By the time the breakwater light had slipped astern, nearly all the passengers had left their vehicles for the warmth and comfort of the upper decks. As the ship powered into the open waters of the Strait, it became apparent that the crossing would be uncomfortable. The hull quivered each time a wave struck. Even the crew of the vessel had traded duties on deck in the lash of rain and spray for less inclement duties below. Only the starboard watch faced the weather on the bridge, and only Fenton Peale and the sole occupant of the white Civic lingered unseen on the vehicle deck.
Peale was of no mind to go topside. As a politician he was sure to meet someone he knew in the lounge, and he had no desire to see anyone. His mind was running heavier than the seas around him. He wanted quiet. He wanted peace. He wanted to rewrite his last eleven years into a quieter script with a happier ending. He wanted a more hopeful future, but want had been his problem, he thought. Want had got him neck-deep into the mire he was trying to wade through now. Want was destroying him.
Peale’s moist, damp breath slowly clouded the windshield of his car. At first it had made him feel alive and animate but, after it restricted all visibility beyond the cabin of his car, he felt as if he were suffocating, the same feeling he had experienced and suffered through while languishing for those few hours in the holding cell at the police lock-up. Starting the car to clear his windshield was out of the question. Painted signs on the bulkheads cautioned against running engines, and to do so would attract attention, and he shunned unsolicited interest in his personal doings.
A fresh northeast wind was setting with the rising tide, and the ferry had made enough distance from Wood Islands to feel its discomforting effects. With the wind abaft the ship’s beam, Peale could sense a small cant to starboard and, by the manner with which wind and sea struck the port side, one could feel an unpredictable short pitch and roll. Leaf springs and coil suspensions beneath the cars and trucks made them quiver and shake. The added movement made Peale grow ill at ease.
Jacob Dawson was not dismayed or even concerned by the erratic tremors and shakes he felt in the white Civic. Before his incarceration, he had spent a season as cork aboard an old lobster boat off Georgetown. The farmer who had been his foster parent sold Dawson’s labour services to his wife’s brother. Dawson didn’t last the full season. It wasn’t the hard work that drove him off. It was the inequity. Little cash for his work ever found its way into his own pocket. He stole some of it back before he left. Then he abandoned both farm and sea—and Kings County. He never returned to boat work, but he had learned never to fear that environment either. He remembered it as a cold job, a hard job, but he also recalled it as clean work, at least it seemed so, somehow, in his mind.
This, too, will be a cold, hard job, he thought. Not so clean, maybe, but an obligation to be respected.
His heart wasn’t in it, as it ought to have been, but he had agreed to it. It was necessary, and he had every intention of carrying it out, come what may.
Dawson no longer had an elaborate and detailed plan to kill Peale. After MacFarlane’s death, Peale’s routine had fallen apart. Now it was more a matter of finding him alone. Peale was no match physically for him, and Dawson knew how to do it quickly. Renous and Dorchester—those prisons had been noteworthy institutions in which to learn the arcane skills he needed.
Dawson’s vehicle was parked behind Peale’s, the transport truck between them. Dawson couldn’t see Peale’s car, but he had a clear sightline of his left rear-view mirror, and his eyes fixed upon it as steadily as a fox upon a ground squirrel.
After half an hour, Peale’s fear of suffocation and claustrophobia finally overcame him and, when he could take no more, he flung open the car door and headed for the lee rail. The storm front had deepened, or, at least, it appeared to have done so. The feel of fresh air and the vague hint of a horizon freed him for the moment, but the chill northeast wind, working around the open deck, was relentless. The weather side of the ship was dashed with a creamy froth, and the hull convulsed with the thrust of several quick-breaking waves. Spume carried across the bow doors and showered the foredeck with a fine spray.
