Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  Albury squinted a little more; his eyes narrowed to razor-edges of blue. “What are you getting at?”

  The question forced him to put it into words: he couldn’t believe that Hiram Standish’s drowning in the blue hole and the near drowning of his son on the Andros drop-off was a coincidence. But Matthias didn’t utter the words aloud. He had no facts, no explanatory theory, and no liking for the way Albury had spoken of Hew or of Cesarito’s father. So he just said, “I’m not getting at anything specific. I’m just trying to find out about Dr. Standish’s death.”

  Albury’s index finger stroked the walnut stock of his twelve gauge. It was a fine old Parker side-by-side; Stepdaddy Number Two had liquidated entire flocks of ducks and geese with one just like it. “I can’t help you on that, sir,” Albury said.

  “Weren’t you around at the time?”

  Albury’s finger kept rubbing the gun. “I said I can’t help you.”

  “What about Mrs. Albury?”

  “Mrs. Albury?” The gun barrel came up a little, as if on its own. Albury pointed it back down.

  “Maybe she remembers.”

  “No,” said Albury. “She don’t.”

  Matthias stood on the pier, silent. He saw the blue slits of Albury’s eyes, heard waves slapping the pilings, smelled the sea, but could think of nothing useful to say to Gene Albury. Then he saw Albury’s eyes focus on something in the distance. He turned.

  A boat was approaching from the northwest. It was moving very fast, throwing up a rooster tail as tall as a waterspout. The boat grew, pushing forward a wave of engine noise, taking on shape and color: Albury’s red and black cigarette. Matthias glanced at Albury. He was chewing his lip.

  The driver came in over the reef, swung the boat in a wide crescent, cut the engines and glided toward the side of the pier, bow facing the sea. The cigarette stopped dead, half a foot from the pilings and perfectly parallel to the pier: a neat maneuver. The driver, who wore goggles, a red jumpsuit and a red helmet, tossed a line to Albury and stepped lightly onto the pier.

  “Visitors, Mr. Albury?” she said, removing the helmet and the goggles. She shook out her long, silvery hair.

  It was beautiful hair, thick and almost glowing; it destabilized the equation between old and gray. The woman’s age was impossible to guess: she had clear, pale, unlined skin, delicate bones, and the body under the jumpsuit seemed trim. Only her blue eyes, deep-set and watchful, showed that she was no longer thirty-five; she might have been twice that, Matthias thought, as she turned to him, and he caught the full force of her look.

  “The fellow from Zombie Bay,” Albury explained.

  The woman studied him for a moment more, then said: “Mr. Matthias, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Matthias said. “Have we met?”

  The woman smiled, but not in a friendly way: a smile at the least ironical, at most full of scorn. “Only through legal representatives,” the woman replied. “I am Inge Standish,” she said, and added: “Happy’s—Hiram Junior’s mother.”

  Matthias thought of saying he was sorry. But that might have implied guilt, and he didn’t feel guilty. So he said nothing.

  Inge Standish’s deep-set eyes watched his face, as though observing this thought process. “What is it you want, Mr. Matthias?” she asked.

  Before Matthias could reply, Albury said, “He’s asking questions.”

  “What questions, Mr. Matthias?”

  “I’ve recently learned that your husband drowned on what is now my property. I’d like to know the circumstances.”

  That brought the smile again: complex and unsettling, like a cruel and elaborately designed assault weapon from an earlier age. “How morbid,” said Inge Standish. “Do you have some special interest in our little family tragedies?”

  “It’s not like that, Mrs. Standish. I’m trying to piece things together. There’s a lot I still don’t understand about your son’s accident.”

  “I thought the court was rather clear on that subject,” Inge Standish said.

  “Hitler was clear,” Matthias responded, to his own surprise: he didn’t like when people used Hitler as a debating tool, but it was too late to stop. “That didn’t make him right.”

  He waited for some sign of anger, but none came. Inge Standish looked puzzled instead. “Hitler?” she said.

  “For example,” Matthias said.

