Glass Eels, Shattered Sea

by Charlene D'Avanzo

  Glass Eels, Shattered Sea

  Published by Charlene D’Avanzo

  Copyright 2020 Charlene D’Avanzo

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy.

  Front cover design by Rick Whipple, Sky Island Studio

  This series is dedicated to scientists struggling to understand the extraordinarily complex phenomena associated with climate change

  Glass Eels, Shattered Sea

  A Mara Tusconi Mystery

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In this novel I refer to several oceanographic and eel studies, plus climate change research more generally. I attempt to represent the science as accurately as possible in a fictional story. Readers will find additional information plus references on my website (charlenedavanzo.com).

  1

  My headlamp spilled a circle of light onto the dirt path, a bright lodestar in a still, black night. Head down, I followed the bobbing orb in front of my feet—which is why I bumped right into Gordy Maloy, a Maine lobsterman and my cousin.

  “Sorry, Gordy. Can’t see a thing out here.”

  “Shh.”

  I flicked off the headlamp, stuffed my hands in my parka pockets, and waited as Gordy continued on the path through a thicket of what looked like beach plum and bayberry shrubs.

  Gordy had called it one hum-dingah of a spring night, and I certainly agreed. Seaward on the beach, stones rounded by the ages rolled back and forth with the breakers. Overhead, the glittering display of stars was like nothing I’d seen before. Looking up, I could hear my father’s words so clearly it was as if he was standing next to me.

  “The spiral in a snail’s shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way,” he’d said. Carlos Tusconi may have died when I was nineteen, but every day I honored his passion for the natural world.

  Gordy hollered from somewhere in the heath. “Mara, where the hell are you?”

  I called out “coming!” and soon caught up with him.

  Gordy cupped his ear. “I can hear the river now.”

  I tried not to sound impatient. “How far?”

  “It’s only down the trail a piece. Dollars to donuts, Mara, Nelson Ives has a thousand tiny elvers. He’ll tell you all about them.”

  Like many fishermen, Gordy leaned toward hyperbole when he described a catch, but this time he could be right. Delicate as spun sugar and literally worth their weight in gold, elvers, also called glass eels, were racing up Maine’s snowmelt-fed rivers by the millions.

  But gold, as the saying goes, sometimes makes monsters of men.

  Gordy turned down the path and picked up the pace. After a final look at the spray of stars overhead, I flipped the headlamp on and followed with a bounce in my step. For the first time, I was about to witness one of coastal Maine’s springtime miracles.

  Gordy’s “only down the path a piece” was accurate for a change. Within minutes, we emerged from the thicket as the trail took us down a bank to the Union River. Walking gingerly in the dark around boulders that flanked the river racing downstream, I finally reached Gordy, who waited further up the path.

  “Kill the light,” he said in a whisper. I reached up, felt for the button above my forehead, and pushed hard. As the light flicked off, Gordy whispered again. “That’s Nelson ahead of us. He’s in the river.”

  I gasped at the otherworldly sight a few hundred feet upstream. Bathed in glowing emerald green, a human figure leaned over and ran a long-handled net back and forth through the water.

  “What’s he doing and why the green light?” I murmured.

  “He’s dipnetting eels. White light spooks ’em.” Gordy raised his voice and announced our presence. “Ahoy, Nelson Ives. Gordy Maloy down the path.”

  The green apparition stepped back into the shallows. His voice shaky with age, Nelson called out, “That you, Gordy?”

  “Ayuh. Me and my cousin, Mara.”

  Nelson said, “Gimme a minute.” As he turned away from us, his green headlamp illuminated someone up the path behind him.

  I touched Gordy’s arm and whispered, “Why can’t we just walk over to him?”

  “You’ll see,” was the answer.

  “Come on up.” Nelson called out.

  Curious about more than eels, I put my hand on the back of Gordy’s shoulder and followed as he picked his way over the rocks to his old friend.

