by Amy Pershing
Though Jason had said that we were going to have lunch behind Nickerson, I wasn’t surprised when he turned the Zodiac to the west, along the curve of the Fair Harbor shoreline. The best way to get to Nickerson was to follow the loop of the deep water channel around the Fair Harbor shoreline and then back around to the island itself. This way we would avoid the long stretches of shallow water over the sandbars that, at mid- and low tide, prevented a straight shot across the bay. At high tide, Crystal Bay holds almost eight thousand acres of water. Then it is a boater’s dream. But as the tide lowers, only the foolish stray out of the marked channel between those treacherous, ever-shifting bars covered by mere inches of water.
Unless you were sailing a Sunfish, as I had as a child. Sunfish are small, flat sailboats, hardly more than surfboards, with an eight-inch-deep footwell about the size of a farmhouse sink and one triangular sail. They were great, even at low tide. Especially at low tide. If you had the wind behind you and your daggerboard up, you could skim right over the long flats of sand bars, leaving the “stinkpots,” as we disdainfully labeled motorboats, confined to the long way around in the channel.
Jason opened up the Zodiac’s Yamaha 150, and Diogi’s ears flew back as he leaned forward into the wind, deliriously happy. He looked like a doggy version of a Rolls-Royce hood ornament. Even at full speed, it took us about ten minutes to take the channel around to where it eventually began to loop back toward Nickerson Island. There Jason cut the motor to barely more than an idle and began taking soundings at the buoys that marked the channel.
“That bar has shifted,” he said, almost to himself, as he marked the depths carefully on a paper chart. “The channel’s narrower here than it used to be.”
I said nothing. It was a pleasure to watch him, completely concentrated on his job. He moved around the craft with the confidence and ease of someone who could tie a bowline before he could say a complete sentence. He was at home.
It was warm in the lee of the island. I ditched the hated foul weather jacket and Jason abandoned his windbreaker. He rolled up the sleeves of his khaki shirt, and I could see the long muscles of his forearms sliding under bronze skin as he pulled the markers aboard. His was not the overmuscled, gym-built body of the men I’d known back in New York. This man was lean and strong from real work, work that he loved, work that made a difference. Work that I knew he’d chosen despite the personal consequences of that choice.
* * *
* * *
During our talks under the Logan Inn’s deck, I’d asked Jason about his father, whom I’d never met. All I knew was that he was from one of those enormous fishing families descended from the Portuguese sailors and fishermen who had settled in Provincetown generations ago.
“What about your dad?”
“Not in the picture,” Jason had said, but without rancor. “Left a long time ago for Maine, where there’s still some fish to be caught.”
In the past few decades, the cod and haddock had all but disappeared from the waters around the Cape, whether because of overfishing or simply a bad cycle, no one was really sure. A lot of fishermen had moved north for their livelihood.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
“Not a problem,” he said. “I figure this way I can’t be a disappointment to him.”
I looked at him quizzically but said nothing.
“Unlike my father, I happen to believe the overfishing theory,” he said. “I’m kind of a fanatic about it. And about all the other ways we’re not being the stewards of the land and the water that we ought to be.”
He talked about how sad it made him when people built trophy houses on vulnerable waterfront, dumping nitrogen-rich fertilizer on their lawns that then ran off into the nearby lakes and ponds, creating toxic algae blooms that smothered the fish below. But mostly he’d talked to me about how much he loved the beaches, the bays, the harbors of the Cape. “I’m really only happy,” he’d said, “when I have a boat under me.” I’d thought that was both lovely and sad.
* * *
* * *
Looking at the man Jason Captiva had become, the work he had chosen, and what it had cost him, I respected him all the more. I stayed out of his way, deliberately not distracting him with conversation. This was his job, and he took it seriously. Also, I was kind of hypnotized by those arms. Diogi was clearly bored, though, and yawned conspicuously several times before giving up and taking a snooze.
Finally, Jason rolled up the chart and tucked it into a waterproof compartment in the stern of the boat. “I’m hungry,” he announced. “If you’re ready to eat, we can head to the river now. I have a surprise for you.”
I was absurdly pleased that Jason had a surprise for me and nodded my agreement.
“The river’s completely silted up on its north end, and there’s a new bar silting up our entrance at the south,” he said, as he moved the throttle up a bit, “but in the Zodiac and with the tide high enough now and still coming in, we shouldn’t have any trouble getting over it and back again.”
Now I understood why we’d taken the inflatable, which could be maneuvered through water as shallow as a foot without hitting bottom, as opposed to the Grady-White, which drew more than twice that.
Jason veered off the deepwater channel into the river that ran behind the island and separated it from the dense stands of marsh grass on its other side. I’d always loved this little river. On the marsh side the cordgrass grew as tall as a man. When the tide was high and covered the marsh’s peaty soil, the dense green spears appeared to be growing out of the water itself.
Jason slowed the Zodiac to a crawl and nosed it over so close to the marsh that I could have reached out, as I had as a child, to run my hand along the cordgrass. I noticed, though, that as he steered he kept glancing over to the other side of the river toward the island, as if he was looking for something.
