Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “A girl named Katia.”

  His eyes flicked up to Merry’s face. “You’ve heard of her, then? She was Jay’s girlfriend and Margot’s college roommate. Katia haunted them both.”

  That single fact explained a lot of things. Merry handed Owen the mug full of scalding tea, and he drank it obediently, as though it had already cooled. “Margot made a phone call yesterday morning, Owen. To Sue Morningstar, one of Jay’s old housemates. She told Sue that it was Katia who had come for Jay, and that they were both coming back soon for her.”

  “A presentiment of death? She was probably out of her mind.”

  “She hung up when someone came through the front door. We don’t know who that was. We found the storm door unlocked, but the screen had been slit.”

  “Margot never left the front door open. She was afraid of violence.”

  “—but it may have been opened by a key. Who had a key to her house, Owen?”

  “Jay.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you ever heard of a man named Charles Moore?”

  “Hannah’s husband? Of course. Margot was house-sitting for his aunt.”

  “How did that arrangement come about?”

  “I assume it happened back in Cambridge. Margot must have known her there.”

  “Charles Moore didn’t set it up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Let’s try something else. Who were Margot’s friends?”

  “Me. Jay. A kid named Paul Winslow. She met Paul when he came to hear us play one night in September, just after Jay came to the island. They had drugs in common.”

  “So I’ve noticed. Did she spend a lot of time with Paul?”

  “Not really.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Owen looked at her searchingly. “Is there a good reason for asking? You think Paul killed her when he couldn’t find any heroin in her house?”

  “Someone murdered her yesterday. Maybe it was a random homicide—but I think that’s unlikely, given Jay’s death.”

  “Jay shot heroin and then drowned.”

  Merry didn’t reply.

  “You think Margot knew something about his death?”

  “I think it’s possible. Any ideas?”

  The vague expression of misery turned suddenly acute. “My God. That’s what I wanted to tell you. This news about Margot put it out of my head.”

  “What is it?”

  He rose and went over to his desk. “Jay left something behind him. A message from the grave.”

  Merry felt a cold finger move up her spine. Between Margot’s dying words and Owen’s present ones, she was beginning to credit the supernatural. “What sort of message?”

  “A spectrogram.”

  “A what?”

  “The image made by a mass spectrometer. It’s a machine that analyzes samples of things—organic compounds, generally—and charts their chemical structure.”

  He handed Merry a manila file. “Take a look.”

  She slid the sheet of paper from the folder and stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  “It’s some sort of graph. Of what?”

  “The chemical makeup of a scallop’s tissue, I think.”

  “What does that mean? And why did he have it?”

  “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask Mel Taylor, Jay’s thesis advisor over in Woods Hole. This must have come from his lab at the Rinehart Coastal Research Center. Jay wouldn’t have access to a mass spectrometer here on the island.”

  “Rinehart.” Merry’s eyes were fixed on the spectrogram, as though it were the Rosetta Stone. “Jay went over there the day before he died. You think that’s when he got this?”

  “It must be.”

  “How did it get to you?”

  “Jay gave it to Margot. The night he died. She was supposed to bring it to our practice session, only she forgot.”

  “So she did see Jay that night,” Merry murmured. Margot’s insistence on the absence of needle marks on Jay Santorski’s arm gained sudden credibility. “Did Margot tell you whether it seemed urgent to Jay?”

  “Not directly. But she felt that she had failed him, by forgetting the spectrogram. She thought he came over here Thursday night to discuss it with me.”

  “And fell into the boat basin.” Merry waved the bar graph under Owen’s nose. “Why would this be important? Do you think it’s part of his thesis?”

  “Could be. Or it could have more to do with that paper you found in his bike pack.”

  “Larval tigers,” Merry said slowly, “and a sketch of the Horseshed.” Hannah Moore, again.

  “None of it makes any sense,” Owen said.

  “But it will. There’s reason behind all of it. May I have this?”

  “By all means.” He stood up abruptly. “And now I’ve got to get going. Get the morning’s catch over to the openers.”

  Which really meant he wanted Merry to get going, and take her misery with her. “Just tell me what you know about Paul Winslow,” she said quickly. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Paul’s a kid. He’s right out of high school. He’s angry at his parents for splitting up, and angry at himself because he thinks he caused the divorce. He’s angry at a variety of colleges for refusing him admission, and angry at the world because he’s decided he’s a scalloper and there are no scallops in the harbor.”

  “Is he angry enough to kill somebody?”

  “That I don’t know. But I’d find it hard to believe.”

  “Where would he go if he was in trouble?”

  “Can’t you find him?”

  Merry shook her head.

  “Oh, man … this just gets worse, you know?”

  No reply to this seemed necessary. At the door, however, Merry turned and said, “Are you sure you should be alone today?”

  A faint smile. “I’m not going to end it all by slipping overboard, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I just thought you might need someone to talk to.”

  “I’d rather talk to myself. Or God, if He’s listening. Is there going to be a service? For Margot?”

