After finally finding the “on” button, I almost lost my balance when the boat shifted as the dull rumbling of its motor activated. “I can’t go out sailing,” I said. “I don’t have time.”
“This is a motorboat.” Sallie was ever-pedantic.
Did I feel anything for her? Any brotherly affection, any tenderness, any warmth, any sense of a shared family history, even shared DNA? No, nothing. I knew then and there that I would never be a Drummond, never feel for any of them what I felt for a close friend or lover, for, say, Chloe or Roberto or Arthur.
“Can’t you even turn on the phone?”
I’d tried, but it wasn’t working.
“Alexander is just getting fuel,” Sallie said, “on the other side of the wharf. When there’s a line at the pump, he just circles the harbor.”
I think I said it then to assert my power; I felt lost on this boat, with this quirky cell phone—and the Drummonds had always intimidated me, the whole family. I told her, there, in the messy cabin: “I know who did it, I know killed Ian.”
She was shocked, of course. Her jaw dropped open, then a strange kind of smile began then died on her lips. I thought her smile might be relief that justice at last was imminent.
“What?!” she said.
“It was Lucas Mikkonen,” I said, “or his orders, anyway. A man called the Enforcer actually did the killing. He drives that junky old van you mentioned. The van with the backrest. A hustler named Edward Babineaux was somehow involved. It’s all connected to the land deal at St. Harold’s.”
I blurted out the story of my day at Truro. “Oh, my God,” Sallie kept saying. I kept pressing buttons, but the cell phone seemed dead. I was beginning to feel faint from lack of food and dizzy from the boat’s motion.
“Give me the phone, Mark.” Sallie was very calm. “I guess it needs re-charging.”
Sallie led me back onto the deck to discover, to my amazement, that Alexander had steered the boat away from MacMillan Wharf, far into Provincetown Harbor. “I thought he was getting fuel, damnit!” I said.
Sallie shouted to her fiancé at the helm, on the bridge. “Alexander! Mark has some amazing news! He says that Mikkonen creature—the cult leader—was responsible for Ian’s death!” She stripped off her sunglasses, and the skin around her eyes looked slack and discolored, bruised, as though she’d gone sleepless for days. “Alexander!” she shouted, but the wind and the argument of the seagulls absorbed her speech and the boat plowed seaward so that the spires and piers of Provincetown were becoming miniature.
The seas were slightly choppy. Hurricane Felix was churning through the mid-Atlantic, endangering the lily fields and pink stone cottages of Bermuda, and whipping up whitecaps even here. My stomach was developing its own private storm and my thoughts were whirling, bright but shapeless, like Carnival confetti.
“Damnit, Alexander, answer me!” yelled Sallie.
A whale watch boat was rounding the tip of Long Point, close to shore. The wake from our speeding craft sent it rocking gently so that its passengers, collectively, let out a thrilled “Ahhh!” But when its captain sounded his horn, there was anger in his series of short blasts.
Sallie bounded up the ladder to the bridge, with me behind her. Alexander sat in one of two chrome and vinyl chairs, his tanned hands gripping the wheel.
“Mark has proof Lucas Mikkonen killed my brother,” Sallie snapped.
Unlike Sallie, Alexander didn’t smile at this news. He said, “That’s extraordinary,” and kept staring straight ahead.
It was actually cold at sea. Sallie was now wiggling into a cinnamon-colored sweater she’d harvested from a tangle of clothing on the bridge. This looked like a party boat, I thought, like something chartered in Miami for spring break. My mother had always described the Drummonds as reckless, so perhaps they sought reckless people to marry, to continue their tradition, the way Lucas Mikkonen sought ways to preserve strains of lost Inca corn.
“My brother-in-law—brother-in-law-to-be—had a first-rate legal mind,” Alexander was saying, “he had the theory down pat…”
Long Point was now a blurry horizon of dunes, something Lawrence of Arabia might have seen in the Great War, the war that undid Royall and his artists’ utopia. In those very dunes, farther toward the bath house, I’d last seen Ian Drummond alive. “Vaya con Dios,” he’d called, then, later, he’d done just that—gone with God.
