by Robert White
Dead Reckoning -a Nantasket Novella
Part One- About Ten Years Ago
Tuesday -6:15 AM
I drove past the entrance to the high school and out onto the gravel beach at the end of the road, overlooking Hull Gut. I like to finish my coffee there, before I head in to work in the morning. To my left, a commuter boat crossed the bay from Quincy, coming to get the people on Pemberton Pier, waiting in their suits and skirts, and take them on to their various offices and cubicles in Boston. A lobster boat with a string of traps perched on its stern rocked patiently in the ferry’s wake, the sternman consciously looking away. Straight ahead, on the other side of the gut, Peddock’s Island hunkered, so close, yet all but abandoned. I turned to take in Boston Harbor with its many islands, spread to my right across Nantasket Roads. The city itself, office buildings lifting through the haze, formed a backdrop, a wall between the worlds of land and water.
The town of Hull definitely belongs to the latter. A curved spit of sand six miles long, it connects a number of glacially formed hills that should be islands. In most places, the town is so narrow you can stand on the main road, Nantasket Avenue, and see the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Hingham Bay to the west. Nantasket Beach, stretching for miles on the ocean side, has been a popular summer destination for over a hundred years. Until recently, the town was the year-round home of fishermen and other working class folks, co-existing with the summer people, but not sad to see them leave in the fall. Lately, however, they haven’t been leaving. The mixed blessings of suburbanization and gentrification are causing all sorts of rapid changes.
I had just put my truck in reverse and was beginning to back around and leave when I noticed a small green hull, cradled in the rocks off Rainsford Island. I dug around behind the seat and found a pair of binoculars. A quick look verified my suspicions. It was Eddie Thayer’s boat, and it looked like nobody was aboard.
I punched 4 then send on my cell phone and was rewarded with three rings and a grunt. “Think you can find Eddie Thayer’s number and give him a call?”
“What about?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Ask him if he knows that his skiff is parked on the rocks out by Rainsford, like it went fishing without him.”
“Interesting. Anyone aboard?” Tom Evers was the town’s harbormaster and my boss, at least in the summer.
“Doesn’t appear to be. I’m gonna take a ride out… I’ll have the radio on. Let me know what you find out. I’ll do the same.”
“Don’t you have school?” I am also a biology teacher at the local high school. This time of year, June, the two jobs sometimes overlapped.
“It’s the last day of exams, and I don’t have kids until 10. I should be back in plenty of time.”
“Okay.” The phone went dead.
I decided to take my own boat rather than drive all the way to Nantasket Pier on the other end of town, where the official boats tied up. It took a quick three minutes to reach the dinghy dock on Allerton Harbor and another five out to the mooring where I kept my boat, an older 19 foot Mako I had rebuilt a few years back. It was a solid boat, and I had bought it cheap after it had broken away during a storm. The previous owner couldn’t be bothered with fixing it and was happy to let me have it for short money.
I threaded my way out the channel and around the condos on Spinnaker Island, or Hog Island, as it was called before it was developed. The morning was bright and clear, a little chilly, with a light northwest wind, typical day after a cold front weather. I pointed the boat out towards the gut and gave it some throttle. The stern squatted and then came up as the boat planed. I looked over to the high school where the parking lot was still pretty empty. I would need to call the office and let them know what I was up to, but not yet. It was only ten to seven.
When I got close enough to see the birds working, my stomach dropped. I tried to tell myself Eddie must have left a bucket of bait out or something, but I’m not a good liar. As I slowed to a stop about fifteen yards out, I barely heard the radio above the noise of the seagulls. “Hull two, Hull two, base.”
“Hull two” I answered.
“His wife says he had a charter last night and hasn’t come home.”
“Yeah… call my cell.”
“Roger.”
I shut off the radio and headed up to the bow so I could look down into Eddie’s boat. I quickly wished I hadn’t and leaned over the side to throw up. My cell started ringing and vibrating. “Jesus, Tom, the birds are at him.” I told him what I saw.
