by Amy Pershing
Caught up in the dreadful dawning of what I was dealing with, it took me a second to register the soft chug of a powerboat coming slowly into the river behind Nickerson. The Mad Max had arrived.
I sat, huddled on my tiny craft, hardly daring to breathe. The motor got louder as it got closer to where I sat hidden and then, almost imperceptibly, the sound began to fade again. He was past me, checking the rest of the curving river. My hope was that once he came to the sandbar at the other end and knew I wasn’t hiding behind one of the river’s bends, he would assume he’d lost me, turn the boat, and leave the way he’d come.
I heard the sound of the craft coming back. And then, as if in a nightmare, the motor stopped, then cut out. It sounded very close to where I sat huddled in the marsh.
“Sam? Are you back in there somewhere? I think you must be. But it’s okay. It’s just me, Norman Logan.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Mr. Logan. Not Trey. Not Curtis Henson. Mr. Logan.
My first reaction was a wave of relief. Of course. He’d come out to tell me everything was okay, that Trey was gone. It didn’t surprise me that Mr. Logan had no idea how powerful the wake of that borrowed boat could be. He’d only ever used it for fishing before.
But something stopped me from answering. Other memories, scraps of conversation were coming back.
“. . . she was there alone. . . .”
“. . . she controlled the purse strings. . . .”
“. . . it might just upset her. . . .”
“. . . Mr. Logan was just here yesterday. . . .”
“. . . she told me that he had been there with her that night, that she had proof. . . .”
“. . . he says I got that confused. . . .”
And the photo of an old, bald guy on a dock with the twinkling lights behind him. The old, bald guy was Mr. Logan. Mr. Logan prematurely aged by his illness, his thick hair temporarily wiped out by chemo. Almost unrecognizable. Almost but not quite.
Mr. Logan, whose last chance to beat cancer had been a hugely expensive treatment with no guarantee of success. Mr. Logan whose notoriously cheap wife had all the money and called all the shots. Had she refused to pay for that treatment?
In my mind’s eye, I looked at the photo again. Yes, definitely Mr. Logan. But behind him not twinkling lights, as I had initially thought, but what as kids we used to call falling leaves—the last glowing embers from fireworks flickering as they fell to the ground. That photograph was of Mr. Logan watching Fourth of July fireworks, not from his own dock, which he didn’t have, but from the dock at the Alden Pond boatyard in front of the Logan Inn.
Mr. Logan, who supposedly had been too ill to come to work for weeks. That’s why, Jenny had told me, his wife had been closing up the restaurant by herself. “She was there alone . . .” when she’d come out to watch the fireworks and had had her stroke. “She might have made it if they’d found her earlier.”
Mr. Logan not sick at home. Mr. Logan calmly watching fireworks while his wife’s life had slipped away.
What had Suzanne said about Estelle? “She told me that he had been there with her that night, that she had proof.” Suzanne hadn’t been talking about an illicit romance as I’d assumed. She’d been talking about Mr. Logan and his wife.
No wonder he’d looked like he’d wished he hadn’t mentioned Suzanne when we talked at Bits and Bites. No wonder he’d tried to discourage me from visiting her. “It might just upset her,” he’d said. No wonder he’d blown off his meeting with Miles and gone directly to the nursing home after our interview. “Mr. Logan was just here yesterday,” Jillian had said, “We hadn’t seen him for a while.” It wasn’t only me Mr. Logan needed to convince of Suzanne’s failing memory. He needed to convince Suzanne herself. “. . . he says I got that confused.”
Going one step further, had Estelle shown Mr. Logan the photo? Had she been blackmailing him? Were his regular visits to the Bayview Grill to meet Estelle and pay her off? When had he had enough? When had he decided that Estelle and her demands were too much? That Estelle had to die?
One thing was for certain. The man at the helm of that boat was Mr. Logan.
And no matter what he said, that was definitely not okay.
THIRTY-EIGHT
From my hiding place in the high grass, I heard the unmistakable splash of an anchor being dropped.
Mr. Logan was settling in for the long haul, prepared to wait until cold or hunger or thirst drew me out. I bet the Mad Max was outfitted with an entire minibar. Maybe even a coffee maker. The vision of a mug of fresh coffee danced enticingly before my eyes. Right about now, I would kill for some coffee. Nice choice of words, Sam.
“Samantha, my dear? Can she hear me, I wonder?”
Mr. Logan. Talking to me. Or maybe to himself. Either way, it was creepy.
“I think you must be back in that marsh somewhere, so I’ll just wait for you to come out. I know you saw that photograph of me on Estelle’s mobile cellular telephone.”
Honest to god, if you say “mobile cellular telephone” one more time, I am going to lose it.
“I could see the photograph over your shoulder. I’m sure you’re wondering about it.”
You got that right.
“So perhaps I can explain some things to you, help you to understand why I had to do what I did.”
Good luck with that.
“You probably have never been given a sign, Samantha. But I have. Twice. The first, of course, was when Darlene had her stroke.”
Darlene. Somehow I had never associated Mrs. Logan with anything as personal as a first name.
