by David Daniel
I thought of Iva Rand’s remarking that her husband owned Standish. “Was either the bank or the trust named Ted Rand?”
He looked at me. “In some form or other. Now he’s gotten around DEQE regs and is building an exclusive compound of homes, along with a seven-hundred-acre golf course. I’m told that’s sizable. I know golf like you know surfing.”
“And golf, too.”
Van Owen was gazing at the dark landmass and the water cupping it, aglitter in the light of a rising moon. “Egrets used to nest out there. Horseshoe crabs would mate in the tidal cove.”
“Thanks for the history lesson,” I said. “What’s your point?”
“Hang on; class isn’t out yet. Come on.” Back at the truck he pulled a surfboard out of the bed, leaned it against the truck and hauled out a second board. “Never been on one of these, right?”
“And I hope you’re not suggesting I start now.”
He tossed me a wet-suit top. “Use that. When we get out there you’ll be glad for the extra warmth.”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“There’s no other way to get where we’re going.”
When I had the wet-suit top on, we carried the surfboards down and set them in the water. “We’re sheltered by the jetty,” he said, “there won’t be any waves. Just do what I do.”
We paddled out. “Tell me the part again about all the sharks being on shore,” I said.
“Most of them, anyway.”
Too late, I realized I hadn’t removed my wristwatch—though for the money I’d paid for it, it ought to be more waterproof than a duck. After several minutes of effort, Van Owen paused ahead and sat up on his board, which sank a little under him, nose up. I tried to do the same, but the board was so wobbly I almost fell off. I stuck to lying on my stomach. “I hope this isn’t our destination.”
“Not yet. Look.” He pointed to a noticeable dark line in the water, some distance out from where we were. “That’s where the brackish water running out of the tidal rivers meets the cold salt water. There’s a lot of stirred-up plant life in it, and that attracts the baitfish, which draws mackerel and blues, and then the big hungry stripers come, all teeth and testosterone—or whatever the fish equivalent is.”
I drew my hands up onto the deck of the board.
“Nickerson first clued me to what’s really going on out here, underneath. He knew the food chains.”
Some of them, I thought but didn’t say. Lying there in the dark on the board, maybe I could imagine that narrow and separate darkness where we each finally lay, but there wasn’t time for metaphysics, and I hoped Van Owen wasn’t in the mood for stoned-soul maundering. I was eager to be back on dry land, back to finding Michelle. He pointed again. “That blinking light out there on the end of the jetty? That’s where we’re going.”
My arms were as rubbery as the wetsuit by the time we drew the boards in close to the sloped side of the jetty. Van Owen dismounted and waded through the rockweed to the nearest boulder. He guided me in, and I scrambled up. The tide was outgoing, so we left the boards propped against the rocks and climbed to the top.
The jetty was built of enormous cut-granite slabs. In the moonlight I could see that the top was broad and flat, the spaces filled with smaller stones and gravel. Once upon a time it had been paved, but the asphalt was corroded and littered with broken crab shells. Weeds sprouted from the cracks. There was the blinker at the far end, but the moon was our chief source of light. We started to walk in the opposite direction, toward the town center, where the Storm Warning restaurant stood in the distance.
Barefoot, we moved over the rocks carefully, and finally Van Owen stopped. Looking down, I saw the charcoal remains of burned wood. Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod sprouted among what appeared to be hard pools of something that shone, as if volcanic activity had sent magma to the surface and it had frozen with time. I stooped and ran a hand over one of them.
“Melted fiberglass,” he said.
Something caught my eye, and I pushed aside pieces of charred wood and broken glass to reveal a section of concrete. It was the slab upon which the structure had stood. Painted on it was a design like the one I’d seen on the surfboards at the big shop and on the plank of charred board that hung there. Ride a Legend. I looked at Van Owen.
He squatted, too. “It was my logo. An old fish shack sat here before I took it over for the surf shop. There was a bait shop down that way.” He pointed farther out.
I’d gotten a version of it from Fran Albright at the restaurant: the same day, I suddenly realized, that I’d seen a man standing out here on the jetty—Red Dog.
