Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  She stopped short, vaguely uneasy. There was something about the image that recalled a scene from Dickens—the spectre of Christmas Future, dooming the happy present. Then Merry shook herself abruptly and plunged across the soggy lawn between post office and police station. Both she and the vanished girl were well beyond the reach of revels.

  Night Reception nodded when she came through the door, and went back to reading her novel. The 911 response officer was bent over his panel of lights. Merry slipped upstairs to her office corridor, went past it, and switched on the light in Bailey’s.

  And surveyed the appalling order of his desk.

  Not a scrap of paper was visible. Even the trash can had been emptied. She crouched down and pulled open the metal file cabinet’s drawers, one by one. The hanging green files were devoid of paper.

  Bailey’s quarters were generally squalid. He was an indolent being, without taste or a genius for order. His clothes looked slept in, and his furniture always held dust. Orange peels grew mold before Bailey thought to discard them; a permanent ring of nondairy creamer congealed on his coffee mug’s bottom. Two dead houseplants had held a mournful pride of place on his windowsill for the past three years. He put red bows around their pots at Christmastime, and never seemed aware of the gesture’s futility. The mildewed pots and their sagging bows were the only recognizable things in the room.

  None of Bailey’s characteristic disorder had been tidied before Merry’s Tuesday-morning departure for the depositions in Boston; and she doubted that the detective had been spurred to housekeeping in the last hours before his disappearance.

  Someone had cleaned up after him. Someone who knew the station inside and out. Her father, perhaps?

  Chapter Six

  The girl Merry Folger had glimpsed in the light of a restaurant window ran on through the storm-bludgeoned streets until her breath came in tearing gasps and the tears streamed down her cheeks. They left dark trails of kohl in rivulets on her skin. Her canvas sneakers were soaked through, and her long silk dress clung to her legs like weeds from a lake bottom. Her hair was wet and long, too, and twined drunkenly about her shoulders. She was shaking from cold and something more visceral, but she did not slow until she had turned off Main Street and managed the gentle incline of Orange. Cars flashed by her, headlights pinpointing the gale. Their tires spun whirlwinds of wetness against her ankles.

  Margot St. John had been crying for most of the day, until the tears seemed almost volitional. She felt she could probably cry as readily as she might say hello to a stranger, which was often enough. Helios were free. It was the goodbyes that always cost her.

  She was walking now, trying not to look over her shoulder for the blond-haired woman who had seemed, in the light thrown out by the restaurant, so much like her dead roommate. An apparition and a warning. Margot had half suspected Katia’s presence on the island. Katia had come back, of course, for Jay.

  “One day they’ll come for me.”

  She stopped still on the sidewalk by the steps of the Unitarian Church, then closed her eyes. Margot was tired unto death; tired of life, and of the mess she had made of it. Katia was gone. Jay was gone. There was no one left.

  And she was desperate for a fix.

  She had gone in search of Owen Harley tonight, needing somebody to cry with. Owen wasn’t home. But Margot had stood for a while on the edge of the Easy Street Basin, looking out at the water churned white and restless by the heightened nor’easter. The sea and the wind were unappeased by Jay’s sacrifice. Margot was afraid and seduced at once, like a vertigo sufferer at the edge of a cliff. She wanted to give way, and jump.

  The shaking and the nausea overcame her a few minutes after she turned away from Owen’s darkened windows and walked blindly up Federal. The need for the drug—the restless fever of craving—left her crouching against the shingled wall of a carefully restored house, her hands pressed against her head.

  It was when she had stood up, dazed in reflected window light, that she had seen the blond woman. And ran like a refugee from war.

  Margot forced herself to go on now, to Paul Winslow’s house. Paul would understand; Paul would help. He had been Jay’s friend, too. When she found the ramshackle rental with the decaying gingerbread in the peaked roof, she hammered on the door. No answer. The windows were as black and unlit as Old North’s. Maybe Jay’s friends had all gathered somewhere without her, for a sort of wake. Margot felt a sharp dread of the night and her own loneliness, and hammered again.

