A Side of Murder

by Amy Pershing

  I could hear nothing but the roar of the motor in my ears. I could see nothing but the waters beneath the Swallow becoming rapidly shallower. And still the motor roared behind me. I could not believe what I was hearing.

  He wasn’t slowing down. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything but stopping me.

  Still I didn’t look back. What was the point? I’d either make it to the mouth of the river and over the shallows to safety or I’d be mowed down by two tons of fiberglass and steel.

  “Please, please, please,” I whispered to the Universe.

  And at that moment, a gust of wind caught the Swallow’s sail and literally blew us into the shallow water over the bar. Seconds later, I heard the monster behind us ground itself with a horrible screech of buckling fiberglass and metal.

  I had no time to rejoice. The Swallow lurched and I realized that the daggerboard was digging into the soft sand of the delta. I yanked the board up and let out the sail to a full run, the wind directly behind me, the only point of sail I could steer without the board down. And glorioso! We were on our way once more, gliding over the bar on barely ten inches of water. Finally I looked back at the Mad Max. All was silence. Until the wailing began. Mr. Logan, climbing out of the wheelhouse, bloodied, shaking, and sobbing in a way that was almost as horrifying as his earlier, deluded monologue.

  “You don’t get to take my life away from me,” he screamed. “First, you won’t sell the restaurant when you know it’s the only way I can pay for that treatment. You want to let me die. Then you blackmail me, a little more each time, taunting me, watching my dream die. And now you pretend to be all sweet and nice and then you steal that mobile cellular phone from me, so you can steal my life away from me again. . . .”

  He’d conflated us—Mrs. Logan, Estelle, myself—into one monstrous woman intent on denying him his life. It was chilling, but it was also somehow terribly sad.

  I was grateful when the words trailed off behind me. I gave my full attention to getting over the delta. Any shallower and I’d be aground, forced to drag the Swallow across the next twenty feet to the channel. What I did not need at this point was to be trapped on the sand with my friend Mr. Logan.

  Twelve inches of water. The bar continued to slide by below. Maybe eleven inches. Still eleven. And then, abruptly, the sand sloped away and the Swallow was in the deep dark of the channel.

  I dropped the daggerboard, pulled in the sail, and almost fell off the boat.

  Coming toward me was a twenty-foot Grady-White, the words “Harbor Patrol” emblazoned on its side.

  FORTY

  I pointed the nose of the Swallow into the wind to slow my headway as the Grady-White reduced its speed to a crawl and pulled up next to me. Jason was at the wheel. I wanted to kiss him all over his face. Jenny, Helene, Krista, and Miles were leaning over the side of the boat, asking a million questions at a million miles a minute and sounding like nothing so much as a gaggle of geese quacking. A gaggle of geese that, at that moment, I also wanted to kiss all over their faces.

  Miles tossed me a line, which I cleated onto the Swallow’s bow, and Jenny and Helene helped me up the stepped stern of the Grady-White. The gabbling continued, and again I couldn’t really make any sense of it. It occurred to me I might be in shock. It also apparently occurred to Jason, who started bossing Krista around, telling her where she could find a blanket and brandy. It was very satisfying to watch someone boss Krista around.

  Through all the commotion, though, Jason had never moved from the wheel. He’d said nothing to me, barely even looked at me. But one look at his set, drawn face told me why. This was a man keeping himself under iron control. His eyes were fixed on the Mad Max up ahead, lying awkwardly to one side, like a beached whale. Mr. Logan was nowhere to be seen, probably down below, for which I was profoundly grateful. Jason moved the throttle out of neutral and pushed it up slightly. We began moving very slowly up the channel, the Swallow trailing along behind like an obedient puppy.

  Jason was steering with one hand. The other held the ship-to-shore radio as he barked out orders to invisible minions. I was seated only a few feet away in the relatively sheltered bow of the boat but the wind whipped his words away from me. My guess was he was telling someone he’d found me. Not that there was anyone left to tell. They were all on the boat.

  Helene came forward with one of those silvery blanket things that you see in photos of people who have finished the marathon that never look very warm but, it turns out, actually are. Krista twisted the cap off the hip flask of brandy that Jason apparently kept at the ready in the boat’s first aid kit and helped my trembling hands move it to my lips. Lately I seemed to be spending a lot of my time in blankets drinking brandy. This was not a good sign.

  When he was done telling whatever to whoever, Jason clipped the ship-to-shore back into its holder. “We’re just going to sit tight here and keep an eye on things until the crew brings the inflatable out and we can take him in,” he said to his unorthodox crew.

  Finally, he turned his attention to me. “Does he have a gun?”

  I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d asked me if Santa Claus had a gun.

  “Of course he doesn’t have a gun,” I said, almost reflexively adding something along the lines of Mr. Logan would never have a gun, but catching myself.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I mean, no, I don’t think he has a gun. If he’d had a gun, he would have used it.” Not necessarily, I realized as I said it. Hard to aim a gun from a speeding motorboat at a girl on a bobbing sailboat. “Instead he tried to capsize me and when that didn’t work, run me down.”

  Jason got very, very still at that, though the gabbling from the geese rose to a new high.