  “Oh, of course,” said Inge Standish. “Touché.” She unzipped a pocket in her jumpsuit, took out three or four rings and placed them one by one on her fingers: diamonds, rubies and sapphires, mounted in settings too big for practical seamanship. “But I still fail to see how my husband’s death concerns you. It was so long ago, Mr. Matthias. Perhaps you weren’t even born then.”

  “That depends when it happened.”

  Inge Standish looked across the Tongue of the Ocean. Her eyes absorbed the light of the sea and the sky, became two deep-set pools of slate gray. “Nineteen fifty-three,” she said.

  “Then the answer’s yes.”

  “But surely you had no interest in my family at that time? You’re not from here, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why now?”

  Matthias considered several responses. “Hew Aikenfield gave me the idea.”

  “Are you a friend of his?” Her thin lips turned up like quotation marks around the word “friend.”

  “I was. Hew was buried this morning.”

  “I didn’t know. I’ve just arrived, as you can see.”

  “From Florida?”

  “Indirectly. I don’t think I’ve seen Hew in thirty years.”

  “Longer than that, according to him.”

  “You’ve been discussing me with Hew Aikenfield?”

  “Your name came up.”

  “I suppose I should be flattered. And was it then that he suggested you come here about my husband?”

  “That’s right. It was the night he died.” There was a long silence. Inge Standish watched a gull swoop down from the sky, change its mind just before hitting the water and soar away. Albury fingered his shotgun.

  “He fell off his terrace,” Matthias added, when it appeared no one else was going to say anything.

  “How dreadful,” said Inge Standish. She looked at Albury, standing at the other end of the pier. “Do put down that gun, Mr. Albury. And please see to the unloading of the boat. I’ll take Mr. Matthias up to the house.”

  “To the house, ma’am?”

  “Certainly. I’ll answer his questions. Hew Aikenfield was an old dear.”

  Albury left the pier and entered a nearby shed. A moment later, two men came down a path, carrying a wooden baby crib wrapped in plastic. They went into the shed too. Albury returned without the shotgun. The two men came with him. They were in their thirties, stocky, with hair worn in the style of Elvis, 1956, but blond.

  “Do you know Mr. Albury’s sons, Mr. Matthias?” said Inge Standish. “Billy and Bobby.”

  Matthias nodded. Billy and Bobby gave no sign of acknowledgment. The Alburys climbed down into the cigarette, began unloading suitcases, groceries, a knitting basket.

  “Come along, Mr. Matthias,” said Inge Standish.

  Matthias followed her off the pier. They walked up a path bordered with pink and white hibiscus. Glancing into the shed as they went by, Matthias saw Albury’s shotgun, locked in a rack with other guns, and the plastic-wrapped crib standing against the back wall, beside an old air compressor.

  “Do you do much diving, Mrs. Standish?” he asked.

  “Diving?” she replied, walking ahead of him.

  “Scuba.”

  Inge Standish’s back stiffened, but she kept moving. “I’m never here, Mr. Matthias. And the ocean has lost its appeal.”

  Matthias, judging from the way she handled the cigarette, didn’t believe that, but he kept the thought to himself. The path went by a small house, past a couple of cottages, then bent inland, rounded a hill and cut through a formal garden. The garden had
a pink marble pool in the center, three or four feet deep and filled with salt water. Matthias knew that from the fish swimming in it—sergeant majors, blue tangs, royal grammas—and from the healthy brain coral they never stopped worrying at. Topiary bushes circled the pool, clipped in an alternating pattern of cylindrical and pear shapes; beyond them well-weeded plots of oleander, red, white and pink, extended to a ring of fruit trees, orange, soursop and lime.

  “I haven’t seen a garden like this anywhere in the out islands,” Matthias said. “Do the Alburys manage it all by themselves?”

  “It’s not difficult. Everything was planted a long time ago.”

  “By Nottage?” Matthias asked, trying to picture a young Nottage somehow capable of that.

