Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  “There were three altogether. None of them sounded like it was written by a man, and since the chief suspects in Del’s murder are male, that left me looking elsewhere. One other woman was a possibility, but I couldn’t quite see the motive. Then, when Rafe talked to me, I just knew.”

  “I thought cops avoided gut instinct.”

  “Do me a favor, okay? Don’t tell anybody down at the station that I guessed about this. Particularly a guy named Bailey.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The jerk trying to solve Del’s murder.”

  “Ah.” Peter followed her to the door of the Explorer and watched as she got in, her narrow skirt making it a tricky business with the Ford’s high running board. This was the everyday beauty of life, he thought; the appreciation for a strong thigh outlined in strained khaki.

  “Had lunch?” he asked suddenly.

  She shook her head, staring at the wheel.

  “Thinking about it?”

  “Peter—”

  “I know. You don’t want to see me right now. Too busy, too dis­tracted by death. Too scared to eat with me.”

  “Scared?” Her chin went up.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I’m not scared. I’m just not hungry.”

  “Right. Since when have you ever turned down a square meal? You’ve got fear written all over you.”

  She slammed the car door and rolled down the window. “It’ll have to be quick,” she said.

  “Follow me.”

  He led her up the Cliff Road past his shuttered ancestral home—inhabited now only in July when his sister, Georgiana, arrived with the children—to the gentle overhang of trees and the hand-painted whale that marked the quahog-shell driveway of Something Natural. The shingled house with the wide porches and the constantly banging screened doors had been an island institution for decades, serving fresh-baked bread and sandwiches to bathers returning on their bikes from Madaket or walking up the twisting roads from Jetties Beach.

  Peter had miscalculated, thinking that one o’clock in the afternoon was past the daily rush. There was a crowd lounging in polo shirts and bathing suits on the porch by the pickup door, waiting for completed or­ders. Sunburned girls, their hair matted with seawater, perched on the railings near too-tall boys, leather thongs braided around their wrists and baseball caps worn bill-to-the-back. He was recalled sharply to his own college summers, the immortality of every moment, the sense of expan­sive future, the pleasure of a good sandwich when hunger was sharpened by sea air. At least the last remained to him.

  “It’s not going to be quick,” he said, when Merry appeared from the parking lot.

  “Of course’s it’s not,” she replied. “And don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

  “Want to go somewhere else?”

  “I want a cheese, avocado, and chutney sandwich on seven-grain,” she said. “Make that half.” A whole sandwich on Something Natural’s bread was impossible to f inish.

  Peter ordered half a lobster salad for himself and two bottles of Nantucket Naturals lemonade, then walked back to the picnic table where Merry was sitting. She was surveying the sky doubtfully.

  “Gonna rain,” she said.

  “Nah.” He set down some napkins and put the lemonade on top as an anchor. “It can’t. There are no tables inside.”

  “Peter—why this? Why now?”

  “Because I have to eat every four hours. I get light-headed if I don’t.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  He looked at her, saw the panic in her eyes, and knew it for what it was. “Why you? is what you’re asking.”

  She waited.

  “I should have ordered chips or something to tide us over. They said it could be twenty minutes.”

  “Now who’s scared?”

  Peter stopped and took a deep breath. She was right.

  “I’ve never been less scared in my life,” he said. “That’s why this, why now. Because I’m ready.” He swung a leg over the bench and leaned toward her across the plank table, wanting to feel her cheekbones under his f ingers. “You know the names of all my ghosts, Meredith. But they have no power over me anymore; I’ve given myself up entirely to the living. To you.”

  That silenced her; she looked away, unable to hold his gaze, and fumbled for the lemonade jar on the table beside her.

