The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  Barton Daggett, the rotund St. Harold’s alumnus who’d been at Ian’s party, owned property in Truro. It was ten-ten, a bit late, but I phoned him from the police station and told him quite truthfully that my car had been stolen and asked to spend the night at his house and bring a friend.

  He was most hospitable, picking us up in his Alfa Romeo. He’d shed a few pounds since our last meeting and developed a teak-dark tan. I withheld the exact circumstances of my Volvo’s abduction until I was deep into a vodka Collins, on Barton’s back porch. Like Ian, Barton was an amateur military historian. The walls of his porch were a virtual armory of swords with gleaming blades and degenerating tassels. Insects, moths and mosquitoes, clung to the exterior of the porch’s fine black screens, unable to reach the light or flesh they craved.

  As the vodka worked to loosen my tongue, I felt compelled to confess what had happened to us earlier. We were, after all, in hiding under Barton’s roof, possibly luring killers to these premises. Draining the last of my drink, I told our tale. Barton registered no more reaction than Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, on the cover of the book of Matthew Brady photographs on the coffee table in front of us, next to a pipe, an ashtray, and a pewter lighter shaped like the battleship Maine.

  “…So we barely escaped with our lives,” I concluded. Then I remembered: “At Ian’s party, weren’t you complaining about these people being disruptive?” And, looking at the insects clinging to the fragile black screens separating the porch from the outdoors and the dark woods crowding the yard, I remembered, with fright, that this house abutted the Master’s fiefdom.

  “Indeed I was complaining and I was wrong,” Barton stated.

  Roberto, exhausted, was sleeping in a big Eastlake rocker.

  “I spoke in haste when I characterized them as ‘hippies.’ A good number of their company are crackerjack scientists, including their leader.” Barton lit his pipe with the battleship Maine. His next thought seemed inspired by the lighter. “Once, I would have said they weren’t worth the powder to blow them up with, but a month ago, I changed my mind.” Barton certainly had his Gothic touches; that might allow him to excuse some of the Master’s behavior.

  The screens on the porch were soft; they belled in the hot wind and could easily be cut. And we could easily be watched, from the woods. I couldn’t believe Barton as he puffed his pipe and speculated that our experience with the Master was “probably some sort of misunderstanding.” He’d had words with a man named Badr, “a fellow about seven feet tall,” the Giant, surely; they’d argued about noise, about their shooting in the woods, culling deer what with the Lyme disease outbreak. “Of course, I agreed with their constitutional right to bear arms. It was their firing them in proximity to my house I objected to, but we settled things amicably enough.”

  Barton had to admit he’d been as prejudiced as we were before he’d been invited for a tour of their compound by a lovely woman about his age, Freya. Had I seen their greenhouses and the laboratories in the concrete, modern building? They were growing Inca corn from kernels found frozen with a mummy, a child sacrifice in the Andes.

  “Yes, they’re keeping up the tradition. They sacrifice children today—and castrate adults.”

  “I didn’t get that intimate—”

  “How did this tour of yours come about?” I asked, not having found these people initially welcoming.

  “Oh, I’d threatened to sue the pants off them,” Barton said. “I mean, they’d caused a godawful racket, all that gunfire, but Ian told me they were essentially harmless. We discussed them at his St. Harold’s bash.”

  But the Master claimed Ian had swindled him, I said, on the deal about selling St. Harold’s.

  “Oh, yes,” Barton said. “They’d thought Ian concealed the fact that the meadow adjoining Lake Chiccataubett couldn’t be developed because the bunny-huggers had snooped around and found some damn endangered plant. But Ian claimed it was all a misunderstanding. He hadn’t known that plant even existed.”

  “They killed him,” I said.

  “No.” Barton kept smoking his pipe. “They’re hardly killers, just a band of idealists who take Prince Valiant too seriously. Why Ian and their leader, Mr. Big, go way back.”

  “Mikkonen.”

  “Enormous man. Very brilliant.”

  “Did you meet him?”

  “Very briefly, in his lab. He was engrossed in some problem about their aquaculture business, raising tilapia.”

  The tanks of rotting fish in our old chapel.