“Don’t touch anything. I’ll call it in and then call you back. Rainsford, right?“
“Southwest side, in the rocks. I’m going to try and get rid of the birds.”
It took the State Police boat about two hours to arrive. In the meantime, I anchored in the cove on the other side of the island, waded ashore and hiked across the island to the rocks where Eddie had gone aground. The tide was dropping for another couple hours, so he wasn’t going anywhere. I carefully made my way out to his boat, climbed aboard and promptly threw up again. The seagulls backed off, but remained circling above, screeching madly.
I sat forward of where Eddie’s body lay sprawled in a twisted heap, keeping my back to him. Tom called and I spoke to him. I told him that it looked like the back of Eddie’s head was missing, and that I doubted he had simply fallen down. He told me not to touch anything, and I assured him I wouldn’t. Next, I called school and told them I was going to be delayed, could someone start my exam, harbormaster stuff, etc. Every so often, a seagull would get brave and come back down, and I would have to turn and face it and scare it away. Eventually, the birds lost interest and I acquired a forced tolerance for the gruesome scene.
When the state cops showed up, they sat about fifty feet away, their loud diesels idling and belching black smoke. The boat, an old hand me down from the Coast Guard, didn’t appear to get much maintenance. A guy dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt started taking pictures. Another, in a jacket and tie, made notes in a small book he pulled from his inside pocket. After a couple minutes, they edged in a bit closer. Notebook looked up at the driver.
“That’s as close as I can get.” The driver told him.
Shrugging, he dropped over the side into the thigh-deep water and waded over to the rocks where Eddie’s boat sat. The photographer reluctantly followed, bitching under his breath, until notebook shot him a look that shut him up.
“Spiro Kounadis” he said as he tried to figure out how to best board the now high and dry boat.
“John Smith.” I said in return, earning a raised eyebrow and a you gotta be shitting me stare. I shrugged and watched him climb over the transom, past the raised outboard. He stopped and looked at Eddie’s body a good long minute.
“I don’t know how long the birds were working him before I got here.” I said, when he turned his eyes to me. The photographer was taking shots from the water, seeming to prefer being wet over joining us.
I finally got to school a bit before eleven. My kids were nose down in their exams. A few glanced up with questioning looks, but got right back to work when I shook my head, no, not now. Not ever, I hoped, thinking about the scene I had left, looking at the fifteen year olds sitting before me.
Eddie’s daughter was eleven or twelve, sixth grade maybe, in the middle school towards the other end of town. Poor kid, her mother must have gone and gotten her by now, told her the news. They would have a tough time of it, long and short. I doubted Eddie had life insurance, probably just a boat, a truck, a car and a heavily mortgaged house- the typical assets of working people in our town.
The last of the kids finished their exams by quarter t
o twelve. Most ducked out as quickly as possible, anxious to be free of school for the summer. A few hung around to say good-bye, let me know their summer plans, ask about mine. Soon I was alone. I decided against lunch and got to work correcting tests. The kids were done, but we teachers had one more day to turn in grades and wrap things up for the year.
I was finished checking the papers and just getting ready to enter the grades in my computer when Spiro Kounadis came through my door. “Why didn’t you tell me Eddie Thayer was your cousin?” he snapped.
I had asked myself that same question a few times since leaving the scene at Rainsford. “I didn’t think it was interesting,” I tried.
He glared at me for a while, and then he walked around my classroom, stopping at the salt water tank. “What else did you think wasn’t interesting?”
I wasn’t sure if there was an answer to that one, so I let it ride and got back to my work. Kounadis got back to looking around. He was in his mid forties, I’d guess, gray and tired looking, with an athlete’s frame and a look that spoke of more work than play lately. Our silence hung there between us, its toxicity growing by the minute. I broke. “Did you find out who his charter was?”
“What do you know about it?” he asked. “I heard you and he didn’t get along.” Suddenly he was standing over my desk, very focused on me. I didn’t like the way this seemed to be going.