“The two shops were zoned okay because they’d been there a long time, but they were pretty ragged—‘rustic,’ I guess, if you get into that sort of thing. But the town didn’t want an eyesore. Rand offered to buy them. The couple that ran the bait shop were glad to take the money and get out of the business. I wanted to stick.”
“Not the most commercial spot,” I said.
“It was a place where I could have some peace, not bug anyone, and if they wanted to come out, they made the hike.”
It was an attitude that Charley Moscowitz liked for his used-firearms business, but you didn’t make the Forbes 500 with it. “What happened?”
“I said no, thanks, to the buyout offer, and that should’ve ended it. Then the town decides that without both structures out here, the rules changed, no more zoning protection. They threatened to take it by eminent domain, which would’ve given me less than Rand was paying. Except, one night, before anything could happen, the place caught fire. You know what fiberglass burns like?” He stood and scaled a chip of burned wood into the water.
“Wasn’t there any insurance? Or protest?”
“No. ‘Bad wiring’ was the official verdict.” He shrugged. “It could’ve been, for all I know. I should’ve taken Rand’s offer.”
“It seems like he’d be a man it’s hard to say no to.”
“He does good work for the town; he’s on this board of trustees and that advisory committee. Can’t argue with that. He’s a player. He’s good for progress.”
“With more strings than Percy Faith. Does he own Vin Delcastro?”
“Nah. Delcastro’s a proud guy, his own man—but there’s no question someone like Rand gets special considerations. One of the ‘elect.’ Anyway, I can’t kick. When the sports supermarket opened up, he told me I could run the surfing department if I wanted. He lets me shape some custom boards, too.”
My mind was churning with the possibilities in all this, but I wanted to keep it clear for Michelle Nickerson’s sake. I shut up, and we turned and wandered farther out the reach, toward the blinking red and green lights at the end. Van Owen seemed drawn, and I tagged along. The water was calm under its bright polish of moonlight. In the near distance, a sleek motorboat rumbled by, a low pale shape that foamed the dark sea, picking up momentum and noise as it went, until it was just a high-speed growling bound for open water.
“Sorry for before,” Red Dog said. “On the boat. What you said … I guess maybe it got a little too close to reality. Living here has its different sides.”
“Like anywhere.”
“I reckon. But one constant for me is the sea. It makes me feel—I don’t know … young. And at the same time reminds me of how much of my life I’ve used up, wasted.”
“There are other beaches, other towns.”
“I grew up here. But Standish can get to you sometimes.”
“Not according to Mitzi Dineen and the local booster club.”
“They’re part of the problem.”
The speedboat’s wake slapped the rocks at our feet, splashing us, sending a flock of nesting birds squawking into the air just ahead of us. “Nautical couch potatoes. Power required, brains optional,” Van Owen complained. “A few years back, there was this shark panic—people went out with deer rifles, shooting everything that swam. They got dolphins, a sunfish, a rare leatherback turtle�
��hell, they finally even got a shark. The heroes came in towing it like that old guy in Hemingway and hoisted it onto the town pier to pose with the monster. It was a basking shark. A totally harmless vegetarian.” He shook his head. “What makes people do it?”
“What makes two grown men roll around punching each other?”
“We solved that one already. This … I don’t know. Do they hate wildness in any form because deep down they fear it? They get a chain saw, and first thing they do is take down every tree in sight. They rationalize—the leaves clog my gutters, a limb might fall on the house—but they don’t know most of those trees would outlast the houses they shade. They worry about coyotes, which are natural there, coming in and snatching their cute pets, which aren’t. They want nature they can push around. They hang out a bird feeder to get the little chickadees but don’t mind that their cat eats its weight in songbirds in a month’s time. Ah, hell, I’m whistling in the wind.”
“Somebody’s got to,” I said, “the wind gets lonely.”
His brow wrinkled. “You’re an odd character, Rasmussen. I’m still trying to figure you out.”
“That’s where I’m at, too. Like how come, if TJ was your best friend, you’ve never gone to see him?”