  “Ian knew Mikkonen from his mother’s shop in…what’s that tourist trap?”

  “Rockport.”

  Roberto snored peacefully. More and more insects were collecting on the outsides of the screens.

  “Correct, Rockport. I ate some bluefish there that was out of this world.”

  “Ian knew Mikkonen—”

  “Because of Papa’s sticky fingers. Papa Drummond would come strolling into Mrs. Mikkonen’s shop and clip things, forget to pay for things. Bad form.”

  “Dementia, Alzheimer’s.”

  “Well, one day, a few years back, Mikkonen and Ian crossed paths when Ian stopped by to return a Cossack doll Daddy had lifted…” Barton seemed to consider this whole history a string of amusing faux pas. “But it wasn’t real estate or kleptomania that brought Ian and Mikkonen together. It was God.”

  He was relishing my skepticism.

  “I know spiritual is about the last adjective you’d couple with the Drummond clan, but Ian came to me, he sat right in that chair—” He pointed to where Roberto was now snoring.

  “When? This year?”

  “Last year, last June.”

  When Ian allegedly was in San Francisco. Had the Master’s story about Ian seeking spiritual nourishment been true?

  Barton blew smoke from his pipe on a mosquito that had breached the screens and was circling his arm. “Ian told me he found Mikkonen poised to make a killing in biotechnology. But Mikkonen offered Ian something more.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something he’d never found in that competitive family where everyone was always chasing some cup or blue ribbon. A sense of peace.” Barton stated it as a kind of challenge. Barton said Ian had been “instructed in meditation” by Mikkonen, that he’d even attended retreats at the Truro compound.

  “Before or after their quarrel about the land, about St. Harold’s?”

  “Before, I believe. Sorry, I didn’t offer you a refill—”

  “Did you tell any of this to the police?”

  “Heavens, yes!” Barton said. “I hightailed my way to the Provincetown police the morning poor Ian was found! But they seemed preoccupied with those Christian Soldiers, they thought Ian’s murder was some sort of ‘hate crime.’”

  I couldn’t believe what Barton was telling me, confirming Ian’s links to the Master, and, incredibly, confirming that the police knew all about these links all along. So why hadn’t they arrested Mikkonen, or connected Clark to Mikkonen and confirmed who he was, linked their John Doe in the pauper’s grave with the panhandlers and that massive man who’d ordered us scalded? Barton showed no reaction when I’d quoted Mikkonen claiming Ian was seriously ill. I mentioned it again: “Did Ian have cancer?”

  He slapped a mosquito on his arm. “Ian was as healthy as a horse,” Barton said. “Look how he’d built himself up. He was what your generation calls buffed.”

  “That might have been steroids.”

  “Ian never mentioned any health problems to me.”

  “Did he mention knowing an Edward Babineaux? Before this summer?”

  Barton was flicking the battleship Maine lighter, but it had run out of fluid and was failing to produce a flame. “He didn’t mention any Edward at all.”

  “How about a Paul?”

  Barton shook his head, just as Roberto was blinking awake. “What time is it? I think I may have dozed off.”

  I was sure I would spend the night awake, but fatigue overpowered me
and I got nine hours of deep, dreamless sleep, in a four-poster bed with mahogany pineapples and a thermal blanket. I actually needed the blanket due to the aggressive air-conditioning. Roberto, beside me, claimed the cold kept him awake, his San Juan blood felt frozen.

  Barton offered to let us remain with him, but I refused. “Where else can we go?” Roberto asked, using one of Barton’s disposable razors, standing at the bathroom sink wearing nothing but a foamy beard of shaving cream.

  “What’s the least likely place we could go?” I wondered aloud, rubbing my showered body with one of Barton’s heavy towels, which could absorb a monsoon.

  Just then a loud rap on the bathroom door made me jump. “The police are here, they’ve found your missing car!” Barton reported.

  I’d braced myself for vandalism, for slashed upholstery and the radio ripped from the car, but my Volvo, found on Orcutt Road, Welfleet, was in pristine condition. In fact, it had been washed, in defiance of the ban due to the drought. And the theoretical puncture was, of course, invisible.