“I have…had no problem with Eddie. It was a one way issue, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Tell me about it.”
“A long time ago, back in the early nineties, he asked me to help him with a transport job, a drug run. I said no. He got busted; they were waiting for him. He ended up doing a piece.”
“Why did you say no. Had you made other runs with him?” He leaned over my desk, started flipping through the kids’ test papers.
“No. And I’m pretty sure it was his first run as well.”
“Did you dime on him? That’s what his wife thinks.”
“That’s what Eddie thought, too. No, I didn’t. But I did try to talk him out of going. It just pissed him off.”
“Was he still moving drugs? Or was he into something else now?”
“As far as I know, he runs charters when he gets them, he crews on an offshore boat when it has trips, and he does whatever else comes along to make things work. But I don’t think that includes anything illegal these days.”
He set the papers back on my desk. “Look, Tom Evers says you’re okay. Problem is, I don’t know anything about him, either. For all I know, everyone in this town is neck deep in something. Maybe Thayer was the only good guy here and that’s why he got whacked.” He looked at me for a reaction to this.
“Who was the charter?” I asked, ignoring his bait.
He stared at me for another good long while, and then sighed. “John Wallace also vouched for you, and him I know and trust.” Still, he didn’t seem pleased to be saying as much.
John Wallace was the Suffolk County District Attorney. My wife worked for him as an assistant prosecutor. We were more acquaintances than friends. We had met at a few dinners last fall; he had shaken my hand, said hello, and quickly filed me under the heading “does not matter.”
“Thayer told his wife the charter was last minute, arranged yesterday afternoon. A guy wanted to go night fishing for stripers, wanted a pick-up at Rowe’s Wharf. He said he was staying at the Boston Harbor Hotel. Thayer was picking him up around eleven. That’s all she knows.”
“The hotel,” I asked, “anyone remember someone looking to go fishing?”
“Nothing. I’ll go back and talk to more people, but it looks like a blank lead. Did the boat seem rigged for fishing to you?”
“Eddie ran light tackle charters. Yeah, he had all the gear he would have needed. Rods and reels, tackle boxes.” I thought for a moment, trying to picture the boat as it was, without conjuring up an image of Eddie and the birds. “Was there bait in the aft well?”
“No, and no fish aboard, either.”
“They could have used it all, or been fishing lures or flies. And it wouldn’t be uncommon to not get any keepers, using the gear Eddie had. He was set up for sport fishing, not for meat fishing. Still….” I got up from my desk and walked over to the windows.
“I want you to take me fishing tonight. Pick me up at Rowe’s Wharf at eleven, take me the kind of places Thayer would have gone….” Kounadis joined me at the windows.
“If he went fishing at all.” I finished for him.
“Exactly,” he said. He seemed to have no doubt that I would agree to the trip. And I guess he was right, because I didn’t even think of saying no. We worked out the logistics and he left me standing there, thinking.
The whole thing had me feeling pretty lousy. I had been meaning for a few years now to patch things up with Eddie. More than just cousins, we had been best friends, growing up together, sharing everything the way friends who are also family often do. After high school, I went off to college and fished summers to pay for it. Eddie joined the Marines. We kept in touch for a few months, but then got more interested in our new lives.
Four years later, he was back in Hull. He bought an old Novi and set it up for lobstering. I finished college and got a job teaching at the high school. We started hanging out together again and worked very hard to ignore the differences that had grown up between us. It wasn’t like old times, but we were friends, as well as cousins,with a lot of good history to draw on.
Then Eddie asked me if I wanted to make some money. He knew teaching didn’t pay all that much, maybe I would like to supplement it. I knew what he was getting at, and was able to tell him no before he gave me any details. I tried to talk him out of it, too, but lots of guys were into the same thing then, and nobody was getting any trouble for it. It seemed like easy money for a night’s work a few miles off shore. He was angry that I wouldn’t go with him, didn’t understand why.