  “Everybody needs to be quiet,” Jason said in a voice that brooked no argument. The geese quieted themselves.

  “Why?” Jason asked me. “Why did he try to run you down?”

  “Because I have Estelle’s cell phone, the one with the photo.”

  “The photo of him killing piping plovers?”

  For a moment, I couldn’t understand what he was asking. “No,” I said, “the photo of him on the dock at Alden boatyard the night his wife died.”

  Jason shook his head slightly, as if he’d heard me wrong. But before he could say anything, Jenny, against orders, broke in.

  “You mean Mr. Logan?” she asked. “Estelle had a photo of Mr. Logan at Alden that Fourth of July, that night his wife died from a stroke?”

  “Not quite,” I corrected her. “That night his wife had a stroke and he let her die.”

  Jason waved toward the Mad Max. “So you’re telling me that’s Mr. Logan on that boat?”

  I nodded.

  “Not Trey Gorman?”

  “Not Trey Gorman.”

  “But Trey Gorman killed Estelle.”

  I shook my head. “Nope. That was Mr. Logan, too.”

  “Well,” Jason said thoughtfully, “if Logan killed her for the phone, it would explain why Gorman didn’t have it and wanted your mother’s notebook so badly.”

  Something bothered me there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “It’s good enough,” Jason said almost to himself. “Even McCauley’s got to admit it’s good enough.”

  And for a moment, I felt the glow of vindication.

  But not for long.

  “And all this,” Helene said incredulously, waving a beringed hand to encompass the Mad Max and my blanket-and-brandy thing going on. “This was your idea of being very, very careful?”

  Helene was not pleased. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Helene was very, very displeased. I burrowed deeper into the blanket until only my eyes peeked out.

  “That’s where you went this morning?” she asked. “To confront this, this murderer?”

  “I didn’t go to confront Mr. Logan,” I protested. “I had no idea Mr. Lo
gan was a murderer. I thought Trey killed Estelle. I just wanted to check something out. I’d seen a cell phone on the kitchen counter at Bits and Bites. Mr. Logan doesn’t own a cell, doesn’t even know how to use one. I just wanted to see if it was still there and see if maybe it was Estelle’s.”

  “We won’t even go into why you didn’t tell me where you were going,” Jason said. “For now, just tell us what happened.”

  “Well, it was like this . . .” I began. I told him about finding the phone, seeing some compromising photos of people I didn’t recognize (Krista made a little noise there, like she was going to interrupt but I glared at her and she shut up). “But Trey taking out plover nests and chicks was unmistakable,” I said.

  “But you didn’t recognize Mr. Logan?” Jenny asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not at first. He looked so different, very old and haggard and bald from his chemo. Plus, I was too focused on Trey, and when he actually showed up at Bits and Bites, all I could think about was getting away from him.”

  I told them about taking the Swallow, what had happened out on the bay and then behind Nickerson Island.

  “I hid in your secret creek,” I said to Jason. I couldn’t find the words to explain how his voice had come to me, how he had told me how to find the creek. “You saved my life.”

  For the first time Jason looked directly at me and allowed himself to show some emotion. “You saved your own life,” he said, his voice rough. “I was looking for you on Trey’s boat, but it would never have occurred to me to go behind Nickerson. No one takes a big boat like that back there. I figured he’d be heading out to the ocean.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I knew what I knew.

  I told them about figuring out too late that Mr. Logan had killed his wife, that Estelle had been blackmailing him for it. I did not mention my initial suspicions of Curtis Henson, of course. I really did not see any reason to bring that up now that we knew who’d actually killed Estelle. Krista would just have to lump it.

  “But what I don’t get,” Jason said when I’d finally finished my piece, “is why you didn’t tell me about seeing the cell phone in the first place.”

  “You were asleep,” I said weakly.

  Miles broke in. “Wait? What? He spent the night with you? What did I miss?”

  I ignored him. Let him think what he wanted. It wasn’t true and it would never be true.

  “You could have woken me up,” Jason said, his eyes back on the Mad Max. “Why didn’t you wake me?” He wasn’t being accusatory. He really wanted to know.

  “You were so tired. I wasn’t going to be long. I just needed to check on that cell. I’d be back before you even woke up, I thought.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Jason said quietly. We could have been the only two people on the boat at that moment. This was just between Jason and me. “Tell me the real reason.”

  I waited a beat. He wouldn’t like the truth, but I was done avoiding our issues. “Because of what you always say,” I said, almost in a whisper.

  “What?” he asked gently. “What do I always say?”

  “You always say, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ That’s what you say every time I try to work with you. Just like how Krista always says I’m off the story.”

  Krista looked up from where she’d been sitting on the equipment locker madly scribbling notes on a steno pad. Of course.

  “I was just trying to keep you safe,” she said.

  “I was just trying to keep you safe,” Jason said at the same time.

  Suddenly I was sick and tired of being condescended to by Jason and bossed around by Krista. Well, okay, she was my boss, but still.

  “I don’t want to be kept safe,” I said, sitting up and throwing off the blanket. “How come I have to be safe but you two get to stick your noses into all sorts of stuff?”