  “It’s taken me a while,” he said. “I know that. My timing could have been better. But most things have their season of growth. All winter, while the rain and snow fell and the ice formed over the cranberry vines, and gray day followed gray day, I’d sit by the f ire and consider taking a walk. And it would occur to me that I wanted to walk with you. I wanted you in an oversized sweater and a pair of boots tramping through the moors in the mist. I wanted you sitting by the f ire afterward with your hair burning in the ref lected light of the f lames; I wanted you rolling my glass of sherry between your hands; I wanted your laughter and words to f ill my silence.”

  Peter’s voice grew quieter. “I wanted you warm beneath the down of my bed in the dark. I just didn’t know how to begin.” He closed his hand over her wrist and felt her pulse, racing like a bird’s. “I’m not going to tell you I love you, Merry,” he said quietly, “only because I can’t bear to watch you run.”

  Merry took a deep, shuddering breath and stood up, loosening his hold. “I can’t do this, Peter,” she said. “I can’t give it the attention it needs. Never mind that I can’t even begin to understand what you see in me.” She turned her back to him, her arms crossed protectively over her chest. “I don’t have the mental energy to explore any of it. No—that’s not it. The whole question saps me of mental energy. It consumes my thoughts. And I need all my ability to f ind Del’s murderer. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of that.”

  “Fair enough,” Peter said. “I’m not so self ish as to demand your at­tention when it’s justif iably elsewhere.”

  She looked at him quickly, suspicious of such ready retreat.

  “As long as you’re honest with me.”

  “Haven’t I been?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to use Del’s death as an excuse, Merry. Nothing would be easier. Telling yourself you’re focusing on what’s meaningful, when in fact you’re avoiding it.”

  “Nothing is more meaningful than Del’s death,” Merry said tensely.

  “Work can be an admirable way—a face-saving way—to ignore the truth.”

  “What makes you so goddamn certain I give a shit about you anyway?” She was angry now, the black brows knitted contemptuously, her back up like a cat’s.

  “I’m an egotistical bastard.”

  “You are, you know. And you have no idea what I think or feel.”

  “Oh, yes, I do.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s all I have left.”

  He saw it then, like a f lash of light—how Merry fought him, fought herself, to keep hold of her stability; how the arms buckled under her breasts were a metaphor for her entire emotional state. She’d girded her­self with an iron resolve not to feel; because if she once allowed feeling in, it might consume her.

  “Merry,’’ he said.

  She saw in his face all that she had told him, and sat down on the bench. She put her head in her hands. “I can’t, Peter,” she said. “I can’t face it.”

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “You can’t help but hurt me. That’s all people do to one another.”

  “Not all,” he said. He reached a hand to the nape of her neck, feeling the warmth of it, the coolness of her blonde hair grazing his skin. Her mouth was like a partly opened shell, awash with seawater and mystery, giving up noth­ing; it drove him deeper and de
eper, drowning.

  Merry broke away. The f irst drops of rain fell on his cheek, and he let them, stunned.

  “Aren’t our sandwiches ready yet?” she said.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time Howie Seitz arrived back on the is­land. He’d spent the past three days traveling from Gloucester to Mattapoisett to Provincetown, and had managed to catch the one-f ifteen ferry out of Hyannis by the skin of his teeth, weaving his way among the line of packed cars waiting patiently to board in the rain that had already doused the Cape for much of the morning. He found a seat on the lower deck by the port rail, the side for disembarking, and settled his large frame with a copy of the Globe. Once they were an hour out on the Sound he’d think about lunch; but the crowd at the upper-deck snack bar was always heavi­est at departure. Something about taking to sea—even for two hours and f ifteen minutes—drove people to eat; the lesson of Robinson Crusoe, per­haps. If by some inexplicable mischance they were all wrecked and cast away, at least the bulk of them would be well fortif ied with chili.

  Howie mulled over the past few days with a f lutter of uneasiness. He was uncomfortable with Bailey running this investigation—the detective would never know if he had missed something vital. The guy cut corners, neglected evidence, ran with his f irst idea and f it the pieces to the size of his personal puzzle. That made Howie feel too responsible, like a tightrope walker without a net. It was Merry Folger he hated to fail. She would listen to his recital, read his notes, and f ind the gap he should have noticed. He wished the chief had put her on the murder.