“It was the Fourth of July. I hadn’t been out of my bed for weeks. But for some reason I had more energy than I’d felt for some time. I thought I could manage to drive over to the restaurant and watch the fireworks from the dock. I knew they wouldn’t be very impressive from that far away, but I just wanted to see the fireworks, even from a distance, one last time before I died.”
My heart almost went out to my captor. But whatever sympathy I might have felt for him was short-lived.
“Everybody was gone and I knew Darlene was busy closing up, so I just went out on the dock and waited for the fireworks to start. They’d just begun when Darlene came out onto the dock, too, I suppose for the same reason I did. She was surprised to find me there. She gave me this odd look, like she didn’t know who I was. I asked her if she was okay. She’d been feeling rather unwell all day, making quite a fuss about it, which wasn’t like her. She didn’t believe in being sick. I don’t think the woman ever really believed I was sick. I think she just thought I was trying to get attention.”
Yes, that sounded like Mrs. Logan.
“Anyway, she took another step toward me, so close I could have touched her, and then one side of her face just sort of slipped down. And then she just toppled over at my feet. It was quite a surprise, let me tell you. She was lying on the dock, looking up at me but not really seeing me, if you know what I mean. She tried to say something, but it was all garbled. I knew she was having a stroke but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.”
Maybe call 911?
“And then it came to me. I had a choice. Darlene’s life or mine. With Darlene gone, I could sell the restaurant, get the therapy that would save my life. All I had to do was nothing. Just as Darlene had done nothing to save my life. So that’s what I did. Nothing. Except watch the fireworks. They were also a sign, of course.”
Of course they were. The Fourth of July fireworks, watched by hundreds of other people that night, were a sign meant just for you.
“A sign of the beginning of my new life,” Mr. Logan continued, blessedly unaware of my skepticism that the Universe was on his side. “When they were over, I could see that Darlene was still breathing, but only barely. I waited a while, maybe another hour or so, until she stopped breathing altogether.”
And then he s
aid it. I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“So you see, Samantha, I didn’t kill my wife. I simply let her die.”
A distinction without a difference, I wanted to shout. I didn’t of course. I just huddled and hugged my knees and wished I was anywhere but here, having a one-sided conversation in my head with a cuddly, cold-blooded killer.
“The next morning, I called the police and told them that I’d woken up to find that Darlene hadn’t come home the night before. When they came to the house later to tell me that they’d found her body on the dock, I cried. My wife was dead. I cried from happiness.”
Great. You were happy. But not for long, I bet.
As if he’d heard my thoughts, Mr. Logan said, “Of course, I didn’t know about Estelle and the photograph then. I didn’t know until she told me a few days later. Apparently, after everyone else had left the restaurant that night she’d stayed on, drinking up on the deck. Then she fell asleep and didn’t wake up until she heard the booms from the fireworks. She decided to try to take a picture with her mobile cellular telephone, even from that distance. She didn’t register me sitting out on the dock, she was too focused on capturing the fireworks. It wasn’t until a few days later that she figured out what she had.”
What she had was a motive for you to kill her.
“She came to me, showed me the photograph on her mobile cellular telephone. She’d just got my head in it and a little bit of the dock and the last of the fireworks, but it was clear where I was and when. And she said the camera keeps a record of the date and time when you take a photograph. She said nobody else knew, just her, but Suzanne told me when I was visiting her at Shawme Manor that Estelle said she’d seen me there. Suzanne said she never believed her, that Estelle was always talking trash, as she called it, about other people. And usually I could convince her she got it wrong, that she was confused. But it worried me.”
I bet it worried you.
“Anyway,” Mr. Logan continued, “at first Estelle wasn’t all that demanding. I was sick and I really didn’t have any money. I think she really just liked her power over me, her old boss. So every month, like clockwork, we met under the deck at the restaurant and I gave her a little money. But once I sold the restaurant and got my therapy and was given my life back, she got quite greedy. I’m not a big drinker, but I must say I really needed that Manhattan before I met her each month. I tried to explain to her that I needed all my money for the new restaurant, for my new life, but she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t understand.”
This was not good.
“After Estelle had her accident, I thought the problem was solved. Nobody cared that she was dead. Nobody was looking for that mobile cellular telephone.”
Something here was out of whack. But I was too exhausted to figure it out. And anyway, Mr. Logan wasn’t done yet.
“I held on to the darn thing thinking it might be fun to take photographs of Archibald if I could ever get it to work for me. When you offered to show me how, I thought that was so nice of you.”
That’ll teach you, Sam. No good deed, etc.
“And then I found you looking at that picture of me. So I knew I’d have to explain things to you. That was all I was trying to do out there on the bay, you know. Trying to get you to slow down enough so I could talk to you. Explain. Explain that I didn’t kill my wife. I simply . . . let her die. I just needed you to listen. I just needed you to understand.”
And what if I don’t? Don’t listen, don’t understand? Do I end up dead like Estelle?
“So I’m sure you understand now what happened, why I need that mobile cellular telephone back, Samantha. Other people may not understand like you do. Why don’t you just come out and we’ll just throw that telephone in the bay and forget all about this?”
For a moment, I wanted to believe him. He might be crazy enough to do just what he said if I played along, if I convinced him I had listened, that I understood.