  “It’s my job,” Jason said.

  “It’s my job,” Krista said at the same time.

  This Greek chorus thing was beginning to get to me.

  “You weren’t doing your job, Krista. You were trying to keep me from doing mine. You told me to cover Estelle’s death and every time I tried to do that, you shut me down. You were completely in McCauley’s pocket.” Which, I didn’t say, is so much better than being the lover of a married man who I thought for a brief moment might be trying to kill me.

  “I shut you down, you big dope, because I suspected this was a murder.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course I did. Granted, you raised the alarm. What with all your questions and all.”

  I looked at her in disbelief. “You told me I didn’t have anything to go on!”

  “Well, it was when you convinced me that Trey had deliberately stolen your mother’s notebook. . . .” I’d convinced her? “So I took it to McCauley and he told me he was already working on it with Jason.”

  “McCauley?” I asked, incredulous. I looked back at Jason. “You were working with McCauley, too?”

  “Of course I was,” Jason said. “I told you it was his turf.”

  “He believed it was murder?” I asked.

  Jason glanced over at me and had the good grace to look a little ashamed. “Not until I made the point, er, sorry, your point about the body being faceup.”

  I couldn’t believe this.

  “So both of you were working on leads that I gave you, but you still wanted me to let the case alone?” Suddenly I was angry again. “May I remind you that if I had left the case alone, you would never have known about Estelle’s blackmail schemes, would never have known about Trey, who, even if he wasn’t a murderer was a horrible person and completely corrupt, would never have known that Mr. Logan let his wife die and killed Estelle because he was being blackmailed by her. And may I remind you that I have the proof.” I whipped Estelle’s cell out of my hoodie pocket with a rather overly dramatic flourish.

  “So,” I said, “I have the same question that you had for me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t,” Jason said simply. “McCauley couldn’t either. We couldn’t risk it.”

  “Risk what?” I asked. “That I would keep finding out stuff and figure out who actually killed Estelle? Because I was ahead of you every step of the way.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “We couldn’t risk your life.”

  He had a point. I could see how they might want to keep this amateur detective off the case so that she wouldn’t be, for instance, mowed down by a crazy man in a two-ton speedboat.

  “Like that stopped her,” Jenny said, and there was a certain amount of pride in her voice. Jenny always thought better of me than I deserved. But, still, I loved her for it.

  Miles took up the banner. “Yeah, looks like she was going to risk her life no matter who told her she couldn’t.”

  “Thanks, guys,” I said. “But, honestly, I never intended to risk my life. That’s why Jason was camping on my couch last night. I’m not a total idiot. And I did try to call him after I found Estelle’s phone, but Harbor Patrol told me he was out on the bay with no cell service. And, believe me, if I could have called or texted for help once I was out on the bay myself, I would have.”

  They looked very disappointed at that, either because they had wanted to believe that I was the superhero they’d just invented or because I wasn’t sleeping with Jason Captiva. Or both. Probably both.

  This riveting discussion about my bravery or lack of same was interrupted by the sound of another engine. I stood and looked back over the stern to see the Harbor Patrol inflatable coming up behind us manned by two men and a woman in official patrol khakis and windbreakers. They were also all wearing holsters with guns in them. And what looked like bulletproof vests over their windbreakers.

  I looked more closely at Jason. He, too, was wearing a gun. My heart began to thud. What if Mr. Logan did have a gun? What were you thinkin
g, Sam, putting yourself and others in danger?

  For a moment I wished I could rewind my life and go back to that first night at the Bayview Grill. That night when my only concern was explaining to Helene how to match an appetizer with an entrée. My future self would make sure that I’d never go wandering under that deck, never find Estelle, so that none of the rest would have happened. And a murderer would still be living among us, I reminded myself. Right. There was that.

  The inflatable tied up behind the Grady-White. One of the guys with guns came up over our stern.

  He greeted Jason with a brief, “Sir,” handed Jason a vest, and took the wheel.

  “Get these people away from here,” Jason said to him as he shrugged on the vest, “and keep them away.”

  “Got it,” the other man said.

  Jason nodded at him and started back to the inflatable.

  “Wait!” I cried out. What if he does have a gun? I wanted to say to him. Just because he didn’t try to shoot me doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a gun. Don’t go. Don’t risk yourself. You’re the boss. Let the people who work for you handle it. Stay here. Stay safe.

  This, I realized suddenly, was how Jason had felt when I kept charging off to do what I did. What I had to do.

  Jason had paused, was looking at me. I bit back my words.

  “What happens now?” I asked him instead.

  “Now,” he said grimly, “I go get the bastard.”

  “Good,” I said. “You do that.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Jason got into the inflatable and we in the Grady-White started back at full speed toward the municipal pier. Jenny, Helene, and Miles sat huddled together on the bench in front of the wheelhouse, silent for once. Somehow everything had gotten very, very serious. I sat apart from them at the bow of the boat, alone in my misery.

  About ten minutes later, all of which I had spent whispering please, please, please keep him safe, the radio squawked. Our pilot picked it up, listened, said “Roger” (I swear, he actually said “roger”), and put the radio back on its clip.