“…He had the theory down pat, old Ian did, but his execution was a major fuck-up. And people don’t like that. Not one bit.”
He was disparaging Ian, which didn’t seem to faze Sallie at all. Was that because she was used to it?
Sallie said, “It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. My brother made the mistake of befriending that monster. Things went bad about the land deal at the school, so people from the cult—”
“Are toast.” Alexander completed her sentence.
“In the fire,” I said.
“I’ll go re-charge the phone, Mark,” Sallie told me.
“No you won’t,” Alexander commanded.
“What Mark found out changes everything!” Sallie insisted. She repeated my story about the community in Truro while the sun ricocheted on her engagement ring and the diamonds comprising her tennis bracelet. Clasping my hand, she said, “Come on, Mark, you can make your call now.”
“That phone is no good!” Alexander said.
Sallie said, “You promised—”
“I was mistaken,” he said.
“So was I!” Sallie shouted. She yanked the diamond tennis bracelet until it ripped from her wrist, fell in two segments onto the mats at our feet and down through the ladder to the lower deck. “If you don’t let him call, I’ll call the police, Alexander, I’ll call them, I swear it, damnit, I swear it!”
That was when I saw it, after first looking at Sallie, scarlet with frustration, then at the diamonds glittering on the mats at our feet. It was lying on the deck of the bridge, kicked into a corner by a pair of binoculars and a bottle of India pale ale. It was a mermaid stamped from plastic in some Asian factory, distributed as a promotion for a fast-food chain. Picking it up, I saw that it was missing one arm and was sticky with the gruel that had adhered to their cellular phone.
“Mark is perfectly comfortable reporting Mikkonen to the authorities, aren’t you, Mark?” Sallie’s voice was jagged with pain. “Those people in Truro did everything. Those fanatics who all died this morning.”
But she was wrong and she knew it. And I had been wrong.
Alexander eased the boat to a halt. We were far out at sea.A fog was gradually collecting around us, so that we were enveloped in a silvery grayness. The water was gray and there was a heaviness in the air, as if, after weeks of punishing drought, it might rain.
“The phone is dead, honey. I busted it this morning, remember?” He stooped to pick up a segment of the bracelet. “Women,” he said to me, laughing, “maybe you and—who is it, Antonio?—have the right idea.”
He smiled when he saw me with the broken mermaid. From a towel on the second vinyl chair, he drew a knife that shone even in the thickening fog, a diver’s knife with a thick serrated blade.
“This is nothing personal, Mark. Some things are done out of necessity.”
I had no understanding of the perverse equation governing his actions, but I knew that it somehow included kidnapping and murder.
“He’s seen the doll, honey, so it’s over, it’s history. I told you old Mark was the curious type.”
The knife had a rubber handle, strong enough to cut barnacles from rock or cut open abalone—or a man’s throat.
“Is Chloe safe?” I said. “Why did you take Chloe? What’s she to you? I don’t get the connection, Alexander.”
He was calm as a counselor. “That’s family business.”
“Well, I’m family, too!” I said, “I’m Sallie’s half-brother!”
“That,” he said, “is unfortunate.”
I found myself laughing a crazy, desperate
laugh at ever wanting to belong to that family, at ever being in awe of their grandeur.
Neither of them said a thing. He rose, pointing the knife in my direction. With a sailor’s grace, he leapt down the ladder from the bridge to the main deck. “Follow me,” he told me.
I was alone on the bridge with Sallie. For an instant, I considered manning the controls but they baffled me, the compass in its bubble, the dozen gauges and dials, the switches for the bilge pumps, for the searchlight, the horn…
“Are you coming down or do I have to get you?”
“This is not going to happen, Alexander!” Sallie said.
I had to buy time, had to keep him talking. As I climbed down the ladder, he pressed the tip of the knife against the nape of my neck. I felt the sharpness that had ended Ian’s life. Facing him, all pulse and sweat, I asked, “Why did you do it, Alexander? Why did you kill Ian?”
“You too, honey,” Alexander said. “Come down.”
She said, “I’m sorry, Mark. I thought he just wanted to speak with you at the wharf. To make sure you weren’t on his trail.” Climbing down, she began crying.