  A bright white lantern at his feet, Nelson Ives enclosed Gordy’s outstretched hand in both of his. “Gordy Maloy. By Godfrey, it’s been a long, long time.” Ives stepped back and put both hands on hips encased in waterproof orange bib pants. “And who is this lovely young lady?”

  “Nelson Ives, meet my cousin, Mara Tusconi.”

  Ives stroked a white beard that neatly circled his lower face from ear to ear. Matching hair poked out from beneath a tattered tan fishing hat pulled down to eyebrow level. “Mara Tusconi, my goodness. Gordy said he might bring you along. I don’t see so good in the dark, but it does look like you’ve got your Irish mother’s big green eyes.”

  My hand flew to my chest. “Really? You knew my mom?”

  “Sure did. Your father too, when I lived down in Spruce Harbor a while back. How I know Gordy. Bridget and Carlos Tusconi talked with fishermen to learn what we knew, not like some of them scientists. Good, good people. Awful they died in the submarine accident. When was that? Ten years ago?”

  I wet my lips. “Um, twelve next month, actually.”

  “Mara’s a marine biologist like her parents,” Gordy said. “She’s excited ta see the eels.”

  The old man rubbed his beard again. “You at the oceanographic place in Spruce Harbor?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “The Maine Oceanographic Institution.”

  “It’s just Nelson, Mara. I got lots to show you. Come on.”

  He turned around and placed the lantern on a large flat rock he was using as a kind of shelf for a towel, his dip net, a yellow slicker, a pair of boots, and other gear. He slid a large orange bowl closer to the lantern.

  “There they are, Mara. Glass eels, a true wonder of nature.”

  I leaned in for a better look. At the bottom of the bowl wriggled hundreds of thin translucent creatures less than a half foot long.

  “Huh, they kind of look like flat clear spaghetti with tiny black eyes,” I said.

  “And isn’t it amazing these little fish came all the way from the Sargasso Sea up to where we are?” the old man said.

  “The Sargasso Sea is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean off the Carolinas,” I added. “That’s a thousand miles from here.”

  “Ayuh. Nobody’s seen it, far as I know, but adult eels spawn in the Sargasso Sea. After that, the baby eels float in the Gulf Stream before they peel off and go up rivers all along the east coast.”

  I cradled the bowl in both hands. “Nelson, how much can you get for this many glass eels?”

  He stroked his beard for a moment and said, “Last I knew, they were payin’ two thousand.”

  I blinked and stared into the bowl once more. “Are you telling me you could get two thousand dollars for this many eels?”

  “Right there, that’s at least two pounds and it’s two thousand per pound.”

  Eyeing the bowl again, I regarded the wigging creatures with a mix of awe and premonition.

  2

  Very, very carefully, I placed the bowl back onto the rock. “My god. The eels in that little bowl could go for more than four
thousand dollars.”

  Behind me, Gordy said, “Now you understand what Nelson’s son Jack is doing here.”

  “Jack?” I asked.

  “Son,” Nelson called out. “Flip on the headlamp.”

  A ghostly figure suddenly appeared thirty-odd feet up the path. Focused on the rifle, I didn’t pay much attention to the guy’s face or the rest of him.

  I stated the obvious. “He’s armed.”

  Without a word, Jack turned off the light.

  “My boy,” Nelson said. “He’s a crack shot.”

  I leaned back against the rock, looked at Gordy, and crossed my arms. “So tell me the deal here.”

  “Last spring Maine fishermen caught eels worth somethin’ like ten million dollars,” he said. “That’s in a couple months. On a good night, Nelson can sell his eels for ten thousand. So if some guy came along and hit Nelson over the head with a rock, that thief could score the ten grand instead.”

  I turned back to the old fisherman, who was slowly pouring water into the bowl and talking to his elvers. “There ya go, little guys.”

  Would anyone really harm this kindly old man over a handful of eels?

  “Nelson, has anyone tried to steal your catch?” I asked.

