and tiptoed backward in his plastic booties, mindful of the evidence. “The normal range for onset of rigor is two to six hours after death. It’s pretty well established two to six hours later, and can last for twenty-four to forty-eight hours after that. So you tell me when she died.”

  The chief knit his brows with the effort of mental calculation, work­ing backwards from seven in the morning. “Sara was hungry this morning, but she wasn’t starving. Her diaper needed changing, but I wouldn’t say she’d spent more than a few hours in it dirty. So we’ll rule out the idea that Del was killed before dinner yesterday and skip the twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ bit.”

  “Even assuming she was killed no earlier than dinnertime last night, the state of her rigor still f its a range of anywhere from seven p.m. to three a.m.,” the doctor said. “Not to mention the cadaveric spasm.”