Peale stood at the rail. A bulkhead gave him some protection, but he still felt the spackling of cold drops and a mist of salty water. Peale wore a long camel hair overcoat. He gathered the collar tightly up around his neck and ears and held it there as if he were going to strangle himself with it. Then he forced down his too-loose cap until the headband ground against his skull, and he buried his free hand into a side pocket. He remained motionless, like a queer sad statue, shoulders unnaturally elevated, stooped over, as if waiting for a beacon of some sort. But there could be nothing of consequence this far off shore, nothing but endless water, broken lines of waves hurtling leeward, evening gloom, and an ill-defined grey horizon, signifying nothing at all.
“You murdered Carolyn Jollimore.”
The words struck him with such horror that he was speechless. He whirled round and saw a man standing a few steps from him, a man he had never seen before. His hand held a tire iron. His jaw was set, his stance ready, and an expression almost mask-like and unreal plastered his face. It carried a grim vacant intensity and the twisted leer of a hunter having cornered some vile and worthless thing.
“You’re mad,” said Peale taking a step back. His face was deathly pale and his voice trembled. “You’re mad,” he said again.
“You’re probably right,” said Dawson. “Prison does that to a person. Being wronged does it even more quickly.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know you. I don’t know a Carolyn Jollimore.”
“Chief MacFarlane might not agree with you.”
At the sound of MacFarlane’s name Peale felt a new chill creep through his bones. His left hand clenched his collar more tightly, his right hand clenched the bulky Webley revolver in his right-hand pocket.
A moment of hesitancy swept both men, the same misstep that kills green soldiers on a battlefield. Then Peale jerked the handle of the pistol, but the hammer caught on the seam of his coat. He fumbled to clear it. Dawson saw the dark glint of the pistol and doubted his ability to disarm Peale in time. He dropped the tire iron. It resounded with a painful clamour on the steel deck. He ran, vaulted the hood of the nearest car, and took cover amongst others. Peale wasted another split second drawing his weapon. When he looked up, Dawson had disappeared.
Now, it was his turn to hunt.
The pistol felt odd in Peale’s hand. He was not a shooter or sportsman of any description. He had taken the gun with him as a deterrent, rather than a weapon. But now it had come to that. Point and shoot was all he knew of marksmanship, and that would have to do. It seemed obvious now that Dawson had killed MacFarlane, and that reasoning in itself would suffice to justify his killing Dawson, even more so knowing that Dawson intended for some reason to kill him.
Peale made a quick visual survey of the starboard vehicle deck before moving. He saw no passengers wandering about, nor a deck hand on a walk-through. So he edged his way aft along the starboard rail. Except for the trucks, it was unlikely that Dawson could conceal himself underneath a vehicle, and there was too little clearance between bumpers to hide. Likely he was between rows.
Peale reached the end of the first row without sighting him. He felt too timid and inexperienced to walk up between the files of cars. He could be too easily surprised. Instead he traversed the ends of the remaining rows. Between the second and third he spotted something move about halfway up the queue, a leg perhaps. He rushed past the end of the final row, just in time to see the flash of blue, Dawson’s rain jacket, disappear into an opening in the superstructure amidships. Dawson was heading up the stairs, Peale surmised, or maybe through a corridor to the port-side vehicles.
Peale’s Webley preceded his cautious walk toward the portal where he had seen Dawson vanish. As he drew near, he heard the faint sound of a machine or motor,
and, the closer he got, the more noticeable it grew. Caution slowed Peale even more as the edge of the portal drew near. Dawson could pop out of anywhere, he thought. Only a few feet more. He cocked the hammer, his back grazing the nearest car, and quickly sidestepped the opening. A short empty passageway faced him. Another hatch, inside and to the left, was open.
Peale moved gingerly toward it. He saw a ladder that led down into a vast, well-lit chamber. A draft of heat swept up from it. He caught the scent of oil. He poked his head into the opening. Suddenly, the full impact struck him as stunningly as if he had been electrocuted. Every nerve ending in his body quivered as if it had been assaulted. An unbearable noise had leapt from the mouth of the ship’s engine room.
It was only a matter of a few steps forward or back between toleration and painful noise, but in that brief venture, Peale had glimpsed Dawson huddled alongside a turbine just past the foot of the ladder. Dawson’s eyes had a wild look to them; his hands clasped his ears.