  “I don’t know. Her body will be flown to the state crime lab for further … investigation. Once it’s released to her parents, they’re free to make arrangements. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thanks.” Owen reached around her and pulled open the door. “For everything. If someone had to find her, I’m glad it was you.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  At the moment Will Starbuck drove away from AquaVital and headed toward Mason Farms, Peter Mason was saying goodbye to Hannah Moore in front of a Main Street eatery, after a prolonged and provocative lunch.

  The morning’s conversation on the Pocomo dock had turned into a tour of the entire AquaVital lab complex. Peter was more impressed than he had expected by the scope of Hannah’s work. Shellfish culture, he knew, was a mix of simple techniques, lots of time, and boundless hope—rather like the business of raising cranberries. Water, rather than soil, was the preferred medium, of course—but success was just as dependent upon the forces of nature.

  Hannah was determined to circumvent those forces, he soon realized. She was playing a little at God in the marshland at the head of the harbor.

  This wasn’t immediately obvious, of course. Most of AquaVital’s outer trappings were exactly like any other shellfish farm. In the shallows just off Pocomo, Hannah had launched a series of wooden rafts that resembled window screens—square, steel-meshed frames designed to protect young scallop spawn during its setting stage. She had staked netting around a group of eelgrass beds to protect established scallops from predators; but netting and rafts could do nothing against wind and wave, as Hurricane Edouard had taught her.

  Back in the Quonset huts, she led him to an array of large tanks. “This is where my tigerbacks spawn,” she said. “Seawater is pumped in from the dock area, and the temperature is raised a few degrees, which tricks mature sca
llops into believing it’s time to reproduce.”

  “Like forcing bulbs.”

  “Sort of. Then, while the young are still in the free-swimming larval stage, which lasts about two weeks, they’re kept in these tanks”—she gestured toward another bank of bubbling vats—“and fed single-celled phytoplankton I grow over there, in a different tank.”

  “The one with the domed cover?” It was bright yellow, and looked hermetically sealed. Two valved chambers permitted entry to the tank, presumably by gloved hands.

  “I want to keep contaminants away from the algae,” Hannah explained. “I’m extremely careful about how I feed my spawn.”

  “I see. And then?”

  “They metamorphose—that’s when they finally start looking like scallops—and grow large enough to set.”

  “I don’t see anything that looks like a scallop.” Peter peered into the larval tanks.

  “Come over here.”

  Hannah was already across the room, and holding up a long, cyclindrical mesh object.

  “What’s that?”

  “A Japanese onion-bag net. It’s used to set the spat.”

  “The what?”

  “Spat. Shellfish spawn. They clamp on to the netting after the larval stage and grow to seed size. This net is suspended in an upweller—a tank that pumps highly oxygenated water to the scallops, making them grow more quickly.”

  “And since there are no natural predators in the tank, and a ready source of algae courtesy of Ms. Moore, the survival rate must be very high.”

  “Yep.”

  “How do they get back in the harbor?”

  “Once the seed is several millimeters in size, it’s placed in these mesh pearl nets. I string the nets from long lines tied to the pilings out there in the harbor. That usually happens in late spring, and I leave them in the nets until fall. Then they’re released throughout the harbor. Unless a hurricane wipes out the pearl nets first.”

  “Like Edouard.”

  She smiled bitterly. “That storm cost me three million seed scallops. And my grant money from the town.”

  “Ouch.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Those tigerbacks were failures, anyway.” She dropped the onion-bag netting back into its tank. “Usually these nets would be tied out in the harbor. But the seed you see here is only experimental.”

  “In what way?”

  She hesitated, openly assessing him. “You’re obviously familiar with the harbor degradation.”

  “As a demon fertilizer, I ought to be, don’t you think?”

  “How much do you know?”

  “I read a copy of the Woods Hole report.”

  “Ah. Then you know about brown tide.”

  “The phytoplankton bloom that chokes the feeding systems of bivalves.”

  “Aureococcus anophagefferens. A dinoflagellate first observed in 1985 in Narragansett Bay, then in the Peconic and Great South Bays of Long Island. It grows rapidly, turns the water brown, blocks out light, and causes widespread destruction of eelgrass on the bottom. Vast populations of scallops and oysters in those waters no longer exist.”

  “They’re ceasing to exist here, as well.”

  “But it’s a reversible phenomenon. If you can get rid of the brown tide, the scallops come back. The problem is, we still don’t know how to predict or control these blooms.”

  “I thought they were due to sewage.”

  “Perhaps. But algal blooms are as old as the seas. They’ve existed from time immemorial. They will probably occur long after our civilization and its pollutants are gone.”

  Peter folded his arms across his chest and studied Hannah’s expression. It was perfectly controlled, which bothered him. He knew that she was attempting to play him like a fish—because she needed money? Or for some other reason?

  He said: “You’re hoping to get rid of the algae.”

  “I’ve done it,” she replied. “Here, in the lab.”

  “How?”

  “How isn’t important. It’s results that matter.”

  “If I’m going to give you my money, I’d like to know what for.”

