Glass Eels, Shattered Sea

by Charlene D'Avanzo

  “You know what my response will be.”

  In unison, we said, “Tastes like beer.”

  The joke broke the tension a little.

  I reached across the table and took his hand. “I’m really, really proud of you and should have said that sooner. It’s amazing you and your colleagues got that grant, especially with funding rates below ten percent. It just caught me by surprise because you were so enthusiastic about our living together.”

  Rubbing my finger with his thumb, he said, “We’ll still see each other a lot.”

  “As much as we can,” I said. “But the commute will make that difficult. During the summer, cars waiting to go to the Cape over either bridge are lined up for a mile.”

  “Did you know that back in the 1620s Miles Standish was interested in building a canal like the one we have now? And that the Cape Cod Canal helped ships avoid U-boats patrolling offshore during World War II?”

  With an eye-roll, I replied, “No, Ted. I didn’t know that.”

  After tasting his beer once more, Ted said, “Let’s see. The grant is for two years. When we go to renew it you might be interested in joining us.”

  It was a nice thought but, as we both knew, a dubious one. Unless I radically changed the focus of my research, using autonomous robots would be a real stretch for me.

  So I answered with a shrug.

  54

  Waking the next morning at six, I reached for Ted to wake him, but he wasn’t there. I had forgotten that he decided to leave for Cape Cod before dawn.

  Going for strong tea as my wake-up beverage, I padded around the kitchen, carried my mug out to the deck, and settled into a wicker chair under a fleece throw to greet the morning. The days were noticeably lengthening now, and the sun was already half a thumb length above the watery horizon.

  A childhood memory—buried for years but suddenly vivid—came to me. Angelo and I were standing in his backyard looking out over the ocean.

  Pointing out to sea, he said, “That line separating the ocean from the sky is called a horizon. To see it exactly you have to be at the ocean’s surface, like where we are now. So we’re very lucky to live right here. How far do you think the horizon is from this house?”

  To a five year old, the horizon appeared very far indeed.

  “Ten miles?”

  “It is very hard to tell, which is why old-time sailors took a lot of trouble to get it right. From here, I’d say it’s actually only three miles.”

  Carolos and Bridget Tusconi’s longtime friend was a patient and entertaining teacher. Little did I know, of course, that he would also become my stand-in parent.

  Parents, godfather, Ted here, Ted gone. Family had long been a weighty issue for me.

  Blinking, I said aloud, “It’s a gorgeous morning. Stop brooding and just enjoy it.”

  I was right. It turned out to be a first-rate day.

  For three solid hours I worked in my office without a single distraction. Three overdue grant proposals got reviewed, a new graduate student’s thesis ideas got the attention they deserved, and unanswered emails worthy of response got them. Then, expecting to leave a “How are you doing?” message, I called Ted.

  He picked up after three rings. “Brilliant minds, Mara. I was just about to email you.”

  “How’s everything in Woods Hole?” I asked.

  “I’d forgotten how much goes on here,” he said. “Besides WHOI, there’s the NOAA Fisheries lab plus the Marine Biological Laboratory right down the street. Need the answer to a marine question? Someone within spitting distance can help you.”

  Ted’s enthusiasm made me smile. “It’s why the town is such a great place for students.” We chatted for a few more minutes, decided to talk again that evening, and signed off with “miss you” and “miss you too.”

  At lunchtime, Harvey and I sat on the bench overlooking the harbor and got caught up over sandwiches. She knew Ted was going to Woods Hole, was surprised to learn he had already left, and invited me for dinner the following evening.

  When I asked about her plans to step in as department chair, she surprised me in turn. “Actually,” she said, “Dixon and I finally had a chance to sit down and talk about that this morning.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “He’s been,” she air-quoted, “‘speaking to people.’ Apparently, it’s pretty much unanimous that folks are tired of Seymour’s politics and think I’d be a good replacement. Dixon will speak to Seymour about taking a sabbatical. When Dixon knows more, he’ll tell me.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s awesome. Are you excited, nervous, or what?”