“Here we are,” he said finally.
And with that, he wheeled the boat directly into the marsh grass.
I gasped and grabbed for Diogi, preparing for the lurching crunch as the boat ran aground on the peat bed below.
Some surprise. He couldn’t have given me flowers?
NINETEEN
There was no crunch. Just tall grass surrounding us, grass sliding under and along the boat with a barely audible whoosh. And then, like a magician’s trick, we came out into another, much narrower waterway, maybe ten feet wide, that snaked through the marsh parallel to the river but completely hidden from it.
I laughed with delight. “It’s a secret creek!”
Jason smiled, clearly pleased with my response. “Isn’t it great? All you have to do is find the spot where the creek is closest to the river and, if the tide’s high enough, you can slide over that narrow hummock between them right into it.”
“I wish I’d known about this when I was a kid in sailing club,” I said. “We used to play hide-and-seek with the Sunfishes. The idea was to find a hidden spot back in a marsh, let down your sail, unstep the mast, and fight off the greenheads until somebody found you. It was so much fun.”
“You didn’t get out and walk on the marsh itself, though, right?” Jason Captiva, ever the harbormaster. But he was right. At low tide, or sometimes even half tide, the marshes can become vast swathes of thigh-deep mud. We’d been properly terrified as kids by stories about holes covered with scum that look like solid ground but where a man could sink out of sight in an instant.
“Of course,” I said. “But mostly because we knew our mothers would kill us if we came home covered in stinky marsh mud.”
I looked around at the wall of grass on either side of the creek. It rose at least five feet over our heads. I felt like Moses in the bulrushes. “This creek would have been a perfect hiding place though,” I said ruefully.
“If you could find it,” Jason pointed out, steering the inflatable carefully along the narrow passage.
“It’s directly across from that high sand dune on Nickerson Island—you know, the one everyone used to run down when we were kids?”
Of course I knew that dune. Every kid on the bay knew that dune. We used to pull our boats up to the beach below it, clamber up the thirty feet or so of sand, and then tear ass down, screaming with delight, in great leaps that almost felt like flying.
“Yeah,” I said. “I must have face-planted a hundred times on the beach coming down from that dune.”
“That was the tricky part,” he said, laughing. It felt good when Jason laughed.
“Maybe we could do it on our way back? Run down the dune for old time’s sake?” I suggested.
“No can do,” Jason said. “The piping plovers use it for nesting now. Nickerson dune is off-limits these days from May to August.”
I was disappointed, but pleased that the endangered birds had found a protected nesting ground.
“That’s good,” I said. “And probably not too difficult to enforce, since no one lives there or uses it.”
But then all conversation ceased as Jason steered the boat around a curve in the creek. Before us was a lovely tidal pond, deep and blue and sparkling in the spring sunshine. The water was so clear you could see the sandy bottom at least eight feet below. Though the pond was encircled by acres of marsh, across from us was a small, tempting sickle of sandy beach. Beyond that, more marsh and then, in the distance, low dunes topped with wiry grass and wild roses. On the other side of those dunes, a tough slog through deep, soft sand, you’d find the cold Atlantic breaking furiously in great, white-topped waves against the Outer Beach.
But here, in this hidden pond, all was peaceful. Jason and I were completely alone, not another boat or person in sight. Our only companions (other than Diogi, who was snoozing up on the bow again doing his solar-powered dog imitation) were a couple of ospreys building a rickety nest of sticks on one of the wooden platforms that had been built by conservationists to encourage just such domestic activity.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” I breathed.
Jason said nothing but looked pleased. He cut the motor. “We’ll anchor here and have lunch, okay?” he said. “Then maybe pull up at the little beach on the other side and let Diogi take a run.”
“Perfect,” I said, and began pulling the chicken and coleslaw out of the cooler as Jason tossed the anchor over. Aunt Ida’s kitchen hadn’t run to plastic forks or paper plates for the slaw (I wasn’t worried about the chicken. Everybody knows fried chicken should be eaten with your fingers), so I’d put in two blue willow salad plates and two monogrammed silver forks.
Jason raised his eyebrows a bit. “Pretty fancy.”
“Here,” I said, grinning at him and pulling out a roll of paper towels. “I had hoped for monogrammed napkins, too, but this was the best I could come up with.”
“A shame,” he said. “Really lowers the tone.”
We shooed a grumpy Diogi off the varnished wooden seat in the bow of the boat and took his place, putting the food and a thermos of lemonade between us. At the sight of the cooler being opened, Diogi had sat up at rigid attention. I was touched that before Jason tucked in, he stripped the meat from a couple of chicken thighs and gave it to his new BFF.
We ate in companionable silence, wiping our greasy fingers on the paper towels and taking deep gulps of the lemonade. As we bobbed quietly under the dome of the sky, the crystal water and shining dunes in the distance glowing in that clear light that you only get on the Cape, it seemed to me that we could have been the only two people on earth. I wanted to hold the moment, savor it. Maybe, like, forever.