  “Open the door! Please, Paul!”

  A window was thrown up. A tousled blond head peered out into the rain.

  “What’re you doing out there, Margot?”

  “Please—I need to talk. Let me in.”

  He disappeared, and a few seconds later the front door swung open.

  “You look like hell,” he said.

  She walked inside, shaking off the rain on the worn pine floorboards. The hallway smelled of wet coats, and something that might be either old fish or oil. A miasma of stale warmth. Her nausea resurged.

  “I need a fix, Paul.”

  “Of course you do.” He said it bitterly. At barely nineteen, he was too young to sound so old. “Come on up.”

  She followed him, trying not to tremble, her palm drawing splinters from the worn banister. And when Paul turned before his bedroom door and kissed her brutally, she didn’t bother to protest. His pupils were like pinpoints.

  “You should wash your face,” he said. “Your makeup’s a mess.”

  She wiped her hand across her cheek and tasted the tang of blood. He had bitten her lip. “Have you got any smack?”

  “I thought you were trying to quit.”

  She felt her face crumple and dissolve again in grief. “That was before Jay.”

  “He wouldn’t want you to make his death an excuse, Margot. He’d want you to transcend. Jay was big on transcending things, wasn’t he? Only it didn’t work last night.”

  “Don’t, Paul.”

  His hands tightened on her shoulders. “I mean it. He’d hate to see you here. Get out, Margot. While you can.”

  “I’ll quit tomorrow. Only I need some help right now. I don’t think I can make it through the night.”

  Paul pushed open his bedroom door and led her into the twilight. She followed, her heart beating faster at the coming salvation, the centering of the syringe.

  “Give me thirty bucks,” he said.

  “I only have ten.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Paul, you’ve got to help me!”

  “This isn’t a charity, Margot. I barely make enough to eat.”

  “I’ll get you the rest tomorrow.”

  He said nothing, and tossed her a rubber band. She tied it around her bicep, her eyes following the movement of his hands. The small spurt at the needle’s tip.

  “Is it clean?” she asked, meaning the needle.

  “Do you care right now?”

  No. She cared for nothing at all. The needle bit at her arm, found the vein. Sent a sweet relief coursing through her body. She sighed, and closed her eyes.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone, Paul. I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Paul fetched a warm washcloth from the bathroom down the hall. And very gently, as though bathing a baby, he began to wipe the black smears of kohl from her cheeks.

  Chapter Seven

  Saturday dawned cold and gray, like so many days throughout that long, wet, despairing year. There had been too much rain altogether, Will Starbuck thought as he turned his stepfather’s battered old Ford into the dirt road that led to Pocomo. His right hand was draped carelessly over the wheel and the collar of his denim jacket was pulled up against the raw cold. He jolted his way toward the water at a steady eight miles an hour, thinking not so much of the road or the weather as of the New England Division 5 Superbowl Game scheduled to start at Burnham Dell field that afternoon.

  It was the Whalers’ second superbowl appearance, bu
t their first one at home; and Will was quietly pleased that the nor’easter had abated. Boston English, the opposing team, would fly in on time. Will’s coach had told the team to defend their turf as though pirates were coming to town—a hokey metaphor, maybe, but entirely suited to the Whalers’ sense of purpose.

  Will played halfback and punt returner, second string. He would probably spend most of the game on the sidelines stamping his freezing feet—but anticipation alone was causing his heart to beat a little faster. How many hours? He glanced at his watch. Nine o’clock. A while to go, then, but he had enough to distract him. He stole a glance at the girl sitting silently in the passenger seat beside him.

  The girl’s name was Marjorie Daugherty. She envied the Brookes and Ashleys of this world and told everyone to call her Jorie. She was pretty in the way of many seventeen-year-olds: honey-colored hair drawn back smoothly from her high forehead, brown eyes wide as Bambi’s. When she spoke, however, it was with such calculation—such determined intelligence—that her listeners inevitably did a double take and quickly revised their opinions of her. She had yet to grow into her intelligence, and for the moment was half ashamed of what she saw and knew.