  We agreed to leave Cape Cod. My apartment, Arthur’s house, the White Gull were all known to people like Edward, in league with Mikkonen. Yet I also felt responsible to tell Arthur all that we’d learned, for his safety and “for the record”—should anything happen to us.

  We decided to phone Arthur later that morning, after first driving directly to Boston. I was doing sixty on Route 6, in Suicide Alley, that section of highway where you’re requested to keep your lights on even during the day, where the road is so narrow, one lane in each direction, a slot banked by high sandy hills. We were listening to music then the Boston news, ragged with static: “…A hiker in Provincetown made a grim discovery early this morning. He found the body of a young girl in the Province Lands…” Then the sound crackled off, as I pounded the radio and went numb then alert with panic. “…not known at this point whether the body is that of little Chloe Hilliard…”

  I almost steered into the oncoming traffic, but Roberto yelled, so I braked, sending a pile of roadmaps from the dashboard into his lap. Instinctively, I turned the up volume of the radio, but the story already was over, succeeded by a commercial about a water park.

  We turned around at the first opportunity, then roared back toward Provincetown. “There must be some mistake,” Roberto said.

  “The mistake was the police not raiding those crazies.” I surged past a Chevy with Utah plates. I wasn’t even seeing the road ahead, I was bombarded by images of Chloe—dipping her mermaid into Arthur’s fishpond, collecting pebbles by the harbor, rubbing against Roberto’s legs…And I fought awful images—the young girl chained to the tree in Truro and the body in the woods in the Province Lands.

  Finally we took the left into Provincetown proper so that dunes and ponds gave way to shingle houses with clotheslines and trellises of roses. Double-parking, blocking Commercial Street, I banged on Miriam’s front door until my knuckles hurt.

  “She’s away!” I became aware of somebody calling. It was a woman with red braids, sanding something in the front yard of the house across the street. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Miriam is at Arthur’s, the poor thing. What kind of monster—”

  People in cars blocked by mine leaned on their horns. I responded by raising my middle finger.

  Near MacMillan Wharf, we were delayed when a drag-queen, bulky and masculine as the Statue of Liberty, complete with silver lamé robe and tinfoil torch, crossed the street. She was followed by Superman and Mr. Peanut. Of course, I’d forgotten! Roberto pre-empted me by explaining, “Carnival.”

  The weeklong, late-August extravaganza, our own Mardi Gras, a time when the spirit of Provincetown, sometimes summed up by Speedos and a Corona with lime, made room for some gender-bending whimsy, for rhinestones and rouge. A man in enough leather to have skinned a roundup of steers was escorting his partner in full geisha drag, face ghostly with rice powder, lips painted red and compact as a cat’s anus.

  I noticed a scattering of fundamentalists, but nothing like their numbers in early- and mid-June, and their office looked closed. But Provincetown was mobbed. Carnival’s end-of-summer bacchanal, the last before Labor Day, filled the guest houses, bars, and shops with riotous crowds.

  Edging into Arthur’s driveway, I scraped his picket fence and swore. To encourage me, Roberto squeezed my shoulder, the one I’d injured on the steam room door, so I winced.

  “Thank God you’re here, we’re beside ourselves,” said Arthur, spent and trembling as he poured himself a Campari. Miriam was upstairs. He’d given her a sedative. “Will this nightmare ever end?” The phone was ringing constantly, media people making a nuisance of themselves. Arthur seemed vulnerable amid his material treasures, the Sandwich glass, the ormolu, the highboy Duncan Phyfe himself had constructed. He had been Chloe’s surrogate father, filling that absence to his benefit and hers. Now, the vision the busyness of driving had fended off asserted itself—a child dead in the underbrush, murdered and left to the elements.

  “Is it…definite?” Roberto asked.

  Arthur was making no attempt to hide the tears streaking his face. “Nothing is definite. The clothes on the girl don’t sound familiar, but she’s been held two weeks, so these butchers could have given her…” I thought of the killers in Truro, insisting we change into their garb.