It is a scientific fact that men are immune to atmosphere.
While I was going all poetic over nature’s beauty, Jason was pushing his plate away and reaching for the cookies.
“Oh, man,” he said, munching happily. “I haven’t had a homemade chocolate chip cookie in I don’t know when.”
It occurred to me to wonder if Jason had a girlfriend. I’d assumed he wasn’t married, partly because he wasn’t wearing a ring but mostly because Jenny definitely would have included that factoid in her biography. But maybe a girlfriend? My heart sank a little, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that he hadn’t had a chocolate chip cookie in he didn’t know when. It has been my experience that, at least in the initial phases of courtship, homemade chocolate chip cookies play a large role.
After polishing off a good half dozen, Jason metaphorically pushed himself away from the table, his face going all serious on me.
“We need to talk,” he said.
I panicked a bit. This sounded serious. Were we at last going to confront what had happened between us all those years ago?
“About the case,” he added. Of course. Lunch break was over. Jason was back on the clock.
“So, I’ve talked to McCauley and he’s proceeding along the assumption that Estelle had been drinking, which the coroner confirms, though not so much that she couldn’t operate her boat. But McCauley’s theory is still that she was stepping onto the dock, missed her footing, fell into the space between the dock and the boat, and drowned.”
“And then floated against the tide toward shore,” I added sarcastically. “You know what I think about that theory.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “And I agree it makes no sense.” Well, duh. But thank you. “But we still need some idea of where she did go in.”
I remembered something. The snail.
“Jason, when I found her she had mud on her face and”—I gave a small involuntary shudder—“a snail crawling on her cheek. One of those little periwinkles that live in the mud along the pond edges. How could she get a snail on her face, if she drowned in deep water?”
Jason absorbed this in silence. Okay, so maybe it was just a small thing, but it was significant. At least I thought it was significant.
“But,” he pointed out, “even if she drowned—or was drowned—where she was found, by the breakwater, the water there was at least four feet deep. If somebody drowned her, why push her face four feet down into the muddy bottom?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly.
“Well,” Jason said, “it certainly bears looking into.”
He glanced at his watch. “The tide’s going to start going out soon. We’ve got time to give Diogi a quick run and then I’ve got to get back to the office.”
We motored over to the other side of the pond and landed the inflatable on the little beach. Diogi leaped off the boat and began running up and down the sand, sniffing the dried eelgrass that marked the high tide mark. Jason and I followed at a more sedate pace.
At one point, Diogi brought me back an empty horseshoe crab shell, laying the treasure proudly at my feet. I have never been a huge fan of horseshoe crabs, which can grow as large as dinner plates and always look to me like prehistoric tanks, creeping along the bottom of the bay dragging their long barbed tails behind them. I took the shell gingerly by the tip of its tail and winged it out into the water. Diogi plunged in after it, swam back with it in his mouth, and dropped it again at my feet.
“Oh no,” I groaned. “The dog wants to play fetch.”
“Now you’re in trouble,” Jason said, laughing. He took pity on me and tossed the by now rather raggedy shell back out in the water. Diogi got to play this incredibly fun game for about ten minutes, at which point Jason ruined everything by insisting that he get back in the boat.
“Time to go home, boy,” he said.
Diogi retaliated by doing one of those doggy fur shakes, spraying both Jason and me with a lovely mixture of salt water and sand.
By the time the inflatable slipped back out of the secret creek into the Nickerson River, I could tell Jason was a little worried about getting the boat over the shallow delta where the river opened back up i
nto the channel. He tipped the outboard up a bit and Diogi and I scooted up to the bow, using our weight to keep the stern of the boat and the engine’s propeller as high in the water as possible. I leaned over, peering down through the water at the sand below, shouting my best estimates as to depth back to Jason at the wheel.
“Two feet, maybe three. Now two again. Getting shallower. Maybe a foot. Okay, deeper again. Two feet. Three. Yay, we’re in the channel!”
It was fun. A little nerve-racking but fun. That’s the thing about being out on the water. It takes you completely out of yourself. You are perpetually monitoring the wind, the currents, the tide, other boats—you are completely in the moment, as my yoga-mad friends would say.
We jounced our way back to the municipal pier. I was happy with the way the day had gone. I felt like Jason and I were on our way toward our old friendly footing. I did wish I’d had the nerve to bring up our history. But that was okay. We’d have other opportunities to talk now that we were working together to find Estelle’s killer.
Back on dry land, Jason followed me over to Grumpy and watched while I coaxed the old truck back to life. He leaned into my open window.
“So,” I said brightly, “what’s our next move on the case?”
Jason pulled back a bit.
“Thank you for your information,” he said, his face suddenly as closed as a summer house in January. “It’s very helpful. I’ll take it from here.”
Whoa. Samantha Barnes, Girl Reporter, gets shut down.
I just nodded coldly and began to raise the window. Okay. If that’s the way you want it. And as the glass slid up, Jason Captiva turned and walked away.