  Hannah looked at him shrewdly. “Are you going to give me your money, Peter?”

  He shrugged. “Depends on what I hear.”

  She seemed to come to some sort of decision. “All right. I’ll tell you. A few years back, two researchers at Stony Brook isolated some seawater viruses that seemed to control the growth of brown tide algae. We’re only beginning to understand how viruses work in the world’s oceans—a teaspoon of seawater contains literally a hundred million different ones—but I’ve taken the research one step further. Do you know much about viruses?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “They’re parasites, of course, and they often kill their host organism. We’ve seen that with HIV. Over time, a virus will mutate quite readily, adjusting itself to prolong the life of its host. That mutability makes viruses the devil to combat—HIV changes shape with almost every attempt to conquer it, for instance. But viral mutations can also be useful. Sometimes, we can influence viruses to serve our ends.”

  “And you’ve … influenced … yours?”

  “Last year, I filtered out one of the brown tide-eating viruses. I exposed it in massive quantities—far more than is likely in nature—to my tigerback scallop spawn in its larval stage. In my first trials, the virus invaded the spawn and killed it. But with repeated exposure, the virus itself mutated slightly until the latest batches of tigerbacks could tolerate it. Virus and spawn seemed to adapt to one another. And when I studied the young scallops, I found a remarkable thing.”

  She moved closer to Peter, and he read the passion buried deep in her gaze. “My tigerbacks had genetically altered. Their feeding systems were capable of ingesting Aureococcus anophagefferens. Peter, I’ve created a super-scallop in my laboratory. It’s the answer to everybody’s problems.”

  There was a dubious silence. Then Peter drew a deep breath. “That’s a remarkable story, Hannah. You must have investors flocking to your work.”

  Her eyes slid away from his and once again, he felt that she was withholding something. “Not exactly. Investors want tangible results. I’ve only just reached the point of confidence in my trials, and I haven’t been able to test these tigerbacks in the harbor waters. The ones I released over the past few years were failures as far as brown tide is concerned. But come spring, I’ll have this seed strung out on the pearl nets. By fall, they’ll be ready to set. The following summer, millions of my mutated tigerback scallops should be clearing the harbor of the brown tide.”

  “You need eighteen months,” Peter said, comprehendingly. Then he peered through the lab’s shoreward window, assessing the pilings that thrust at intervals through the Pocomo shallows. Far across the harbor lay the protected barrier beach of Coatue, its trailing fingers lacing the sea at almost predictable intervals; to the left, barely glimpsed, was the sprawl of town. It was a spectacular piece of property from any point of view—and it would never have been beyond Hannah to marry for real estate.

  “It’s fortunate that your husband owned all this prime water acreage.—Or is that why he’s your husband?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “The taxes must be astronomic,” he mused. “Has Charles ever been tempted to sell?”

  Hannah flinched. “Of course. Real estate is his business, and I don’t have to tell you that home values are skyrocketing right now. This house has been in Charles’s family for several generations, but it costs the earth. If Charles is going to sell, now’s the time.”

  “Hard to blame him,” Peter said. “This part of the island is a summer resident’s dream. Harbor views, without the fear of erosion. It’s relatively sheltered, except for the occasional nor’easter.”

  “The same conditions that make it ideal for scallop culture,” Hannah said softly.

  Peter turned his back on the water and looked at her speculatively. “Has he talked about it?”

  �
�Charles is always talking. Whether he follows through is another matter. He likes to think that threats will keep me in line.”

  “Is that what he needs? Coercion?”

  She shrugged. “We’ve grown apart. People do. Charles feels that I’ve drained him of capital to little purpose. I feel that he’s shortsighted. It can make for unhappy dinner table conversation. Sometimes I think he’d sell just to spite me.”

  She momentarily lost control of her expression, and Peter glimpsed the desperation and anger—the sheer violence of will—that animated Hannah Moore. Then she walked abruptly away from him and out of the Quonset hut. After a moment, Peter followed her.

  “How did you do it, Hannah?” he asked her.

  “Locate the virus?”

  “No. Alienate your husband.”

  She looked at him speculatively. “Why do you want to know?”

  “If I’m going to back your work, I want to do it with my eyes open.”

  At that, a smile flickered around her lips. “Alienating Charles was as easy as breathing, Peter. He can’t bear the fact that I love my work more than him. I told him the truth back in Cambridge, before we ever married—but he didn’t believe me. Now he does.”

  “Let’s go get lunch,” Peter suggested. “And you can tell me the rest.”

  “You really want to know about my marriage?”

  “Not your marriage. The virus.”

  And so Peter was parting from Hannah Moore late that afternoon in front of Arno’s when a voice behind him said, “Peter.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw Merry.

  She was standing stock-still on the sidewalk roughly ten paces away, and her eyes widened as she looked from Hannah to himself. He recognized the strained expression she generally adopted when she was determined to appear casual; but perhaps her emotion had nothing to do with his return to the island, or his apparent intimacy with Hannah Moore. She was, after all, involved in a case; and Merry rarely spared a thought for anyone when her work engrossed her.