  She was huddled into a ski jacket with a broken zipper, and her jeans were worn through at the knees. She had bought them this way from the J. Crew catalogue, to her mother’s perplexity and distress. Jorie’s striped knit polo was fashionably too small, and it rose up from her waistband to reveal a curve of velvet stomach. Will trained his eyes away from that waistband, but Jorie seemed as unconscious of it as of her ears, or the soft curling hairs at the nape of her neck, which he also knew enough to avoid. Jorie was taken.

  The cigarette held negligently in her French-manicured fingers trailed ash from the open window of his cab. It was essential that Rafe da Silva, Will’s stepfather, never have occasion to find smoke in his truck interior. Jorie understood that without Will having to say it, and left the window down despite her jacket’s broken zipper. The raw damp of a Christmas Stroll Saturday was like a third person between them.

  They were on their way to AquaVital, a shellfish farm and laboratory in the marshlands off Pocomo. Ten hours of volunteer work a week and a final paper on scallop culture—their senior-year science project.

  “Is Paul gonna be there?” Will asked.

  Jorie shook her head. “He’s working the Horseshed.” This was a spit of land across the harbor, and what she meant was that Paul Winslow was dredging scallops along the nearby bottom. He was nineteen, a year out of Nantucket High, and betting he could make a living on the water. Will Starbuck saw this as the triumph of romance over reason, or maybe just stupidity—but then, Will was the son of a scalloper who had drowned years ago. There would never be a future for Will in fishing.

  He eased the Ford into the long drive that led to AquaVital. A venerable old house with wide porches, dormers in the third story looking out over the harbor, mildewed shingles in need of replacing. A peeling red door. Shutters so green they looked black. A very faint air of neglect, of purpose shifted elsewhere, of distracted attention. A multimillion-dollar estate declining to fixer-upper.

  And then the lab complex behind the house swung into view. Three efficient Quonset huts were hunkered down like enormous barrels near the water, with the spawning nets and barrier rafts in the marshes beyond. There was a generator in a separate building. Beside it, a series of docks with several high-powered craft bobbed in the scatty wind off the water.

  Hannah Moore stood waiting for them on the gravel walk near the first of the huts, hands on her hips and face unsmiling. Impatience screamed in every line of her body. Hannah was the shellfish farm’s resident marine biologist, thirty-eight years old, nearly six feet tall, and as fit and angular as a triathlete. She wore lean black clothing summer and winter, making everyone around her look overdressed. Will had never heard Hannah offer a word of praise or thanks to anyone. She was complete unto herself. Men saw in this a blatant challenge, something to pursue and attack. Women simply saw danger, and gave Hannah a wide berth.

  Occasionally, Hannah intimidated even Will, who had nothing to gain or lose by knowing her; but this morning she had pulled a hood over her long dark hair, and it somehow diminished her self-sufficiency. Made her look miserable, in fact. Will sat behind the wheel of Rafe’s truck, unable to avoid feeling superior to Hannah getting soaked in the rain—and when he glanced at Jorie, he read the same inner mirth on her face.

  “You’re late,” Hannah called over his dying engine.

  “Sorry.” Will shoved the keys in his pocket and thrust open his door. “Traffic out Orange Street was terrible.”

  “Christmas Stroll,” Jorie added. “Town’s crawling with tourists.”

  “In this weather?” Hannah’s eyes drifted upward to the clouds, as thick and smudged as cappuccino foam. “I thought the storm would keep them away.”

  Will shrugged and adjusted his cap. “What’re we doing today?”

  “I want you two out on the water in the Whaler. Sample for tigerbacks and see how our population’s doing.”

  “Alone?” Jorie looked askance at Will. “Water’s pretty rough.”

  “I’ve got to work in the lab today. I’ve got a grant application pending, and the data just aren’t there yet.” Hannah turned abruptly away from them and strode toward the Boston Whaler moored at the dock. Will raised an eyebrow at Jorie, and the two of them followed slowly in the biologist’s wake, hands in their pockets and heads down in the heavy mist. Last night’s raging wind had dropped, and with it the horizontal rain and sleet; but it was cold, and the sea beyond the dock looked dispiritingly choppy. If there were any scallops in the head of the harbor, Will thought, they were probably huddled down over cups of coffee, with nary a tiger stripe in sight.