  Inge Standish halted by the marble pool and looked at him. “Mr. Nottage is still alive?” she said.

  “Yes. You seem surprised.”

  “He drank, if I remember. I wouldn’t have thought his life expectancy very long, that’s all.” She watched Matthias’s face for a moment, then turned and walked on. “Mr. Nottage had nothing to do with the garden,” she said over her shoulder.

  The main house loomed ahead. Matthias hadn’t seen anything like it either, in the out islands or anywhere else. It was enormous, baroque: an overwrought mass of pediments, columns, statuary and lots of features Matthias couldn’t name. Coming closer, he saw that the windows were boarded up, the façade was crumbling at the edges and marred by several long cracks, and some of the statues had broken. Chunks of lost arms and heads lay in the Bermuda grass like classical debris in a nineteenth-century poem. Inge Standish seemed to notice none of this. She mounted the broad marble stairs like a chateleine and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Matthias followed her inside. It was dark; for a few seconds he could see nothing at all. Then his pupils widened and he found himself standing in an entrance hall that seemed as big as a hotel lobby. The only light came through the half-open doorway, but it was enough for Matthias to see lots of furniture, all covered with white drop cloths; a staircase rising into the shadows and a chandelier dangling down; oil paintings on the walls. The shaft of daylight cut across one of the paintings, illuminating the bottom two-thirds, leaving the rest hidden. Matthias could make out two pale hands, a dark suit jacket, a weak chin. He remembered that chin from Hew’s scrapbook.

  “Sit down, Mr. Matthias.”

  There was a card table near the door, with two folding chairs. Inge Standish took one, Matthias the other. On the table rested a crystal glass with a fresh white rose inside, and a Horizon radiophone. Inge Standish pinched the bridge of her nose for a second; in that second she looked quite old. Then she shook her silver hair and the years fell away.

  “I should hate you, Mr. Matthias. But for some reason, I don’t.”

  “Maybe you realize I had nothing to do with what happened to your son.”

  “It’s not that.” She sighed. “Of course, I know you had nothing to do with it personally.”

  “Then why did you sue me?”

  Her voice hardened. “You had everything to do with it legally.”

  Matthias looked at her, saying nothing. She looked back at him for a while, then turned away. “No,” she said. “I don’t hate you.” There was a long pause. “I’m tired, Mr. Matthias. Tell me why you’ve come here.”

  “I already told you,” Matthias said.

  “To find out about my husband’s death. But why?” “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that one drowned and the other almost drowned less than a quarter of a mile from each other?”

  “‘Odd’ wouldn’t be the word I would choose, Mr. Matthias. I haven’t your gift for detachment.”

  “Do you think I feel detached from all of this?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Mr. Matthias. I don’t know you. And I’m not sure your feelings are what matter, in the circumstances.”

  A long-tailed rat ran through the shaft of light and disappeared in the darkness; Matthias could hear its clawed feet on the marble long after it was out of sight. Inge Standish appeared not to notice. Matthias waited for her to continue, waited for her to say that he had a lot of nerve to talk to her about his feelings while her son lay in a coma caused by his negligence. But that’s not what Inge Standish said. She glanced for a moment in the direction of the oil portrait, seemed about to smile and said: “Let me put your mind at ease, Mr. Matthias. There is really nothing odd, not in the sense that you mean. They both loved the sea, loved this scuba diving you speak of. A dangerous sport, even when the proper precautions are taken.”

  “Who are you talking about, Mrs. Standish?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “My husband, of course. And my son.”

  “Your son loved the sea?”

  “Is it so surprising? He spent his boyhood here. He could swim like a dolphin.”

  “And he loved scuba diving?”

  “Very much. The coral reefs, the tropical fish. I’m sure you know all about it. He was an expert.”

  “Your husband too?”

  Inge Standish nodded. “He had one of the first Aqualungs in the Bahamas.”

  “Do you mean he was wearing it when he drowned in the blue hole?”

  “That’s correct. Is there anything strange about that?”

  “What was he doing in there?”