As we’d been talking, I heard the powerboat returning, its snarl growing. It was moving faster than it had been going out. Van Owen was a step or two ahead of me, moving back to where we’d left the surfboards. I turned and saw the white water as the boat cut a sharp turn, not thirty yards from the end of the jetty, and then I saw the outline of a man in the open cockpit, and for a second I thought he was reaching to brace on the windshield.
“Get down!” I shouted.
Van Owen swiveled in surprise. I actually reached to shove him, but he was nimble and jumped down the inner slope of the jetty. I was slower going down, too conscious of the rocks. A gunshot cracked, and something passed over my head at high velocity. I shoved my face into seaweed.
The boat didn’t come back for a second pass. I thrust up my head and watched it turn in an outward arc, flashing its underside, then roar seaward. Van Owen scrambled back to the top of the jetty. “Assholes!” he yelled. But the boat was already fading. He turned to me. “You okay?”
My heart throbbed with adrenaline, and barnacles had shredded my palms, but I didn’t appear to have any extra holes. I picked seaweed off my face. “Who was it?”
“The kind of idiots I’m talking about.”
In the distance, the roar of the engine still sounded, but dwindling, slipping slowly under the cover of the night. “Yeah?”
“You got another theory?” he challenged.
“A warning?”
He frowned. “You mean somebody telling you not to be talking to me?”
“Or vice versa.”
We considered reporting the shooting but decided to let the police concentrate on locating the Nickersons. Van Owen said he’d probe the incident on his own. I fetched my things from his boat and said good night. At the beach house, I took my .38 inside and put it in a kitchen drawer, underneath some dish towels. I telephoned the police, not caring that I was being a pest. There was no word yet on Michelle. As I hung up, I remembered my question that, in the excitement aboard the Goofy Foot, had gone unanswered.
27
I hadn’t been to Brockton in years, and here I was for the second time in as many days. I got only a little lost but soon found the VA hospital. It was going on nine-fifty. I had no idea what the visiting hours were. The visitors’ lot was mostly empty, dotted with pools of coppery light. I took along the copy of Ben Nickerson’s high school yearbook, thinking it might come in handy, and headed for the lobby, passing folks wearing post–bedside-visit looks of relief coming out. When I asked at the information desk about hours, the kindly old volunteer’s face got as long as Joe Camel’s. “They end at ten,” he said. “You better hurry.”
I found the elevators and rode to the fourth floor, where I oriented myself and headed for Wing C, room 406. As I passed a nurses’ station, trying to move by unnoticed, or at least unobtrusively, a broad-shouldered nurse called out to me. “Sir, can I help you?” It was delivered like a sentry’s challenge.
Tentatively, I lifted The Torch. “I wanted to drop this off for a patient. It’s his class yearbook. I thought it might cheer him up.”
“Which patient, sir?” She looked a bit like a sentry, at that.
I told her. She glanced at one of the other nurses, who pushed up out of a desk chair and joined her at the counter. “Who told you you could do this?” This nurse was a petite thing, but she sounded just as forceful.
“I wasn’t aware anyone had to authorize it. It’s still visiting hours.”
“This is a private ward,” the broad-shouldered nurse said, not bothering with “sir” now. They had smoked out an invader in the smoothly functioning routine of their ward, and they were having none of it.
“But a public hospital, no?”
“You can’t be here,” said the short one. “You can leave the book with us.”
I gave them my disarming smile. “It’s a personal keepsake. I’ll only be a minute.” I’d come this far; I knew now it would be the only chance I got, and all at once I felt a need to see Teddy Rand.
“That makes no difference. You’ve got to leave right now, sir.”
She was a charmer. “Can I stay if I lay off the stewed prunes?” The petite nurse gave me some thin, menacing mouth action, then spun on her heels and marched off quickstep on a mission. Broad-shoulders reached for a phone.
I hurried along the hall, scanning the numbers above the doors. Two-thirds of the way down, 406 stood open. I glanced back before entering. At the far end of the corridor, the petite nurse was talking with a black orderly, pointing in my direction, saying something I could only see in pantomime.