The chief engineer sat at a small fixed desk out of sight in the control room, a narrow compartment just forward of the engine room. Industrial headphones covered the bald and deeply freckled crown of his head as he checked a panel lined with gauges and busily jotted entries into a log book.
Once more, Peale ventured forward, this time steeled against what he knew would be a necessary ordeal. He had a clear view of Dawson and, Dawson, quivering like a spooked dog in the nerve-jangling din, had not yet seen him. Peale leaned in, raised his pistol and fired. The bullet struck the steel bulkhead just to the left of Dawson. The sound of the gunshot was no more than a ripple amid the shriek and rumble from diesel pistons, whirling drive shafts, and throbbing manifolds. Dawson heard nothing of the shot, but he felt a spatter of lead fragments, flinched, looked up, and watched Peale level a revolver at him.
Although the engineer could hear very little in the control room, he sensed something. His fingers rose searchingly to his protective earphones. He turned in his chair, one eyebrow cocked attentively. Perhaps he caught only a single arrhythmic note in the clamorous ocean of noise that engulfed him. He gazed about, saw nothing. Then he stood, entered the engine room, and walked the metal grate of the cat-walk between two resonating ship’s engines. He studied gauges, checked fuel lines, and, finding nothing amiss, wiped his hands on a cloth stuffed in a rear pocket of his overalls and disappeared into the aft heeling and trimming compartment.
Peale had held his second shot when he saw the engineer begin his rounds. Meantime, Dawson had shifted position. When Peale poked his head in again, Dawson was out of sight. So was the engineer. Another heavy sea struck. Peale tottered unsteadily with the impact. His gun hand, braced against the door frame, prevented a fall, but his torso swung forward with the momentum, and his left hand reached out instinctively for the rail of the platform just inside the engine room.
It could have been sharp peripheral vision. It could have been instinct. Or it could have been lingering agitation over the morning quarrel with his wife over his greasy boots dirtying her kitchen floor. But something drew the engineer to look up and, at the top of the ladder, he saw a man framed in the opening to the engine room.
The engine room was strictly off limits for passengers. Only an idiot could miss the bold warning at the entry. The engineer leapt forward, rushed toward the foot of the ladder, and wildly threw his arms about in order to signal his message to get the hell out of his station.
Peale’s jaw fell open. His hands still desperately clutched the rail and door frame for balance. Surprise and horror coursed through his mind. He gawked stupidly at the engineer. Then Peale’s eyes shifted toward the gun in his hand. Peale suddenly realized that the engineer couldn’t see the Webley from where he stood. Relief and mortification supplanted Peale’s fright, and a feigned composure, acquired through years of political fencing, quieted his surprise.
Peale backed up, made humble non-verbal mea culpas to the engineer, and withdrew from the threshold of the engine room. Once again the Webley found a temporary home in his coat pocket.
78.
Anne pulled into her driveway at eight-thirty. A dim light shone in the upstairs front bedroom, Jacqui’s room. Another, a counter light, burned in the kitchen.
Anne was exhausted. She felt a weariness that seeped to the bone. God knows she needed a full night’s sleep, a real night’s sleep without interruption. And she hoped the coffee she had drunk earlier wouldn’t keep that from happening.
Then her thoughts turned to Jacqui, whose world was upside down as well. But that was the fluky road of adolescent life, she thought, a reflection that gave neither succour for her daughter’s pain nor relief from maternal anxiety. Teenage girls could cope with the occasional snap and snarl of adversity, learn from those experiences, and move on, but Jacqui had gotten both barrels of bad luck all at once, and she was bleeding. It didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t fair.
Anne locked the side entry door and stepped lightly up the stairs. A light had shone in Jacqui’s room. Perhaps she had fallen asleep with her lamp still lit, she thought, and she made her way silently toward Jacqui’s room. Her hand touched the doorknob, then stopped. Anne heard a faint something. She waited, listened. It was Jacqui. She was awake, and the sound was soft weeping on the other side of the door. Anne remained quietly where she stood and considered whether to intervene or let the passage of time heal her wounds.