“You’re still an accessory,” Alexander told her. “In this and in covering up your brother’s accident.”
“Accident?” I said. I scanned the sea around us, but there was no one else in sight. The chaos in Provincetown and Truro—the fires, the gridlock—had reduced the number of recreational boaters. There was no one else to turn to—Sallie was my only hope, this half-sister who’d shunned me as family, this spoiled heiress complicit in her own brother’s death.
Alexander threw her some keys. “Sallie, go to my cabin and get a blue nylon jacket in the top drawer. Don’t be alarmed if it seems a bit heavy, I’ve sewn weights into the pockets. Mark, I’ve got to ask you to disrobe. You’re going for a swim, and I don’t want to leave the cops any clues.”
“How was Ian’s death an accident?” I asked him.
His expression was handsomeness untroubled. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”
“You owe it to her—to your fiancé!” I shouted. “You owe her an explanation why you killed her brother!”
Sallie’s eyes were bright, like the diamond ring that dominated her hand the way this psychopath dominated her life.
“It was an accident, Mark,” Sallie said. “It was really Ian’s fault. He’d been drinking at the beach then back at his house. Ian was so jealous by nature. Jealous that I was getting engaged. Jealous of Alexander’s success.”
All along, I’d assumed Ian had been killed returning from the beach, returning from his hollow in the dunes in Herring Cove. But he’d gone home first, to his house on the hill, to that spaceship of a house overlooking the breakwater. If he had been killed returning directly from the beach, from meeting me, from our sex in the dunes, he would have been found.
“They went for a walk on the breakwater, after dark, Ian and Alexander, after dinner,” Sallie said. “Ian got mad and pulled a knife on Alexander. They scuffled and lost their balance—the rocks were very loose. They fell and Ian accidentally got stabbed.”
“That is a lie,” I told Sallie. “Ian didn’t pull a knife on Alexander—Alexander pulled a knife on him. The only knife Ian carried was his Swiss Army knife, with the little collapsible blades. That was much too small to slit Ian’s throat—ear-to-ear, almost to the bone.” I shouted at Sallie, “I know because I saw him, I saw Ian dead on the breakwater that night!”
“What?!” Sallie again began crying.
“He’s lying,” Alexander said.
“I was at the beach, all day,” I said. “I saw Ian there, at Herring Cove. We shared a bottle of vodka. We talked in the dunes.”
The boat was rocking. The waves had swollen and the whitecaps sent spray that occasionally wet our faces. Sallie, lost in the immensity of a sweater that was obviously his, was sobbing.
“Why did you take Chloe?” I yelled at Alexander.
“Take your clothes off, you prick,” Alexander ordered me. “You’re going overboard, naked, with no identifying clothing, no wounds, no marks—” To Sallie, he said, “He knows about Chloe, so he’s got to go.”
“He’ll kill Chloe too, if he hasn’t already,” I said. “He cut your brother’s throat, he cut his throat!”
“He was wounded in the chest, honey,” Alexander stated. “Just like the newspapers said. And that was an accident.”
Alexander advanced toward me, readying the knife.
I had always thought of the sea as my ally; I’d grown up in Gloucester, which drew its living from the sea. I saw myself at five on Good Harbor Beach, by the rust-colored rocks in the eelgrass of the estuary, and I saw myself with Ian, off Ten Pound Island, in a sea that seemed eager to claim my life. It might do that today, I thought.
Unless I decided to fight.
I could fight only by remaining calm, calm as on stage. I was doing a scene, I told myself. And fighting for Chloe and my life.
Unlike the Master’s Enforcer, Alexander wasn’t armed with a gun. He couldn’t kill me from a distance, he had to get close enough to stab me, and, unlike Ian, I couldn’t be taken by surprise. This time, I wouldn’t let fear shut me down, freeze me the way it froze me in Truro at the steam bath, when we’d filed in, obedient as schoolchildren during fire drills.