  “Ayuh. Couple years ago, this punk came right down this path.” He gestured over his shoulder in the opposite direction we’d come from. “Big fella. He shoved me so hard I nearly fell right in the river. Guy grabbed my eel bucket and marched back up the path. Heard ’im drive off a while later.”

  The image of the old man falling backward into that cold, rushing river was appalling. “Nelson, that’s dreadful. How could they?”

  He spat out his response. “Easy money and lots of it. Who cares about a worn-out fisherman?”

  To change the subject in a happier direction, I quizzed Nelson about glass eels. When does the eel fishing season start? (March.) What happens to eels you sell? (They’re shipped to aquaculture farms in places like Japan.) For sushi? (Ayuh, but I never eat it.) Why are eels worth so much now when they weren’t before? (There used to be eels by the zillions, but now they’re gettin’ fished out.)

  The old salt returned to the American eel’s life history. In colorful language, he described the fish’s transformation from bottom-dwelling, tiny glass eels living in rivers to large, sexually mature fish that travel the open ocean.

  “Nelson, you’re a natural teacher,” I said.

  “Teachers ask me to tell school kids all ’bout the eels.” He gestured toward the river. “Every spring this amazing thing happens right in our backyard. Folks hardly noticed till there was so much money in it.”

  “Speaking of that, I’m sure you want to get back to your work,” I said.

  He lifted his hat, scratched the top of his head, and settled the hat back down to eyebrow-level. “Well, I guess prob’ly. Mara, it’s been a pleasure more than you know meeting Bridget and Carlos’s little girl.”

  Affection for the elderly Mainer I’d only just met flowed through me. “Nelson, you’ve been generous with your time. I really appreciate it.”

  Gordy patted his longtime friend on the back, thanked him for his time, and promised to see him soon.

  Walking back down the trail, the river that carried elvers upstream on our right, I questioned Gordy about Nelson’s safety and the astounding amount of money eel fishermen could make in a single night.

  “It’s great for folks who work hard at their jobs and don’t make much. But it comes with big, big problems.”

  “Like the need for protection,” I said.

  “That’s one. Jack’s got the rifle you saw, plus a Glock.”

  “What other problems?”

  “Trafficking.”

  “I’ve read about that in the paper.”

  “The eel fishery is regulated,” he said. “Guys like Nelson have an annual quota, need a license, all that. Maine’s one of the few states that has any eel fishing. That means glass eels are worth a whole lot. Not long ago some guy in southern Maine got caught trafficking a million dollars’ worth headed for Japan. He’ll be in jail a good long time.”

  “A million dollars in eels,” I repeated. “Absolutely astounding.”

  As we walked alongside the river on our way back to Gordy’s truck, I twirled my arms in circles to warm up. In early spring, wind off Maine’s water can be frigid. Gordy had abandoned his usual frayed canvas shorts and T-shirt for jeans and a windbreaker, which said a lot.

  We followed the trail up the bank and into the thicket. Shrubs brushed against my parka and I caught the sweet, woodsy smell of bayberry as I matched Gordy’s pace and thought about eel trafficking. In the world of illegal trade, animal trafficking was right up there with drugs, humans, and arms. I had read that every year countless birds such as scarlet macaws, along with reptiles including turtles and snakes, plus monkeys, and many other animals were taken from the wild and sold live as pets. In addition, elephants were dismembered for ivory, rhinos for their horns, leopards and tigers for their fur, sharks for medicine, and a half-dozen large animals for bogus medicines, including animal penises touted to improve male libido.

  But, for some reason, I hadn’t recognized the illegal selling of eels right in my home state of Maine as anything like the lucrative trafficking business it was.

  The crack of a gunshot rang through the low shrubs. Together, Gordy and I spun around and faced the river.

  “Nelson, oh my god,” Gordy cried. “Mara, we gotta run back there!”

  Gordy sprinted toward the river with me on his tail. We bounded out of the shrubs, slid down the bank, and leapt over rocks until we reached Nelson. The lantern, still upright on the flat rock, illuminated a grisly scene. Sprawled across the trail, the old fisherman lay on his back, arms outstretched. In the middle of his chest, crimson oozed from a deep, ugly crater and ran down his orange bib.