  He found her sitting in her off ice, staring at a crack in the opposite wall, since she had no window to serve as a suitable focus for daydreaming. He rapped a knuckle on the open door and hovered.

  “Seitz! Just the man I wanted to see. How was Gloucester?”

  “A dead end. The guy had already left. But I found him in Mattapoisett,” he said. “The f ishing business is pretty unstable, I guess.”

  “Pull up a chair. You talked to Bailey yet?”

  He turned red. “Your off ice is f irst along the hallway.”

  She refrained from comment. “Why don’t you run through it from the beginning.”

  “Okay.” He pulled his notebook from his back pocket, even though he knew the contents by heart, and sat down, shoving a hand through his dark curls. “Let’s see. Charley MacIlvenny is the guy in Mattapoisett. Formerly Gloucester, for all of a week. Formerly Nantucket, where he joined Joe Duarte’s crew last October. Formerly Hyannis, where he cap­tained a boat that unfortunately sank in that same month of October.”

  “It sank?”

  Howie nodded, uncertain of the signif icance. “Hit an unmarked wreck while racing for port in a storm, and sank pretty quickly, appar­ently.”

  “Did MacIlvenny own the boat?”

  Howie looked back at his notes. “I don’t think so. He talked about the owners, how after the boat sank he couldn’t get hired as captain anywhere, so he went to work for Joe.”

  “Go on.”

  “I asked about the night of Joe Duarte’s death, and his story pretty much tallied with Jackie’s. Said he was standing across from the Swede waiting for the net to come up, and that it was winched in too fast and Joe got clobbered on the left side of his head.”

  “He said nothing about why the net was winched in too fast?”

  “Just that it was a pretty confusing night. The storm was hitting hard, and Jackie and Joe were yelling at each other, and f irst the order was to drop nets, and then it was to pull them up, and they weren’t sure who to obey.”

  “Jackie and Joe were yelling about the net?”

  Howie nodded. “Jackie wanted it dropped, and Joe wanted it raised. From the way Charley tells it, Joe was so mad he wouldn’t have seen Moby Dick coming over the side that night. He was right in Jackie’s face, telling him he’d better f igure out who was captain, who gave orders on his boat, and so forth, and Jackie was giving it right back. Charley f igures the Swede was just distracted.”

  “So that’s why Joe Duarte was messing around the net,” Merry said thoughtfully. “Del couldn’t f igure out why he hadn’t left something that routine to his crew. Jackie never mentioned a f ight. I wonder what else he’s keeping to himself?” Her eyes f licked back to Howie’s. “What’d Char­ley have to say about the night Del died?”

  Howie looked uncomfortable. “He was busy,” he said.

  “Getting to Nantucket and back? Or what?”

  “Busy. You know.”

  “No, Seitz, I don’t.”

  “He was with a—girl. Woman. Whatever.”

  “Ah. All night?”

  Howie nodded and looked away.

  “You talked to her?”

  “I had to track her down f irst, and that wasn’t easy, believe me. Charley remembered she was called Kiki, and he had a rough idea where she lived, but couldn’t tell me the address or her full name. Talk about drunk. Those two must’ve been—” He paused, and reddened again. Merry wondered how much older than himself he thought she was.

  “But you found Kiki?”

  “Yeah. I had Charley drive me to what he thought was her apartment complex, and then I waited around until the manager came back, and found out her name is Christine Benson. Kiki’s her stage name.”

  “I see. An artiste.”

  “She’s a sort of—dancer.”

  Exotic, by the look on Seitz’s face. “Gotcha. And according to Miss Benson, Charley was not on Nantucket at the time of Del’s death.”

  “So she says.”

  “Okay.” Merry sat back in her chair. “What about the second guy you interviewed?”