“A Swiss Army knife isn’t something you use suddenly, it’s too slow. You have to take it out, choose the right blade, unfold the blade…” I pointed to the divers’ knife Alexander had the bravado, the gall, to use again. “Look at that knife closely, Sallie, that’s the knife he used to kill your brother, our brother—”
“He’s right, the papers said—”
“The part about the throat wound wasn’t published in the papers. Sometimes the police withhold details of a crime, it helps them to weed out false confessions! Remember, Ian’s casket was closed. That was because of the wounds to his throat. That wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d only sustained chest wounds.”
“It’s all lies,” Alexander said. “He’d fought with Ian, he’d assaulted him in public. Ian told us all about it, remember, Sallie? He didn’t speak with Ian the day Ian died because he and Ian weren’t on speaking terms!”
“Sallie, please, I’m your brother!”
Sallie’s crying seemed to provoke the seagulls, which were circling the boat like a Greek chorus. That passing simile, that theater cliché, called to mind a detail of my encounter with Ian that might convince Sallie I was telling the truth, about seeing Ian dead and alive.
I said, “Chorus Against Fascism: The Greek Resistance.”
“What?” Alexander laughed.
“By Stavros Zarefes,” I said. I repeated the title and author as the gulls kept squawking in their chorus. “That was the book Ian was reading the day he died. He showed it to me when we talked in the dunes. He left, then I fell asleep on the beach. I found him coming back, on the breakwater, dead. With his throat slit open, ear-to-ear.”
“It’s true, Alexander.” Sallie was speaking as softly as I’d ever heard her. “I remember us talking about that book that evening. You mentioned being in Greece, in Symi, at the sponge diving museum—”
He lunged toward me, grappling my shoulders, the knife in his right hand. The shoulder I’d injured in Truro, throwing myself against the steam room door, sent a current of pain coursing through my system that made me buckle and drag us both down. He’d been clutching the segments of Sallie’s broken diamond bracelet, and, as we struggled, these dropped to the deck.
He was readying the knife, his plan about a body with no wounds now abandoned. With desperate effort, I punched at his face and pushed him so that he stumbled and I stood.
It was strange that at that moment that time did not stop but seemed to stretch, like the endless seconds before an inevitable collision. I saw, on the deck, between the segments of the bracelet, three possible weapons to save my life—some rope, a bait bucket, and a jar of something dead from the sea, floating in something murky, in fo
rmaldehyde.
I seized the jar of marine specimens and struck the crown of his head so that the jar broke and glass, fish entrails, and poison went streaming down into his eyes. “My God!” he gasped. “I can’t see!”
Blood from his scalp went running down his face. Blindly, he bumped against the bait bucket, still clutching his knife. “Sallie!” he screamed. “Get me water to rinse—”
Would she help him? Would she switch sides at last?
She pushed me aside, crunching through the broken glass as she stepped toward Alexander to place her hands against his chest—her dark hands with the diamond ring sparkling against the blood-red stripes of his rugby shirt. She picked shards of glass from his rugby shirt as he bellowed, “Get me water to rinse my eyes, Sallie. NOW!”
Then she shoved him.
“Cunt!” The blood from his scalp in his eyes went streaming down his face to his neck so that it mimicked Ian’s wounds. He raised his knife to slash at her, but missed. She shoved him and he fell against the low side of the boat, slipped in the fish entrails, then righted himself. Then she shoved him again and he lost his balance, and, flailing his arms, he fell overboard.
He screamed. A wave, gray and massive as the side of a whale, washed over him. He seemed dazed by his wound, unable to swim. I saw his hand, then the top of his bleeding scalp.
There was a life preserver within easy reach, but neither of us made any move to throw it.
Alexander’s face rose briefly above the water before he sank for the last time, and the only sounds were the heaving of the waves and the chorus of gulls arguing and arguing…
Sallie began sobbing, staring at Atlantic.
“Where are the keys to the cabin that’s locked? Chloe’s in there, isn’t she?” I shouted.
“…Above the sink,” she said. “…Marked ‘1.’”
I found them, suspended from a small brass rack shaped like an octopus. I had to coax the lock, wiggling the key in and out, but finally it gave.
They were side by side on the bed, bound with plastic restraints on their wrists and ankles—the little girl and the old man—Chloe and Duncan Drummond.
The Fisher Boy Page 31