The Dark of Summer

get around to make their choices. You see, most lobsters are sold quickly, either to speculators in Calder or to scouts from the major seafood processing companies and chain restaurants, who keep a number of offices in the area. But private buyers, restauranteurs from Boston, travel the coast every week to make the following week's purchases. These are the specialty restaurants that usually boil the lobster alive — and they're able to pay quite well, considering that they charge their customers ten bucks and up for a lobster on the plate. Some lobster men prefer to hold their best catches out of the pack that goes to the seafood companies; they tag them, drop them into a community keeping tank, and hope that someone from one of those fancy Boston places will be especially taken with their beauties. Anyway, we kept a tank in Lamplight Cove, which held as many as four hundred prime lobsters. But we lost it, along with everything else we had there, when your uncle bought the bay property and sent us all packing like a bunch of grubby hoboes who'd settled down illegally.”

“Why did you sell to him?” she asked.

“We didn't. We rented the place — and it was our landlords who sold out from under us.”

“Well—” she began.

“Your uncle hasn't done a damn thing with the Cove in a year,” he said, extremely bitter and making no effort to conceal his feelings. “Yet he won't let us move back there. Instead, the docks and buildings we put to such good use are now standing idle. He'd rather collect nothing than get rent from us. He'd rather make our lot in life harder than to make a few dollars from a lease.”

“You've got nowhere else to go?” Gwyn asked.

“Oh, we've Jenkins' Niche, where we are now.”

“Then, what's the problem?”

He spat in the sea. “Jenkins' Niche is exactly what it's name implies, a cubbyhole in the coast, well enough protected from the sea in rough weather, but hardly large enough for sixteen separate fishing boats that have to use it. We squeeze in, but we're far from comfortable and farther still from being happy. We wanted to buy it, just the same, but the landlord won't sell. At most, he'll give a year-by-year lease, which he can break at any time. He's given his oh-so-generous permission for us to build temporary buildings there, but we don't know when he may ask us to leave. He's a friend of your uncle's. Now, you see, though we all live north of Calder, we must drive south, through town, down to Jenkins' Niche each morning. Then, once in the boats, we must come back north again, to where the lobster beds are. It means an extra half an hour or forty-five minutes in the car each day — plus again as much extra time in the boats. Perhaps that sounds like a trifling disadvantage, but if you add it to other inconveniences we now suffer — none of which we suffered when we had Lamplight Cove — you can see as how it puts us to the biting edge.”

She had heard all he said, but found it a bit difficult to believe. “Has anyone approached my uncle to—”

“Your uncle,” he said, with grim laughter, “is unapproachable. “He answers none of our letters, and he takes none of our telephone calls. He refused, on three separate occasions, to even listen to a plea from our lawyer. And he has only replied with the worst sort of invective when he's encountered any of us in the streets of Calder.”

“That hardly sounds like Uncle Will.”

“That's him, all right,” Jack Younger said. He was no longer gripping the boat, but had his hands fisted on his thighs, as if he were looking for something to beat out his fury on. “We even tried to embarrass him through the local newspaper, but we found out it was owned by one of his friends. They wouldn't print our letters to the editor, or publish anything about our plight — and they wouldn't even accept a paid advertisement from us. Approach your uncle? It would be easier to approach the President of the United States in his White House bedroom, without the permission of his guards. Your uncle's as remote as the North Pole!”

“And there's no other cove or bay, besides these two, that's closer to your lobster beds?”

“None,” he said. “The coast here is rugged, but it's very short of well-sheltered backwaters where a thirty- five-foot fishing boat could weather a good blast in safety.”

“Perhaps if I talked to Uncle Will, he—”

“Would feed you some unlikely story that, because you love him, you'd believe.”

“Do I look stupid?” she asked, rather hotly, rising to her feet.

“No, but you look trusting — far, far too trusting.”

“I'll ask him, anyway,” Gwyn said.

He stood up too.

She sensed a new tension between them, an antagonism that she did not want, but which, right now, was unavoidable.

He said, “There are new rumors floating in Calder.”

“About my uncle?”

He nodded. “They say he is negotiating to buy up the land around Jenkins' Niche. If he purchases that and locks us out again, we'll have to go at least three miles farther south to find another base of operations. And that will be worse than Jenkins' Niche. To find a good place, we'll have to go five miles — which will put us intolerably far away from our beds. We can't keep the lobster catch out of the water for as long as it would take to transport them that far.”

“I'm sure Uncle Will won't be unreasonable,” she said.

“You're more optimistic than I am.”

“He must have had a reason, no matter how it looks to you, for closing down Lamplight Cove.”

He sighed. “If you ever do talk to him about this—”

“Not if, when,” she said.

“When you talk to him about this,” he said, “maybe you better tell him that the fishermen aren't going to put up with another move, not a move like this one would be.”

“Is that a threat?” she asked.

“Call it what you will.”

He splashed to the rear of the old boat. Without looking up at her again, he wrestled it free of the sand and guided it around in the swirling water. He pushed it out a few yards, hopped into it and started the engine. Putting only the tips of the blades into the shallow water, he moved cautiously toward deeper channels. When he dropped the engine down completely, he roared away in a wake of white water, soon out of sight.

FIVE

Gwyn waited until dinner was finished before she brought up the subject of the lobster fishermen. When the three of them had retired to the easy chairs in the library and had begun to mellow the effects of the dinner with tiny glasses of sweet banana liqueur, she said, “Well, I met Jack Younger this afternoon.”

Elaine sat up straight in her chair, her shoulders suddenly gone stiff, her face lined with concern and less young than it usually appeared. “Has that old scoundrel been hanging around here again?” she asked, quite evidently perturbed.

“He's been warned by the sheriff,” Will said, as stiff and ill-at-ease as his wife. “He's not to harass us any more, and he knows it. What did he want?”

“You misunderstand,” Gwyn said. “Not that Jack Younger.” She smiled to herself as she remembered the comic routine about his name which Jack had gone through when they met on the beach. To her aunt and uncle, she said, “That's his father. I met the — younger Younger.”

“Even so, he's no right coming around here,” Elaine said. She was more distressed than the situation seemed to warrant.

“Well, he wasn't around the mansion,” Gwyn explained. “I went for a swim, as I said — and then for a walk along the beach.” Modest, she decided to underplay the reason for their meeting. “We met — by accident, south of here about a mile.”

“And what did he have to say?” her Uncle Will asked. Although he had settled back into his easy chair and had crossed his legs once more, he appeared to be still ill-at-ease, strained like a rubber band. He ran one long-fingered hand through his silvered hair, over and over again, unconscious of this betrayal of his frayed nerves. But what did he have to be so awfully nervous about?

“He just wanted to chat,” Gwyn said. “He didn't know, at first, that I was your niece.”