  “There’s so much Seymour could be doing, and I’ve wanted this for a while. So mostly I feel enthusiastic. But it’s a huge responsibility. Raising money worries me the most. Getting grants is harder at the same time it all costs more.”

  I certainly understood Harvey’s concerns. Everything about oceanographic research was expensive, including ship time, lab and field equipment, travel, plus salaries for research assistants and support for graduate students. As chair, Harvey would need to raise funds for the department as a whole and also help researchers get their own money.

  Standing, I said, “It’s time to get back to work.”

  “A quick question before you go?”

  Wondering what this was about, I said, “Sure.”

  “Do you have any advice? For when I’m chair, I mean.”

  I sat back down. “Look, you’re going to be terrific. The only thing I can think of is your upbringing. Most people you’ll be dealing with had a very different experience.”

  She frowned. “Different?”

  “Harvey, you grew up in a wealthy family, spent your summers as a kid at the country club or beach house, and went to an expensive women’s college. Nothing wrong with any of that, of course. But most people at MOI—Alise and the other grad students, many of the researchers, plus your staff—have very different backgrounds, expectations, and daily lives.”

  She frowned. “Could you give me an example how that might play out?”

  “Sure,” I said. “A graduate student attending a meeting might surprise you with a request for additional money when her thesis advisor has covered the cost of her flight and hotel.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “She’d only need to pay for meals.”

  “But suppose she’s supporting her sick mom or her sister’s new baby and is strapped for money. She might not have any extra cash.”

  “You’re right, Mara. I wouldn’t have considered that. And it’d be a tricky situation, too, because she might be embarrassed about the whole thing.”

  “Right,” I said. “But if you’d done your homework and had a secretary who knew what was going on, you wouldn’t be surprised by the student’s request.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I was going to replace Gloria anyway, but your scenario gives me a better idea about the type of person I’d replace her with. Any other suggestions?”

  “Not really, but why not talk to Connor? His background couldn’t be more different from yours. I’m sure he’ll have some good ideas.”

  Grinning, she said, “That he will. He’s been giving me pointers ever since we started living together.”

  I spent much of the afternoon reading research papers about local effects of climate change, including recent research on the impacts of warming on seasonal migration of endangered whales in the Gulf of Maine. At the end of the day, Alise stopped by tell me about Intrepid ’s return trip back up to Spruce Harbor.

  “We were lucky on the weather,” she said. “Smooth ride the whole way. And the bioluminescence was amazing. A couple of other grad students and I took turns in the bow chamber. Wow, was that a trip! Glowing strings of salps and flashing fish.”

  Nodding, I said, “I remember my first research cruise as a graduate student like it happened last week.”

  “You must’ve been so excited.”

  “Actually, sometimes I was too sick to think about
anything but terra firma. Racing toward Boston Harbor ahead of an approaching hurricane, the ship bucked and shook like a wild horse trying to throw its rider.”

  “But you stayed with it. Oceanography, I mean.”

  “You just described watching mind-blowing underwater creatures from the bow chamber of a ship. Who gets to do that for work? I’m incredibly lucky and can put up with a little seasickness if that’s what it takes.”

  55

  On the way home after work, I stopped at the grocery store and bought something unusual for dinner—shrimp. Ted and I ate all kinds of seafood except that particular crustacean because after one nibble his face looked like a balloon. Now with Ted gone, I could eat whatever I wanted.

  I had gotten used to bustling around the kitchen as Ted and I made dinner, so standing alone at my cutting board felt strange. In fact, the whole house seemed eerily quiet. I chopped garlic and onions for shrimp marinara and muttered to myself, “Make up your mind. You wanted the place to yourself and now you feel lonely?”

  My cell phone buzzed as I dipped bread in last of the sauce. The screen identified the caller as Lieutenant Dunn. With a sigh, I swiped the phone.