  The tigerback was a Nantucket Bay scallop Hannah had bred in the controlled conditions of AquaVital’s labs. It had a distinctive band of orange and brown running as jagged as an electrocardiogram across its corrugated shell. Hannah hoped that by propagating her tigerbacks, and releasing millions of their young into the harbor each year, she would eventually be able to market a scallop genetically identifiable as Nantucket’s—a boon to fisherman and buyer alike. Now, with the project in its infancy, she simply tracked her spawn’s fortunes in the harbor’s population. For every sample dredged from the bottom, a certain percentage would be tigerbacks—and their distinctive markings tagged them as AquaVital produce. Over the months and years, Hannah charted the percentages of tigerbacks in the samples she took, and got a fair idea of survival rates. Lately, the numbers had been sobering. Two years after Hannah’s arrival on-island, she’d had three million young tigerbacks ready to release in the waters of Nantucket Harbor. Hurricane Edouard had wiped them out.

  Fishing was like that, Will thought as he climbed over the Whaler’s side and moved forward to the controls. Death caught you with your head down.

  “Did you hear about that scalloper?” Jorie sprang from the dock to the boat’s gunwale, her question intended for Hannah rather than Will. “The guy who drowned?”

  “No.” Hannah tossed her the mooring line. “Work your way from the Gauls to the Jetties and back, okay?”

  “Got it,” Jorie said cheerfully, and began to coil the rope.

  Will turned the engine key, feeling the Whaler roar to life beneath his sneakered feet. Eelgrass and tiny shells churned in the engine’s wake as he slowly steered the boat away from the dock. He had heard about the drowning; he had been pushing the fact of it to the edge of his mind for the past twenty-four hours. To Jorie the drowned scalloper was simply a sensation, as unreal as a Hollywood marriage. She had no idea what a body pulled from the sea could look like after a few hours. But when Dan Starbuck was washed overboard in a nor’easter years ago, it was Will who had found him. No kid of fourteen should have to do that, or live forever with the memory.

  “He wasn’t a local,” Jorie said at his elbow. “Only been here a short time. My friend Ashley worked wi
th him at Ezra’s. And I think he hung out with Paul.”

  The Whaler picked up speed as it left the shallower waters of the marshland and headed toward the Gauls, tidal flats that ran along the island’s northern arm. The tide was running out and the wind was coming in; heavy chop bucked like an untamed horse and slapped the boat sideways. Jorie shivered in the wind. A wisp of hair worked free from her ponytail and streamed across her face. Will brushed it aside. Her eyes grazed his face a moment, expressionless, and then she turned her head toward the gray water. They were both braced in the cockpit, hands gripping the dashboard’s rail, and the shooting spray felt cold and clean. After a moment, Will took one hand from the wheel and stuffed his baseball cap in his jacket. The wind tore through his fine dark hair. He had taken to cutting it very short, so that it stood up like a brush. With his high cheekbones, the effect was almost exotic.

  He pulled back on the throttle and the whine of the engines declined an octave. The boat circled a bit, while Jorie craned over the side, her eyes straining to make out something of the bottom. “Okay,” she said finally, the boat slowing, “well do a test tow here. Let’s throw out the dredges.”

  They grabbed the purse-shaped dredges by their steel frames and tossed them over the side into the sea. Will was enough Dan Starbuck’s son to make sure that the dredges’ lines were clear of the Whaler’s engine before he eased away. He gave the wheel to Jorie, and when the boat moved forward, kept his hand lightly on the lines. He was waiting for a sensation he could feel but could never adequately describe, a sensation embedded in childhood. The feeling of unseen scallops slipping into a steel-framed purse.

  Jorie towed the dredges several hundred feet, then cut the motor. “Winch,” she said.