  Then the stairs began creaking just as the telephone—loud as a stone shattering plate glass—began ringing. “Don’t answer it, I forbid you to answer it!” Miriam said, gripping the banister with both hands for support as she descended the stairs, one slow and heavy step at a time. “The police said they’d come, not call. This has nothing to do with my daughter.” She began sobbing silently, as if her finite supply of tears for this lifetime had been expended.

  She wore one of Arthur’s terrycloth robes, its pockets brimming with tissues. She was barefoot, like some desperate pilgrim on the loneliest of holy roads. “I saw Chloe in a dream.” She knotted the cord of the robe. “She told me she was fine and she’s never lied.”

  “Thank God for the sedative, I’m so glad you slept,” Arthur said.

  “What on earth do I have to be thankful for?” Miriam snapped. “Thankful some other girl was found dead in a ditch? What kind of monster would do such a thing?”

  We all froze when we heard the sirens in the distance, knifing through the air. Was this the police coming with awful news? The room—the people, the furniture, our thoughts, the atoms comprising everything—seemed to pause on their journey through time. Then the sirens grew more faint, moved away.

  “They sound like fire engines,” Roberto said. “They’re not coming here.”

  It was nearing noon, so Arthur urged Miriam to join him in the kitchen for some curried chicken on a fresh baguette. Roberto followed. Alone in the living room, I punched on the television, keeping the volume low. Even though the police had promised they would visit, not phone, and be sure Miriam heard the first estimate of the dead child’s age, a sense of fear rippled through me as the picture bloomed on the screen. It was a bit before twelve, so I’d expected the cheers and bells of a game show. Instead, I saw reporter Doug Doherty, handsome with concern, against a burning hillside. Bat-like ashes flickered through the air as he spoke.

  “There are fires now throughout the lower Cape. All of them started at approximately ten o’clock this morning, and the worst are in Truro. Police don’t think that is a coincidence. Two suspected arsonists have been apprehended by the Provincetown police. They have refused to answer questions, and, when asked about their identity, gave numbers instead of names in response. The suspects were discovered running through the woods of Cape Cod National Seashore, not far from the location where the child’s body was found. They tried to escape using this old van…” Footage of a Volkswagen, rusted through like a useless old muffler, was broadcast. The van’s steering wheel was sheathed in fake fur. “…The Provincetown police who arrested the pair were shoc
ked to discover that their van was packed with explosives as well as what may be containers of deadly bacteria. Both suspects were tattooed with emblems of Norse mythology—and both men had been castrated.”

  Then the camera cut to an anchorwoman at a desk, Marcia Haight, remarking how dry conditions were throughout Cape Cod, calling the fires “a disaster waiting to happen, with or without help from some very disturbed people.” Then she shifted so that her body moved but her jacket’s padded shoulders remained still. “Are there any new developments at the compound, Doug?”

  The screen changed to a helicopter shot of woods, with a pond and greenhouses glinting like mica in the sun. In a voice-over, Doug Doherty said, “What we know at this moment is that the Provincetown arsonists were part of a cult centered around this commune and a mysterious leader called the Master. At eleven-fifteen this morning, after the arson suspects were arrested, two Truro policemen, Sergeant Reginald Colby and Officer Paul Driscoll, entered the compound grounds with a search warrant and were shot. Sergeant Colby, an eight-year veteran of the department and father of five, was killed. Officer Driscoll remains in critical condition.”

  We had spoken to them just last night.

  Doherty returned onscreen as the hillside back of him erupted in flames. Some fireman gestured for him to move. The camera panned a traffic jam as Doherty said, “Route Six is impassible. Provincetown, in fact, is now cut off from the rest of the world.” Behind him, cars shimmered in the heat, then a curtain of smoke obliterated the scene. “This just in, Marcia,” Doherty said, “I’ve just been informed that Officer Paul Driscoll of the Truro police department has just died.”

  I ran into the kitchen, shaking. Roberto was eating some bread. Arthur was persuading Miriam to try his curried chicken. “You can eat around the meat. There are apples and raisins and walnuts in it too.”

  “There’s trouble,” I said, there in the kitchen where Edward had concocted his bouillabaisse. “Hurry up, come into the living room!”