  “Hello, Lieutenant. It’d be nice if this was just a friendly call, but I assume it’s not.”

  “I wish it was too, Mara. Nothing to worry about, I hope, but we’ve seen increased activity with Shu’s family. It’s important you know about this.”

  “Increased activity?”

  “They’re working with a gang of eel traffickers in Portugal who transport elvers in suitcases, if you can believe that. The illegal luggage is flown by a commercial airline to Asia.”

  “I heard about that,” I said. “But what does it have to do with me? Shu is dead.”

  “He is, but apparently his son has taken over the business, so to speak, and he’s much more aggressive than his father.”

  “Aggressive?”

  “Yeah. He poaches with night vision and rental vehicles, and can drop his crew on a river in total darkness unobserved. In Asia, demand for eels as an aphrodisiac is exploding. Shu junior has made it known that he’ll buy black market eels as long as nobody develops a ‘big mouth.’ If anyone does double-cross him, he’ll pay $200,000 to have them killed, he says.”

  “Good lord,” I said. “He sounds incredibly cocky.”

  “He is, and I’m worried that he might want to avenge his father. You know, mafia style.”

  I closed my eyes. Was this ever going to stop?

  “Mara,” Dunn said. “Are you there?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. I’m just so tired of this.”

  “To be clear, we don’t know you are in danger. I’m just worried about this punk wanting to look like the big guy. So doors locked. Do you have outdoor lights that are triggered by motion at night?”

  “I do but usually leave them off because deer trigger them all the time. I’ll switch them back on. Lieutenant, um, when you found Shu after that electrical storm, he was dead, right?”

  “Very dead. His hand and arm were badly burned, and he died of cardiac arrest. Why?”

  “Oh, just checking.”

  After the meal, I slipped into my home-alone routine—doing the dishes, an hour of evening news, a walk along the beach if the weather was good, and relaxing on the couch with my latest mystery. Heeding Dunn’s warning, I skipped the walk, made a cup of herbal tea, and settled onto the couch. The phone buzzed before I had even opened the book.

  Smiling, I took the call. “Hey, there. How was your day?”

  “Terrific. I spent the afternoon catching up on the history and mechanics of underwater gliders.”

  “Give me a lesson while I drink my tea.”

  Ted jumped in rapid-fire. “WHOI physical oceanographer Henry Stommel came up with the idea for buoyancy-driven underwater vehicles, including gliders. That man was a visionary.”

  “Hold it right there,” I said. “What does buoyancy-driven mean?”

  “Imagine a hydraulic pump that can inflate and deflate an external bladder filled with a fluid,” he explained. “The change in the vehicle’s volume changes its buoyancy, making it float upwards or sink.”

  “I think I get that,” I said. “But you said float or sink. That’s up and down, but gliders also move forward.”

  “Right,” he said. “The glider has hydrofoils, basically underwater wings, so it can glide forward while it descends into the water. At specified depths, the glider switches to positive buoyancy, floats back to the surface, and the cycle starts again.”

  Ted’s enthusiasm was catching. “Wow,” I said. “So that’s how gliders can take measurements up and down through the water column sawtooth-style for weeks.”

  “And WHOI’s gliders, including the one I’ll be using, can go deep, thousands of feet. They move slowly, about a half a knot.”

  “So the amount of data they record through depth—temperature, light, salinity, whatever—is stunning.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Just think if we had one of these on the Sargasso Sea cruise. Compared to that, we were working in the Dark Ages. But enough about the glider. How was your day?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Harvey spoke with Dixon about being chair, so she and I chatted about that for a while.”

  “Sounds good. Anything else?”

  “Um, I just spoke with Lieutenant Dunn.”

  The timbre of Ted’s voice darkened. “He called you?”

  “He wanted to tell me about Shu’s son.”

  “Because?”

  “Apparently the guy is cocky and brags about what he’ll do if anyone crosses him. He’s taken over his father’s business.”