He went out alone to the Loran coordinates he had been given by a woman in a bar in Southie. About halfway through the transfer, the Coast Guard lit them up and hauled everyone in. The people on the mother ship, an old steel trawler, were all Columbians. They were deported and their vessel kicked around Boston Harbor for a while, before disappearing one night. Eddie was handed over to the DEA and charged with trafficking, his boat was confiscated. The Feds really only wanted names, but he claimed he had none, so he paid the price: five years inside.
I finished my work and gathered a few things from my desk to take home. I would have to come in the next day to turn in grades and do a few administrative chores, but otherwise I was done for the summer. It didn’t feel as great as it usually did.
Tom Evers was tying up at Nantasket Pier when I got there. He had come out to Rainsford that morning, arriving about an hour after the state cops. If he was just now getting in he must have had a long, lousy day. I went down the ramp and met him on the dock. He glanced up at me for a minute, then pointedly went and retied every line on the boat. Finally, he turned to me.
“What a mess. They towed his boat to Boston, evidence I guess. Not that Sharon will want it back… Shit… I suppose I’ll have to go see her.” He started up the ramp. I followed.
“That state cop, Kounadis, wants me to take him fishing tonight.”
“Yeah, I suggested it. Take the patrol boat, it’s all fueled. I stopped at A Street on my way in.” A Street Marina is a small private marina with a gas dock, about half-way through town, bayside at the end of A Street. Eddie Thayer kept his boat there.
“Anybody there know anything about his charter?” I asked.
“Nope. They noticed he was out when they opened up this morning, but assumed he had an early trip.” He turned and started to cross the pier to his office, located in an old trailer. He looked back at me. “Then Sharon called and tried to get someone to take her out to Rainsford. They talked her out of it. Be careful tonight. Remember, you’re not a cop.”
I got into my tru
ck and headed home. I lived in a winterized cottage on a double lot in a section of town called Gunrock. I had inherited the house from my great aunt. She had lived there for years with her friend. I guess today they would be called partners, maybe even wife and wife, but back then they were just two spinsters, sharing a house. They were some of the few year round residents in what was then a mostly summer neighborhood.
Up until a few weeks ago, my wife, Lauren, had lived there with me. Now she was sharing an apartment in Boston with a friend from work, another prosecutor. I was pretty sure they really were just friends, but I wasn’t sure why my wife had moved out. She didn’t seem to know why either.
She had finished law school the year before and gotten a job with the District Attorney’s office in Boston. She took and passed her bar exam and assumed a full load of cases. At first she would tell me about her work. I tried to keep up interest, but it all seemed so depressing and pointless. She got tired of explaining the fine points and, instead, came home later and left earlier. We e-mailed empty words back and forth. Then, a couple weeks ago, she took a bunch of her things and told me she was going to try living in the city for a while. I didn’t attempt to talk her out of it. I now wonder if maybe I should have.
I parked my truck in the shell driveway beside the house and climbed the steps to the kitchen door. The house was a typical cottage from the early 1900’s, simple frame construction with a wide porch. The gradually sloping, treeless yard in back led down to Straits Pond, a tidal pond separated from the Weir River by a set of locks. For years, the pond had been kept isolated from the river and the tides, and had become quite unhealthy. Lately, a group headed by one of my neighbors had gotten permission to operate the locks and flush the pond with each tide. It seemed to be changing things for the good.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and a bit of the evening doing chores around the house and getting things ready for the night’s trip. Kounadis said he wanted me to take him fishing, so I got together a couple spinning rods and a selection of tackle just in case he meant it literally. I also made a pile of sandwiches and got out my big stainless thermos for coffee. The forecast was for clear skies, which meant it would get cold out there. I found a couple of wool fisherman’s sweaters and tossed them with the food in an old canvas bag. At about seven, I brought all the gear down to Nan Pier and stowed it aboard the patrol boat. Then I went back home, put the Red Sox on and had a supper of bacon and eggs.