And then I remembered his words from our conversation at Bits and Bites. The words he’d said with such peculiar, unnerving intensity.
“Nothing is more important than your life. You have to fight for it. Illness will try to take it from you. Acts of God will try to take it from you. Other people will try to take it from you. You can’t let them. It’s yours, yours to live. You can’t let anything or anyone get in the way of that.”
No way am I getting in the way of that, chief.
The challenge was going to be how I was going to get out of the way of that.
THIRTY-NINE
Well, Samantha,” Mr. Logan said, “I really do have to be going if I’m going to beat the tide out of the river.”
He was right. The tide was going out fast. Soon the water over the sandy delta where the river met the bay would be too shallow for the Mad Max to cross back into the main channel.
“I’ll wait for you out on the bay, shall I?”
The Mad Max rumbled back to life. I listened carefully as the soft chug gradually diminished, trying to determine if Mr. Logan really intended to go back into the bay. Which I did not for a moment believe.
What I believed he’d done, what it had sounded like to me, was taken the Mad Max in the other direction, back behind the first bend in the river. There he could drop the anchor at the very tip of the bend, then let out the anchor line until the Mad Max drifted back to where it would be hidden from me when I eventually ventured out into the river. And there Mr. Logan would wait for me.
Better then to sit tight? Eventually somebody might come looking for me. Maybe. But probably not. There was no reason for anyone to think I’d be out on the bay. What had started out as a gray day was now rapidly getting colder and wetter. Nobody in their right mind would be out on the water. Not to mention that, as far as anyone knew, I didn’t have access to a boat. Jason might go looking for Trey, but Trey was somewhere on dry land. And he’d never be looking for Mr. Logan. No, nobody was coming to find me. And Mr. Logan in his nice dry boat could easily keep his vigil up for another twenty-four hours, maybe longer. And in this wet and this cold, exposed to the elements, perhaps overnight, how long could I last?
But what choice did I have? Try to make a run for it in the Swallow? Of course, I reasoned to myself, if I couldn’t see Mr. Logan in the Mad Max, he couldn’t see me either. That argument didn’t hold water for long. I knew that all he had to do was every few minutes pull the boat noiselessly forward with the anchor line and peek around the bend. If I wasn’t in view, he could drift noiselessly back again. If I was in view, he had me. Worst-case scenario, he’d start up the engine, run me down right there in the river. Best case, I’d make it out to the bay, where the whole cat and mouse game would resume until out of sheer exhaustion I lost control and my fragile craft would capsize. Death by hypothermia. Which wasn’t much of a best case. And my old friend Mr. Logan would get away with murder. Again.
Unless . . .
* * *
* * *
I knew that every minute I waited, exhaustion and cold and my cramping legs would make me that much less capable of what I had to do. But it couldn’t be too soon. Maybe not for another fifteen minutes or so. For what I had planned, timing the tide was going to be crucial. With no cell service and thus no tide chart available, I was going to have to make my calculations based on the tides from two days earlier, which I’d noted because of my sail with Trey. No sailor goes out on Crystal Bay without first checking the tide chart. So if the tides change by approximately an hour each day . . . I did the math in my head.
The minutes ticked by interminably. Finally I thought the time was right.
I crawled awkwardly up to the bow of the boat, stood up cautiously, and dropped the mast back into its step. Crouching back down I used the daggerboard to push the Swallow off the marsh bank and back into the creek. Still kneeling on the bow, I used the board to paddle the boat across to the other side of the creek
and slide silently over the grassy hummock into the river. My heart was in my mouth.
There was no Mad Max in sight.
I crept back into the Sunfish’s cockpit and dropped the daggerboard into its slot. As quietly as I could, I raised the sail. I was lucky that a couple of seagulls chose that moment to fight over a blue crab that one of them had snagged, and their angry squawks covered the creak of the sail’s hoops sliding up the mast. I noted that the wind would be coming over the Sunfish’s back quarter. This was good. We’d be on a close reach, always the fastest point of sail. The mouth of the river was only about a hundred yards away. We could make it in maybe two minutes.
I pulled in the sail, hoping the squeak of the pulleys wouldn’t give me away, and the Swallow took off like the champ she was. Almost immediately I could see the water becoming progressively shallower as we flew toward the sandy delta where the river met the deeper channel of the bay. I tried to gauge how deep the water was going to be over that bar. It looked like about a foot. Fine for the Swallow. Not so fine for the Mad Max. The Mad Max would be trapped in the river. I crossed the fingers of the hand guiding the tiller. If I could have, I would have crossed myself. I told myself my luck was holding.
I spoke too soon.
Behind me, I heard the roar of a Yamaha 250 engine. I didn’t look back. He’d seen me. I’d always known this was a possibility. That’s why I’d waited as long as I had. Mr. Logan had to know what would happen to the Mad Max, to himself, if he rammed his boat at top speed into the delta. Even if he rammed into me first, he wouldn’t have enough time to stop. It would be a disaster when he hit the bar. He knew that. He’d have to reduce his speed. And, my reasoning was, if he reduced his speed, I’d have more time, I’d have a chance.