Then she turned the handle and entered.
“Hi,” said Anne. Her one word evoked delicacy and concern, as well as a tacit apology for the intrusion. Jacqui lay on the bed, her head cradled on one arm. She had buried the side of her face in a pillow. She stiffened a bit at her mother’s entrance, and her whimpering subsided.
“Can I help?” said Anne.
Jacqui’s head moved negatively back and forth. She sniffled twice, and the back of her hand swiped her nose.
Anne pulled a couple of tissues from a box on the side table and placed them next to Jacqui. She took one and blew her nose. She took the other and dabbed her eyes. She did it quickly, as if to conceal both tears and disappointment. Anne settled herself onto the edge of Jacqui’s bed.
“I’m not going to school tomorrow,” said Jacqui. An uncharacteristic finality coloured her declaration.
Anne responded by brushing a comforting hand gently up and down Jacqui’s arm.
“I understand.”
For a long while, Anne simply sat beside Jacqui, her hand touching Jacqui’s shoulder or stroking her hair. Sometimes, simply being there is enough to relieve the ache of a loss, she thought, and, sometimes, saying nothing says everything.
A few minutes elapsed before Jacqui’s tears dried and her breathing became regular and measured. Her eyes still reflected regret and sadness, but Anne also saw in them a lucidity and warmth that had not been there a short time before, and she felt confident that her daughter’s old spiritedness lay not so far beneath the melancholy.
“I don’t think I can face anybody ever again. My life…everything I’ve worked for…is falling apart. Everything is broken,” she said. Anne watched a fresh gush of tears as she spoke, and Jacqui sank once again into a bleak silence.
“You know, I felt that way once…when I was young…a few times actually…and it hurts like hell. I have some idea what you’re going through… I’ve been there, too.”
As Anne spoke, she stared vaguely at the front window of Jacqui’s bedroom. The houses across the street cut vague silhouettes against the dark, blustery night sky. Anne’s eyes saw, but were oblivious. Her mind and memory had drifted to a place many years away.
Something circumspect in her mother’s admission caught Jacqui’s curiosity, and she looked at her for the first time since she’d come into her room.
Anne’s reverie lasted only a few moments. Then it broke like a wave on a north shore beach, and Anne returned to the edge of the bed. She smiled a broken smile, bent down,
and gave Jacqui a firm, tender hug. Anne’s eyes clouded with a mysterious sadness.
“You want some hot chocolate?” asked Anne when she pulled away. Jacqui stared back, confused by the sudden disconnection and left wanting.
“What happened? What happened to you?” asked Jacqui.
Anne gave up a cheerless laugh and, with an ostentatious gesture, swept the question away.
“It was nothing…at least that’s how I see it now…inconsequential…”
Jacqui braced herself up on one elbow, and her eyes probed for something more substantial than the trivial dismissal her mother had proffered.
“What’s important, hon, is how I worked through it. Mind you, it wasn’t a lightning bolt revelation, and, frankly, I didn’t see it as any help at all, not at the time.”
Anne shot a surreptitious look at Jacqui. She was still quiet, still attentive. So Anne went on: “When you share fears and worries with someone else, they lose their grip on you. That’s what I learned.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
“I don’t really know. I suppose it’s like turning the lights on while someone is telling a frightening story. The fear has nowhere to hide. Guilt can’t fester.”
Jacqui suddenly felt a rush of anger. It leapt from nowhere, and she couldn’t contain it.
“But I’m going to be the laughingstock of the school tomorrow! Madame Desjardins will hate me, and Rada can never be my friend again! Nobody will want to speak to me. Don’t you understand that?”
“That’s quite a burden to carry. It is. And you think you’re responsible…for all of it?”
“Yes…yes! Who else?”
“Why? Did you organize the party?
“No.”
“Did you invite those kids?”
“No.”
“Did you do try to get them out? Did you try everything?”
The Dead Letter Page 29