The room was a double, but the bed closest to the door was unoccupied. The other bed, near the window, had a man in it. He was on his back, hooked up to monitors and IV drips. My first thought was that he was asleep, or even comatose, but as I went nearer I realized he was awake. His head didn’t move, but his eyes rolled my way. His face had not changed a lot from the photos I’d seen. The clean jaw and the bright eyes remained, though admittedly they were gaunt. The body, though, which lay under just a sheet, belonged to a different man. Trauma, inactivity, and time had wasted it. The shoulders and arms, which weren’t covered by the sheet, lay slack and stick-thin, the muscle bulk gone. I stepped near the bed, and his eyes moved with me—the only part of him that could move, I realized.
“Teddy Rand?” I said.
He gave no response, but his eyes held mine, and suddenly I felt exposed by them. Why was I here? What had I imagined I would accomplish by coming? I hadn’t brought well-wishes or flowers or hope. I was an utter stranger to him. I had only a book under my arm. The book.
I stepped nearer, so that the blue eyes were full on mine. I said, “I’m Alex Rasmussen. I’m an acquaintance of Red Dog’s.” I told it then, in quick, streamlined fashion, no time for a back-story, and he didn’t need it. Ben Nickerson and his daughter were the centerpiece. I took out the photograph of Michelle to show him—obviously he had never seen her, but I wanted it to go with my tale. He looked at it, but there was no change in his eyes that I could detect. From the corridor outside, I heard a doctor being paged with that controlled urgency of a crisis situation. I held up the yearbook, so that Teddy Rand’s eyes could see the title embossed in black on the pale gray cover—The Torch.
I flipped pages to the picture of Teddy himself and showed him that. No reaction. I bypassed Van Owen’s portrait and went straight for the sports section, to the shot of the two of them as football heroes. Nothing. I paged backward to Nickerson’s portrait. Same. I was dealing a losing hand. In the hallway, I heard a mutter of voices, and the quick patter of footsteps on rubber tile, moving this way. Desperate, I flipped through the big shiny pages one last time, fumbling past strangers in the hairdos and garb of twe
nty years ago. I found what I was after.
Teddy Rand looked at it. It wasn’t one of the senior portraits, because she had been a junior that year; but she was in the sports section, and as head cheerleader, Ginny Carvalho was featured alone, standing in her short pleated skirt and letter jacket, her pom-poms held out, smiling.
In Rand’s face there was nothing, no visible change. I closed the yearbook. And right then, at the corner of his eye, I saw a tear form and roll down his cheek. He moved his glance to mine. Suddenly, it seemed deep with meaning. I laid my hand on his thin arm.
“All right, what is going on here?” someone demanded from the door.
He was a squat man with a large face, and more jowl than a Saint Bernard, and a voice trying to be firm. A stethoscope protruded from the breast pocket of his white coat, stitched on to which was the name I’d heard being paged moments ago. Dr. Joffrey. “You have no business here!” he said.
“I think you’re wrong,” I said, not sure what I meant.
“No, you are!” The stethoscope jiggled like a rubber squid. “Security is on their way.”
Behind him, someone said quietly, “That’s okay, Doctor. I know this gentleman.” It was Ted Rand.
Looking uncertain but relieved, Joffrey retreated. Rand stayed in the doorway, not looking toward his son. “Can we take this outside, Mr. Rasmussen?” he said with half the volume Joffrey had used, and twice the force.
Clasping the yearbook, I glanced once more at Teddy Rand, then I stepped past the empty outer bed and followed Ted Rand into the corridor. The broad-shouldered nurse and the black orderly were standing by. “We tried to prevent him, sir,” the orderly said.
“Thank you, William.”
“Anytime, Mr. Rand. I’ll just ride downstairs with you.”
The man did, and the three of us rode the elevator in silent descent. I didn’t know if the orderly saw his role as lending physical protection or moral support. He and Rand exchanged good nights in the lobby. When Rand and I stepped outside, three other men were waiting.