  “He was curious about the blue holes. Aren’t they of some scientific interest?”

  “Yes. But nothing was known about them at that time.”

  “He wanted to find out. He was a scientist, after all.”

  “I thought he was a doctor.”

  “That’s true. But research was his first love.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “Human fertility.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with blue holes.”

  Inge Standish’s voice rose: “I’m describing his mentality, his character.” More softly, she added, “He was a man of science, as I said.”

  “What happened to him in the blue hole?”

  “I believe he ran out of air, Mr. Matthias.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “His Aqualung was empty.”

  “Who brought him up?”

  “Brought him up?”

  “To the surface.”

  “No one. He—the body came up when the blue hole … boiled. Is that what they do?”

  “Some of them. Sometimes.” No heat was involved; the bubbles were caused by a tidal surge. But Matthias didn’t get into that. Instead he asked: “Was he diving alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Scientists are supposed to be careful. Careful people don’t dive alone.”

  “It was a long time ago. Perhaps he had a partner.”

  “Who might that have been?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Was it Nottage?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Matthias looked into her eyes. They had darkened in the dark room; he could see nothing in them. “So the body came to the surface?”

  “The body did,” Inge Standish said. “Is there anything else, Mr. Matthias?”

  Matthias thought of asking her to withdraw the suit and rejected the idea with disgust. She smiled: maybe she had read his mind. “No,” he said.

  “Then perhaps I’ll walk you—”

  The radiophone crackled. There was something wrong with the speaker. A man’s voice, obscured by crackling and a high-pitched whine, said: “Two-Head, calling Two-Head. Come in, Ge—”

  Inge Standish switched it off. Her eyes shifted feetingly toward him. Then she stood up. “If you’re ready, Mr. Matthias.”

  He followed her out the door, through the garden, past the pool, down the path. Through a gap in the hibiscus, he saw a tiny graveyard, enclosed by a white picket fence. A few weathered gravestones were bunched together in the middle. In one corner stood another stone,
all by itself: small, white and new, so new there was nothing engraved on it.

  Matthias and Inge Standish walked side by side onto the dock. He could smell her perfume and very faintly, her sweat. Everyone sweated, of course; he just hadn’t expected it from her.

  The cigarette had been unloaded and scrubbed down. Matthias climbed down on the deck of So What. The clouds were lower and darker than before; some trailed frayed sheets of vapor. “We’re going to have nasty weather,” Inge Standish said. She untied the line and held it until he started the engines. “Goodbye, Mr. Matthias.” She tossed him the line with a gesture that made him think of someone flipping change to a beggar.

  Matthias turned the boat toward Andros. Rain began falling again, hard and cold, but he didn’t feel it. He had a lot to think about.

  First, he knew Inge Standish had been telling him the truth when she said she didn’t hate him. But why didn’t she? She might have shown anger and bitterness; she might have talked much more about the lawsuit; she might even have ordered him off the island. But she had done none of those things.

  Second, Inge Standish had told him that Happy swam like a dolphin and was an expert diver. But Wendell Minns and Hew had both said he was afraid of the water, and Minns had told him that he was a novice diver, whose experience totaled an hour and a half in a swimming pool.

  Third, the voice on the radiophone, so quickly switched off, had been Brock McGillivray’s.

  28

  Matthias came into the dock fast, tied up and ran along the crushed-shell path to the bar. Except for Chick on his perch, the room was empty. Lunch time. The bird’s head swiveled as Matthias hurried behind the bar and through the door to the kitchen.

  Krio was bent over a butcher block, slowly and carefully chopping onions, so slowly and carefully that he must be stoned, Matthias thought; a perception he had no time to deal with. It flashed quickly through his mind and out. “Where’s Brock?” he said.

  “Gone,” Krio replied.

  “Gone where?”

  Krio looked up. Tears streamed down his face. “Employment interview.”

  “Where?”

  “In the land of the free,” Krio answered. “And the home of the brave.” Then he looked more closely at Matthias and said: “What’s happening?”