  As Gordy pressed a towel against Nelson’s chest to reduce the blood flow, I held one of the old man’s hands and told him we were there to help. Nelson mumbled in response and I leaned closer to catch what he was trying to say. It sounded something like “he was Siamese” and “ham” or “nam.”

  Tears streaming down my cheeks, I looked around for Jack. But the old man’s son was nowhere to be seen.

  3

  Still in shock, Gordy and I watched as the ambulance, with Nelson and Jack in the back, sped out of the parking lot. As the sirens faded, Ellsworth sergeant Craig Purdy pulled out his notebook and got right down to business.

  “After I get your personal information, why don’t you run through what happened while your memories are still fresh? It’s cold out here, so we’ll do that quickly. At the station I can get more details. Ma’am, let’s start with you.”

  I spelled out my name, gave my address, and added, “I’m a research scientist at the Maine Oceanographic Institute in Spruce Harbor.”

  “So it’s Dr. Tusconi, then?” Purdy asked.

  Answering to the affirmative, I mentally gave the man a gold star.

  After Gordy spelled out his last name (“Maloy with one ‘l’”), he gave his Spruce Harbor address and explained that he was a part-time lobsterman and my cousin.

  “Thanks,” Purdy said. “Mr. Maloy, let’s start with you. You said earlier you and Dr. Tusconi walked back to your truck on the same trail you’d taken earlier. That’s when you heard a shot. Tell me what you remember, starting from when you approached the parking lot in your truck to when you called 911. Like I said, we’ll get more details at the station, but we’re out here now and your memories will be sharper.”

  Still high on adrenaline, I didn’t feel the cold while Gordy spoke. But when it was my turn, I was shivering so violently I could hardly get the words out.

  “S-Sergeant, I’ve got to get somewhere warm,” I said.

  Purdy pocketed his notebook and said, “There’s plenty of hot coffee and tea at the station. We’ll drop Mr. Maloy at his truck so he can follow the cruiser to Ellsworth. Dr. Tusconi, we’
ve got blankets in the cruiser, so why don’t you ride with me and Officer Jennings to the station?”

  Seated in the back seat of the police car under a heavy wool blanket, I replayed the evening’s events as the questions bubbled up. Above all, who put a bullet in Nelson’s chest and why? And what happened to the shooter? Sobbing, Jack had told the police he’d walked up the path to investigate a suspicious noise, raced down to his father when he had heard the shot, then quickly scrambled back up the trail to catch the shooter. He hadn’t seen anyone, he claimed, so he ran back to Nelson. That all sounded reasonable to me, but what did I know?

  I wasn’t any closer to answering my questions when the cruiser pulled into the Ellsworth police station’s lot.

  The interview room was small and spare, with a couple of reasonably comfortable chairs. Sergeant Purdy left me alone for a minute and returned with a mug of herbal tea. He slid the hot drink across the table as he sat down across from me.

  He began with an apology. “I know you’re exhausted, Dr. Tusconi, but we’d like as many details as you can remember now, like I said earlier.” He smiled and added, “If you need anything, let me know.”

  With his close-cropped hair, black tie, and black shirt decorated with gold badge, Purdy looked all business. But the smile brought out two large dimples, which softened the “serious cop” image.

  “Why don’t we start with you calling me Mara?”

  “Mara Tusconi, nice name.”

  He clicked on a tape recorder, dictated the date, time, who was in the room, and the purpose of the interview. “Okay, let’s start again with you and Mr. Maloy walking on the path that leads to the river. Before you met Nelson Ives. As much detail as you like. You never know what could be important.”

  Staring into space between sips of tea, I described the night sky, ocean waves in the distance, and my excitement at meeting Nelson and seeing the eels.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” Purdy said. “Could you go back and describe the shrubs in more detail? Things like how big or dense they were?”