  “So Dunn’s worried that Shu junior might want to avenge his father’s death?”

  “The lieutenant didn’t say that. He wants me to be careful to lock the door at night and be watchful.”

  After a pause, Ted said, “Mara, do you want me to drive back up there?”

  “No, Ted, I don’t. If I’m worried, I can stay with Angelo. He’d love to have me, you know that.”

  “Yes, Angelo would love to have you. Promise me that you’ll call him if anything happens—anything at all—that worries you.”

  56

  My mug was still half-full when my phone buzzed again. Thinking it was Ted again, I took the call and was shocked to hear Jack Ives’s voice instead. After all, the last I knew Jack was in jail. In the background I could hear a motor.

  Stumbling for words I managed, “Jack. Um, this is a surprise. Are you on a boat or something?”

  “Hi, Mara. Um, yeah, I’m on a boat heading for the coast. I’d really like to see you. If you’re home, can you come down to your beach so we can talk for a little while?”

  “I am home, but what…”

  Cutting in, Jack said, “Good. See you soon.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  Curious and confused, I got up, dumped the last of the tea in the kitchen sink, grabbed my fleece jacket from the hook by the door, and went out by the cliffside to watch for an approaching boat. Although there was nothing on the water that I could see, a large dark-blue blob on the beach directly below gave me a start. It was a man o’ war.

  The Portuguese man o’ war is a large jellyfish-like predator that drifts on the water killing prey with long, stinging tentacles dangling below the bell-shaped float. An unlucky person who swims or drifts into a man o’ war suffers from whip-like red welts that last for days. Severely stung children have died from such an encounter.

  Since they don’t actively swim and are pretty common, they routinely end up stranded on beaches up and down both U.S. coasts. Even though I’m a marine scientist who should be nonjudgmental about sea creatures, the loathsome mass of blue goo I had spotted gave me the creeps. In any case, it certainly didn’t belong on my beach.

  Carrying the bucket and shovel I keep in the garage, I walked down to the beach to scoop up the man o’ war and watch for a boat. Jack arrived much more quickly than I expect
ed. Still holding the bucket and its gooey contents with one hand, I waved as the boat, its motor gurgling, approached shallow water. A fifty-odd-foot Boston Whaler, she was one sweet craft very much above Jack’s pay grade.

  Jack returned my wave from the port side of the cockpit. The captain behind the wheel was obscured by a windscreen.

  When I left Little Moose Island, Jack was in terrible shape, but it looked like he had gained weight. Someone had probably talked him into getting treatment.

  Its motor still gurgling, the Whaler came within shouting distance. Expecting Jack to speak, I left the bucket on the beach and walked a few feet to the water’s edge.

  But Jack just stared at me and held, white-knuckled, onto the railing.

  “Jack, what’s the…?” The remaining words in my throat, I stared as the captain joined Jack on deck. The man was clearly Chinese, and I guessed his name was Shu.

  Pointing at me, the captain said, “You. In the boat.”

  To buy time, I pretended not to hear and yelled, “What?”

  He bellowed, “In the friggin’ boat, now!”

  There was no way that was going to happen, so I needed a diversion. Fast. As I backed from the bellicose madman, my legs touched the bucket. I picked it up and took a few steps down to the waterline once more.

  I said it in the calmest voice I could muster: “No.”

  Shu took a couple of steps over to the wheel, came back, and held up a gun.

  “In the boat. Now.”

  With its motor lifted off the water, the boat had drifted closer to shore and within easy throwing distance. I held the bucket’s handle with one hand, placed my other hand firmly on the bottom, and hurled its vile contents squarely at Shu’s face.

  It was a direct hit. Shrieking, Shu clawed at the gelatinous mass glued to his cheeks, lips, and forehead. But the jellyfish’s stinging tentacles had already punctured the man’s skin.

  Still screaming, Shu jumped overboard. Then, weighed down by his clothes, the man slipped below the surface.