  “Rick Berkowski. New Bedford born and bred, currently crewing on the Jenny Lyn out of Provincetown. Joined Joe Duarte’s crew in January after his boat sank—”

  “No way,” Merry said, though she’d been half waiting for the words. “Where’d this one go down?”

  “Hit an unmarked wreck near the Nantucket Shoals. Pretty far from port.”

  “About forty miles.”

  “There was a New Bedford trawler near enough to pull off the crew.”

  “Lucky for Rick. Men die in a matter of seconds in January water.”

  “They couldn’t save the boat, though. Sank in ninety fathoms.”

  “How convenient for the owners—since I very much doubt Rick was skippering his own boat. When it came time to f ile for insurance, the wreck was probably hard to locate. Sending divers ninety fathoms down in the middle of the winter is no picnic, either. Wonder how long it took the insurance company to pay out?”

  “You think the sinking was deliberate?”

  “I think it’s just too much of a coincidence that three of Joe Duarte’s crew were former captains who’d sunk boats in the past year. It’s not that common. Scuttling vessels for their insurance is, however.”

  “Wow,” Howie said. “You think Joe put those pieces together?”

  “If he didn’t, it’s because he chose not to,” she said. “A man who’s been on the water as long as Joe was knows to mistrust coincidence.” She leaned across the desk. “I’ve got a job for you, Seitz. Find out who owned those two boats—you should be able to get the information from Terry Samson at the Coast Guard. And note down who insured them. Something stinks about the whole story.”

  Howie stood up, his face alight. Merry was pleased. He’d done good.

  “Where was Rick the night of Joe’s death?” she said.

  “Down below. It was his turn to sleep.”

  “And last Wednesday?”

  “He doesn’t remember.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what he says. Can’t remember what he did last Wednesday. Thinks he might have been watching TV.”

  “Alone?”

  “He’s not married.”

  Merry sat v
ery still. “What color’s his hair, Seitz?”

  “Dirty blond,” he said.

  “Thanks. Be sure and tell Bailey that, would you?”

  “Of course, Detective. Anything else?”

  “Don’t tell him about the insurance stuff yet, okay?”

  Ralph Waldo was in the backyard culling lettuces from his vegetable garden when Merry got home. It occurred to her that he’d been practically house­bound since Sara Duarte had come to stay. Not that he couldn’t have taken Sara with him on most errands—he could, and did. But he had abandoned many of his normal pursuits, his quiet routines, his visits to old cronies or to check library books out of the Atheneum.

  “Hi, Grumpus,” she said to the white head bent over the soil. “I decided to come home early.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said, rising with a grunt. “I could use the help.”

  “Sara giving you trouble?”

  “Apparently the honeymoon is over,” Ralph Waldo said. “She’s been fussy all day. Started crying after breakfast, and its been like King Lear ever since—howl, howl, howl, howl, howl. The worst of it is, I can’t help her, my dear.” He tossed some Bibb lettuce in a basket and turned toward the back door. “All she says, over and over, is I want my mommie. Mommie. And to that, Meredith Abiah, there is no answer in the world I can give.”

  “No,” Merry said. “I’m so sorry, Ralph. We’ve left you here to hold everything together, Dad and I, while we ran around looking off icial. It isn’t fair. Should we get a baby-sitter tomorrow?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” he said. “I’m fond of the little thing. One more stranger right now is the last thing she needs. It’ll pass, with time. If she could get more sleep she’d be less unhappy. But she had nightmares again last night.”

  “I slept through them,” Merry said, feeling guilty. “Did you get up?”

  “Twice. Both times she’d fallen back to sleep.”

  “I wonder what she sees.”

  “I don’t think she has the vocabulary to tell us yet. I only hope it passes before too much longer.”

  “Ralph,” Merry said, following him to the kitchen, “I called the state Registry of Vital Records this morning.”

  He set the lettuce down on the counter near the sink and turned on the water. “About Sara?”